Friday, January 23rd 2009

The Truth:  Miscellaneous

Some Music You Should Know Better Than To Actually Listen To

By Skwerl

I’m an evil son of a bitch, full of hate and ignorance. Sometimes anyway. Look, what I’m about to do is mean and totally unfair, but I love music with a passion. And passion is a volatile thing that can flip at any second.

A lot of music crosses my path. People send me links every day, I click around a bunch of blogs, I do my own hunting, and I go through the Antiquiet mailbox whenever I’ve got the time and optimism to waste. I used to believe that you couldn’t judge a book by its cover, but as the music business gets more and more formulaic and derivative, as the expectations bands have for their target audience’s attention spans get lower and lower, well… These days, you can. And here are some examples:

Talk about picking on the little guys- Switchblade Kitty has 390 friends on MySpace. They’re nowhere. Which means that writing about them here is serious exposure for them. So I suppose I should expect a thanks.

I forget how I came across this band. I think it was during the course of writing my Idle Warship review, because Lady Tigra has a song called Switchblade Kitty and sometimes you step in shit while Googling.

First of all, they’re from Los Angeles. Strike one. There are a lot of great bands here, but most of them do everything they can to avoid the fact if they actually live here. Nothing screams pathetic sellout poseur like a band that prowls the Sunset Strip with pride like it’s 1989. It’s pretty fair to automatically give any self-identifying Los Angeles band one strike while judging. Just trust me.

Now… OK, look. I like girls. Boobs are great, trashy naked sluts and rock and roll and all, I totally dig it. But strippers are strippers and musicians are musicians and never the twain shall meet be one and the same. If you’ve got to take your clothes off to get attention, you suck, you’re lazy, you should be put down by the ASPCA. And if you’re a chick in a band, and you like taking your clothes off, please for the love of god, make sure the goods are ripe. Don’t commit the crime against humanity if you’re as ugly as any of these disgusting hobags.

Besides, the only one with bigger tits than Dakota Fanning is the blonde one who bought some. Obviously she’s either a trust fund kid with no business in a band like this, or she fucked & sucked her way to six grand.

I haven’t listened to a single note of their music, because it obviously sucks.

Next up is Gladhander. I’ve seen their advertisements here on Antiquiet. I may have actually listened to a few seconds of their music at some point, but I forget. Actually, you know what… These dudes at least seem like nice guys. I mean obviously their music is bland, their live show must be dreadfully boring (they all look asleep in that photo), and their entire career is most likely a completely self-indulgent exercise in futility, but… I mean, whatever, they’re not really asking for trouble and they could all probably kick my ass pretty good. So nevermind. Let me go into the submissions inbox and see what’s stinking there…

Ahh, here we go. Fuck. Krumb Snatcha! Jesus. Took me a second to make sure that I was Googling the right Krumb Snatcha, as there seems to be a few of them. All of his photos seem to have been taken with an iPhone, they’re so grainy and low-res. But this is a case of being able to judge an artist by the state of the official website:

As soon as I landed on krumbsnatchamusic.com, I was assaulted by shitty hip-hop I couldn’t control the volume of. There was no ‘mute’ or ‘off’ button. If I hovered over the player it seemed to break, but if I went to do anything else on the site the audio resumed. I just had to shut my speakers off altogether. Strike one.

I can’t even count the shitty hip-hop clichés. Now understand that hip-hop is the hardest genre to judge at a quick glance, because even some of the finest artists in the business are putting their own album covers together with MS Paint while high on wet endo. But if you see all of these symptoms together, you can still assume somewhat safely that the product is defective at the core.

Strike two: Flash site with all text in the 5 Cent graffiti font. Fuck man, what self-respecting wannabe thug still identifies her/himself with graffiti writing? This is the equivalent of the rock band with long teased hair in tight women’s clothes, not called Steel Panther, working the Strip with Switchblade Kitty over there. It was played out by 1990, and yet still won’t be even ironically cool again for another year at least.

Strike three: City skyline in the background! This dude is from fucking Massachusetts, and the skyline isn’t even Boston’s. It isn’t even any particular city’s actually, it’s just some generic clip-art bullshit. You can’t tell me that a truly imaginative, original hip-hop artist of any kind would be satisfied by a design that looks like it came out of the mind of a twelve year old suburban white kid.

By the way, Krumb Snatcha’s official website is best viewed with IE, Firefox, or FUCKING NETSCAPE.

Finally… in the mainstream: The new U2 song. I haven’t heard it yet. But I can already tell that it sucks as it drops to #34 or whatever on the perpetually U2-ass-kissing iTunes Store. I’ve even had friends whose opinions I generally respect recommend that I check it out, but I know better. The new promotional art is sucking Trent Reznor’s dick harder than all of the parts of Chinese Democracy that were recorded before 1998. Even the new logo is a thinly veiled NIN rip-off.

U2 had three and only three truly great records (War, Unforgettable Fire, and Joshua Tree), and ever since, the downward slope in quality has been in direct ratio to the ever-increasing levels of douchery in Bono’s getup. Notice the peace sign and the superhero glasses. Fuck’s sake man.

Now you go listen, and tell me if I’m wrong.