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CITIZINE REVIEWS By Mark Prindle
Hey look everybody! It's my imitation of the new Eminem CD! Everybody misunderstands me, and I grew up without a father. You know I love you Hayley, you're my world. But your mother, who contributed half of your DNA, is a fucking bitch!!!! But the reason I feel that way is because I grew up without a father. Fuck shit asshole you suck! (*fart noise*) Fag joke! (*belch noise*) The war is wrong, and if I get killed now, you know why it happened? It's because I had the BALLS, the GUTS to be the ONE person in entertainment to speak out against the war! (*vomit noise*) Here are some Michael Jackson jokes I heard ten years ago. "Boy -- oops! I mean "girl"! HA HA! (*belch noise*) I'm so angry at that guy who does that insult dog puppet character. I think I'll make fun of that guy, but without being funny at all, because somewhere along the line I completely lost my sense of humor. "I keed! I keed!" And the rest of this song makes NO SENSE AT ALL! (*vomit noise*) Look how crazy and wacky I am! I'm crazy! My weenie is bigger than yours! To say that, I must be CrAzY! (*belch noise through an effects processor*) I never meant to make anybody die. I grew up without a father! I was white, and black people didn't like me. Don't you feel sorry for me and my sad youth? Here, let me talk about fucking some girl. Also, let me take care to not make a single one of these songs danceable. Yeah! I'll fill them all with slow clunky beats and simplistic synth "riffs" that sound like Dr. Dre B-sides from the early '90s! Also, I totally and completely suck now! At some point the imitation lost its way. Regardless, to sum up: (a) Eminem assumes people still give a shit about his minor rivalries and boring memories, (b) both his raps and his music have gotten lazy and bored-sounding, and (c) he can't remember how to be 'Slim Shady,' so he replaces that character's tacky but intelligent witticisms with such "shocking" content as curse words and gross body function noises (he makes fart noises in THREE different songs!!! Belch noises in at least two. And I guess the song "Puke" is self-explanatory). It's rare that an album both bores the shit out of me and grosses me out at the same time, but by trying to be both a pained artist and a jokesmith without having any ideas left on how to play either role effectively, Eminem has managed to create just that phenomenon. There are very few positive things that a person over the age of 12 could say about this record, but I'll try: "Never Enough" and "Big Weenie" are both quite catchy, the title track and "Like Toy Soldiers" have their moments, and my wife claims that the Michael Jackson song at least has a beat (though I fail to find one). The only other positive thing I can say is that at least Eminem's fall from grace was instantaneous rather than drawn-out like the endless, mediocre-but-never-quite-dead career of Public Enemy. Hopefully Eminem's fan base will agree with me that this is one of the worst hip-hop records ever recorded by a major artist, and we will never have to hear from this self-important dumbfuck again.
If you're "all about" listening to bands with no new ideas at all, the new U2 album will rock your ass to town! Quite a task for a band that doesn't actually play "ROCK" music at all. Their two attempts to do so on this release are hilariously misguided ("Vertigo" is so lame, for example, that I've taken to referring to it as "what passes for 'rockin'' to U2 fans"), but even their patented audience manipulation audio-beauty ballads fail and fail and fail this time around. However, you'd be amazed by how much it sounds like U2! As such, it's being declared a great new U2 album. Their goal is pretty clear -- make a simple, obvious album that will please fans of simple, obvious U2 music, and pile on as many pretty piano notes, electronic washes and echoey "vintage U2" guitars as possible in an attempt to mask a truly pathetic absence of melodic ideas. But you know what they say -- you can spend all day piling make-up and rouge onto a corpse, but your dick's still gonna wind up smelling like a corpse! Yes, Bono still has a beautiful voice and yes, that Edge guitar-tone will break hearts from Daytona to Anotyad, but where are the SONGS???? Where is the "New Year's Day"? Where is the "Beautiful Day"? Where is the "With Or Without You"? Actually, I can answer that one. It's in "Miracle Drug," a new 'composition' based on the "With Or Without You" bass line. Actually, in a larger sense, this whole album can be seen as a series of U2 rewrites. Brilliantly produced, full of wonderful tones, moods, jangles, oooo's and love, but no new hooks to be found beneath the lush veneer. By the last three songs, they don't even bother trying to be pretty -- it's just "the same old shit ballads" to fill out the rest of the running time. (Try singing "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?" when the chorus of "Original Of The Species" comes along. Actually better yet -- try NOT singing "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" -- it's the SAME MELODY!!!!) So let's look at the true positives on this CD -- (a) it sounds freaking AMAZING when you're wasted, (b) the recurring guitar motif in "Crumbs From Your Table" is just beyond gorgeous and heartwarming (and the echoey chimey chorus is nice too!), (c) "Love And Peace Or Else" is a true Grüever! The one attempt to break out of the U2 comfort zone and do something a bit different, this one is a groovy swingin' number that (once the damn thing finally gets going after a minute and a half of ambient electronic crap) sounds like a high-tech update of the Rattle And Hum-Bo Diddley-Americana sound, (d) the acoustic punker "All Because Of You" will remind punkers of the Circle Jerks' terrific "When The Shit Hits The Fan" song -- because it's damn near a complete ripoff of it!!!!, (e) people who have never heard songs before will think these are really great. Because in a sense, they ARE! But in another sense, they've already been written and recorded by U2 already. Several times. And too many of them are slow and don't go anywhere. And the lyrics are boring as shit. And that's what's so great about it! It's still better than Metallica's St. Anger though. As a hilarious young man recently wrote on a popular music message board, "Should the cuts on that album even be considered songs? What does it take for something to be a song, really? Because that shit might actually fail the test." HA! Way to go, Liquoramica! "Take these hands -- don't make a fist. Take this mouth -- give it a kiss." In this way, Bono is ending the War In Iraq.
"Around The Sun is the sleeper of the
year!" This album is made up of almost nothing but very slow, relaxed ballads played with strummed acoustic guitars, pianos, and synth drones/washes, with electric guitar generally introduced only for solos. Most of the ballads seem to be aiming for a dark and misery-ridden mood, but their limp and instantly forgettable melodies -- mostly based on two boring minor chords going back and forth, followed by a simplistic, predictable chorus -- fail to create any actual feeling in me aside from complete indifference. It is appreciated and refreshing that they try to keep the arrangements interesting by introducing and layering different elements, sounds, and instruments into the mix as each song progresses, but far too many of these extravagant productions are built upon foundations of boring, hookless shit-air! God, I remember when I first learned how to play the shit-air. I was blasting out Ramones and AC/DC riffs for weeks before it turned all white and crusty and fell apart. Unfortunately, any love for such hard-ass-boogie bands as these were lost in transition when REM drank four tons of liquid opium and lay down to record the least energetic album of their career. There are five stand-out tracks on here, in my estimation. "Leaving New York," "Boy In The Well," and the title track are honestly pretty, sad little ballads of which REM should be proud; "Aftermath" is actually a peppy uptempo song (!) with a lovely keyboard tone and happy little melody -- not to mention some gorgeous Mike Mills harmony vocals in the chorus; and my FAVORITE on here is also the strangest and most creative tune available, proving that Mike, Mike and Mike (Peter) are still occasionally able to whip a surpriser out of their six sleeves and the sleeve of their drum machine -- "High Speed Train." Never in the annals of Michael Stipe's distended anals have they come up with such a strange, odd and completely UNNATURAL group of chord changes. Add to that a rhythmic off-key bell-hit noise, flamenco guitar solo and Zombies-esque organ groove, and you've got the single sole solitary one moment on this CD in which it sounds like REM bothered putting any effort at all into their songwriting. Five songs good, two legs bad! Ah, but see that's only five songs. The other eight tracks range from the merely drab ("I Wanted To Be Wrong," "The Worst Joke Ever" - two songs without a single hook between them!) to the vomit-lickingly horrifying ("Make It All Okay" is wimp-folk so pussyish that even James Taylor would take a piss on it, "The Ascent Of Man" features without exception the MOST ANNOYING STIPE VOCAL in the history of the band -- 'YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!,' and I generally enjoy rapper Q-Tip of A Tribe That Calls Itself Quest hip-hop fame, but he sounds like a real dope trying to "cut some rhymes" over the empty, uneventful "The Outsiders"). I was hoping to love this album just because everybody else hates it so much. I thought that would make me "cool" and I could be a real iconoclast with my freewheeling musical tastes with which nobody could compare or fathom of it me. Unfortunately, it's the worst REM release of all time. Until their NEXT one, of course! ---- Reader Comments No Comments. |
-- ELSEWHERE ON CITIZINE -- Interview
with Don Bolles of The Germs CITIZINE
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