You don’t need to hear it…

Posted by High Priestess Kang as Music

…to know it sucks complete ass.

After all, they don’t call it an, “educated guess” for nothing.

Black Crowes lash out at Maxim magazine
Reviewer didn’t listen to CD, but just made an ‘educated guess’

NEW YORK - The Black Crowes are lashing out at Maxim magazine for reviewing the band’s new album — apparently without actually hearing it first.

The review, published in Maxim’s March issue, gives the Crowes’ “Warpaint” a rating of two-and-a-half stars out of five.

“The writer — who has not heard the album since advance CDs were not made available — wrote what appears to be a disparaging assessment anyway, citing, ‘it hasn’t left Chris Robinson and the gang much room for growth,”’ said a statement on the band’s official Web site.

The band’s manager, Pete Angelus, said the magazine explained that its review an “educated guess.”

“It speaks directly to the lack of the publication’s credibility,” Angelus said in a statement. “In my opinion, it’s a disgrace to the arts, journalism, critics, the publication itself and the public. What’s next — Maxim’s concert reviews of shows they never attended, book reviews of books never read and film reviews of films never seen?”

A representative for the magazine would not confirm or deny to The Associated Press whether the writer actually listened to the album. Instead, Maxim released this statement in response: “Maxim will continue to provide our readers with information that is important to them, whether it is about fashion, lifestyle, technology, music, movies and more.”

“Warpaint,” the band’s first album in seven years, is set for release March 4. The blues-rock group, fronted Chris Robinson, has released only one song from the disc, “Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution.”

The band’s hits include “Hard to Handle” and “She Talks to Angels.”

Guitar Hero

Posted by Dock Ellis as Guest Author, Music

Ok, maybe I’m just an old fart- but when I was a kid, “Guitar Hero” meant this:

Not this:

LOL Sting

Posted by High Priestess Kang as Amusement, Music

I have never cared much for Stink Sting. I’m not exactly sure what it is about him but…oh…let’s face it. Stink is annoying and irrelevant.

Which is why I was simply tickled to discover this delicious tidbit whilst reading The Daily Mail.

Superstar hypocrite: Meet Sting the master of contradictions

He boasts of his rock solid marriage, but this week was caught in a brothel. He’s oh-so green, but is paid to advertise gas-guzzling limos…meet Sting, the master of contradictions…

The passenger ducked down in the car seat so that he couldn’t be spotted as the silver 4×4 accelerated away from the Hamburg club in the early hours.

Not such an unusual sight, perhaps, as customers leave the Relax club which modestly describes itself as a strip venue but is in reality the city’s most luxurious brothel.

However, this was no ordinary customer.

The fashionably-cut blond hair and rugged good looks made him easily identifiable.

As one of the most famous rock stars in the world, Sting really needn’t have bothered trying to hide. Everyone at the club on Wednesday had recognised him, and the two bodyguards who accompanied him did little to disguise his celebrity status.

Surprising behaviour, perhaps, from a man who is obsessed by trying to keep his private life separate from his public persona.

But then Sting is a figure of contradictions.

Although never short of a few words of wisdom for the rest of us on carbon footprints, saving the rainforests or Third World debt, he could be described as an adherent of the old adage: “Do as I say - not as I do.”

In a 30-year career, which has earned him a personal fortune of more than £100 million, Sting has established himself as not just a pioneering rock singer with his original band the Police - now on a worldwide reunion tour - but as one of the first stars to parade a social conscience.

As early as 1985, he took the seemingly rash decision to step aside from the Police, then at the height of their commercial success, and release what was called by one reviewer a “jazz-inflected personal manifesto” entitled The Dream Of The Blue Turtles.

The first single from the album, which was to launch him on his highly lucrative solo career, was called If You Love Somebody Set Them Free.

At least some of the song’s lyrics seemed to touch on Sting’s much-vaunted support of recycling and conservation, at a time when many considered these to be fringe issues rather than the global preoccupations they are today.

“We can’t live here and be happy with less/With so many riches, so many souls/Everything we see that we want to possess”, Sting sang, in one emotive passage.

It was a theme to which he returned at this summer’s Live Earth climate change concert, where the reunited Police were among the leading attractions on the bill at Giants Stadium outside New York.

At one point in the performance, Sting pledged to the audience that he would “work to reduce” his carbon footprint in the future.

A commendable objective - but what Sting didn’t mention was how much larger his carbon footprint is than just about anyone else’s.

He maintains no fewer than four properties in the UK with his ‘core’ home the 800-acre Lake House estate in Wiltshire, which boasts 14 bedrooms and eight baths.

Earlier this year, a glimpse into Sting’s daily routine at the mansion was provided by Jane Martin, 42, a cook who took the rock star and his wife Trudie Styler to an employment tribunal which awarded her £24,944 following her “shameful” dismissal from her job.

According to Ms Martin, Styler in particular had a “grandiose ego” and wanted to be treated “in a royal manner beyond her station as an actress”.

Revealing some of the “fabulous” lifestyle of her former employers, Ms Martin said that “opulent extravagance reigned” at Lake House, and that there was “no regard to expense, cost or wastage” where food and drink were concerned.

The cook added that she had often been required to make an expensive rail and taxi journey between London and Salisbury just to prepare a soup and salad meal for the family, even though they also kept two housekeepers, two nannies and a butler on the premises.

But Sting’s well-heeled lifestyle in the Wiltshire countryside is only one part of his worldwide empire.

This same paragon of self-denying minimalism who reminds us all not to squander our resources also owns a three-storey mansion in Highgate, North London, a townhouse in Westminster and what’s described as a workman’s cottage in the Lake District.

He also maintains a beach house in Malibu, California, and a 600-acre estate in Tuscany.

And when Sting performs in New York he goes home at night to a £1 million duplex on Manhattan’s exclusive Upper East Side.

His immediate neighbours in Manhattan included his friend and sometime collaborator the late Luciano Pavarotti.

Other rock stars live just as lavishly as Sting does - the difference is that relatively few of them have proved as willing as him to back up their words with generous, and often anonymous, donations to causes around the world.

But he hasn’t always been enthused.

Sting was introduced to the Brazilian rainforests by a Belgian author and adventurer named Jean-Pierre Dutilleux, who had made an Oscar-nominated film about the plight of the local Xingu Indians. Sting’s initial reaction to Dutilleux’s pitch was blunt: “Dolphins, penguins, who gives a ****, JP?” he asked on their first visit to the area.

Despite this unpromising start, Sting and the Rainforest Foundation were eventually able to set up a 12,000 square-mile national park dedicated for the use of the Xingu and other indigenous tribes.

Given the generally lukewarm support of the Brazilian government, this was an impressive achievement.

Sting’s involvement included not just giving away money but also a more personal gesture.

While lobbying political leaders around the world, the singer was to play host at his elegant Highgate home to two Brazilian Indian chiefs named Raoni and Red Crow, the former of whom sported a CD-sized wooden plate stitched into his lower lip but little in the way of clothes.

Sting’s neighbours’ view of the chiefs sharing a peace pipe in a makeshift camp laid out on the back lawn was one major local talking point, although the sight of Raoni calmly strolling up Hampstead Lane in his loincloth was also something of a novelty.

Sting was later quick to refute a charge by critics that his campaign was badly managed, and specifically that the Rainforest Foundation had failed to both properly account for the money it had raised and prevent the deaths of several local tribesmen from malaria.

Certainly nothing illegal or unethical ever came to light involving the Foundation’s fund raising. There was, however-a well-placed source assures me, something of a row when, on a subsequent trip to the area, the rock star declined to buy his hosts a helicopter as they had asked.

In time a certain coolness also crept in between Sting and Dutilleux over their jointly-authored book, Jungle Stories.

Although the book’s cover stated that “all royalties go to the Rainforest Foundation”, it later emerged that Dutilleux had pocketed at least some of the proceeds.

“I’m a professional writer,” he said. “I had to take the advance. We’re not all multi-millionaire pop stars.”

A British TV programme raised questions about some of the Foundation’s business practices, but it may well be that its celebrity figurehead simply didn’t concern himself with the mundane details of its accounting practices.

This is perfectly possible given that, in 1992, Sting learned that a company managed by his long-time accountant Keith Moore had crashed with debts of £13 million, and that Moore had embezzled some £6 million of the singer’s own money over the previous five years.

Sting had never even noticed.

As Moore told me while serving his six-year sentence for fraud: “I always judged clients, particularly those in the music business, on a ‘meeting tolerance’ scale.

“My recollection of Sting is that his ‘meeting tolerance’ level was near nil. He was easily bored and was quite content to leave the business side of things to others.”

Such insouciance over his affairs will surprise the many people who know him well and who describe him as being highly astute in micro-managing every aspect of his career.

But perhaps that is only one of the paradoxes about this 55-year-old singer who’s rarely been burdened by consistency.

Early in his career, he expressed the opinion that “I just don’t agree with (procreation) any more.

“I think it’s bull****, and I think if we carry on thinking like that, we’re doomed.

“We have too many people - we’re not the most important thing on the planet, and until we realise that, we’re in deep s***.”

How ironic then that Sting has six children, from two wives, ranging in age from 30 to 11.

There’s nothing wrong with that - he’s long since earned the right to live just as he likes - but, taken as a whole, it would seem to suggest that Sting’s campaign against Western excess might not always be a priority in his own day-to-day life.

In 1981, he declared: “I don’t want to end up as the guy in Vegas with the balding head and the tux singing Roxanne.”

Some 15 years after making this announcement, he walked out on stage at the city’s MGM Grand Garden casino, and, sporting a radically cropped haircut, performed his first hit. (To his credit, he avoided the tuxedo.)

In 1995, he was happy to accept a reported £500,000 to advertise the Seagaia golf complex in Japan, where developers had flattened miles of historic pine forests to build a luxury leisure resort.

The contradiction of a man known for his environmental campaigning helping to promote a project that locals complained harmed the local ecology wasn’t lost on his critics.

More recently, the singer gave his blessing to an advertisement for a gas-guzzling Jaguar that used his hit Desert Rose as its backing track. Sting was reportedly paid a six-figure licensing fee.

Some may see this as not entirely in tune with his well-known views on energy conservation.

Even his attitude to his band the Police is marked by inconsistency.

Despite the regular recycling of the group’s records since their last new release in 1983, until recently the prospect of a full-scale reunion has seemed remote at best.

Asked about the rumours of a tour in 1997, the 20th anniversary of the band’s formation, Sting said: “Bull****. I’d rather die.”

It may be purely coincidental that his radical change of heart on the subject follows the relative failure of his last album Songs From The Labyrinth, whose accompanying DVD features an extended sequence showing Sting, dutifully followed by his musicians, padding around the well-manicured maze at Lake House.

Whatever, in 2006 Sting decided that reforming the Police was not such a bad idea after all.

The tour, which has played to packed houses in North America this summer, is said to have guaranteed the three musicians an initial payday of £4 million apiece.

One cynic has described it as “the unedifying sight of a pension plan being topped up”, although that’s unlikely to concern crowds who waited nearly 25 years to see their heroes on an extended European tour.

And although Sting’s wife Trudie seems remarkably unconcerned that the singer may see the tour as an opportunity to visit other venues such as the Relax club in Hamburg, it is hardly the behaviour of a man whose social conscience is his calling card.

The tour itself - with its fleet of accompanying trucks, dazzling lighting systems, jet travel and so on - shows no signs of restraint.

It all adds up to a personal carbon output for Sting that has been estimated at up to 30 times that of the average Briton. And the trips in a gasguzzling 4×4 to the local brothel will certainly do nothing to reduce that prodigious footprint.

Country Music Needs To Get Over Its Bad Self…

Posted by High Priestess Kang as Music, Tentacle Wagging

Oh goody.  We just cannot leave these women alone, can we?

Last night, The Dixie Chicks had quite a remarkable showing at the Grammys.  As well they should.  Taking the Long Way is one hell of an album.  As a matter of fact, it is one of my personal favorites thanks to their stylings and some kick-ass songwriting by Gary Louris, Linda Perry and Dan Wilson (among others). 

Now there is a story about how country music is going to get the proverbial knickers in a twist.  Big phucking deal.  Country music, these days, is so limp wristed and entirely irrelevant, let Nashville and the Bush supporters rant, rage and seethe.  All the belly aching and ballyhooing isn’t going to change the fact that Nashville cranks out crap on a continuous basis.  Aside from the Dixie Chicks, there hasn’t been a “normal” (note:  not alt-country) band worth a damn in moons.

So…today’s phuck you (brought to you by the letter ph) goes to Nashville and those in country music with the stick of self-righteousness lodged so deeply up their collective asses that they are tone deaf and completely incapable of realizing that the current product sucks dick (that’s right you tight-assed homophobes, I said your product sucks dick).

Country radio won’t forgive Dixie Chicks
Group’s Grammy haul may even spark another backlash

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Country radio still isn’t ready to make nice with the Dixie Chicks.

With a haul of Grammys Sunday, the Texas trio topped their comeback from their 2003 Bush-bashing comment that turned them from superstars to pariahs — but Music Row isn’t welcoming them back into the country-music fold.

“Most country stations aren’t playing the Chicks, and they aren’t going to start now,” said Jim Jacobs, owner of WTDR-FM, a country radio station in Talladega, Ala.

The awards might have the opposite effect, sparking another radio backlash against the group. Country broadcasters said Monday that the group’s five Grammys show how out of touch the Recording Academy is from the average country fan.

“I think (the listeners) are outraged,” said Tony Lama, program director for KXNP in North Platte, Neb. “This is rural, conservative America. They are just disgusted.”

Country stations quit playing the Chicks in 2003 after singer Natalie Maines told a London audience: “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.

Almost overnight, Maines became a lightning rod in the debate over the Iraq war, with conservatives blasting her for criticizing the president, especially while on foreign soil.

The Chicks sang about the controversy in their single, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” which won Grammys as record and song of the year. Their album, “Taking the Long Way,” won album of the year.

“I’m not ready to make nice. I’m not ready to back down,” Maines sang. “I’m still mad as hell, and I don’t have time to go round and round and round.”

Country radio may not be ready to embrace them again, but the Grammy runaway suggests that a significant portion of the rest of the country has come around to their way of thinking. The president’s approval ratings are down, and his party was ousted in the midterm elections.

“I’m slowly getting my faith back in mankind,” Maines said Sunday.

But the rift with country-music radio seems impossibly wide. The Chicks have said they never felt at home on Music Row, even when they were a top-selling country act.

“If you’re trying to offer an olive branch to country radio, that’s not the way to do it,” said Ken Tucker, Billboard country music correspondent. “The Chicks are celebrating being the outlaws.”

The Grammy for best country album almost never goes to a mainstream Nashville act.

Bluegrass siren Alison Krauss and Union Station won the award last year for “Lonely Runs Both Ways,” and Loretta Lynn won in 2005 for “Van Lear Rose.” Neither got airplay on country radio.

The last time a country album won album of the year was 2002, for the movie soundtrack to “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” — a collection of old-time country that didn’t fit the Nashville formula.

Johnny Cash won best country album in 1998 and then made headlines when his record company took out an ad showing a much younger Cash flipping his middle finger and thanking “the country music establishment in Nashville.”

Wes McShay, program director of KRMD-FM, in Bossier City, La., said country fans understand that the big stars don’t win Grammy awards.

“If you’re talking about who’s selling out 15,000-seat auditoriums, those acts are not awarded at the Grammys year after year,” McShay said.

Consider the Country Music Association awards handed out a few months ago in Nashville: Entertainer of the year went to Kenny Chesney; the other big winners were radio favorites Brooks & Dunn, Brad Paisley, Keith Urban and Rascal Flatts.

That the Chicks weren’t even nominated for a CMA award shows how narrow-minded and parochial Nashville’s Music Row can be, Maines said.

“Country music, as far as radio and the industry, they are all right there on four blocks in Nashville,” Maines said after the show Sunday.

The Dixie Chicks peaked at No. 36 on the Billboard country charts with “Not Ready to Make Nice.” That ought to disqualify them from winning best country album, said Jacobs, the Alabama radio station owner.

“How do you win country music album of the year, when country music radio is not playing you?” he said.

Dixie Chick Emily Robison said the Grammy organization is known for recognizing great albums that don’t necessarily get played on the radio.

“Especially in country, it does have that tradition of honoring the unsung great albums,” Robison said.

Buying A Guitar

Posted by Dock Ellis as Guest Author, Music, Op/Ed, Personal

So this weekend I bought an electric guitar. I wrote a lengthy dissertation about it which you can read under the “pages” column, or by clicking here.