Good lord. I hate to sound like that grumpy old fucker at a mere 32 years of age, but about an hour ago I was awoken from my after work nap by a gaggle of about twelve children not ten feet outside my front room window. The enterprising little bastardsn had taken it upon themselves to set up a lemonade stand and begin SCREAMING BLOODY HELL at every car that passes by to advertise. One little kid even has a casio keyboard and keeps playing the demo song on it, some age-old classical piece we all recognize but probably none of us remember the title to, over and over AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER…
I’m not going to be the guy who goes out and tells them to beat it, because that shit used to happen to me when I was a kid and skateboarding on the street in front of the wrong house. Some asshole with no control over his own pathetic existence would every once in a while storm out and make idle threats of ‘kicking our asses’ which would then usually just serve to A) serve to illustrate his assholery and B) put him on ‘the list’. Not the sit the fuck down list, which would come later in my life of course, but the ‘as soon as Halloween rolls around we’re going to fuck that douche bag’s house up’ list.
Plus, the louder they yell and scream, the louder I can play my music in defense.
My defense, much like Robert Neville in the Richard Matheson short story I AM LEGEND, is indeed to blare music. My music however is not nearly as ‘nice’ as Neville’s Wagner*, preferring instead to use Fantomas’ brilliant DELIRIUM CORDIA album, the Mike Patton conducted, fever dream nightmare, to frighten off the locals’ children.
Only thus far, it’s not working. Oh well, on then to the blog, proper.
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A few weeks back when I posted my big tirade about the band Megadeth, I had actually been en route to discuss something of a related topic before changing course. The way that blog originally began it wasn’t about Megadeth at all but Judas Priest.
Yeah. I know, I’m splitting fucking hairs here but bare with me, there’s comedy goodness ahead, I promise.
You see, after seeing the movie ROCKSTAR for the first time ever that week I got to thinking, ‘whatever happened to the BRITISH STEEL boys’ and thus I ended up on the Judas Priest website. I was at once both horrified and amused to find that not only did they have a new album coming out, but there was a link to something called, ‘The Judas Priest YouTube channel (all Priest, all the time!!!). Well, of course I could not help but follow the link, as the idea of an entire ‘channel’ dedicated to Judas Priest offered at the very least some laughs.**
Boy, I had no idea of the jack pot I was about to stumble upon.
Here’s the link to the YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/JudasPriest
Check out the video to ‘War’. I love when old schoolers try to stay current. They always go way over the top and have things like gratuitous computer animated videos. In fact, trying to stay relevant has been a bit of a theme with at least some of these guys. Rob Halford’s ridiculous attempt at going ‘goth industrial’ in the 90′s with that ‘I wanna be in with the NIN crowd’ project ‘TWO’ is a perfect example of why I feel justified in picking on these guys still, even though truth be told, Living After Midnight era had some good bar fight anthems.
Anyway, I’m sure you’re back from that little excursion, because unless you’re a fucking sadist there’s no way you watched that entire video or spent more than a few seconds on the ‘channel’. If you did, well, you’ll never get those seconds back, so I hope your happy. Now, here’s the real comedy. Go here:
http://judaspriest.com/sound/sounds.asp
and follow my instructions carefully; any deviations could lead to METAL OVERDOSE
(MAHAHAA he laughs evily while imagining Ronnie James Dio’s face
appearing in your mirror in the morning):
In the upper right hand corner there is a link to listen to the title track from this ‘high concept’ album ‘NOSTRADAMUS’. Listen to this for as long as you can, I’ll be hear smiling when you return.
…….
Okay, was that not fucking hysterical?
So, I ws set to write about this all those weeks ago but put it aside.
Why?
Well really, how relevant is any new Judas Priest album in 2008, right? Why waste the reader’s time? So I scrapped the blog and ended up writing about another bad metal band. But here’s the thing. In the two or three weeks since scrapping this as a tirade, I’ve seen hype for this Nostradamus everywhere.
One of the advantages and banes of controlling inventory at a book store is you see everything that hits the floor, including metal magazines. Usually I laugh or raise my eyebrows at some of the outright douche baggery that passes for headlines in metal focused magazines, and in this case I can tell you several magazines are really pimping this Nostradamus shit. And based on this pre-existing radar-blip*** now you can see how I would already have a predisposition for picking up a magazine like BWBK (no, it doesn’t have anything to do with Burger King) for some more laughs at JP’s expense, especially when the cover had an awesome quote like this from the band:
“We didn’t pick Nostradamus, he picked us”
Based on that how could it not be a good time, right?
So here’s some of what I found as I spiralled further into the suck spiral.
The highlight of what I could stomach reading from the ‘zine is an interview with JP guitarist Glenn Tipton, who when asked the question, ‘At any point did you think the project (Nostradamus) was too danting or would rise over fans’ heads?” Ol’ Glenn answers, “We’ve always been fairly brave as you know” (oh don’t we Glenn. Modesty, anyone???).
Proceeding further with whether or not they think the fans might have trouble with the concept of the album (a theme I don’t think Glenn caught on to) Tipton says, “It’s not far removed from anything a normal Priest fan would like. And yes, our fans are intelligent. They must be – they like Judas Priest! Let’s give them some credit.”
Well, there you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth.
****
I understand that to some degree you have to have the stones to stand behind your art and hold it up for all it’s worth, but when your Judas Priest, whether it’s a concept album about Nostradamus or freakin’ Mother Theresa, it’s still a metal album. Very few manage to transcend this genre with high concept art (Tool comes to mind, but that’s only if you consider them a metal band, which I most certainly do not) so take it fucking easy. Rock out, throw up your devil horns, have fun and be creative, but PLEEEASE, for the love of all that you may hold holy, don’t take yourself too seriously. It’s unbecoming, egotistical, and a sure fire way of getting on the list (I’ll leave it up to the reader to determine if that’s the ‘Sit The Fuck Down List’ or the aforementioned ‘as soon as Halloween rolls around…’ list.
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*I think it was Wagner although I loaned out my last copy of the book probably almost ten years ago and have never re-bought it, especially now that the movie tie-in cover has flooded the market. Not to imply I didn’t like the movie, because surprisingly I did, although my reaction to it is an entirely different story which is pretty much no longer relevant, or at least not until it feels far enough in the past to perform a ‘Time Machine Go!!!’ on it. Whoah. Run on, off topic meanderings – all that allergy medicine I took a while ago must have kicked in with a vengeance. Good allergy medicine combined with massive doses of caffeine often has a speed-like effect, and here’s the proof…
**As I write this the sounds from the lemonade stand outside my window continue unabated. In fact I just heard one of the kids vehemently suggest that tomorrow the customers should have to pay $2 a cup instead of the $1 currently set. Wow, 100% price increase in less than 24 hours? You’d think Exxon would have shown up by now to recruit them for oil market speculation.
***Oh, this might be good. As I continue to write this now it is 8PM and the ice cream man that shows up EVERY FUCKING NIGHT and sits with his ‘Pop Goes the Weasil’ playing and his loud-ass refrigeration truck running DIRECTLY OUTSIDE MY WINDOW is here, right in front of the lemonade stand. Perhaps I will peek my head out and see some Yakuza style territory war. Mmmm….
****all this is quoted directly from the interview in BWBK’s July issue. the interview I read did not have an author credited, but I put this for legal reasons. And of course I wouldn’t want anyone thinking I talked to these guys.
