’Mong the various delusional ambitions I’ve had o’er the course o’ my life — & still have, which includes the recent “video game level critic”, which isn’t a career, & still writer & game developer, despite only making tiny updates in both these categories nowadays — when I was a kid I had ambitions o’ becoming a newspaper cartoonist, back when people other than that 1 blogger still read newspaper comics & newspapers in general. For ’bout 2 years in middle school — starting near 20 years ago — I wrote a drew a comic for e’ery day, like newspaper comics had, up to a total o’ 600 comics. Similar to my sprite comics & Pokéme comics, this was impressive in quantity, specially for a middle schooler, but when we see the quality o’ the comics, we can understand how I was able to crank these out. Also, one should not get the misimplication — my spellchecker says that’s not a word, but it’s wrong: I have now made it 1 — that I created a comic e’ery day: more oft I would create these comics in batches, usually several weeks after they s’posedly were published.
As this comic’s title hints, this comic followed the tradition o’ focusing on cute animals ( Garfield was my favorite comic @ the time ). 2 o’ the main trio, Pandora the Maine Coon ( Pandy for short ) & Peta the bunny, were based on pets we had. Since this comic is 20 years ol’, you can probably surmise that these animals aren’t ’live anymo’. Doney wasn’t based on any real animal I had, tho I did later get a turtle I named Doney, who also died, since I was too poor to afford the proper equipment & too busy to take care o’ it. Those who have read my great work, “Doney & Sid & the Epic o’ the Lightbulb Bong”, may recognize that name. After I wrapped up the 3rd “book” — yes, I drew these comics into fake treasury books like real newspaper comics had, included with commentary in red pencil, which I think was inspired by a Dilbert book, back when Dilbert was a comic people actually read for the comic itself, not just a footnote to its creator’s wacky Twitter political antics — I renamed the comic “Doney & Sid” & continued writing comics, only on rare occasions actually drawing comics, for a few years later, all the way up to when I started writing the unreleased novel Boskeopolis, the precursor to Boskeopolis Stories ( which, itself, is already 10 years ol’, horrifyingly ’nough ). As it turns out, Pandora & Peta, as much as I loved them as pets, were like Shermy & Violet in Peanuts. If you’re asking me who those characters are, that’s precisely it: they were so boring that I gradually phased them out o’ the comic & replaced them with characters that could actually inspire jokes. I don’t e’en think I e’er latched onto any consistent personalities for either o’ them.
Possibly the most boring opening to a newspaper comic that wasn’t named Garfield. If I had been familiar with Pearls Before Swine by this point I would’ve opened the comic with something as exciting as an ol’ bingo-playing woman being crushed to death by a ceiling tile ( a’least that’s how that comic opened in e’ery paper by the Bezos Post, if its 1st treasury is accurate ). I think I thought I was being clever introducing all the main characters’ names & tying it to the “punchline”. Eh, there will be far worse comics.
Case in point. The red commentary below it says this was actually the 1st comic I made. That can be the only explanation for why I chose “Where’s the Turtle’s Treat” o’ all lines as the title for the 1st “treasury”, as it’s not a particularly funny punchline. I guess the joke is that their owner is abusive & neglects his turtle. So he’s a foreshadowing o’ my neglect for my real turtle later on in high school.
I included this comic only ’cause o’ the commentary below it, pointing out how “interesting” these early comics were. So e’en then I knew these comics blew.
I looked up “umisaki” in Google Translate, & it tells me it means “seashore”. According to my commentary, I stopped using this alter ego ’cause ’twas too close to the Ninja Turtles. Apparently I was ’fraid Mirage Comics would sue my 12-year-ol’ self.
Being inspired by Garfield, there are a lot o’ “boy, this animal sure likes eating food that would poison them in real life” jokes. ’Cept e’en Garfield was much funnier ’bout it. I will be skipping most o’ them.
The weird thing ’bout this comic is that, being made by a moomer, & not someone o’ the silent generation, like the majority o’ newspaper comics, this comic is a strange, anachronistic mix o’ boomer jokes & video game references you’d find in a webcomic. I don’t think I’ve e’er seen video games @ all in a newspaper comic. That I chose an NES is particularly weird, since I hadn’t e’en played a real NES by this point & the NES was far from my favorite Nintendo system.
O yeah, & this comic’s “punchline” is just an advertisement. That’s probably the most important thing to note — its failure to be funny, despite that being its expressed goal.
1 o’ the things I loved as a kid, & still appreciate, ’bout Garfield are all the different title banners it would have for its Sunday strips. I was always disappointed in other comics that didn’t do something like this & made sure not to make the mistake myself.
I guess I only bothered to colorize the non-Sunday comics for the 1st week — I guess as a reference to the fact that @ that time Garfield had a special version o’ the 1st book that had all its comics colorized.
I figured this comic was me trying to establish Pandora as the “dumb” 1, but looking @ the commentary below I was reminded that Pandora, who I think was bought from a seedy seller, had some obscure disease that made her not want to eat & constantly grumpy. After my mother took her to the vet & had her treated, we were all surprised by how much nicer she became afterward. So this comic, which attributes Pandora’s problem to a serious eating disorder as a joke, in hindsight is mo’ fucked-up than funny. Quite an achievement so early in my career.
I’m pleasantly surprised I found a comic that I still find funny this early. I don’t like the weird Dreamworks smirk Pandora’s doing with her brows in panels 1 & 2 but I love Doney’s sour eye in the 3rd panel.
In true newspaper comic fashion, in order to pad out these daily comics, I just keep repeating the same joke ’bout being absentminded ’bout food for the whole week.
Gulford, believe it or not, would continue up to when I stopped writing Doney & Sid in round 2011. ’Cept in this later edgelord political iteration he would undergo quite a change: he would become a Nazi. This was back in the good ol’ days when fascism was widely held to be a joke & you would ne’er hear a politicians praise Hitler, unlike nowadays where just ’bout e’ery Republican does so to get his 15 minutes o’ fame.
Then jump o’er it, you idiot.
Damn, e’en young me is straight ripping into this comic. He’s right: this comic doesn’t have a joke, other than that 2 cat comic stars happen to be fat.
This comic baffled me & made it seem like these 3 just hate each other now, but I think the joke was that s’posedly Pandora was shaved bald by Peta & this was blamed on Doney ( how she judges Doney did it is unexplained ). The problem, ’course, is that this is meant to be indicated visually, but this is uncolored, & Pandora’s hair is ne’er drawn, so Pandora doesn’t look any different.
Mo’ unfunny advertisements. Man, I was really simping for Nintendo as a kid. This was back when Nintendo’s new releases were actually exciting & not disappointments. ¿Remember how people ragged on Super Mario 64 DS for its shitty controls? Man, I loved the hell out o’ that game when it 1st came out. Li’l did we realize how shitty a rerelease Nintendo would make for that game later on.
Cleo was a cat my grandmother had, who was already ol’ when we moved in, & would die the next year. Cleo would be replaced by the world-famous Patches, who was a baby then, but has recently died of ol’ age ( as had my grandmother a couple years before then, as commemorated in my masterpiece poem, “Taco Time” ), which only reiterates how ol’ these comics are. These facts are far mo’ interesting than this comic, which thinks saying hi to someone with “uh” in the middle is a punchline.
The 2nd actually-funny comic, & only week 6 — ¡& e’en my younger self agrees! I e’en managed to sneak in a visual gag o’ Doney’s shell springing up in the 2nd panel — albeit it’s hard to see, as I wasstill am a terrible artist then — & a different camera angle on the last panel.
This is some surrealist antipunchline. Also, ’nother advertisement.
Before this comic I’d forgotten ’bout how the squirrels would gather round Peta’s cage. This comic feels less like a comic & mo’ a boring pet blog ’bout all the “quirky” things my family’s pets did.
Our family also had a mouse named Dario, who was my older sister’s, which Pandora would, being a cat, try to grab. Thinking back, I don’t think I e’er made a character for a bird my younger sister had — I have no idea why we had so many pets; I think my mother wanted each o’ my siblings to have a pet ( mine was a fish that died 2 days after I got it, so I got the short shaft ). I guess by that point I realized that these character’s weren’t interesting.
This is the 1st unintentionally funny comic, thanks to the absurdity o’ Peta being possessive o’er grass, which is all o’er the place, & Dario’s “punchline”, which doesn’t connect to the rest o’ the comic @ all.
I’m shocked that this brilliant character, a horseshoe that causes chaos for no reason, didn’t stick round till the end. I think I just picked a horseshoe ’cause e’en my younger self couldn’t fuck up drawing it.
What actually is shocking is that I stretched the nonjoke o’ horseshoe causing pain & suffering to these animals for 2 whole weeks. We will be skipping the rest o’ these, as they’re boring.
Young Mezun won an award for his shocking discovery o’ an e’en less funny version o’ “I Hate Mondays”.
Doney discovers some edgelord from Kiwi Farms, who, presumably, called him a racial slur.
I love my stubborn hatred o’ punchlines by adding this pointless “Got some coffe” — whate’er “coffe” is; I wonder if it tastes like “covfefe” — line, which is like taking the air out o’ the punchline — not to say that the punchline was great in the 1st place.
Funny ’nough, I only use my TV for video games. I don’t think I intended to imply that Doney is taking advantage o’ his newfound discovery o’ television programming in that 2nd comic & that I just forgot the 1st comic’s joke immediately afterward.
Cosmo was a dog my uncle had. Not only is Cosmo dead, my uncle is also dead. The photo from my poem, “Shiny II”, was taken @ his memorial ( which, despite this poem coming out in November, actually took place in June ).
I think that’s s’posed to be the phone Pandora’s chopping up. Which makes no sense, since Cleo doesn’t need the phone to come o’er. Checkmate, liberal.
When I 1st saw that this wacky topic would fill 2 whole weeks o’ material, I was pissed; but then I realized it just meant mo’ content I can skip. Fun fact: we’re now up to the 150’s in terms o’ strip #s. That’s ¼ done. Be glad you didn’t have to read the stuff I skipped.
Look @ that inconsistent characterization: before Peta was so dumb she didn’t realize she had to eat; now she’s making wisecracks @ Doney’s expense.
& now I’m realizing that Doney’s characterization is inconsistent, too. ¿Wasn’t he lazy & dour before ( he certainly is later on )? ¿Why’s he dancing like he’s Snoopy here?
’Stead o’ “Where’s the Turtle’s Treat”, this comic should’ve been called “Where’s the Joke”, ’cause I have no idea what the point o’ Horseshoe Man scheming with the moon is s’posed to be.
These comics, which introduce the character who would later be named Sid, show why Sid stuck round after Pandora & Peta got Lyman’d: these comics are strikingly much better than anything else in this tedious “treasury” — specially that 3rd comic where Sid devours the fuck out o’ the wanted poster, which is hilariously badass.
Man, I can’t believe Cute n’ Cuddly’s already going woke, bro. I can only imagine how well it’d go if someone who “treat[ed] a black unequal” tried to rectify that situation by giving them a chew toy. Actually, that’s not true: that’s how the average edgelord YouTuber “apologizes” after spending a whole hour whining ’bout cancel culture.
Literally just a Garfield comic.
¿Why’s their owner bringing a pet turtle to help him carry his golf club? Man, he really is an abusive owner. E’en I didn’t make my turtle bring me golf clubs — tho that’s mainly ’cause I ne’er played golf.
This whole week o’ comics is just Doney fat-shaming Pandora’s boyfriend. Worse, this is a ripoff o’ a series in Garfield, where Garfield does the same ( ’cept Garfield, being fat himself, has such N-word privileges ). Those jokes, unsurprisingly, were much funnier than these.
Worse, that caps off the 1st book. Well, ’cept that due to the weird formatting o’ this book, I separated all the Sundays from the dailies. Howe’er, I will spare you almost all o’ them, as none o’ them are interesting, & the vast majority just reiterate their week’s themes. But I will leave 1 mo’ with Sid:
My only complaint gainst this comic is that the final panel is bad. If I made it now, I’d end it on the final pause.
I wouldn’t blame anyone who bowed out on reading the next 2 books with me, e’en the incredibly abridged version I have here. The comic does get a’least mo’ interesting — albeit not better — in the next few books.
“Defeat the giant bee!” feels e’en mo’ like a padding level than other boss levels, repeating similar setpieces with the bees introduced in the level preceding this level, — granted they fit better here: they just would’ve had a better effect if they were introduced here — as well as returning the terrible floors you can fall thru to hide the treasure door, as well as yet ’nother down there for some coins.
The bees aren’t fun, either: puffy Wario is ’mong the least fun status effects in the series thanks to how slow it moves & how redundant it feels next to bouncy Wario; & thanks to the camera in this game, which doesn’t move unless you touch a boundary, it’s a guessing game where there are spots high ’bove you can float up to, so you’ll end up getting stung & floating up @ various places just to check e’erywhere if you haven’t already memorized the level or looked it up in a guide. They’re not challenging to get past, either, as you can just stay ducking & they can’t sting you. You’d think they’d put the effort to better differentiate this level from “Escape from Maze Woods” by making you climb up platforms that require you to be standing to reach them to add difficulty, but the bee sections in this level are actually easier & simpler than that earlier level.
Wario Land II was a transition point from the 1st Wario Land. It introduces the main physics, controls, & moves that define Wario Land for most people: Wario’s invincibility; a greater focus on puzzle platforming than action, which better suits Wario’s still-floaty — but not as floaty as the 1st Wario Land’s — physics; & most importantly, introduces possibly the most famous twist o’ Wario Land games, the status effects where Wario gains special power by being hit by enemies, which in different contexts can be helpful or necessary for reaching places or stifle progress, whether it be springy or puffy Wario making Wario move higher than his jumps can move him, whether he wants it or not, or flat or fat Wario, the former o’ whom can go wider distances & go o’er gaps in thin passageways, the latter o’ whom can break thru ground that regular Wario can’t, but both o’ which have weaker jumps & cannot enter doors.
That said, I don’t think Wario Land II realized the true potential o’ the series, & this mainly comes down to its levels: with the exception o’ a few branching paths to multiple endings, which are basically glorified secret exits like those in Super Mario World, & the treasure doors with their repetitive, tedious minigames you have to find in e’ery level, as well as the also-tedious & repetitive guess-the-# game, which are like the bonus coins in Donkey Kong Country games, but with e’en mo’ repetitive challenges, this game’s levels are still linear &, due to Wario’s invincibility, don’t offer much in terms o’ challenge.
I have recently compiled a long list o’ e’ery 2000s nu-metal or alt rock album I will probably e’er review on this blog — ’nough to last several years, mo’ than 60. & o’ all those albums, I promise you: none will be as cringe as this album. Yes, including BrokeNCYDE & Family Force 5, who are all on the list. Arguably Falling in Reverse are mo’ cringe, but they’re too late to be included in this series, so Ronnie Radke’s precious feelings are safe from the venom o’ my keyboard & he’ll have to stick to dressing up as Danthony Phantomtano for Halloween to occupy his time.
Hollywood Undead is not so safe, howe’er. I would joke that all I need to say to close my case is point out that this band started on MySpace, but to MySpace’s credit, they also spawned the ol’ band Drill Queen, — now mostly known as the band who created the Jimstephaniequisition song — who are not nearly as cringe. So instead I will make my case with a different statement: this is a band that combines whiteboy gangster rap & goth emo. ’Course combining hip hop & emo wasn’t that wild by that point: Korn & Linkin Park did it all the time. But Jonathan Davis & Mike Shinota weren’t talking ’bout how they’re gonna point their gun @ yo son.
The album we’ll be looking @ is their debut, Swan Songs. Despite how obviously bad this album is, my rock-bottom standards in my high school years liked it fine. I didn’t go around telling people ’twas my favorite or e’en remember it much beyond the year that I 1st listened to it & ripped a couple songs onto a blank CD ’long with random unrelated songs from CDs I checked out from the library, but I somehow didn’t feel too ashamed to play this music out loud @ places, & nobody shamed me for doing so, ’cause that’s just what music was in the 2000s. E’en I can’t remember how this was e’er allowed to happen, so there is no chance I could explain it to people who weren’t there @ the time, & I don’t think any good could come from younger people understanding this savage relic. But we can get some good laughs out o’ making fun o’ it, so that’s what we’re going to do.
1. Undead
O my god, ¿where do I e’en start with this song? Apparently its music takes Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train”, but fucks with its notes & makes it computerized & shitty.
This song is a brag rap; but rather than exemplify any actual clever wordplay or multilayered rhyming or paint a believable picture o’ someone who is a legit threat, they mostly sling around the same small #s o’ the same “motherfuckers”, as well as plenty o’ homophobic slurs, ’cause ’twas the noughties, & brag ’bout how they love getting drunk & crash their cars. I’m not kidding: they have a line that goes, “’cause we drunk-drive Cadillacs, we never go far”, implying that their drunk asses crash into a wall just after they start driving.
& if that doesn’t make your peepees shrink in their magnificent presence, a’least a full verse is dedicated to insecurely whining ’bout the haters, ’cause that always makes you look cool. It’s especially badass when it comes with lines like these:
you make me wanna run around pulling my guns out and shit you’re tempting me to run my mouth and call you out on this, bitch
¡Don’t you dare tempt me to… call you out? & then you call them a bitch, so you’re already calling them out. Too late. Looks like it didn’t take long for you to give into that temptation.
They follow this up by whining ’bout people misinterpreting their lyrics:
¿how ignorant you gotta be to believe any of this? you need to slit your wrists, get pissed, and go jump off a bridge what, ¿you can’t see the sarcasm in the verses I spit?
Crackas, this is your 1st album: you don’t have haters yet ’cause nobody knows who the fuck you are. Nobody’s going to slit their wrist ’cause fucking Hollywood Undead told them to.
I should add that the chorus to this hard-edge song has lines like “get up out the way” & “I don’t give a fuck what you think or say”, which surely impressed the 12 year ol’s o’ 2008.
& then J-Dog, with the most generic rap name, comes in with these hard lines:
white boys with tattoos p-pointing right @ you we’re breaking everything, r-rowdy like a classroom pack of wolves ’cause we don’t follow the rules & when you’re running your mouth our razor blades come out
Better watch out, ’cause this rowdy classroom’ll give you a close shave.
Genius claims the song has the following lines:
because there’s nothing in my life except my dick & what I spit so my dick is in my hand when I respond to faggots talking shit speaking of fag, already rapped with the drag we killed him then we stuffed his body in the Cadillac
But I didn’t hear this on either the YouTube Music version o’ this song or the version I ripped off the CD I borrowed from the library way back in 2008, presumably the original release. I could understand why they would want to remove it, as it goes beyond the casual homophobia o’ throwing round slurs @ anyone & e’eryone to specifically talking ’bout carrying out a hate crime gainst someone in drag.
In any case, it’s impossible to take seriously that these clowns could carry out such a crime, anyway, especially when they follow it with these hard-ass lines:
¿so what the fuck you know about being a gangster? ¿& what the fuck you know about being in danger? you ain’t doing this so you know you’re just talking shit
& in his defense, he’s right: I ain’t making cheesy raps ’bout being a whiteboy gangster & I am talking shit.
Grade:D
2. Sell Your Soul
We follow that hard-ass gangster brag rap with a bizarre mix o’ an emo song, starting with generic piano notes, & a “fuck the haters” anthem as the verses & chorus devolve into shouting & screaming. Like the previous song, the basis for this hate is vague; — beyond I guess the fact that this music is goofy — but unlike that song the way this writer describes it is mo’ detailed & much mo’ melodramatic, with such lines as:
¿how did it come to this? ¿how did I know it was you? it was a bad dream asphyxiated watch me bleed the life support was cut the knot was too tight they push and pull me but they know they’ll never win
&
my heartbeat stumbles & my backbone crumbles i feel, ¿is it real?, as the lynch mob doubles they want blood & they’ll kill for it drain me & they’ll kneel for it burn me @ the stake met the devil made the deal for it guillotine dreams, yeah, their guillotine gleams the blood of their enemies watching while they sentence me sentencing ceased sentence deceased & watch them bask in the glory of their holy disease
I don’t get the point o’ this song or what the listener is s’posed to feel — & for as cheesy as most nu-metal is, I understand what pretty much e’ery Thousand Foot Krutch, Skillet, or Papa Roach song is s’posed to evoke int he listener.
Grade: F
3. Everywhere I Go
& then after that emo song ’bout the struggles o’ the hood life we get a song ’bout how they like to show their “weenies” — that’s the word they use — to women in a kind o’ hoedown ’bout how “bitches always know” with a wacky accent & cheap artificial music that sounds like an e’en worse Eminem song off Encore, but without the creativity — yes, I will defend Encore compared to this.
& the lyrics in this song make the previous 2 sound like Eminem in comparison. The 1st line o’ the 1st verse, in a jerky stop-&-go flow:
wake up, grab beer, grab rear, shave beard
We also get some o’ the most forced, & yet also unimaginable, references e’er:
& I’ll punk the pussy like I’m Ashton Kutcher
I’m like Cheech, you got the Chong, hitting up this beer bong
¿Is “the Chong” e’en a real thing? ¿What is the point o’ bringing up Cheech & Chong? You’re not e’en smoking weed; you’re just drinking. ¿You couldn’t e’en do drug as hard as I do?
I’ll be straight: this is the only song so far that I’ve just refused to listen to all the way thru ’cause it’s so intolerable & makes me deathly ’fraid someone somewhere will somehow hear it seep thru the headphones, it’s so embarrassing. E’en while reading thru the lyrics I could only scan them, as they are just humiliating the read. Literally the worst nu-metal song e’er — & yet it somehow merited a music video.
Grade: ☠️
4. No Other Place
See, now this song is actually pretty fun. Gone is the artificial emo shit or try-hard butthurt “fuck the haters” crap. Instead it’s just a song ’bout partying with a decent beat. There are a million better rap songs out there, e’en in that era, which was also a bad time for hiphop as for rock, but with the rock-bottom standards this album gives us, this is a godsend.
’Course, the lyrics are all dumb, specially the chorus, where the singer for some reason feels it necessary to bring up to the woman he’s asking to dance that she “got a fat ass, but you shake it like you ain’t a hoe”. ¿Do hoes not shake well? I would expect that hoes, whose job is to be sexy, should be the best @ shaking.
Grade: C
5. No. 5
This is basically “No Other Place”, but a sillier & lazier. The chorus has the singer in a very high-pitched, squeaky voice squeal, “& all the kids in the hood come on & wave & shake your hands”, which is just as rad as the average chorus line in a Thousand Foot Krutch song, while the lyrics just keep rhyming “drunk” & “fuck” repeatedly, as well as mo’ forced references that come out o’ nowhere to Paris Hilton & Bob Saget. & then the bridge tirelessly lists how all 20 members o’ this band “make the booty drop”. I will give Johnny 3 Tears, as lame as his name is, that he has charisma while rap/singing/whate’er; it’s just too bad they couldn’t get a better lyricist.
Hold on, ¿what are these lyrics, tho?
ladies show me your treats like it’s Halloween you got a fake id & you’re 17
Charlie Scene wants to have sex with an underaged girl.
¡Thanks, Genius!
Grade: 🚨
6. Young
O god, now we’re back to the fake emo stuff, & this is the nadir. You know a song’s good when the 1st line o’ the 1st verse is, “i see the children in the rain like the parade before the pain”. Like Simple Plan’s telling these crackers to tone it down. ¿What the fuck is “the parade before the pain”? Also, after the last song I don’t want to hear this band talking ’bout looking @ children.
But during the prechorus they get pumped & angry — ¡they’re raging gainst this vague machine! — as they talk ’bout marching to the drums &… ¿being numb? I’ve ne’er heard someone so aggressive ’bout not feeling anything @ all.
What they’re marching against is, as I said, vague. The only specific line is some rag gainst “medication for the kids with no reason to live”. Clearly a bunch o’ people in costumes marching around is a better cure for suicidal depression than medicine based on peer-reviewed studies.
I really feel the whiplash when we hit this line:
but you take all we are the innocence of our hearts
It’s hard to take seriously the innocence o’ the hearts o’ people who had just gifted us such sentimental lyrics as “everywhere I go bitches always know that Charlie Scene has got a weenie that he loves to show” & “you got a fat ass, but you shake it like you ain’t a hoe”.
& if you didn’t think this song was excruciating ’nough after the 2 verses, the bridge has a children’s choir sing, “till the angels save us all”. I wish they could save me from this song.
Grade: F
7. Black Dahlia
¿Mo’ emo shit? I thought these were s’posed to be badass gangsters. These lyrics are so cliché that they actually talk ’bout how they cut themselves — rhyming “cuts” with “fucked up”, no less — & make constant references to tears being “dried up now” &, my favorite, “these tears are deadly”. ¡O fuck! ¡Don’t fuck with this bro’s tears, dogg! ¡You make ’em want to run around pulling their guns out & shit & calling you out on this bitch!
The verses are rapped in this stilted, jerky 1, 2, 3, 4 meter with the most obvious rhymes:
¿you feel bad? ¿you feel sad? i’m sorry hell no fuck that it was my heart, it was my life, it was my start, it was your knife this strife, it dies, this life & these lies i wish i could’ve quit you, I wish I never missed you & told you that I loved you every time I fucked you
This last line has the lyricist so desperate to rhyme a word “love” with “fuck” ’cause they couldn’t think o’ any other word that they invented this bizarre scenario where someone regrets not saying, <Remember that I love you, baby>, e’ery time just before ramming his cock into her — ’cause that’s a normal thing to do, not, like, when you meet.
& underneath these tragic lyrics are a generic midi sample that sounds like ’twas rejected by Wesley Willis, with the softest o’ drum beats — mo’ like plastic slaps.
Grade: F
8. This Love, This Hate
OK, now this is just nursery rhyme bullshit, with that obnoxious squeaky “DOO-DOO-DOO-DOO DOO-DOO-DOO” jingle thruout the whole song while the singer sings generic lyrics ’bout being strong & shields & lions & shit with the most grating, nasally voice, specially when saying, “& we got each other’s backs” or in the chorus. What the title “this love, this hate” has to do with this song, by the way, I have no idea.
Fitting this juvenile song are juvenile lyrics that struggle to cobble together words into halfway English sentences to keep its common rhymes:
& we once also had a story too you can see that good men only come in few
I, too, would say that phrase, “& we once also had a story, too”, ’cause I am also an alien.
Howe’er this song does sum up my feelings for it with these lines:
i don’t wanna live this destiny it goes on endlessly
Honestly, I think I can’t stand this song e’en mo’ than “Everywhere I Go”, which a’least was somewhat funny & audacious in how bad it is.
Grade: F
9. Bottle And A Gun
After the previous boring whiny songs, this song’s absolute stupidity is much better appreciated, as well as the much better deeper, darker beats — which, granted, just sounds like the level theme to a generic FPS.
The lyrics are, ’course, dumb & repetitive: “Funny Man” telling girls to drop their panties like he did in “No. 5” while bragging ’bout how he “play a bitch like Nintendo”, after which someone helpfully shouts, <¡Zelda!> in the background to remind you o’ what Nintendo makes, & Charlie Scene’s rapping ’bout being drunk & telling women to shake their asses ’gain while giving such killer lines, like telling women to smoke his pole like a Marlboro. Some lines don’t e’en make much sense, like when Funny Man says he’s “sexual like I’m hetero”. ¿Is he implying that LGBTQ+ people aren’t sexual? That’s an interesting inverse o’ the stereotypes that conservatives have gainst them.
On the other hand, the pop culture references are less awkward: the Charlie’s Angels bit a’least felt relevant, albeit obvious, & the line ’bout buying Tom’s soul back from Rupert Murdoch was probably the only legit kinda funny thing they said on this album — albeit it requires knowing ’bout News Corp buying MySpace & Hollywood Undead’s origins on MySpace to get it. Also, Specific Media would do Charlie Scene’s work for him just 3 years later.
That said, these poseurs have the gall to use the line, “Hollywood Undead ain’t nothing to fuck with” stolen straight from Wu-Tang Clan. That’s sacrilege.
The chorus is ridiculous, singing in a soft, soulful croon how they “can show you how to hump without making love”. I am curious ’bout that & what it e’en means, but tragically, tho they claim they can show how to do this, they do not actually do so in this song.
Grade: D
Intermission
Speaking o’ Wu-Tang, I think we’ve all earned a break from this album, so let’s listen to why Wu-Tang Clan are truly nothing to fuck wit:
All right, let’s get back to work.
10. California
This is just “Shitty California Love”. ¿Why would anyone want to listen to this song when that song already does e’erything this song meagerly attempts to do fails? ¿& why do so many people make so many songs ’bout just vaguely California as a whole? California is the most populous state in the US & is the media center o’ the world: it’s not all that impressive that you’re vaguely somewhere in this massive state like e’eryone else involved in media. You might as well make a song representing the entire US @ this point. Nowadays rappers should have to talk ’bout specific territories in California, like LA, San Francisco, or San Diego — or if they want to be exotic, Oakland or Sacramento. It specially looks silly to see these doofuses in their costumes pretending to represent a state that hundreds of other rappers already pretend to represent — & is still represented by St. Tupac, as canonized by the Council o’ Rappers. These crackers couldn’t e’en represent North Dakota.
This is the most generic song on this album full o’ generic songs with generic lyrics that just say stuff just to rhyme, e’en tho the rhymes themselves are so predictable:
horny like a sickness, quickies with the quickness pussy like it’s business, work it like it’s fitness listen while I spit this, game at all these bitches now I’m gonna hit this & fuck it till I’m dickless
None o’ these metric feet have any relevance to each other, & “quickies with the quickness” is both redundant & involves a word like “quickness” that nobody actually uses outside o’ bad songs trying to force a rhyme ’cause it sounds awful.
Grade: F
11. City
O’ all the emo songs — yes, Hollywood Undead’s manic depression has switched back from their manic high o’ fucking bitches back down to their emo crying — this is the best o’ them. Yes, the lyrics are vague & repetitive ’bout making the city burn & repeat the same weird rants ’bout medication as “Young” & the chorus’s soft, soulful croon does not fit talking ’bout acts o’ citywide terrorism @ all & the soft slap drums are annoying. But the verses themselves have some pretty interesting rhythms, specially the 2nd verse, where the singer jumps from rapid shouting to a slower tempo, in an erratic way that fits a song ’bout chaotic terrorism.
Considering the tumulus/violent [sic] environment that Hollywood Undead transcended as a result of Swan Songs and Desperate Measures, this is a track resonant with the societal ills that families in Los Angeles face.
These 2 clauses don’t fit together. ¿What “tumulus” & violent environment did Hollywood Undead so-poetically transcend as a result o’ this album, ¿& how would that resonate with regular people’s problems? ¿What problems do Los Angeles citizens face that others don’t?
“City” is pretty metaphoric and self-referential; considering the band’s ascent to fame, they asked if anybody wished to accompany them during their rise, an ascent comparable to arson enactments.
1st, there’s no “pretty metaphoric”: metaphoric is binary — it either is metaphoric or isn’t. 2nd, LOL on “considering the band’s ascent to fame”. Fuck J. Cole’s big 3 — there’s only the big undead. There’s a reason Kendrick was afraid to diss real Gs Hollywood Undead ( tho, as we saw in an earlier song, a’least 1 o’ them apparently likes them 17 like Drake ).
Grade: C
12. The Diary
You’d think I’d go all-in hard on this song, arguably the most emo o’ emo songs on this album, but I’m mo’ mixed. While the opening sad strings are cheesy as hell & the singer singraps his depression like he’s in a rap battle, ending 1 verse with the line, “pour myself a whiskey & go back to sleep, bitch” like he’s emo Jesse Pinkman, the lyrics are mo’ specific & real ’bout depression than some generic tripe ’bout “deadly” tears & shields & lions & shit, talking specifically ’bout bitterness @ a father shared with his mother — tho no detail on why — & what seem to be shout outs to family members. This song e’en ties into the party sex songs, with the line, “& hoes you see hoes you see I’m just in a rut” recontextualizing the singer’s hedonistic partying as an attempt to fill a vacant life in a similar way to Weezer’s ( much better song ) “Tired of Sex”. While repetitive, the repetition works better for this song, since the repetition matches the feeling o’ being “just in a rut”. In essence, it’s an emo song, but it’s a halfway competent 1. If not for the hokey music & the squeaky voice o’ the chorus, I’d go far ’nough to call it full-on good.
Grade: C
13. Pimpin’
& after that raw song o’ deep suicidal depression, we get a song called “Pimpin’”, where the chorus goes, “we ride with gangsters and the pimping’s easy”. This song’s fine. I do kind o’ like the rhythm. ( Yawn ). ¿This album’s still going? This is less generic than “California”, but not by much.
Grade: D
14. Paradise Lost
OK, after that song ’bout gangster pimping now we have a very angsty song ’bout how angry the singer is @ God for — ¿Who fucking knows? ¿What is up with the whiplash on this album? ¿Is it intentional?
God, I’ve tried ¿am I lost in your eyes?
Maybe if you tell God they have a fat ass but they shake it like they ain’t a hoe they’ll give you salvation.
The singing is obnoxious, with the verses having this incessant thudding “augh augh augh augh”, while the chorus is the typically squeaky squeal. Meanwhile, the music is electronic goop. The only notable thing is that the opening notes o’ this song are just straight up stolen from John Carpenter’s Halloween theme, but slowed down. What a great song on which to end the album.
Grade: F
15. Pain
’Cept YouTube Music was nice ’nough to offer me the “Collector’s Edition” with 7 extra tracks. ¡That’s 1.5 times the fun!
This is the same typical screamo shit, with those patented Kroeger-brand emo lyrics:
the next of this youth with their necks through this noose were told lies like it’s truth and we suspect that it’s you
Yeah, telling “lies like it’s truth” is, indeed, how lying works. Thank you for that clarification that clearly doesn’t just exist to force in a corny rhyme.
The singer then goes on ’bout strapping kids with an AK, which I thought was ’bout how society was making kids into school shooters or something, but Genius thinks it’s ’bout leading kids into the military. See, the problem is that they’ll throw in these short quips ’bout medicine or war, but don’t elaborate on them.
Anyway, later in that verse the singer says he’ll “watch the world die thru crimson eyes”, & then says “I cry, it turns to night” in a monotone voice like he’s telling his mom what flavor o’ TV dinner he wants that night.
Grade: F
Intermission 2
To prove that I don’t hate emo, — I certainly have no room to judge, given that I grew up with Papa “I cut my heart open, I sew myself shut” Roach — just bad emo mixed with whiteboy gangster bullshit, here’s a much, much better emo song called “Pain” as a much needed 2nd break:
16. The Natives
Mo’ midi music, only to add midi guitar during the 2nd verse.
I don’t want to hear this cracker talk ’bout “beef” while singing in such a squeaky voice.
Charlie Scene’s attempts to praise himself in the 2nd verse are adorable: yes, keep telling yourself you take it seriously & that you’ll keep getting props — ¡which are like “permanent high-5”s, dude! — for the rest o’ your lives & that your rhymes are tight — ¡just before a line with an awkward pause @ the end ’cause it wasn’t long ’nough to fit the meter! Maybe ’twas on purpose. A Genius annotation is nice ’nough to explain to the listeners that “‘Tight’ is slang for ‘cool’ or ‘good’”, which should be very helpful for the 80-year-ol’ grandma listening & wanting to know what this hiphippin’ youngfolks be all about in the cabbage patch, daddy-o. This annotation also expresses perplexity @ the description o’ the band as “6 white guys”, when 1 o’ the members is Mexican, apparently oblivious to the fact that there do, in fact, exist Mexican honkeys — & looking @ his profile on the Hollywood Undead Wiki, he does, in fact, appear to be un blanquito.
Grade: D
17. Knife Called Lust
With such a title, ¿would it surprise you to hear it start with electro clown music & then a “¡YEAHT’s GO!”. This belching voice — who is apparently “Shady Jeff”, because there’s no better rap alias than putting a dangerous-sounding adjective before a nerdy name — also nicely helps Deuce sing the latter part, “this love, this hate, is burning me away” with a raspy scream, which goes together with Deuce’s squeaky voice like if Thom Yorke & David Draiman did a duet.
I cannot get o’er how fucking generic these lyrics are. Verse 2 starts with the line, “I’m mad @ the fact that your dad is an addict”. ¿Who talks like that? ¿Is this song from the point o’ view o’ a robot? “Panic” is rhymed with “tragic”; “fuck some girl” is rhymed with “fuck the world”; “choice”, “voice”; “love”, “trust”.
Grade: F
18. The Loss
sick with myself, but I’ve got no one else so I give it to myself, it’s the only thing that helps it’s the same thing, this pain thing that keeps me from sleeping & screaming to God I must be motherfucking dreaming
So, I read the 1st 2 lines &, I’m sorry, when I see “I’ve got no one else” followed by “so I give it to myself”, the only logical assumption is masturbation; but then the 3rd & 4th line talk ’bout some vague pain & screaming @ God, but it’s too late, the image o’ some angry whiteboy jerking it under the sheets has already arrived, unrequested, & any mood for epic drama ’bout nightmares & God has been killed before it could take the stage. This is the problem with lyrics as vague as “give it to myself”.
¿have you ever met a living legend, just a real friend?
¿who planned his end & where do I begin? you said it was pretend & when the bullet went thru it took more than just you it took 2, it was you, it was me & suddenly
Bitch, you did not just describe your homey’s suicide with these nursery rhymes.
¿how could someone say they’re helpless & then they act so selfish?
O, cool, ’nother “suicidal people are selfish” line. That’s what psychologists always recommend you say to suicidal people: “quit bein’ a selfish-ass bitch & stay alive, bruh”. A’least Thousand Foot Krutch had the excuse that they probably believed in 1 o’ the weird sub-branches o’ Christianity that still thinks suicide is a sin. ¿& haven’t these crackers been spitting rhymes ’bout their own suicide idealization thruout this whole album? ¿Who are they to judge?
¿you thought you found an exit? like I said, let’s end this
this line is the most perplexing on this whole album. you say that suicide is no exit, but then follow by saying, “let’s end this”, which presumes that you have the real “exit”; but these lyrics imply that your friend is already dead. ¿so what are you going to give them after they’re already dead that’s a “real” exit? ¿Are you afraid that their ghost will languish the earth till you finalize some ritual?
I just wanna say goodbye disappear with no one knowing I don’t wanna live this lie smiling to the world unknowing
This is the weirdest call & response song e’er: “Don’t commit suicide: it’s selfish & makes me feel bad & if you were a true friend you wouldn’t give a shit ’bout your bitchy problems & would think o’ how I would suffer”. “No, I think suicide is the answer”. ¡& that’s the final say!
OK, since these are technically just bonus tracks, this time I won’t make fun o’ yet another mood whiplash o’ a song ’bout suicide being followed by a song called “Bitches”, which has the following deep lyrics in its chorus:
bitches I hope you know I won’t stop till I hit that ho baby come say hello & get your drunk ass over here let’s bone
This song has this very generic boop-boop beat with these cheap claps that —
¡Nope! ¡Scene, you stay the fuck away from those kids! Quit staring @ their “ghetto jeans” & telling them to shake their asses.
& I’m ne’er going to take your song seriously in how rad these kids you’re preying on are when you list MySpace as 1 o’ the hip things they do — presumably ’long with playing with slinkies & collecting pogs & Davy Crockett hats. You might as well list them being fluent in JavaScript & Klingon like Weird Al’s “White & Nerdy”. Nor am I going to take you seriously when you mention beef with someone with the name EvanThomas750, especially when Genius tells me that’s just a sockpuppet account you made up for the lolz, or give shout outs to someone with the MySpace username “Ndlestremofbombs”.
Also, we’ve established that this band is “6 white guys”, ¿so who’s the guy saying, “niggas in shit alley show me where you @”? Genius tells me it’s Deuce, who’s definitely a cracker.
Anyway, this song is the same annoying electrojunk as the rest & I definitely don’t want to hear 1 o’ these guys repeat, “fuck the pain away to make it thru the day” in a song called “The Kids”.
Grade: F
Intermission 3
I know we just have 1 song left, but since I brought up “White & Nerdy”…
21. Circles
We start with some harplike dreamy plinking & 4 lines that are the closest Hollywood Undead has come to serious lyrics that don’t sound hackneyed or embarrassing:
take my hand let’s go somewhere we can rest our souls we’ll sit where it’s warm you say, <look we’re here alone>
OK, so they’re not the most original lines: but compared to lines like, “I’m mad @ the fact that your dad is an addict”, this sounds like Wordsworth.
But then the song devolves into the same generic nursery rhymes o’ “find my purpose”, “everything was so worthless”, “I didn’t deserve this”, “you were perfect”, & comparing this girl to an angel & saying you need a savior & blood &… I’m almost wishing Deuce would go back to telling girls they shake it like they ain’t a hoe.
Grade: F
The last 3 songs are just remixes o’ the “Black Dahlia”, o’ all songs, & I don’t need to review them. They’re all repetitive, o’erproduced electrojunk. We are finally free from the cringe… till next month.
On New Year’s Eve of 2014, I became the subject of a terrifying experiment.
By the end of my stay, I had turned from a happy-go-lucky novelist into a squeaking gerbil of a man, psychologically compromised and barely sure of what constituted reality.
This “terrifying experiment” this melodramatic writer experienced was watching laughably inane state propaganda. The hairs haven’t stood up on my flesh this much since when H. P. Lovecraft described the unspeakable horrors o’ having to stand next to a black person on a New York bus. If they wanted to engage in a truly terrifying experiment they could subject themselves to the kind o’ real torture Russia — & the US — inflicts gainst people who were very naughty rather than the kind o’ shit the average unemployed person watched in the afternoon while bored & on drugs.
On the one hand, the length of my sentence has been commuted to five days from seven; on the other hand, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the state’s propaganda has become even more loud, brash, and genocidal, making any length of exposure to it psychologically problematic.
Clearly the worst tragedy o’ this invasion aren’t the many, many Ukranian lives lost but this o’erpaid writer’s emotional hardships having to endure this prison sentence that they inflicted on themself o’ sitting on their useless ass & watching TV all day.
Day 1
I arrive at the Public Hotel on the Lower East Side on a cold day this past April. My room has nice views of most of the downtown-Manhattan skyline, which lights up in flashes of pink and purple as the sun begins to set over New Jersey —
O, ¡fuck off! I fucking hate these shitty writers stroking their own hard-on pretending like they’re fucking Tom Wolfe. Nobody fucking cares what the weather was on a day you decided to sit on your fucking ass watching TV you assclown. “My orange Cheetos glowed under the dim light o’ my apartment. Now that my TV was muted during a commercial the only sound that could be heard was the skrit-skrit o’ me scratching my hairy balls”.
The first thing you notice when you switch on Russian TV is its totemic fascination with the swastika, which regularly appears on one of my screens. Sometimes it is taken from footage of the Nazi era, sometimes from purported videos of the Ukrainian far right. Sometimes it is on the news, sometimes in a documentary, sometimes in a TV drama. By my third or fourth swastika of the day, I start to believe that when the symbol is shown this often, it is not done so entirely with disparagement, but with a subconscious appeal to authoritarian power and to the state’s own fascism.
While I don’t disagree that contemporary Russian culture has an affinity for authoritarianism, this thesis o’ his is self-contradictory & absurd. ¿Why would Russia heavily associate the Ukrainian far right, the problem they use as a ’scuse for their invasion, & thus something they want to appear e’en mo’ gainst than Ukraine’s government, with their own culture? Furthermo’, as we will see, Russian propaganda apparently also loves to cater back to WWII & Russia’s fight against the Nazis. ¿Wouldn’t it be the ultimate treason to praise the very organization that tried to obliterate Russia, which literally put Russians in the holocaust? ¿Why not pick a mo’ fitting authoritarian leader, like, you know, Stalin, an actual Russian leader? I don’t want to doubt this writer’s amazing arm-chair theorizing that isn’t totally pulled out o’ his ass, ¿but wouldn’t it make mo’ sense that Russian propaganda is just using the Nazis as an effective Godwin’s rule tying the west in general to the Nazis & to try inducing constant fear gainst the west in their populace that if they don’t support the Ukrainian invasion the west will invade & mass murder them like the Nazis did in the 40s? After all, it’s not just Russian media obsessed with the Nazis: American media, like the History Channel, is notorious for their obsession with Hitler & the Nazis. ( Granted, given that this US election has a candidate who outright admits he’ll become a dictator “[only] for day 1” & is still ’bout half & half in popularity with his opponent, we can’t rule out the US having an affinity for authoritarianism, or Hitler, for that matter, given that candidate’s dogwhistling references to Hitler & the Nazis ).
A lot of time on all three networks is given over to flashy “newsroom” sets populated by older men in blazers who scream about the West. Kto Protiv (“Who Is Against”), on Rossiya 1, is one such program. The subject matter is often akin to what one sees on far-right television in the U.S., the exemplar of which is Fox News.
Fox News has always been known to scream ’bout “the West”.
But Russian state television is several degrees to the right of Fox, or even of its more lunatic competitor, Newsmax, although Tucker Carlson, the onetime king of televised white supremacy, is frequently shown on Russian TV as well—or, at least, he was back in April.
& here this hack writer stumbles o’er himself in contradictions, presumably so as not to offend his American audience. If Russian state television is “several degrees” to the right o’ Fox, ¿why does it regularly have on a former regular Fox white supremacist, — acknowledging that US media regularly has on white supremacists, ¿how can any media be several degrees to the right o’ that? — who is apparently moderate compared to worse US media? It sounds like Russian state television is @ just the level o’ lunatic fascist propaganda as US media — which I would agree is too much.
A panelist mispronounces the term LGBTQ+ to general laughter. (“Is it plus or minus?” another panelist asks.) Afterward, an “economic expert” tells the audience that transgender bodies have begun to fall apart. No evidence is cited for any of this; it’s merely people talking or, as some like to say, “asking questions.”
Meanwhile, on Channel 1, a black-and-white documentary shows Khrushchev greeting a group of cosmonauts. The glories of the Soviet past on one screen are contrasted with the realities of the present on another.
O’ all the bad propaganda Russian state media surely has defending their dumbass war, the typical nostalgia fuel is the least “terrifying” I could imagine. I know I always hide in pure terror @ the dystopian I live in whene’er I see histories ’bout George Washington. Clearly this is a devious plot by the US to make me like the US mo’. It’s almost as if e’ery country likes to pump up its past accomplishments. Hell, it’s better than Russia pretending they have present accomplishments.
You may ask why a government obsessed with propaganda would be showing programs about broken families. One reason is that audiences of all nations enjoy watching their fellow citizens in pain.
The show is presented by two dapper male hosts who are part of a well-trod Russian-TV theme: Provincials in distress are interviewed by stylish urban hosts, as if they are Chekhovian peasants being judged before the district court in czarist times. Subconsciously, shows like these teach poorer and older Russians (the kind of people who regularly watch state television) that they should be ashamed before their betters and that they cannot expect much from life or their immediate families.
This isn’t really any different from US daytime television, which is also aimed @ unemployed poor & is also infamous for propaganda denigrating toward poor people, especially Cops, literal state propaganda that shows cops as always competent & in the right & the criminals they go after always being incompetent, lazy, sloppy, ( usually ethnic ) & always poor. & if you were to ask my mother @ the time why she watched it, she would say the same thing: it’s comforting to see someone e’en worse off — e’en if clearly fake. Hardly the traumatizing torture that this article writer presents it as. If anything, what’s wrong with this is how boring it sounds compared to US shows like Maury or Jerry Springer, when he was still alive & it was still on.
The old woman crawls on the floor. “Forgive me! Forgive me!” she cries to her children. Now we have left the pages of Chekhov and arrived in Dostoyevsky Land.
This writer must’ve thought himself so clever & well-read for referencing 2 o’ the 3 most well-known Russian writers & not, like, any o’ the thousand other writers mo’ fitting — & my research indicates that this writer came from Russia, so either he barely read anything in his original language or he’s deliberately dumbing down this article for his audience. ¿& how would an ol’ woman crawling on the floor & crying, “Forgive me!”, be out o’ step for Chekhov — especially when you just described “Chekhovian peasants being judged before the district court in czarist times”.
The show about the dysfunctional family cuts to a commercial for a fast-food chain that has replaced McDonald’s after the sanctions for the Russian invasion of Ukraine were imposed.
Truly we see the unbearable hardships Russians now face for their imperialist crimes: ¡being deprived o’ that irresistible American cuisine!
The copycat McDonald’s is offering an unconvincing-looking “beeeeg speshal roast beef,” as an announcer describes it.
To be fair, if the roast beef looks unconvincing, then they did a pretty good job o’ emulating McDonalds.
On Rossiya 1, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is giving one of his usual bombastic speeches: “They want to cancel our country, as they like to say. They’re trying to cancel our country for pursuing its own politics. The West has long groomed Ukraine … Just like Germany invaded Russia.” The television shows another Nazi parade, a long sea of swastikas and chanting in German.
It’s only 9 p.m., but I am exhausted. I have drained two glasses of pisco sour and eaten my ceviche from the hotel’s restaurant, and am blindly watching a movie called Razplata (“Payback”), which seems to be about a drunken man who beats his wife. My vision is getting hazy and my eyes can barely see what’s happening on the three monitors, but I can sense that it is a triptych of a nation that has no idea what it is supposed to be.
What I love is that this article is far worse anti-US propaganda than Russia’s weak-ass attempt: nothing makes the Americans look like weak-ass crybabies like getting “exhausted” from sitting on your ass watching TV till 9 PM instead o’ working a real job. For any non-Americans out there reading this: we’re not all that lazy & useless; some o’ us have real, productive jobs & don’t just sit around watching shitty TV all day. Shit, as this blog shows, I read shitty news articles in my free time, & somehow I don’t get exhausted. Maybe this writer should eat better & work out mo’; it sounds like he has health problems.
Day 2
O my god, ¿we’re only @ day 2 out o’ 5? I take back what I said: I’m tired o’ this shitty article.
“Not my King!” The day’s news begins with anti-monarchist demonstrations in the U.K. “At least no one is throwing eggs at him like last time,” the NTV announcer intones as King Charles III is booed.
¡Hell yeah! I agree with this propaganda. ¿Who doesn’t hate filthy monarchs? Obviously only fascist Americans who have rejected e’en the watered-down liberalism on which the US was founded, that’s who. The only person I disagree with is the announcer: I wish they did throw eggs @ him.
Here the Royal Family is criticized for a variety of sins, such as colonialism in Africa and the 3 million pounds King Charles supposedly received from a Qatari sheikh.
Well, it’s cool to hear this white writer simp for colonizing Africa; ¿or is this writer like Kanye West & denies that the west colonized Africa? I dunno, I’m a far-leftist extremist, so I don’t support colonization & slavery, so maybe I’m not a reliable perspective, especially given the aforementioned large American audience hungry for white supremacists, but maybe it’s not a good idea to try attacking Russia by associating them with critics gainst African colonization. I’m sure this writer is implying that Russia is cynical in their criticism; but the west is surely a li’l cynical when they criticize Islamic fundamentalists & their treatment o’ women ( especially when they largely supported those Islamic fundamentalists gainst the Marxists who respected women’s rights better in Afghanistan earlier as part o’ their proxy cold war with the Soviet Union ), & yet it would still be right to call someone who snorts @ criticism, e’en by the west, o’ Islamic fundamentalist oppression as assholes.
Although Russian propaganda normally skews far right, its producers are able to pivot quickly from feigning horror at transgendered people to promoting a kind of Soviet-flavored anti-colonialism.
It’s almost as if Russian propaganda serves its own materialist interest rather than the US’s own made-up abstract ideology groupings. To be fair, I’m sure foreigners find the US supporting left-wing ideas like political democracy, but opposing economic democracy & supporting right-wing economics absurd.
Surely something will appeal to Misha from Murmansk or Vanya from Vladivostok, or any of the more than 100 million viewers who spend an average of almost four hours a day digesting this spicy gruel.
I would say that you could feel the seething disdain this writer has for these filthy foreigners with their weird names, but as stated, this writer came from the Soviet Union, so either he’s just cynically playing on the average American’s seething racism so he can be 1 o’ the “good ones” or is like that Dave Chappelle black KKK member.
After the booing of King Charles, the national weather forecast features temperatures in Donetsk and Melitopol in addition to Yalta, all cities stolen from Ukraine. I note that the city of Kherson, liberated by the Ukrainian army, does not make an appearance.
Clearly the worst thing Russia has done to Ukraine is refuse to tell them what the weather is in their cities. Ukrainians are now rethinking this war thing. “Let’s face it: ¡we are nothing without Russia’s irreplaceable weather-predicting technology!”.
But NTV is skewing younger with a show about women being stalked by ex-lovers. “He’s a professional boxer and he punched me several times,” a woman says of her former boyfriend. “He has a very aggressive nature.” A model is being blackmailed over sex videos by her ex. “Smartphones have made stalking easy,” the announcer intones. “He threatened to knock my teeth out,” another woman says, and we are treated to an array of horrifying bruises. The program notes that stalking of exes by spurned lovers is a problem in the U.S. and Germany as well.
If this article taught me anything — & that’s if this writer isn’t completely making e’erything up, which is possible — it’s that for all Russia’s talk o’ the weak, decadent west, Russia’s media is just as trashy as US media. That’s what happens when you let that capitalism into your country. Lenin wouldn’t have let this happen. ¿Where are Marx & Lenin when we need them, Counter Punch?
This may be true, but after watching Russian television for less than 24 hours, I am starting to see a through line here, which is the consistent presence of violence in Russian shows, usually committed against women and children. The verb meaning “to hit” comes up constantly, which makes sense in a country where men encounter horrific hazing in the military as well as a cruel and violent penal system. In 2017 the Duma even passed a law decriminalizing domestic abuse that does not result in the victim being treated in a hospital.
I would love to hear this writer’s theory on why US media — & media all o’er the world, in fact — is also full o’ violence, especially gainst women. It’s terrible, yes, but not terribly relevant to Russia’s invasion o’ Ukraine or their authoritarian politics. I can’t imagine thinking, { Well, yes, they are making an imperial conquest on Ukraine & have essentially a president for life; but a’least they don’t love to hit women }.
There’s an ad break for a male anti-impotence drug called “the Emperor’s Secret,” supposedly made in China out of various fungi. “The Emperor’s Secret can be mixed with alcohol,” the announcer helpfully advises the Russian male.
¿What is the point o’ this? This shit exists in the US. I’m sorry writer who has ne’er watched TV before & is apparently amazed by this 20th-century technology, but I’m not enthralled by this carnival you’re attempting to exhibit. All you’re telling me is that Russians are just as boring as Americans. ¿Is this meant to make me sympathize with Russians? ’Cause the idea that anti-impotence drug commercials will be the seed to the US’s own fall into fascism doesn’t make me feel better.
Next up, NTV introduces an American named John McIntyre who fought with the Ukrainians but then fled to Russia. He has been described as mentally unstable by fellow soldiers and commanders and was allegedly pushed out of the Ukrainian army for incompetence, but in Russia he is a prized asset, proudly wearing his Che Guevara baseball cap and T-shirt. The program intimates that it was a right-wing Ukrainian battalion that caused the well-known massacres in Bucha and Irpin, and not the Russian soldiers whose campaign of rape, execution, and terror was well documented.
I’m not sure why this writer assumes we’re all ableist assholes like him & think we’re going to naturally hate someone Ukrainians insult for illnesses that are not his fault or ’cause he wears T-shirts. I love how American media is so shitty that it makes me almost sympathize with the opposite side with which they want me to sympathize when I already sympathize with their side. It’s almost as if American culture is repugnant & has a twisted conception o’ what is “good”. We can’t emphasize Russia’s imperialism too much, as imperialism is too popular for Americans to make them hate Russians as we want them to, so let’s bring up neurodivergent people & Che-Guevara-shirt-wearing hipsters: those people Americans hate.
It’s especially ludicrous that they mix that nonsense with a short sentence o’ actual, serious whitewashing @ the end, in the same paragraph, e’en tho it has nothing to do with the sentence before. It’s almost as if this writer is an illiterate hack who doesn’t know how paragraphs work.
“Are there people like you in the States?” the interviewer asks McIntyre. “There are many pro-Russian Americans,” the young man replies. “American intelligence, they own the media machines. Most people watch CNN, but Fox has the most objective positions.”
I mean, if most Americans are watching fucking CNN, that would explain why so many o’ them are stupid ’nough to be pro-Putin.
“Their voices are getting louder!” an announcer on a Rossiya 1 newscast booms as older Germans are shown marching in a pro-Russia demonstration. “NATO out of Ukraine!” they chant. “U.S. and CIA out of Ukraine!” Afterward, an attractive young female correspondent brings cakes to Russian soldiers at the front. The war may be brutal, but, for Misha from Murmansk, it can also be sexy and exciting.
There is nothing mo’ sad than this o’erpaid idiot shaking his fist @ this rando Russian he made up in his head. “¡Damn you, Misha from Murmansk! ¡You were the cause o’ e’erything!”. ¿Can I get a citation proving that this totally-real Misha from Murmansk finds this war sexy & exciting & gives a shit @ all ’bout this woman & isn’t just listening to this program in the background while grinding for shiny Pokémon like most Americans do?
Channel 1 is stepping up its game in the propaganda Olympics with a “documentary” series called The Age of the USSR, which blends animation and old footage. The Russian language, the announcer tells us, has no word for “loser,” but instead has neudachnik, literally “unlucky person.” “The loser is guilty for what he hasn’t achieved,” the announcer explains. “The neudachnik is not guilty of a lack of achievement, just a lack of fortune, and he deserves sympathy.” Hence, Russia, a country of poor roads, decaying houses, and abysmal life expectancy, is not a nation of losers who lack achievement, but simply those upon whom fortune has not smiled. In other words: Don’t blame Putin for the mess we live in.
Yes, Russia should be mo’ like the US, who always blames ourselves for our own failings, which is why we try to blame Russia for magically brainwashing us into electing a white supremacist president in 2016 & not the US voters themselves, who are surely not racist, that’s why they were still lynching black people into the 50s. I’m not sure who this “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” line is aimed @: the Republicans dumb ’nough to believe in it are too far gone down the Russian hole & leftists don’t believe in this right-wing idea o’ shitting on “losers” for not being rich. I guess I’m not sure who this article is aimed @. Presumably a tiny minority o’ self-important people who will have no actual effect on US politics. But I won’t let that burst the bubble o’ this creative-writing-associate-degree dropout from his valiant, hard-hitting work sitting around watching shitty TV while judging the “losers” from his o’erpriced New York apartment. Here’s a propaganda tip for this writer that he could have learned from his “experiment”: propaganda works better if it’s not delivered by an insufferable douche.
And then the genocidal rhetoric is amped up with an animation showing a half-naked drunk Ukrainian in a pigsty (the actual pig is snorting nearby). The Ukrainian is shown with a haircut featuring a long lock of hair. This hair symbolism refers to the khokhol, a slur that Russians use against Ukrainians. It is equivalent to the worst kind of anti-Semitic and racist slurs. The image of the drunken Ukrainian with his khokhol haircut is no less eliminationist than the “hook-nosed Jew controlling the world” imagery of the Third Reich.
Yeah, ¿how would Russians feel ’bout media depicting them all as drunken losers who sit around their decaying homes drinking watching shitty TV all day & making up excuses for why they’re just “unlucky” instead o’ lazy & just let their husbands beat them all day?
O, wait: that’s this entire article. Well, like I said: we know why so many Americans end up pro-Putin — racist fascists tend to flock together. Perhaps this Russian-American writer didn’t intend to feed into that sentiment, but that is 100% the demographic the WASPs who run The Atlantic were aiming @ when they agreed to publish this.
Meanwhile on NTV, more German grannies are chanting “for peace” in a pro-Russia march, participating, whether they realize it or not, in what amounts to their own Nuremberg rally.
O my god, this propaganda is so fucking boring. Go back to the ol’ woman crawling on the floor & begging for forgiveness. Man, I can’t fathom what kind o’ country would have so much propaganda favorable to itself in its media.
As the day continues, NTV presents a documentary entitled I Was Zelensky’s Filth. A young imprisoned woman is accused of trying to bomb Mariupol’s city hall, after the battered city held a sham election in favor of joining Russia. “Mariupol is a place of glory for Russian forces and shame for the Kiev führer,” the announcer declares. That führer, of course, is none other than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, a Jew whose relatives perished in the Holocaust. The show visits the apartment of the supposed terrorist, which is hilariously staged with an American flag and Nazi memorabilia. Can Sasha from Samara possibly believe this nonsense?
This is pissing me off @ Russian media for a different reason: you can’t name your show “I Was Zelensky’s Filth” & have it be this boring. ¿Where’s the sex? I want to see some bad Zelensky imitator fucking plow 3 women @ a time. I want to see him make ol’ woman beg on the floor.
Meanwhile, on Rossiya 1 news, we learn that German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz has “fully committed himself to America. Germany can’t deal with the rising price of energy. The Greens are to blame. Germany will be turned into Kenya soon.”
This is hilarious propaganda ’cause, other than the Kenya exaggeration, it’s true: if Germany’s dumbass chancellor hadn’t shut down those nuclear power plants Germany wouldn’t need Russia’s climate-killing gas. I’m not sure how this sick burn serves Russia’s political goals, howe’er.
Geopolitics takes up an inordinate amount of airtime on Russian TV. Russian viewers are probably subjected to more images of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen than their American or European counterparts.
It makes sense that western media would want to keep such a warmonger as Blinken from too much scrutiny, which is why only the filthy leftist In These Times wants to bring it up here. Perhaps “journalists”, as they call themselves when they want to feel cute, in both countries should be ashamed @ their lack o’ scrutiny toward their own military leaders.
Day 4
There is a sadness to watching this much Russian television. I have started drinking earlier and have switched from pisco sours to vodka martinis. A part of me wants to die.
I find this writer’s constant moaning & groaning e’en mo’ unbearable ’cause here I am having to read his awful fucking reiteration o’ Russian propaganda. So not only do I get the most dumbed down version o’ what he sees, I have to see it thru his shitty-ass writing. Also, I’m not a money-wasting jackass, so I don’t know what is so inferior ’bout vodka martinis to pisco sours, ’cause I don’t waste thousands o’ $ on shit that’s just going to make me go blackout drunk, anyway. If this fuckface actually cared ’bout Ukraine he would have saved his money on grocery-store beer that’s just as good — or just not have been a degenerate drunk while hypocritically criticizing Russians for being degenerate drunks — & sent that money he saved to Ukraine’s cause. But that would be actually sacrificing himself for someone other than himself, & he only wants to pretend to do so.
But not before I catch Maria Butina’s new show on Channel 1. Butina is famous for being arrested and jailed as an unregistered Russian foreign agent in the United States. Once she was deported from the U.S., she became a member of Russia’s Parliament and, of course, the host of her own TV program. (“Today’s program is brought to you by Erecton Activ. Every woman wants to be near a strong man, strong in every way. Only 2,999 rubles.”)
Yeah, it’s crazy that Russia’s government would reward someone who did work for Russia’s government. It’s almost as if they serve their own interests & not the US’s. Like, that would be crazy if an American spy became a government official or had a show ’bout all the cool spying they did, ¿right? Clearly nobody would take that person seriously, since absolutely nobody likes spies or finds them cool.
Today, the redheaded Butina, wearing an equally red blouse and suit pants, decides to talk about Hillary Clinton. Wait, what? Who still cares about Hillary Clinton? Apparently, Butina and Tanya from Taganrog still do.
Damn, I don’t think Trump has said something so cold ’bout Clinton.
Tense music begins. According to the program, Clinton laughed “hysterically” when she was shown pictures of the death of Muammar Qaddafi. “What kind of monster responds to a person’s death like that?” Butina asks. A “psychiatrist” appears and says, “Yes, she’s a monster. But it’s because she has had to compete with men.”
I love how this writer glides o’er the inconvenient footage o’ Clinton laughing @ someone’s brutal death, which apparently included being sodomized with a bayonet. Whether “hysterical” or not, well-adjusted people don’t laugh @ pictures o’ brutal death, e’en gainst dictators. So while I don’t agree with this so-called psychiatrist’s public psychoanalysis without consent, which violates many psychological ethics, I think a layman would agree that it does make Clinton look like a terrible human being who lacks empathy. Many Americanliberals think Clinton is a monster: that’s kind o’ why she failed to win an election gainst Donald fucking Trump. Hating on Clinton, 1 o’ the most hateable American politicians, is the most low-hanging fruit e’er. Wake me when Russian propaganda has some shit to say ’bout Jimmy Carter.
But Hillary is just the appetizer to the entrée of evil that really controls the strings of world government. That man is of course George Soros. “He helped the Gestapo arrest his own co-religionists and then take away their own possessions,” an announcer says to chilling background music. “George Soros. The spider.”
I can’t believe Russia would steal Glenn Beck’s best bits.
Of course, the image of Jew as vermin or as a spider holding the world in its web is typical and, frankly, not even very imaginative anti-Semitic propaganda.
I would love to know how this writer thinks imaginative anti-Semitic propaganda would look.
But as I watch Butina’s show, I remember that my own grandfather was a Jew born in Ukraine who died fighting Germany’s fascist armies during the siege of Leningrad. A decade after his death, another fascist named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in the city my grandfather died defending. Watching Butina and her garden-variety anti-Semitism feels like a terrible desecration of his memory.
If it makes you feel better, Russia was desecrating Ukrainians long before Putin was born. If the Nazis didn’t get him, there was a good chance the famine would’ve. You could say his invasion o’ Ukraine was “typical and, frankly, not even very imaginative”. & honestly, I think the fact that your father begat such a whiny, spoiled buffoon who compares sitting on his ass & watching television to actually fighting a war is a far greater desecration o’ your grandfather’s memory. To paraphrase the wise Kendrick Lamar: “I read this & wish your grandpa would’ve worn a condom”.
Meanwhile, on NTV’s news program, Elon Musk declares in a clip, “All news is propaganda. People have to decide for themselves.” Russian state television could not have said it better.
This is baffling on all accounts. I expect Musk to say something as empty & hypocritical; ¿but is The Atlantic trying to claim that “People have to decide for themselves” is a totalitarian idea & not, what most would consider it, an Orwellian lie that a totalitarian regime pretends to follow while presenting only voices they disagree with as the “real authoritarians”? ¿Is The Atlantic unironically against people deciding for themselves? ¿Why else would they make the absurd statement that “Russian state television could not have said it better”? Liberals would certainly say they could live it better. Also, all news is propaganda, as empty as that is to say: as George Orwell said, all art is propaganda. ¿Or is George Orwell, 1 o’ the western world’s leading critics gainst Soviet Russia, a Russian asset, too? The fact that The Atlantic, a rich, relatively powerful ( which to be fair, still isn’t all that powerful anymo’ ) part o’ the news decided to hammer its readers o’er the head with this digression gainst “the news” certainly doesn’t convince me that The Atlantic isn’t propaganda — & very sloppy, poorly-concealed propaganda, to boot.
Day 5
I can almost taste my freedom. The weather is improving, spring is finally here, and all of New York seems to be beckoning me to escape my luxurious prison cell.
Anyone who uses the term “luxurious prison cell” does not know what a real prison cell is.
But I also feel overwhelming disgust, as if there’s a thick layer of dirt behind my shirt collar.
That’s ’cause you’re a dirty fucking slob who didn’t shower the whole time you were laying there boozing up & watching shitty Russian propaganda. But you’re not a loser who can’t be bothered to take care o’ your fucking self while engaging in the easiest job in the world, you’re just a neudachnik, an unlucky person.
I watch a show called For Men / For Women, in which a woman is attacked on the street by her ex-husband, who, with the aid of his relatives, also kidnaps her little son. “I fell on the asphalt, and he is holding me down and beating me,” the woman says. “I lost my breast milk. I went to the police. The police didn’t do anything.”
The poor woman’s lament reminds me of the show I watched a few days prior (it now seems like a lifetime ago) about women being stalked and beaten by their ex-lovers. “He has a very aggressive nature,” a woman said of her former lover, the professional boxer. As does Russia in 2023. So many of the shows I’ve watched during the past five days were obsessed with the West, with our Clintons and Soroses and Von der Leyens. Russia is the spurned lover with the “very aggressive nature” taking out his inhumanity on the innocent neighbor next door. Despite all the posturing and doublespeak, Russian television announces as much to the world. Whether on the airwaves or, perhaps someday, at the Hague, the evidence has been clearly presented.
I sure hope Gary’s middle-school teacher gave him gold stars for this totally-not-corny metaphor. “It’s like, ¿what if Russia was, like, an abusive lover to Ukraine, bro?”.
& as an extra taunt, this article ends with an ad for this writer’s book — ’cause I certainly want more o’ this great writing. Said book is, shockingly, a bunch o’ rich assholes in a rich house & half o’ them are struggling writers & the other half are racist stereotypes, like a “Korean-American app developer” or “Southern flamethrower of an essayist” ( the latter o’ which is both ). Or if you want a real treat, you can read his most recent article @ The Atlantic, titled, “Crying myself to sleep on the biggest cruise ship ever”, which repeats this article’s riveting day-to-day gimmick, almost as if this writer is a 1-trick pony ( & that 1 trick blew ass ). The only article I want to read ’bout some rich asshole crying himself to sleep on the biggest cruise ship e’er is just before he & the ship are burned down by the proletarian uprising, &, spoilers, that badass shit doesn’t happen. Thanks for writing propaganda just as boring as Putin’s lame-ass I Was Zelensky’s Filth yet again.
Fuck The Atlantic for publishing what has got to be the least effective propaganda against Russia’s aggression against Ukraine e’er — & most insufferable writing I’ve read in a while — & fuck Putin for sparking a war that, e’en indirectly, led to it being published. With all the paranoid red-scare conspiracies people drum up, ¿are we sure The Atlantic isn’t infiltrated by Russians & this article isn’t an attempt to delegitimize Putin’s critics as useless morons? If The Atlantic really wants to help Ukraine, they should start writing propaganda for Russia: they’re such unlikable twats that they’d hurt Russia mo’ by association than by antagonism.
Anyway, we won’t be focusing on that inanity, but on the music itself, which, sadly, is a bit mo’ competent than Thousand Foot Krutch, but also less funny. Said album I have chosen is the generic-titled Awake, released in 2009, @ the end o’ the age o’ nu-metal, but not too late for this album to go double-platinum & having its singles play regularly on the radio. Admittedly, their 2006 Comatose, with hits like “Whispers in the Dark” &, well, “Comatose”, probably has a greater hold on people’s memory — to the extent that this band does still remain in people’s memory — & is the mo’ well-regarded for the good reason that it is much better than this album… — tho it didn’t sell as well as Awake, only going single-platinum — but ’cause o’ that it is less funny & memetic. In truth, there is 1 song in particular I want to talk ’bout & it is on Awake, not Comatose.
1. Hero
You have no idea how disappointed I was when I read the Genius lyrics & saw the line “I’m not superhuman” where I always distinctly heard sung, “I’m not superheroman”, which is a far funnier, & therefore better lyric. As you can expect, this song’s lyrics are generic — tho here they fit a bit better, given its evocation o’ silver-age-style superhero comics, which also oft spoke in clichés. If anything, I wish this went the full way & actually used lines from comics, like, “With great power there must also come great responsibility”, from Spider-Man or, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, from Marxman.
Since Skillet is considered a Christian Rock band, his savior could be interpreted to be Jesus Christ. However, since there is no direct reference to His name, the titular “hero” could refer to anyone that’s willing and able to save him and this world from self-destruction.
As for the song itself, it is standard Skillet, with plenty o’ bombastic strings & singing, tho the backup singing by Jen Ledger… exists, I guess. It’s mildly catchy, tho not quite on the same level as their big hits from Comatose.
Grade: B
2. Monster
This is the whole reason I’m writing ’bout this band, so enjoy it before we have to waste time on 10 generic songs afterward.
& that reason is the end o’ the bridge, where the oft-repeated line, “I feel like a monster”, is sung in a Frankenstein’s-monster-like growl & it is the most amazing thing.
Outside o’ that, this song is a clear ripoff o’ Three Days Grace’s “Animal I’ve Become”, which came out ’bout 3 years before this, but obviously not as good. That’s not e’en close to Three Days Grace’s best song, or the best song off its album, One-X, but, spoiler, this is the best song, musically a’least, on this album, so that lets you know how these 2 albums compare. Still, I’m savoring that Three Days Grace lite sound as long as I can, ’cause I know it’s going to go downhill from here.
Grade: A
3. Don’t Wake Me
LOL that they made a Skillet AMV using footage from Elfen Lied, given all the fan service in that anime ( so I’ve read: the only fan service that gets me off are news outlets jerking themselves off ). Cooper may not be fucking with that wet-ass pussy, but Skillet’s fans sure are fucking with that anime-ass pussy.
Speaking o’ going downhill from here… ¿What is this Nickelback-ass shit? You dare to follow the amazing “Monster” with this fucking slush. “Don’t wake me” is right: sleeping is better than listening to this. The chorus legit sounds like Nickelback’s “Savin’ Me”, in the chorus where Chad Kroeger-brand sings, “& sing it for me, sing it for me”. ¡Go back to ripping off Three Days Grace!
No, ¡wait! I’m thinking o’ the chorus o’ Nickelback’s, “Far Away”, where he sings, “I love you, I loved you all along…”. That was the song.
Grade: F
4. Awake and Alive
Ah, there’s that Three Days Grace lite I was looking for.
Actually, I kind o’ wish this song sucked as hard as the last song, as while I much prefer listening to this mildly nice & catchy song, there’s nothing interesting to write. I do kind o’ find the “¡waking up, waking up!” part @ the beginning o’ the bridge funny, with the sing-song way it’s sung that makes it sound like the singer is singing to a child.
¿What kind o’ title is “Awake & Alive”? Obviously you’re alive if you’re awake: dead people can’t be woke, which is why Republicans love dead people so much.
Grade: B
5. One Day Too Late
God, this chorus sounds like it belongs on a kid’s show. I’m certainly not in the mood for hearing a song ’bout making the best o’ my time when I’m writing ’bout a fucking Skillet album — masturbating all day like Jon Arbuckle sounds downright productive in comparison.
¿& does e’ery verse need to start with an ad for Tiktok? ¿Hath this devout band not read the 11th commandment, “Thou shalt not be a fuckin’ sellout”?
I shouldn’t need to tell you that the jingly guitarwork & squeaky singing are intolerable. I don’t e’en know what this is ripping off, but I dread to hear it.
Grade: F
6. It’s Not Me, It’s You
O’ all the Three Days Grace songs, this is the most Three Days Grace, from riffs @ the beginning, the way the singing builds, & the shouts o’ “¡You!” @ the end, which is just like the shouts o’ “¡Home!” in Three Days Grace’s, um, “Home”. Obviously, it’s not as good: the music is too clean & o’erprocessed ( e’en compared to Three Days Grace, who are not exactly Velvet Underground ) & the singing sounds weaker & mo’ weaselly.
But lyrically this is on the same level, if not better, & is, unironically, the best-written song I’ve e’er heard from this band. O’ all the breakup songs I’ve heard, — & given all the angsty nu-metal & post-grunge I’ve listened to in my teens, that’s a lot — I don’t think I’ve e’er heard a song that twists the mealy-mouthed, “It’s not you, it’s me” cliché into this bitter invective, but it’s great — & especially coming after all the lame-ass Sunday-school songs before, such a bitter song starting with the line, “Let’s get this story straight: you were poison”, like the singer is sick o’ this bullshit already, is heaven to my ears. Hell yeah. More o’ this, please.
Grade: S
7. Should’ve When You Could’ve
Sigh. It seems I have to resign myself to getting a shitty song e’ery other song, like Skillet was thinking, “All right, we can’t spoil them: they’re too happy, so let’s give ’em shit now”. In contrast to the iconic, “It’s Not Me, It’s You”, which is a clever title for a song, “Should’ve When You Could’ve” is the corniest shit e’er, & the sassy way the singer sings, “better luck next time, girl”, makes me want to die. & the music is so cheese, it e’en ends with the cliché noodly boops so many pop-rock songs end with & has millennial woahs in the chorus, e’en tho nu-metal is far too early for millennial woahs.
Grade: F
8. Believe
It says something when I’m grateful they’ve gone back to sounding like Nickelback. Actually, this country-sounding song is hilarious, with its dime-store twanging notes & the way the singer sings, “I can’t fill the emptiness inside since you’ve been gone”. ¡Move o’er, Johnny Cash! Also: the smarmy way the singer sings, “I know I said things that I didn’t mean” in the bridge.
Speaking o’ the bridge, I love the guitar solo @ its beginning, which starts with standard Skillet strings, & then melts into those dime-store country guitar twanging, which devolves into rapid fire notes that sound like they’re being played on a plastic Guitar Hero guitar.
That being said, I unironically like the end to the chorus, with its bombastic, “you’re all that I need / just tell me that you still believe”, as generic as the lyrics are, especially @ the very end.
Grade: A
9. Forgiven
O, now we’re aping Evanescence, with those opening notes that sound very similar to the iconic opening to “Bring Me To Life”. Too bad the singing is nowhere near as catchy. In fact, it’s so monotone, & yet sung with such intensity, that it’s annoying. Same goes for the “ho-woah-woah”s @ the beginning o’ the bridge.
& the lyrics fall into the same Cartmen syndrome where I can’t tell if this is ’bout God or someone they want to fuck — or both. It doesn’t help when you have lines like this:
I get down on my knees feel your love wash over me
Like, come on, they had to know. I don’t care if you’re Todd Fucking Flanders ( weird how Ned would give his son such an unholy middle name ), if you read these lines, your 1st thought is wishing for God to shower the singer with coconut cream pies.
10. Sometimes
( Note: ’twas a statistical inevitability that 1 o’ the AMVs I randomly chose for 1 o’ these songs would end up having an upskirt in its thumbnail ).
¿How could the band who made “Comatose” make a song so boring. I can’t emphasize how bland the chorus is, both in lyricism & its failure to form an interesting melody. I guess this song has a somewhat interesting guitar sol — No, fuck it. It’s not interesting. Nothing ’bout this song is — woah. ¿What the fuck are those beeps @ the end. ¿Why the fuck isn’t that the song?
Grade: D
11. Never Surrender
“Na-na, na-na, na-na, na-na”… Zzzzzz… This album has 14 songs. Many albums had only 12. ¿They couldn’t afford to cut these obvious filler tracks out?
Grade: D
12. Lucy
The opening is literally just someone hitting 1 fucking note on a piano repeatedly. It’s so annoying.
Because I have a working brain — well, I do so far; we’ll see if this album finally breaks me — I assumed that these smaltzy lyrics were ’bout this singer’s fucking dog dying & was hoping it wasn’t ’bout an actual adult woman, as the lines, “now that it’s over / I just want to hold her” sound idiotic in that context ( well, they sound idiotic in any context, but e’en worse there ). But then I read Cooper’s explanation for this song’s meaning & remembered that Cooper doesn’t have a working brain, but has 1 that has been melted by too much exposure to Jesus’s warm rays:
Listen up while I tell you a story about a young girl and a young guy who found themselves in a hard situation. They didn’t know what to do when they found out that she was pregnant; they were young, they didn’t have any money, they were scared, they didn’t want to tell anybody, they didn’t know what to do, and the only option that they could see was to terminate the pregnancy. So that’s what they decided to do… they went to a clinic, they had the procedure done, and at first they felt relieved that all their problems had gone away. But then something happened that they did not expect, and then over the next few weeks, which turned into a few months, they began to feel an intense sadness… and a pain and an agony and a guilt that wouldn’t go away. They didn’t know what to do, so they finally went to see a counsellor [sic]; they said, ‘look – tell us what to do, we just don’t know,’ and the counsellor [sic] made a suggestion. The counsellor [sic] said, ‘here’s what you need to do – stop acting like you had a procedure, and act like you had a death in the family.’ So the couple went home and they made three decisions; number one, they decided to have a funeral service for the baby; number two, they bought a tiny little headstone; and the last decision to make was what to name the baby. After a couple weeks they finally decided they would call her… Lucy.
I’ll give Cooper 1 thing: it’s creative — in that such a thing would only happen on an alien planet, not real life. I don’t know any counselors — e’en the misspelled ones with too many L’s — whose 1st inclination when trying to soothe a couple grappling with the trauma o’ abortion would add to that trauma by insisting to them that that abortion was a “death in the family”, which was not necessarily the idea they already had, much less inventing a bizarre ritual where they hold a funeral for this fetus, rather than, I dunno, just telling them, “It is common for people to feel guilt after something like this”, & maybe saying something ’bout moving on. Fun tip: the psychological community tends to not look highly on fixating on past mistakes or trauma, especially when it involves weird rituals, & in contrast to what Cooper thinks, most health professionals, in fact, do think o’ abortions as procedures, not “deaths in the family” — that’s why they perform them & don’t rub their hands afterward & twirl their moustache & say, “¡Now my kill count is e’en greater than Dr. ikillbabies23!”.
E’en worse, you only get to hear this fanciful story in this garbled recounting, not in the song itself, which is so vague I mistook it for being ’bout a dead dog. Yeah, there’s the line, “I’ve got to live with the choices I made”, which I now see as a wink-wink, nudge-nudge gainst “pro-choice” people, but without this context could just refer to the dumbass singer accidentally leaving chocolate out that the dog ate. ¿Was Cooper trying to hide this song’s true meaning for fear o’ alienating his audience till he felt it had become accepted ’nough to reveal its true dark meaning, or is he just a bad lyricist? Considering P.O.D. made a song called “Abortion Is Murder” & nobody gave a shit ’cause nobody gives a shit ’bout ✝-rock, I’m going to guess the form — hold, on, ¿what’s the 1st line o’ that P.O.D. song?
you are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge
Bitch, ¿you’re blasphemous ’nough to sample the iconic opening o’ Straight Outta Compton in vain for your lame-ass ✝-rap song?
Grade: D
13. Dead Inside
You have no idea how excited I was when the previous song ended on Spotify YouTube Music & I found myself suddenly listening to “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” by Panic! At the Disco. { ¡There are only 12 songs on this album? ¡I’m free! }. But I saw those other tracks on Genius & forced myself to check out the “deluxe” edition, so we’re not free to listen to better music just yet. You could e’en say I feel dead inside.
As trite as it is to say, the best way to describe this song is, “¿What if someone AI-generated a Skillet song?”. It sounds distinctly Skilletlike: it’s got those blasting strings & bombastic choruses, but it lacks the interesting melody twists that make their better songs listenable.
Cooper is begging God to save him from his severe depression.
No, this song will ne’er matter, which is why it wasn’t included on an album that had standards low ’nough to include “Sometimes”.
This song is an alternative metal ballad by Skillet. It is a bonus track from “Awake”. This track has never been performed live. The basic context is about a person who no one cares about and hence wants to leave this world.
E’en the author o’ this annotation doesn’t think this song matters. This is the most clinical description o’ a song. @ this point “sonic material” is a mo’ fitting term than “song”.
Despite this song not mattering, I was still able to find an AMV for this song, ’cause it is against the law for there to exist a Skillet song without an AMV.
Grade: Doesn’t Matter
15. Monster (Alternate Radio Version)
This is the “Wicked Monster” ( unlike Thousand Foot Krutch, not in the good way ): much as the “Wicked Bible” corrupted the LORD’s words by replacing their demand not to commit adultery with the command to commit adultery, the “Wicked Monster” replaces the aforementioned memetically amazing line, “I feel like a monster”, in a monster-growl voice with 1 that sounds like the normal singing used thruout the choruses — apparently for the radio, presumably ’cause square executives didn’t think ordinary listeners could handle such memetic cheese. ¡Cowards! Thus I have not included a AMV, tho I’m sure I could’ve found 1 with this version, as nobody should listen to this abomination.
