One! One, nothing's wrong with me! Ah! Ah! Ah!

The cold clutches of a hundred VH1 propagandists came for me one Friday night, as my friends and I gathered around a bar rail and drank off the approaching bar time. The button-up middle aged prick to our right was having trouble keeping his head from exploding, due to my usual disdain for the Beatles circle-jerk. In typical hipster fashion, he reacted as though I had just punched his mom in the face, though I only called Lennon an overrated schmuck and McCartney a dopey slinger of trite. After the freakout he sniffed that I needed to expand my musical horizons. Ever notice that this statement usually means fawning over whatever safe/edgy acts populate the current Rolling Stone best-ever list? That’s not expansive; it’s not even musical.

Still, after the namedropper declared that he couldn’t handle our level of ignorance and ran off, I decided to think a bit more about my musical tastes. A question shot out of me, and it shocked me that I had never asked it before. What’s the worst song ever? I blinked. Naming all the various Top 5s of preference was easy and had been done before, but perhaps because music is a form of media (alongside television) with a constant barrage of involuntarily absorbed crap, it’s hard to single out one shining turd to carry the shame. For a second, there was no answer. I looked down at my drink, sideways at my friends, rolling the magic 8-ball around in my head before the answer leaped out and punched me in the face.

“Bodies,” by Drowning Pool, is the worst song of all time.

Now I’ll admit that a big part of my Beatles loathing is cultural and not musical. I was born well after the band’s place in history was set in stone and made it an unassailable cliché. Music, in our state of propaganda, is much more than music; it’s marketing, packaging, radio play, monthly messianic music media. You can be bombarded from a dozen different directions by a musician whose music you’ve never even heard (see: the Osbournes, Chris Brown, the Heartagram). Therefore, I think it’s acceptable to dislike a musician based on the culture he or she creates.

I say this to point out that culture was secondary in declaring “Bodies” my worst song ever. Musically, it’s a mediocre song with a predictable low end and vaguely interesting guitar wails, but Dave Williams’ inane, repetitive growling of third-grade lyrics pushes “Bodies” into shit superstardom. We get sinister whispers in the opening, building tension. We get winded, contrived couplets that would make William Hung piss razors (“Beaten, why for?” Really?). We get a pre-chorus counting game that transforms Dave Williams into the mongoloid cousin of Sesame Street’s Count von Count (“One! One, nothing’s wrong with me! Ah! Ah! Ah!”). And of course, there’s the Cookie Monster call to arms: “Let the bodies hit the floor!” Stir these ingredients, add a pinch of the requisite walls-are-caving-in metal lyrics at the interlude, throw in a few randomly placed adolescent wails, and you’ve got a real piece of shit anthem on your hands!

Now here’s the cultural. It was bad enough hearing this song before Dave Williams died in 2002 and martyred the goddamn thing. Now, “Bodies” has become a permanent Bat-Signal for fistheads across the globe; wherever there are pro wrestling shows, monster truck rallies, or scattered gunfire, there by the grace of God goes Drowning Pool.

It gets better. A few years back, a story broke which stated that American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay were torturing detainees with loud, abrasive music, blaring it at all hours. Guess what one of the songs was. And while most reactions from the appropriated musicians ranged from moderately disturbed to fury and outrage (Metallica’s James Hetfield was a rare case of the cautiously supportive), Drowning Pool’s bassist, Stevie Benton, had the arrogance to say the following:

“People assume we should be offended that somebody in the military thinks our song is annoying enough that played over and over it can psychologically break someone down. I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that.”

Reader, just stop right here. Go back to that quote, and read it again. Then read it another time. Let’s get this straight. Drowning Pool’s music is going to STOP another 9/11? If I was forced to listen to “Bodies,” on repeat, cranked to unbearable volume, I would want to perform an act of destruction so monstrous that it would make terrorism seem like a little girl’s tea party.

So yeah. For reasons both musical and cultural, I deem “Bodies” the worst song of all time.

But fear not, sinners, for although Drowning Pool has authored the greatest abomination in music history, they are not, in fact my worst band ever. For making Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles retirement home rock look viciously Satanic by comparison, that title belongs to the Carpenters.

Music Morphine

August 29, 2010
Categories: Y Marks the Spot . . Author: Y . Comments: 2 Comments

A Typical Stripper

During a recent rant against moral absolutism, I made mention of owning one’s beliefs. In the midst of that I mentioned a side comment about one of my own social hang-ups, the porn star. After some thought, I realized that this category is too narrow, and not cut-and-dry at all. I could have included strippers, skanks in music videos, and really anything that relies on a pair of tits to sell it. What bothers me about all of these phenomena is not all the sex involved in them, but how they’ve become symptoms of obnoxious commercialism. One of the most fun things to do in the world has been co-opted by advertising and repeated into oblivion.

But I do have one glorious tale of capitalist pseudo-sex. The time was similar to now, a time of waiting for time to run out. The big difference between then and now was that now, I live alone, and I’m not liable for other people’s stupidity. That wasn’t the case then.

For a while, I was the only person in my apartment with a job, and the only person covering the bills and paying any rent at all. But there was no way I could take care of everyone’s share, so I finally decided that there was no more point to working at my crappy food job. What followed were six months of eating detergent-tasting Kwik Trip bread and watching my apartment turn into a pit. And even then, I could raise enough money to pay the rent.

There wasn’t much left over for anything else, though. It’s a good thing that my best friend was willing to pay for everything we did. On one such night, CJ Slugger rousted me out of my moldy dwelling in order to take a trip to the Twin Cities with him and the Leprechaun. The adventure was independent wrestling. We piled into Lep’s Inventory Van and hit the road with me in the back, trying to study.

Seeing pro wrestling in a dimly lit club was about as strange as seeing a rock concert in a retirement home. The game was wrestling, but the atmosphere was bar fight.

Big guys were stomping around bar tables, trying to look menacing while they beat the crap out of each other, and all I could think was: is he going to knock over my drink? Nonetheless, the three of us left the show in high spirits, excited over what we had seen. But the night wasn’t over. When you’re out on the town with CJ Slugger, you’ll probably end up in a strip club. And that’s what happened.

Class Act is a dingy bit of neon on the main highway south of the Twin Cities. It seemed to become a rest stop for my group of friends whenever we went on a Minnesota road trip. Lep pulled into the gravel, and once more CJ paid my way. The naked girls were doing what naked girls on a stage always do – going after a sucker’s money – and CJ was happy to provide the sucker. Lep and I sat on each side of him, watching him try to play it cool while face-smashing dollars between girls’ boobs. The thing I remember most was that one girl had a tattoo of the eye from the cover of Tool’s Lateralus album. The color on it was brilliant.

When the country music came on I hid in the bathroom, knowing what was going to happen next. Sure enough, the curtains parted, and out strutted a fifty year old broad in a cowboy hat. I laughed at the Leprechaun, who stayed at the edge of the stage and gave pity-bills to the old dame. After she rode off into the sunset, the three of us reconvened.

“For your heroism, Lep, I’m buying you a lap dance,” CJ announced. He summoned a shapely young blonde and sent our friend away with her. We returned our attention to the stage.

But when the next song ended, the Leprechaun didn’t reappear. It was strange, but we said nothing. When the song after that was over and he didn’t return, we grew worried. Ten songs later, we were concerned that he had been abducted and killed by vampire hookers.

Like this.

We started asking strippers if they had seen the Leprechaun, which was as absurd as asking pro wrestlers if they had seen our lost puppy. I asked Lateralus Girl about my short, ginger friend while she writhed and spun naked on a pole. “Sorry, haven’t seen him,” she said, upside down.

Forty minutes after he had vanished, the Leprechaun finally reappeared. He was surrounded by apes in suits. “Guys, I think I’m in trouble,” he said.

Turns out that he was over $200 in trouble. It blows my mind that a guy who, when he lived with me, used to sleep on a mountain of porn magazines and pizza boxes didn’t know the rules of lap dancing. You’re paying for one song’s worth of dry humping. When a girl asks, “Do you want to keep going?” she isn’t being nice. You have to keep paying. Once more, CJ picked up the bill – via an ATM that charged seven bucks – and we finally got out of there.

Once we were in the van, our shamed friend told us all the dirty details. When the tale was done, he slumped into the driver’s seat and sighed. “I guess I have to remember,” he said, “that strippers are all about money. Not people’s feelings.”

The van exploded.

August 10, 2010
Categories: Y Marks the Spot . . Author: Y . Comments: 1 Comment

The White Pride Towel of White Lake, South Dakota

It was the last day.  I was leaving Wisconsin again, once more headed west to seek further adventure.  This time the roads would take me to Washington instead of California, a place to where, as it turns out, I’m far, far more suited.  Apart from the wretchedness and automotive paranoia that comes with mountain driving, it was an easy trip.  I saw neon palm trees in Montana, of all places, a Tom Petty-themed van going through Seattle, and took part in an outburst of ass photography in Butte, Montana.  Yet the strangest thing to happen during the four days between there and here happened on that last day in Wisconsin, when my grand exodus ceased to be theoretical, and got, well, kind of weird.

My cohort and I left town in the afternoon, having said our goodbyes to everyone who mattered and some who didn’t.  (One of the last things to happen to me in La Crosse involved a car’s passenger leaning out and shouting “Nice hair, faggot!” at me while it passed.  I’ll treasure that hometown moment forever.)  We drove through threats of thunderstorms that never followed through, passing through Minnesota and part of South Dakota before deciding to stop for the night.

We turned off at the 300 mile point, stopping in a town that time forgot called White Lake, South Dakota.  I pulled into the first motel to cross my path, an all-purpose oasis which called itself A to Z.  Red flags should have went up when I saw the motel’s gravel parking lot, its run down gas station, and a pair of shirtless good ol’ boys carrying on outside of their rooms.  At this point, however, I didn’t care where we stayed, so long as it was cheap.  Oh yeah, we got cheap.

The office was a cubicle lodged between the soda machines and the first stretch of rooms, manned by a gimpy old guy who appeared welded to the place.  According to my cohort – who is a lady – the guy gave us the stink eye when we asked for a single bed, surely convinced that we were poised to commit all manner of sin against god and man in his establishment.  He took my money, all the same, and gave us the key.

That key unlocked a wood-paneled wonderland of bad wiring and cramped space.  The television perched on a ledge above a mirrored desk and green leather rocking chair, all of which looked like they could fall apart at a moment’s notice. In the bathroom, a cartoon towel disclosed to us the pleasure it received from being white, and it asked us not to use the real towels to wipe down our cars.  There were bolted-down hand soap dispensers and a paper bag for tampons.  Jesus poetry greeted us from the bed.  Classy.

But let this not lead you to believe that this idiosyncrasy was solely the domain of the A to Z Motel.  As we’d soon find out, the whole town of White Lake was a bit odd.  My cohort, having run out of cigarettes, planned to go to the motel’s gas station and restock.  She found out that it had closed at six p.m.  On a Thursday.  In fact, the whole town was closed up at 9:30 at night, with the exception of a sports bar down the street.  Of course.  We crept in, briefly discussed the universally flammable properties of cigarettes with the locals, and made off with generic, patriotic smokes.

Meanwhile, the sky started to flicker.

We settled into our humble lodgings and watched astronauts on Comedy Central.  Eventually I decided to wash the final days of Wisconsin off me and hit the shower.  Firing up both the water and the soap dispenser attached to the shower wall, I started scrubbing.

Then the lights turned off, and the window became a strobe light.  We had entered a horror movie.

After wiping myself off with a white, white towel and pulling my clothes back on, I crept outside and beheld a maelstrom.  The entire neighborhood was blacked out, but lightning flashed every second, showing us the falling flood.  It was both magnificent and terrifying.

Being that my flashlights were in my car, I decided to dash the ten feet between the motel awning and my vehicle.  When I came back, I looked like I had fallen into the ocean.  We spent the rest of the night in dim illumination, and I fell asleep clutching my flashlight, not quite unconvinced that a horde of scarlet-robed cultists wasn’t going to burst in and sacrifice us to Cthulu.  But everything passed, unscathed.

When we woke up in the morning, the lights were on and the ground was merely damp.  Still, we got the hell out of White Lake in a hurry, and we stayed in bland, cookie-cutter, white-washed hotel rooms the rest of the way here.  It seemed safer.

July 20, 2010
Categories: Y Marks the Spot . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment