CAN YOU NAME ALL THESE MOVIES?

Cthulhu-core metal band Darkest of the Hillside Thickets have put together a video for their song "Yog-Sothoth!" that includes a large number of imagery and moments from films, shorts, TV shows and other bands' videos that are all somehow evocative of cosmic horror and Lovecraftian dread. See how many of the included clips YOU can identify! I can pretty much guarantee that you won't be able to spot them all!

BOB DYLAN PRESENTS PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED TRACK "MURDER MOST FOUL"

Considering the timing of this song's release, some of my more learned friends, bigger Dylan fans than I, are saying this is Bob's epitaph for America. Not sure I'm feeling that, exactly, but it sure is something.

NEW CHILDISH GAMBINO SONG/VIDEO A MASTERPIECE

This is some REAL shit right here.

THE MOST INTENSE MUSIC EVER CREATED? YOU BE THE JUDGE!

I don't know if it's the MOST intense, but it sure is intense, and as a fan of progressive rock and jazz fusion, I have to say, this definitely makes me interested in digging up more material from the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a band I've long known about and have often had recommended to me based on my tastes.

MY PROBLEM WITH PEARL JAM

Although I can’t recall ever having been confrontational or evangelical about it, I have never been a fan of Pearl Jam... the early stuff in particular. In the main, I believe this lifelong beef was initially triggered by seven words: “Clearly I remember picking on the boy.”

Within the context of the song "Jeremy", it was a de facto declaration that Eddie Vedder--the band's lead singer, who also happens to have a perfect bully’s name--placed himself squarely on the side of the Normals, the Jocks, the Popular Kids, the In Crowd.

And the rest of the lyrics aren't much better. The song starts out with some dime-store psychoanalysis, chock-a-block with a teetering pile of hastily lashed-together cliches, to which the obviously expensive and equally embarrassing video adds a number that remain unsung.

At home
Drawing pictures
Of mountain tops
With him on top
Lemon yellow sun
Arms raised in a V
Dead lay in pools of maroon below

Daddy didn't give attention
To the fact that mommy didn't care
King Jeremy the wicked
Ruled his world

Troubled kid draws disturbing shit, yes. Daddy is a big empty suit, uh-huh. Yeah. Running shirtless through the woods. Yes, yes. "An affluent suburb", yes. "It is very relevant in America today", yes, of course. And yes, big angry wolf devouring sad lonely boy. And all, or most of it, is Mommy's fault. And Eddie behind it all, rocking himself back and forth as his eyes roll back, up into his skull, every muscle in his face a-twitch with dynamic tension, his hands flashing obscure signs in the air... Deep, man.

WOW, does that video ever suck. I'm sure Vedder must find it excruciating to watch today. Hell, maybe this video is what made the band decide to never ever make videos ever again (a promise they've mostly kept). What possible artistic justification could there be for the way Vedder contorts his face like that? He goes through a series of grimacing expressions, equal parts painful and goofy, that would make Jim Carrey cringe.

Anyway, back to the song, where we're just getting to the good parts...

Clearly I remember picking on the boy
He seemed a harmless little fuck
But we unleashed a lion
Gnashed his teeth and bit the recess lady's breast
How could I forget?
And he hit me with a surprise left
My jaw left hurting, dropped wide open
Just like the day, oh, like the day I heard 

Vedder puts himself at the center of the action, having the unmitigated audacity to make himself the subject of a song that is supposed to be about a boy who commits a brutal, public suicide in the middle of a packed classroom. This, after essentially confessing to being one of the bullies who causes Jeremy’s suicidal hopelessness!

Consider the casual cruelty implicit in the lyrics above. If Jeremy was such a harmless little fuck, then what possible reason could Vedder (or whoever Vedder is meant to be voicing for the duration of this song) have for tormenting him into killing himself?

Furthermore, Vedder seems to relish reliving his "fight" with Jeremy. He sounds almost prideful as he recalls how he helped to "unleash a lion", and indulges in a muscle memory re-enactment of the fight, swinging his fists and pulling angry faces in a way that is bound to be familiar to anyone who's ever run afoul of an angry jock in high school.

And finally, adding one final insult to a long list of injuries--which ends, we are again wont to point out, with a young man killing himself--Vedder has the gall to link the surprise he felt at Jeremy fighting back (his jaw dropped) with the surprise he felt upon hearing that Jeremy had committed suicide in front of his classmates (his jaw dropped).

And then, the song ends with the following verbal flourish:

TRY to forget this! (TRY to forget this)
TRY to erase this! (TRY to erase this)
From the blackboard...

It's not "think about Jeremy, what happened to him, what he did"; it's "think about this awesome, kick-ass anecdote I just laid on you, dude... TRY to forget that shit!" It's the prideful boast of a bully using the tragedy of his victim's ultimate act of self-negation to make himself seem cooler, more dangerous, in the listener's mind.

The lyrics to "Jeremy" are the ultimate expression of the kind of solipsistic narcissism that leads some people to try and make themselves the central focus of whatever public tragedy is going down.

Think back a couple decades, back to heyday of schoolhouse massacres. In "Jeremy", Vedder is the equivalent of all those telegenic teens who either sought, or were sought out by, local TV news cameras, whereupon they would tearfully relate their gripping (and frequently exaggerated) tales about coming face to face with the killers in the hallway, only to be saved by a miraculous gun jam, or about how a passing bullet came so close it combed a new part in their hair, or about how they calmly tried to talk the killer down only to be rebuffed with a diabolical cackle and a command to “SAY YOU LOVE SATAN!”

All this, even as the bodies of actual victims, dead children, are being carried out of the building behind them on stretchers, literal collateral damage for what will eventually become the war stories around which they will assemble the pieces of their public self image; their life’s story... their personal "brand".

It’s all about me, even when it isn’t.

And what of Jeremy? The kid about whom this song would really be, if Vedder were any kind of poet? Well... Jeremy shares more than a little in common with Vedder’s Pacific North West Grunge Rock competition, Kurt Cobain, doesn’t he?

Consider, for example, the slim literary virtues of “Jeremy” in comparison to the stark perfection of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way”. Cobain manages to convey so much with so little. Even the chorus, which consists simply of the words “something in the way” repeated eight times with a kind of call-and-response emotional counterpoint, manages to convey a sort of narrative drive.

Of course, Cobain is dead now, and Pearl Jam continues to tour. They were even inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, by none other than David Letterman, a last minute replacement for Neil Young.

Ah, what do I know, anyway... Maybe Eddie Vedder is really a very nice guy. The band sure stuck to their guns in their fight with Ticketmaster, that's for sure. You can't really get the full measure of a band that's been around, and productive, for almost 30 years from just one bad song. It's not Pearl Jam's fault that "Jeremy" struck a chord in the popular imagination...

But jeez oh man, is it EVER a garbage song.

STREAM THE NEW GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR UNTIL SEPT 22

The latest offering from Montreal's legendary ambient multi-artist co-op (and long-time Jerky fave) Godspeed You! Black Emperor, evocatively titled Luciferian Towers, is a magnificent slice of drone-tastic aural majesty, and you can stream the entire project for free until the album's multi-format release on September 22, 2017.

Oh, and thanks to our pals at Noisey for the heads-up about this.

SYD BARRETT'S "EFFERVESCING ELEPHANT" (NEW RETRO STYLE VIDEO)

Syd Barrett - Effervescing Elephant from Yoann Hervo on Vimeo.

NEW ON NETFLIX ~ BULLET REVIEWS

THE HISTORY OF THE EAGLES / NOW MORE THAN EVER: THE HISTORY OF CHICAGO ~ Over the last couple of weeks, I've spent a combined total of nearly six hours watching these documentaries about two of the most successful bands in the history of popular music: The Eagles and Chicago. Odd thing is, I didn't much care for either band prior to watching these in-depth, decades-spanning, warts-and-all explorations of their career highlights and lowlights... and now, after spending so much time with both bands, I still don't care for their music. At some point in both docs, the bathos gets to be a little difficult to swallow: "Waaah! We had too many hits! Waaah! The cocaine was too pure! Waaah! The groupies were too beautiful!" Both movies do an admirable job of chronicling the clash of monumental egos, the back-stabbing management shenanigans and record company rip-offs, and the obligatory late career comebacks, always suffused with a tinge of regret and, at the very least, one or two left-behinds who are unable to rise above the hard feelings generated by all the drug-fueled drama and chaos. But you can really see how much of what would turn out to be the worst parts of the 1980's were presaged by some of the seedier undercurrents in the popular culture of the 1970's. Before watching these, I'd seen the "Blue Jean Committee" episode of the Bill Haider/Fred Armisen parody series Documentary Now (IFC), and it turns out they were way more gentle and soft than they could have been. So, yeah... both these docs were a hard slog. But it could have been worse. It could have been a 4 hour documentary about Uriah Heep.

***

It's So Easy and Other Lies ~ Whoever convinced Duff McKagan that getting (kinda) sober, having two kids, and developing a mid-life obsession with martial arts is the stuff gripping biographies are made of... that person did the Guns and Roses/Velvet Revolver bassist a great disservice. I mean, the Duffster seems like kind of a nice guy and all, but this... this flick is an embarrassing enterprise on all fronts. From the idea of having Duff up on a stage, reading (slowly, haltingly) from his own recently published biography, to having him be surrounded by musicians providing a bed of cues and vamps that build towards what should be moments of great catharsis, only to have those moments be something utterly banal, like "we had another hit record!" Everything is so disconnected in tone that it leads us, the viewer, to feel completely alienated from Duff's life as he lived it. Actually, come to think of it, maybe that perfectly realized alienation makes It's So Easy the most true-to-life rock documentary ever made!

***

THE KEEPERS ~ Ryan White's ridiculously complex, infuriating, and disturbing documentary series dares to stare deep into the heart of darkness for hour after life-sucking hour. He might as well have called this one Trigger Warning: The Series. I won't bother giving you the details. This is, after all, a bullet review. If you're partial to the wave of Scandinavian Noir books, movies, and TV shows that popped up in the wake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, then you'll probably dig The Keepers. If you liked Making of a Murderer, you'll find White opening up a whole new bag of tricks for this outing. Either way, if you do decide to watch this, try to remember what Nietzsche said about staring into the abyss. Small bites... and maybe take a Jim Carey break between each episodes. I recommend Dumb and Dumber.

***

KARDASHIAN: THE MAN WHO SAVED O.J. SIMPSON ~ I suppose the success of ESPN's incredible documentary series O.J. Made in America made this documentary look into the life of the man who may have been instrumental in Simpson getting off inevitable. Surprisingly, it didn't make me vomit into my own mouth. Your mileage may vary.

***

IS GENESIS HISTORY? ~ There's an old publisher's cliche about how any news story or book title in the form of a question can usually be answered with an emphatic: "NO!" This most definitely turns out to be the case with Is Genesis History?, a competently produced but also profoundly dishonest attempt to frame the creation/evolution question as one of Deep Time orthodoxy versus the possibility of rapid Earth changes. The former is portrayed as Charles Darwin piling errors atop the foundation of 19th century geologist Charles Lyell's folly (Deep Time), while the latter is shown as being HIP! and FRESH! and backed by much beautifully photographed and convincingly argued (for the layperson) evidence. A brief perusal of online critiques of this film indicate that people who actually know what they're talking about find it even more offensive than just plain old activist atheists do... and we all know what a grumpy bunch THOSE guys are. Anyway, if you have no interest in checking out rebuttals afterward, I'd probably just skip this one. It's basically really well made Christian Fundamentalist propaganda... and who needs that in their lives?

ROGER WATERS' LATEST IS TRANSCENDENT AND DEVASTATING

I seem quite incapable of stopping myself from listening to "The Last Refugee", the latest preview cut from Roger Waters' Is This The Life We Really Want?, over and over again. It's an incredible track, a paradoxical mix of raw, open wound production over a delicate yet devastatingly poetic mise-en-scene... an absolute, unqualified masterpiece, right out of the gate. 

That production should be provided by Nigel Godrich is only fitting, perhaps, seeing as Radiohead carried the Pink Floyd mantle into the 90's and beyond (much to their chagrin at times). A match of artist and producer that was obviously forged in heaven, or Valhalla, or wherever all transcendent things are forged.

As a life-long Pink Floyd fanatic who has always, more or less, found things to love in Waters' solo output, I have to admit that the passing of a quarter century (and the release of his opera, Ca Ira) left me more than a little skeptical that he would be able to recapture the magic of old. 

As of today, I am no longer a skeptic. Is This The Life We Really Want? is shaping up to be a worthy successor to Amused to Death, Waters' previous and best post-Floyd release, if not its equal, or perhaps even its superior. Either way, we'll know for sure in two weeks, when the album is finally released.

Oh, and if you're reading this... thank you, Roger. For everything.

THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD, BY BUBBLES