Let's have more fun with the Drumset Haiku Translator:
Those phat thundering tom-tom triplets he rips at the end of 'Stairway':
"Hidderit-da, Hitterit-da, Hitterit-da, Hitterit-da Hittera-BOP!"
The solo fill at the end of "Rock 'n Roll":
BA-DOP!
vlaROP boom DOP boom DOP Dadaboom ba-
Bidderit-da!
Bitterit-da!
Bitterit-da!
Bitterit-da!
Bitterit-da!
Bitterit-da!
gooodalaHROP gooodalaHROP TOP
TOP TOP Huddalaroom...
Boosh.
It ain't a Dead Sea Scroll transciption, but hey.
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Speaking of beautiful things, this morning I enjoyed the 2nd half of Fat Bottom Girls enroute to McD's for a pre-work breakfast burrito, and while waiting in the drivethru, was bestowed with the majesty of 'Lick It Up'.
That song could be used in physics and art seminars to explain perfect composition. It's a diamond edition Lexus of Big Party Pop Rock. The balance, the integrity, there's no waste in its structure. It's a 3 minute audio science fair. From the mix to Paul Stanley's howls, it's perfect in every way for what it's designed to be and do for its intended recipients.
It won't win the Nobel, but neither did the can opener. When the alien armada sifts thru what they anniolated to colonize this planet and find the buried canisters of film and audio masters in those Kansas vault mines, they'll hear LIU and say "this works." Because it truly does.
Wouldn't it be funny, if like in Demolition Man with Taco Bell being the finest and only dining experience on Earth in the future, the alien armada picked up the LIU canister instead of the Mozart one? They go to grab the Mozart, but a rat scuttles out from under it, so they blast it, thereby forgetting what original canister they went to grab. So they grab the LIU and thus institute the music of KISS as the planet's most holy and sacred form of music in some kind of retro-homage to the cultures who once lived here.
The beauty is they won't have to sculpt their own statues of Gene Simmons to erect in the Temple. They'll just U-Haul over the ones from Gene's mansion he had made of himself in the late 70s.
And yet again, Gene Wins.
Bastard!
7 comments:
You are fucking crazy.
"Lick It Up" is the worst Kiss song ever, and possibly the worst song ever written.
May I remind you of the chorus?
It goes:
Lick it up
Lick it up.
Oh-Oh-Oh
Please note, I love Kiss (despite the fact that they also wrote the lyric "She's a dancer, a romancer. I'm a Capricorn and she's a Cancer") but that song, and the stoopid image of the video of the four of them standing (sans makeup) in a junkyard howling the chorus makes me want to put guns in both of my eyes and shoot 'em kinda sideways so the bullets come out my ears.
Ah my friend, but note that I never said it was the best song ever. It's all about the attributes and excellent design. Or better put:
It's a perfectly ridiculous, sexist, simplistic, arena setting, chauvinistic, adolescent, geared for masses, play to the meathead, button-pushing, piece of non-humanity enriching stupid rock song.
And it's EXACTLY what they were trying to do. I'm celebrating the success of that. Not saying Gene should sit next to Ghandi at the Kennedy Center Honors.
And the fact that you can so vividly recall how utterly bad that video was proves that the message they intended got across seamlessly with no impedance. I love that we hate that they loved getting us to hate it. Because we're tattoo'd by that video and song. But I don't forsee any Belosophies on Krokus or Dokken coming anytime soon. They tried to gain credibility within the genre and it gray'd it.
Gene and those boys are just as legit in their "artistic" infamy as Crispin Glover, David Blaine, Madonna, Wayne Newton, Fear Factor's producers, Volkswagon's ad agency, Evel Knievel, Ali, Howard Stern, and GWAR. They know what creates reaction and they sniper-rifle those hot buttons for their crowd and the genral public that shows half an interest. Because that interest, good or bad, ='s cash and the non-need for a day job.
And chicks. Lots of chicks. Unbeleiveably so.
If Chuck Berry can fart in the face of a woman he just finished pee'ing on on film, and she beleives he's still worth saying "I love you" too, it's not KISS that's the Earth's problem. It's us Carbon-Bots.
Life is Cool.
Just because you remember it doesn't mean it's necessarily good.
We're talking about music here, not advertising. I also remember Stone Temple Pilots' fifth album, that don't make it high art. I remember getting my tooth knocked out before the Cub Scout parade in second grade, but that doesn't mean it should hold a place in a museum.
"That song could be used in physics and art seminars to explain perfect composition" you say, comparing "Lick It Up" to an inclined plane or a Brancusi sculpture, when in reality it's just four sweaty Jews in wigs watching the cash roll in.
You're right that it accomplished the task it set out to do, but so does cleaning out your ears with the end of a pencil: Effective, yes, but not very pleasant, and nobody wants to use that eraser after you're done with it.
You're right that life is good, but that song suuu-uucks.
P.S. Don't get me wrong. I firmly believe that the "Destroyer" album should be taught in every class from Kindergarten through college, but "Lick It Up" should be forced to listen to itself for all eternitiy.
Awesome.
Does it suck because it works so well, or because the premise behind it (cash flow for sweaty middle aged rockers) is anger inducive?
Yes, in so many ways that song does indeed totally suck. I never said it didn't suck. I'm defending it's attributes, structure, it's worth as a pop music vehicle. This is about appreciation of craftsmanship, not honoring it's morality. And also not the values behind it's creation, the strategy to create a work to invoke conditioned responses in order to gain market share. Because music shouldn't be a commodity, it should be truth, with higher aspirations than commercial and status gain.
Defending the value of a system does not mean that the system's intent or premise is valued. Hitler did incredible things, awe-inspiring feats of leadership and control. Like Tony Robbins if he was a bad X-man. Admiring the ability of a human to do that much damage does not condone the damage. ABBA "sucks" too, because disco was deemed suck-worthy. But since we had no reason to hate the personalities of Bjorn, Benny, Frida and Agnetha, we allow credit to be given to their perfect hits that worked and got the masses dancin, even though it was that "awful shitty disco pop". I bet there's more people at the "Mamia Mia" stage show who had WRIF D.R.E.A.D cards back in the day than anyone would admit. But another perfect pop composition by Gene "Businessman" Simmons can't be given credit for accomplishing the same task?
No one's saying LIU should be heralded as the greatest song ever. In terms of the typical friendly paint-by-numbers pop song of verses & choruse and their most effective lengths for pop radio, solos, bridge, tension/release, call and answer, establishing riffs, vocal plumeage, re-establishing transitions, hooks, prepubescent mentality trying to masquerade as intelligent empowering...LIU could be the lead off page of the "How To Write a Radio Hit" [copyright 1983] books one sees in the Borders music section. LIU was a bulls-eye, regardless of how much we hate that more honorable and noble bulls-eyes were also available that should have been topping the charts and evolving the human condition.
I think the crucial difference is separating between the tangible piece of work and the psycho-emotional perception and reacton to it. I think alot of DJ and techno totally sucks, but I know from interviewing Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson for the first DEF and seeing them do their work at industry functions beforehand that there's an art to their craft that goes beyond my casual perception of "people playing other people's tunes and making them transition into each other." There's more to it than than and I know it. I'm ignorant to it, but I try not to let myself say it sucks because it bugs me. (Not saying you should be doing the same with LIU.)
But when I hear "Doonts Doonts Doonts Doonts..." and see people losing their mind like their having the orgasms of 10 elephants on E, I wanna ask what the hell they possibly can be gaining spiritually and artistically from a metronone thru a PA. Kinda like how people can't understand how a grown man can be fulfilled screaming the chorus of LIU in an arena watching a shirtless Japanese cartoon fly over his head on a wire.
Its probably because its the primal experience of the crowd, the energy, the pulse, the vibration. It's not about musical composition so much maybe as it is about a Moment, a Happening, driven by a heartbeat pounding in everyone's ears the same way. Maybe the appeal is that for as distanced and fractured our social and human interaction is at this time in history, the appeal of one throbbing heartbeat allowing a huge mass of people to feel like THEY are one heart is what's so attractive and fulfilling? So much cynicism and gratification abound, the world needed to get that stripped down... a lone pulse, stripped of any adornment, color, taint, mindset, atttitude, bias, ism, ethnicity, region, nationality, gender, age, status, or power.
And like a parade, the only thing that anyone lining the streets can every truly agree on or get in sync with is the kid walloping the bass drum at the back.
Hmm.. I just thought of that. I think I just solved myself with techno!
KISS ='s [ABBA + dance] leads to --> techno --> family descendent of marching band and Sousa --driven by--bass drum.
It's all about the Bass drum.
And at least 44% lettuce. Which is just the right crunch. No more, no less.
That's next time. :)
Heh. You said "taint"
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