Has It Been That Long Already?
Yep, it’s been that long… it actually has been five years since I started blogging (this site started in 2007, and I apparently miscalculated last year… fuck it!) Time to update the annual list of what I’ve been through since I started blogging:
Two webhosts (only one of which I recommend, Bluehost)
Four laptops (Don’t get me started…)
Three iPods (I finally upgraded to a 120GB model!)
One iPad
Morning Musume and AKB48 both making their American concert debuts – and way fucking overdue to return to these shores on a regular basis… no excuses, please, just book the dates and get on the plane! And yes, I know AKB were just in DC last week…
Twenty-one Morning Musume singles
Nineteen (soon to be twenty) personnel changes in Morning Musume
Two personnel changes in C-ute
No personnel changes in Berryz Koubou
More personnel changes in AKB48 than anyone can keep up with… (and I’m not even going to bother trying to anymore!)
Seven and a half Morning Musume albums (the “half album” being the 7.5 Fuyu Fuyu EP)
Twenty-one Berryz Koubou singles
Five and a half Berryz Koubou studio albums (the “half album” being their misnumbered (3) Natsu Natsu Mini Berryz)
Eighteen C-ute singles (all of their major-label releases)
Six and a half C-ute albums (I still consider 2 mini ~Ikiru to Iu Chikara~ to be an EP)
Seven Koda Kumi studio albums (I lost track of compilations and singles!)
Four Ayumi Hamasaki albums (Go ahead and yell at me, Vee…)
Two albums and three EPs from Maki Goto
Three albums, two EPs, one best-of, and four guitar tab books from SCANDAL
Three post-Whiteberry EPs from bands led by Yuki Maeda (One Yukki, two The Husky)
Nine Stooges albums (two of those being the remastered editions of their Elektra albums, another being a 180-gram pressing of Raw Power, and counting 2010’s 2CD and four-disc deluxe reissue of the original Bowie mix of Raw Power and the Raw Power Live album released last Record Store Day)
The entire Koharu Kusumi solo discography
The entire Buono! discography to date
The entire AKB48 singles discography to date
Six New York Dolls albums (three of those being vinyl editions of the first three studio albums)
Eight Puffy AmiYumi albums
Five Mission of Burma albums (and a new one on the way)
Three Panic! At The Disco albums
Three Meat Puppets albums
Three Cannibal Corpse albums and two DVDs
Three Deicide albums
Five Hank III albums (counting the Assjack album and the overdue legit release of the This Ain’t Country sessions as Hellbilly Joker) – and Hank III finally getting to say “fuck off” to Mike Curb.
Two copies of Flyleaf’s first album (one autographed)
Three autographed Sick Puppies CDs
One guitar autographed by Iggy Pop and the Asheton Brothers
One Asheton brother being transferred from the Stooges to Rock N’ Roll Heaven’s Helluva Band (I’m sure Ron is trading Mike Watt stories with D. Boon!)
James Williamson rejoining the Stooges
The Stooges finally making the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame (Next targets: The New York Dolls, Black Flag, and The Minutemen… and that’s a fucking vow and a promise from me!)
Lux Interior being transferred from the Cramps to Rock N’ Roll Heaven’s Helluva Band
Captain Beefheart succumbing to Multiple Sclerosis after several years… and the original version of Bat Chain Puller finally being released by the Zappa Family Trust a year later!
A Sex Pistols reunion
A Public Image Ltd. reunion
Malcolm McLaren, the former Sex Pistols “mis-manager” dying of cancer… followed by Johnny Rotten NOT singing “Celebration” or “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” (good on ya, Johnny…)
A fIREHOSE reunion (!!)
Seven books autographed by Henry Rollins
One book autographed by Sen. Arlen Specter
Three e-mails from Henry Rollins
Two e-mails from Jello Biafra
Three day trips to New York where I spent over $700 combined in one store (Virgin Megastore) alone
One day trip to New York where I didn’t spend any money in any record stores (Virgin Mega closed two years prior!)
Four visits to Apple Stores where I spent $0 (and wish I had been able to spend several times what I spent at Virgin)
One visit to an Apple Store where I finally bought something (my iPad!)
Six day trips to Philadelphia
Three day trips to Syracuse, NY
One Stooges concert
One Bon Jovi concert (goddamn motherfucking fuck!)
Two Flyleaf concerts
Two Evanescence concerts
Two Sick Puppies concerts
Two 3 Doors Down concerts (Which makes four times I’ve seen my fiancee’s favorite band, versus zero times I’ve seen my favorite band… that’s gotta be corrected quick-fast)
Two opening sets prior to 3DD by Hinder (Most boring band not named Nickelback or Daughtry, by a long shot)
Two Breaking Benjamin concerts (and unfortunately, although they played well as always, the sound at the second sucked! What was up with that, Ben?)
One Michael Angelo Batio personal appearance
One missed Puffy AmiYumi concert (goddamn motherfucking fuck!)
One missed Morning Musume concert (yes, that concert!!)
One missed Mike Watt & The Missingmen concert (which I made up for on April 2, 2011!)
Six 100-count spindles of CD-R’s
Two Palm Treo 680 smartphones
Three Blackberry smartphones (never again!)
One iPhone
Four SD cards
Three phonograph needles (I’ll be needing a fourth soon.)
Morning Musume CDs finally being released in the United States (until a certain “label” dropped the ball… REAL indie labels like Matador and Merge, the opportunity is now…)
Ten WordPress themes
Seven domain names (on top of the previously mentioned ones, there’s TGML’s URL, the one for the Meetan blog, and a second one for the Reina blog)
Two different Reina Tanaka/Robert Fripp header graphics at MotokoAoyama.com (Vee improved on the original)
Ai Kago finally making a comeback… then blowing it… then joining her fellow ex-W in the world of MILFdom.
One W album that’s gone the way of the original version of SMiLE
The original version of SMiLE going the opposite direction of W3: Faithful (and in a big way… five CDs PLUS double vinyl and two 45s? Got it!)
One Guns N’ Roses album finally being finished, handed in, and released!
Ace Frehley beating his ex-bandmates to record stores with new material… and not having to sell out to Wal-Mart to do it!
Four of the many Mike Watt-related albums that were recorded during this blog’s and its predecessor’s lifetime finally seeing release… and getting sneak previews of a couple of them from the man himself the day before hypenated-man came out!
Two animes with Reina Tanaka doing voice work
The return of most of my favorite O.G. MoMusus
Three knocked-up MoMusus
Two instances where I bitched about Nozomi Tsuji getting knocked up
Three instances where I remarked about what a lucky bastard Taiyo Sugiura is
Three snarky remarks made by me about Avril Lavgine
One snarky remark made by “Reina” about Jamie Lynn Spears
One snarky remark made by me to “Reina” about Beyonce Knowles
Countless snarky remarks about American Idle
More American Idle contestants losing their recording contracts
Five Reina Tanaka photobooks… and a sixth finally on the way!
Two tires
Three illnesses
Three NaNoWriMo wins
Three book projects (two simultaneous, one on hold)
One published short story (”The Man In The Hummer” in Deliver Us From Evil, available from Jaded Silence Press)
One novel coming out on my own book label next month!
All four versions of American Wota
All three versions of International Wota
No getting the Sunn O)))-themed IW 4.0
One nomination at the IntlWota Awards
The debut of IdolMinded
Two jokes stolen from Jeff Dunham
One joke stolen from Nothing Nice To Say
Three times I got under the skin of Tony Brummel at Victory Records… that I know of. (Might as well make it four: How does it feel to lose Silverstein AND Bayside on top of Hawthorne Heights and Atreyu, baldy? I hear Aiden’s next…)
Seven (or was it eight by now?) times my partner at My Sweet Meetan, Chris (CK) went to Japan
Reina Tanaka’s 18th birthday
Reina Tanaka’s 19th birthday
Reina Tanaka’s 20th birthday
Reina Tanaka’s 21st birthday
Reina Tanaka’s 22nd birthday
My 40th birthday… I stopped counting after that.
Mike Watt’s 50th birthday… and counting
Iggy Pop’s 60th birthday… and counting – face it, he’s one unstoppable motherfucker, for which we should all be grateful.
Several boxes of CD sleeves
Countless mouse and camera batteries
Five new electric guitars, all named after J-pop idols
Five effect pedals (two formerly owned by essential brother/up and coming guitar shredder/fellow MoMusu fan Maxxxwell Carlisle!)
Several packs of Ernie Ball Slinky guitar strings… and then I wised up late last year and switched to D’Addario .10′s, except for the Dean MAB3 I named after Erena Ono which will still get .09s!
A year and a half of experimentation with different kinds of guitar picks before I finally settled on 1.50mm Dunlop Tortex Sharps (heavy and pointy is best, it seems… – I could probably do a whole blog post on that subject!)
Countless VitaminWaters
Countless instances where I took to heart David Peel’s adage that “fuck” is not a dirty word
A year and a half of lost blog archives (Don’t trust your webhosting to anyone who stage-names himself “Vikki Stixx”… or for that matter your real estate matters)
Not enough trips to Starbucks or Sonic (yeah, N.E. PA got one of those in 2008!)
Two coffee pots
One K-Cup machine (about fucking time I got one of those… the aforementioned second coffee pot is now on reserve duty)
More money spent at CDJapan than at Gallery of Sound
Not as much money spent on vinyl since 2008, at least I don’t think so… but then again I’ve still taken that option whenever offered)
Virgin Megastore going out of business in 2009
Five Record Store Days (counting the forthcoming one this Saturday, which I’ll be honoring)
And one girlfriend, since upgraded to fiancée and then to wife on 6.26.10
All His Rowdy Friends Are Probably Just As Uninformed And Ignorant As He Is
Quite honestly, I’ve tried to hold my tongue as long as possible on the whole Hank Williams Jr./ESPN brouhaha. I was ready to let it pass without much comment beyond the occasional smartass remark on Twitter and Facebook, but now that his firstborn son has spoken up and that ESPN made the only move they could make, I’m going to comment.
Over the weekend, by coincidence, I happened to read the book Family Tradition: Three Generations of Hank Williams by Susan Marino (Backbeat, 2011). Quite honestly, I was never as much of a fan of Hank Jr.’s music as I am of his father’s and son’s, and I’ve always seen him as someone who, initially by his mother’s heavy hand, made a lifetime career out of riding his esteemed father’s reputation. I did gain a small bit of respect for him thanks to one incident in his story about how he was genuinely upset with some of his backing musicians who had openly cheered the news of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. That bit of respect went down the shitter after news of his remarks (on Fox News, of course) comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler went viral.
One has to wonder how much undetected brain damage Hank Jr. suffered in his near-fatal fall of that mountain in Montana, just as he was starting to reinvent himself as a country-rocker, or how lingering or long-term the effects of his multiple injuries have been since then. I ask that not as a mockery or as an insult, but as a sincere inquiry as to whether or not those injuries may have impacted Randall Hank Williams’s judgement and common sense in the long run.
Since the remark occurred the day of a Monday Night Football broadcast, ESPN wisely pulled that night’s opening intro tape (which for years has consisted of Hank Jr.’s regular rewritings of “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight” for every Monday night football game). Hank Jr., at first, gave what was pretty much a non-apology apology on his website and Facebook where he spent more time boasting that he didn’t have a press agent writing the statement for him than he did apologizing or explaining himself (or double-checking his typed statement for randomly capitalized words).
Lest anyone was left wonder what Hank 3 felt about the whole thing, he was pretty blunt… albeit with more intelligence than his estranged father showed in the first place, stating that his father shouldn’t talk about politics, period, and that the only musician that was qualified to discuss politics, in his opinion, was Jello Biafra.
Jello Biafra and Hank Williams III after one of III's recent West Coast shows.
This morning, ESPN chose to pull the plug on Bocephus for good, issuing a professional statement this morning to confirm as such. Not surprisingly, Hank Jr. chose to take the typical road of the right-wing liar, falsely claiming that he chose to leave and that, trying to further make himself look like the hero and ESPN the villains, falsely claimed that “stepped on the toes of the First Amendment” and that “me, my song, and my rowdy friends are out of here.”
What’s that old expression about not letting the door hit you in the ass on the way out, again?
His son’s more educated opinion not withstanding, Hank Jr. is rumored to still be looking into running for U.S. Senate in his native Tennessee as a Republican. So much for his talk a couple of years ago that he was going to put out records on his own after following his son out of Curb Records’s front door (especially since last month, Hank 3 has run circles around his father in that aspect, putting out three albums simultaneously on his own label). None of that should be any surprise, though – Hank III has been outpacing his father in a lot of aspects to the point where I’ve always wondered if the musical talent in the Hank Williams family skipped Hank Jr. and went right from Hank Sr. to Hank III.
Whether that’s possible or not, one thing is for sure – Hank Williams Jr. is not even a fraction of the man that either his father or his firstborn son is.
My own impression of Hank Williams Sr., especially after reading Family Tradition, is that he was a gentle and generous man despite his substance abuse problems. If Hank Williams Sr. – who was taught how to play guitar by a black blues musician, by the way – were alive to see what an embarrassment his son has become, he’d probably sober up and smack the shit out of him. And I wouldn’t blame him.
How To Prevent “Idol” From Becoming “Idle” Again
It’s been two weeks, and pretty much everyone I’ve talked to is still bewildered as to why James Durbin, one of the few American Idol contestants this season that had never been in the bottom, got voted out. As I am writing this, while people are watching two servings of country crock vie for the “top spot” (which is really who is going to be promoted a little more than the other artist and get a slightly bigger budget) on the program, I am ignoring the entire spectacle and listening to a playlist of all of James’s AI digital singles via earbuds.
Would someone like to tell me, without any bullshit, why this dude isn’t in the Top 2?
How telling is it when, after the Top 4 became the Top 3, Randy Jackson was on The View (and, I’m sure, elsewhere) openly criticizing the vote that had led to James’s uncalled for ouster?
I suggested when I wrote about the situation the night of the disaster that part of the blame should have been directed at an audience that wasn’t really into music (buying it only as an afterthought during a trip to Wal-Mart rather than as a thought-out purchase or chance discovery at a record store, chain or independent, as I put it in said article) but was tuning into the last couple weeks of episodes of the show and voting like they were invested in the season since day one.
That may be one factor. Abbey Phillips from the James Durbin fan Twitter/Facebook page The Durbin Source hipped me to another factor that I hadn’t taken seriously until now, although my own wife had mentioned it in passing as the season progressed: VoteForTheWorst.com
Yep, an anti-American Idol site is apparently to blame a great deal for the disaster this year – and maybe in years past from Season Two onward.
During the Top 4 round that James Durbin found himself voted out of, VoteForTheWorst had put up this graphic on their website (they may have tried to hide it, but Google Images is a wonderful thing):
This isn’t the first time VoteForTheWorst’s followers have skewed the results of a show that most of the visitors don’t even watch or care about. An article from Examiner.com written after the Top 4 had become a Top 3 noted:
“Although it is currently unknown the magnitude of influence the website has, there is little doubt that they have a sizeable following and that many of those followers vote for the chosen “Worst” of the week. The site claims several successes, such as getting Sanjaya Malakar to the Top 7 in Season 6 and Tim Urban to a like finish in Season 9.”
Ugh. I wonder if this site is the reason why Taylor Hicks, who didn’t even last a year with his major label contract, ended up the Season 5 winner? (As I pointed out two weeks ago, I’m sure Chris Daughtry is still laughing like hell about that.)
Can something be done to make sure future seasons of the program don’t go the way of this year’s? Yes. There’s plenty of things that can be done all around to make sure AI viewers aren’t being forced to settle for two flavors of blandness like they are this year.
First off, quite obviously, those that watch AI’s seasons from beginning to end should vest themselves even more in supporting the more deserving contestants, and not skimp on voting. That much is obvious. Just because someone like James Durbin didn’t make the bottom three doesn’t mean they’re immune to getting eliminated.
Second and most important, there should be a serious revamping of the judges’ roles in the eliminations versus those of the people calling in, especially if VoteForTheWorst’s followers are going to be waiting in the wings to fuck things up. Giving the judges a save to use this season was a step in the right direction and they weren’t wrong to give it to Casey Abrams. For next season, the judges and AI’s producers should closely monitor what VoteForTheWorst and any similar “anti-fan” sites that are out there to see what kind of chicanery is afoot. Why should a group of people who don’t watch the show (at least, not with the vested interest actual fans do) be a major factor in who stays and who goes? When chicanery is being dictated, the final say in who gets eliminated from season to season should be left in the hands of the judges.
Is there anything else that can be done to neuter the likes of VoteForTheWorst? Perhaps, and as a big fan of democracy I hate to put it like this, but perhaps AI’s producers should look into making it a little harder for people who don’t give two shits and a fuck about the show to vote. This is admittedly a bit of a stretch, but look at it this way: would the people who vote for who VoteForTheWorst tells them to vote for “participate” if they had to actually pay for their phone calls and text votes? This is a stretch, and no, the phone charges don’t have to be the equivalent of 900 and 976 numbers, but any vaguely substantial charge would easily deter prank “voters”.
A little tightening of standards could also help prevent a boring Top 2 like this year’s as well. American Idol is primarily designed to be a pop/rock/R&B show, and it baffles me how someone like Scotty McCreary(*), who only has an octave and a half at best in his vocal range and very little personal experience with any music outside of the watered-down pop-country that websites like SavingCountryMusic.com rail against, even got into the Top 24. It should have been obvious that someone with that poor of a vocal range and that limited of a musical education could never have pulled off the variety of different material expected of an American Idol contestant.
I can’t say that I’m a fan of the idea of having anyone under 18 audition for the show either – which might be an odd thing for longtime readers of this blog familiar with how often I champion the pop and rock talent coming out of Japan, given the fact that the present lineup of this author’s favorite band features four new members younger than AI Season 10’s Top 2. But the next year or so in the professional and personal lives of Scotty McCreary and Lauren Alaina (face it, it doesn’t matter who becomes finalist and runner-up – they’ll both be handed record contracts by Interscope/UMG the second they step off stage) are just as likely to be the worst of their young lives. I honestly don’t see them handling the pressure that someone in their positions will most definitely be experiencing. Will they be unafraid to stand up for their own artistic ideals, if they have any – or will they let whoever gets assigned to them as a producer call all the shots (Lauren might do so, but that’s a long shot; the bad experiences that both the Dixie Chicks and Hank Williams III have gone through in the past decade easily attest to how difficult it is to be daring when you’re a country artist on a major label). And if they both get dropped from UMG within two years, will they even have the desire to continue performing and recording, even if they have to result to putting out their own records?
Time will tell, but with the track record AI’s past post-Kelly Clarkson finalists have left behind – which isn’t a good one, with only Carrie Underwood and non-winner Chris Daughtry still holding on to their original contracts at the time of this writing, no one should hold their breath. (As this article notes, James Durbin and Haley Reinhardt are already having the last laugh – both of them have sold the most digital singles on iTunes to date. That says a lot.)
As an aside, I also have to wonder what Jimmy Iovine is thinking this past week – he probably expected to get two very good rock/pop artists to add to Interscope’s roster at season’s end; Interscope isn’t exactly a country-friendly label; Scotty and Lauren will probably be parceled out to whatever label UMG’s country division puts records out under, which last I heard was MCA Nashville or Mercury; I certainly don’t see either artist ending up on UMG’s “boutique” alt-country label Lost Highway.
(* Yeah, I said last time I would never mention the names of either of the Top 2, but given the odds they’re against all around for their post-AI careers plus my own Buddhist-influenced beliefs, they deserve at least a little sympathy. I just won’t buy or listen to any of their recordings.)
NEW MUSIC: HANK III “Pistol Packin’ Motherf**ker”
A mere few months after Hank Williams III cut himself loose from his oppressive Curb Records contract, his former label is planning to release a rock/”hellbilly” album that III had handed them as a follow-up/companion to his sophomore solo effort Lonesome Broke and Drinkin’, entitled This Ain’t Country. Curb rejected the album as a whole, and save for one song (“Hang On”) ending up on a soundtrack album, they wanted nothing do to with it. III attempted to get a third party to release it (Alternative Tentacles Records was said to be one of the candidates) but Curb cockblocked him, so III had some “bootleg” CDs pressed and sold them at his shows, then refused to record anything else for Curb for years, a standoff that ended when they agreed to release his third country album, Straight To Hell in the exact form Hank III handed to them.
Now, with III getting ready to release his first independent recordings, Curb are going to release a version of This Ain’t Country under the new title Hellbilly Joker, the original opening track of the rejected original album. The track listing appears to have a couple of tracks shuffled, another substituted, and others retitled. The album drops on April 5 in all three major formats (the LP edition has a bonus CD copy enclosed), but III recently issued a public statement encouraging fans not to buy the release, but steal it instead. Either way, I welcome better sounding copies of such Hank III rockers as the title track, “Now He’s Dead”, and the track below (sourced from my mp3 copies of the original This Ain’t Country. Listen and tide yourself over:
Stream: Hank III “Pistol Packin’ Motherfucker”
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REVIEWS: The Big Catch-Up, Part I
THE BIG CATCH-UP… In which the wearied webmaster of this here site gives some quick capsule reviews to recent albums he’s liked but hasn’t gotten around to writing about.
I usually don’t like to do capsule reviews. In my view, they tend to be written by lazy hack writers who only seem to skim through the promotional copies of CDs they obtain for review before piling them up in a box somewhere for them to sell off at a used CD store somewhere – if they bother to listen to them in the first place. But since I’ve been doing a whole lot of listening but no blog-related writing over the past few months – thanks in part to all of the preparations I’ve been going through for my wedding this Saturday – this particular format will have to do. After the honeymoon and once I’ve gotten settled in, I’ll go back to my regular reviewing style. This’ll be part one. Part two I’ll be completing and posting after the honeymoon.
AKB48 – Kami Kyokutachi (You! Be Cool/King) – While there’s a whole pile of albums out there with the AKB48 name on them, they’ve all been, with the exception of the Set List – Greatest Songs 2006-2007 compilation, basically “original cast albums” of all of the separate teams’ shows – lots of good songs and good singing, but nothing that could cohesively be called a studio album. Fortunately, although billed as a “best-of album”, Kami Kyokutachi comes off as close to a coherent studio album as the group has ever come. All of the band’s King A-sides plus their interim digital-only indie single “Baby! Baby! Baby!” get supplemented with a few random B-sides (no Undergirls/Theatre Girls material or Erena Ono’s beautiful solo cut “First Kiss” though) and some new tracks and make for the most cohesive – and long overdue – long-playing experience to be released under the AKB48. Now if they could put out a single A-side that is a hell of a lot more exciting than the last couple of singles they’ve released since the year started…
Rating: 
Available on CD/DVD combo and on iTunes Japan.
DEVO – Something for Everybody (Warner Bros.) – When it was first announced that Devo had gotten back together full-time, resigned to their original American record label Warner Bros., and started working on a new album, I saw a couple of skeptical tweets from people who wondered why anyone would want a new Devo album in the first place. Well, not only have Devo debunked Thomas Wolfe’s old yarn about not being able to go home again by returning to Warner Bros., they’ve also followed in the tradition of the Stooges, New York Dolls, Mission of Burma and Ace Frehley and handed in an album that was worth both the multi-decade wait (two decades, in the case of our beloved spudboys), but they’ve made their finest album since 1983’s Oh No! It’s Devo. Simply put, they’ve redeemed themselves after the debacle of their Enigma Records period and made an album that stands up as tall as their classic back catalog (most of which has been very nicely remastered and reissued by Warner Bros.). (Also, in my opinion, Warner Bros. should surprise the hell out of casual listeners and service the ballad “No Place Like Home” to radio.)
Rating: Available on CD, LP, and in three different iTunes/Amazon MP3 editions; this review is based on the highly-recommended 16-track deluxe edition.
HANK WILLIAMS III – Rebel Within (Sidewalk/Curb) – This is the last album Hank III is doing for Curb Records, and once it was announced earlier this year that he had completed the album and handed it in to the label, people wondered how much of an effort he’d put into it, given his open disgust with how the label handled his music. Given his intentions to continue as an independent artist for all future albums onward, III could not certainly squander his hard-earned fan base for the sake of kissing off his soon-to-be-former-label. Thus, Hank hands in a set of mostly country material closer to Lonesome Broke and Driftin’ than his seminal Straight to Hell, but changes gears in a few places with the title track’s touches of Assjack-style hollering in the chorus, the eerie “Karmageddon” with its lyrical allusions to the plight of Native Americans, and – the true highlight of the album – a raucous country/punk/metal hybrid in “Tore Up and Loud”, where III’s “Hellbilly” style gets kicked up several notches with personal lyrics, power-metal double-kick drumming (done by III himself – like “Punch Fight Fuck” on Damn Right Rebel Proud, anytime you hear Slayer-style drums behind country guitars, III’s sitting behind the kit), and Pantera-esque electric guitar riffing, culminating in a blatant, obvious, and long-overdue Declaration of Independence capped with a “Fuck all y’all” to the Curb Records staff. Fuck Curb, indeed – and a big “fuck, yeah” for Shelton Hank Williams.
Rating: Available on CD, LP with bonus CD, and on iTunes and AmazonMP3.
Again, part two comes after the honeymoon… see you then! Until then, one can follow our exploits via Twitter.
Happy 4th!
Fourth Blogging Anniversary, that is…
I almost forgot to post something today, but I have a good excuse: Today was also my fiancee’s bridal shower, and guess who had to schlep gifts back and forth in his car? Yep…
I should note that for the past few weeks I’ve been – on top of planning towards the wedding and subsequent move into mine and my wife-to-be’s new apartment – finishing up the novel (yeah, still… but then again if I didn’t have to hold a day job it would have been finished already), working on a screenplay for Script Frenzy, working on a couple of reviews for this blog (they’ll be up this week), and working on my guitar.
And last night, boy, did I work on my guitar… I got this thing (Epiphone Les Paul) a few months ago, but I never changed the strings until last night. Such was my Saturday night:
And to keep things J-pop related, here’s another part of what helped keep me sane, especially today:
Besides, I couldn’t figure how to equal or better the live MoMusu and Stooges clips from last year! But what I can do is (even though I didn’t get this finished until after midnight when the 11th became the 12th) update a list I posted two years ago on my second blogging anniversary at MotokoAoyama.com, which would make this “A List That Took Four Years To Make”:
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BEST ALBUMS OF 2008: #3: HANK WILLIAMS III “Damn Right Rebel Proud”
HANK WILLIAMS III
Damn Right Rebel Proud
(Sidewalk/Curb)
Available on CD, 180-gram LP with bonus CD, iTunes, and AmazonMP3
Mike Curb is a moron. When he first signed Shelton Hank Williams, Curb figured that, starting with the infamous 1996 Three Hanks: Men with Broken Hearts album of Hank III and his father Hank Williams Jr. doing posthumous duets with Hank Sr., the foundation would be laid for a series of million-selling pop country albums like III’s formal debut album Rising Outlaw. Then Hank III handed Curb as his follow-ups the more traditional-sounding Lonesome Broke and Driftin’ and the metal/punk “hellbilly” album This Ain’t Country and all hell broke loose. Curb refused to release This Ain’t Country and seemingly gave Lonesome little or no attention becuase it didn’t sound like Tim McGraw. Hank III would be in legal limbo for several years, touring his ass off both with his own band (doing country, hellbilly, and punk/metal all in the same show) and as bassist with Superjoint Ritual. Eventually, a settlement came and Hank III released his definitive album Straight To Hell in 2006, complete with his already infamous anti-pop-country anthem “Dick In Dixie”, through Curb’s Bruc imprint. Damn Right Rebel Proud is more of the same and then some. III lashes out at Gaylord Entertainment, the Grand Old Opry’s current owners, for not reinstating III’s influential grandfather (“The Grand Old Opry (Ain’t So Grand)”), unleashes some “hellbilly” material for the first time on an official release (“H8 Line” and “Long Hauls and Close Calls”), disses the Bush Adminstration (“If You Can’t Help Your Own”), carries on the “family tradition” in his own way (“Smoke and Wine”, “Six Pack of Beer”), and pays tribute to GG Allin (“Punch, Fight, Fuck”). This definitely isn’t your sister’s country - unless your sister is the type of girl who jumps onstage while Hank III and his band are playing and flashes her tits at the crowd.
