E-mail Lucifer; Tell him he’ll have to place an order at Land’s End for winter gear, because I’m about to say something nice about Miley Cyrus.

No, I can’t stand her. She’s a terrible singer and actress. Koda Kumi or anyone in Morning Musume (or any female in the Japanese pop scene, quite frankly) could eat her for breakfast and shit out the Pussycat Dolls. But in a Parade magazine interview that hitting newspaper inserts this weekend, apparently she has a few choice words about the genre her father helped ruin:

“It scares me, that’s why. It feels contrived on so many levels. Unless you’re wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots and singing and whining about your girlfriend or boyfriend leaving you it’s not going to sell. I think that’s why my dad finally got out of it. You have to wear those cowboy boots and be sweet as pie. It makes me nervous, the politics of it all.”

Yeah, it’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but in this case, the pot is right: Even though her weak attempts at what she passes off for pop music in this country aren’t exactly any better than the Carrie Underwoods, Rascal Flattses, and John Riches (and their umpteen clones) that Nashville has been passing off as “country” music since her father dropped that achy-breaky one-hit wonder on America’s heads, she hit the nail on the head with an unerring eye. What started out as the unintended invention (for all intents and purposes) of Hank Williams Sr. and Jimmy Rodgers, what used to be the province of distinctive outlaws like Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, and Kris Kristofferson has become an assembly-line genre dominated by a select clique of writers, producers, and session musicians backing a series of interchangeable clones.

It’s not Garth Brooks that should be faulted, although some people like to use him as a convenient whipping boy. Garth Brooks came in as an artist who grew up on both Kiss and George Strait and turned a genre weakened by the Urban Cowboy fad back around. It was the “parade of horribles”, to borrow a Circle Jerks song title, who didn’t give a fuck about the accomplishments of Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, or Buck Owens but saw a way to make a quick buck that infected Nashville. Look up the lyrics to Alan Jackson’s song “Gone Country” and you’ll see a decent idea of what went wrong. Is it any wonder why Garth stopped recording and performing, why Terri Clark walked out on her BNA/Sony-BMG contract and started putting out her own records, why the Dixie Chicks told the country establishment to fuck off and hooked up with Rick Rubin?

Ask Hank Williams III how wonderful Nashville is, or at least listen to or read the lyrics of his songs “Trashville”, “Dick in Dixie”, and “The Grand Old Opry (Ain’t So Grand Anymore)” sometime. There’s your answer.

Not surprisingly, Country Music Television’s blog, playing Fox News to the pop-country establishment’s Republican Party (i.e. acting as an echo chamber/propaganda unit), is seeing fit to defend the current Music Row tripe. Their opinion doesn’t matter – this same blog also praised the idea of record stores going out of business after Sugarland signed with Wal-Mart to have an exclusive right to distribute their next album. Perhaps the author of that CMT blog piece should go visit a real record store – especially on Record Store Day this forthcoming 4.17.10 – and see what real people are buying!

I’m not going to hold my breath and wait to see if Miley has an even bigger epiphany, takes a year off from the public eye to disappears somewhere with a guitar and some Stooges and Minutemen albums, and turns up on some indie label somewhere after letting her Hollywood Records contract lapse. But the mere fact that a super-corporate pop act made such a critical comment speaks volumes – even if she doesn’t follow it up by putting Fun House and Double Nickels on the Dime in her iPod!

2010 is barely two days old, and already there’s new music to look forward to. Nothing on the Western music front yet, as far as I know. But by the time this post is less than a week old, a new Shonen Knife album will be on my desk. A new Koda Kumi album and new Buono! album will follow next month, followed by a new Morning Musume album the month after that – the latter just in time to define the final months of my bachelorhood. And there’s also singles from MoMusu, AKB48, Buono! and SCANDAL to deal with during that time period as well. The last time I recall looking forward to a new non-J-pop release at the beginning of the year, it was The Stooges’ The Weirdness album, which was scheduled within days of Morning Musume dropping Sexy 8 Beat – and those two albums dropping within weeks of each other early in 2007 made the rest of that year quite the anti-climax. By the end of the year, while I was trying to sum up the year in albums at MotokoAoyama.com, I was also planning to propose to my girlfriend.

Oh yeah, there’s that little interruption.

Truth be told, I’m already planning ahead, and not just for that. I’ve already anticipated that there’s going to be a short break in blogging action around the last week of June and going on for at least another week. Which only means one thing: I intend to stay as busy as possible, trying to post as much as possible here and at So Hot She Shits Fire (and whenever I can at My Sweet Meetan), while also going into final preparations for the wedding, getting the last scenes folded into Here Is The Wonderland in the immediate weeks to come, thus finishing that long-in-the-making first draft before plunging into the second, which should only take a minuscule fraction of the time it took to complete the first draft. And also upping my guitar skills.

What?

Yeah, I got a new electric guitar over the Christmas holidays. I don’t think I will be discussing it much here – this blog is meant for serious music discussion, and personal ramblings about trying to re-master the pentatonic scale or getting a better handle on sweep picking don’t really belong here, so there may be a little place somewhere where I’ll let those out of my system. (Updates about my personal life don’t belong here either, of course. I might refer to them in vague here or in “conversation” at SHSSF, but that’s another story, and I already have places for that.)

This, in a nutshell, is as personal as I intend to get, and I’m keeping it in topic: 2010 is going to see a lot more activity here. Beyond that, I’m not hard to find, as the list of “personal” links that has always existed here and at this blog’s predecessor will attest. With one of the series that I hinted at back in November (the Best Albums of 2009 series) out of the way, the other one will be starting next week to formally kick off blogging activity here at TGML for 2010. For now, I’m going to spend the rest of the weekend decompressing from New Year’s Eve/Day.

Other than that (and my wedding), I don’t know what’s going to take place in 2010. Hell, I didn’t know when 2009 started that Morning Musume were getting ready to announce their American debut and that Ron Asheton was going to be transferred from the Stooges to Rock N’Roll Heaven’s Helluva Band either.

Stay tuned. Things are only going to get insane here. But in a good way, of course.

The above headline is not sarcasm. And I’m not a fan of Beyonce’s solo work, but Kanye West (one of the few Western mainstream artists that gets my money every goddamn time to begin with) jumping in and interrupting pop-country puppet Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for her undeserved MTV award was great. Last night’s incident was a reminder of why Kanye West is one of the few hip-hop artists worth paying attention to in an era dominated by talentless 50 Cent clones, and why artists like Taylor Swift are a total joke in the current state of Nashville’s parade of fake-country artists that wouldn’t survive a week, let alone a entire tour, with a legit country artist like Hank III or Willie Nelson.

Let’s see what these people who are quick to defend Taylor Swift now will say when she’s playing nothing but state fairs in five to ten years, while Kanye West is still making records as both artist and producer.

ETA: Triggerman over at SavingCountryMusic.com has his own, rather lethal point of view on last night here.

I know people often bring up how the deaths of famous people seem to come up in threes, but today was ridiculous. And all three of the people who passed today were pop culture mile markers in my own lifetime.

Farrah Fawcett’s passing at 62 after battling cancer – and a mere day or two after it was announced that her and longtime partner Ryan McNeal were going to marry (they’d been a common-law couple for a couple of decades) – is a sad but not surprising passing. Her cancer battle had been public for some time; a network TV special on her cancer battle also served in part to cast more light on America’s desperately-overdue-for-an-overhaul health care system when part of that special depicted her seeing treatment in Europe for her cancer.

When I was younger, I used to watch Charlie’s Angels during its first-run status on ABC. If I recall correctly, Farrah only remained on Charlie’s Angels for their first season (her character did recur in a later season, but I’d stopped watching by then). Her famous poster from that period (said to have sold 12 million copies) has long become iconic, as is the hairstyle she popularized in the series. She also managed to strengthen her acting cred in her post-Angels career by appearing in roles that were a far cry from her TV character: most notably, the off-Broadway play Extremities (1982) and the anti-domestic abuse TV movie The Burning Bed (1984). Extremities in particular is cited as the role that gave Farrah serious credibility as a dramatic actress, making the choice to have her reprise the role for a 1986 motion picture a no-brainer.

The second passing of today was that of early garage-punk icon Sky Saxon, leader of the legendary 60’s rock group The Seeds, of “Pushing Too Hard” and “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine” fame. Both songs were minor Top 40 hits in their day, but both songs have gone on to be considered garage-punk classics, a designation that began when “Pushing Too Hard” was tapped to be one of the songs included on the now-classic compilation album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era, and both songs have been covered by many punk groups, including the Ramones and early California hardcore punks The Klan, in the 80’s and beyond.

Saxon himself, after being aligned for much of the 70’s with a religious sect/commune called the Source Family (their leader, Father Yod, is said to have given Sky the moniker Sunlight, which stuck almost permanently for the rest of his life), spent the rest of his career working both with various reformations of The Seeds and with other pickup groups. More recently, Saxon had collaborated with Billy Corgan on some new material and would later appear in the Smashing Pumpkins’ video for “Superchrist”. Saxon had recently moved to Austin, TX, initially after only intending to stay briefly for some performances. He had checked into an Austin hospital with a suspected infection of his internal organs, but succumbed to whatever was ailing him not long after being admitted. He was 63.

And then, there is the most shocking death of the three.
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