For those of you who don’t know who Saul Williams is, he’s the dude in the movie K-PAX. Before his movie career he was better known for his spoken word hip-hop. Motherfucker is good. Listen intently to the lyrics from Penny For A Thought, Nigga’s Way Back, or Tao Of The Now. My friend John Noto knew I was into political music and, despite being primarily into Punk and Metal, was also into Hip-Hop and Rap (hell the third album I ever owned as a kid was RUN D.M.C.’s “Raising Hell”). He put on Penny For A Thought for me and I was instantly hooked. He’s been around for quite some time now and his music spans many different styles and genres. I just found this cover song’s video (Niggy Tardust, the album the video is from, is a collaboration with NIN’s Tent Reznor). and thought I’d pass along info about a great artist in case some people didn’t know about the man.

-=Grim=-

When I saw that there was a new video for their first single off the new album I expected the worst. Seriously. I mean, it’s [hed] fuckin’ PE. Here’s what I saw [I hope this video stays online]:

That’s actually pretty brutal and… and… good? Still, it was only one song so I expected the rest of the album to blow. I’m listening to it right now. It doesn’t blow. Man, I stand corrected. Okay, it’s still [hed] PE so it’s still got some juvenile lyrics I’d expect to come out of a high school hip hop act, but compared to their other albums the band has matured a bit. You can tell they’re less obsessed with sex and “the marijuana” and more upset with the state of the world around them. The music is a lot better too. I only expected “Suffa” to be decent, but out of 19 tracks (a sizable album for this day and age) more than half are worth listening too. Songs like “comeova2nite” will still make you want to puncture your eardrums with your fist, but lame songs are the minority on this piece.

About time.

As a side note, I do appreciate the vast number of styles present on the album. They definitely didn’t constrain themselves to one genre with this one. They went with what they felt and thus we have lots of punk, hardcore, metal, hip hop and Latino present, but not in a boring hodgepodge like so many other newer school bands of the day (shit bands like Slipknot and KoRn come to mind). If anything, check and see if your local library has the album and give it a listen. It’s not bad. Fuck I hate being wrong after abusing a band for so many years. Just be prepared for a total lack of political correctness. I respect that.

-=Grim=-

Here’s the deal: the lead singer is what pulls peoples’ attention to the stage. Failing that, the guitar players. The drummer and keyboard could have all the presence in the WORLD, but it won’t matter: the stage will seem empty if the guitar players and lead singer can’t pull it together. Skinny Puppy, being Skinny Puppy, didn’t have any guitars on stage, so the whole thing fell to Nivek Ogre. Many people consider him a titan of industrial or something, so he should have been able to pull it off, right?

*sigh*

Wrong. Want to see what I had to deal with?

That’s right: Ogre was behind a fucking sheet the whole time. The stage seemed really empty and devoid of energy. Sure it was nice and artsy at first – “Ooooh, look at the cool shadow play when he sings.” But the keyboardist looked bored and the drummer looked like he’d rather be somewhere else, so it really was up to Ogre to pull this shit together. Of course he didn’t. My friend Mike thinks he was on some serious drugs and too wasted to sound like Skinny Puppy (seriously, he sounded like shit). I think he just needs to call it quits for a while. His voice sucked and his presence wasn’t there. BORING. The whole damned band wasn’t there, mentally or emotionally. I felt like I was watching some crap high school band or a geriatric ward slowly die of old age, not Skinny Motherfucking Puppy! The thing is, once in a while Ogre would come dancing out from behind the sheets and start singing to the crowd. Then there was a noticeable surge in crowd energy; they went from zombies standing there looking confused by the bright lights to something resembling insomniacs trying to dance. The latter was an improvement, trust me. But I don’t blame the crowd at all. You can’t get into a show that isn’t there. Even when Nivek came frolicking out from behind the curtains to scream in the crowds’ faces it still wasn’t anything to get excited over. Sure he *looked* cool, but image only goes so far.

This is boredom:

To make a long story short, Skinny Puppy was a waste of money. Mike and I left before the set was even over. We just couldn’t take it any more. The after party was fun though, but I admit that we mostly hung out outside with my other homies that we met there. Gnargh! Friggin’ Skinny Puppy. What a let down. But like I said, what we did before and after was cool, but that’s all for another blog.

-=Grim=-

I mean COME ON. What, were they out of Black Metal drummers in Norway (or whatever Midwest town this group is from) so they had to ask the high school marching band snare section to come lay some tracks with them? Look at this guy! They even gave him sad clown makeup instead of corpse paint! *sigh* It really ruins a band’s image when people like this try to do the rock n’ roll pose for photos. I don’t give a fuck if you’re gutter punk or some other anti-establishment band, image is everything (the gutter punks would have the image of “we don’t need an image!”, usually the standard punk image, i.e. “We really do have an image, but we like to think we don’t.”). For Black Metal image is about eating babies, skull-fucking the pope and destroying all things pleasant. You can’t pull that off when your band has that one weak link in the photo. Look as bad-ass as you want, the weakest link is the image presented. Yo, it’s even funnier in the unmarked photo:

Holy D&D dork, Batman! He probably goes by the name Zamoth Gar, Bane of Light. Why couldn’t they give this guy a mask or something? Some mean looking thing with rusty nails and fangs or whatever is this years trendy thing in the Black Metal scene. No, they give the Chess Club looking guy sad clown makeup. Whatever, I’m an asshole. Bite me.

Christ…

-=Grim=-

P.S.: For the record, the band is called Emaciation. I have a feeling there’s another 30 Black Metal and Death Metal bands with that name, probably meaner looking too, but whatever.

“I just want to kiss your tits.”

-=Grim=-

Whatever happened to the Leftover Crack of old? Last night they SUCKED. And the time I saw them before this they also sucked. And the time before that. Three strikes and you can’t claim they’re in a rut, not when there’s YEARS in between each time. They used to be raging assholes that abused everything about society and made me crack up. They used to put on awesome sets with tons of energy. Now they just suck. I payed $12 ($12 for a fucking LoC show! What happened to the $4 shows!?!) to listen to them talk. They talked about stupid shit more than played songs, even going so far as to start talking in the middle of songs, thus killing the whole fucking vibe. Had you measured the talking against the music you’d have thought that it was LoC: the Spoken Word.

Also: the new shit blows.

I won’t be seeing LoC again. They’ve changed. It kills me too, because Choking Victim/Leftover Crack remind me of a great period in my life, romping around the Village with Greg, my brother, the two Toms and Crispin. Those were good times. LoC should have broken up when they decided to get a new guitarist, whatever the fuck his name is. If I had to come up with a watermark for when they went down hill, it’d be when he joined.

Meh.

Witch-Hunt was pretty good though. But barring that it was a pretty disappointing night. It sucks to see a band you once really liked start to suck. And yes, the new shit blows and totally caters to 16 year old upper-crust suburban kids. Y’know, the Anti-Flag crowd. At least i can say I saw them back when they had crowds made up of crusties and street punks and played real fuckin’ sets, for whatever that’s worth.