Yeah, the teaser kind of sums things up this week. I started a new job this week doing landscaping for the summer, which means my free time has become virtually non-existant. Mon-Fri is when I work my ‘regular’ job, and then I get to go back to the record store for some evenings and the weekend. On top of that, I’m finding it really hard to talk shop about music this week in light of some recent revelations as to what Canada’s neighbor to the south has been up to in Iraq. The job, while it’s going to keep me busy, is going to earn me a lot of money and looks to be fun while the incident in Abu Ghraib sure as hell doesn’t.
Eric S has already done a column on this subject, talking about the recently released pictures and the atrocities that were committed by American soldiers while serving in Iraq. A quick clarification to Eric’s column, though, since I’ve been watching this incident rather closely. Bush didn’t apologize for the pictures or the abuse when he was doing interviews with 2 Arab TV stations; an apology only came after criticism was sent his way over a lack of apology. If you’re gullible enough to believe what Bush says, apparently knowledge of the abuse didn’t come his way until he saw the pictures on CBS, like everyone else in the world. Yet, if you are to take a look at this article (which also has a nice list of the different types of abuse that was heaped onto the Iraqi prisoners and a nice, long list of quotes from Georgie Peorgie), you can see that the Defense Department, indeed, the chairman from the Joint Chief of Staffs, Gen. Richard Myers, was attempting to block the release of the CBS 60 Minutes II segment that dealt with this story.
So, to get this straight and to make sure I understand all of this, George W. Bush, the most powerful man in the world, and a man who has access to more intelligence and information sources than he’d ever possibly need, did not know about any of these abuses and atrocities being committed in Iraq (and I say Iraq, as there have been reports of this happening elsewhere) as well as everyone’s favorite little hell hole, Guantanama and Afghanistan. Ignoring the fact that the media was reporting about the abuse as early as January, how can we believe that the United State’s leader could be so in the dark about what his ‘boys’ were doing overseas?
Of course, the usual cast of Shitheads and ne’er do wells decided to come out and chime in on this. To wit, I present you with the King of All Shitheads, Rush Limbaugh, and some comments that were made on his little radio show:
Caller: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men-
Shithead: Exactly! Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are really going to hammer them because they had a really good time.
You know, these people are being fired at everyday. I’m talking about the people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You heard of the need to blow some steam off?
To which, all I have to say is what the f*ck. It’s bad enough that there are people out there who were depraved enough to want to actually do these things, but to have people, even people so far flung to the political right that they’d make Hitler blush to actually endorse this shit? Unbelievable. Neverminding the fact that these two idiots in the above quote are forgetting that these people were Iraqi PRISONERS and were not college students and that their actions against these prisoners is what’s going to ‘hamper our military effort’, why the hell shouldn’t we hammer these people for having a ‘really good time’. Murder and treating your fellow man as though they were less than animals just so happens to be grounds for locking you away for a very, very long time. If it wasn’t, I’d imagine there’d be quite a few people out there who would just LOVE to get accquainted with your bloated, sad sack of shit self that you are, O King Of Shitheads.
The sad thing is, for us Canadians, abuse by our troops isn’t exactly news for us. Several years ago, while our troops were handling peacekeeping duties in Somalia, reports began to trickle in about the abuse that was being suffered by civilians out there. One incident involved a Somali teen being forced to drink a mixture of semen, blood, urine, and other unmentionables, while another resulted into the torturing-to-the-point-of-death of another Somali teen. The resulting investigation led to the dismantling of the Canadian Airborne Regiment, and to the jailing of several members of our military, as well as the decomissioning of several other, high ranking officers. Not to sound like too much of a pessimist, but I’ll be very surprised to see anything of the sort happen to the ‘higher ups’ who were involved in these current American abuse charges.
Already, shows like Inside Edition are helping the Bush Administration with their spin doctoring. Arguments that these individuals were ‘only’ National Guard reservists, and that they couldn’t possiby know anything about the Geneva Convention or what to do with handling prisoners are already being made. Claims that the pictures were ‘staged’ or that they were fake pictures involving non-American soldiers are starting to circulate. The argument that these poor, poor American soldiers were ‘coerced’ into committing these horrible things is being put forth, as though ignorance of the law or ‘just following orders’ will somehow remove any sort of culpability from their deeds.
And you wonder why it’s sometimes hard to write about the series finale of Friends, or what’s going on with Jessica Simpson. Sometimes shit just happens to come along that puts your whole life into perspective and makes you realize how trivial some shit can be. With that said, I apologize for the lengthy introduction this week, but I’m sure the 5-6 readers that I’m able to snare in week in and week out may have learnt a little bit more about this whole fugly situation. Informing people about what I know is the least I can do to try and be a responsible citizen, right? Before this gets all too heavy handed, though, let’s move on to covering…
Da News
Skimping on news a bit this week due to the lenghty intro bit this time around. Lemme know if you like this ‘news-lite’ approach or not…
– In an interesting story this week, it looks as though the major labels have agreed to pay $50 million worth of back royalties pay to a number of artists out there. According to the record labels, they said that they couldn’t pay the royalties because they couldn’t track down the artists whose money was due to them. Included in the list are notables such as: David Bowie, Gloria Estefan, Sean Combs, and Dolly Parton.
The record companies couldn’t track these guys down? Right, sorry. I forgot that these are the same idiots who insist that file sharing is destroying the industry from the inside out. Very silly of me to expect them to actually tell the truth about something, for once. Ha ha ha.
What constitutes the ‘interesting’ part of this story is that, as part of this agreement that’s been made, if a label is unable to locate an artist and pay them their royalties, the money reverts to the state. Now, this, to me, looks like a very clever scheme set up by these idiots to help cough up some funds for groups like the FCC who happen to be well accquainted bedfellows with alot of these major labels. Although it has been stated that the money will be ‘held’ by the government until a rightful recipient can be found, expect some sort of statute to exist where if no suitable candidate for the royalties cannot be located within, say, a year of it being held in state hands, the money is then up for grabs for the guvvy-ment to do whatever they’d like with it.
– Ashton Kutcher might be getting tapped to portray Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee in the movie adaptation of the band’s best selling autobiography, The Dirt: Confessions Of The World’s Most Notorious Rock Band. Nikki Syxx, the bassist for the group, has stated he would like to have Johnny Knoxville portray him. A Crue movie, eh? Well, if they’re going to try to keep this thing even remotely close to actual events, expect this baby to get slapped with the mother of all NC-17 ratings.
– Courtney Love uses cocaine, according to a Los Angeles prosecutor. In other obvious news, Courtney Love’s new album is a rancid pile of beetle feces that was urinated upon by a bunch of moneys infected with the Ebola virus and then baked into a cake and fed to Rush Limbaugh. The resulting rancid, toxic offal was then taken out of the pigpen that Rush likes to call ‘home’, and distilled down into a less offensive, audio format and given the name America’s Sweetheart, as well as the distinction of YOUR Courtney Love Jab of the Week!
– Rock group The Music, who released one of the better albums last year and opened for Coldplay on part of their world tour last year, have begun work on their new album way down in Atlanta, Georgia. No idea yet if Lil Jon or Ludacris will be making any cameo appearances on the follow up to the group’s self titled disc, although I would have to say getting Michael Stipe to appear on the record would be pretty cool. HA! Three geographical references in the same little news reference. How d’ya like THAT?
– Skinny Puppy are making their triumphant return to the world of music and catchy, upbeat fun pop tunes later this year, which is the first release since 1996’s The Process. Danny Carey from Tool and Wayne Static from Static-X are guesting on the record. Tool, Static-X and Skinny Puppy, all sort of mish-mashed together. Weeeeeeird.
– My fellow Canucks, if you insist on being a Sucker, you’ll be able to use Napster pretty soon. The once-free-now-part-of-the-label-machine will now be available to all of us here in the Great White North, now greatly expanding upon the current material that you are able to PAY to download. Unfortunately, the amount of material that you can still download for FREE and do so LEGALLY still vastly outweighs that which is available, but hopefully the pay-per-download sites will be able to catch up sometime in the next 100 years or so.
– Matthew Good has released an album cover, tracklisting and 2 new tracks in conjunction with his forthcoming CD release, White Light Rock & Roll Review. Head to matthewgood.org to check out the new tracks and get a feel for what a Sound Advice inductee sounds like.
– In what probably constitutes the most kick ass news item of this week, Johnny Depp is attempting to get Rolling Stones axeman Keith Richards a role in the upcoming Pirates Of The Carribean sequel. As most everyone knows, Depp based his Captain Jack Sparrow character off of Mr. Richards, and, as a way of saying thanks to him, he’d like to get Richards a role to play Sparrow’s father for the upcoming sequel. Sounds rather kick ass to me!
Anti-Pop: Freedom can only be found in the dictionary, under ‘f’
– What do the Invisible Man and Jeff-F have in common? I CAN’T SEE NEITHER OF ‘EM ON THE 411 COLUMN PAGE! So, by now I’m sure most of you know what to do….check out the meat that makes up the Minority Report sandwich when you’re done checking me out. Word.
– ABBA member, and the KING AMONG MORTALS in terms of us weakminded and feeble 411 Music Zone Writers, Mr. Aaron Cameron has got a plethora of information and goodies for you this week, as he shares his reasons as to why he has such a close, personal bond with David Schwimmer. A-Cam also runs the risk of having a horde of angry Winnipeggers come storming down to sunny California by bringing up old wounds, vis a vis the Winnipeg Jets purchase to Phoenix many moons ago. Watch out, Aaron, as Winnipeg will sic their horde of trained attack mosquitos on you without the slightest provocation. Okay…now that we’ve immersed ourselves so deep in all things Canadian our elbows are dripping with maple syrup, let’s MOVE ALONG….
– Voted most Popular & Friendly 411 Hall Of Justice Poster in a recent poll held there, we have Ryan T Murphy filling in for Mr. YOU this week. Come see one of the Music Section’s Golden Boys tear things up in one hell of a column this week.
– Katz, no, not the one from that stupid ‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us’ Flash vid, has your independent news for ya this week.
– Smilowitz is making a rare appearance this week, covering everything Tuesday. Can we hope and pray for continued Elliot Exposure? I hope so, as filling out the week would make my job a hell of a lot more challenging (less stories to pick from), and make everything look nicer. If you like what you read, shoot Elliot an e-mail and show him some love.
Sound Advice
This week, we’re going to give some props to Hogtown, who just suffered Take 38 of ‘Na, Na, Na, Na. Na, Na, Na, Na. HEY, HEY HEY! GOOOOD-BYE!’ after getting dumped by a beautiful Jeremy Roenick goal last week. We’re nearing 40 years of playoffs choking, Maple Leafs fans. Hopefully the tandem of Trevor Kidd + that other guy will be able to cover things since it seems Ed Belfour might be retiring this year…considering how wrecked his back is after years of falling off of barstools the continent over. Ooh, that was lowblow, but the artist this week, Toronto’s Metric, have been doing enough asskicking to yours truly this week previous that I think this sort of evens things out. Well, nothing will really ‘even things out’ when TSN blew their collective load over the signing of Ron Francis, but that’s another story….riiiiiight.
Anywho, lead singer Emily Haines hooked up with Julliard student James Shaw and formed a rather new-wave-esque group that kicks about 80 tons of ass. If you’re a fan of New Wave material from the 80s, or newer stuff like Hot Hot Heat, The Network or The Faint, you’ll find yourself warming up to Metric pretty darn quickly. The group has one disc out, entitled Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, and the entire thing just rips, from start to finish. With that said, I will direct you to their website to find out a tracklisting and get a feel for the band yourself.
Other artists featured in Sound Advice: DSK, Knucklehead, Matthew Good, Joel Kroeker, The Dears
If you’d like to see an artist featured in Sound Advice, you can contact me on MSN Messenger or e-mail me at trevor411music@hotmail.com or catch me on AIM as flinch311.
The End Is The Beginning Is The End
Massive Judas Priest box set coming out this week, complete with studded metal around the outside of it. Check out Hayden’s new disc, as well, and y’all have yourself a wonderful Mother’s Day today. Melchor’s got the goods for you tomorrow, as always. Until next time, kids…
