Helters of Skelter

At the risk of giving a few fractional pennies to some miserly old jerks, assuming any of these videos are allowed through the ever-shifting wall of copyright shenanigans to be playable as embeds, behold:  one of the heaviest songs of all time, Helter Skelter, by Whomever & Pals.  This is a tune, and as I’ve been saying about tunes lately, good ones transcend their origins to become standards – insofar as we’re allowed to have those anymore.  A good tune sounds good even when divorced from its original context and style, like Hendrix covering Dylan.  Dig the original, and then let’s consider how it holds up to the manglings of cover artists.

Helter Skelter, by Some Bros

There are people who happen to be doing a cover, and there are literal cover bands.  This first example is one of the latter – the kind of people who make a living playing casinos and smaller venues for ehh dollars, by giving the audience exactly what the fuck they want.  The bands that originate songs often play those songs in concert however they please, riffing and changing them up.  Cover bands know you wanted to hear every Yo and Ungh and Grunt in the exact same time and tones as the album version, and they do this job very competently.

Helter Skelter, by Magical Mystery Doors

OK, good job.  But too faithful!  This doesn’t get us anywhere near the spirit of the original, which is a heaviness that comes from the soul.  They tried to bring a new flavor to it by medleying with Zepp, but this only highlighted the fact these guys are incapable of innovating on preexisting material.  Or unwilling.  It isn’t a true medley; it just stops and starts.  Even so, I respect the hustle.

To me an artist should bring their signature style to a cover.  With the most successful bands – the Hall of Rock alums – the style is what we want from them.  I found Bon Jovi doing a cover live and eh, the vocals were a lil’ jovey, but it was too faithful, not interesting at all.  Aerosmith fared better only by merit of Steven Tyler’s vocals being so distinctive.  It was equally low effort.  To me, Mötley Crüe did a much better job.  They crüed this shit more than anybody on the list brought a style of their own.  That said, with this particular band, how good of a thing is that?

Helter Skelter, by Mötley Crüe

Siouxsie and the Banshees likewise bansheed their version well, tho I think it’s much less heavy than it should be.  U2 were in high asshole mode on their cover, fucking up the lyrics on purpose.  Raw talent made it almost tolerable, but not fucking quite.  Bizarrely, I found some other covers that fucked up the lyrics in the same way as Bono.  Were they covering the U2 cover?  Gross.  Rob Zombie’s duet with Marilyn Manson had decent production quality, which is better than most of the videos I’m posting, but it was an uninteresting waste of time.

Pat Benatar did a fine job but was, again, too faithful.  But that got me thinking about lady covers, and this one was pretty damn good.

Helter Skelter, by Dana Fuchs

That said, maybe as I was watching this I just wasn’t in the mood for a raggedy throat blastin’ rock broad, as much as that’s a very cool thing to be.  Respect, but it wasn’t for me at the moment.  Still, I carried on with the ladies.  Now forgive me, the quality of sound on this next video is just horrid.  But I thought they did very well for high schoolers.  I hope they are high schoolers.  Like the more virtuous and experienced ronk dragon above, these kids brought something new to the song.  Not as much, not as showy, but it’s there, if you listen close thru the painful crappiness of the video.  It’s most obvious on the solo.  Shreddin’.

Helter Skelter, by Heiress

Let’s pull away from horrible ass quality and back into the realm of actually good sounds.  Here is another young-ass group of youngsters fronted by a lady, doing a good job of it.  The arrangement is, again, bringing some original spirit to the cover, and so it becomes obviously superior to the cover band version.  However, while the singer has a great voice and does well, she doesn’t make it very interesting.  I have a suspicion if I could hear the above girl thru the grime, her voice would be a fifth as powerful and skilled as the below girl, but I’d like the performance better.  But also, the band did a great job of making this one distinctive and heavy.

Helter Skelter, by Hündersins

Here’s another indie band with good modern production value, and this is an interesting one to me.  I think there’s a name for this genre they’re working in and I’m not familiar enough with millenial ronk to put my finger on it.  You can hear the influence of pop punk like Blink 182, but it’s more hardcore.  Was MCR like this at all?  Is it called hardcore?  Some other kinda core?  Whatever the case, it’s distinct.  He sings so clearly and nicely, it’s kinda funny in contrast to the rest.  He isn’t vamping, isn’t playing into his own ego or enjoying the art of the impression too much, and I appreciate it.  Also, props to the drummer’s t-shirt.

Helter Skelter, by Joker’s Hand

Is it bad that I also like these boys because the lead singer is very beautiful to me?  Probably.  That is a freakin’ beautiful young guy.  Mwah.  Even so, they were definitely getting away from putting an interesting spin on it, edging closer to that cover band approach of just being very competent.  Close, but their genre predilections and his nice singing helps them clear that trap.

I had to save the best for last.  Here’s the thing most of the coverers did not understand.  This song is about the instruments as much as – or even more than – the vocals!  I did not find what I wanted when I was seeking a cover for Helter Skelter on this occasion.  I was hoping to hear a deconstruction, a reconstruction, maybe an industrial or electronic version.  Still, in making the cover instrumental, Asterism made it rock harder than all of the above.  Get dusted, y’all.

Helter Skelter, by Asterism

So fucking heavy.  And u kno what’s funny?  Asterism is apparently a cover band.

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It’s a Kind of Magic

I find myself lusting for magic again.  I may have mentioned before that my soul is forfeit because I made an ill-considered deal with the devil while walking home from a shift at Pizza Hut in the ’90s:  Show me magic is real and you can have my soul.  Why make such a foolish deal?  Because the world can seem so very dull and pointless.

I can’t tell you why it feels to me like magic would make it interesting and worthwhile.  There’s evidence a lot of people out there feel this way, especially those who are able to fool themselves into believing, at least in fits and starts.  Probably cultural damage of some kind.  It doesn’t really make sense.

Some people have very magical thoughts, like they’re the center of reality, important and big in some way.  It isn’t always a good feeling; you see this a lot with paranoia-flavored mental illnesses.  Tough to feel OK with life when everybody is out to get you.

I didn’t really want to write about that.  I’m just trying to put a finger on this feeling again.  The place it’s most relevant to me is in the creation of art.  I can’t make myself believe in some cult bullshit or mainstream religion either.  I can’t eke a transcendant spiritual feeling out of the things that I do believe, in my heart of hearts.  All that stuff just overwhelms in a bad way.  But fiction, that’s another thing altogether.

This feeling connects to other thoughts I’ve had in the past, as expressed through blog posts on The Doors, on levitation, on action, on Faust.  Is it wrong to want the weirding way?  To be a scanner, or if I’m ready to go, to get scanned?  I want my will to move the world, just a little bit.  Push.

I am reminded now of the Floaters-themed personal ads on my levitation post, and how they should be updated to reflect my current name.  Here I go…

Cancer, and my name is Bébé
And I like a lover who gots somethin’ extra in their jayjays
Whether that’s a big belly or a dingly dang dongus
There’s no way you and I can go wrongus
when you
Take my hand, come with me baby, to Love Land.
Let me show you it’s queer and/or gay
Sharin’ your love with Bébé
I want you to Float On… Float with me baby…

Way off topic.  The important thing is that y’all tell me how you do it.  Projecting your will like Charles Gray in The Devil Rides Out.  Stop holding out.  Slip me the runes.  I can handle it.  It’s time.

JUST GIVE ME THE PRIZE!

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Life List: Song Sparrow

There are sparrow sparrows, from the Old World where Karl of Linne was doing his big naming project, and decided they were the for real deal.  Then there are embirizids or New World Sparrows, which include most of what this amurrican would ever talk about.  Of those, the song sparrow is one of the most common and most commonly heard.

I feel like there was a Calvin and Hobbes comic with a very realistically drawn song sparrow in it, but don’t recall for sure.  At any rate, they are streaky brown and grey things like every other sparrow around here so who cares?  But they sez god jeezy has his eye on the sparrow, so… get judged, fools.

I didn’t know song sparrows were so common because they aren’t so easy to see.  Maybe if I had a bird feeder to watch all day.  For years after I started paying attention to birds, I never saw one with the clarity to ID it.  Only once I used the birdy app to recognize calls did I find out just how common they are.  And, having become more familiar in that way, I finally took some notice of them visually.

Still not very often.  One time they blew past me like lightning at the rhododendron garden in Federal Way, one time I saw them cross the footpath in the wee hours outside my old place of work, and one time I saw them in the rose bush in front of my house.  But if you know the calls, they are everywhere, all the time.

And yet… I don’t know the calls.  Just don’t have a good memory for ’em.  The list of birds whose calls I recognize is much shorter than the ones I know visually, and the more varied and complex a bird’s calls are, the less I can remember them.

Why am I writing about a bird I barely recognize, am not impressed by, and have no stories about?  I needs an angle…

Song sparrows are drab little brown birds that compensate with a fancy song.  Some people are like that.  I was reaching for this in my head and first person that came to mind was Teena Marie, the very ’80s singer who did not look amazing.  She looked fine, like any rando you’d meet working the counter at the bank or the grocery store, but had a big voice – and she wrote her own songs?  That’s a skill that a lot of singers don’t have.  Good job.

Then I find out she died of unknown presumed natural causes, not even 55 years old.  Life is cruel and sheisty.  Hey, I’ve got 6 years until I’m as old as she was when she checked out.  Gotta watch my back for scythes.

Anyway, the art of writing a tune is real business and I don’t think I always appreciated it, until listening to a bunch of bob dylan covers on a random lark one time.  The best way to tell if a song is really well written is to divorce it from its original style completely and see if it still stands up, and the more covers you have, the more evidence you have to weigh and consider.  Nobody’s gonna cover Teena Marie, so we’ll just have to decide about her qualities for ourselves.

As far as I’m concerned?  She’s alright.

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Lostwave

You might not be aware, but there is a whole internet subculture bent to the task of investigating cultural obscurae.  Presented with an image or a snippet of audio or a video clip, they try to find the origin.  This is not always possible, because despite idealistic dreaming and much human effort, you literally can not find everything on the internet.  Much of humanity’s artistic and intellectual output, even from the internet age, has been lost forever, or was never recorded in the first place.

With regards to music, they call this “lostwave,” a genre defined by what you don’t know about it, and nothing else.  There were a number of lostwave songs that people had just about given up hope on having their origins revealed, when recently they came to light.  Check out the reddit community to see a lot of interesting stories of independent research, and observe some odd bits of culture that were nearly lost forever.

I just want to talk about one such story briefly.  A guy posted a clip of a song and asked if anybody could identify it, then the poster disappeared.  I forget what reason he gave, for why he had a clip but didn’t know the origin of said clip.  Speculation was intense, the mystery lasted a few years.  But at last, it was revealed to be a studio song used in the pornographic film Angels of Passion.  You can find that moustache-tacular porn its entirety online, if you are so inclined.  I skimmed it.  Anyway, the guys that made the song published a remaster on yewchoob, so we can all check out this porn quality jam together…

The best part of this little tale is that you can tell from the clip the original poster had presented that it was carefully cut around the moans and groans of 1980s style fucken.  He knew where he got it, set people up to get pink-faced about it, and bounced forever.  Good one, man.

The song shows up at about 1 hr 7 min 30 sec into the porno, depending on which copy you’ve found, probably.

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Fat Middle-Aged Genderqueer ASMR Unbagging Reaction: Trader Joe’s Crispy Dried Watermelon Chips

Need one o’ them there meridian responses?  Like unboxing and reaction videos?  Product reviews?  You like slow paced grainy video where the loudest sounds are packages rustling and fans whirring?  If ya want my body and ya think I’m sexy, come on baby let me know.  Sorry for rod stewarting at you there.  Point.

I referred to an inanimate object as crazy, in violation of my ableism policy, but I don’t know how to bleep it.  Enjoy this little walk on the wild side.  And go to sleep!

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Make Your Own

There’s this song by Triple Six Mafia called Bin Laden Weed.  It’s actually got some emotional heft to it, for a rap song.  Usual content warnings for rap: misogyny, violence, self-harm, drug abuse, homophobia, some of those worse than others.  Anyway, I listened to this like a thousand times before I realized the recipe is right there in the chorus.  You too can make your own Bin Laden weed!

It’s “three types of weed grown all together,” and those types are “hydro … light green … bobby brown.”  How do you grow them together?  Just the same soil?  Grafting?  If you graft, what precise arrangement mingles their properties to produce this stuff?  We don’t have specifics, but we do have ingredients.  And I think at least one guy from this band is still alive, so maybe he can let us know.

Let us know!

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Igon and the Joy of Overacting

There’s a guy in the Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree named Igon, who is just deeply hilarious.  The first time you become aware of him, he’s yelling and moaning in the distance.  As you approach, you find a crippled guy laying in a heap, alternating between over-wrought sobs and wailing about his agony, and thunderous self-righteous rage at the enemy who has laid him low.  CURSE YOU BAYLE!  oh, take mercy upon my broken body, do not savage me so.

Overacting is really good for a laugh.  Maybe I’d feel differently if I was drowning in it; I only see it occasionally.  This clip from the old cartoon Home Movies illustrates:

What can I say?  Me like funny voice.

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Once Again I Rule Freethoughtblogs

It was brought to my attention that I am the only one posting within the very recent, and that gives me a chance to rule FtB with an iron feest.  What luxury!  What decadence.  I post a compilation of an American character in a Japanese cartoon swearing and freaking out.  And you will suffer it, presently.

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