There are a lot of great things about being a rock star. First and foremost is the fact that your only real responsibility is playing music for thousands of adoring fans. Other than that, you pretty much get to spend all of your time getting drunk, banging groupies and throwing TVs out of hotel room windows. Even if you end up a penniless burnout before you hit 40, you can always count on a second career doing the circuit of lucrative casino gigs and VH1 reality shows.
In fact, just the very act of playing rock music gives you enough shine to pull off a lot of cool shit. Even if you never make it past touring small clubs in a rented van, being a rock musician still justifies the tattoos, tight leather clothes and lewd behavior that you could never get away with being, say, a mid-level accountant. No guy ever walked into a bar and picked up a girl by telling her he works a low paying office job. But that scruffy looking dude making $8.75 an hour at the local coffee shop? I guarantee he’ll go home with a girl on his arm as long as he buys her a PBR and invites her to his show at the Hemlock next weekend.
Speaking of girls and rockers, I think one of the best perks would be making music videos. Even if nobody watches them, you still get to spend a couple of days in front of a camera living like a movie star. And since it’s your video, you can do whatever you want. You can launch the drummer into outer space or you can have the guitar player battle a group of axe wielding ninjas. It doesn’t matter. It’s your video.
Personally, I would take a cue from Cincinnati’s The Lions Rampant. In their video for “Lights On” - a catchy song that blends indie garage rock and 60s R&B - the band members bathe with hot naked girls, wrestle with hot girls in their underwear, and make out with and get licked by hot girls while drinking, dancing and generally carrying on.
Mel Brooks famously said it’s good to be the king. I say it’s better to play rock n roll.
Conventional radio is in a weird place these days. With the exception of some college stations at the low end of the dial and maybe NPR, almost everything you can pick up on your car stereo is a commercial station owned by Clear Channel, Infinity, etc. Those guys have openly admitted that they’re in the business of selling advertising, not bringing new and exciting music to the people. It’s no surprise then, that they play only the most obvious Top 40 drivel. Everybody’s busy talking on their phone, or listening to their iPod, or not giving a shit, so what difference does it make anyway?
What is comic about the whole thing is that these stations are still entirely under the control of the FCC. This means that despite the fact that a lot of these stations play music that brazenly glorifies sex and violence - and despite the fact that this has been largely accepted by the public - the radio stations still have to go through the basically pointless step of bleeping out “bad” words. C’mon now. Everybody knows that “chick” rhymes with “dick,” “itch” rhymes with “bitch,” and “fuck” rhymes with half the English language.
The other day I was at a stop light and heard a so-called urban station blasting from the car next to me. The lyrics were something like, “Got that itch, driving in my truck/looking for a *bleep* for me to *bleep*.” Well done FCC. Like any 10 year old can’t figure that one out on their own.
What’s even more comic is that a lot of the smooth jazz/R&B stations cover this same territory - albeit with songs that are easily twice as lewd. At the laundromat where I wash my clothes, the radio is stuck on a station that seems to cater exclusively to the grown n’ sexy crowd. There’s no profanity in any of the songs they play, but there certainly is plenty of licking, caressing, stroking, grinding and making of sweet love all night long. I’m no prude, but I feel like some of these songs should only be played when two people are between the sheets (not folding them).
Which reminds me of another thing. I once played in a band with a singer who sounded a lot like Bill Withers. Some times at the end of band practice, when everybody was good and drunk, we would play fake slow jams with lyrics pulled from the pages of Penthouse Forum. You should try it some time. It’s super funny to juxtapose the underlying idea of an R&B slow jam with pornographic language that describes the same thing.
R&B slow jams (slow jamz?) get old pretty quick though, so it’s nice to see an indie rock band stepping up to the plate and broadening the options for those of us who want to say dirty things without being too dirty. The Ums from Tallahassee, Florida have a clever new track that does a nice job of laying open the male psyche. Of course, the fact that guys spend a lot of time thinking about sex is no secret and, honestly, not that interesting. So The Ums have couched that idea in a jazzy little pop song, reminiscent of Ween’s “Freedom of ‘76,” but with better lyrics, better production, and some weird guitar parts. It’s catchy as hell and makes me want to *bleep* and *bleep* every girl I see.
We had, like, five different circuitous intros for this post. However, our editors determined that all of them would have been offensive to somebody somewhere. Apparently Germans, homosexuals, river trolls, priests, and deranged surgeons all have one thing in common: no sense of humor. Oh well. Your loss.
Instead, we’ll just give it to you straight (sorry homos!). Trost is the surname of one Annika Line from Berlin, Germany. It is also the name of her new musical project. She used to be in a band called Cobra Killer. Thurston Moore thought Cobra Killer was the bomb. Truth be told, they weren’t as good as Trost’s new solo project, which combines electronic production, older R&B, and a creepy Tom Waits/Kurt Weill kind of vibe into a strange, distinctly Teutonic funk. It’s the kind of music ghosts probably listen to when they throw a cocktail party. Deranged surgeons might like it too, but what do we know, right?
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