WTF Moments of Rock Part I

Ah, where to begin? It seems like every year the corporate music geniuses come up with ever increasing ways to insult the ears of mankind, and womankind for that matter too. Just when you think it can’t get any worse, a record label proves you wrong. I thought Celine Dion was the bottom of the barrel, so of course someone went out and found Lady Gaga forcing me to do an epic face palm.

But even the disaster that is the current state of pop music can be entertaining. Not the actual music, mind you, just the depravity by which the record execs practice their particular brand of torture. By example, Biggie Smalls gets murdered and the record execs think it’s a great idea for Justin Bieber to cover his songs. Actually I’m glad Biggie didn’t live to see this.

So, I present you with just a small first sampling of what I believe to be some of the greatest WTF moments in recent music in no particular order.

Chris Gaines

All I can think of to say is really? Garth Brooks apparently thought that by covering up his shiny, redneck dome with a bad emo toupee he could live out his lifelong rock star fantasies and no one would be the wiser. What actually happened was an abortion of bad country music thinly disguised as even worse pop.

If you’ve never heard it, I strongly recommend you go to your local music store, find a copy, then go out to a nice large field and burn it. You’ll be doing yourself and the rest of the world a big favor. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t completely bad…well, yeah it actually was but I thought I’d try to say something nice. Don’t worry, won’t happen again.

But as horrible of a human being as Garth Brooks is to have pretended this was a good idea, the people at VH1 are worse. They actually made a rockumentary about Chris Gaines. This abomination did nothing but encourage Brooks. We’re lucky he didn’t decide to come out with a double live album, or a traveling festival of Gainesapalooza especially considering that somehow he actually had a single make it to number 5 off this album. REALLY, number FIVE! To put this in context for you KISS fans, just consider that Detroit Rock City only made it to number 7. I guess the usual brain-dead mall music buyer prefers rednecks dressed emo to rockers dressed mime. So, in conclusion, if you’re one of the people that bought this album and almost forced another one on society, then I hate you and you should hate yourself.

The Blown Out Penis.

Yes, I said that, a blown out penis.

It seems that back in the prehistoric rock days of the 1970’s Three Dog Night was a mobile pimp show. I know you think the sexual mojo modern generations attribute to them doesn’t seem to be the type of whirlwind force you’d expect to produce stories with titles such as “Blown Out Penis”, but you’d be wrong. These guys were definitely one of the top groups of the 1970’s both musically and culturally, and women noticed.

It all began with a guy named Chuck. Chuck Negron was a nice looking guy with the obligatory 70’s Farrah hair who was living the dream. He toured the world doing good drugs and even more random women. Somewhere along this adventure, it seems that good ole Chuck began having man problems.

You see, the male body was never meant to copulate more than 42 times per day. But being the rebel that he was, Chuck threw caution to the wind and pretended he was a coked-up rabbit.

But somewhere along the road to infamy, he began to have a rather sensitive swelling and chapping. He finally managed to give himself a break and go to see a doctor. In his book, Three Dog Nightmare, Chuck says, "In my ignorance I thought, 'Wow! It's just like working out a muscle. It's going to be huge!” Poor ole Chuck. The doctor informed him he was flirting with disaster and made him promise to give his body a break. In Chuck’s defense, even Newton said that a body in motion tends to stay in motion. And since his body had been in A LOT of motion, it was quite difficult for him to quit cold turkey. He did, however manage to make it a week until he met a local beauty queen backstage. And the rest is the type of freak show history that makes drunken stories even more entertaining.

Apparently this innocent local pageant winner was witness to Chuck’s body attempting to unzip itself from him and run away after having decided that it had had enough of his misuse. It was reported that as soon as the festivities began, everyone heard a ripping sound which was, undoubtedly, followed by a high pitched screaming sound coming from Chuck. What followed was years of expensive psychotherapy for a beauty queen and a painfully embarrassing few hours in an emergency room in Oklahoma where Chuck says he “held his manhood while it bled profusely and closely resembled a split open, overcooked hot dog”. OUCH.

LULU

Metallica and Lou Reed. Separate, forces that can inspire awe and devotion. Together they just simply inspire you to shove an icepick as far into your ear as possible.

First, I have always found that when a band decides to get “artsy” they begin to suck. In this case, that’s truer than I ever thought it would be. Somewhere along the lines, some musicians begin to actually take themselves too seriously. They hang out in uppity coffeehouses with people wearing turtlenecks who reek of cloves and sandalwood. So apparently Lars’ AARP membership came with a Starbucks gift card and twenty gallons of essential oils.

To backtrack just a little, you have to understand where these two misguided elements immediately came from for this travesty. Lou Reed had pretty much destroyed any semblance of respect and reputation he’d had with his horrific Metal Machine Music, an album that has been described as, “getting ear fucked by a toaster”, “The tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator” and compared to the excitement of a night at the bus station. I’ll save you the torture of hearing it; it’s pretty much a little plastic disk full of guitar feedback that makes it debatable as to whether there are enough semblances to anything intentional to actually be considered music.

On the other hand, Metallica’s previous release was the beginning of the end of the illustrious career of Robert Trujillo. After Load, which I still can’t shake the idea that the title should’ve been preceded by “taking a-“I guess anything they came up with would be good. Well I’d be wrong. Granted St. Anger wasn’t the worst album ever made. So for Metallica’s sake I say thank you Bay City Rollers.

But back to the most current abomination. Just in case you don’t know the story behind it, LULU is based on the plays of a 19^th century German playwright named Frank Wedekind. Yes, Metallica has gotten so commercial they’re essentially doing musical theater now. They’ve reached the heights of that guy from high school who lived for nothing more than the drama club and now does cheesy dinner theater still pretending to be mysterious and rebellious even though he’s a glorified waiter. So what’s the album about? Well, it’s about 85 minutes too long.

So of course you’d expect the critics to love this. Well then you'd be wrong, and the fans hated it even more. Lou Reed has recently discussed death threats he’s received for “bringing Metallica down”. Lars commented by saying that the negative reaction comes from Lou Reed’s poetry, “not being for everyone”. No, really? Of course not wanting to be outdone, Lou Reed managed to insult Metallica fans even more by saying that the album wasn’t doing well among the fan base because, “this is an album for literate people”. I guess Master of Puppets was for simpletons and Ride the Lightening was for people without the common sense to not stick sporks in their eyes.

According to Billboard, Metallica has no literate fans since this is the lowest selling album ever put out by them. To tell the truth, I’m not really sure what to say about this album. It seemed everyone knew it was going to be crap before it came out, except Metallica and Reed that is. Why they would do this to themselves, and their fans, is beyond me. I guess this is Lars’ way of giving the big middle finger for not getting his cut from all those illegal downloads. Well Lars, don’t worry, you won’t be getting ripped off this time. I can pretty much guarantee no one will be illegally downloading this album.

Too Young to Die

If you haven’t seen the movie Too Young To Die, then you can’t truly be a KISS fan. Well, either that or you’re trying to keep a positive opinion about Gene Simmons. What does it have to do with Gene? Well, see that rather ugly drag queen to the left? Yep, that's Dr. Love himself.

In this twisted flick, the soundtrack is why I included it in this list. Well that and the complete joke Gene Simmons makes of himself.

The movie is a James Bond knockoff starring John Stamos as the son of a murdered secret agent. But that’s not important. What IS important is that Gene Simmons plays a transvestite so brilliantly you have to actually ask yourself if he is the world’s greatest actor, or a closet freak.

When Gene first comes on screen, it is during his musical number It Takes a Man Like Me To Be A Woman Like Me. Yeah. Sure the song is borderline, or over the line, but what’s worse is the costume. Gene comes out literally bumping and grinding while wearing a leather teddy, high heel hip boots, fish nets and a huge pink showgirl headdress. Gene sings the opening line to the title song while looking like Frankfurter’s ugly, fat sister and, for some strange reason, it sounds so familiar ("I've got no manners / And I'm not too clean / I know what I like / If you know what I mean, yeah!"), because he later ripped himself off and used the same lyrics on "Spit" on KISS' Revenge album. For the sake of KISS fans everywhere, I sincerely hope he spent months researching drag queens for this part and he didn’t just show up and do this naturally. But the fact that the costume is the same one worn by Lynda Carter in her TV special when she was trying to look like a female member of KISS, not sure if it would matter. So there you have it, Gene borrowed clothes from Wonder Woman.

As scary as his performance is, what’s scarier is that with all his money, influence and close guarding of imaging he does that this is still out there. If you haven’t seen it, I do recommend you search for it. This is the kind of thing that shuts down KISS drinking trivia games. But you have been warned, therapy may be necessary after viewing.