"Eat shit and die"

Kanye West got so pissed after a fan threw a penny at him during a gig in Melbourne four days ago, he free-styled his way into minute-long rant culminating in a sing-along of "eat shit and die." And he was singing through auto tune the entire time!

I'm not a fan of Kanye West, but this video is hilarious. This is why YouTube rules:

Josh Homme does my bidding (or why I like QOTSA more now than ever)

If you know me well, you've probably heard my proposal for extending days by 12 or even 24 hours. Because, you know, we sleep for 8 hours (if we're lucky), and we work for 8 hours (if we're working for the 'the man'). That leaves only 8 hours to do our regular chores, keeps lines of communication open with our loved ones, pursue our hobbies, etc.

I started by asking for 48 hour days, then dropped it down to 36. It seems Josh Homme, frontman for Queens of the Stone Age, has been working on this request too. In a Billboard article that ran last week, he said, "I'm talking to this one guy about adding four more hours to each day, but he's not real positive about it." Damn! Could we at least get two hours? Two would be better than nothing.

And then, jumping over to a Pitchfork interview (also from last week, 4/13/07), Josh expresses my same assessment on this current age of overload:

"...it's an age of disinformation, where it's not like it's being kept from you, it's more like it's being piled on top of you [emphasis mine]. And so I think every time you go to make a personal decision, it's like more information comes to light. I think it's not really bad, it's more gluttony rad. It's sort of like indecision. And I think while we're all deciding, everyone samples a little bit of everything. And I'd like to play that party."

I complain about this sort of thing at work all the time -- there's just too much information being generated and it's impossible to take in everything we should! Just from my own day job office alone, there are new articles being generated every day that could completely take over my reading time if I let them. The only difference here is that, while Josh wants to "play that party," I kind of wish more people in the world would take vacations and shut the hell up for a few months at a time. And stop pumping out so many new members of the species and actually take the time to look around and figure out what kind of world we are really, truly capable of sustaining before we all suffocate on our own hot air.

Yes, I know, I'm part of the problem too... so I guess I should just shut up myself, join Josh at the party, and wait patiently for the suffocation to take over with a big smile on my face. Which is fine, just as long as it happens after June 16 so I have a chance to hear the new QOTSA album, Era Vulgaris, and use it as my end-times soundtrack.


P.S. -- head over to www.qotsa.com to hear "3's and 7's" from the new album. It fucking rules!

Reissue rants

I'm hearing these strange French voices in my ear as I listen to a compilation of French psychedelic pop (no, you thought it was going to be Pakistani pop, didn't you?) and it's just totally groovy! That time machine is running again...

There's usually a price of admission for that time machine, and I'm finding that it's a bit steep for me these days. So naturally, I'm going to bitch about it. And the first target of my ire is Best Buy.

Why Best Buy, you ask? They sell lots of fine electronics at reasonable prices, and have great sales on CDs since they sell them as loss leaders. Well, let's call this a case of sour grapes. I bought a fine LCD monitor for my desktop computer there, and a keyboard that types really quietly, and a mouse, all for under $300. Earned some points in there rewards program that translate into discount coupons, too. Big scam, I know. The kind of thing I regularly rant about, like when I tell my mother that coupons are just a way to con you into buying shit you wouldn't have bothered buying otherwise. So I'm ranting against Best Buy because I fell for the rewards program scam, AND because of the big tease they pulled with the Sly & The Family Stone box set.

Sly's limited edition The Collection box came out last week, and was briefly advertised on Best Buy's website at the unbelievable price of $9.99. The saga has been chronicled in posts to the Smile Shop message board. Basically, it was first advertised online, in advance of its release date, at the sale price of $39.99. Then, suddenly the price dropped to $9.99. This was unbelievable mostly because the set contains seven full CDs with bonus tracks. It's a set that could easily fetch $70.00, so even $39.99 was a great price. Not long after the thirty dollar price drop, the set quickly "sold out" at the $39.99 price, leaving the rest of us to look for copies in physical stores for $49.99. This was all happening on Easter weekend, mind you, so people like myself who were too busy making nice with relatives and stuffing our faces with the flesh of baby animals were completely oblivious to the big online snafu at Best Buy.

In retrospect, I'm fully confident that the weekend I spent breaking bread with the fabulous girlfriend's fabulous family was far more enjoyable than embarking on a sterile treasure hunt inside of a big-box money-sucking machine ever could be. But still, why the torture? It seems awfully fishy that the price dropped so drastically and then the set sold out. I couldn't even find the box in the local Best Buy I walked into, and in the end I decided that my old versions of the albums collected in the box were just fine, thank you very much. Besides, ever since I tweaked the EQ settings on my Winamp, everything I listen to on my PC sounds like a unique remaster.

And though this isn't exactly news anymore, we can expect to see some new reissues by Elvis Costello. I mean, this is going to be the fourth label to manhandle Costello's first 11 albums: the originals were on Columbia, then Rykodisc added bonus tracks in the '90s, then Rhino added fully-stocked bonus discs to each album in the early '00s, and now... Universal gets their shot at creating the 'definitive' versions of these albums. No word yet on whether the full bonus discs from the Rhino versions will be preserved, or if the single-disc Ryko editions will serve as the new old standard for nostalgia, or something completely different. Hopefully Elvis and Universal learned from the mistake the Beach Boys made in the mid '90s -- when you take away bonus tracks and strip your albums back down to basics after giving fans a taste of the bounties of your archives, fans will be pissed off and accuse you of being a greedy, idiotic nincompoop.

And I still haven't heard Neil Young's 'raw' version of his Living With War album, which mirrors a trend in recent years of albums being re-released within a year of their original release date with bonus tracks, bonus DVDs, or other such promises of aural and/or visual revelation. Given that Neil has also released two archival live discs in the past year devoted to classic performances he put on in the '70s, and is about to release his long-promised Archives box set, I'm just a little overwhelmed.

The pace at which new and archival music is released and re-released has gotten to the point where, if I'm going to keep up with my favorite artists, and with artists who potentially could be my or somebody else's favorites, I'm going to have to listen and research full time and get paid so I can put some food in my mouth and keep a roof over my head. Any takers?