Most people have at the least heard of GWAR. The theatrical thrash group has a reputation for raunchy and disturbing stage shows skewering politics, religion, sexual taboos, and so much more. They have outrageous costumes and claim to be from outer space and have come to Earth to reign terror upon the populace.

My first exposure to GWAR came in fifth grade when someone dubbed me a copy of Scumdogs of the Universe. I don't remember who and I have no idea what happened to the tape, but do remember it was very naughty. Case in point, this song that just randomly played in my ITunes and inspired this post: "Sexicutioner." A quick scan of the thousands of songs in my music library reveal this to be the only GWAR track in my hard drive and I have no clue how it got there. The Sexicutioner, wikipedia tells me, is a side member of GWAR and "was summoned in an ancient ritual by Oderus, and was raised from infancy to become Scumdog material." Of course, the song says he comes from France and "when you are in France, you pull down your pants." Yep. e also has a predilection for adding the letter "s" to any word that starts with "ex", such as "sexcuse me."

GWAR :: Sexecutioner

All that really needs to be written about "Let's Go All the Way" by Sly Fox is "zhum zhum zinna-ninny." A cooler vocal rhythm bed is difficult to find in the world of 80s music and it is a constant surprise to me that no one has yet to cop it for a modern hip hop song.

"Let's Go All the Way" also features poignant lyrics defining the time:

"Livin' in New York looks like an apple core/
Asphalt Jungle got to be a man of war/
California dreamers sleeping in the sand/
The Hollywood Squares are living in Disney Land"

New York City - the Big Apple - apple core! Get it?
To me the song expresses a deep frustration with the way of the world and the only option remaining, to put it bluntly, is to fuck the days away until the bomb is dropped.

Sly Fox :: Let's Go All The Way

I consider myself part of the final "Community Bus Stop" generation. I grew up in a rather safe development called "Pilgrim Hills" which was composed of roughly six streets making up around 2.5 miles of road. When I was growing up the busses would pick up fifth grade and up at one of three bus stops in the development and starting in ninth it was one of two bus stops. These days, when I go home, it makes me sad to see that every grade is picked up in front of their homes - even high school. This is detrimental to the growth of kids for many reasons. One, you lose out on meeting the other kids on your block and suffering together through the winters when the bus is running late. Two, and I hate to say it as a former target of a neighborhood bully, but you lose the neighborhood pecking order. Don't take this the wrong way, I hated being bullied, but for as horrible and awful and spirit crushing as it was, it made me who I am today. It also forged alliances within the neighborhood as we plotted ways to get back at or deal with the bully. Three, you lose the independent streak of not going straight home from the bus stop no matter how many times mom tells you to come straight home. So many times we would get off the bus, throw our book bags in the front yard of the kid who lived nearest to the bus stop, and run off and get mucked up and filthy in the woods or have a spontaneous snowball fight. Four, exercise. Hello, will it kill your kid to walk half a mile in the morning?

Anyway, what does this have to do with the Dead Milkmen? The bus stop is where I was given a copy of Beelzebubba and it quickly became one of my most played cassettes of my formative years. The tape came from a kid who was two years older than me and, while I didn't at the time get many of the tongue-in-cheek references, it was goofy and silly enough for me to enjoy. I didn't know what a "punk rock girl" was, but I sure did want to hang out with one, because, to quote my 11-year-old self "hey, they started playing the Beach Boys on the jukebox and she started screaming! I love the Beach Boys, too! Wow, punk rock girls are cool!." The other song I listened to a lot was "Stuart." I don't recall if I had any concept of the words "queer" and "homosexual" at that age and I think I liked it because it referenced aliens. The album also taught me that trying to burn banana peels is not such a good idea. It wouldn't be for a couple more years that I would actually learn about the history of the Dead Milkmen and discover that they had more albums, such as the seminal DM album Big Lizard in my Backyard.

Below are the two songs I listened to the most:

Dead Milkmen :: Stuart

Dead Milkmen :: Punk Rock Girl

Time sure moves so fast. Half a year already since I did my first weblogging. 6200++ page views have been generated since. Again, I thank you, dear readers.

Writing sure is not an easy task to do. A lot of time has to be spent to read other articles just to know the subjects that really take on in the real world of classical music.

Yet, this is a very niche subject. Great happenings does not just take place every single day. And concerts are quite rare. Even if they aren't, I will not have any resources to watch all of them and to make a review for every single one of them.

Subjects are difficult to find, I must say. Presenting a new writing of a certain quality is always difficult, especially after 50 or so writings. Subjects ran dry.

Since readers kept coming, I felt obliged to continue to write and write. I also felt obliged to come up with at least one post every week. This was the first time I dealt with "market demand", and it's quite frustrating some time, especially when there is no inspiration and creativity left.

Writing topics other than music also crossed my mind. But I already had dedicated this blog to music, and I should not turn my eyes then. I had to continue doing this kind of stuff, trying to establish something that was and is not common in the world of music blogging in Indonesia. So, made up my mind, and A Musical Promenade is still a music blog up till now. (I hope so)

So, I invite all dear readers to drop a comment or two or suggest a topic that might be discussed here in the blog. I will be very thankful. If you disagree with any statements in any posts, please feel free to express it. I appreciate it very much. I will try to facilitate any those suggestions and statements.

meltarisa, livergirl and other readers have suggested a topic or two. These suggestions have been taken into account. Some are already posted, some are still in the midst of my mind, trying to figure out what to say.

I still try to blog every other day, hoping I can still find suitable and interesting subjects to write about. Is blogging hard? It surely is not that easy. Is it worthed? It definitely is. Wish me luck...

The Count (per May 25th, 2008 )

Today I'm going to reveal you the stats of the blog for the first time. These numbers were copied from the wordpress stats at 00:17 am this morning. Dear readers, I thank you. These are also your numbers...

Blog Stats

Total Views: 6,224
Best Day Ever: 99 —Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Views today: 35

Totals

Posts: 67
Comments: 292
Categories: 27
Tags: 241

Pictures:

• http://flickr.com/photos/dmang/461875649/
• http://flickr.com/photos/simpologist/16734948/

For punk rock and me the best I can come up with is Boy Scouts, a taped college radio program, and Suicidal Tendencies. This memory came rushing back to me as I sat in the theater watching the third greatest superhero film ever made, Iron Man. During the scene where we first see Tony Stark in his garage/workshop the song playing in the background is Suicidal Tendencies "Institutionalized." Pop quiz: What was the first film to feature this song as part of the soundtrack?

"Institutionalized" is probably the first "punk" song that resonated with me. I must have been roughly 12 when I first heard the song while on a Boy Scout camping trip. My troop was notorious in the Boy Scouts for being a little rough around the edges. From what I understand Boy Scouts is meant to help shape boys into pillars of society. Our Scout Leader, for better or for worse, preferred fun to the discipline and he encouraged our independence.

The older scouts would always bring a radio and music with them. During one of these camping trips a tape was brought of a radio show on UConn's student station WHUS (where I would eventually go on to be music director a decade later). I don't recall the name of the show and all I can remember is that the shtick of the two hosts was to randomly yell out "SPERM COUNT!!!!" And then count to a random number. The music of the show was predominantly punk rock and it shook my world.  I ended up...ummm...borrowing the tape at the end of the camping trip when no one was looking and one of the two songs that stood out more than any other was "Institutionalized." (The other song was Dead Milkman's "Punk Rock Girl," but more on that later). I would rewind and play that one song over and over and over again. Why? I'm not sure, maybe Mike Muir's words of being misunderstood when nothing was wrong resonated in my tween brain as I gazed out into my teenage years?

Suicidal Tendencies :: Institutionalized

To go back and listen to the song now makes me nostalgic for the times I would listen to the song and be nostalgic about all of the quotes. I wonder if 10 years from now I'll be nostalgic about the time I wrote a blog entry about being nostaligic about my "These are the quotes" nostalgia. My life is a redundancy.

Bouncing Souls :: These Are The Quotes From Our Favorite 80's Movies

Side note: Google thinks the Bouncing Souls might cause harm. Awesome.

First up, the Angry Samoans. A band that started in '78 and still occasionally gigs out. Apparently they recently toured Germany. I came across Angry Samoans when someone who knew I was into Operation Ivy recommended them to me. The only vinyl I ever added to my collection from the Somoans was the 1982 release "Back From Samoa." It, along with an entire crate worth of my high school soundtrack, warped while in storage and a few years back I replaced it with a CD version. "Lights Out" was by far my favorite track from the release and clocking in at less than a minute is the ideal punk anthem.

Angry Samoans :: "Lights Out"

DJ Mmmm Coffee :: It Started with a Sneeze

MC Frontalot relates.

MC FRONTALOT :: It is Pitch Black.

I have gotten a bit stuck on what I wanted to do for this week's blog post. It is a bit harder to upload an Excel chart to a blog than I thought. Thus I birthed (yes birthed) this blog post out of my subsequent frustration. Anyway these are two random things going on in either the blog-o-sphere and the music world that I have realized are important to note. And hopefully I will figure out how to post my cool Excel chart for next week. I imagine that this wont be the last episode of Random Realizations though... but on to the relevant items!

1) First off thank you to Angela for the article from the News and Observer about vinyl record collectors. My realization stemming from the article is that I have completely neglected record collectors in my recent posts about the future of music. Vinyl is one medium that doesn't seem to be dying out, in fact the popularity and nostalgia of records seems to be growing. It is one bright spot for the world of hard copy music, many believe the sound quality of vinyl is better than digital copies. My excel post was related to this, so I am not going to get too far into the subject, I have to leave something for you guys to come back to next week.

If you would like to read the story, it can be found here. And thanks again to Angela for the article!
(P.S. While you are in the blog-o-sphere check out Angela's blog Chapel Hill, China. It's got some very interesting posts on the situation between Tibet and China among other cool things.)

2) Second Random Realization: (except it really isn't all that random) It is getting to be that time of year again. That's right concert festival season. There are several big festivals that have recently released full lineups that are very impressive. Lollapalooza and Coachella seem to be the hot tickets this year. Lollapalooza has secured Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, Kanye West and Radiohead to headline (easily my favorite lineup of the summer). Coachella announced yesterday that the "Purple One" himself, Prince, will headline along with Jack Johnson (a very close second runner up only because Prince will be there).

Check out the line ups for all of your favorite summer festivals, so you can sweat it out with thousands of other people to all your favorite bands:
Lollapalooza: Chicago, Illinois, August 1-3
Coachella: Indio, California, April 25-27
Coachella East (All Points West Festival): Liberty State Park, New Jersey, August 8-10
Bonnaroo: Manchester, Tennessee, June 12-15
Bumbershoot: Seattle, Washington, August 30-September 1
Sasquatch: The Gorge, Washington, May 24-26

UPDATE: Ok so, I really have no life at all. So much so that I made a nifty time-line of the major summer music festivals this year with Simile. It only took, like, forever. Please click on each tour and click on the name that pops up for a link to each festival website.

Happy Road Tripping! (Oh and don't forget to pack the sunscreen!)

I thought I would do something a little different this week. I decided you guys have probably read enough about the music industry to make your eyeballs fall out. So instead of boring you with another lengthy info session, I chose to spotlight one of my favorite new web features: The Hype Machine.

The Hype Machine is my favorite site on the internet to go to simply because of the first thing they say on their homepage, "Every day, thousands of people around the world write about music they love — and it all ends up here."

Put simply it is an RSS feeder for a variety of mp3 music blogs. Of course it's really far from being that simple though, the site tracks various music blogs (too many to count in number, I am sure). When a blog posts an mp3 they take it and post it on their homepage. It also links directly to the blog it got the track from so you can read more about why the blogger chose to post the track. It also provides searches by mp3, blog, artist and almost any other way of searching for music possible.

The mission of the site is to "make music discovery fun and get artists paid," so tracks are not for download, but you can preview the whole track as many times as you want. Then, if you like it, you can purchase the track using one of the options they provide (Amazon or iTunes) or go out go out and get it yourself. So the blogs get read, the artists get paid, and the readers find music they love. It's a win/win/win situation for all involved!

What's even better, is that if you are big music nerd (like myself) you can create a profile and personalize your own Hype Machine homepage. So you can keep track of what all your favorite music blogs are writing and keep track of your favorite tracks and searches.

I recommend checking out the popular feature, it lists the top 50 searched tracks on the site. Click on the pop up player and it plays through all fifty. In fact you can do this with any search you do. Just perform a search, click on the player and you can play through all the mp3's that come up in the search. It's like your own personal internet radio (kinda like Pandora Radio, except you have more freedom to choose a track list and access feedback from the music blogging universe).

Well I need to calm myself down now, The Hype Machine just gets me all excited.
Happy Hype Machining!

Shearwater :: Rooks 

...

...

Hey...what? Oh. Yeah, some people won Grammy Awards tonight.

...

Neat. I guess.

Oh! Did you know the PLUG Awards are on March 6? Did you vote yet?

I'm not a consumer of paparazzi, but it is impossible to live in this society and not know what is going on in the life of Britney Spears. I know, just by standing in line at the supermarket, that this pop superstar has been in and out of clinics, is battling for her children, and had some sort of scuffle with Dr. Phil. Thanks to Anderson Cooper, who typically doesn't dabble in Britney during his newscast, I also know she is at the end of her rope and her parents are concerned for her life.

As I watched the birdseye video on CNN last night of Britney stuck in traffic while15-20 paparazzi whores swarmed around her car and took pictures of her I felt literally ill. Then I thought about Michael Jackson. The media always says MJ is bat-shit crazy, they never say "we made him bat-shit crazy." They, and those that consume the paparazzi media, are the ones that broke Jackson down and are now destroying this poor woman who obviously needs nothing more than space. People thought she was crazy for sacrificing her career to have children, but I think that was her attempt at bringing some normalcy to a life that she has never had control of ever since her parents turned her into a Mickey Mouse Club kid.

When Britney eventually kills herself we should all be held accountable for this cancer in society we have created. Chris Crocker is right, leave her alone before it is too late. Mocking her just isn't funny anymore.

Remember Eminem's video for "Mosh" from the 2004 election. It gave me a sense of repsect that I previously did not have for Eminem:

El-P probably released one of the most poingnant and memorable videos of 2007. "Simthereens" is a rare treat in an industry that should be oozing with political music and videos, but has been failing us:

NOFX are one band that can always be trusted not to shy away from putting the political front and center. 2003's "Franco-Unamerican" reflected how many of us felt as we watched our country once again slip backwards:

Going all the way back to 1992, Sonic Youth's "Youth Against Facism" was one song that played an important role in my adolescent development. The video doesn't reallystand the test of time, but it is poignant in the sense that it is targeted at a completely different Bush then the one in the above NOFX video. This is a censored version, the censored lyric goes "yeah the president sucks/he's a war pig fuck/his shit is out of luck..."

Before I found my path to punk rock thrust into my 12-year-old hands by a teenage comic book store clerk was a copy of Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet." I was too young to quite understand what it all meant, but remember thinking I was pretty cool for being the only kid on the block to have a real rap tape that wasn't Vanilla Ice.

I would have put "Young Folks" by Peter Bjorn & John much higher.

That song has significance in my life as it was once used as passive aggressive musical warfare against me. I don't care to go into it at this time. Anyway, thinking of that song led to my brain kicking out a number of other songs that mention cartoons. "I Wanna Watch Cartoons" by the Happy Flowers musically captures a six year old temper tantrum like none other. I discovered it back in 2000 while digging through the vinyl library at WHUS and I was struck by the Happy Flower's childlike album cover. I popped it on and they soon became a regular fixture on my radio show (Natural Selection of Accidents).

I tried to dig up the Happy Flowers on line, but was only able to come up with the following two songs. Both of these also were spun, occasionally back to back because then they tell a story. Baby comes home from hospital. Child hates baby. Child suggests eating baby. I'm sure Jonathan Swift would approve.

Happy Flowers :: Why Didn't You Tell Me You Were Bringing Home a Baby?

Happy FLowers :: Let's Eat the Baby (like the gerbil did)

The Happy Flowers have a MySpace page and occasionally still play shows.

Full reviews of their entire discography are available here.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

What?

Thankfully the majority of albums I purchased this year are not on RIAA member labels. While that list is dauntingly long a close look reveals it should be no problem for me to make 2008 a RIAA free year. If there is so much disdain for customers coming out of the RIAA then I no longer need to be a customer. That regretfully means I will not be purchasing the following albums I have been looking forward to:
Hot Chip
British Sea Power
Basement Jaxx
Built To Spill
Doves
Elbow
Franz Ferdinand
The Notwist
Portishead
Spiritualized
Stereolab

1. Sunset Rubdown :: Random Spirit Lover
2. Beirut :: The Flying Cup Club
3. Amiina :: Kurr
4. Les Savy Fav :: Let's Stay Friends
5. Old Time Relijun :: Catharsis in Crisis

10. Dean and Britta :: Back Numbers

Alpha Team :: Go Speed Go

Every year Riko puts a personalized track into the mix and this year he steps it up a notch by putting a spin on Billy Idol's "White Wedding" with the help of Marcie. Visit DJ Riko's site to download his Mixmas albums for free. the Hello Saferide track is also available on the Razzia Records compilation "Oh, no...it's Christmas."

DJ Riko with Marcie :: Hey Mr. Santa
Hello Saferide :: Ipod Xmas

The name comes from a lyric in one of my favorite Built To Spill songs, "Car."

"I wanna see it when you find out what comets, stars, and moons are all about"

I chose the lyric when I first started WCSMAAA over on blogspot and planned to make it strictly a music blog. The goal was to reflect on my past and write stories about why certain songs were important to me at various parts of my personal history. It was intended to be a reflective and sentimental musical diary and seeing as most of my life has been spent chasing comets, pondering the moon, and capturing stars it made perfect sense to me. That lyric also defines the type of people I try to surround myself with in life. When I started WCSMAAA I already had a blog called "Natural Selection of Accidents" that I used for writing about everything else - mostly politics and Asian film. However, as time went on I started writing on WCSMAAA more and more and because I am completely unable to focus on one thing at a time (in a good way) WCSMAAA slowly became filled with much more than just music writing. Then dane101, my job, my secret projects, and more all came along and I ran out of time to maintain more than one blog at a time.

Some of those things that prevented me from running two blogs at a time are now settling down and opening some new free time opportunities for me. Hence, the return of WCSMAAA.

This new version will be a mind dump for everything non-Madison related. Spending the last two years and eight months writing about mostly Madison for dane101 has led to me neglecting many other things I'm interested in writing about and sharing with others. This is my attempt to get back to myself again.

So it goes.

Illegal Art, it should be noted, turns 10-years-old next year. In the past decade they have churned out quite a bit of material from some of the finest samplers working. Of course, the most notable is Girl Talk. Helping pave the way for Girl Talk and all the wacky work he does was Corporal Blossom. CB dreamt up the "Mutated Christmas" project which takes more than 100 pieces of Christmas music and destroys them for the betterment of society.

Corporal Blossom :: White Christmas