The RoBeast vs. Cuntry

The world of popular music is pretty sad these days, but for some reason, I still read the charts every week. Call me a geek, but I could read Billboard for hours. I don't though, because I don't have that kind of time, and I don't buy Billboard. And I don't know how to read.

Instead, my number one source for all quick and dirty information in the world is USA Today, because it's the only newspaper my cafeteria sells and it has lots of pretty pictures and graphs that I can look at for 15 minutes while stuffing my face with yogurt. I get excited every Tuesday to see all these new names and faces of artists that I've never heard nor will take the time to actively seek out and listen to. I also look forward to rolling my eyes as I see USA Today's reviews of albums that mysteriously seem to always be rated between **1/2 and ***1/2. Their ratings just have no edge, and therefore, can not be trusted. Mine, on the other hand, have no room for mediocre. Music is either "The worst thing I've ever heard in my life" or "Awesome." And therefore, can not be trusted either.

Who can be trusted? Not USA Today, not me, and certainly not the Radio Industry. When I look at these charts, the only statistic that supports the airplay rankings are the "number of spins." To me that translates to either "the number of times radio stations played the songs that the record company told them to because they're both owned by the same corporate conglomoration and they're both trying to keep each others' sinking business afloat" or "the number of times radio stations played the songs based on the number of times other radio station played the songs based on what they read in the charts the week before." There's certainly nothing about requests, or sales in there, so the ratings are completely arbitrary and don't prove anything at all. Seether's "Rise Above This" is higher than Puddle of Mud's "Psycho" this week on the Active Rock chart. It doesn't mean "Rise Above This" is a better written song than "Psycho" (technically, they are both the worst thing I've ever heard in my life). It doesn't mean more people like one over the other either. It doesn't even prove that a single person has even heard either fucking song except the DJ's in the US who pressed play in the booth 1500 times. If there are even DJ's in booths that push buttons anymore.

I know this isn't far from the truth. When I was a DJ in college, we our playlists formatted by the programmers (albeit Student Programmers) way in advance. In that hour of music (no commercials in college), we were allowed ONE song to choose of our own. ONE pre-selected track from a rack of pre-selected CD's. It didn't matter if I got 20 requests for "Surprise, You're Dead" because I'd only be allowed to play "Epic." The theory behind that is "Well, we're playing this new Harvey Danger song every other hour, so people are probably just going to keep requesting that because it's all they know, and when you say 'I'll put it on for you,' you're not lying because it will be on in the next hour anyway!" Sometimes it worked in my favor because every douche in college just wants to hear "Blister in the Sun" over and over anyway, but it's still a shitty cyclical system of shit. Much like that phrase. One of the most memorable moments of my entire college radio career was the night the computer fucked up and skipped an hour of programming and I could pick whatever I wanted. JUST LIKE HOW RADIO USED TO BE EVERY FUCKING HOUR BEFORE IT WAS COMPLETELY RUINED BY CORPORATION GAMES. WE BUILT THIS CITY ON ROCK AND ROLL, GODDAMMIT.

Anyway, I don't want to talk about radio anymore. I just want to talk about country music. Every week I look at the Country charts, again, not knowing who anyone is or what their stupid song sounds like. All I know is that to be a top ranking Country artist (they are ranked by "points" not spins for some reason), you have to have a simple yet strong male name.

Typically, the first name should only have one syllable:

Blake Shelton
Jake Owen
James Otto
Joe Nichols
Josh Turner
Tim McGraw
Trace Adkins


Another thing that helps is having a first or last name that ends in "Y" or "LY." (This is also a good tip for naming a dog):

Brad Paisley
Dierks Bentley
Kenny Chesney (double points!)

If want to stray a little from the norm, it helps to incorporate a noun that reminds us of the South or chores on the farm:

Montgomery Gentry
Lady Antebellum
Ashton Shepherd
Carrie Underwood ("Paw made me chop down and carry underwood all day and now I gots me a splinter!")

These people who could've sold a lot more albums if they tried a little harder:

Toby Keith (should have been Keith Toby)
Jewel (should have had a penis)
Phil Vassar (that better not be short for Philosophy.Vassar.Edu, ya sneaky carpetbagger!)

Despite my mother's utter contempt for Shitkickin' Music (her words, not mine), it turns out that I actually have a near perfect Country Artist name:

Rollie Hatch (and hopefully, my stalkers will now subscribe to my blog when Googling me)

The real winner in the name game, and clearly supported by his number 1 ranking with 15,334 points for the week of whatever week this is...

George Strait

Say it out loud a few times. George Strait, George Strait, George Strait, start the fingerpickin'. You can't say it without nodding your head to a fucking Country N' Western backbeat! Plus it's such an everyman name. His last name is strong, simple and reminds us of waters difficult to navigate (definitely more treacherous than the Brooks of Garth). And George is probably your grandfather's name. Or your favorite President. Or the guy down the street that's always working in the yard early on weekends. And don't you worry about those soft G's, his name is as heterosexual and masculine as possible. George Bush certainly couldn't get to the top of the Country Charts.

Well there you go. Country is just as formulaic as all the other garbage out there...

FYI: The top two Smooth Jazz artist this week are Kenny G and Jessy J, but I don't really need to go writing a whole entry about them, now do I? Just look at this for a few hours.

Words of Incoherent Welcoming

I have not been pouring my crazy into a barrel and scrying over it so much lately. Mostly because a) I am lazy and b) I am a professional procrastinator vs. slightly OCD once activated, so pushing the panic button and getting shit done generally has consequences, not all of them good. However you want to define it, I have to have one person, place, thing or task to be actively avoiding doing thus giving me the strength to do other menial miscellaneous tasks like pay bills or put on pants or put on makeup and take Tylenol and go to the MALL the weekend before Xmas and try to give people free samples of Purell whilst on my period. I was paid what is essentially a ridiculous amount of money to do this, so I jammed a smile on my face and wished America a gracious cleansing as my uterus tried to slide right out of my body. It was rapturous.

Did you know that people are afraid of free things these days? Well, they are. Many people acted like I had handed them a rattlesnake and walked away only to process my words and come back for the 'free' sample. One guy asked me what the 'catch' was. To which I replied, "Nothing good sir. Take it, and be cleansed." We're so cynical and obnoxious nowadays and savvy to the perfidious ways 'they' have of extracting our personal information for marketing usage...that we're immediately suspicious of anything free or a 'good deal'. I find it all to be a little sad, and plus, that mall was filthy. If you touched the escalator rail, and then didn't immediately sanitize; let it be upon your head when you come down with some filthy stomach flu or horrible bacterial colonization. *brrrr* Srsly, fuck the mall. There are still mallrats, people who are at the mall every single day no matter what the reason or the season. These are people who know all the mall employees by name; people I see every time I get hired to do one of these "spokesmodel-y" gigs. These tend to be short, balding, fat men of possible borderline retardation, but who am I to judge at least he is actively seeking socialization while I hide away in my house under layers of blankets and scifi novels and try to achieve human hibernation.

Two whole paragraphs to explain why I have been avoiding writing lately, but I have. Mostly because I want to write for the blog, and therefore, have been studiously avoiding it like the plague. Plus, it was Xmas, and this Xmas I kind of fell off the Xmas wagon and celebrated the Feast of Alvis. Christmas, though pagan in origin, has been co-opted by the Christians and the Capitalists, the C&C Music Factory of soul and wallet shredding delight. I usually do something to celebrate the season even if it is putting up a tree on Xmas eve, taking hallucinogens, and watching Cronenberg's Crash, not the Sandra Bullock rascism vehicle but the scar-fucking-in-car-wrecks version. Xmas this year just seemed like a waste of money, so I opted out and went for whiskey, ham, and pomp. Though neither pomp nor ham is really required, but whiskey is mandatory. Besides all I want for Xmas is a real live boy to FUCK loudly and for long time. Many of you kind, giving gentlemen out there have offered, nay feverishly volunteered, to render me this service, but I am afraid only one boy or man or male-type human bipedal will do, and he lives 1176.03 miles away. We (meaning Pinche Guero, Dreidel Mazeltov, and I) did get drunk and go see the lovely holiday lights in the Hill Country, so that counts as being festive, and we hit a brewery along the way, so score one for Alvis too.

All this avoiding and processing and having lots of drunken introspection has made me really think about the best Xmases I have ever had as an adult. Shockingly, most of them involve hallucinogens. I grew up in a teeny, tiny town above 9,000 ft in NM wherein it snowed a great deal. Only 700 people lived in this small town at that time. 700 really fucked up people. See, here's the secret about New Mexico it's actually part of the UNITED STATES. Wait, that's not a secret; that's a FACT. Sorry, that one was for the Deep South. No, the secret to NM is really that everyone who lives there is trying to escape something; that's why they moved to a state with a population of roughly a million folks, in the WHOLE state. Whether they're trying to escape civilization, religious persecution, or jail-time they come to what's left of the Wild Wild West to simultaneously both lose and find themselves. Due to this secret truth NM is filled with evangelicals, drug-users, new-agers, cowboys, drunken Indians, illegal aliens from Mexico (charmingly referred to as wetbacks), gun runners, ranchers, atomic scientists, and makers of hideous coyote and Kokopelli art. The Kokopelli is the sign of the apocalypse as far as I am concerned, but maybe I am qualified to judge in this case because I actually worked at a restaurant called Kokopelli's, and it was a hideous nightmare wrapped in artistically colored and beaded bandannas that had leapt full-blown from the very mouths of HELL. NM land of freaks, land of both Enchantment and Entrapment. Conspiracy Theorists are welcome!

Cloudcroft, NM, is a town of 700 people trapped on top of a mountain filled with crazies. Everyone in town is either super-religious -in that fall down, foam at the mouth, and speak in tongues kind of way- or filled to the very brim with dirty sin. Just guess who I'd rather spend time with? Sinners *hands down* are going to be more interesting, everytime. For a while there, we had this weird little tradition wherein everyone would come home from college for the holidays, and we would all trip on Xmas Eve. Here is a town half-filled with crazy tripping people and super uptight Jesus freaks. Here's the best part. We would all trip, and then visit each other's houses and the local bar, the Western to play Shitty Claus on the jukebox and drink copious amounts of whiskey. It wasn't just the college kids either, oh no, the adult population of town would get into the act, and then we'd stay up all night, and have to go back to our respective homes for our family Xmas' mornings while the fucking tree melted before our very eyes. And it is these memories, these Xmas mornings, that I treasure the most. I believe in embracing the insanity full-force and kissing it in a car wreck. Thus, it is that I have fallen upon the Feast of Alvis. Though Festivus, It's for the rest of us!, is not-mutually exclusive with the Alvian faith. If you wish to combine them both, then your aluminum rod can only be strengthened by your faith in whiskey and shamanism.




ps. This blog post was supposed to be all welcoming and laying down the path of what this blog will be and who the writers are, but you get what you get. I don't want to restrict either of us in any way. One day it may be whinging about Xmas, one day it may be pop culture, one day it may be a precise dissertation on politics, one day it may be a wholly incoherent rant fueled by alcohol and nonsense. I really have no idea, but I do know if we don't just start buckling down and writing the damn thing, it will never happen. Welcome to Beautyandtherobeast.com. May Alvis bless us everyone.

*Princess out*