Goodbye old friend

NOT the best of weeks here in the [Gorp] household. And to top it all off, some bad news. I'm losing something very close to me, something I didn't think would ever leave me.

I'm talking about this piece of work right here:



This bad boy has a long and storied history. Originally used by my grandma(r), it saw a lot of action. And I mean action. Used to watch Knight Rider on it while playing with army men in her apartment.

Then he came home. Our home. He went to the basement, the boiler room in fact. That's where he is right now, on a shelf. But beforehand he was on a table, captaining one of the sickest gaming rigs of the time. My NES got booted from the basement proper years ago, and the TV that used to be there up and died. This one took its place and was magnificent.

The old TV was prone to fuzzing up and having its vertical scroll go haywire. I don't know if you remember what life was like when you had to adjust that thing, but it was part of the joy that was watching television in the 80s and early 90s.

This new guy was perfectly stable. Pristine signal. Never fucked up. He was dependable. If you wanted to play some Rampart, he was game. When you played Bases Loaded or Ice Hockey, it was like HD. I am dead serious. The colors were sharp and you could see ever square end of every pixel. Hell, he even made the Intellivision look magnificent.

But as time went on, the NES got less and less use as the PlayStation, then the PS2, came in. By 2000, he was in semi-retirement. By 2002, he was done. Not done done, but I was done with the NES. We retired the NES (though the setup is still in its spot, ready to go at a moment's notice) and kicked the TV to the shelf because it wasn't compatible with any cables we had. A computer now occupies its space.

I learned that tomorrow I have to haul the old buddy upstairs so he can be trashed. He'll become one with a landfill somewhere, unless they use some parts for recycling or something. I'm sure he has some nasty chemicals inside there, though.

I think he's okay with it. Deep down inside, every appliance knows that one day this day must come. Just like everyone else, everything has to degrade, break down, retire and get trashed. Except plastics. Those motherfuckers have to be melted or something, they never go away. EVER.

I'm okay with it too. Old buddy was there for me, but he's been replaced now. That's the way it goes with inanimate objects.

It's tempting to say that a lot of memories are going to the landfill. That's not true. They're here with me, and as long as those neutrons are functionl, they are not going anywhere.

So long, dude.

An Okay Book

Another two months, another book down.

This time around, it's Time Wise's "Speaking Treason Fluently," a follow-up to his "White Like Me" book of essays. I heard of Wise a while ago and was interested in seeing what he had to say en masse. This is ALMOST his latest work.

For those of you not "in the know," :quotefingers: Wise is... someone, a consultant I think, who talks a lot about racism. I mean, a lot. I mean, all the fuckin' time. He's also white, in case you couldn't tell. It's rare hearing a white dude talk about racism and not sound like a douche doing so, and Wise almost pulls it off, with some minor stumblings.

Wise's whole deal is that white people have privileges in America, privileges they take advantage of daily, even when they don't realize it. And even though society has progressed (mostly) since outright racism, there are still vestiges around us that keep minorities down.

He backs this up with a solid mix of logical arguments (which isn't hard since racism itself is pretty goddamned illogical) and stastical stuff, though some of his info is outdated in this book. But the studies he uses (for example, criminal studies that show that white people are more likely to possess drugs in traffic stops, even though blacks are overwhelmingly stopped more often) are very effective. Too bad they will mostly fall on deaf ears, because racists usually have earworms and stuff.

Wise uses language well enough to avoid launching walls of text at you, but he runs into another problem. Wise repeats himself. A lot. Not as much as the Chomp, but he usually swings by the same sets of arguments over a span of essays. It's not overly repetitive, but you do notice the repetition. And if it's one thing, I repeat, one thing I really hate, it's repetition. STOP DOING THAT.

OKAY.

He's also pretty good when he stays in his statistical, professional element, but when he delves into certain tangents, he can sound like a bit of a magoo. Case in point: He devotes an entire chapter to defending Barry Bonds. Yeah, him. Barrold, you see, was victimized by racism, and it doesn't matter anyway because the records suck because most of them were taken when whites shut blacks out of ball.

I think the essay was written before the Roidmuffin admitted under oath that he took roids ("unknowningly" :quotemarks:), because he attests that Barry never even admitted to taking them. Well he did. He definitely dog did. Then he tries to argue that roids don't make you a great player, which is missing the point (they allow great players to hit more HRs than they would, which was the entire fucking problem with Barry). As for his Negro League argument, well, I don't know what he wants to do about that because there's no way to prove that the great Negro Leaguers would have done better or worse if the MLB was integrated from the start. It's irrelevant anyway because they have done a lot since integration, including holding both the legit and illegit titles of Homerun King.

But other than that, Wise usually is on point and entertaining. He's even better when he speaks (his cadence, in particular, is cool to watch). In print, though, he suffers a bit from repetition and the occasional odd tangent.

If you're at all interested in racism in modern America and are prepared to learn some shit you might not already know, you should check this one out.

And that, as they say, "is that." :fingers break doing quotemarks:

ELECTION 2009: AMERICA: THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING, PART 3: JUDGMENT DAY

I don't know what's going on in Poland on Tuesday, if they're having elections for chief comissar or if they're voting on the referendum to rename Lodz to Get a Lodz of Me, but tomorrow is election day. Or erection day if you live in Corea. Corea has the best elections.

But, you might say, it's 2009. An off-year election. How interesting can this shit get? You might not have noticed when you were here, but America has gone kookier than normal, especially your right-winged comrade at arms. In fact, things are downright HECTIC. This year is no different.

There are three elections that people are hyping because a) they're bored and b) they're desperate. Even though these elections will change absolutely nothing pertinent about anything, they're amusing to watch because of all the batshit nonsense implications about them, and because they reveal a glimpse of the background machinations of our shitty political system.

Let's stop chewing the fat and get right down to brass tacks. While we climb the ladder of success, keeping our noses to the grindstone.

ERECTION 1: VIRGINNY GUBENATORIAL. GOOBERNATORIAL?

Name: Creigh Deeds

Party: Democrat

Pros: Professional macker

Possibly rich

Cons: Illiterate

Everyone laughs at him

VS.

Name: Bob McDonnell

Party: All the time

Pros: Loves Jesus

And her boyfriend too

Cons: Not quite Hawaiian

Insane

Virginny went to Obama in the last election, but when it woke up and realized it was sleeping next to a black guy, it quietly panicked and took a shower. That shower is coming in the form of Bob McDonnell, a graduate of Jerry Fallwell's Bible camp. Now all Virginia has to do is wait in the shower until the black dude goes away, then it can come out and confess its sins. Oh wait, they don't do that down there.

McDonnell's opponent is Creigh Deeds. I have no idea who Mr. Deeds is (HEH), but he certainly isn't going to Washington (HEH HEH). Because the governor's house is in Richmond, actually (HEH HEH HEH). But yeah, he's like 13 points down in the polls, so of course the GOP is playing this shit up. It's like when the Dodgers were going to the playoffs and they're like, "HELL YEAH WE BEAT THE REDS. WORLD SERIES HERE WE COME." Then Manny slips on a banana peel and they're eliminated by Jonathan Broxton's shitty pitching.

So yeah, this is a layup for the GOP. But it's also the least important of the BIG THREE.

ERECTION 2: NEW JERSEY GOVERNOR. GUVNA!!!

Name: Jon Corzine
Party: You betcha
Pros: Rich as fuck
Rockin' the beard
Cons: Incompetent as fuck
Exemplies pretty much everything wrong with our system

VS.

Name: Chris Christie

Party: The elephants

Pros: I suppose he's "bonhommie"

Can use fat to survive long winters

Cons: JOWELS

As generic as Republicans can get

Chris Christie vs. Jon Corzine on paper looks like a mismatch. Corzine has tons of money, tons of fans, and tons of some other stuff probably. Oh yeah, he's also the incumbent.

But Corzine has gotten in his own way. First it was getting in a car crash rushing to the aid of the Ruggers women's basketball squad. Then it was fucking up the budget. Then everyone realized that he's the governor of New Jersey.

Amazingly, someone wants to take this job away from Corzine, and that's this guy. Up there. On the right. Chris Christie. He's a lawyer, and probably a really nice dad, and he probably lets his kids smoke weed. I think. He looks the type. But other than that, what does he stand for?

Well, not much. His campaign is basically CUT YER TAXES AND CUT SPENDING. I HATE FRAUD AND I LOVE P(censored). So Republicans have supported his campaign, but not overwhelmingly so.

New Jersey hasn't been Democratic since Christie Todd Whitman, but she was not a maniac right-winger so her tenure isn't looked on so fondly. I don't think Christie will similarly be that nuts, just a bumbling retard but not crazy Jesus retard. I'm not sure NJ can be destroyed much more than it already can be.

To show how confident Corzine is in his election chances, he let loose this devastating salvo.

The race is in a dead heat. That's all. Go away now.

THE MAIN ERENT: NEW YORK CONGRESSIONAL-23. TWO THREE.

Name: Bob Owens
Party: Like a rock star
Pros: Doesn't look like he will kill/molest you
Cons: He's Bob Owens

VS.

Name: DeDe Scozzafava
Party: Nobody

Pros: Was a Republican

Can farm beans

Cons: One "De" short of being a Kirby archvillain

No longer in the race

VS.

Name: Doug Hoffman
Party: Co-- wait a second, that's not Doug Hoffman!!

Name: Doug Hoffman
Party: Ahem. CONSERVATIVE
Pros: Will kill babies to win
Has a ton of money now
Cons: Look at him
Just fuckin' look at him

NY-23 started off as a ho-hum affair. The former Congressman, Jon McHugh, a Republican, got picked by Obama to be Secretary of d'Army. So he ditched NY-23, as any thinking person would, and left a vacuum. The local GOP picked DeDe Scozzafava, a liberal Republican, to run for the special election. So far, so good.

No wait, not at all. I don't know how or why, but right wingers noticed DeDe and noticed that she's relatively liberal. She supports gay marriage and is pro-choice. She's also "pro-union," whatever that means. She was endorsed by the Working Family Party, which means ACORN. If you don't understand why ACORN is dangerous, imagine an overweight southerner in a thatch cowboy hat saying it as loud as he can. Not yelling it, but just saying it. Like "ACORN." As in "THAT GAM ACORN TOOK MY DANG RACCOON." It's the devil.

Well right wingers weren't gonna take that. In a move only Stalin could appreciate, GOPers flooded NY-23 like crusaders descending on Constantinople. I mean they got in and owned that P-(CENSORED). Suddenly DeDe was in hot water in a normally safe GOP area.

Enter: Doug Hoffman, an accountant or something who doesn't even live in the district in question. Dougie Doug passed the right-wing purity test. He hates abortion, hates fags, hates taxes and loves business. That's him in a nutshell. Oh yeah, he's also apparently dog stupid.

Let's take a brief intermission to talk about NY-23. NY-23 is hinterland defined. Only the Jersey Pine Barrens are less densely populated in the Northeast. I've been to the area in question. You could carpet bomb it with hydrogen bombs and you'd only kill maybe 1,000 people. It's that fucking empty and boring, so this whole election shit must be like their first Christmas.

When Hoffman jumped in, he immediately split the GOP vote. Now all of a sudden Scozzafava is pulling in less than 25%, while the Democrat, an empty shirt named Bob Owens (who is incidentally more CONSERVATIVE than Scozzafava) took the lead, if only a slim one. As Scozzafava decreased in popularity, Hoffman's surge intensified. The psychos smelled blood.

It became so bad that Scozzafava fell to THIRD. That was enough for her. This past weekend, she quit the race, giving Hoffman a boost (or so I think; I don't know if there's been any solid polling since then). But as a final fuck you to the party that summarily ditched her, she endorsed Owens. Not sure that'll make much of a difference.

The race is currently in a dead heat, or a dad heat if you don't believe in death. The smart money is on Hoffman but it's not a sure bet. If Hoffman wins, he will be nominally a Conservative, not a Republican, but he has the GOP's organized support now. Not that that means anything at all.

So there you have it. Three races, all really not a big deal at all, but all are marked as "bellweathers" about Obama. If the right wingers take all three, then OBAMA IS TOAST. If not, then OBAMA IS STILL TOAST because we are not dealing with rational people here. Basically any vote for these honkies is a vote against the black dude. That's all it boils down to and that's all it's been about since November '08.

Stay tuned for an update!!

It's Halloween and I gotta take a piss

And go to bed.

Before that, I dunno if you've been reading my shit. If you haven't, get wise. If you have, go directly to my latest shit. Do not pass go. Do collect $200. I am a generous Monopoly player.

Echo! (Echo! Echo! Echo! Echo on)

I realize now that I started this blog 10 months ago, so we haven't yet had a proper cliched Halloween entry. Well it's time I stopped spoiling you bastards and written one.

Halloween of course is the time where we face our fears, or at least our retarded getups and slutty womenfolk, which isn't so bad especially when they pull off a Sarah Palin. ........... ah yes....... Well anyway, while that's all well and good, I still believe Halloween should still primarily be about scaring the living shit out of you, and I figure now is as good as time as any to face one of them.

Now if I were to go on and on about some of the things I'm really afraid of, it'd just turn into a depressing bore, and if I depressed you I wouldn't be doing me job. But there is one thing I find genuinely unsettling that is also fascinating and I think worthy of giving a good look at.

I'm talking about :thunder strikes: ABANDONED BUILDINGS.

Abandoned buildings are really cool, but also really creepy. They're inherently creepy. If you're in an abandoned building, it means that someone went through all the trouble of building one, then inhabiting or working in one, and then one day... gone in a flash. Everyone left, like an audience that accidentally stumbled into a showing of an Uwe Boll film. It means that you're in an area that everyone decided was better to run away from.

So when you get right down to it, aside from the actual dangers that an abandoned building has (rotting floors, shoddy walls, deranged hobos living in them, the fact that a lot of them seem to be in New Jersey), abandoned buildings are a representative of the creeping horror that sometimes befalls places.

Before you consider this concept alien, keep in mind that some of the most famous buildings in the world are really just abandoned buildings. Angkor Wat is abandoned (sorta). The Pyramids are abandoned, though they were pretty much designed to be off-limits anyway. The Coliseum is perhaps the quintessential abandoned building. Imagine Giants Stadium 150 years from now, assuming they don't demolish it. Oh who am I kidding, of course they will. Just hope the Jets are in it at the time etc. etc.

Of course, none of those places really feel like abandoned buildings. The most dangerous things about them basically amount to German tourists, which can be pretty bad, admittedly, or the occasional Italian-American tourist gal, a gal I want to do outrageous things with. RETURNING TO THE TOPIC AT HAND, the Coliseum may be impressive, but it's not scary. It's history. And history is only sorta scary.

Modern or nearly modern abandoned buildings are a whole nother matter. A whole nother? Really? Anyway, unlike the places mentioned above, these places are not kept up and nobody wants to see them, which makes them prime spots for spook hunters. Why don't we take a look ourselves?

This deligftul snap was taken in Kings Park, NY, not far from me grandma actually. This is a former mental insitution, and there are a LOT like them around the country, but particularly in the northeast. Buildings like these are one of Ronald Reagan's lasting gifts since he didn't think that spending money to keep insane people in asylums was really worth it.

Most of these buildings are right delapidated, but they are still standing and, intriguingly enough, are partially furnished, as if the inmates and workers were just taking off for the weekend. One of my favorite pictures of these places, which unfortunately I have not been able to track down for this entry, is of one such hospital room, its floor littered almost completely with what looked like little pill containers. Why were there all these pill containers on the floor like that? I don't know. But there you have it.


Not to leave the ladies out of it, here's another prominent theme in abandoned building exploration (hereon known as "urbexing"): hallways. This photo came from Worcester Park, an abandoned mental health facility in Massachusetts. Perhaps you've been? Hallway shots always strike me as particularly fascinating because hallways are places where people HAVE to be. A room in any given building can be empty, but there always have to be people in the hallway going somewhere, right? Hallways are also good for channeling wind into scary noise to SCARE YOU TO FUCK on windy days, so they have that bonus.

But hospitals aren't the only thing that's been abandoned. As the economy continues to slither towards depression, expect to see more of these: abandoned malls. In fact, there's an entire website devoted to them. Heree's another creepy motif for you: a place of commerce, of people going to and fro, shopping for tennis shoes or ginger snaps or whatever it is ragamuffins buy these days. The noise of people eating, talking, playing arcade games (oh wait, this isn't 1989!!!), of mall cops engaging in savage brawls with skateboarders in front of a Krispy Kreme.

Well, no more. The story of malls closing down is actually rather morbid. First one store closes. Then another. Then another. Before long, entire sections of a mall are nothing but closed stores, shuttered to keep people from rummaging through... the empty shelves I guess? After a while, it no longer becomes economically viable to keep a mall open, and they eventually turn into this.

A good abandoned mall will still have some signage in tact, a reminder of bygone days, of some proprietors holding out until the end, until all that's really left of civilization is a Prada 50% off sale sign, now collecting dust.

(50% off for Prada is still like $300 by the way.)

There are still other kinds of abandoned buildings, but by now you get the picture. The only thing scarier than an abandoned building, though, is of course abandoned towns. Ghost towns.

Above is actually one of the world's biggest ghost towns in the making: Detroit. Imagine Detroit as an abandoned mall writ large, except the suburbs are Walmart, steadfastly holding strong while Trader Joe's and Crate & Barrel (pours a bottle of liquor on the ground) die off. If you think I exaggerate, remember that many of Detroit's skyscrapers are literally sprouting grass. They're that unkempt because nobody is using the damn things.

The quintessential ghost towns can all be found in Arizona and Nevada and New Mexico, i.e. old gold rush towns. But those sites suck because most of them were built with dinky wooden structures that fell over after the last panhandler farted, so there's nothing much to see at all. Actually, ghost towns are pretty rare; well at least a ghost town that's still in tact.

So where are the good ghost towns? Well, old Baghdad is still there, kinda. Jonestown, Guyana is mostly gone so it's probably not even worth the trip.

Ah yes, there is one really big one, and mostly new at that:

Our old friends the Soviets were happy to provide us with one. You know what this is. Someone claims to have taken a bike tour (look here for more info) through it, but even if her story is utter shite, the photos are not. This is perhaps the best raw ghost town on the planet, a view of an entire people disappearing overnight, in many places dropping whatever they were doing. Except not to read, but to get the fuck outta dodge.

Gunkanjima (Battleship Island) is another fascinating place that is mostly in tact, though that becomes less so with each passing year. Gunkanjima was basically a floating coal mine in operation until 1974. People not only worked on it, they also lived there. If you're ever heading back to the Pacific and have time to kill in Japan, you can take a boat out to it as the island reopened for visitors this year.

A more obscure place is Centralia, Pennsylvania. There's hardly anything left of Centralia, actually, except roads that look like this. No, the drivers weren't that bad nor did they keep forgetting to take off their snow tires. The roads, much like everything else that was in the area, were rended under thanks to coal fumes. Centralia was built on top of a coal vein, and when the vein caught on fire, sulfur and CO2 and all sorts of happy shit seeped up through the ground, poisoning the area.

Fortunately nobody died (I think), but naturally the area was uninhabitable, and will be for a few centuries because coal fires are impossible to put out. It turns out that there is not a blanket large enough to smother it, unless everyone in the country wants to make a quilt big enough to cover PA. Hmmmm, actually, now that I think about it, that doesn't sound like a bad idea...

Today Centralia looks like that. You can get a better view on Google maps, actually, but this is the gist of it. Empty suburban lots. I'm not even sure there's a single structure left standing, but there are still roads available. Sometimes I wonder if people attempt to use it as a shortcut when passing through.

Another famous ghost town is the area around Love Canal. The story is baasically the same as Centralia's though, and no, Al Gore was not the inspiration for it. He was the inspiration for the Love Story, get your lies straight. There are a few more ghost towns rendered so by environmental circumstances, but they all basically look like this today.

I don't know what it says about the state (actually I do know and I'm just trying to be noice), but New Jersey has an awful lot of abandoned sites in it. It's a pretty good starting place for urbexing, a "target-rich environment" as we say in the militurry.

The closest I've been to an abandoned building (aside from driving past Kings Park's mental ward a few times) has been in my own town. A house down the block-ish had its inhabitants abruptly take off, leaving behind a rusty ol' house. Actually it wasn't rusty, bricks don't rust you fool. YOU FOOL. The inside was almost totally empty and the outside was remarkably unkempt. I don't think the owners gave much of a rat's ass, which frankly I think is great because if I (we) ever get a house, you can be damn sure I'm not doing any siding, no roofing, MAYBE I'll clean the gutters like once. And don't get any ideas about adding a new wing, we're not doing it. Honey... no, honey, I said no. NO.

Alas, the house was only abandoned for like a week before someone new came in. Now they're renovating. Actually I think they're done renovating. Who cares. For a while the entire front lawn was dead and it was great and we had fun and shit. The house and I, I mean. We had fun. You can't take that away from us!!!

Where will the future's ghost towns be? I can't say for sure, but Detroit is already on its way. With my help, it could be the biggest urbexplace in the planet. Dubai is another candidate now that people realize that building a theme park in the middle of a desert is a less than ideal idea (a lettandealea, if you will). Las Vegas is another candidate. Basically any city that's going to be fucked royally hard by even the slightest bit of climate change, so all of the southwest USA is on notice, as is Florida and New Orleans.

The problem is that abandoned buildings and such are not that accessible. I mean sure, a determined soul can break into an abandoned building, as many have, but it's illegal to do so and there are usually fences and wild animals around to deter you. And exposed metal. Oh my God they're all tetanus factories! Ewwwwwwww...

Nevertheless, a good birthday gift (ahem ahem) I think would be a trip to one of those places, just to wander around in a world that people decided to flee from. I'd just like to see what people leave behind, because you can tell a lot about people from what they leave behind. If you had to flee your home right this second, what would you leave behind, knowing that future archeologists like the famed Indiana Jones would be rummaging through your shit, looking for the Arc of the Covenant in your stash? (Note to Indy: If you're reading this, it's in the other seat-box thing. Next to the basement fireplace. Just lift up the seat. You'll know what I'm talking about. Basically don't look through my shit though. It's... um, it's really boring. Really really boring. Yeah.)

(In lieu of an abandoned building, I would accept a certain photoshoot of you in a certain football jersey of a certain football team, particularly of a certain football player named a certain Eli certain Manning, certainly. Ahem ahem.)

Well there you have it, kids. Did that creep you out? Well don't be scared, it's not like there are ghosts in them. I mean, why the hell would a ghost hang out in Asbury Park? You're a goddamn ghost, you can go anywhere in the world, and you're just gonna hang out at an abandoned movie theater? Okay, ghost man, I'm not gonna tell you what to do, but...

Still Rock 'n/'r Roll to Me Part 2: The Part 2ening

When we last left our heroes, they were locked in a sex factory closet war of words over the state of rock. Is it dead? The negative side went first, valiantly defending rock against the assholes of unrockertude. But now the affirmative weighs in.

But before we begin, let's give a round of applause to my favorite gal Tina for giving her two ZLOTYS or whatever barbaric currency she's using now. It took her a long time to get to this place so we wanna make her feel welcome so that she'll come backstage and then we can do very, very, very sensual things.

Also I'd like to say that LI is not NJ's hat. No. No, we are NYC's bedpan, and we are quite content to take in that lovely city piss, thankyouverymuch!

Now on with the show!

"Is rock dead?" We ask that question not because we don't know the answer, but because we do. And that is definitely YES. The analogy of the doctors asking if a patient is dead is stupid because all doctors have to do is whatever witchcraft things they do to figure out if someone is alive, and then they know. That's why they're doctors and why I'm not. Okay, look, how was I supposed to know that the lungs were an essential organ? C'mon, look at them, they look so stupid!!

No, the better analogy is coming across a car accident and seeing rock 'n roll, splayed out on the pavement a la Elvis if he drove, and saying, "Is this dude dead?" If you have to ask, then the answer is probably yes.

But what do we mean when we say "rock is dead?" Well, there are still rock acts, rock is still on the radio, it still has a very large following and still has concerts and shit. So how can it be dead? Well I got two words for you: Disco. ... Frankenfeuter. But the important word is disco.

Disco is dead. But you can still hear it on KTU and shit. But disco as we know it is dead. Nobody makes any more music for it. I mean sure, if someone really wanted to, they could make a new disco song, just like people still make new country songs and new freestyle songs and new house songs. But good luck getting anyone to listen to that without rolling their eyes. That's what we mean as being well and truly dead.

It's more accurate to say that rock is dying. It's spitting up blood and its life is flashing before its eyes and some hobo is going through its wallet. Well too bad, hobo, I already cleared out its cash and AAA card, have fun with its library card!!

In 20 years, good luck hearing rock on any Top 40 station outside of the "goofy oldy song we play once in a while" context. And good luck having those songs be ANYTHING other than U2 or something. Rock is in dire straits and it doesn't take a record mogul to see that (and they are seeing it).

Let's wind the clock back a bit. In the gay 90s, the "Is rock dead?" question first started getting asked because Kurt Cobain decided to end it all. At the time, grunge was going to revitalize rock music, if it's possible for grunge to revitalize anything, that is. But Cobain didn't play along, and now rock was doomed to fall into the pop rock routine. This was the fatal blow to rock's future because pop rock turned into a black hole from which no decent rock music could hope to escape.

So basically all mainstream rock we hear today is basically a repackaging of mid-90s pop rock, give or take a few gimmicks. Look at the "big" acts of today (not counting old acts coughing up new records): OK Go (one hit wonders), AFI (dead), Paramore (struggling), The Killers (ha), My Chemical Romance (double ha), Evanescence (holy shit). Simply put, no new musical act since 2000 has had any kind of staying power except Coldplay and MAYBE fucking Fall Out Boy.

Who is dominating the market? Linkin Park (amazingly still), Green Day and occasionally Weezer. Ah yes, it's 2000 all over again.

And there's the key indictment: "all over again." Only Linkin Park really sounds different from other rock groups, and they STILL have trouble getting any real wide recognition (because they are just not that good). But basically everyone sounds the same. Everyone. And people are starting to notice.

When Cobain died, the other question on everyone's lips (not mine, though. I was wondering when the fuck were we going to get personal jetpacks, motherfuckers) was "Who will save rock?" Who will save rock? Is that the question you ask of something that is supposedly alive and well? If your musical genre needs a savior, it's done for.

Cobain was supposed to be that savior, but he failed to rise on the third day. So the industry turned to Indiana Jones to find the lost saviour of rock. Remember those awful days? First it was U2, but people realized that U2 was already an established rock group. Then it was Foo Fighters, but they never really caught on beyond the rock genre. Then it was the Smashing Pumpkins, but then they vanished. Then it was Oasis, but they went nowhere. Then it was Limp fucking Bizkit but even that was too much of a joke to maintain. Then it was the White Stripes, who couldn't follow up anything for shit.

After that, people stopped asking that question. They knew the answer. Nobody can save rock music. Something is wrong with the genre at a fundamental level. Maybe the record companies are too incompetent to give the right people to push rock into a new creative direction, but after decades of rock in a noticable decline (the hair band days did a lot more damage to rock than anyone really wants to admit), rock producers are starting to realize that we've hit peak rock and that indeed motherfuckers would rather do something than rock out.

Like peak oil, industry folks will keep digging deeper and deeper for a decreasing amount of rock. I mean sure, you can write a new rock song and shit, but will it really be that interesting? It'll likely have the same chords, the same beat, the same melodic structure. Like country music, it'll be one giant self-referential mess. Worst of all, everyone will have heard it before and go, "Yeah, I liked that song... when it was fucking called 'Love in an Elevator.' Wait no, I hated that song. AND I HATE THIS SHIT."

Most of rock's glory is rooted firmly in the past. U2, the E-Street Band, Aerosmith, Billy Joel, what's left of the Beatles, all old. Most aren't even truly active. McCartney and Joel have grown bored with rock and are writing fucking classical music now. When two of your giants are bored with your music, you have to realize that rock's creative potential seems to have tapped out.

Really, rock hasn't been taken in a new direction since 2000, when Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park pushed rock/rap hybridization to the fore. But that never really took off, and now rock/rap has been pushed to the fringes where it can do precisely 0 to help mainstream rock. This is a serious problem. Rap and hip hop continue to dominate the airwaves not just because of saturation, but because they do new things, and people will listen to something that is new over something that they've heard before.

No matter what direction rock takes, it winds up back in the mid-90s pop rock funk (and not real funk, lame funk). If it's not Oasis trying to channel the Beatles (stupid move, by the way. If people want to hear the Beatles, THEY WILL FUCKING LISTEN TO THE BEATLES), it's the White Stripes trying to ape psychadelic rock (ditto) or today's modern bands trying to incorporate vaguely punk elements into their style (nothing turns off people more than people trying to act edgy for MTV's cameras, I believe).

This is not a question of rock being successful relative to pop or R&B or rap or whatever. This is a question of rock's ability to entertain people in new and exciting ways. Whatever you think of other musical genres, they are still innovating while rock keeps falling back on the same formulas. And people will get tired of it because they love SHINY NEW SHIT.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, it's Top 40 music so the majority of it will always be shit. That can't be helped. But rock being shoved to the fringes of everyone's musical conscience can't really be a good thing. Rock is still a distinctive sound no matter how much pop borrows from it, and it should be preserved like the panda. Because rock is so fucking cute and dawwww look at it go down the slide! You are so precious rock! Yes you are! Yes you are!

Unless someone truly comes along to take rock in a new direction, in 20 years' time, there we will be, attending the 15th Oasis reunion concert, kids on our shoulders, you bellowing out "Wonderwall" and me checking my watch, hoping we get home in time to watch the Space Rangers play tonight's Space Stanley Cup Space Playoff game, the only people on earth still listening to rock music unironically. And you'll still be the sexiest thing I ever laid eyes on. Yes you are! Yes you are! BUT I DIGRESS.

Well thank you, affirmative side. So there you have it, the definitive argument over the state of rock 'n roll. I'd ask you what you think but you already weighed in. Unless you have more to say. Do you? DO YOU????? Only YOU can decide who won.



































































* not really, I decide that.

It's Still Rock 'n/'r Roll to Me

Keeping with our (my) musical theme, as someone who frequents Top 40 stations (in no short supply all over Long Island), there's one thing that keeps hitting me, something that has hit me for years. No, not low-flying birds, dumbass. I'm talking about rock music. Get it? That's a line from a song. If you liked that you better leave because that's as witty as this shit will get.

"Is rock dead?" is a question that has been asked for years now, since the mid-90s, really. With Oasis breaking up, The Smashing Pumpkins collapsing (again), Green Day fizzling and most of rock 'n roll's usual players turning up AWOL or DOA, it's a fair question to ask. A book has even been written about it, and since it's $27.95 on Amazon, you can bet that it has at least some clout. By the way, this is the most scientific inquiry into music ever.

But is rock dying? Does it need to be resurrected? Or is it merely asleep, still vital but othewise occupied, ready to jump up and kill the nearest thing when someone pokes it (rock suffers from PTSD, unfortunately)? There are only two people on the planet who can settle this question once and for all, and they both happen to be me. Yes, I will argue with myself this most vital of questions. To start off, I have flipped this two-headed coin. The negative side has won and chosen to go first. Very well, asshole, IS ROCK DEAD?

In short: no. In long: this is a stupid question and you should feel bad and should go to bed without dinner tonight. This question has been asked for years for a reason: nobody can say YES. Do you see people still asking if the Pope shits in the woods? No, because they figured out the answer to it: HE CERTAINLY DOES.

More pertinently, do doctors keep asking, "Yo, is this patient dead?" for over a decade? No, they know right away. If he's dead, they prop him up like a puppet and use him to entertain the cancer ward. If he's alive, they prop him up like a puppet and use him to entertain the cancer ward. No, cancer, I mean, rock is very much alive.


Who calls rock "dead" when it's still on the radio? It's a proposterous proposition. A propostition, in fact. MTV still is down with rock, rock stations are still on the air, rock concerts are still going strong, rock may be weak right now but it's not disco.

I don't even know what constitutes it being dead. Record sales? Rock is still profitable. Concerts are still selling out. They're even making rock video games (bideo games if you're from the ORIENT). Does that look dead to you?

Rock detractors point to the failure of rock to come up with superstars as evidence. Just because we don't have anyone equivalent to Elvis running around does not mean that rock is devoid of talent, especially long-lasting talent. Pearl Jam has come out with a new album. So has Weezer and Alice in Chains. Are they dead? There's not as much churn as people think. Rock acts still have staying power.

Trying to point to sagging sales is itself idiotic. As you can see, the entire music industry is sagging. Rock is not doing any better or worse than anyone else.

When we get down to tin tacks (brass is too fuckin' expensive), rock is still the "it" genre, and I hate myself for calling anything "it," but there it is. It's the truth. People still dream of being ROCK stars. Just like baseball, the numbers may be down relative to other genres, but it's still the standard for popular music excellence, and it'll take a lot more than a bunch of limeys having a tiff or a bunch of washups flaming out to spell rock's doom.

So why don't we end this stupid feud and acknowledge that rock is here to stay. It's here, it's queer, get used to it, as they say in Afghanistan.

Okay, negative side, thank you for that wonderful report. Tomorrow we will hear from the affirmative side who will no doubt destroy this chicken-shit argument, and then swing in through the window to ravish the ladies. Tune in next time on MACGYVER (MACGYVER... MACGYVER... MAGYVER... MACGYVER)