As far as newspaper editorials go, it basically shits on him for 750 words. Using polite language.
Here’s another video of a “rock band” of Republican congressman, including McCotter and one token Dem, playing badly at Farm Aid a few years ago. It’s unlistenable, twenty seconds being about all you can stand. Pantywaist vocals while murdering a Beatles tune plus the drummer making a good argument for replacement with a drum machine.
“We like to have fun every once in awhile,” says one of the men in the band called, wait for it, The Second Amendments. Mystifyingly, it appears to have been shot for television broadcast.
None of these guys ever rock, even remotely. Originally, I wanted to cut McCotter some slack because he so obviously loves to play guitar. But he just stinks at it — totally “dad rock.”
It’s doubly damning because he’s from Michigan, Detroit being known for many great electric guitar players in the Sixties and Seventies.
For example, if Jim McCarty of the Detroit Wheels was/is a Boss 302, McCotter is an old Pinto or Chevy Vega.
Big joke! Move your music to the Google cloud! For fuck’s sake, why? It’s already all there. YouTube would collapse if it weren’t for all the pirated old albums on it.
And here are two cuts from Bill Cosby’s 1967 music album, the much lauded by me, Hooray for the Salvation Army Band.
Good news, lads! Good news! There’s a a Barry White spoof, too: “Yes Yes Yes.”
You’d never know this stuff without me. Life would be even more grim than usual.
You can bathe in the mass delusion of Independence Day having actual meaning in 2011 as we head into the 4th. And if you want to read tearful crap about the American flag as a security blanket for a “wounded nation” post 9-11, go here.
Or if you’d rather not indulge in these displays of mock patriotism and piety for the purpose of hiding from unpleasant reality you can briefly enjoy the Hooray for the Salvation Army Band slideshow. Which doesn’t pretend to be anything but humorous in a mildly disgraceful way.
It’s my version, posted as an MP3 on the blog a while ago, from the old Bill Cosby album of the same name, published by Warner Brothers in 1967.
Support an old independent voice in security affairs, fine music, and other interesting things in the fourth or fifth day of my first fundraiser, ever!
A $10 app purports to duplicate a piece of revolutionary home-studio kit from the Eighties, the 4-track cassette recorder. Well, the look of it, anyway.
I used what was known as a Fostex X-15 to record the first Dick Destiny & the Highway Kings LP, Arrogance.
Both pieces of original gear were in the $300-500 range, as I recall.
It was harder to make a decent multi-track recording than the appearance of a cheap app for iKit now makes it look.
Since cassette speed was slow and recording area much smaller compared to analog reel-to-reel tape, it was difficult but not impossible to duplicate high fidelity recordings done with traditional studio gear. And the azimuth on the recording head had to be corrected fairly frequently or the quality took another big hit.
It was also good to have a decent bit of quality tone-shaping gear outboard to get the best signal to the cassette tape.
The Rockman was sold as a high-end piece of guitar gear meant to put great studio sound to tape with a minimum of fiddling. It subsequently wound up all over hit records in the Eighties. That decade’s hits from ZZ Top and Def Leppard have Rockman-treated guitar all over them.
I don’t miss the Fostex X-15 and analog cassette-recording gear. But my systemic hatred of all things app and iKit prevent me from being more than passingly interested in this new piece of ‘retro’ recreated for the digital world. To be totally retro it would have to duplicate the bass hump that occurred on old cassette tape when you did multi-track bounces on these things. And it would somehow have to recreate the warm coat of analog “furz” that resulted when you tried to cram multi-layers of sound onto the old physical format.
Sure it’s cheap. However, the platform isn’t and you can get similarly fiddly 4-track digital recording hardware stand-alones for less.
When Tom Petty (“American Girl”) and Katrina Leskanich (“Walking on Sunshine”) protested the use of their tunes by Michele Bachmann, Ted Nugent stepped into the breach, suggesting “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” and “Stranglehold.” Really. But we already know he’s an annoying tool, lads.
As readers know DD blog has assiduously committed its rock n roll to satirical videos appropriate for the time. The collection is called Tales from the Great Depression. And it will wind up on iTunes and places like that in about a month or earlier, depending on how I feel about paying the Tunecore protection money for the privilege of being in all the official digital stores, sooner rather than later.
Then you’ll be able to get the mp3’s in one place instead of the fun but idiosyncratic task of wading through the Rock n Roll tab and having them for free.
Or you can just go to YouTube and see them all lined up here.
I don’t know of any other uniform collection quite like it although some people must be doing the same thing. The Tea Partiers do a lot of folk music and I’ve touched on it here and here.
It’s almost all bad kitsch and not because of the political content. These things just got no groove, no lyrical zing, or any cool at all. You just can’t be hip singing about the communist living in the White House or how you pine for the old glory days of the Civil War South when you thought all red-blooded Americans were really free.
And theoretically, I’m inclined to like the mild audacity of Rock Solid with Thaddeus McCotter. But, y’know, for a stalwart GOP candidate for President there’s just no evidence he can actually play that red, white and blue Telecaster … loud. So F for Flunk.
There is some good funny music being made on these matters. However, unlike the enthusiastic Tea Party support for its folk music — no matter how bad it is, the progressive side has no such unifying enthusiasm.
Mean is integral to satire. (Well-placed cheap shots, too.) It’s something lefties never really master.
Anyway — if, for example, I did something like this on a Democrat, Drudge or somebody similar would pick it up tomorrow, forcing it in front of every eyeball possible — like this.
The other side, of which I am a part, has nothing like that. Still.
It’s because we all are weak.
There are a number of punch lines buried in “Fat Man.”
Can you guess the identity of the “guest” vocalist from a famous Seventies hard rock band?
A free No-Prize if you can.
Side technical notes from the artisan economy:
I’ve now done enough of these to know — empirically — that YouTube games your video uploads unless you bribe them not to. This is one of the monetization strategies employed by Google properties.
The push to monetization lies in subtly providing inferior service and processing that screws with you unless you sign up or arrange for a premium capability.
When uploading — even if your video is already compressed because of the nature of the video-making software and format you employ — YouTube will randomly attempt to destroy it more.
YouTube’s processing will take your audio track, which has already been degraded in the video-making process, and peremptorily often try to –loss it further. You’ll hear this as an absence of high end, stereo image, or addition of digital artifacts, either in ghostly noises, icy tinkling or other shadowy anomalies.
YouTube processing will often also add digital artifacts to the imagery.
For example, in Fat Man, one sequence of Chris Christie makes it look like he has a disease on his lower lip and chin. It’s not a feature. It wasn’t in the clean copy uploaded to YouTube.
Google YouTube’s “processing” added it.
YouTube “processing” may inexplicably edit your video in a senseless way. One up-load of Fat Man had two seconds hacked off the end of it.
Deleting files messed with in this way and re-uploading doesn’t generally fix such errors. YouTube kept hacking two seconds off the end of Fat Man until I changed it completely and added about six seconds of filler. At which point it stopped and did something else bad to the file.
In other words, you can upload as many times or editions as you like but there is always the chance more interesting digital corruption will be added to your contribution.
YouTube’s “processing” will select three thumbnails from the video. Of these, it will also pick the middle of the three as the default. If you should decide to change it to one of the other two, YouTube may simply decide to ignore your new settings no matter how many times you re-enter and save them.
You’ll have noticed that the old media giants generally never suffer these problems.
That’s because bribery works.
You’ll never see anything that looks or sounds less than perfect from Nashville or Hollywood because all the bandits have been paid off and the proper palms greased. Now, enjoy the shiny advertising YouTube and its partners add to such songs before they load.
Taylors are high end acoustic and electric guitars. The company was always artisan. Now it’s a perfect fit for the new economy, high end instruments — like the Fender and Gibson custom shops — for old classic rockers, Nashville artists and the servants of the upper class who acquire them to fiddle about with in their spare time.
At Taylor’s 200,000-square-foot El Cajon factory, which is open for public tours, the company’s mixture of delicate hand craftsmanship and cutting edge technology is on display. One example of the latter is a robotic painting machine, built by Pinnacle Technologies Inc. of Italy for $250,000, which uses an electrical charge to increase the amount of spray paint that adheres to the instrument …
A roster of Taylor guitar owners reads like a guest list from the Grammys: Katy Perry, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Dave Matthews, Taylor Swift, Prince, John Mayer, Jackson Browne, Sting, Paul Simon, Stanley Clarke, Bryan Adams and many others …
Scientist Joyce Jones, administrator at the Vaccine Research Institute of San Diego, owns two Taylors and is contemplating a third. She recently strummed an eight-string baritone at the company’s factory store that she said was “divinely inspired. I am basking in its glory.”
Taylor’s least expensive guitars — those costing around $300 to $1,300 — are made in a 300-worker factory in Tecate, Mexico. But the bulk of the company’s revenue comes from guitars that range from $1,900 to $10,000, and to as much as $20,000 for specialty jobs. Those are made by the 400 employees in El Cajon.
Pretty much all jump-on-the-grenade material for anything over 40 seconds.
This one has the added bonus of a strong Taliban-like religious message: Women should shut up in church, or something.
Dad punk rock and death metal isn’t any better than Dad classic rock.
All worship church bands are virtually be definition, Dad rock. This one tries to ameliorate the stain by putting motorcycles on the stage of the superchurch tabernacle. Or something like that. Couldn’t get much past the Life in the Fast Lane parts.
My dad rocks harder than your dad, says the description. Aiming low. I like that.
This is accidentally decent. And short. Sadly, it’s the kid who messes it up with enough overenthusiasm to make your neck sweat. If you’re the Dad.
If there was a button to push …
The zenith of Dad rock — rock fantasy camp with Slash.
Dad rock to the max: Playing a Kiss song with Paul Stanley. Dig Dad, looking a little like Bruce Ivins, on the keys.
Sadly, some women lack the usual female wisdom and cleverness which steers them clear of the shoals of Dad rock fantasy camp.
Please don’t indulge the Dads. Dad rock needs to be discouraged.
If you’ve been to Guitar Center even semi-regularly on weekends you’ve suffered through some, if not many, of the annoying aspects of Dad rock.
There’s the Dad who’s buying his little American-branded made-in-China combo amp used in the soft-rock-at-worship on Sunday band.
There’s the Dad who has brought in his acoustic guitar with a couple broken strings because he’s too totally [deleted] to restring and tune it himself.
There’s the Dad at the Pasadena gig who tells you he plays guitar, too, and is now really getting back into it again because the kids are at school.
There are the Dads who want to play their old blues licks or stumble through a classic rock riff for everyone in the showroom.
Possibly the worst — the Dad rock politicians, now seemingly mostly Republicans — doing this gig for advertising.
Back when I ate shoe leather and liked it in Pennsy, the tradition was accordion and polka. If Dad had an old button box he often handed it down to his boy.
This was a big thing, particularly as the accordions were often ornate and beautiful instruments.
Polka is a family tradition, one you can do with your Dad and not be a source of mortification for everyone around you.
There is no rock with Dad. Going to see Kiss or any rock band with Dad may be fun but it’s always lame now, a sign you’ve given it up for the price of a ticket.
I can only imagine how hard it it must be for teenage children in the house when Dad attempts to rock on a newly bought guitar.
Begging to go to Dad rock camp, as in this now ubiquitous commercial for a credit card, is the most patience-trying thing you can do.
Nothing desperately signals “mid-life crisis” and “buyer’s remorse over family” quite like it:
