Keith's Rants

The other day, I was at the department store while my girlfriend was looking for pants to buy. Not wanting to be seen loitering around the women’s clothing section, I wandered over to the music department, not really intending to buy anything. Strolling up and down the aisles of CDs seemed like it would be a good way to kill some time.

This being a department store, they didn’t really have a great selection, particularly once you exclude (as I did) the “Rap,” “Hip-hop,” “Sickening teeny-bopper drivel” and “Gospel” sections from your musical wandering. Most of the rest consisted of bands that I had never heard of — a category which, since I got a CD player for my car, includes pretty much anything released in the past two years.

As I was walking about, feigning interest and hoping not to meet a salesperson, I came across a CD by a group called “My Chemical Romance.” Now, there was not much to distinguish these guys any other modern rock group, aside from the fact that several months before, during a golf game, my good friend Brian Greppo had recommended them to me.

Now, one of the downsides (perhaps the only one) of living off campus is that I no longer have access to my school’s Ohio-renowned gigabit ethernet, whose uses include downloading pirated music from other students in the blink of an eye. I am now stuck with shitty Adelphia cable internet, and, since I dare not download Kazaa or any other spyware-ridden P2P music program, I have not gotten any new music since a last-minute orgy of downloading this past May.

Now, I respect the opinion of a man who plays a good game of golf, so I picked up the CD and bought it as I was leaving the store — the first time I’d paid for music since approximately 1999. I put it on in the car, and listened to the whole album on the ride home.

Not wanting to subject you to an Alex Rock-style music review, I’ll sum up by saying that My Chemical Romance blows. The entire album was one long and indistinguishable stream of indistinct, emotional muttering masquerading as song, backed by constant, droning guitar noodling of the type you typically hear from grunge-inspired garage bands composed of high school dropouts. I have not heard such garbage since I bought an Anti Flag album in high school to impress a girl. I fully intend to mail Brian the CD and demand that he send me a check for $13.99 plus postage, or the equivalent value in illegally acquired (and illegally mailed) whiskey.

This illustrates one of the dangers of buying music in the store. Unless it is one of those fancy (and expensive) record stores such as FYE, you can not listen to the music before you buy it, and are forced to rely on the recommendations of friends. The problem with that is that your friends usually have terrible taste in music, no matter how much money they can win off you playing golf.

In the future, I think I will go back to my old system of deciding which CD to buy. This system is based on the one thing you can tell in any record store: the name of the band. Before you criticize this system, allow me to explain.

Band names fall into a few categories:

Names of artists you know: For instance, Pink Floyd, Queen, Radiohead, Randy Newman. These guys are typically good enough (or at least old enough) that their music and relative talent is common knowledge. Even if they suck, like Manfred Mann, they are a known quantity.

Marketing names: This is something that not many people pick up on, but which is good for excluding bland modern rock music. Bands tend to debut in waves, with similar names coming close together in accordance with what record industry marketeers think will appeal to the discontented 16 year old market. If you don’t believe me, consider Taproot/Switchfoot/Soulfound/ (vaguely dark sounding + usually two syllables with emphasis on neither + nonsense meaning), The Shins/The Kicks/The Vines/ The Hives/ The Strokes (The + one syllable word & not falling into the “names of artists you know” category i.e. The Clash) or Fuel/Train (single syllable+ industrial theme). Notice, too, that all of the bands that I’ve grouped together pretty much sound the same, thereby proving my theory. Grouping these names together is more an art than a science, but if you can do it, you can pretty much write off the band.

Music released since 1998: Pretty much sucks. Few exceptions. You’d think I would have paid attention to this rule. Applies especially to Radiohead, Pearl Jam, and Oasis albums.

Another way to judge an album by its cover is to look at the picture of the band, if any. Generally, if any of the members is androgynous, you should not buy the CD. Also, if more than two of the members have a shaved head, you are probably not holding a winner. Goth chicks signal a depressing, untalented band appealing primarily to goth chicks. Sinead O’Conner signals a Sinead O’Connor album, which is a definite no-go. My Chemical Romance is composed of hair-gelled pretty boy rockers, trying their best to strike a tough pose for the photographer and failing miserably. Don’t make my mistake.

Album art is a bit trickier to go by, but at least if there is awesome cover art you have got that. Pink Floyd albums tend to have great cover art, as does Appetite For Destruction, by Guns ‘n’ Roses, but it’s hard to spot a trend here.

Technology — in the form of online music and in-store listening a la FYE — is slowly making inexact systems such as mine unnecessary, and this is a good thing. Compared to a quick listen online before you buy/steal, trying to spot contrived band names is like submitting to modern, scientific medicine against trying to bleed out the bad humors. No matter what, though, it beats your friends’ recommendations which, continuing an already poor medical analogy, is akin to using strychnine as do-it-yourself chemotherapy: it’s sure to end poorly.

OK. I apologize for that last bit. I’m not changing it, though.
{democracy:13}

One day several years ago, Alex Rock and I were bored. I was surfing the internet at the time, and came upon an article about Buzkashi, the Afghan national sport. For those of you unfamiliar with the sport, it is played essentially like polo, with two teams on horseback attempting to move an object into a goal of some kind in a large field. In polo, this object is a ball, which you move with a long mallet thing. In Buzkashi, it is a headless goat, which you are expected to move with your bare hands. There is a certain logic to this, because after the game is through, a goat is much more edible than a polo ball.

We briefly contemplated setting up a team, but rejected the notion when we realized that we had no idea where to get a goat carcass. I suggested that we drive around the countryside until we found a farmer with a goat, then come back after dark with an axe, but Rock dismissed the idea, saying that if we got caught, the authorities might suspect occult connections.

We finally decided that the game would be cheaper and less weird if we Americanized it — replacing horses with cars, and the goat carcass with a bag of pop cans. A second man in each car would try to grab the bag with one of those claw things that old people use to grab groceries on high shelves. There would be two goals, and the object would be to get the bag into the other team’s goal as many times as possible before all of the cars had been destroyed or ran out of gas.

Alex Rock set about drawing up rules for the game, drawing heavily from the rules for Demolition Derby, which we were fairly certain our game would come to resemble. We tossed around several names for it, including Motopolo and Automopolo, before deciding that the brutality of the game meant that it more resembled rugby than polo. Motorugby was born.

For reasons unknown, we also decided that the sack of pop cans would be referred to as the “Xebec.” We may have been drinking.

Unfortunately, AlTech’s entire market capitalization was insufficient to fund even one team, let alone two plus a venue, so Motorugby remains a sport in waiting.

Additionally, 6% of people at the Rochester Institute of Technology are rapists. Alex said it himself.
{democracy:12}