My Mom Wants To Fake Rock-N-Roll All Nite

This post could also be titled "Being For The Benefit Of Mrs. B", but then it wouldn’t be a KISS reference as much as a Beatle’s reference. And the KISS reference is important here.

My mom is something of a saint to me. Since my ex (insert double entendre here) over three years ago, my mom has been coming to stay a couple days every week to help with my kids while I’m at work. It’s not a small thing since she lives a bit over an hour away. She wathces the youngest who will start school next year, she helps with homework, and more than anything else…she spends time on the phone.

She’s a township trustee, and a good one. It’s something of a thankless job, having to deal with local weasels and whiners for little pay. And it consumes a lot of phone time. She’s also pretty conservative in her tastes. It’s really getting her out of her shell to have her watch some lame reality television with us. But hey, family bonding time is family bonding time.

So imagine my surprise when I came home from running some errands the other evening with one of my daughters and found my mom, plastic guitar slung over her shoulders, playing Guitar Hero III. Specifically ‘Rock And Roll All Nite’ by KISS.

Her defense was "I’ve never played before and wanted to try it." I didn’t really care what her reason was. I just thought it was great she was playing.

So I grabbed the other guitar and we spent the next hour or so playing a few songs I’m sure she didn’t know or recognize the lyrics for. This is the woman who used to go around singing lines from Sublime’s ‘Santaria’ because she thought it was catchy after all. She never seemed to get to those bits where they sung about poppin’ a cap in the guy hitting on the girl. So I got some fun out of pointing out "Remember all those crazy posters we had in the basement when I was a kid? That was Iron Maiden, and this is one of their songs." Yes, I had my mom playing the bass line on ‘Number of the Beast’.

And then her phone rang in the middle of a song. And just that fast the band was broken up. She was on the phone talking about issues with the local fire department and our audience booed us off the stage.

But for a while, we were rockin’. And after all these years, my mom showed she had a bit of cool in her.

Sympathy for the Devil

Actually, the Stones song in Guitar Hero III is “Paint it Black”. I finally picked up an X-Box 360 the other day along with GH3. I’m giving it to the family (i.e. me and the kids) at Thanksgiving so everyone can play along with all the extended family. I had to break it all out and test it while the kids weren’t here though. Of course. Had to make sure everything was in working order and all. Good thing too, because the wireless guitar controller I originally got didn’t work, which was disappointing.

GH3 is an excellent game, with perhaps one exception. There’s a bit of a cartoony story line, and the rockers wind up on the wrong side of the devil. Typical rocker theme, for sure. Except the devil isn’t usually portayed as a fatter, sunglasses-wearing Wolverine wannabe. He just wasn’t an imposing devil figure.

But then what is the nature of the devil anyway? Or the origin of evil for that matter? I was driving to work last week and through some odd chain of thought or another my mind wound up on this track, along with one of those insights where a person has a bit of a smack-the-forehead “well of course that’s it” moment.

Another primer for the non-Mormons in the room. The Book of Mormon is a book of scripture we read in companionship with the Bible. Both are sacred scripture to us. And in one of the first books in the Book of Mormon, known as Second Nephi, is this bit of knowledge:

Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh ; and all things are given them which are expedient unto man. And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life , through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil; for he seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself.

Eternal life to us means much more than just living forever. It’s about living forever in the presence of God, with our families. Family is an intrinsic part  of salvation from our perspective. For me, an eternity without my children would really…well…suck. My “aha” moment started to come with a clarity on an emotional as well as cognitive level of just how badly my former mother-in-law had blown that all to hell for Brokeback’s entire family. That entire family turned away from the gospel and from God in general. They all determined that if God didn’t agree with their choices, then He must be wrong.

That brought about the second half of my “aha”, and an understanding of the nature of Satan that I hadn’t had before. The last part of that scripture reference says “might be miserable like unto himself”, and is something that I’d heard innumerable times since I was a kid. But the meaning of it finally hit home completely. Brokeback’s mom couldn’t admit that any of her kids were doing anything wrong. And what’s the one way to make yourself feel better about your position when you can’t admit that you’re wrong about it? Why, get others to agree with you, of course. If you have numbers on your side, then of course you must be right.

It’s a simple school-yard mentality really. If I can get enough people, especially key people, to agree with my position regadless of how cockamamy it may be, then I must be right. Everybody in Brokeback’s family bought into it, and I keep vigil with my kids to do my best to help keep them from being sucked in. But in the bigger perspective, that’s all Satan really is too. God kicked him out, and he just couldn’t admit he was wrong. It’s not that Satan spends him time saying “I’m going to go get people to commit some evil today, because evil is cool!” He’s just stewing over being wrong. Knowing deep down that he’s wrong. But being way, way too prideful to admit it to himself. And so instead he tries to get people to agree with him. Or at the very least to disagree with God’s position. Because then that, of course, would prove that he’s right.

Then again, he might pull some evil sometimes just because it’s fun. I just finished watching Dancing With The Stars, and one of the couples did a routine to The Cure’s “Why Can’t I Be You”. Sung by the house band. And an evil joke is the only explanation I can imagine to explain what I heard.

I call it "The Amy Winehouse Effect"

Have you ever come away from a session of surfing the Internet, looking at train wrecks in Hollywood and elsewhere, and thought “Damn, we’re way too connected”?

I have. Several times. And I’ve come to call this “The Amy Winehouse Effect”.

Why Amy in particular? Why not Brit-Brit, or LiLo, or Paris, or one of the dozen other celebrity ho-bags? Why do I use Amy Winehouse as my touchstone? It’s simple. She, unlike the others, has actual talent.

I had at first rejected the notion of buying her “Back to Black” album. I mean, c’mon, the big hit is about how “they” (seemingly meaning “everyone”) tried to get her to go into a rehab program for substance abuse and she told them all to pound sand. Not your typical role model of the week. It just seemed too trashy. Too low-brow. Like I would be supporting someone who needed to get their life turned around rather than lauded. Like…like…uh…geez, that song’s really kind of catchy.

In a moment of weakness, and an effort to add some current material to my music collection by joining BMG, I ordered the album. I’ve had it for over a month now, and it seems I listen to part or all of it pretty much daily. It’s on the verge of being a joke. But it’s just that good. Sure, she has some inappropriate language. Not Eminem calibre, but it’s there. What she also has is an amazing voice, and honest-to-goodness real instrumentation and composition in her songs. Much of the album doesn’t even have a guitar. You listen to it and can easily imagine hearing exactly this same performance live, in an intimate club setting, exactly as it’s meant to be.

And when I realized all of that, I immediately saw just what all this connectedness of the Internet had done to me. Done to all of us. It has been collectively tainting our souls by making it a popular sport to find as much fault in each other, and especially the famous, as possible.

Amy Winehouse, for all her troubles (and they are legion), isn’t any worse in how she is conducting her life than many of those famous musicians and artists that preceded her. Led Zeplin were known to have done some incredibly outrageous and drug-fueled things in their day. John Bonham died from his excesses after all. As did Hendrix and others. The Beatles attained many of their sounds while under the influence. Go back far enough and you’ll find Mozart largely inebriated throughout his genius.

This isn’t to say that what any of these people did was right. Again a quick tutorial for those non-Mormons: we believe in a little thing we call the “Word of Wisdom”. The long and the short of it is no alcohol, no drugs, no coffee, no tea, and no smoking. Along with the no sex outside of marriage, some people think we must be more dull than a convention of chartered accountants, but really we’re quite enjoyable to be around and in an awkward moment make for superb designated drivers. So I by no means condone chemically altering one’s brain in the name of art. However, that isn’t to say that the resultant art can’t still be appreciated. And what’s more, when all of these people created their art the entire world wasn’t blathering on daily to each other about how trashy the artists’ lives were outside their work. The odd story would crop up, like the John Lennon “bigger than Jesus” comment, but it wasn’t constantly on the nightly news.

Can you imagine what it would have been like had the Internet existed in late 1800’s France? How many people would have been relentless in their pursuit of the distasteful details surrounding the crazed ravings of Vincent van Gogh? And how much more or less likely would it have been that the world would then be able to recognize the beauty in his unfortunate insanity? He would more likely have been turned into tabloid fodder and ground under the heel of a society consumed in its desire to point at those less respectable than themselves in a vain effort to feel superior. Which likely wouldn’t have changed his outcome other than to hasten his inevitable end.

So all that’s said to get to this: Amy Winehouse is a wreck, but I don’t care. The fact that I nearly let the Internet and tabloid gossip machine prevent me from listening to (and legally owning let’s not forget) one of the most enjoyable albums I’ve had in a long, long time is depressing to me. My career is focused around the capabilities of the Internet, and the gossip machine is one of those abilities that really taints it for me. It’s like renting a herse for a family trip. Sure I’m using it for honorable pusposes, but I can’t shake the thought of the bodies its buried which kind of ruins the experience.

We need to stop turning into a bunch of Romans looking for the next spectacle. People need to stop digging dirt for fun and sport. More importantly, I want Amy Winehouse to get her life in order so she doesn’t wind up dead from an overdose. Because she needs to make another album. I’ll buy it when she does.

I’m Not Sure Who I Should Be Embarassed For More

So I’ve mentioned before that I used to run my own business. It wasn’t a multi-million dollar multinational conglomerate or anything, but we did reasonably well. I did, however, do work with some multi-million dollar multinational conglomerates during that time. One of them was MTV. Yes, the MTV.

More precisely, I was brought in to do work with MTV that then fell apart. Twice. For two years, back-to-back, they brought me in to work on developing some cool web toys for the VMAs. They were always ambitious projects that would be really cool, and that somewhere along the line fell apart under the weight of their own internal disorganization, and frankly, their own corporate shallowness. The entire MTV mindset is about perpetuating a vapid culture of partying and celebrity voyeurism.

I’ve never been mad that those projects fell apart coming out of the gate. I only tell you all of that to tell you this:

I should have known better. Tonight, I should have known what I was going to get before I even got it. I went in to watching the VMAs specifically looking for something, then got it and more. I was looking for what all the rest of the sideline voyeurs were looking for. I was looking to see a Britney trainwreck live and in person. My mom and my sisters are gasping, guffawing, and holy-cowing over me, I’m sure. But I was somehow drawn, like a moth to a flame. And as they say at the infamous Smithee Awards, some things you just can’t un-see.

What I saw was proof that the entertainment industry is coming back around to accepting performers that aren’t super-skinny and instead look like normal people with a few extra pounds here and there. That’s the good part, as our society has what could certainly be called a strange body image. What I also saw was that those same people shouldn’t be doing stage performances in an outfit comprised solely of rhinestone-covered hoochie shorts and sports bra. I also saw that if such people do decide to do such a performance anyway, they should make sure that they don’t look periodically lost while on stage. It leads to the on-air audience having the same reaction as the at-home audience: utter bewilderment.

But then again, I got what I tuned in for. Which begs the question of who should be more embarassed? Me, or Britney?

The answer of course is that it’s probably me. Britney finished her stint on stage, smiled, said thank you, and then hustled off faster than Wile E. Coyote’s would-be dinner. I, however, continued to watch the VMAs, mysteriously paralyzed in wonder at the possibility of how insipid things could become. How much harder would they try and make this seem like a serious awards show? Would any of the presenters or recipients ever act like they actually cared about any of it? How many times would Justin Timberlake get away with saying “I challenge MTV to play more music videos, because we’re not interested in this lame reality show stuff”? (The answer was either two or three. My brain was too damaged by the end to be sure, and I still can’t guarantee it wasn’t a stunt organized by MTV in the first place.)

I was grateful for a brief reprieve from the obvious lip-synching everyone did when Alicia Keys actually sang. Then only to be disappointed again by having her ovation afterward enhance by canned applause. But, this is MTV, and I had no reason to be surprised. I knew who I was dealing with. I knew what I was asking for. And that’s the worst part. The VMAs epitomizes the basest of our culture. Radical jihadists get extra bent out of shape because they think all Americans are like MTV. And I participated. Which probably makes me something of an idiot.

So let me say up front that when I write about MTV again in a month, it won’t be because they sucked me in like an idiot. The other thing I saw during the VMAs, the thing for the new show they have coming, has my blood boiling. But I’ll hold off until I can see it for myself once so as to blast it appropriately.