People who know me know I’ve had a list for quite some time. I like to call it my ‘Sit The Fuck Down List’. It is essentially an over-caffeinated rebuke to the ever-increasing parade of celebrities, musicians and public figures whose time runs up, yet they continue to subject us to their unhealthy wares. Previous examples of this would be Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Tucker and Billy Corigan. Well, I guess previous is misleading, as once you get on the list, you tend to stay on it. Today I’d like to add to that list. The today’s discussion is Dave Mustaine of Megadeth.
Random? Well, I noticed a DVD on the shelf at work today, one I had never seen before. It is entitled Megadeth: That One Night. It is a live concert from Buenos Aires and the cover serves as an accurate encapsulation of how lame I find Dave Mustaine. On it, he is in what could only be described as a ‘Celine Dion-esque pose, arms raised graciously in the air on stage as if answering thunderous applause. It, like so much else he has done in the previous 15 years or so, reeks of self-importance. What’s more, WHERE THE HELL IS THE REST OF THE BAND? Seriously, its ‘Megadeth’, not MEGA-EGO, so why wouldn’t the rest of the band be pictured there?
Growing up I admit, I was a metalhead and as such I had my share of Megadeth albums. In fact, to this day I will stand by the first four albums from Dave Mustaine and co. I’ve since lost my old cassette copies, and wouldn’t really care enough to replace them (for reasons I’m getting to), but I’ve always felt those first albums were pretty good examples of the ‘old days’ of Metal. Then Metallica (cough*douchebags*cough) released the Black Album and Dave Mustaine went into a jealous tailspin from which his band and his music would never recover.
This is the penultimate stoner discussion, and it makes me feel a bit silly discussing it in 2008 when I did so enough in the early 90′s to put it to bed, but that DVD stirred up some animosity and so as a jumping off point I’ll sumarize my view: Metallica recorded the most insanely technical yet poignant and catchy album of the era (…And Justice For All) and afterward decided to take it easy a bit. The musical zeitgeist was changing and either they or their record label was smart enough to see that if they got a real ‘Hit-maker’ like Bob Rock in on production they could take over. So prompted by a pretty natural evolution of their writing process, social lives and desire to grab their future fidelity by the horns, they made what was to the masses the hard rock album of the decade. To those who were already fans of ACDC, Black Sabbath or even bands like Kyuss, the last thing the world needed was a hard rock album by James and the gang. What they had done on their first four albums was effectively the birth and near perfection of Heavy Metal – hard rock had its pioneers, kings and underground and really didn’t need a second rate offering from anyone to help it anywhere but into the shitter.
So, to me, Metallica changed for personal reasons – the evolution of four people and how they made music together. Dave Mustaine on the other hand saw what his former bandmates were doing and said, ‘I can do that too!!!’ Thus, Countdown to Extinction.
Blah!!!
I can still remember in exquisite detail the day my friends and I (then Juniors in High School) picked up Megadeth’s long awaited fifth album. It was summer and we flew to the local record store (Red Tower) and each bought a copy, racing back to my friend Jake’s house to give it a first group listen.
To try and accurately portray our reaction, when the album finished my friend Jake ejected his copy of the cassette, walked outside, set it in the middle of the street and commenced to obliterate the steaming pile of musical shite with a nine iron.
Yep, that about sums up my opinion of everything ol’ Dave and the boys have done ever since.
Now you might say, ‘hey, that’s just your opinion. You like the old stuff, stick with that and keep your opinions to yourself’. Well, that would probably be for the best but then I wouldn’t be the opinioned bastard, would I?
Thing is, one day a couple years ago I was in a nostalgic mood and went to a local record store to buy a CD copy of Rust in Peace. This album was, in my opinion, the pinnacle of what Dave and his band ever did musically. I’ll still always prefer Killing is My Business and Business is Good, but R.I.P. was the companion piece to Metallica’s And Justice for All, ie – a demented technical masterpiece. This wasn’t that sterilized technical shite that comes from Yngw…Ywng.. however you say that guy’s name. Or Satriani* for that matter. This was hard, fast (really fucking fast) but with razor hooks and some honest to goodness wit. The copy I found had a big honking sticker on it that advertised it as being ‘completely remastered by Dave Mustaine himself’. Interested I pluncked down a few bucks and unwrapped that puppy on the way out to my car, ready to violently return to Metal’s hey day.
WRONG!!!
Inexplicably, unbelievably, ALL THE VOCAL HAVE BEEN COMPLETELY RE-RECORDED. BADLY.
Mustaine joins winy ass poetry nerd Billy Corigan as a member of a rare calibur of musical douche bag – both completely changed their vocal styles to winy, snarly pre-teen crap. Mustaine did so on the aforementioned harbinger of their apocalypse ‘Countdown’ album and then had the rare audacity to go back and alter his earlier works with it. Gone was the adequate metal vocals I grew up with, replaced by over-emphasized, cynical-to-the-point-of-charicature craptastic ‘enhancements’. In honor of Jake, who died several years previously, when I returned home from that wasted trip to the record store I walked straight to the garage, procurred a nice big hammer and proceeded to smash the offending compact disc into tiny shards of glistening plastic, depositing them in the toliet and urinating on them while chanting ‘SIT THE FUCK DOWN, SIT THE FUCK DOWN’ over and over again.
So you see, I cannot simply rest easy with the music I enjoyed as an angry, long-haired and sexless youth because Mustaine has triggered a retroactive suck effect. Perhaps he should go even further back in time and cause his father to wear a condom, thus sparing all of us one more shitty metal band.**
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More nominees for the list later. In the meantime, here’s what the computer at work had to say about that Megadeth dvd. Knee-slapping hilarity, I tells ya!!!
‘Few heavy metal acts can bring an entire arena crumbling to the ground like Dave Mustaine and Megadeth, and now fans can bring all the fury of a live Megadeth show home with this release of a 2005 concert captured in Argentina .’
And if you think I might be mistaken about those vocals, follow this link, scroll down the page and read this chap’s experience with the same reissue:
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Rust in Peace
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*There’s another one for the list. How many albums, nigh decades do you think it will take to show us you can play through a Phrygian scale backwards and forewards at 200 bpm? IT’S ONLY RELEVENT ONCE. Can you write a good song? No? Okay then, sit the fuck down!!!)
**If you think you really dislike either Metallica or Megadeth and you have not already seen Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s 2004 documentary ‘Some Kind of Monster’ I implore you to do so. You will finish the movie hating both camps more than you could ever imagine. For two hours you get to watch a bunch of grown men act like spoiled little fourteen year old girls. I could actually feel pieces of my disgust becoming tangilbe and fire off back through the SpaceTime Continuum, rocketing back to 1990 and hitting young Shawn in the face while sitting listening to his favorite bands, staring at the album art in his room after school.
