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The Ten Bands I Will Be Forced to Listen to In Hell

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Sean Beaudoin is going to hell for being a complete Rock ‘n Roll snob, and he knows exactly what soundtrack Lucifer will play in order to seek revenge. 

Originally appeared at The Weeklings

I’M GOING TO HELL. You know it and I know it. But I’m fairly sure it’s not going to be of the William Blake-etching variety. There will be no eternal fire, three-headed dogs, or seas of percolating sinners. There will be no cloven hooves or torture racks or rounds of cribbage with Pol Pot and Hitler. No, my hell will almost certainly take place in a windowless basement room buried deep in the purgatorial nethers. The ceilings and walls will be slathered an institutional shit-brown. I will be in the center of a wet cement floor, Duct-taped to a broken lawn chair, with old Victrola megaphones stuffed in each ear.

And I will sit there. Forever.

Listening to scratchy mp3s at top volume.

For untold millennia.

Not only do I know this treatment is coming, I know I deserve it. Mainly because I have a deep and unforgivable flaw. A personality defect. A gaping and oft-salted emotional wound: since the day I turned eleven and inherited my uncle’s Beatles albums, I’ve cared about music to the exclusion of all else. I’ve been an unrepentant vinyl nerd. A tedious mix tape fanatic. A mortgage-flouting download freak. I’ve bought, sold, and archivally stored such a pendulous, debauched, and endless train of rare vinyl that there should have been an intervention years ago, one that ended with me forcibly installed at Santa Barbara’s Passage to a New Promise.

For some reason I just seem to hate certain songs more viscerally than normal people. If normal means “not driven to psychotic distraction” by Bizkits, limp or otherwise. I simply need not to listen to music I choose not to listen to, in a very physical way, from psyche to belly to rote musculature. I am the sort of person who snaps off the car radio in anger, tears records from under expensive diamond-tipped needles and flings them out into the street, secretly donates my loved ones’ Dixie Chicks CDs to charity, and loudly bemoans musical choices in restaurants, cafes, and in front of hostesses of small social gatherings.

In other words, a total asshole.

But I just can’t help myself. I have no reverse. My only three musical gears are John Coltrane, blessed silence, or the sort of turgid pop indulgences that make me want to run, naked and screaming, deep into the night, doomed never to return. At least not until I am tased, hog-tied, and relegated to Belleview for ninety days of involuntary observation and a round of Wellbutrin suppositories.

And so for these crimes I am sure, much like Robert Johnson, that I will eventually have to pay Ol’ Scratch down at the crossroads. Or at least down in Gehenna. And once I am in his fiendish clutches, The Lord of Flies will no doubt devise a loop of ten bands, spinning them with merciless repetition. They will come at me one after another, song after malformed song, for days and months and years and decades. It will be a playlist of eternal aural misery. Of soul-damned disharmony. Of long-due euphonic comeuppance. There will be no snacks, no piss breaks, and no skip button.

There will only be the sound.

The constant, pounding sound.

Of pure brimstone retribution.

And these ten bands.

 

♦◊♦

1. Counting Crows

While it’s true that one man’s hell band may be another man’s rockin’ ceiling poster, I think we can all agree that that this whiny, falsely poetic, utterly self-satisfied unit, slated to ruin every wedding from now until the name “Duritz” is struck from the connubial lexicon by writ of post-apocalyptic parliament, is an obvious candidate for The Dark Prince’s most damned playlist. They are melody made torment, choruses made grief, hooks of despondency and woe, a steamy squirt of maudlin pandering. Listening to Counting Crows makes me want to eat my appendix raw–along with a delicate zinfandel, a sack of roofing nails, and a hearty swipe of deli mustard.

AP Photo

2. The Beach Boys

For a band that has been around sixty years, it’s an astonishing accomplishment that pretty much every last song is a Guernica-like assault of falsetto warbling, sugary melodics, cheap Hawaiian shirts, male-pattern baldness, and banal lyrics about cars that should long ago have crashed into telephone poles. Not to mention girls with atrocious breath who never actually put out, beaches swamped with spilled petroleum, surfers who went under due to the Greg Brady tiki curse, and the falsely benevolent California sunshine that delivered an archipelago of neck melanomas to an entire generation. Yes, I’ve listened to Pet Sounds. Yes, I’ve listened to Smile. The Beach Boys continue to be the sonic equivalent of having a dog whistle implanted in your medulla and then honked on by a didgeridoo player with protean bong-tested lungs.

3. Billy Joel

The limp, brutally Caucasian, cheese-larded background for a thousand muggy Staten Island Tuesday nights. Every BJ song is crammed to the very brim with a Big Shot’s worth of insipid lyrics, unabashed emotional pandering, 80′s nostalgia, and weepy songs about piano men and struggling steel towns. Not to mention Captain Jack and Mrs. Cacciatore. It may Still Be Rock N’ Roll to Joel, but he’s been high since the fall of ’77, so who do you really believe? Listening to Billy bust out yet another sailor ballad or salty bar drama is like being held down and waterboarded with Christie Brinkley’s morning breath.

4. Weezer

Alternative nerdom at its most annoying, twee, and self-indulgent. Fauxllectual tunes about sweaters that sound as if they were written by the Song-O-Mator 5000. Dorm ditties for dorm hermits. Dice rock for dice rollers. Dance jingles for lonely singles. Unexpectedly raises the specter of late-stage syphilis while using the term “infectious melody.” Buddy Holly glasses + bad haircuts + oversized collars=They Might Be Giants for people who think They Might Be Giants thrash way too hard. Each and every song is like being stabbed in the face with a frozen venison steak.

5. Eric Clapton

Not Cream, not Blind Faith, not even Derek and the Dominoes. They all get a pass. No, it’s solo Clap that really scratches Lucifer’s itch. The Clap is to the blues as mayonnaise is to a gallon of warm mayonnaise. His style is so wheezy and derivative it’s almost gone full circle and become cutting edge again. He puts the yawn into stultify, the stupefy into catatonia, stone-facedly delivering the exact same chords, licks, and nasal delivery for over three decades over a backbeat that would have lost the Boer War. The Clap is a one man soundtrack for the many and various stages of menopause. He is the lodestone of radio stations that should have had their licenses immediately yanked after they shot the sheriff, but not the deputy, for the four-million-and-first time. When you want to get down, down on the ground, Cocaine. Followed by an eightball of Clapton.

6. R.E.M

The doe eyes. The repeating choruses. The catchy hooks. But mostly, the voice. Hey, I understand why (white) people like to dance to R.E.M at (white) parties. What I don’t get is why no one ever mentions that Michael Stipe’s voice is always (and, yes, that is all ways) off key. Out of tune. Unharmonious. Sharp. Pitchy. Flat. Wrong. Every line, every bridge, every verse, every chorus. Every single note. Truly and deeply unlistenable. If only Europe really had been Radio Free. If only Mike wasn’t Superman and couldn’t Do Anything. If only Everything Did Hurt. If only there really was a Man on the Moon. Spinning R.E.M. is like mowing the lawn, except with a tractor made out of castrated Culture Club and grass made out of shards of Foreigner 4.

7. Oasis

Britishness stripped down to its worst and most cynical cliches: arrogance without due, rhyme without style, sarcasm without wit, pose without prose, booze without tolerance, chav without street, repetition without foundation, Wonder without Wall. Oasis is one long watery dump taken on decades of English pop mastery that came before it. It’s held-up-lighter music for an empty EnormoDome tour, big sweeping choruses that lead straight to the merch table or vomiting in the alley. It’s all that was wrong with the nineties encapsulated in one inane, brain-worm lyric. The Gallagher brothers should have to fight each other with meat hooks during halftime of the next Super Bowl. The Son of Perdition cackles with glee each time I am forced to guzzle yet another champagne supernova.

8. Sting

Has one man in the history of music fallen farther than Gordon Sumner, from the heights of the Police to the nadir of Sting? Phil Spector, maybe? The Vegas panty-clown that is now Rod Stewart? If pompousness were bullion, Sting would be the third Koch brother. Or the owner of the world’s largest bowl of soup. If clumsy, mortifyingly unsuccessful Tantric sex had a musical spokesperson, Feyd Rautha would be on every billboard west of Santa Fe. The Stinger once asked, with weapons-grade pretension, in his stirring cold war ballad “Russians,” if the Russians loved their children too. The answer can now finally be told: Yes, Sting, they do. But they hate the flute solo on your last album enough to bomb London anyway. And Putin thinks you need a new haircut. Not to mention a few years in a re-education camp in Northern Siberia.

Likelihood that Sting still burns deep down inside because Toto beat him to the idea of writing a song about Rosanna Arquette first: MASSIVE.

9. Creed

The absolute worst purveyors of a certain post-Vedder brand of earnest baritone wheezing masquerading as vocals in a very long line of bands subsequently featuring earnest baritone wheezing masquerading as vocals. Fake Christian, fake profound, fake fake. Wearing guitars and playing makeup. Even the Lord of Babylon thinks Creed is imbued with all the spirituality of a sweaty wad of ham. Not to mention bestowed with every inch of sexiness displayed in Kid Rock home videos. Featuring lyrics that sound as if they were written by a barely sentient hard drive, tats and hair vainly trading on Red Hot Chili Peppers market share, and just enough muscle to wet gullible panties and encourage a dorm’s worth of sing-along choruses. Creed is the sort of music bitterly-permed girls crank in Hyundai Elantras while stuck in traffic, fifteen minutes late for their thong-folding shift.

Likelihood that Scott Stapp not only wrote a song about the Florida Marlins, but that it sucked harder than every single other baseball and/or deep sea fish-related song ever recorded: A LOCK.

10. Pearl Jam

Possibly the worst band in the history of music. In 1992 I once came very close to being beaten half to death in a seedy bar for loudly proclaiming, halfway though the third jukebox round of “Jeremy,” that I wished The Jam would immediately all die in an airplane crash. Or at the very least go down in the snowy Andes foothills and be forced to slowly eat one other until only Eddie Vedder’s marinated larynx and Stone Gossard’s finger were discovered by rescue teams. Pearl Jam is Bad Company with knit caps and better goatees, a bloated strain of Seattle-soaked cock rock pretending to bleed at the alt alter. Their dalliance with the Black Hole hole of ill-defined social concerns was barely overshadowed by a cameo in the seminal Bridget Fonda ’90s angst-fest, Singles. Pearl Jam are mumble-core that is irritating beyond measure, unearned flannel brooding and hilarious furrowed lip, all testost and no terone, every song a wash of lazy sludge that never fails to devolve into Vedder’s signature vocal move, ritualistic small mammal yowling: yeah-hah-uhhh-ah-uhhh-ooh-oh-oh-oooh-yeah-grrr-mammer-jammer-ah-hah-huh-oh-yeah-oooh-Jeremy-Jeremy-uh-uh-ooh-eah-huh-hibble-dop-deeble-dibble-dop-yeah-hah!

AP Photo/Tony Avelar

Likelihood The Ved takes himself 9% less seriously now than he did while manning the barricades of this century’s quintessential proletarian conflict–the battle against Ticketmaster: Very Low.

 

ABOUT SEAN BEAUDOIN

Sean Beaudoin’s latest novel is the rude zombie opus The Infects. His stories and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including: The Onion, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Spirit, the inflight magazine of Southwest Airlines. He frequently ends his bio with an ironic or self-deprecating personal comment.

Ignore me here: The Face Book

Disdain me here: The Twitter

Join the vast line of people not visiting my site here: seanbeaudoin.com

 

Lead photo courtesy of BeerNotBombs/Flickr

The post The Ten Bands I Will Be Forced to Listen to In Hell appeared first on The Good Men Project.


Massive Trove of William Blake Drawings Uncovered

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A lost trove of William Blake’s art has been discovered in a Manchester library, art that went unappreciated when it was made.

Alan Moore called him “England’s greatest Holy Fool.” He was in that remarkable subset of artists who are, observably, not mentally okay, but who create immortal work nonetheless. Perhaps best of all, he was one of those tragically romantic stories we can’t resist: an artist and writer who was unappreciated in his lifetime, his genius only recognized posthumously.

There’s something we love about that story, isn’t there? It validates us as men, and more deeply as human beings. We love the idea that yes, it may seem like we’re failures, it may seem like what we do doesn’t matter, but when we’re dead, then they’ll all be sorry. Then everyone will appreciate the work we did and call us brilliant. We love the story of Vincent Van Gogh, of John Kennedy Toole, of Robert Johnson, because it frees us from the Success Myth. That narrative tells us that we may seem now like failures, but it is too early to judge us. We may yet be the geniuses and legends of a future age, and we’ll be properly appreciated only when it’s too late.

That story is also William Blake’s. And just recently, fans of Blake’s stunning contribution to British art and poetry got a very impressive gift. Hundreds of commercial engravings done by Blake have been uncovered in the University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library. This is the kind of discovery academics dream of, a treasure hunt with a prize beyond measure. The dedicated researchers who worked so hard to find and catalog these lost masterworks deserve to pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

To my mind, though, the great beauty of this discovery is that they are commercial engravings.

What we see in these lost works, at least those that have been released so far, is a remarkable sample of Blake’s work. He is known for his half-sane visions, his attempts to explicate the universe he perceived, his art and writing teeming with themes of the gods and mythologies and hidden logic underlying reality. And yet in these commercial works, that impulse, that vision, is muted down to mere subtext. We see in them not a brilliant artist trying to make sense of the universe, but a brilliant artist trying to make rent that month. His powerful, iconoclastic line shows through, but the job takes precedence. His unlimited vision is seen here in its limited version, hemmed in by the need to suit the parameters of the job.

One can argue that limitations on art are what give rise to great achievement, and that’s certainly a valid case to make. More interesting to me, though, is how this underlines the narrative of Blake’s life. These were commercial engravings, stuff Blake did under deadline at the behest of some publisher. This trove is hundreds of images of a genius working a day job. And that makes the story all the more powerful.

Today, as you slog through whatever it is you have to do that keeps the bills paid and the wolf from the door, imagine that two centuries from now, dedicated researchers have found an archive of your work. Imagine their excitement as they compare your long-lost works to the familiar ones they know, seeing how your style and your vision come through in even the smallest decisions you made, trying to derive a sense of your mind from the work you did in life.

Your job today is to give those researchers something to get excited about. William Blake did it with every hurried, deadline-fraught line he laid on paper. You can do it too.

The post Massive Trove of William Blake Drawings Uncovered appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Music Paradise or When the Blues Man Overstays his Visit

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Riffing on classic Biblical stories, Elvis Alves gives us music, rivalry, sex, and the devil…everything you need for a good blues song.


Music Paradise or When the Blues Man Overstays his Visit   
     

          Saxophone

Long ago, the story goes, a man and a woman
ate a fruit and made music: A child with the

bluest eyes and the darkest skin that sang the
blues with eyes closed

          Trumpet

I walked to a house without a door
People sat on blocks of ice

The sun was shining

“Hey man, where you going?” a man yelled

He was fat and wore a mean look on his face
A look that said he can beat you—beat you
bad—just because he can

I ran to him
He held me by the throat with hands
of ropes and said, “hello”

          Piano

So Caine and Abel were two dudes
They were actually brothers

Abel killed Caine because Caine slept with
his girl, Eve

No. Eve was the mother

Abel killed Caine
Definitely

         Drums

Hands unable to stand still; always
hitting something

Worn out mama’s mahogany coffee table
with fingers that would strangle a man dead

and caress the softest parts of a woman’s
body in a single motion

          Guitar

Name’s Robert Johnson

I took what the devil gave me at the
Crossroad to Dockery

***

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Photo by Edgar_Wang /Flickr

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10,000 Fathers Wanted to Tackle Early Childhood Literacy

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When an 8th grader can’t read, Americans have a real problem

He is in the 8th grade and cannot read at the expected proficiency level. He is like 87% of his peers. He is a Black male—but not from a third world county. He lives in the United States of America.

1. Recognizing the Problem
The number of Black children with single females as the head of the household is 72%. The website www.BlackMaleAchievement.org reports that only 17.7% of Black males are reading at or above proficiency levels by the time they reach 4th grade. The numbers do not get any better by the time Black males reach the 8th grade. At this point, 12% of Black males are reading at proficiency levels, marking a decline from the fourth grade. The 2010 Schott Foundation 50 State Report found that only 47% of African-American males graduate from high school. Black men age 16 and older account for 5.4% of the civilian labor force but 10.4% of the unemployed. Black males were 40% of the male inmates held in state or federal prisons or local jails, as of June 2009.

We see from this information that single Black females are having children whom they are left to raise by themselves. In 72% of these households, no father is present, leaving the mothers to operate without the proper support. Black males suffer from a lack of positive Black male role models in the house from the very beginning. This pattern starts a pipeline from birth to illiteracy, leading to dropping out of high school, high unemployment, and incarceration.

2. Providing the Solution
Current approaches to this problem have been fragmented and have not developed a scalable model or system. The data shows that, in many ways, having fathers in the lives of children greatly increases the likelihood of improving the social problems plaguing us today. Research has noted several positive outcomes when a father is present in his children’s life, such as better socio-emotional and academic functioning, fewer emotional and behavioral problems, higher educational outcomes, and lower rates of poverty, infant mortality, incarceration, delinquency, teen pregnancy, obesity, and drug and alcohol abuse.

Fathers in Education (FIE), www.FathersInEducation.org, seeks to involve 10,000 fathers in their children’s education. Initially, the organization aims to get fathers involved in increasing the number of Black male children reading proficiently by the time they reach 3rd grade. The hope of the organization is that these fathers will stay engaged in their children’s educational attainment through high school and beyond.

Originally appeared on Black Life Coaches by Alvin S. Perry

Photo: Flickr

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When Men Are Gathered Together, Beware… Danger

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gathering of men

 

The concern that men are up to something nefarious when in a clump, is understandable. Most of the mass destruction in the world by military, religious, governmental, and corporate idiocy was hatched by white guys gathered in some back room. These decisions are often made by the most emotionally immature and psychologically unconscious of our species. The ascension to places of power in complex and impersonal bureaucracies often requires the ability to shut down any feeling in service of cold intellectual decision making.

These hard-driving movers and shakers can be adept at looking good, acquiring wealth, getting lots of stuff, and saying things like, “I got this”, and “I’m not weak, I don’t need anybody”. Unfortunately, these guys need healing more than anyone. I have been working with emotionally wounded men (which is most of us) for 25 years, and it is the guys that are married to success and intellectual toughness that are the most dangerous to themselves and others. It usually takes a giant train wreck in their life for them to be open to inner work and a different kind of men’s gathering.

The major obstacle to overcome on the way to healing is not the cultural bias against men gathering together, but the internal terror that men carry about being seen as vulnerable.

After a particularly strong men’s retreat about a decade ago, a friend and I stood across from each other in an adjacent park sharing a tearful hand-on-each-others-heart connection (I know, it is weird, but much of the work seems weird because we do not have many healing rituals for men in our modern world). Suddenly, two cop cars came skidding in. They had been called to break up the fight. The neighbor who called and the officers who arrived could think of no other reason that men would be standing tall and facing each other!

The major obstacle to overcome on the way to healing is not the cultural bias against men gathering together, but the internal terror that men carry about being seen as vulnerable. The wildly exaggerated fear that feelings and healing are related to homosexuality or being excessively feminine is rampant. My dad was clear and enthusiastic that I should never be a ‘limp wrist’ or ‘act like a girl’. I was stiff as a board and robotic when I came into men’s healing work, and It took quite a while for me to loosen up and find a less rigid authentic carriage.

We can argue for hours on Facebook about the leaders we think are incompetent, the ones who may be coldly pursuing selfish pursuits. We can rail against corrupt politics and corporate greed. Instead, or in addition, we can take our male selves, or our male partners, to a men’s group or healing intensive. Read Iron John, by Robert Bly, or He, by Robert Johnson, or Fire in the Belly, by Sam Keen, or Daring Greatly, by Brené Brown. Most men see being strong and tough as the highest ideal. I am sorry to be the one to tell you, but vulnerability takes much more courage than being shut down and distant. Further, it is among the highest factors that determine inspired followership in business (Beare, 2016). People may obey out of fear, but to instil trust, a crack in the armor has to open.

Remember, there is a mountain of internal and external misinformation and shame directed toward men and their emotional capacities.

Is it right to distrust what goes on when men gather? Traditionally, the good old, wounded boys have cooked up some considerable destruction. But when it happens for healing purposes, and the work is facilitated with maturity and compassion, these men emerge as transformational leaders and healers. There is much evidence that these kind of intense healing experiences make significant positive change in the way men approach relationships (Burke et al, 2010).

Remember, there is a mountain of internal and external misinformation and shame directed toward men and their emotional capacities. So, the choice to gather for healing must not only be tolerated, it must also be seen as deep heroics and encouraged boldly.

♦◊♦

Beare, R. K. (2016). Senior Leader’s experience with Vulnerability: A Multiple Case Study. Doctoral Dissertation. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1809114914.html?FMT=ABS

Burke, C. K., Maton, K. I., Mankowski, E. S., & Anderson, C. (2010). Healing men and community: Predictors of outcome in a men’s initiatory and support organization. American Journal of Community Psychology, 45(1-2), 186–200.

 

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