The Suck Foundation #2: Get Trashy.

The Suck Foundation is Emerald Miasma's journey through the insufferable, forgettable and bland music of Blitz's youth (namely 1997-2003). Ranked from still moderately listenable (Five Stars) to absolute trash (Zero Stars), these songs make you realize that sometimes a trip down Memory Lane isn't a pleasant one. Enjoy.
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Since I started this a week or so ago, this column has been the main focus of my free time. I've sought out old mix tapes, scanned tons of YouTube videos, and done a lot of soul searching over the last couple days, and I have no idea how I came to like what I like today. I don't want to mince words, but I was a goofball. A whiny putz listening to any dumb thing I saw on MTV or VH1. I'm guessing that it was the Wu-Tang Clan and Fugazi that steered me to the music I like today, but I think it was more sheer luck than a conscious decision to explore more interesting stuff. I always had an intellectual curiosity about music, and by process of elimination logic should dictate I would get there eventually, but after going back to a lot of the music I loved in my formative years, I really don't know. By all rights I should be sitting at some suburban bar playing some deep cuts off of the first Tantric album, talking about the great guitar work of Todd Whitener. What a beautiful asshole. Hey, speaking of Tantric...

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Tantric - 'Astounded'. From the 2001 album 'Tantric'.

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Jesus Christ. Music really doesn't get dumber than this. This has all the trappings of a bad early 2000s band. Is it overwrought? Are the band members four different, but essentially socially acceptable polished rock dudes? Do they say 'fuckers' for no apparent reason to seem edgy? Yes to all. The band rose from the ashes of Days of the New, a band that I never listened to as their name was utterly repellent even to 13 year old me. They formed Tantric by adding the growly voiced lead singer you see in the video, who is apparently doing ASL to the deaf members of the audience (THOUGHTFUL!). They're also from Kentucky, which makes perfect sense in retrospect. I listened to this band a lot. Too much actually, which of course is more than once. This song was on many a shitty mix tape of mine. That guitar was revelatory at the time, (SOOO EASTERN INFLUENCED!) and of course that 'stupid fuckers' line hooked 13 year old me. NO ONE GETS ME! But looking back, this is such a bummer, man. Generic rock, plastic women and a drummer that looks like he'd rather be playing with Dokken. This is post-grunge at it's most bleak and beaten down. Even though all the band members are gone except the lead growler, Tantic still somehow sadly exists to this day and plan on releasing another terrible album later this year. This is one of the biggest musical regrets I have.

BLITZ GIVES THIS SONG ONE STUPID FUCKER OUT OF FIVE.

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Ma$e - 'Feel So Good'. From the 1997 'Harlem World'.

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It's hard to imagine how Ma$e ever got famous. Even as a friend of Sean 'Puffy' Combs', the maestro of the biggest rap enclave on earth at the time, Combs should have known to not made this guy a superstar. Despite being in a rap group with Cam'Ron, Ma$e is a liability on mic. It's not being relatable or charming, he's awful. He has the delivery of JaMarcus Russell after being locked in a Rite-Aid for a week, and the voice of and confidence as a 17 year old high school athlete being interviewed for public access television. For someone that postures like he's a fucking Gambino, he looks and sounds like a contest winner. He also may be a worse dancer than Puffy, which I thought was physically impossible. This album went platinum four fucking times on the back of this single, which is batshit. Considering the fact that the East Coast/West Coast battle was centered around Bad Boy and Death Row is astonishing now. Bad Boy had ONE solid artist for the length of the feud, Biggie Smalls, and I'm not even a huge fan of his. Bad Boy has an impressively awful track record. Outside of Biggie and Janelle Monae, their next best record may be by The Lox. That's not good. Ma$e has famously been in a contact dispute with Bad Boy for years. He's retired to become a minister, been cockblocked by Diddy from joining 50 Cent's crew, released, resigned, and so forth. There have been bidding wars over Ma$e, which I think is nuts. He seems like an OK dude in his personal life, but Jesus he can't rap.

Here's a true story: I owned a lime green FUBU jersey with a crimson '05' on the front, in honor of Bad Boy's garish aesthetic. I wore it to a Bob Evans family breakfast once, and all of my older cousins knew that I was essentially wearing a neon 'Kick Me' sign around in my everyday life. 

"Doesn't his shirt look nice, Josh?", my mother asked in an insistent tone to my cousin.

"Yeah, it's great", he said holding back his laughter.

The rest of the table chuckled derisively, even my dad I think. I need to add at this point that this was sort of this shirt's unveiling, and it was ostensibly a safe zone, racist church-goers stewing over their sausage gravy bowls not withstanding. I went to Catholic school, so I wore a uniform and never got a chance to wear this monstrosity around my peers. That is until we had a dress-down day. Dress-down days are like fucking Mardi Gras to Catholic kids, and the peacocking that takes place is astonishing. We've had months to plan this day, and it can spell disaster to anyone that is easily swept up in the fads of the time. So the day arrives, and this is the ensemble I landed on:

-FUBU jersey

-Green cargo pants with zip-away knees to turn them into (GASP!) cargo shorts, frayed at the bottom with a bungie cord belt

-Bike chain necklace

-Wide Wire-Rimmed glasses

-Spiked hair

-Shawn Kemp Reeboks

That's unacceptable. It's totally idiotic, and it didn't take long for me to be rebuked by the upperclassmen.

"Hey Blitz! Whassssup, Homeboy? You Gettin' Jiggy with some hos later tonight? HAHAHA!"

Yeah, I deserved that.

BLITZ GIVES THIS SONG ONE FISH EYE LENS OUT OF FIVE.

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Powerman 5000 - 'When Worlds Collide'. From the 1999 album 'Tonight the Stars Revolt!'.

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Rob Zombie is one of the most important rock stars of the 90s. With his band White Zombie, he transitioned from pretty good garage rock band that few people cared about, to hard rock superstars that set the tone for dozens of other bands to follow, to a solo career that was just as successful as his band was, to directing grind house movies that people consider pretty good that star Sid Haig and Chris Hardwick, to doing atrocious remakes of beloved horror classics. All in all, he's probably the most successful heavy rock/metal/whatever star of that era. Spider One, Rob's younger brother and frontman of Powerman 5000, is not. PM5K was in the same vein as White Zombie, Korn, Etc, but with a space twist. While Rob's music was very horror movie centric, Spider's music was very campy sci-fi centric. Their albums were full of space imagery, but the DARK SIDE OF IT, BRO. I wore this album the fuck out. I actually liked this album a lot more than any of Rob's work, and I'd say that still holds true to this day. Granted, that isn't saying much, but I feel like that would get me stabbed if I said that around some of my former restaurant kitchen co-workers. Like many albums of this era, there was one very calculated, tossed off curse, this time in the middle of a lazy interlude. This phenomenon was brought up on the excellent Low Times Podcast during a discussion of The Most 90's Song of All-Time. In the discussion, the panelists bring up several interesting Nineties songs tropes, one of which was the idea of the pronounced, calculated inclusion of a single curse on a hit single to give a band some unearned credibility. That's what I have come to understand over the years, and was put into very sharp focus during the Low Times discussion. This stuff is ALL VERY CALCULATED. There are no happy accidents with these types of songs. This is all passed through filter after filter, from engineer to exec to A&R guy to manager to MTV to advertisers all to create a thoroughly agreed upon consensus of acceptability. This sounds cynical, and it is, but I don't think that's necessarily an assuredly terrible thing. Don't get me wrong, it usually is, but every once in a while the MAN will spit out a 'SexyBack'. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've seen PLENTY of hipster women jamming out to the Gin Blossoms. Anyway, to get back to PM5K, the band continues to release albums with varying levels of success. They even have another coming out sometime next year. I know I haven't ragged on this song nearly as much some others, and its because I don't really despise this album like the rest of these entries. The video isn't gross and sickly like so many other videos of that era. It's cheap, harmless and fine.

BLITZ GIVES THIS SONG THREE LASERBEAMS OUT OF FIVE.

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Dexter Freebish - 'Leaving Town'. From the 2000 album 'A Life of Saturdays'.

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Of all the forgettable bands of this era, this is one of the most forgettable. Honestly, do you actually remember Dexter Freebish? If so, are you in Dexter Freebish? Because I've never heard anyone talk about this band, even during their 'heyday'. They must have had fans other than myself, because this song reached #22 on the pop charts back when that meant something. For such an innocuous band, they actually have a moderately intriguing back story. You see, this isn't just some ordinary straight-to-VH1 song. This was selected as Song of the Year in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest back in 1999. This contest, which was started by Yoko Ono in 1997, features past winners of note such as Dexter Freebish (which, if you're wondering why they chose the dumb name, comes from a Houston rollercoaster) and several bar bands. This launched them into moderate obscurity and got them signed to Capitol Records back when that also meant something sort of. The song is an ode to a loved one's shattered dreams essentially. The singer talks about how his significant other is leaving town (imagine that), and how he'll be here when she fucks up and has to come home. It's one of the most spiteful songs I think I've ever heard, which is strange considering how poppy the song is. What sounds like a fun, forgettable pop song meant to be disposed of quickly is actually a pretty big Fuck You to anyone with aspirations outside of what seems to be a Gold Rush ghost town, according to the video. Seriously, What kind of asshole tells a person he loves, "Hey, I'll be here when you INEVITABLY FUCK THIS DUMB DREAM OF YOURS UP. Get me a pack of Camels on your way back, too. Peace, Bitch." I actually owned this album. Yes, I was the one person. I bought it at a Sam's Club and made my parents play this in the car all the time, which sounds like a
Good Charlotte lyric, but it's actually a true life thing that happened to me. I was actually more a fan of their song 'My Madonna' from the same album, but this was the song with the half-rent video, so that's why it's here. After this minor hit, they went on to license a lot of their songs out to video games and even played at the fucking 2004 Republican National Convention (!!!). Must be the Texas thing. They still exist, I guess. Who really knows why? After doing research on a couple of these bands, I'm shocked that 90% of these fucking bands are still together. Maybe they're trying to ride out the unhip part of their existence until the disgusting 'ironic love/nostalgia act' phase of their career begins. It's certainly not because they love music.
BLITZ GIVES THIS SONG ONE SPITEFUL LOVER OUT OF FIVE.

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Eiffel 65 - 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)'. From the 1998 album 'Europop'.
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Speaking of bands in their nostalgia phase, long before Iron Man 3 there were just two brothers that adored eurotrash techno music. My brother and I will never get the fucking year back that this album took from us. YES. I SAID 'ALBUM'. WE LISTENED TO THE WHOLE FUCKING ALBUM ABOUT 100 TIMES. There's not a lot going on with this song, but there's certainly a lot going on with that video. First and foremost, LEATHER BASEBALL CAP. No one can wear that. Not even a spray-tanned male prostitute that was wrangled from Ibiza's sunny shores in a ketamine haze and deposited in a German recording studio that smelled like clove cigarettes and stale cum to lay down some nonsense in mangled English over a Real McCoy B-Side. Secondly, The video looks like a PS2 Oddworld game palate swapped to blue with a blond dude Hadouken-ing all over the place. Thirdly, it takes Leather Ball Cap about two minutes to realize that he's playing to a crowd of blue aliens. Perhaps it's the ketamine again. Finally, as my friend Jeremy pointed out years ago, blond dude doesn't actually play that keyboard in the concert. He just waves his hands like an asshole. NOT BUYING IT, EIFFEL 65. The band is credited for pioneering the use of Auto-Tune in their work, so you can thank them for that. They also tried to do a half-assed virtual band by introducing the character Zorotl (you would know him as one of the blue aliens in the above video). So they were on the cutting edge of a lot of useless non-musical music tropes. The band released two albums after this one that tanked pretty hard, and the band disbanded in 2010. But fear not! The band reunited two years later and announced a still unreleased fourth album. Maybe Iron Man will inspire them to complete their quest. Either way, I don't really care. This is usually a go-to guilty pleasure for most people my age, so I guess it's not all that shocking that I liked it. That doesn't make it any less dumb.
BLITZ GIVES THIS SONG THREE BLACK TURTLENECKS OUT OF FIVE.

The Week in Yeah #4: Long Carly Iced Tea.

The Week in Yeah is Emerald Miasma's weekly round-up of the good, the bad, and the incomprehensible of pop culture, the world at large, and life in general, as seen by me.

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As I write this, I'm stranded in my school parking lot, waiting fruitlessly for AAA to come. Why? Because I'm an idiot. I tried to make it 20 miles on 1/16 tank of gas, and I missed it by about 100 feet. This is what school does to people. You often forgo common sense for the sake of higher learning. You buy hundreds of dollars in textbooks that have a higher level of designed obsolescence than a pack of Juicy Fruit, you accumulate thousands of dollars of debt for the promise of a higher paycheck that may never come, you become addicted to Adderall to finish your thesis only to lose your future job because this is a drug-free environment. But you do these things to try and better yourself, or perhaps more accurately, to be better than those around you. 80% of people hate their bosses, and 20% of people are liars. But YOU. You're different. You'll turn this company around when you're in charge. But secretly you know you won't. You just want to dick around, drink on your lunch hour and still get paid more than anyone. That's the real allure of college. You want to work obscenely hard for 4 to 8 years so you'll NEVER EVER HAVE TO WORK HARD AGAIN, and to be honest, that's not a bad goal, because the only thing that sucks worse than school is work.

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I've spent the last several days watching a fuck load of Spike TV. Why? Because I'MA MUTHAFUCKIN MAN, BRAH! WOOOO! WINGS AND TITS! BUD LIGHT PLATINUM! OK, enough of that. I've watched about 20 episodes of 'Bar Rescue' this week, which is sad in a very immediate way. A guy named Jon Taffert takes shitty, unprofitable bars and makes them boring, somewhat more profitable bars. Inevitably, the bar in question made a big splash when it first opened, only to start really fucking up and going into massive debt shortly thereafter. Then Taffert comes in to strip all the roaches and charm out of the bar and make it a bland, unrecognizable places for men in chinos and poorly appointed women to swill the Ruby Tuesdaysest of Ruby Tuesdays cocktails. In a way you feel bad for these hapless bar owners. They have no idea what running a bar actually entails. All they wanted to do was have their own special place to drink. But then I always remember that THE BUSINESS PLACE HAS NO USE FOR YOUR DUMB WHIMSY.  One bar that was almost a million dollars in debt was a fucking pirate themed bar. Then Taffert came in and renamed it something like The Corporate Retreat, I think just to punish them. Good. Fuck this pirate bullshit. National Talk Like a Pirate Day can suck my cock. Pirates are now short-hand placeholder 'jokes' for dipshits that think they're hilarious. Same with ninjas, monkeys, and anything else Hot Topic wants to screen print onto a bumper sticker. You do know they are RAPISTS, right? They force people to fuck them against their will. And they still exist! Try waiving your cutlass and yelling 'Avast!' at One-Armed Bashir. One-Armed Bashir doesn't fuck around. He'll kneecap you with the AK he stole from a dead man, cut your parrot in twain with his machete and skullfuck you with your freshly vivisected bird friend. Then he'll sell you to a Brunei prince to get violated in unspeakable ways until you die screaming. Don't fuck with pirates.

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You know what's good for drinking? iCarly buckets.

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My friends and I later filled it with Jameson and Ginger Ale because we know how to fucking get it. 

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Podcast News! The Fogelnest Files celebrated its One Year Anniversary this week, and Jake released a Best-Of show to celebrate. There are few shows that take an impossible sounding premise and makes it amazing. It has a Talk Soup/Tosh.O format where Jake shows YouTube clips to a guest and they discuss it. Since this isn't a video podcast, it shouldn't work. But Jake is one of the best curators of outsider pop culture on Earth. These are videos you not only have never seen, but would NEVER think to look for. Anal Breathing Instructional Video? Yeah, he talks about it. The best thing about the show is that Jake is supportive of everything. A lot of the clips are played for laughs, but its never in a mean-spirited way. He recognizes that passion is the engine that drives anything worthwhile, and is one of the few people that uses his public platform to appropriately celebrate people that love the things they love. He is truly the anti-Tosh. Jake exudes positivity, shows crazier clips, and the final product is so much edgier than any hate Tosh can spit at his prospective targets. He even showed one of MY suggestions on his shows, and I'm not ashamed to admit I squealed in delight like a 10 year old girl at a One Direction concert. Jake is my Harry Styles is what I'm saying, I guess. I highly recommend this show for anyone that knows the different between weird and Weird.

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I'm a fan of proto-Stoner Rock movies. Van Nuys Boulevard comes to mind immediately. Electra Glide in Blue, Easy Rider, any movie about a bunch of dudes in denim jackets in vans and motorcycles smoking weed really. That's why I'm surprised I hadn't seen Werewolves on Wheels before. It's a movie about dudes cycling around being degenerates. They stumble upon a Satanic church and get turned into werewolves. Simple premise, just how I like it. It's a pretty fun movie with a good soundtrack and some great bullshit mysticism (again, just how I like it). So dope.

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MUSIC! Tony Touch's The Piece Maker 3: Return of the 50 MCs is a great Deltron style team-up of 50 of the best MCs in history over some dope old-school beats. The list of rappers is too staggering to mention, but just imagine the best rappers alive today, and they're on it. Highly Recommended. Nails' Abandon All Life has been atop many Best of lists so far this year, and for good reason. Their rise reminds me of Tombs. They release a monster of an EP that everyone buzzes about, only to follow it up with a full-length that's even better. This is just straight-up, stripped-down blackened grind of the highest order. 'Pummeling' is a great word to describe it. So is 'Brutal'. It's almost refreshing to hear an album that's so lacking in the usual coterie of cross-genre flourishes that metal dudes love these days. Very entertaining.

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The Suck Foundation #1: The Worst of Times.

Welcome to our new feature, The Suck Foundation, a column about all of the forgettable, bland, awful and inessential music that I was exposed to in my formative years.

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Music is essentially the most important thing in my life. It's been that way for decades, and I cherish thousands upon thousands of songs, bands, and albums. Of course, that means that as an angsty teen, I was insufferable. My formative years were from roughly 1997, when I received my first album (Everclear's 'So Much For the Afterglow") to my freshman year of college (when I bought Boards of Canada's 'Music Has the Right to Children', Bonnie Prince Billy's 'I See a Darkness', and the Super Furry Animals Singles Compilation in one outing). This was the heyday of not just Total Request Live, nu-metal, emo, cheezy R&B, shiny suit rappers, post-post grunge dickheads and the boyest of boy bands, it was also the Napster/Aimster/Kazaa Era. This means I could fill up countless blank CDs with the worst mixes you could ever imagine. For every one song I still listen to from that time, there are about 3,000 that make me shutter with the force of a million Fukushimas. Not only did I have the worst taste in music, I considered myself some kind of 13 year old tastemaker. This next statement is 100% true. I once told my classmates that I had discovered Eminem after seeing the 'My Name Is' video two weeks before everyone else in my VERY SUBURBAN grade school in Ohio (and I must once again stress that Ohio is not this desolate taste wasteland everyone that's never left Park Slope insists it is. That said, this grade school was because it was a grade school). Long story short, I have countless musical skeletons that no one should be proud of.
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All that said, I think it's important to be brutally honest with yourself. I could bury this stuff forever, but at one point quite a lot of this music meant something to me, and countless other hapless kids that knew they had a passion for music, but weren't exposed to anything better or in some cases not ready for the IMPORTANT STUFF yet. That time is really important to a kid/teenager. Everything sucks, you're angry and you don't know quite why, and you don't realize that there's something outside of you're own awful, self-indulgent bubble of you. Also, if you still love the music I'm going to be talking about, that's obviously cool too. The world's hard. You need to have something to love no matter what anyone else thinks about it. With that in mind, don't take it personal when I rip most of this music to shreds, because A.) it's going to happen shortly, B.) it's never a personal attack (at least with me), and C.)it's staggering the amount of 'trashy', 'derivitive', 'boring', 'soulless', and 'idiotic' music I listen to. Hell, I just professed my love of that fucking Farrah Abraham album, so take that for what you will when I start lacing into Hawthorne Heights.
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These are all going to be songs released in that 1996-2003 range, which was not only the worst time in modern music history (arguably), but gave us a huge glut of said awful music. This is the peak of the record companies' stranglehold on popular culture, as well as the beginning of it's precipitous downfall. I've also assigned a rating system to the songs I'm going to talk about. It's your standard five star ranking. Five stars means I would listen to this today and enjoy it. One star and it's unlistenable. Pretty simple. But to start out, I'm going straight for the most humiliating bullshit that I listened to REPEATEDLY. These are the worst songs I listened to dozens of times. This is going to hurt. BAD.
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Alexisonfire - '44 Caliber Love Letter'. From the 2002 album 'Alexisonfire'.
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I told you I was going to be brutally honest. Jesus, this album was so important to this beautiful little snowflake. Seemingly super-underground, screamo self-righteousness with two Catholic schoolgirls in a switchblade fight on the cover? Yeah, I was the twat this album was made for. Oh, I openly rejected the emo lifestyle, but I was a ball of directionless rage and high energy that needed to be the center of attention AT ALL COSTS, so this album hooked me through my sub-consciousness' back door. I listened to this album repeatedly, especially driving home from football practice (CONTRADICTIONS!!!) with my friend Andy and my brother. I thought I was the paragon of emotional depth and complexity. Windows down in my RAV4. Sleeveless weightlifting shirt flapping in the open air. Alpine bumpin' something so BEAUTIFULLY GODDAMNED TRAGIC you'd think it was written in tears of blood. It was quite a sight. Alexisonfire are from Canada, and formed only ONE YEAR before releasing this momument to being different in an inconsequential way. They futzed around doing whatever the fuck this is from 2001 to 2011 without making much of a dent in popular culture before disbanding without much fanfare. The band's guitarist went on to form folk group City and Colour, which is odd. The rest of the band hasn't done much. The other guitarist formed a band called Black Lungs, and the drummer joined a band called Cunter, which is pretty great. Also, the band's official website was theonlybandever.com, which is unforgiveable.
BLITZ GIVES THIS ONE CATHOLIC SCHOOL GIRL JUMPER OUT OF FIVE.
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American Hi-Fi - 'Flavor of the Weak'. From the 2001 album 'American Hi-Fi'.
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Everything about this video is a lie. An obvious parody of the 15 minute idiot masterpiece 'Heavy Metal Parking Lot', American Hi-Fi is so thoroughly not metal that it makes Britny Fox sound like Pig Destroyer. This all screams, 'Give us some completely unwarranted street cred, please!'. The hot lady in the cut off Saxon (!!!) shirt, the whiskey guzzling, the pixelated middle fingers, it all comes accross as trying WAAAAAY too hard for a band fronted by a dude who looks like a less threatening James Van Der Beek (That dude, by the way, is Stacy Adams, former drummer for Veruca Salt and Letters to Cleo. That's batshit crazy). This was the first song I ever burned onto a CD. That mixtape (dubbed 'The Arby's Pirate Mix' because I'm a fucking idiot) had some mind-numbingly idiotic stuff on it, and this now seems an appropriate lead-off cut to my inaugural slapdash collection of jackassery. GIRLS DON'T FUCKING GET IT, MAN! THAT GUY'S A DICK AND I'M ALL SORTS OF AWESOME WITH MY POLITE CHARM AND MY RAV4 COVERED WITH 311 AND ALKALINE TRIO STICKERS! HI-FI FORUUUURRRRRVUUUUR! It really set the pace for what was to come. Am Hi-Fi released a follow up to this album that I didn't even care about back then, but they're still together according to my intense research on Wikipedia and are maybe making their fifth album this year. Bully on ya, Stacy.
BLITZ GIVES THIS TWO TRANS-AMS OUT OF FIVE.
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Bloodhound Gang - 'Mope'. From the 1999 album (SIGH) 'Hooray For Boobies'.
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There's no reason to like this band if you're not thirteen. Good thing I was thirteen when this came out, right? Even though 'Hooray For Boobies' was WAAAAAAY more famous for the single 'The Bad Touch', this was always my favorite song from the album. It's a pastiche of really childish bullshit. The Falco, Metallica and Frankie Goes to Hollywood breakdowns (that seem to come out of nowhere) were a revelation to me at the time. As was the ridiculous Pac-Man breakdown, which I would quote CONSTANTLY. This hit me around grade 7 or 8, and this was almost tailor-made for my idiot friends and my sensibilities. In a sad and strange way, this could be one of the most important songs I ever heard. It's dense with pop culture in-jokes that made me curious to seek out what they meant. The album brought together (in a very basic way) several different genres of music that I was inspired to check out. They were also one of the first band of straight dudes to address the homosexuality issue. Granted, it was due to perceived homophobia, but lead singer Jimmy Pop went out to write for a gay porn magazine (of course it was a porno mag) and come out saying that he was pro-gay. Sure it's INTENSELY childish and often played for laughs, but to a kid in the late nineties surrounded by intense homophobia (look, Ohio's cool, but some things are accurate about it), even that kind of childish affirmation was huge, especially to a straight kid that was frankly afraid to support something that could cause you to be instantly shunned by your classmates. I know how insane all of that sounds, that's because it totally is. That doesn't make it any less tragically truthful. Bloodhound Gang continue to this day, and actually just got into an international incident when they descerated the Russian flag while on tour in the Ukraine, something I'm sure none of you care about. I shouldn't still like this song. It would be humiliating for someone who champions Riot Season Records and John Hodgman and Mikal Cronin and The Holy Mountain and other ultra-chic, hip, insightful artists and generally thinks he's above dick jokes to love this song. But, I then again...
BLITZ GIVES THIS SONG FOUR PAC-MEN OUT OF FIVE.
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K-Ci and Jo-Jo - 'Tell Me It's Real'. From the 1999 album 'It's Real'.
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It's about time to touch on my obsession with schmaltzy-as-fuck R&B. NAME ONE HUSKY WHITE KID THAT OWNED K-CI AND JO-JO'S FIRST TWO RECORDS. You can't? Because I certainly can. K-Ci and Jo-Jo represents the most over-the-top, dripping with earnestness R&B of this time, and I fucking couldn't get enough. Listen to that shit. That angelic-as-fuck string section soaring over the raw emotion emoting from those two men. Fucking glorious. What can I say? I was a hapless romantic. Not anymore though. Now I'm a sexless automaton, pistons firing on pure confidence and a metric fuckton of American Spirits. Not unlike the hair metal bubble that popped when the world realized Nirvana existed, this type of buttery-smooth crooning disappeared out of nowhere one day. Probably the day Sisqo left Dru Hill and made 'Thong Song'. This burst bubble hit K-Ci and Jo-Jo hard. They released an album in 2008 that only came out in Japan, which is appropriate and depressing. Now, since this entry isn't nearly humiliating enough, I'll say this: I once tried to serinade a girl to their hit 'All My Life'. It didn't work, mostly because I tried to do it in my bedroom, with my brother just outside the door, as well as both of our parents in our kitchen. For something so thoroughly planned out, it was SOOOOOO poorly planned out. Oh, also K-Ci was arrested for indecent exposure for exposing himself onstage in front of both adults and children. HE'S LIKE THE BLACK JIM MORRISON!
BLITZ GIVES THIS SONG THREE EXPOSED COCKS OUT OF FIVE.
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Bad Ronald - 'Let's Begin (Shoot the Shit)'. From the 2001 album 'Bad Ronald'.
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This one's particularly painful. I don't suffer bad rap anymore, but Bad Ronald is proof that I not only suffered it at one time, I fucking loved it. There's nothing redeeming about this awful video. The video is Pre-Crank Yankers/Wonder Showzen/Avenue Q, so the dirty puppet/kid show thing was new to me at the time, but even then I knew that it was a dumb idea. But easily the worst thing about the video would be the girls. Whatever the fuck THAT is isn't sexy. It's infantilization to the point of being almost pedophilic. It looped itself around and became an ouroboros of upsetting. It's not surprising that these guys weren't around long. This was their only record, and there's been nary a word about them since they folded up shop. Probably because of the creepy fucking video. Just a guess. But there's an odd catchiness to the beat, and I am mesmerized by that turtle furry kick-sliding on the dance floor for some odd reason.

BLITZ GIVES THIS SONG TWO ONESIES OUT OF FIVE.