Showing posts with label 311. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 311. Show all posts

Friday, January 23, 2009

Wigger slam update, winter edition

There's a new dance craze that's sweeping the nation. It's called wigger slam and it's causing devastation!

It's been a while since we made a wigger slam post, which is a tragedy that makes Darfur look quaint by comparison. I would trade the lives of every single Romanian orphan for a single chance to play the Repudilation discography on my iPod while I'm in line at Starbucks. Seriously, fuck those kids, they're as good as dead anyway. In any case, there have been some exciting developments in the wigger slam scene that need to be mentioned.


Composted's SLAMBULANCE shirt
While it is disappointing to see that brutal death band Composted don't appreciate wigger slam like we do, we are still excited to see them raise awareness for the genre with the shirts you see below. The band is only mediocre (even to someone like me who has extremely low standards for slam metal- I mean I listen to fucking Artery Eruption!), but you might think about paying their MySpace a visit anyway. I'm sure it would make their day, since they probably spend all day bagging groceries or something to scrape together a pittance that pays the rent on the room they share with 8 other disgusting creeps at the local dirtbag metal flophouse. I'm sure glad I was never stupid enough to be in a band.


Entorturement vocalist drops some science
We have some insights on the origins of wigger slam from none other than the originators of the genre, Entorturement (and also the band who can legitimate claim to the worst name ever). He chimes in on the comments to an older post of ours, "The Facts About Wigger Slam":
LOL! This is Tim (former vocalist for entorturement). This is funny shit. Ok, yes Repudilation was the first to actually infuse a bit of Jazz into Death Metal. brian, their drummer, joined us and we wanted to do something different. So we went all out combining internal bleeding and suffocation with jazz,NYHC and Hip Hop. Growing up where we were you listened to Hip Hop. That was just how it was, mainly just NYC groups like Wu-Tang,Nas, Jay Z. It was like you are death metal (or deadhead,or jock) and you listened to hip hop. I am sorry for people taking it wayyyyyy out of hand. All the "thuggery" was taking the NYHC attitude at the time and multiplying 10 fold. In general, making fun of them.
Note that New Yorkment left them a nice comment on their Last.fm page:
OH FUKKKKKKKKK YEAH SON THESE BE THA SIKKKKKKKKEST SLAMZ EVAH!!! TOTAL BEATDOWN BRUTHAZ STYLE FO LYFE!!!
Amazon opens a wigger slam store
MI reader Matt Smith from Relapse tipped us off to Amazon's new wigger slam store. I'll be honest, the selection is a bit lacking (currently just a few Dying Fetus and Devourment shirts), but I'm happy to see that a big company like Amazon sees the potential for developing this market. I am sure that once they start producing Katalepsy and Abominable Putridity arctic camo parkas they'll have trouble keeping them in stock. MAKE IT RAIN!! I'm hoping they can hook up with Paul Wall and make some Soils of Fate grills. That shit would be HOT, and I'm sure all the European wiggers would eat it up. As anyone who ever sold anything metal-related in the 90s know, Europeans will buy anything!! I mean, without them, Joey DeMaio would have been out on the streets decades ago, picking cigarette butts out of the trash and selling Diet Mountain Dew cans for food.

See the store here!


Frogkill: World's first self-identified wigger slam band??

Perhaps I'm tooting our own horn here, but it seems that our influence has spread as far as Germany. We have been singing the praises of wigger slam for a while now, but it has so far been a externally-applied label. And to be honest, bands are generally not that stoked when we call them wigger slam (like these comments from that butthurt pussy in the Virginia-based wigger slam band Short Bus Pileup). A new one-man band named Frogkill is the first band we are aware of to call itself wigger slam, which is an amazing thing to behold! Congratulations, my friend! You are blazing new trails!We especially liked this statement on their MySpace:

And God said, "Let there be guttural slamming sickness!",
And there was guttural slamming sickness.
And God saw that it was good.

Now here comes the sad part. This poor kid is probably 19 or 20, and instead of sowing his wild oats banging hot German scene girls, he's spending his free time trying to impress internet metal nerds by making a one-man wigger slam band! Kid, you are going to look back on this part of your life and cry your eyes out at the way you pissed away the best years of your life. But congratulations on amusing a bunch of jaded metal dorks in their 30s at the expense of your youth!


Last.fm tags up 182%
Finally, thanks to everyone who has been dilligently using the wigger slam tag on Last.fm! If you haven't already, please tag all the relevant tracks you can. Fight the good fight! I'm not sure how Fall Silent got in there, but that's pretty funny.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Retroview: Crazytown discography


Introduction
Many of us look back on the late 90s with a mixture of horror, disgust, and amusement. After all, those are the years that brought us Lincoln Park, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, and legions of other bands that combined the most annoying and ignorant aspects of white trash and poor black people. By now, most readers of Metal Inquisition will already know where I'm headed with this- I love all those bands! The late 90s were SWEET! They produced Mandy Moore, Christina Augilera, Blink-182 and Jordan Knight's comeback song, all of which are still totally great. But maybe the very best of late 90s douche rock was Crazytown, and it's time that Metal Inquisition gave them their due!

But first, on the future of the media business...
If you read gay, shitty magazines like Wired, they will tell you that physical media are dead. They'll say that nobody buys CDs anymore, that digital distribution is the future. They couldn't be more wrong. I am listening to pirated Guttural Secrete MP3s as I type this, but when it comes to bands you really love, you want to own the physical artifact. I definitely love Crazytown, so before I wrote this, I hopped on eBay and picked up the entire CxT discography, for a grand total of 74 cents. I know what you're thinking: I got ripped off! But not so fast: both CxT albums were 1 cent each, although I had to pay 72 cents for Shifty's solo album. I'm not sure what makes that one worth 36 times more than the other two put together, but valuation of physical assets is kind of a black art that I don't totally understand, so I was OK with paying top dollar to get these albums that mean so much to me.

The Gift of Game (1999)
The cover of this album has some hottie on it sucking on a lollipop, I guess because they want you to imagine her performing oral sex, and that makes you think about her having a penis in her mouth instead of a lollipop. I have a hard time getting aroused by her, though, because she combines every awful 90s trend into a single image: tribal tattoos, excessive piercings, Betty Page hair, arched eyebrows, and I'm guessing she's wearing Mudd jeans, even if you can't see them. In any case, you probably only know the hit single "Butterfly," but actually this record is packed with sick jams from top to bottom.



My favorite song is "Darkside," which showed the world that Crazytown was versatile, going from tender ballads like "Butterfly" to uptempo rockers like this song. In case you thought CxT didn't know anything about rock, Shifty's lyrics in "Darkside" namecheck the Circle Jerks, Bad Brains, Sex Pistols and all kinds of other ill shit:
Nasty na na, ha, ha
Darkside marijuana.
Fueled of the drama.
Drifting on the darkside.
I’m the black eye bomber.
Do what I do on a darkside
Rendezvous.
Raising hell, out the shell.
Of fantasies I never tell.
Dispersin’ untamed perversion.
My bad brain’s working,
Circle jerking, rocking riddles,
Sex pistol, sexperts
Acting uncivil.
Damn, son!! That shit got me almost as excited as when I saw Mark McGrath wearing a Circle Jerks shirt in Sugar Ray's video for "Answer The Phone." If that wasn't enough for you, click here for a really good live version of "Darkside."



The album closes with "B-Boy 2000," which is an awesome rap/rock thingamajig featuring KRS-ONE (famous for declaring that the "li-bary" is "where they bury the lies!"). I really like the song, but there is one part I wish they would have changed. I know Shifty isn't strong in terms of quantitative methods (I mean, if he even has a GED I'd be pretty amazed), but when he drops the line "Destroying MCs with my vocal algebra," I wish that he would have said something like "vocal differential equations" or even just "verbal Lagrangian relaxation." It just sucks because I don't think he realizes that a reasonably smart 7th grader should have a pretty good handle on algebra, you know? On the other hand, I think even his staunchest critics would be quite impressed if he could, for example, uncover arbitrage opportunities with simply his lyrics!



Darkhorse (2000)
This is the album that helped me realize that I was a douchebag. More specifically, I saw that I started out as an ironic douchebag that just listened to CxT for a joke, but had become an honest-to-god, authentic douchebag that seriously liked them. I remember the moment as though it was yesterday. I was lifting weights, and the song "Skulls and Stars" from this album came on my iPod, and I thought to myself, "Man, the lyrics to this song are really good! I can't believe I used to laugh at this band, they're seriously good." Then I thought, "Holy shit, I just flexed in the mirror while telling myself that Crazytown is a great band. What have I become?!" I'd like to think that Shifty would have been proud of me. He'd be all, "Fuck it dude, it doesn't matter what anybody thinks. People told us we were crazy for combining rock and rap, but we flipped the script on those fools. Don't even trip, fuck the haters, bro!" He's right. You can laugh at me and Shifty if you want, but just remember: they called Galileo a fool, too!

As far as the cover goes, it depicts what seems to be the same girl from their first album, only now she has a better haircut, wings, and she looks really tired. I don't get it, but I'm sure that Shifty and Epic have a hella deep explanation for every detail in the image. They always do, sort of like on Miami Ink how some self-absorbed sorostitute will come in and ask for a tattoo of a dolphin on her hip, then drone on for 20 minutes about what it symbolizes.



Split 7" with Paul Oakenfold (2003?)
After their second album, Crazytown released a three-way split 7" with Paul Oakenfold and Psycho on Ax/Ction Records featuring the single "Starry Eyed Surprise." I first heard it in a Coke commercial that they played at the theater before some movie (this is also how I discovered Forever The Sickest Kids- yay Movietunes). It is possibly the ultimate summer jam, right up there with "Steal My Sunshine."


Shifty - Happy. Love. Sick. (2004)
First, here is a review I wrote for Rolling Stone of Shifty's solo effort:
Upon initial contact with Shifty's music, I had envisioned him to be an ill-mannered and psychologically unstable man with an extremely uneducated and barbaric frame of mind, whose raps displayed nothing but ridiculous jargon, shocking sexual audacity and repulsive images of the ghetto.

However, after further analysis of his music I can deduce that he is the epitome of antidisestblishmentarianism who embodies the entire spectrum of the urban experience and struggle.

But to make things more plain and simple to the layman, I find Shifty to be the dopest, flyist, O.G. pimp hustler gangster player hardcore motherfucker living today. To be honest I'm totally and irrevocably on his dick.
Anyway, here are a couple of things I bet you didn't know about Shifty and CxT:
  • DJ AM, most known for banging Nicole Richie, was CxT's DJ on their first record (lolz @ his credibility if anybody finds out about that)
  • Shifty appeared in the film Clifford with Martin Short
Closing thoughts
I have come to terms with the fact that I seriously like Crazytown. At first I thought it would be funny to listen to them as a post-ironic bit, like "Hay guyz I like the absolute worst band on the planet, look at me!" And it is pretty funny in that context. But like I said earlier, I turned the corner, and I honestly like their music. I seriously think their first album is really catchy and fun and I am kind of mad that I never saw them live.

Not only that, but I feel like Shifty and I could definitely have a bromance after seeing him on Celebrity Rehab. He needs someone like me in his life to help him chill out and focus on what's really important. Maybe we could start doing yoga or something, then have some hella deep conversations at the juice bar afterwards, I don't know.