HATE IT! Part 13 - Surrealistic Pillow

Again I've gone to the slop trough that is the Rolling Stone list of the 500 greatest albums of all time to elbow the swine of classic rock to the side and pull out a scrap of rotten food undeserving of its accolades. Honestly, what the fuck were those hippies thinking when they listened to this crap and thought it sounded good? Grace Slick could never sing for shit, none of the members could really play all that well, and how many fucking songs about drugs did they need to listen to anyway? "White rabbit" in all its jackass allegory can suck the corn out of a bum's diarrhea pants. "Somebody to love" was really nothing new when it came out, it was just shriekier than the other, poppier schmaltz of the time. Jerry Garcia produced it, but even he didn't seem to like these guys too much. If you watch "Gimme Shelter", there's a great scene where Hell's Angels punch Marty Balin in the face and knock him out, then when Paul Kantner steps up, they beat his ass too. Then we see the Grateful Dead show up and someone tells Jerry that Balin and Kantner got their asses kicked, and Garcia is standing there with this giant shit-eating grin on his face, saying "oh, bummer, man." Yeah, he was as stoked as I was. Why? BECAUSE THEY FUCKING SUCK. THEY SUCK SEVERED PENISES FILLED WITH PUS AND TOPPED WITH SHIT, LIKE SOME KIND OF VILE, DISEASED ECLAIR. Then eventually they wrote "we built this city" about how they fucking invented rock in that town or something, which ironically was the opposite of a song that rocks. So fuck 'em and fuck the RS person who put this pile of shit on the list.

HATE IT! Part 12 - the assholes who live behind me

I don't know what they call their band and I don't care. All I know is that scarcely a day goes by that they don't practice, and they generally go for 4 or 5 hours at a stretch, stopping just before I can finally call in a noise complaint to the pigs, which is the ridiculously late hour of 10. The sound comes right in through my walls and I can hear every sound like they were in my living room. This also means every mistake. You see, they are abysmally bad. They sound basically like Coldplay farted out some jingles for walmart commercials and some high school kids just learning their instruments got asked to play the songs. And they only have 5 or 6 songs. For hours every day. A couple of times somebody has tried to take a guitar solo, which is unfortunate because he obviously isn't familiar with the concept of "key signatures", or even of "scales". And while they all suck at their instruments, the bass player is the worst of them all. He can't play outside of a 4/4 time signature, thumping the root of whatever the guitar's playing. But he can't play inside of a 4/4 time signature, either. In fact, I can play all of their instruments better than they can, and I'm not saying that to boast. No amount of practice will ever help these guys. The most musical they're ever going to get is when I finally snap and kill the lot of them, and use their ribcages for xylophones.

GOD DAMN IT ALL TO HELL.

HATE IT! part 11 - The tragically hip - Road apples

Wow, this is my 3rd go at getting this post up. I guess someone at google must really like these guys. I think there are too many warm fuzzies floating around this blog lately, so it's time to call shenanigans on some garbage. Well, these guys set the bar awfully low when they called their album "Road apples", but they didn't manage to live up even to that. According to Wikipedia, "The album is often cited by fans and critics as the band's finest work." I remember when this came out the critics were all stoked on it. Then I heard it and I couldn't for the life of me understand why they thought it was so good, or how anyone could get a job as a critic when they had such obvious defects in their judgement. This is the worst album of 1991. Think about that. Think about what came out in 1991 and Gerardo and Color me badd and everything else that happened (isn't that when Celine Dion made the scene, more or less?) and drink that in for just a minute, and then think about what it means when I say this is the worst album of 1991. Just think about what that means.

HATE IT! part 10 - Mick fucking Hucknall

THIS fucking asshole. He's given us a quarter-century of pure garbage, and in the process has gone from licking up Sade's sloppy seconds from the studio floor to resorting to using samples of Hall and Oates. That voice of his is front-loaded as hell and used for evil. Always one to attempt blending the latest in technology and musical stylings with "Northern soul", (a combination doomed to sound horrible) he has failed to create anything good and has left little but annoyance in his wake. His defenders would call him a voice for the ages, but I think "wrinkled ginger cunt", to use british parlance, is more appropriate. Eat shit, Mick Hucknall. The face he's making in this photo is the exact face he'll make when my dream finally comes true and I kick him right in the nuts.

HATE IT! Part 9 - Bonfire Madigan

I think this photo does a decent job of capturing the shittiness of Madigan Shive. "But who is she," you may ask, "and why do you hate her so?" The answers are simple: She is an excremental and talentless "cellist" who writes music so hackneyed and rudimentary, every bunch of high schoolers who have played loud instruments together in the last 45 years have cast aside the very same riffs she plays (poorly) on her cello because said riffs just weren't up to their own low standards, and I hate her because she is not only a prime perpitrator of feculence, but she is also head over heels in love with herself. Behold the bio from her own website: cackle at her incessant name-dropping and sad attempts to boost her own credentials as someone of import. Lady, shut the fuck up about yourself. You wheedle away incompetently on your oversized fiddle while screeching inanely about your vagina. I couldn't care less about your views of the world, gender, and patriarchy; you haven't got the lyrical ability to make your ideas interesting as songs. You do too poor a job at what you do to capture my interest in what you have to say. When I want to hear ranting over noise, I usually just put on a Crass CD. YOU CAN'T MAKE MUSIC FOR SHIT. You're just rehashing Ani DiFranco's trip but without the instrumental, lyrical, or songwriting ability and substituting yowliness in its stead. That's not cool at all. What might be cool is if you wrote your thoughts out as essays, if you can pull off the verbal articulation thing, and judging by your lyrics, I have my doubts. I might find essays you write to be interesting to read, or even good. This shit, though, makes me want to puke in your face and fart on your dinner. Kindly stop. You're withering my stirrups and anvils, and making a colossal fool of yourself in the process.

I hesitate to pepper a review (even in HATE IT!) of such overtly feminist music with terms such as "screeching" and "yowly", because many women take umbrage to anything feminism-related being associated with the word "shrill". I'm not just dismissing her as some harpy with hairy pits. This is legitimately awful stuff, and the "shrill" shoe fits it perfectly. Cope. When Madigan Shive makes music, the whole world loses. Anyone with two good ears dies a little when they hear this trash, and only the blowhardiest of the blowhards can ignore the pathologically inept and criminally poor execution of her music to actually get around to caring enough to align themselves with it. This fuckery gives even Ida a run for its shitty money. A resounding "FUCK YOU" to this nonsense, I rate it "Piss poor minus".

HATE IT! part 8 - Combat Rock

I know, I know, I'm kicking them when they're down. 2 "hate it" posts in a row, about 2 Clash albums in a row. But Jesus, Mary and Sammy Hagar, Everything this band did after "London Calling" was just gawd-fucking-awful. This album alone has "Should I stay or should I go" and "Rock the casbah" on it, 2 of the stupidest songs in the history of creation. Like, stupider than anything Sam the sham and the Pharoahs with their "woolly bully" or Frankie Lymon and his teenagers ever released. And The Clash took those songs seriously. Seriously enough to try singing about the Iranian revolution, anyway. And those were the hits. In ancient China, there was a (quite righteous, actually) movement to destroy confucianism shortly after confucius croaked. It almost succeeded, but some wiseguy had a handful of scrolls tucked away inside a wall, and once the coast was clear, confucianism regained its footing and subsequently decimated eastern asia, and has deleterious effects there to this very day. I say let this album be the modern equivalent of those scrolls. Destroy every copy. Delete every file. Kill the surviving members of the band by burning at the stake, burn the sheet music and tablature. This fucking album is every bit as horrid as any offering Richard Marx or Desmond Child ever shat out. And look at what was happening in music then: Diamond Dave was singing for Van Halen. How could anyone willingly put themselves through this circle-jerk when they could listen to stupid music that didn't take itself seriously and was infinitely more fun? Clash fans in 1982 should have been thrown in a gas chamber. Stupid is supposed to hurt. 2 minuses on this F.

HATE IT! part 7 - Sandinista!

Oh, The Clash. Now here's a band I can sink my fangs into. My hollow, venomous cobra fangs.

"Gee, why do you hate The Clash so much?"

Really, I don't, strictly speaking. I have always had a real problem with them being labelled a Punk band. They damn sure started that way, but by the 3rd album the punk had been worked out of their systems and they had gotten down to the business of just making good rock music. Somewhere after that, however, they started believing their own press and bought into the whole "only band that matters" label. What did that get us? A triple-album. OK, people look back to the 70s and groan at the self indulgence of double albums (especially live ones) and wonder what the fuck went wrong. Now how the hell can anyone justify a triple album? Not even from Frank Zappa will I put up with that kind of shit. Especially when it's largely political bla-de-blah. I almost never will stand for politics in my music, whether I agree with said politics or not. Perhaps the greatest crime committed here, though, is the fact that "Police on my back" is the one and only good song to be culled from one hour, fourty-four minutes, and twenty-nine seconds of what is otherwise an exercise in self-indulgence, masturbation, and enjoying the smell of one's own farts. And it's an Eddy Grant cover. At 3:15, that leaves 1:41:14 of pure, unequivocally feculent trash. How into yourself do you have to be to do that to people? And guess what? They never lifted themselves back up from their slide into shitsville. This album is a headstone for what this band used to be as much as it's a triple-sized monument to their own willful failure. Queen had naked midgets with mountainous trays heaped with coke strapped to their heads, The Clash had the pleasure of listening to themselves bray about politics for almost 2 hours. They couldn't even get extravagance right. Fucking assholes.

HATE IT! part 6 - Led Zeppelin comes back up the U-bend to haunt us all

Really? Are you guys really going to do this? According to what I heard this morning on the BBC, Zep is going at it again. Ah, but here's the rub: Robert Plant has no plans to join the tour. Who, then, will be singing? According to the BBC, there's been no announcement, but the rumor mill has Chris Robinson high in the running. OK, so the guy's got a good set of pipes and he can shriek and wail as he proved with the Black Crowes. But really? John Paul and Jimmy, what are you thinking? Seriously, dude, what are you thinking? Now it would be a stretch to call my own opinion of Zep "lukewarm". Even so, Zep without Plant is like Van Halen without Roth. At best this will be another Van Hagar, and more likely would be a Van Cherone. When Queen toured with Paul Rodgers, they at least called it "Paul Rodgers and Queen", and said "No, he sounds nothing like Freddie, and we don't want him to. And we're playing some Bad company songs too. It's a different deal." But there's just no way you can have Zeppelin without Plant. One of the things many Zep fans keep saying is that they knew when to pack it in and bow out gracefully. I say they should have pulled the plug after "Presence" that we may have been spared from "In through the out door". Now this? Why? This is as bad as KISS with scabs dressed as Ace Frehley and Peter Criss. Maybe even worse. I know they don't need the fucking money. Why on earth would they drag one of the most venerated musical franchises in history through the bog? No good, dudes. No good. This will go over like the "lead zeppelin" mentioned by Moonie 40 years ago. Actually, this will be more like the Hindenberg, but much, much funnier. I hope the plug gets pulled before you do this. And if not, I hope your reputations never, ever, ever, ever recover.

HATE IT! part 5 - Rage against the machine

OK, this one is going to be a little different, because the lion's share of my ire isn't directed against the entire band, but at Zack De la Rocha. An important caveat. Sure, the rest of them share in the culpability for being knee-jerk blowhards, but Zack is not only the biggest of the blowhards, but the least talented as well. Tom Morello will always have my esteem for playing guitar like nobody else. That's tough to do, and laudable when someone does it. But really, what's unique about the band as a whole? Well, Mr. Morello is, and that's it. His contributions are absolutely nullified by the utter banality of De la Rocha's ranting. I've never understood why people think the guy's such a lyrical genius; "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" isn't exactly the kind of pithy political espousal that one can admire, or even take seriously. Of course, there's the use of Ernie Guevara's disgusting visage to object to as well. If these guys were half as politically aware as they think they are, they'd realize that Guevara was nothing but a bloodthirsty failure as a politician as well as a revolutionary, and that the only of his many revolutions that succeeded was the one in Cuba. This was entirely thanks to Fidel's political acumen. They'd also realize that the same iconic image they use was taken by some poor bastard who's never seen a dime in royalties, despite his photo turning up on t-shirts and posters in every pot-smoke filled dorm room in America. Equality indeed. In a 1993 interview with Deadline magazine, De la Rocha said "If I weren't in a rock band, I'd probably be a sexual harassment attorney." Or working in a head shop, methinks. How many women's studies majors did you cajole into the sack with that line, you cad? Renegades of funk? Did you give Afrika Bambaataa any royalties or even any credit for that, since you ripped that title off from him? I'm guessing no. I know it's not necessarily your fault, but how many frat boys hopped up on Schmit ice have listened to your music and pummeled some hapless computer major into a bloody pulp? I know that it's mostly Dave Matthews' and Jack Johnson's territory, but how many times has your music been the soundtrack to a date rape? You are stupid. Your music is stupid. Your fans are stupid. This is political awareness still in its training pants. They're full of shit, Zack, you'd better get them changed. Then you can fuck right off.

P.S. I'm guessing Josh Beckett loves you.

P.P.S. Your message is lost on the majority of your audience, who voted for Bush twice. Just sayin'.

HATE IT! part 4 - "Ten", by Pearl Jam

Oh, man. These fuckers. First, let me say how much the "grunge" label annoys me. It does. It was applied wholesale at the time to any band out of Seattle. This included the venerable Young Fresh Fellows, who, as anyone who has listened to them knows, are not a "grunge" band. They are buffoons who enjoy buffoonery and write songs like "The ballad of only you & the can prevent forest fires" among other fine examples of foolish fun. Naturally, the "grunge" label was extended to Pearl Jam despite their music not fitting within that particular ouvre. Next, I will lament the number of times I saw a bunch of asshats in a "mosh pit" aping the above record jacket by putting their hands up in the air together. Furthermore, I shall bemoan the fate suffered by my poor ears at the strains of this crap. Eddie Vedder sounds like a fucking horse trying unsuccessfully to shit out the family of chinamen who were smuggled into america via his colon. Besides his voice, I don't like the music. It's crap, just like the rest of their albums are crap. This band is crappy and craps crap all over the place except in the crapper, where crap is obviously supposed to go, lest we trod in it and smear crap all over the floor, making it all crappy.


FIE!

HATE IT! part 3 - Damien Jurado

I do not own nor have I even listened to any of his albums. I have, however, been subjected to a few minutes of his live show. How did this happen? I went to see Subset at the Break Room (now Chop Suey) on Capitol Hill in Seattle. I paid to get in. I bought a beer. Then this fucking fat pile of shit got up on stage. Subset had been canceled and replaced by this guy, this second coming of Pedro the Lion, this subliminal worship musician with a hymnal full of angsty bullshit and a pocketful of unresolving chord progressions for added "tortured" cred. Now, Subset consisted of The presidents of the USA with Sir Mix-a-lot. What kind of bait and switch horseshit is that? Is it even possible to find a replacement who's musically any farther removed than Jurado is to those guys? I guzzled my beer as fast as possible and walked up to the doorman. I pointed to the stage and said "I'd like my money back. I mean, DUDE." He glanced at the "no refunds" sign and shook his head. "Yeah, this is some bullshit. Here's your money." I thanked him and went on my way. That was 8 years ago and I haven't patronized that establishment since. If I ever see Jurado walking down the street I'm gonna throw a fucking brick at his balls. One pedro was two too many. Two pedros is like walking in on Amy Grant taking a shit in the middle of your living room floor while she plays Ida on your stereo. Then when you've tossed her out and everything's clean again, you want to go to bed but you notice she's wiped boogers all over your pillows and on your toothbrush.

HATE IT! part 2 - It's hard to find a friend

Pedro the fucking lion. It's hard to find a friend, is it? It must be when you sound like this. I really hate this album, and this band in general, for 2 reasons. The first is that this album sounds like a junkie nodding off on smack. The second is that it's god-rock subtly wrapped up in some kind of late-90s hipster disguise. Fuck you, Pedro, for boring me to death, and fuck you again for springing Jesus on me in the middle of it all. Fuck you.

HATE IT! part 1 - You are my flower

In the "HATE IT!" sections of this blog, you will not find me giving an actual review of an album which I dislike, and giving due explanation of my distaste. You will simply find me abusing an album or band which I find particularly excremental. The band in this case is Brooklyn's own Ida, and the album is "You are my flower", to which I reply: "You are my nightmare." I had a roommate years ago who positively adored (and probably still does) this band. As a result, I was subjected to their pabulum strains for untold hours on end, in spite of my vocal protestations. While they do actually perform some really nifty Prince covers, the songs they themselves write can only be adequately described by pulling out one's hair by the fistful and swan diving from the aurora bridge in Seattle into Adobe software's nicely paved parking lot below. God knows I wanted to every time I was subjected to it. It is absolutely the most inane, boring boy/girl pap you will hear in your life. Period. It drives me to violence in its maddening placidity. It is anathema to life itself. This is what taking a nap sounds like. This is worse than eating a bowl of teeth and hair. This is the gentlest, most frustrating rape my ears have ever endured. It sounds like the picture on the Massengill box. This is what it sounds like when the most sensitive poet on earth makes wine from the tears of a butterfly, and then slips you a roofie and sticks both feet up your asshole while you're out of it and leaves you to wake up covered in rose petals and rancid semen. It is so drudgingly fucking slow that the music has no discernible beat or rhythm. It sounds like someone thoroughly enraptured by the process of their own slow death by a horrible disease. I would not wish this on Hitler. I would rather die than listen to Ida again, because their music just isn't worth living through. An F is far too kind, so it gets an "E", for "emetic". And the only known antidote for these guys is Motörhead.