Two things: One -- I jumped feet first into the Guitar Hero fray last weekend, when I picked up my very own copy of GH3, and I have no clue what took me so long. To say that its the most awesome thing ever to exist is a severe and unforgivable understatement.
Two -- along those lines, the kid depicted in the following video is now officially on my all-time hero's heroes (the author is a dolt - ed.) list. I'm slotting him in between Joe Strummer and FDR, and saying "tough titties" to Steve McQueen. I've watched this video approximately a bazillion times and it never gets old.
He's totally hyperventilating when he's done. He can barely squeak out his brother's name. This is clearly the signal accomplishment of his young life, and I say if its all he ever does, it still ain't all that bad. Ok, enough with the talking, I need to watch it again.
(Editors Note: I started writing this post and got about halfway finished before I remembered that Jodi had done something awfully, awfully similar a few months ago. On the bright side, she came to all the wrong conclusions, so let's just call this imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and move on.)
I can't stand instrumental music. Can't stand it. This probably why I'm so hostile to jazz in all wankerific incarnations. It may also partially explain my profound loathing for hippie jam bands (though they're despicable on so many levels that it's probably not worth parsing the individual reasons why they suck). Music, especially rock and pop music, for me is all about the vocal. This is not to say I don't enjoy an impressive rhythmic or melodic flourish, but I really need the lyric to tie it all together.
Lyrics don't necessarily have to be important, or profound, or even cogent (I'm looking at you Anne Wilson) but they do have to grab my attention if I'm going to make the emotional investment of listening to a 3-minute rock song. Suffice to say, if you're selling you're little song to me, the lyrics are important, and perhaps none more so than the opening line that sets the table for the whole listening experience.
The opening line is key. A bad one is like a canary in a coal mine -- it can clue you into a bad song before it picks up steam (see: uno, dos, tres, quatorce). A good one can tip you off that you're about to hear something special (e.g. I knew a girl named Nikki, I guess you could say she was a sex fiend). So here, without further ado, are the top ten opening lyrics of all time, until I remember the ones that I'm forgetting.
(Astute readers will also note that some of these opening "lines" are in fact the opening two, or even three "lines." I could have called it "best opening complete thought" but that would have been a little bulky. - ed.)
1) "I'm a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm" - Search and Destroy/Iggy and the Stooges
As a statement of intent, you don't get much stronger than the first line of the first track of the Stooges 1973 masterpiece Raw Power. Iggy is informing all of us that he is about to rock our faces off, and that if that doesn't sound like our cup of tea, we may want to stick to Seals and Crofts.
2) "Kick out the jams motherfuckers!" - Kick Out the Jams/The MC5
I don't know what was in the water in Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but I want some of whatever it was, cause it produced the two best opening lines ever. To be honest, the ordering of the rest of this list is pretty arbitrary, but numbers one and two are absolute locks. This line is even better in the original live recording when Rob Tyner yells to the crowd: "And right now! right now, right now I think it's time to.....kick out the jams motherfuckers." It's like the anti-Wilco.
3) "I got a letter from the government the other day, I opened and read it. It said they were suckas" - Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos/Public Enemy
As a lyric-driven genre, hip hop has some of the very best opening lines. You could probably compose this entire list out of hip hop lyrics and not be that far off. As awesome as this lyric is on paper, you really need to hear Chuck D's menacing delivery to get the full impact.
4) "I knew a girl named Nikki, I guess you could say she was a sex fiend" - Darling Nikki/Prince
I can't imagine I need to defend this choice, but suffice to say that this line gets extra bonus points for singlehandedly creating the Parental Advisory label. I love picturing Tipper Gore's face when this little gem came pumping out of the family hi-fi in front of her lily-white daughter.
5) "In the days of my youth I was told what it means to be a man" - Good Times, Bad Times/Led Zeppelin
The line that introduced the world to Led Zeppelin. I'd day it was pretty effective.
6) "One Saturday, I took a walk to Zipperhead. I met a girl there and she almost knocked me dead" - Punk Rock Girl/The Dead Milkmen
Simple. Direct. This is how all love songs should aspire to start.
7) "A cheap holiday in other people's misery" - Holiday in the Sun/The Sex Pistols
Johnny Rotten always had a flair for a nasty turn of phrase. This was his best opener.
8) "Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you" - Maggie May/Rod Stewart
If only because I have to agree with Jodi about something.
9) "Concrete and chaos rise up, spiderweb across the land like a giant rash" - Big City/Operation Ivy
If you don't know Operation Ivy, you should quit reading this list, buy their discography and come back when you've rectified the gaping hole in your music collection.
10) I'll tell you one thing that I know: You don't face your demons down, you gotta grapple 'em jack and pin 'em to the ground - Long Shadow/Joe Strummer
Yes, I realize its like four lines (see above), but its awesome, and nobody really thought they were getting out of that list without reading something written by Joe Strummer, did they?
Well that happened.
The Eighth Annual Karaoke to the Death VIII went into the books about 40 hours ago, but its historical significance will reverberate for years to come. To paraphrase something I heard in some shitty movie one time, this wasn't the end. It wasn't even the beginning of the end. But it was the end of the beginning.
Early in the evening, long before the singing got underway, I gazed out over the sea of KttD fans and competitors thronging the dismal Rock It Grill. I beamed and remarked to Vrabel that this was how responsible adults must feel when they see their children foraying out into the world. Eight years after a small band of tuneless interlopers crashed a townie-infested karaoke bar to settle a bet, the KttD community had descended on the Rock It like a conquering army, girded for combat.
Before our tough-but-fair DJ "Slam" had even arrived, it was clear that this year was going to be something special. Despite the conspicuous absences of former KttD Champs Soo Doh Nim, Doc Paradox and "Lord" Bill Ramsey, the field was, by far, the deepest ever, comprising a murderers row of tone-deaf anti-melodic hacks committed to winning KttD glory, no matter what toll they exacted on the hearing and sanity of the assembled masses.
I won't spend too much time rehashing the performances. In addition to the official writeup, I'd commend readers to Cap'n Crunch's extensive, pen-and-paper generated not-quite-live blog and Jason P's stunning outsider's take on competition.
Suffice to say, what we witnessed was jaw-dropping. No fewer than four contenders could have won, and won not only KttD VIII, but any previous KttD, save for the legendary KttD III. The performances by Emma Peel, Peter, newcomer Matyas and eventual winner Aussie Bob were the sort of musical abortions that make you question whether you want to go on living. When a local townie offered her badly inebriated boyfriend a sex act in exchange for singing along with Bob, he declined, somehow sensing through a haze of Miller Lights Lites and vocational school education that there were some lows to which even he should not sink. This was beyond bad singing. It was a polytonal sort of un-singing that had the power to deeply affect listeners' moods.
It was also the new face of KttD.
For years now, the winds of change have been blowing. When Hotrod and I started KttD, we just went up there and sang whatever crappy song came to mind. In the years that followed, we improved our research methods and training regimens, but at its core, KttD remained the same. The winner was the one who chose the lousiest song and sang it the worst. Now though, it's no longer enough to be a bad singer. You have to be a NON-singer in order to have any hope of winning this competition. The new KttD thoroughbreds are miserably tone deaf and wildly uncomfortable on stage. These savants can take any song and make it a bad one, regardless of training.
I thought I had a doozy on my hands this year with "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother." And I feel certain I sang it poorly, but I didn't come close to factoring in the final voting. Could I have done worse? Sure. In retrospect I probably should have gone with something in a higher register, where I've enjoyed most of my past success. That's an oversight I can correct in KttD IX. But what I'm beginning to wonder is whether even my theoretical "worst" performance would be bad enough to win in this modern era of KttD. I'm still as bad as I ever was, but as the stature of KttD has grown, so too has the quality of the competition. I'm starting to come to grips with the fact that maybe I just don't suck enough.
With the Eight Annual Karaoke to the Death VIII fast upon us, the editors at Dabysan in Hammersmith Palais thought it would be a good time take a closer look at some of the main competitors: their strengths, weaknesses and potential obstacles to taking home Lord Ramsey's Cup.
What makes Hotrod great? Preparation, effort and a steely will to win. Hotrod's reedy, tremulous voice is certainly bad, but not the worst KttD patrons are likely to hear. His wooden stage presence, sweaty delivery and sickly pallor paint an ugly picture, but is not as morbidly off-putting as say Cap'n Crunch or Soo Doh Nim. But Hotrod has always made up for whatever deficiencies he may possess by simply outworking everyone else. Nobody watches more game tape, nobody reviews and discards more possible songs, nobody practices as hard and nobody prepares themselves with as much vigor (think Clubber Lang in Rocky III). It's pretty much a given that when KttD rolls around, Hotrod will be there, ready to stand and deliver. Competitors who aren't ready to compete may as well not show up at all.
Strengths: There's a reason why Hotrod is the only two-time champion in KttD history. He's got all the tools, and more importantly, all the desire, to win every time he gets on stage. Nobody puts their bad voice and nervous stage presence together with really terrible songs better than Hotrod. And word from Hotrod's inner circle is that he is eager to avenge last year's embarrassingly decent performance with something for the ages. Hotrod's larger-than-life presence looms large over KttD, and under the right circumstances he could easily become the first three-time champion on February 17th.
Weaknesses: It almost seems unfair to call them weaknesses. Hotrod is still as bad as he's always been, and that badness was enough to earn him two World Championships of bad karaoke. It's not that Hotrod has developed weaknesses, so much as it is that the new wave of KttD competitor is like nothing the bad singing world has ever before witnessed. Facing a murderer's row of tone-deaf musical butchers, Hotrod needs to work twice as hard every year, and at some point, one has to question whether any amount of work will be enough. The KttDing world will have to wait and see what Hotrod has up his sleeves this year.
With the Eight Annual Karaoke to the Death VIII fast upon us, the editors at Dabysan in Hammersmith Palais thought it would be a good time take a closer look at some of the main competitors: their strengths, weaknesses and potential obstacles to taking home Lord Ramsey's Cup.
KttD co-founder Dabysan steps up to KttD's stage carrying a lot of disadvantages. A hyper-extrovert, Dabysan never met a stage he didn't like. If you haven't heard about his love of performing, wait five minutes and he'll probably tell you about it, along with anything else that might be on his mind. If you time his infrequent pauses for breath just right, you may even get a chance to respond. So the palpable, squirming sort of discomfort that plays such a critical role in so many great KttD performances simply isn't a part of Dabysan's playbook. Making matters worse, in certain limited lower registers, Dabysan's singing voice can actually be borderline pleasant, as Akaijen likes to gleefully point out. Given the current state of play in the KttDing world, with new tone-deaf introverts casting their hats into the ring every year, it's reasonable to ask if the sport Dabysan helped create may be passing him by.
Against that impressive slate of negatives, Dabysan weighs in with just one enormous asset -- volume. If KttD was conducted without the benefit of amplified sound, Dabysan would win every time. What Dabysan lacks in discordance, he makes up for with sheer sonic impact. When Dabysan gets his voice around a particularly ambitious high note, the townies in the way back look up from their pool cues and take notice. Armed with the right song, Dabysan can deliver a performance that inflicts real physical pain on his vict...er...listeners. He proved it in KttD V when he swept all competitors with bone-chilling interpretation of Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now," and through the years he's consistently tallied votes with his piercing performances of the greatest hits of Boston, the Bee Gees and Spandau Ballet. The big question for Dabysan is: will his one-dimensional attack -- strong as it is -- be enough to conquer a new breed of KttD competitors, who are transforming the sport every year into something new and altogether more wretched.
Strengths: Raw power. Dabysan's voice is an impressive instrument, and really not in a good way. It's something that people remember, the way people remember childhood traumas. With his out-sized delivery, Dabysan will always have a puncher's chance to win Lord Ramsey's Cup.
Weaknesses: KttD audio chronicler Vanna (who's audio posts are a must listen for any true KttD fan) once remarked to Dabysan, "when I heard you on tape it was sooooooooo much worse than I remembered it in person, but when you're up there, you're having so much fun, its easy to forget how bad you suck." There's the rub for Dabysan. In a competition that trades on humiliation, a congenital lack of shame may ultimately be a fatal flaw.
With the Eight Annual Karaoke to the Death VIII fast upon us, the editors at Dabysan in Hammersmith Palais thought it would be a good time take a closer look at some of the main competitors: their strengths, weaknesses and potential obstacles to taking home Lord Ramsey's Cup.
Not much is known about Aussie Bob, but what is known is enough to be worrisome to other KttD hopefuls. Painfully shy, Bob's sole KttD performance came way back in KttD V, when he delivered a stunningly atonal, unmusical rendition of "Patience" by Guns 'n Roses. The cards were stacked against him from the outset. As a neophyte, Bob would have to battle the cynicism of a hard-bitten KttD crowd. Guns 'n Roses is a terrible KttD choice, given that Axl's keening screech isn't terribly difficult to mimic. And to top things off, Bob knew none of the words outside of the chorus, meaning that for most of the song he was just standing there, silent, trying unsuccessfully to catch up with the teleprompter. Yet for all that, something in Bob's performance arrested the attention of the KttD faithful.
Like reigning KttD Champ Emma Peel, Bob is truly, utterly, irretrievably tone deaf. Tone. Deaf. Can't hear or replicate tones. In a a word (or rather two words): tone deaf. As you may imagine this is a pretty stunning advantage in a bad singing competition. Whatever Bob tries to sing comes out in the same repellent monotone. Awful. And if that wasn't enough, Bob is a super-introvert. It's pretty profoundly clear that he has zero desire to be up on that stage, sucking as badly as he knows he does. Suffice to say, if Bob could bring these twin tools to bear in a concerted bad singing effort, there's know telling what he might do.
The twist in all this, is that nobody really knows how badly Bob really wants to win. This chronicler questions whether he even wants to participate, or if he is doing it to please/humor his svengali/wife Akaijen. When Bob failed to garner substantial votes in KttD V, Akaijen was outraged, insisting that Bob's rancid pipes should have carried him to victory. She even went so far as to accuse KttD V Champ Dabysan -- who's honor is beyond dispute -- of tanking. Akaijen vowed revenge, and now after two years of exile in Holland, she means to have Lord Ramsey's Cup on her mantle by any means necessary. A musician and singer of some repute, Akaijen's only chance to hoist bad karaoke's highest crown is through her pupp...er...husband Aussie Bob. We've heard reports that she's training him in a super-secret Soviet-era facility, pumping him full of horse steroids and shouting Maoist invective in his ears 17-hours a day.
Strengths: Tools, tools tools. Bob has them all. Not many people can bring true tone deafness to bear on the KttD stage. Bob can. And discomfort? Bob has it in spades. Bob also comes packaged with one of the most cunning, ruthless conditioning coaches the KttDing world has ever known in Akaijen. If you were to genetically engineer a KttD competitor, he'd look (and sound) an awful lot like Bob.
Weaknesses: We'll just have to see if his head is in the game. Bob has all the natural skills you could want in a bad singer, but when it comes time to step up to that none-too-clean microphone, natural (lack of) talent will only take you so far. To get up and sing a bad song, badly, with gusto, in front of a bar full of marines and surly townies requires a certain inner fortitude and passion to be the best*. Does Bob have it? Only time, and KttD VIII will tell.
*worst
At the outset, I'd like to acknowledge that this is a bit of a desperation post. I was in California most of the week (more on that in a second), I'm busy all day today and then Super Bowl shenanigans get underway. Suffice to say, the 52 Posts in 52 Weeks Challenge is hitting its first major obstacle, and that means its time to do what all great writers do under pressure -- pull something out of my ass and regroup next week.
This past week, I went to California, about 40 miles south of Half Moon Bay, for a working "retreat." I was informed well in advance that the chosen venue for this experience would be an "eco-resort." A week or so out, I decided to do a little research, and what I determined was that "eco-resort" meant "you'll have to walk to the bathroom." I also learned that the eco-resort in question was owned by the nice folks at KOA campgrounds, where I spent a lot of nights in less-than-sterile conditions as a young person. Suffice to say, I was troubled.
Now, as it turns out, the eco-resort in question was actually quite nice, and after I figured out that one could, in theory, pee off the back porch in the middle of the night, the fact that the outhouse...sorry, "comfort station," was located some distance away became less of a concern. Still, the experience gave me time to reflect on one of life's inarguable truths:
Camping sucks.
It just does. For years I said "I don't like camping," as if the problem with that activity stemmed somehow from my inability to enjoy it. Well, no more. Camping objectively sucks. It sucks the way canker sores suck. Some deviant minds may enjoy getting canker sores, but that doesn't make them suck any less. Ditto camping.
I love nature. I love the outdoors. I visit them every chance I get. But in this day and age, there is absolutely no reason why you can't visit nature, commune with the bears, swim in a stream, whittle, whatever, and then return in the evening to a comfy bed, in a climate-controlled room, with a functioning bathroom a few steps away.
In fact, I think making the affirmative choice to sleep on the dirt, in the elements, with only a nylon sheet to separate us from the bears and the howling wind, is the moral equivalent of pissing on the graves of our ancestors. Generations of people suffered, battled and innovated to claw their way out of the dark ages, developing indoor plumbing, heating, air-conditioning, orthopedic beds, and we want to jam our collective thumbs in their collective eyes by going back to sleeping on dirt?
Count me out.
