For the Winter of Your Discontent

Words & Music by Joe Giambrone
Vocals by Lunasong
Copyright 2020 all rights reserved

This Rocks, and so 2020

Words & Music by Joe Giambrone
Vocals by Lunasong
copyright 2020 all rights reserved

Debate Rebuttal

Fuck Your Culture

Fuck Your Culture is where I’ve finally had enough, and I needed to get it out: the descent to fascism, the victims, the lies, the liars, the collaborators, the dupes. It was Mussolini who said, “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it represents a merger of state and corporate power.”

 

 

New song, Beatles cover

 

Sophia The Robot / Sexy, Crazy, Kill #MusicVideo

 

mirror

Muse Has a New Album

Muse say new album ‘Drones’ is ‘a modern metaphor for what it is to lose empathy’

And there’s a behind the scenes concert vid at the link.

Party Music 4 Halloween

Taylor Swift “Glitter and Ribs”

Deep cultural resonance…

 

PS

This surely goes with the David Lynch Miley Cyrus video.

 

 

$ellebrity (2012)

“Frankly they stopped telling important news about the world, and they just tell gossip.”

–Salma Hayek

This is a frustrating and depressing documentary.  It behaves pretty fairly to all parties, including the paparazzi.  The idiot nation purchasing this crap is also called to the red carpet, and the whole thing screams for a God Bless America type solution.

The children of the stars are also being attacked whenever in public.  That was the point where I had to pause and consider the consequences to those on the other side of the lenses.  Horror stories abound of celebrities hunted down.  Jennifer Lopez, Jennifer Aniston, Salma Hayek, Sarah Jessica Parker and others recount situations where they were trapped or chased.

The larger questions concerning what this idiotic worship of glitz is doing to the nation also get asked.  It could have used quite a bit more of that, and fewer paparazzi photographs, seemingly legitimizing what they’ve set out to attack.  That is the problem with anything film related, this documentary being no exception.  Film is mass marketed and reliant upon celebrity to sell it, and to get me to write about it and you to click on the trailer.  We are complicit and stained by this culture of mindless fame and image promotion.

I’ve never purchased one of those gossip rags, and I don’t watch that shit.  I think I made the right call.  Fuck them all.  There are so many important, desperate issues to investigate.  Whether or not someone showed cellulite on a beach is so fucking irrelevant to the world it strains belief that it’s now a big business, a billion a year or more.  People fill their puny little minds with this gibberish, and they’re part of our society, voting, giving approval, nodding to the talking heads they worship, be they movie stars or politicians.  The price of an uninformed public is tyranny, a tyranny engineered out of mass deception.  Big lies are made possible because of small minds with little knowledge of history, law, and lately just basic morality.

There’s an opportunity cost to garbage culture that the masses don’t understand.  Filling your mind with trivia can only be done at the expense of not filling it with knowledge and relevant information.  This is the society America has largely chosen to be, gorged on junk food, junk drinks, junk “news”, and political deceptions that they have no clue how to properly analyze.  The “consumers” are the ultimate villains here, a point the film actually does make.  It is their spending decisions that enable the rest of it.

PS

Tell me this isn’t related:

stupid americans asked simple questions (2005)

Fans Only. Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (2010)

I’ll admit it; I was a pretty big fan in the 80s, went to 3 or 4 shows.  Places like Madison Square Garden and the Meadowlands Arena, huge crowds, sold out, the golden years for Rush. They had matured by then, moved past the Dungeons and Dragons screechy half-hour song phase and into some seriously tight, relatable social commentary set to the most difficult to play rock and roll around.

A cohort introduced me to 2112, one of the aforementioned screechy half hour concept albums, early in high school.  It was weird, for more than a couple reasons.  I still have the CD somewhere, but I never play it.

Rush’s moment, the one that made them, came with their near demise after a particularly radio-unfriendly concept experiment.  They couldn’t get played, and they were booted off tours.  Desperate to just open for other bands like Kiss, Bad Company or Manfred Mann, it looked like a dead end.  Their manager accepted every note the record label demanded.  They wanted pop, radio friendly hook songs.  They wanted #1 chart singles.  Of course they did.

The band, however, did the exact opposite.  Giving the finger to the record label, this was what inspired 2112, an album like no one had ever heard.  It was science-fiction, fantasy, battles of ideas.  It was a rock opera from another realm.  Of course no radio station would play it, but the fans went insane for it, made it a gold record.

Now it’s hard to get strongly behind the vocal stylings of Geddy Lee, actually.  This single factor has held the band back, always, and kept them off the mainstream radar.  I often wondered if they had only hooked up with another singer, someone with a less grating voice, what could have been?  Perhaps one of the greatest missed opportunities in rock.

Now, the film.  It’s a thorough exploration of the band’s origins, covering their entire career right up to the release of this documentary.  Great editing, and lots of never-before seen clips.  Only it spent too much time on the early years and later years, and it gives short attention to the best period the band ever had: Moving Pictures, Exit Stage Left, early 80s.  This is what the world thinks of when they hear the band’s name.  That one period could have been the bulk of the film and no one would have complained.  The director decided to go for the longevity angle, staying power.

I got the impression that we haven’t learned enough about Neil Peart, as he is a legendarily private person, protective of his personal life.  He’s always at arm’s length, even from the other guys in the band.  He’s also probably the greatest rock and roll drummer and the band’s lyricist.

An unexpected twist in the late 90s came as a shock, one that I wasn’t aware of.  The film does have a third act, and packs a decent ending, which is sure to please fans everywhere.

Rush fans can be cultish and fanatical, and they have multiplied exponentially over the decades.  Round about the time I was tuning out, from their synthetic new wave phase, the band was gathering more and more of a flock.  It’s the fans that have made all the difference, and their shows still all sell out, even 60,000 seat stadiums in Brazil – some of the most fanatical music fans I’ve ever seen.  Rush has had a 20 year period of ever-growing notoriety, one that I had missed completely.

The film also revealed a private little tidbit, of relevance to me, near the middle.  I actually wrote a letter to Neil Peart when the band’s sound turned synth-heavy and marginalized guitarist Alex Lifeson – and that is exactly how I put it in the letter.  Peart wrote back, in typical Peart style, telling me off for suggesting how they should be writing songs.  I was a little bummed out at the time, but it seems I was dead-on accurate.  In the film that’s what Alex himself says!  The synth-heavy direction of the band had marginalized him in the songwriting, making it literally more difficult to find space in the mix for his own instrument.  Peart and Geddy Lee agreed and changed the direction for a more raw-sounding subsequent album.  Perhaps a lot of others wrote them too, or told them likewise, but the personal connection was pretty satisfying.

So that’s Rush, in a box, if you’re interested.  Songs are cut short most of the time, and thankfully so for a lot of the earlier stuff.  But you can’t ignore that they have influenced many thousands of musicians, some of whom appear in the film and attest to the fact.