MTV VMAS 2015 (AKA The Danny Glover Memorial Awards for Me)

When I was a kid, the VMAs were the gangsta shit. My family didn't have cable until 1994, so I had to stay up super late and watch the VMAs when they were rebroadcast on KITN 29 after MTV got done. We'd watch that shit as a family, and make Pizza Rolls and popcorn and errythang! So many awesome things, like Spike Jones bum rushing the stage as Nathaniel Hornblower, pretty much anything involving Nirvana, Pearl Jam, or Guns N Roses, and Chris Rock shitting all over everyone.

And now we get Miley Cyrus with balloons on her jubbs...

I turned on the VMAs 20 minutes late, but honestly, does it matter? I get the feeling that I am like Danny Glover when it comes to these things, I am too old for this shit. So I made a running list of the things I saw on the show that confused and or bothered the crap out of someone born when AM radio was still a viable medium:

-Miley Cyrus and Nikki Minaj get into some sort of maybe scripted beef about something Miley may have said. Nikki also may have been on Molly, whatever that is

-Rebel Wilson with a shirt that says "FUCK THE STRIPPER POLICE" doing a really unfunny monologue. MTV didn't seem to realize that this shirt was going to be worn, and couldn't blur it out. Even though they did it with all of Snoop's and Dre's weed leaf stuff in the (or tha) Nuttin But a G Thang video 22 years ago.

-A commercial for not smoking cigarettes with the hashtag It's a Trap, which MAY be an Admiral Ackbar reference but I am not 100% sure it isn't something a Kardashian said. There was also a unicorn who puked on a chick smoking a hookah. If this is advertising now, I am glad as hell I didn't go into my chosen field after college.

-Miley Cyrus in some sort of skit with her Achy Breaky Dad and two rappers I didn't know making drug references. Miley also said "fuck" and "Shit" a bunch. God, so EDGY!

Apropos of nothing, here is a nice image of Miley about to be entered from behind by Robin "Beetlejuice" Thicke from the 2013 VMAS!



-Biebs started crying for some reason after he preformed a dubstep joint. My wife had heard the song on the radio multiple times and thought that the dude singing on it was not white. I think we may be entering a new era of Biebs being a modern Michael McDonald.

-Big Sean getting an award for some sort of changing society video, yet we don't see the video. NOTE - Big Sean may be the most normally dressed person on the show besides Kanye.

-Yet ANOTHER fucking Miley Cyrus drug reference...seriously, we get it. You like drugs, you like to do them with Snoop. Isn't weed fucking legal everywhere now so people like Miley don't have to use it as a signifier of cool? Man, I can't wait until weed becomes like booze and isn't edgy. But then, what will be? Maybe gas huffing or whippets or some drug that I don't even know about? God, I hope it's not meth...

-Kylie Jenner is NOT the transexual one! Why couldn't they get the transexual Jenner, she is ON FLEEK (or so I've heard).

-Some girl dressed in leopard print with a guitar showed up on stage to sing a song that sounds like it could have came out in like 1999. This is LITERALLY the first instrument on the show so far. Upon further review, this lady is named Tori Kelly and is 10 years younger than I. At this point, she might as well be Joan Jett or the fucking Bangles because I am shocked I'm seeing a woman with a guitar on MTV.

-There was a commercial for something called White Squad which may or may not have been real. I think it was ripping on white entitlement, but once again, I am glad as hell I went into Project Management and not copywriting in 2007. Everything seems like it's an Ad Council spot written by someone who took way too many women's studies classes.

-Tay Tay Swizzle said the first album she ever bought was The College Dropout when she was 12, and it was on iTunes. I bought that same album when I was 20 years old, in college, used, at a Disc Go Round location that no longer exists.

-Man, what the fuck was Kanye talking about? "I will die for the art"? I love Kanye the Music but hate Kanye the Megalomaniac Jesus Complex Having Crazy Person. The Kanye speech sounds straight up like your drunken uncle rambling on about how he doesn't understand why hair metal isn't cool anymore and why he's single at the age of 45. And to cap it all off, Kanye is going to run for president in 2020. I hope his running mate is Jamie Foxx or Killa Cam and then they can sing Gone or Gold Digger on a whistle stop tour.

-Something named Fetty Wap is beating Vance Joy very badly in an fan vote contest. Fetty Wap has one of the worst songs I've heard this year in Trap Queen, all sorts of auto tune and off key shit and mumbled rhymes. Vance Joy has Riptide which is inoffensive and contains a great line about his girl being hot as Michelle Phiffer. I have a feeling that if music is going the Wap route and not the Joy route I am going to be playing a lot of thrift store LPs, and may even branch out into swing and ragtime music. Because that has to be better than Fetty Fucking Wap.

-Weed reference from Miley again. This has to play well with the Hannah Montana crowd or something, right?

-Skateboard P has become like the Neil Diamond elder statesman of this shit, singing about Freedom and being happy and being pretty damn smooth. Actually, I would love to see a Neil/Pharrell duet now that I think of it.

-I find it ironic as hell that the Artists to Watch category doesn't give us anything to watch. It's not like we are watching a fucking VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS show or something. Oh shit, Fetty Wap won. Time to go buy some Glen Miller joints.

-Miguel is here but not preforming, which is the opposite of winning the sexy ass lottery. Twenty One Pilots and A$AP Rocky are instead. I bought the A$AP Rocky album because it was hailed as some sort of masterpiece and it really sucked besides like three songs, one of which was about Fucking Problems and another was an aggy dub step joint about wiling out. As for the other group, I think Twenty One Pilots are a white Christian rap group or something. Anyways, the performance was horrid, bringing Rap-Rock's batting average down to .003 since hitting a home run with Epic in 1990.

-Tay Tay Swizzle wins the video of the year award with Kendrick Lamar, which was presented by O'Shea's Sr and Jr. COMPTON REPRESENT! I wonder how many in the audience felt that Death Certificate was Cube's best album? It really seemed like more of a Kill At Will or Lethal Injection crowd, truth be told.

-Miley is closing out the show dressed as a cross between Wendy O Williams from the Plasmatics and a Level Boss from Banjo Kazooie. She has cursed a bunch from the sounds of it, as every other word it totes censored. There are also drag queens in thongs and costumes that look like Bob Holly's ring gear when he was Sparky Plugg. Fuck this shit, I'm going to bed.

There you have it. The only highlights for the entire event were The Weeknd and maybe the Tori Kelly chick. Otherwise, I may just watch a rebroadcast of the first VMAs or something next year because I get that. I just wasn't made for these times I guess.

Jabadoo, Delahoohoo (AKA A Treatise on Adam Sandler or Dying Young Like Ke$ha)

My two year old has been running around the house lately making random noises. It reminds me of the career of Adam Sandler.

Sandler, if you don't remember, was once funny. Up until about the time cable internet came to high society, Sandler was making movies that made the average person laugh. Granted, the random "jabadoo" shit he did 1/3rd of the time rubbed many the wrong way. But movies like "Happy Gilmore" and "Billy Madison" are genuinely funny films that still can make a 32 year old man chortle.

While making tacos and listening to a two year old do the greatest hits of someone worth a small countries GDP made me think. What would have happened if Sandoo would have died after filming, say, Little Nicky? Would we think of Sandler like some think of Chris Farley? A comedic lightning bolt that flew across the sky on a trail of humor and coke?

I think that if Sandler had passed in 1999, most would have held his works in higher regard. Many hold folks like Kurt Cobain or James Dean as paradigms of burning out and not fading away. When an artist dies young, there is no flabby middle period or long, slow fat Elvis period. Sandler had both, and hasn't made a watchable movie since, I don't know, Click?

NOTE: I find Click watchable for two reasons 1) Kate Beckensdale runs around in boy shorts and 2) It made me cry when I was REALLY hungover and saw it on HBO like 10 years ago

Point being, Neil Young really did have it right. It's better to be a bright shining star and to burn out and fade away than make a huge piece of shit like Pixels.

Brrrrrraaaaappaadooo

I am super amped up, for I get to watch pro wrestling live and in person tonight. More specifically, I get to watch WWE Raw, and it's the Go Home (AKA last) show before their SummerSlam Pay Per View. So it's going to be dope.

Pro wrestling is something that is looked down on by the majority of polite society. And honestly, it's pretty hard to hold something up as a paradigm of high entertainment with shit like this going on:



My reaction to that was the opposite of polite society. Where most would say "well I never", I would say "it is awesome that those dudes super kicked an 8 year old. So heel!" Maybe it's because I'm Minnesotan and like 9/10s of the wrestlers from the 80s and 90s came from the cities directly around me. Maybe it's because I delivered Mr. Perfect's Brooklyn Park Sun-Post when I was a paperboy in the 90s. I don't know exactly why, but I know that I am drawn to wrestling's mix of theatre and athletic contest.

Anyways, it's going to be a beautiful night. And then I will go on the message boards and bitch, piss, whine and moan about the fact that my favorite wrestlers aren't getting pushed properly. Such is life...

Record Digging Journal Volume 1

One of the minor miracles of living in my neck of the woods is that once every three months or so, a record show happens in a garage about a mile from my house. The records are all reasonably priced (there are multiple dollar bin full of gems for those, like me, who like their records rough and ready to go) and it's never overly packed full of creepy know it alls hawking 500 dollar "West Coast" pressings of Doors records like at the Uptown record show.

Saturday brought about a great day of digging. I walked out of the record show $39 dollars poorer, but I did leave with a couple of garage records (Electric Prunes, Shadows of Knight), some new wave (The Beat, The Vapors), the Bob Seger classic Mongrel, and a turntable to replace my broken down one that I've been "loaning" from my pops for 15 years.

Two additional finds from Saturday transported me back to my childhood. Which is strange, since the records are from 1970 (approx). When I was just a youthful boy, my mom somehow acquired a cassette of a bunch of the 45s she had as a girl. At least I thought it was...it also contained this horrid song, which dates more to 1984 rather than the Nixon period.



But I digress. The cassette tape was all bubblegum killer and no filler besides the Rick Dees joint. Gems like "Indiana Wants Me", "Heartbeat-It's a Lovebeat", "Don't Pull Your Love" and "Midnight Confessions" all bring me back to trying to read Sports Illustrated while my mom Nordic Tracked (god, that is so 90s). Two of the songs that stuck with me the most were "Band of Gold" by Freeda Payne and "Build Me Up Buttercup" by the Foundations. And Saturday I was able to acquire the parent records of each for a buck.

There is no sensation in the world of consumerism quite like finding a record that you have been looking for on a dig. It is a mix of unbridled joy and nostalgia for the time in your life when you first fell in love with the song, or songs on the record. You cannot wait to get home with the record, play the record, tell fellow diggers what you found. It is life affirming.

Neither one of the records mentioned disappointed at all. The Foundations record has one side of live cuts and another side of studio originals. "Build Me Up Buttercup" is great, but so is "I Can Take or Leave Your Loving", and I am shocked it didn't become a hit on it's own as it is "Buttercup" Adjace. The Freeda Payne record is great too, but pretty much anything even vaguely associated with Motown at that time was (Holland-Dozier-Holland produced and wrote the record for their own label).

As I was coming down from my digging high, having a few delicious Point IPA's last night, I went back and re-read probably one of my favorite digging articles from Dust and Grooves about going to Africa to dig for Afrobeat and Funk records. The joy, frustration and kinship of digging is all spelled out in the article, which can be read here (sorry about the lack of embedding, I am typing this on the Mrs. MacBook and I have no clue how to work this with a Mac):

http://www.dustandgrooves.com/digging-in-ghana-with-frank-gossner/

Ooooooh Ooooooh Ooooohhh Oooooh, Lawd I Miss You

It's been three years since I posted on a blog. Well, what have I been up to in that time? Since the last blog post, I have gotten married, had a kid, bought a house, rekindled my love for pro wrestling, drank many beers, and had three different jobs. I suppose the only constants in my life have been purchasing copious amounts of music, drinking beer, and being a disappointed Minnesota sports fan.

Oh, and the 2004 Ford Focus I bought after my Sophomore year of college. Yeah, that is still around (200,000 miles and running).

So what drew me back to spilling my guts to tens of random strangers on the internet? Probably a lack of creative release, maybe a need to spill my ideas on pop culture of the moment (holy shit, I missed out on the ascendance of Taylor Swift and the fall of Lady Gaga). Maybe it will be a good record for my daughter someday to see what daddy was thinking about when she was obsessing over Doc McStuffins and learning to count to 3. I don't totally know for sure.

Nor do I know what I will write about or how often. But I assure you, I will provide some rants and random thoughts (and hell, maybe even recipes!) on this bad boy. And of course, music. No matter how much my life changes, my love of other people's musical talent will never change.