Professional freestyle motocross rider (OMG! She was in the X-Games)
Professional motocross racer
Drag bike racer
Funny car racer
Scuba diver
Skateboarder
High school basketball player
Cross country runner
Tween soccer player
Go karting enthusiast
Reality TV “personality.”
Lingerie football player
Owner of two large, round breasts
Ok, that’s just too much shit, there’s no way someone can do all of that stuff and be good at it. It doesn’t even make sense. It’s just too much, TOO MUCH!
Sorry, back now.
Anyway, in the below video Ms. Williams lets you know how awesome she is by pretending to be Lita Ford while showing VHS footage of all the stuff she’s into. She also breaks Shredding Rule Number One by turning her back to the camera during the solo. Nice ass or no, you’re supposed to show off your tasty licks, not hide them.
Warner Music Group doesn’t understand how the internet works, so I couldn’t post up “Jesus built My Hotrod” (which is obvious, but also kicks ass). I figure this is a good substitute.
It’s always been obvious in R&B music, the Xerox effect. Where you end up with a copy of a copy of a copy that vaguely resembles the original but in a totally superficial way. Where as, say Aretha Franklin and Al Green started in the church and their singing style evolved from that, Whitney Houston was influenced by both singing in church and the things that Aretha/Tina/The Supremes/The Temps/Etc. brought to it. By the time we get to Mariah Carey the church is gone and it’s just an imitation of Whitney Houston and Beyonce’, an imitation of Marian. A copy of a copy of a copy that vaguely resembles the original, but not really. It went from “The Spirit moving me” to “urban yodelling” in forty years.
Hair metal is no different, but the time span was well and truly more compressed. That first generation of bands, your Motley Crues and Quiet Riots were influenced by 70s glam and punk bands. Motley, specifically, were the result of Sid Vicious sodomizing Ziggy Stardust. The second generation, your Poisons and Warrants (Guns and Roses were always an outlier, anyway) lost the punk rock attitude and focused on the glam image, by the time you got to the third and fourth generation you ended up with bands who either had great musical chops but no identity (check out Shotgun Messiah, a band that put out three albums and an EP that all sound like they were made by different bands) lots of musical chops, but little sincerity (I’m looking at you, Spread Eagle) or Trixter. You also had a weird situation where the bands that influenced the movement (Kiss, Aerosmith) re-tooled their image to fit into it better.
Also, Tuff. Stevie Rachelle’s greatest musical accomplishment was running the now pretty much dead in the water Metal Sludge. But before that he was the lead singer of Tuff, and it would not surprise me if he ever demanded a paternity test from Brett Michaels. Tuff was to 80s hair metal what Justin Bieber is to Al Green, a copy of a copy of a copy of a thing so far removed from the thing that only the faults remain. Even through the influenza and cough syrup haze I currently live in, this song sucks. Hard. Not even the ‘Tussin can help.
Over on the Deciblog they’re still doing “Justify Your Shitty Taste in Music” (I STILL think someone should do “Justify The Shitty Music in Your Web Edit”). They got around to someone justifying liking Celtic Frost’s Cold Lake. And they posted the video to Cherry Orchards
I had forgotten how bad that song was. Really. (I will agree that the opening riff is pretty awesome, though)
To understand why Cherry Orchards is so bad you kind of have to hear what Celtic Frost is supposed to sound like.
I’m waiting for Sean to chime in on how it wasn’t that bad. It was that bad. Tom G. Warrior, the man who wrote “Procreation of the Wicked” is wearing fingerless, white, lace gloves. It was that bad.
Riddle me this, Batman…what do you get when you combine members of Chemical Waste, M.O.D., Celtic Frost and Uniform Choice? If you said, “a funk metal band,” you are correct. I will also be seeing your family about an intervention. Mindfunk was sort of a super group of bands that sold like eight albums, simple math would tell you that they should’ve sold 24, 25 albums easy. Not that they did, but they should have. Actually, Mindfunk (which released the best Soundgarden album never made) isn’t the band we’re talking about here, the band I’m here to discuss is Mind Funk, which is a band composed of almost all the same members which Guitar For The Practicing Musician magazine described as “what The Red Hot Chili Peppers would sound like if they stopped making Nike commercials and listened to their Metallica albums.”
In all actuality, this is not true. Mind Funk wasn’t RHCP with 100% more metal (that would be Fishbone). Mindfunk was Bang Tango with 75% more ugly (let’s be honest here, in the 80′s Joe LeSte was the second prettiest woman in metal behind Nuno Bettancourt, while John Monte looks like he was birthed out the wrong hole). This is not an insult, of all the third-ish generation pop-metal bands I think that Bang Tango is clearly at or near the top of the heap and their first album stands up even now:
Also they had a bass player named Kyle Kyle which ranks right up there with Shotgun Messiah’s Tim Tim as the best stage name ever (Truly Fucking Stupid division).
But this isn’t about Bang Tango.
The first Mind Funk album is a masterpiece of a genre that gets no respect. I mean, funk metal got no respect when it was popular and even less now. But this album stands up, in part, because unlike many bands in the genre (excuse me while I glance askance at The Infectious Grooves) Mind Funk played down the funk and played up the metal. There were grooves aplenty to be found, sure, but almost all of the tracks were just just good, solid, hard rockin’ songs.
(I have no idea why the person who posted this video decided to not adjust the tracking on their VCR)
Ok, to some extent you have to excuse the fact that Pat Dubar can’t really sing, but who knew that John Monte and Reed St. Mark had any groove in them? Not I. Granted the album had some clunkers on int. the closer “Touch You” comes from the trying too hard school of really clunky, and the “do dodo do do do dodododo down!” chorus of “Blood Runs Red” completely jacks an otherwise great song. But all is forgiven. Why? Sister Blue
Reimagining the standard heavy metal power ballad as a country blues tune with a RIDICULOUS Louis Svitek guitar solo at the end. This song is, in a word, brilliant, and makes up for pretty much all other shortcomings of the album.
Decibel Magazine’s Deciblog has a new(ish) section up called “Justify Your Shitty Taste,” where their writers have to justify their love for an unlovable album such as Judas Priest’s Turbo or Metallica’s St. Anger or anything that Varg has ever done.. As far as ideas go it’s a fairly awesome one and one worthy of thievery, by someone else obviously, I’m way too lazy to follow up on this. However, I offer out into the universe the following idea:
Justify the shitty music in your video part.
It’s no secret that BMX videos are often set to some of the shittiest music known to man. It can be argued, in fact, that the only videos ever released in BMX that didn’t have shit music are, the handful of videos that use Refused “New Noise,” the original Macneil video which used Suicidal Tendencie’s “Thee Feeling’s Back” and Standard’s “Stronger Than All” which used Prong’s “Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck” (although in that last case the song was edited so terribly that it almost loses points. How did the Macneil folks manage to extend that ST track seamlessly and Standard couldn’t do the same to such an obviously re-mix ready track? Is it because they’re in Iowa?).
Of course there are obvious problems with this idea. Granted all I know about modern BMX “culture” I’ve learned from the comments on The Come Up, but there’s a good chance that asking a BMXer why their musical taste sucks will result in a poorly spelled, grammatically atrocious homophobic rant. And, of course, the obvious answer is either “money” (good music isn’t cheap to license) or “youth” (hey, fuck you, I got Look What The Cat Dragged In for CHRISTMAS when I was 14, I know youth based bad musical taste).
Still, I think someone should get on this. Stat. Defgrip guys, are you listening?
