Kinda Like Nicotrel, But For Musicians

A measure of how society is progressing: used to be musicians would stab each other for how they dressed, their overbearing douchiness, or some other superficial measure of quality. Now they're finally getting to the heart of the problem: if you suck at playing, you're gonna get knifed:

The 18-year-old singer of the Italian gothic heavy metal band SOUL CRY and her 16-year-old brother, the band's bass player, are facing premeditated attempted murder charges after allegedly stabbing the group's guitarist dozens of times because he did not play well enough, according to the Associated Press.

I must say, I'm pleased that members of the metal community are at the forefront of the revolution to end shitty musicianship with ridiculously extreme violence. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to go practice my guitar. Wouldn't want to shivved because of a missed chord change, you see.

I DO Inspire the Best in People

Damn, does this warm the cockles:

The publication: Scanner: A Nerve Blog
The topic: Crush of the Week: Wendy O. Williams
The relevant line: "We're especially into the song "Jailbait." But not the Motörhead version. The Wendy O. Willliams and the Plasmatics version."

What the post doesn't mention is that the writer is my good pal Nicole Pasulka, who used to work with me until she fled for the world freelance (I know, who does that). Nicole first heard the cover after I mentioned that I had seen a video (now lost from YouTube) of Wendy O. and Motorhead playing the song together back in the early 1980s. Now she's using that first experience to give Wendy O. some big props. Makes me feel like I've made a difference today...

Something About 17

I was in a club last night - not the kind with live music, but the kind with thumping "club" music and over- (and under-) dressed men and women in their 20s and 30s doing their best to seduce each other. Not really my scene, but I was there for a friend's birthday party.

In any case, the house DJ would occasionally take breaks from song selections where the music consisted of THUMP THUMP...THUMP...THUMP THUMP and long streams of incomprehensible lyrics to go to song selections with loud guitars and long streams of incomprehensible lyrics, most of which I knew. One of them, towards the end of the night, was Joan Jett and the Blackhearts's famous cover of "I Love Rock 'N Roll" (point of connection to the blog, in case you're wondering: The Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal includes Joan Jett in its pantheon of artists. While I don't always agree with its selections - why is Cheap Trick and Dream Theater out? - it made for a good justification to write this post), which features the lyric, "I saw him dancin' there by the record machine/I knew he must a been about seventeen" and it got me to thinking: why do rockers have an obsession with 17-year-olds?

Joan Jett isn't the only example, obviously; Winger, Stevie Nicks and The Beatles all come to mind when thinking of this lyrical convention and I'm sure there are others. My initial theory was that 17 is a year younger than 18, the traditional age of adulthood; choosing to idealize 17 is the rock 'n roll thing to do because it's a little rebellious to make the kid seem like the adult. Then my wife pointed out that 17 is the legal age of consent in most states and it's probably no coincidence that all of these songs seem to be about sex in one way or another. I like both ideas - sex, drugs and rock 'n roll are so tied together that they end up as the subtext in song lyrics.