One Stupid Mop

We like music. You should too.

Gwar - RagNaRok

(download)

It's amazing how many people I meet who don't know that Gwar is a real band. Most my age remember the scene in Empire Records where Ethan Embry freaks out on special brownies (extra sugar) and thinks he's watching himself being eaten by a stage prop. Apparently some interpret that his hallucination is the whole video - not just his involvement.

Gwar was, and will always be, metal; this album, however, strays in a different musical direction. This eponymous track, for instance, has some early-version rap-rock with a bit of funk style on one of the main guitar lines. It was a period of odd experimentation for the band, having recently come down from an unexpected explosion of popularity that quickly waned once first-time fans figured out that, yes, all of their stuff is crazy and offensive and gory.

What's truly unfortunate is the limited numbers of people that appreciate how excellent and necessary it is to have a band like Gwar. You need the lunatics wearing giant fake penises and pretending to bleed all over the audience. Someone's got to sing about how much fun it will be to have a fuck-fest while destroying the planet during armageddon. It's an equalizing force to have such a stark example of the extreme.

There is no other band that can really pull off what Gwar does. Jesus sucks because he's a meat sandwich. Some guy had sex with a cow so he could get the chance to be pissed on by Zog. Happy Death-Day. This is all some seriously weird shit. Coming from them, it's completely normal.

That, and downright hilarious.

Green Day - "The Grouch"

(download)

This song has haunted every step I've taken since I was 16 years old. Then and now, I feel like I've seen that story before, as everybody probably has, and it bugs the hell out of me.

But that's the thing about Green Day: For those of us who were teenagers in the 90s, this band is pretty damn dead on in representing a generation. At least, I feel like they've captured a lot of what's already in my head anyway. 

Say what you will about how much that sentiment kills you, but everything up to and including Dookie caught teenaged life exactly as it is; Insomniac, Nimrod, and Warning catch the weird 20s, or any uncomfortable transition from frustrated teenager to the uncomfortable kind of adult you're going to be; and the last two albums are about as actual adult as you can get. 

What's interesting is that both American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown are Billie Joe Armstrong looking both out at his country and inward to whatever it is he's become, and that has connected him to another generation of teenagers who may or may not hold onto his band the way that most people my age (pushing 30) have held onto Green Day - whether they cop to it or not.

Armstrong offers a lot of universal realizations based on himself in the lyrics to Nimrod, and he had lived a lot considering that his band was, for two years, the new standard-bearers for punk rock in a newly "alternative"-minded world. Once he got past the anger of a popular revolt after the masses didn't get where he was coming from on Insomniac, the songs went back to honest reflection, instead of just lashing out emotionally.

Roughly half the songs on Nimrod are about being an adult, and dealing with the fact that being an adult is just as challenging as being a teenager. It's just that the anger isn't as productive or effective. "The Grouch" scared me in high school because I was afraid it could happen, and it's kicking my ass now because I fear that it actually is.