DON'T FORGET TO "LIKE" BEE-OTCH OF THE DAY ON FACEBOOK!
Name: various
Age: various
Occupation: everything
Last Seen: everywhere
Bee-otched For: killing rock 'n roll
Age: various
Occupation: everything
Last Seen: everywhere
Bee-otched For: killing rock 'n roll
---
Everything I ever wanted to learn about life I learned from last Sunday's Oscars:
*Just because you show off your hot, naked body sans vajayjay in Love and Other Drugs doesn't make you a great Oscar host.
*Randy Newman will get more paychecks from Disney.
*No CEO has gone to jail since the Great Bush Bailout of 2008.
*When you get your snatch - soon to be infested with stretch marks and ugliness thanks to pregnancy - fake munched-on by Meg Griffin, you get an Oscar.
*The Hollywood elite doesn't give a damn about the unions in Wisconsin (thank you Mike Malloy for that one).
*94-year-old stroke victim Kirk Douglas should have hosted the Oscars. Then again, it would have ended at 5 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
But most of all, the biggest lesson from last weekend's Oscars is this:
*Randy Newman will get more paychecks from Disney.
*No CEO has gone to jail since the Great Bush Bailout of 2008.
*When you get your snatch - soon to be infested with stretch marks and ugliness thanks to pregnancy - fake munched-on by Meg Griffin, you get an Oscar.
*The Hollywood elite doesn't give a damn about the unions in Wisconsin (thank you Mike Malloy for that one).
*94-year-old stroke victim Kirk Douglas should have hosted the Oscars. Then again, it would have ended at 5 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
But most of all, the biggest lesson from last weekend's Oscars is this:
*Don't expect a Nine Inch Nails album soon.
Last weekend, Trent Reznor won his first Oscar alongside Atticus Ross for their scoring of the Facebook drama The Social Network. The soundtrack is like any 'Nails song: gloomy and dark, but ambient unlike many of their stronger songs.
But that's not all. Reznor and Ross are busy scoring The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, set for release this December. Plus, the two, alongside Reznor's wife, Mariqueen Maandig are part of a new band called How to Destroy Angels. The band did release an EP last year that mostly went un-noticed.
NIN's last album, The Slip came out in 2008 and its biggest single, "Discipline" did fairly well.
However, Reznor has said that NIN has given up touring.
Great. Trent Reznor's kicking back. Who's gonna save rock 'n roll now?
And I do mean SAVE rock 'n roll.
Last week on The Howard Stern Show, Baba Booey pointed out to an article in Rolling Stone that stated that no rock album made the top 25 portion of Billboard's year-end album charts. Part of the reason why is due to the lack of good rock albums or bands out, plus the fact that rock radio stations aren't doing well.
Sadly, Rolling Stone and Billboard are right. Rock was dead in 2010. The top album last year belonged to Susan Boyle's I Dreamed a Dream. Not bad for an artist whose music attracts the Old Country Buffet crowd. Eminem's Recovery CD was #2, and he's considered alternative... 10 years ago. Also in the top 10, we saw two albums each from Taylor Swift (puke) and YEP! Justin Bieber (QUADRUPLE PUKE!). Browsing down the list, there's the fair share of country, pop, vocoder-laced hip-hop and a few modern AC artists like John Mayer, but where's the rock? Yep! There's no rock in the top 25. #30 was the ever-so-annoying Now That's What I Call Music! 32 featuring pop-punk crap from Cobra Starship and Boys Like Girls and #31 is the soundtrack to Twilight Saga: New Moon, featuring oodles of indie bands.
So, where's the REAL rock? Who are the saviors of kick-ass, hard rockin' rock music these days? The answer is Nickelback and their Dark Horse album, which spawned hit singles such as "Something in Your Mouth", "If Today Was Your Last Day", "Shakin' Hands" and the theme song to Monday Night Raw, "Burn it to the Ground". Interestingly enough, 1) the album was released in 2008, 2) it sold five million copies less than their previous offering, 2005's All the Right Reasons and 3) Nickelback sucks.
Going further down the list, there's Kings of Leon's Only By The Night at #50, A Thousand Suns from Linkin Park at #53, a bunch of old AC/DC songs for the Iron Man 2 soundtrack at #65 and, well, here it is.
So, who is saving rock in 2011? According to Billboard, it's a folk band who sounds Irish called Mumford and Sons. They have the top rock album in the country with Sigh No More. The top hard rock album? Bon Jovi's Greatest Hits album.
Sadly, rock is dead right now. Part of it's due to indie rock making its waves on the internet and underground, plus the fact that loud and edgy hard rock and metal's audience is getting older while the 20-somethings are listening to either indie music or even crappy pop and country. Thankfully here in Grand Rapids, our beloved WGRD is one of the top stations in the market. When WKLQ was yanked off the air, GRD stepped up their game and won. The station is now a mainstream active rock station with splashes of Ozzy, Metallica and AC/DC. End result? They're close to the top in the Arbitron ratings. Their only competition is 101.3 The Fox, which does play more-recent rock, but mixes it in with butt rock from the 70's. That station's ratings suck.
Kinda reminds me of New York and their only new rock station, WRXP. That station's playlist is very unfocused and is all over the place, seguing Mumford and Sons into AC/DC and Bruce Springsteen into Depeche Mode. End result? 22nd place with a 2.2 rating. Not bad, but then again, the pop, Spanish and rap stations are pounding them harder in the ass than Marlin Brando on top of Maria Schneider.
Basically put, I think people still want to rock, but the whole business model of promoting hard rock artists needs to change. Hell, I think Billboard needs to find ways to prove that rock still has an audience and to prove that an album released two years prior isn't the top hard rock album out there. Not everybody likes Taylor Swift or The Black Eyed Peas, or even Nickelback for that matter. I understand. We're still trying to recover from the great recession, but dumping a shitload of money into a skank like Ke$ha - who looks and sounds like AIDS - won't help matters.
But as the artist whose Scream album only made it to #154 on the charts once said, "you can't kill rock 'n roll, it's here to stay".
---
Bee-otch of the Day Archives can be seen on http://beeotchoftheday.blogspot.com !
Bee-otch of the Day is a production of Chuck69.com, Grand Rapids' site for Stern, politics and more!
No comments:
Post a Comment