What happens when a guy goes from some of the crappiest pop made to hard rocking? He gets compared to Jimi Hendrix.
Lenny Kravitz - Are You Gonna Go My Way
Lenny Kravitz has had an interesting career with the charts. Besides being called Mr. Lisa Bonet (don’t remember her? she was the hot Cosby kid) he had a hit with this annoying song: Read the rest of this entry »
There are probably more songs about the usage of marijuana, hidden within the lyrics, than any other topic outside of sex. Anyone who thought the following by a group of kids was about anything else but pot was high themselves.
Musical Youth - Anthology
Originally done by the Mighty Diamonds (as Pass The Koutchie), this version (Pass The Dutchie) was indeed changed to talk more about those having no food and living in poverty, but it is still a cannabis song at the core. Read the rest of this entry »
Here is one of those posts that I have dreaded; a post where it is overwhelmed by one artist completely.
It isn’t that I don’t like the artist, as I do, but I generally didn’t want any one artist to overload a single post. Too bad that Johnny Cash put out so many “American” albums before his death.
Going alphabetically, as iTunes does it, we will hit quite a few in this post. We start with:
Johnny Cash - American III: Solitary Man
The third in the series, Solitary Man, wherein we have some covers that were in response to Cash’s various illnesses at the time.
After Alice Cooper the man left Alice Cooper the group there came an album called Welcome To My Nightmare, which introduced fans to Steven. Steven was a strange little boy that had strange occurrences happen within his life ranging from the death/murder of his mother to the Devil himself trying to take his soul.
With last year’s Along Came A Spider, Alice Cooper brought to a close the story of Steven. While the album is about a serial killer named Spider (no relation) it is found out that Spider is nothing other then either an alternative identity for Steven, or Steven is an alternative identity for Spider. Either way, the host body has been killing for 28 years and it can be assumed that the host body killed the mother along with many others.
Alice Cooper - Along Came A Spider
The whole album is amazing in not only sound and storytelling, but for the fact that the 60+ year old Cooper still has a voice that sounds as strong and real as it did on the Love It To Death album.
A taste of what the album has in store can be seen in the “Along Came A Spider” mini-movie, with more fan service then I have seen in a video ever:
As promised in the mission statement of this website, I am putting out a “guilty pleasure” in the list.
The first season of American Idol is the only one I watched all the way through. The second season bored me after the audition process due to the, well, boring contestants. Every season after that got worse until the point where I no longer care or watch. I think I got through maybe four seasons of auditions before I just gave up entirely.
For my money Nikki McKibbin was the better rocker of the first season group, but Kelly Clarkson did have something.
Unfortunately her first album, while a major seller, is not what could be called the greatest thing she would ever put out.
Her latest album, All I Ever Wanted, isn’t that great of an album either.
Kelly Clarkson - All I Ever Wanted
Every song on this album sounds like the request of a teenager on the radio. A teenager playing the most idiotic game of “break up/make up” in high school you ever saw. The lyrics are nothing more than pandering to that age and mindset. There is no growth from Kelly as an artist, which is something we did see on the previous two albums.
I am not sure when or where I first heard Soundgarden. It could have either been an episode of Beavis & Butt-head or through KRQR 106.7 Z-Rock FM in the NorCal valley. I am thinking it had to be Z-Rock as my family hadn’t had satellite in years, and the cable we had did not have MTV.
Around this time I was in my freshman year of high school and living in a gated community. Before anyone gets the wrong idea this was not your ideal, Hollywood gated community where you were welcome with open arms because you could afford to live there. No, this was your “we are better than everyone because we live three miles from any form of civilization” suburb. You were shunned if you weren’t part of their clique, derided if you didn’t allow everyone to know your business. Not a fun place.
I was living in a house there with my father, sister, Evil Step-Mother and Evil Step-Sister. To make a long story short I had lived with my grandparents from the age of two, but my grandfather decided to go off the deep end a bit more than usual and attacked my grandmother. My father came in, took my sister and I, and we ended up in another type of hell. (I call her Evil Step-Mother for a reason.)
Around this time I started getting into heavier music then my usual Bon Jovi pop-rock stuff but any incoming music was limited. As stated above the cable we had in that house didn’t have MTV. We had VH1, which served its purpose, but at the time it was adult contemporary music only so no alternative or metal type music. At 4pm everyday it would switch to Comedy Central so there were no late night viewings. As well, the Evil Step-Mother didn’t think that MTV was a good influence because of “the fast moving images” and sexualization of people. This from a major druggie was a bit hypocritical.
I know now that Soundgarden had been around for ten years by the time I had heard of them, and that Chris Cornell had helped produce and sang on Alice Cooper’s The Last Temptation album, but it was in that year of 1994 that I first heard Black Hole Sun which got me to dig a bit deeper for their music. I bought the Superunknown album (discussed much later) but it wasn’t until 1997 when I bought the A-Sides album that I actually heard any of their earlier stuff.
Soundgarden A-Sides
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