Laugh at What I Love

Welcome back to our weekly endevour into the world of pop music you silly sons of bitches! This week we get all kinds of freaky, I am talking about hazmat suits and poppers freaky, I am talking Del talking to a girl without his hands in his pocket and looking at the ground freaky. I am talking Joel freaky. Sure it is all pop music that everyone secretly loves, some simply hate it to justify their existance and experiences as somehow more valid because they listen to a Norweggian shit pelican who samples a meat grinder and laces it with bossa nova drums and the drones of meth heads, of course I am talking about Dick here. Why not relish in the simple pleasures like the music that your wife most certain lost her finger cherry to at some 7th grade dance, or as Tom calls it, the best night of...

Yes, deep inside, I am a 15 year old girl, writing song lyrics on my arms and the walls of my room. I remember standing backstage at Lollapalooza trying to decide who to go see next, it was either 30 Seconds To Mars or whoever everyone else in my band wanted to go see. I didn't argue with anybody, but I walked away from them and towards the stage where 30STM was about to start. I knew nothing about them besides having met Jared Leto a few times while living in Santa Barbara, and because I had nothing but positive experiences with the dude, I figured I'd see what dude was offering up as music these days. My previous musical experience with Jared was with a band he was in back in 1999, as they were playing a bar in SB and he approached my group of...

Yup. It's official. Let's get a time of death. I have officially become a professional jerk off, the thing I swore I would never be - one of "those" parents. I fucking love Yo Gabba Gabba. I always remember friends of mine who had kids telling me about Yo Gabba Gabba and how it was the only tolerable children's show. I usually made a mental note that these people were dicks and kept drinking, now I'm the dick and could you please pass the seltzer with lime. See what I mean? I'm one of “those” fuckers now. I don't know how the fuck it happened. The first time I threw it on was during the particularly harsh winter of 2011. We were buried under snow; everyone was suffering from cabin fever and on a razors edge. Add a frustrated 1 year old to the mix and you...

I am a full on child of the 80s. That means a few things. First, I am old as fuck. Second, I remember a time when rap didn't exist, it sucked. Third, I LOVE THE SHIT OUT OF SOME POWER BALLADS. Now I am not talking about the run of the mill industry churned out sap-fests that ended up destroying a genre of music, that up until record execs figured out the formula, was pretty fucking fun. This means I am not talking about your White Lions, Wingers, or Warrants. I am talking honest to goodness POWER FUCKING BALLADS. The first power ballad that caught my attention was probably the Def Leppard song Bringing On The Heartbreak, a slow but heavy churner of a song that found its way into heavy rotation in the very early days of MTV. This was...

As much as I try to make it out to see cool bands, all scarves and sweaters and leather pantsed, as often as I trek out to some mystery, converted loft space to see the flavor of the month DJ, hit up the swanky soul Sundays here at the bar, or get so wasted that dubstep is dope, I keep going back to shit venue after shit venue to catch unknown emcees flow over mediocre beats to lackluster crowds. What is it? Why do I continually do this to myself? It must be how alcoholics feel opening the door to an empty, loveless apartment clutching a fifth of vodka in their cold, twitching hands. I love underground hip hop! I don’t think any other genre of music puts up with what us devotees of underground hip hop deal with. Underground hip hop is like the worst husband ever: out late, gets drunk,...

Over the past year or so I have become a full fledged addict of Podcasts. At one point I think they were all I listened too. I was subscribing to about 19 or so, not including the ones I would only listen to at work (I’m looking at you PTI and NBC Nightly News). It started out with the BS Report, Bill Simmons wildly popular ESPN podcast that covered the world of sports and pop culture, pretty much the pre-cursor to his site Grantland. Being that it is one of the most popular podcasts, I don’t think I am alone in this one. Like with anything, I feel into the rabbit hole and found more and more podcasts that I liked. They took over my listening habits and eventually started blending into each other. I decided I needed to walk away from a bunch of them*, it is not...

Iron Maiden is the first band that I can remember absolutely and unquestionably loving. I don't know if it was the dark themes that played to my adolescent mind, or the comically low budget videos filled with old tyme silent film stock featuring men and women reenacting wars between 'injuns' and the white man or wars between the white man and the white man. Who am I kidding? It was the fucking album covers! They had the best album covers ever. They featured a corpse monster who was obviously an early 80s punk/metal fan and his name was Eddie, just Eddie. Eddie was the best, especially for a young jag off like me, whether he was killing a random stranger with a blood soaked ax, trapped in a mental asylum after having his brain removed, having is visage used as the...

There’s something about Scandinavia that I can’t help but love. I’m not really sure what region that term covers, but my personal boundaries are Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, etc. Any place with lots of blonde people, glaciers, and fjords qualifies in my book. Acts like Sigur Ros, Bjork, Mum, Mew, and Lykke Li have been instant favorites, either despite or because of the fact I usually can’t understand a fucking thing that they’re saying. Most musicians from that area have a quirky story about their childhood that makes perfect sense given the context of their music. Lykke Li, for example, lived on a mountaintop in Portugal for 5 years as a child, and her family vacationed in Lisbon, Nepal, India, and Morocco. I couldn’t make this shit up if I...