Saturday, January 31, 2015

Jian Ghomeshi Sucks (and so does Moxy Fruvous)



Brace yourself for a somewhat lengthy history lesson...

Back in 1993, a band called Moxy Fruvous had a minor hit with a song called "My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors". It's pretty hard NOT to take notice of this song playing on the radio. The song was okay and seemed to be somewhat influenced by "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer". Immediately upon hearing the song, I shouted "THEY MUST BE CANADIAN!" Why is it that Canadian bands can be automatically identified by their musical stupidity? Other good examples are The Barenaked Ladies and Celine Dion.

Anyway, Moxy Fruvous quickly disappeared from the airwaves and from my mind... until 1996.

I was taking a specific subject in a vocational high school that year. I clearly remember the day my teacher excitedly came into class with an educational videotape called "The Science of Energy". He told the class, "You guys are really going to enjoy this!" While the intro credits were rolling, I was surprised to see the text "Featuring Moxy Fruvous" appear on the screen. My immediate thought was "are you fucking kidding me???"

We were treated to an extremely boring educational video, interrupted by some of Moxy's extremely terrible music. One of my classmates began pressing the fast forward button on the VCR every time Moxy would hit the screen. After the teacher scolded him for doing so, my classmate asked, "All in favour of skipping the songs, raise your hand!" We all raised our hand, and the periodic fast forwarding commenced. We broke our poor teacher's heart.

Moxy Fruvous had made themselves 'uncool' with kids of the 90s by selling out and contributing to educational videos. I suppose the band now had a steady flow of income to invest in new guitar strings since all their albums that followed "Bargainville" had flopped. (I looked in my archives for the cassette copy of Bargainville that my ex-wife had left behind, but it appears that I rightly threw it in the garbage)

That incident has been sitting in my mind ever since. Then about a year ago, I found this video in the thrift store:



OH JOY! But this video is about genetically modified corn. If you look at Medicinema's website, you'll see that they used Moxy Fruvous on a whole pile of their videos. And the price they're asking (over $1000 for the entire "Cracking the Code" series) could certainly generate a LOT of guitar string money!

So this video has been sitting in my queue box for quite some time already. I should have reviewed it when I initially bought it. If I had done so, I would have reaped great website traffic when the drummer for the group hit top news stories about beating the hell out of women he wanted to fuck. I did a lot of reading about him when the news broke out, but news stories were more focused on his most recent career with the CBC. Moxy Fruvous was mentioned absolutely nowhere in the articles I read (which just goes to show how much they shook the music world). So that's why it's taken so long for me to cover this video. I didn't realize he was in Moxy Fruvous until a couple of days ago.

So let's get to the video!

Disclaimer: 
To be fair, I doubt the rest of Moxy Fruvous had anything to do with Jian's sexual shenanigans. Band members don't have to live and breathe each other's sweat, blood, or semen. In fact, it's probably better if they don't.
*End of Disclaimer*

This video came out in 2003 which is peculiar, since all the sources I've looked at claim that Moxy Fruvous had disbanded in 2001. Perhaps they made an album called "GeneticallyModifiedVille", produced some music videos for it, threw them in the garbage (because they were terrible), and Medicinema came across them while picking through Jian's trash can, looking to frame him for beating his female victims with a stalk of genetically modified corn.

Moxy Fruvous has four appearances on this video, however they seem to  play only two songs chopped in half, but whatever. It would make for a good EP.... Or a bad one.... Either way, these songs suck. Here's Jian singing the theme song for this video series:



Seems pretty innocent, doesn't it? However, let's take a deeper look into Jian's twisted, puny mind. Let's interpret his lyrics:

"Learning how to modify the crops we grow, the fish we fry"

Obviously referring to the erection of the penis, and the scent of the vagina.

"Their DNA is now at our command"

According to news stories, Jian liked to command his victims with physical abuse. What a sick fuck.

"The genes we want can now be moved, the food we eat can be improved by adding traits that nature never planned"

This is in reference to Jian wanting to psychologically alter the "food" he wanted to "eat" with violence

"This power's now the subject of dispute"

It certainly is if you look at all the controversy he caused on various interactive forums

"Are we biting into new forbidden fruit"

You certainly have, Jian. And now you're going to trial for it.

"Cracking the Code"

In reference to cracking his victims across the face. Sick bastard.

And I'm done interpreting this garbage. I'm disgusted with myself for even bothering to read into this song. Jian, your days are numbered. You shall pay for your crimes against your victims, the terrible music you contributed to, and the awful educational videos you starred in. But don't worry, you'll be able to get all the violent sexual fun you want in prison.

If MediCinema has any brains, they should edit Moxy Fruvous out of their videos. Then they could move forward by producing a movie identical to "The Execution of Gary Glitter", replacing Gary with Jian, and replacing execution with castration. Then, sell copies of the video to school boards as a sex ed film entitled "Beat Your Meat, Not Women"

MediCinema needs to hire me.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

A Big Hunk of Sh*tty Elvis Tribute Albums - Part Two

Happy new year! I'm celebrating Elvis's birthday a bit late here, but he's dead so I doubt that he's going to mind. I figured I'd bring you three more Elvis tribute albums for fun. These things accumulate quite quickly, so I'm trying to keep on top of them. It's not working too well.

Alan Presents The Elvis Presley Story



Alan? Alan? Who the fuck is Alan???

I'd be more than happy to tell you what Alan's last name is, but unlike the rest of the band members, it's nowhere to be found on the album credits. With regards to how closely our three contenders sound like Elvis, this Alan guy wins hands down. The record is an interesting piece of work in itself. Between songs (which are NOT marked by blank spaces on the record, making each song impossible to find) Alan gives you little pieces of his Elvis knowledge.

The band's renditions are... well... okay for the most part. Apparently, "Treat Me Nice" is Alan's favourite song, but the rendition on here sounds like everyone downed a six pack before recording. The lyric "make me heel at home" is evident that drunken Alan was expressing his foot fetish during the recording. However, I have no clue what "piss off a head of cheese" means. Feel free to listen for yourself.

Listen to Treat Me Nice


CMG Music - Hits Made Famous By Elvis Presley



HOLY SHIT, look at that cover art! Must have taken the art department WEEKS to come up with that.

I have a number of cassettes manufactured by CMG Music. I haven't really touched upon them because they're sitting in my personal cassette collection. I bought most of them in the 1990s brand new at K-Mart at a price somewhere between $1.99 and $2.99. CMG Music uses shitty artwork, shitty tape stock, shitty editing, and pretty much shitty everything when they make these cassettes. They *usually* print a warning on the back of the cassette that says the recordings are NOT by the original artists, but they seem to have forgotten about it on this one. So the person who originally purchased this thought he was getting genuine Elvis. Poor guy.

These songs were recorded in 1974 which means that CMG Music likely bought them from some other ass-crack recording company for the price of a blowjob. If I ever find the original release of this, I'll be sure to let you know.

Anyway, the songs here are very dry. There's just something wrong with them, complicated by the fact that I couldn't get a good azimuth alignment on the tape head for the highest quality playback. CMG also has a history of being the cheapest bastards on the planet when it comes to actual tape usage. The beginning of Return To Sender on side one is slightly chopped off by the leader. This is certainly not the first time I've seen this from CMG.

The tape is full of dropouts, with the exception of the intentional one near the end of Suspicious Minds. The song quickly gets faded out and leads right into the cue tone to stop the duplication machine from wasting the cheap tape stock (which disintegrates significantly every time you play this cassette).

If someone out there happens to find a copy of this with my lost chunk of "Return to Sender", please let me know. In return I will give you a reward...  A sealed Glen Campbell tribute 8-track.

As for the performance of Suspicious Minds, all I have to say is that it was a nice try.

Listen to Suspicious Minds


Various Artists - Tribute To Elvis Presley



It's always a treat when they label the tape as "Various Artists" and it's the same group of nobodies performing throughout the entire album. They used a cheap echo feature on the recordings which makes it sound... well... cheap.

As for the cover? I don't know what to think of that. It's like a bastardized American flag with a picture of... ummm.... city landscape and an ocean liner???  It's not even the square shape of an album cover. Perhaps they cropped it to save on the cost of colour ink.

So I've brought you two songs: "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You" and "Heart Break Hotel" (sic). Nobody seems to be able to spell the name of this song correctly. My last Elvis entry contained an error with this song title as well.

"I Want You" is just a terrible performance. This song will give you an idea of what Kermit the Frog would sound like if he was an Elvis impersonator.

"Heart Break" starts off with the wrong lyrics. Way to go Various Artists! How could you guys fuck this one up? There should be at least ONE guy in the band who knows how the lyrics go, and you would think he'd pull the singer aside and say "Hey buddy, you fucked up the first verse!" But then again, these guys were out to make a quick buck and probably didn't care that they got parts of the song wrong. After all, there's good money to be made in 8-tracks.

Listen to I Want You, I Need You, I Love You
Listen to Heart Break Hotel

And now we close off another batch of Elvis tribute albums. I have more, and you'll get to hear them eventually.