Wednesday, January 19, 2005

For the past three years, I've been posting on the I Spit on Your Groove music nerd message board, which consists of some of the smartest, funniest people on the whole goshdarned interthing. Unfortunately, the board's home teeters on the brink of joining pets.com and webvan.com in that great browser cache in the sky. So, for future generations, here are the better entries I made to the world famous ISOYG riff threads. This is, essentially, what I did with my mid-20s. Note: a failure to get most of these jokes may indicate a lack of focus on stupid pop culture trivia and a balanced, healthy perspective on life.

The Movie Titles Thread:
Tora! Tora! Spelling!
Secretary 2: Sadomasochistic Boogaloo
Atlas Shtupped
Annie Get Your Gun (After a Background Check and a Seven Day Waiting Period)
Full Denim Jacket
Francis the Talking Heroin Mule
Guess What's Crawling On Dinner
Bring Me a Plate of Fettucine Alfredo
Panty Raid on Entebbe
The Phish That Bored Pittsburgh
Andy Hardy Gets Jungle Fever
The Texas Chain Restaurant Massacre
(On the menu, murder...with a side order of jalapeno poppers.)
You Can't Take It In You
The Fall of Haim
The Merzbow Incident
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, The Stable Boy, Two Midgets, The Cal State-Fullerton Womens' Swim Team, The Night Watchman, The Delivery Man, The Naive Co-ed and Her Lover
American Juggalo
The Taking of Jello 1-2-3
The Days of Weinberger and Roses
U.S. News and World Report's European Vacation
Death and the Maidenform Woman
Bikini Savings and Loan

Bikini Pawn Shop
Burn Cambridge Burn - A Village Smithee Film
Bowling for Combines
(a documentary focusing on gun violence among Nebraska corn farmers)
Smilla's Sense of Entitlement
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Yawn
Alice's Texas Chainsaw Restaurant Massacree
Bill and Ted and Carol and Alice
Scream, Chocula, Scream!
Harold Robbins' William Shakepeare's Romeo and Juliet
The Guns of Provolone
Meet Me in East St. Louis
Seven Brides for Seven Samurai
Gimme Tax Shelter
Dead Man Powerwalking
A Panini Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich
That Third Place Season

Fellini's Troma
Polterzeitgeist
Veto Vito: Bill Kill Vol. 1
The Popeil of Greenwich Village


Worst Possible Band Names Thread:
Olivia Newton John Donne (debut album: Let's Get Metaphysical)
Godspell You Black Choreographer!
Hawley-Smoot Overdrive
Hot Pockets of Resistance
Ghostface Keillor
Racially Pure Prairie League (skinhead band covers 1970s soft rock favorites)
Screamin' Stephen Hawking
Bob Marley and the Hartford Whalers
Coagulation of the Filling
Alfalfa Male
Al Kaline Trio
Tayback Machine
Hieronymus Beotch
The Self-Preservation Jazz Band
Camryn Mannheim Steamroller
Dead White Hope (or: Really Really Thin White Hope) (a tribute to then recently deceased Bob Hope)
Flying Reddenbachers
Jews for Deezen
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Bread Crumbs (indie rock band whose lyrics all come from Grimm's fairy tales)
Inanimate Objectivists
The Whigga Party
Rage Against Gene Gene the Dancing Machine
Honkeypox
Sucker MC Escher
Kafka Eskimos
Tabitha Soren and the Loneliest Monks
Pop Tarts Will Eat Themselves
Lenny's Reef Installers
Fonzie Scheme
Shock and Jive
Hall and Ass

The "create a reality show" thread:
All Women are Money Grubbing Whores
The new dating reality show that dares to say what "Joe Millionaire" and "For Love or Money" are only thinking.

Survivor: Upper East Side
Twelve young heirs are cut off from their trust funds for a month. The winner is the one who manages to survive without accepting a demeaning minimum wage job, pawning off any personal belongings or moving to Staten Island.

The Pitch
15 strangers are selected by the Fox network to pitch ideas for new reality shows. Points are awarded for the ability to copy existing ideas without being sued by a competing network, the creative use of washed-up b-list celebrities, and avoiding rehab for cocaine abuse.

The Album Titles Thread:
Show Me The Way to the Next Ice Cream Bar - Doors Songs for Kids!
Smith and Wessonality
Love in the Time of Cold and Flu Season
And Cotton Mather as The Beaver
Terror Alert Level Blue is the New Terror Alert Level Yellow
Mavis Staples Teaches Typing
I Get Knocked Up, But I Get Down Again
The Nizzle of the 'Narcizzle'

Two Seven Elevens Clash
Thug a Lug: The West Coast Rap Tribute to Roger Miller
The Law of Joementum Conservation
Dustin Diamond is a Very Funny Fellow...Right!
Flogging Joey Bishop
Roadkill is Manslaughter
Gangster Lean Cuisine
Handbags and Doorags
I Paid For This Coffin
(a tribute to the late 40th president)
The Shadow of Your Simile
A Prairie Home Longtime Companion

Persona au Gratin
Douche ex Machina
Will the Circle K Be Unbroken?
Honky Tonkin Resolution
Hussein in the Membrane
Hitchens Brew
Utica Calling


Worst Possible Thread Titles Thread:
One Man Come on a Barbed Wire Fence - The Taking Lyrics Out of Context Thread
Cardinal Tettamanzi or Adolfo "Shabba-Doo" Quinones - Who Should Be the Next Pope?
Down with Toquemada - Protest the Canadian Inquisition Here
He Hate Me, But I Love Him - The Dysfunctional Relationships with Former XFL Players Support Thread

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

I was going to post something about the much ballyhooed switch of DC's WHFS to Latin contemporary last week, but work is kicking my ass right now. So here are a few disconnected thoughts a week later, now that no one cares any more:

- WHFS never meant anything to me personally, but it is a good thing to see it put to sleep after years of slow decay. Stumbling onto the later incarnation of HFS on the radio dial was kind of like flipping channels and seeing that ER is still on the air: a "WTF, this is still on?" reaction combined with vague embarrassment for all involved.

- Longing for the old, diverse HFS is a pipe dream. People who value music and want to hear a variety of things are already being served by iPods and/or satellite radio, so commercial radio will most likely become even more tightly formatted as it tries to appeal to the 12-CD owner who wants to hear the same general songs during their workday. And freeform radio sounds great in theory, but in practice almost no one listens to it and it's commercial anathema. (Even WRNR, which many former HFS listeners tout as some sort of alternative, is a. programmed to an extent and b. apparently devoted to an ongoing experiment to see how many different times Jack Johnson can be played in an hour.)

- Rock radio is in a death spiral of confusion and irrelevance right now. Rap-metal seems to be sputtering out (praise be to Odin), the Killers/Franz Ferdinand school of slicked up dance post-punk is doing OK saleswise but isn't really a commercial juggernaut, and there's nothing else really filling the gap. Hip-hop radio has displaced rock for the most part, with a dwindling number of fading classic rock stations and confused-sounding "modern" rock stations raging against the dying of the light. I'm not a "rock is dead" guy; a majority of my favorite musical stuff right now could probably be filed under "rock," but Animal Collective or the Fiery Furnaces or Destroyer isn't the kind of stuff that fits comfortably beside beer ads or inspires 17 year old kids to blare out of the windows of their parents' station wagons. The era of rock dominating everything is long gone (for the best, I'd say), but I worry that complete and total disengagement from the rest of the culture will just create an artform of museum pieces endlessly recreating the same moments in time. Clearly, what is needed is rock protectionism! Subsidies to our hard-working (and -rocking!) bands! Tariffs on hip-hop CDs! Dick Gephardt smashing crates of Lil Jon CDs to the cheers of a bemulleted crowd in Des Moines!

- The alternative rock station of my youth (which, in retrospect, kinda sucked but was a revelation to 14 year old me on Maryland's Eastern Shore) switched formats all the way back in 1997 to fucking sports talk radio, which was even more appalling (although, again in retrospect, this occurred at almost the exact same time that mainstream alternative rock radio went from "kinda sucks" to "completely sucks goat balls"). For once, the Eastern Shore was on the vanguard of culture! But maybe not; amusingly, x107 has apparently come full circle and is now playing bad modern rock again! Maybe there's hope that rap-metal will rise again on WHFS! As Karl Marx (who had the 2-6 slot on Seattle's famed KJET during the mid-80s) once said, "History repeats itself twice, first as retro, then as ironic mocking of retro."