I finally fixed it so that you can just put in www.mindyourowngoddamnbusiness.com to come to this page. You don’t have to slap on the “/wordpress” part anymore, although that way will still work too.

Just letting everyone know.

A couple of days ago, I got a sweet, sweet case of strep throat. I’m apparently getting old or just becoming a sissy, because I don’t remember it hurting this much to swallow the last time I came down with strep.

Anyway, I’m drinking NyQuil by the gallon, eating a lot of popsicles and taking some sweet, sweet erithromyacin to kill all of the bullshit that’s decided to set up shop in the back of my throat. Unfortunately, I’m still a little bit too beat up to do anything much more strenuous than sit at my computer and type. The urge to start up my World of Warcraft account and start playing again is almost unbearable, but so is the thought of being back on the WoW wagon.

So I guess that I’m going to blog for a little while instead. My brain isn’t functioning quite like I would like it to right now, but I’m going to do my best to put something coherent together, because I’m starting to get a little bit tired of knocking myself out on the couch and waking up long enough to eat some chicken noodle soup and then knock myself out again. 2 days is enough.

First of all, I know that music recommendations in here are unwelcome and ignored, but has that ever stopped me before?

Daft Punk has a new CD out. It’s a live CD, which is normally the kind of thing that’s only cool if you’re already a huge fan of the band, but I think this is definitely worth picking up.

I’ve learned a lot of interesting things as a substitute teacher, and one of those things is this: Anyone much more than three years younger than me is completely unwilling to believe that techno is cool, was ever cool, or is good for anything other than background noise in cheap pornography.

It shouldn’t really surprise me, but it’s just another of those “Fuck. You’re old.” moments that I have on a more and more frequent basis, because when I was in high school, techno was still pretty cool. If you were a pretentious shithead, it was really important that you had a few techno CDs that you could whip out and pretend to enjoy. All the better if it was something really unaccessible and barely even music, like Plasticman or The Orb.

Anyway, the point is that 10 years later, the jig appears to be up. You need indy rock or emo that no one has ever heard of if you want to turn your nose up at everyone else.

Before I got off track, my point was that even when techno was cool, one of its common criticisms was that seeing it live didn’t add a whole lot to the experience. Most of the music isn’t created in real time, so most of the time you go to a show and watch a lights show while the guys from the band dance around and occasionally press “play” on their sequencers. Some bands pulled off shows pretty well, while with others it felt like you were paying 30 bucks to watch some guy take his album and pop it in a CD player on a stage.

Now that I’ve wasted all of that time trying to make a very simple point, let me bring it all full circle: Daft Punk’s new CD doesn’t suffer from the problem of sounding like they added a little bit of crowd noise to the background of a few of their old CDs and repackaged it. After hearing this CD, I’m tempted to try and see them live at some point. Well, maybe not. I don’t know. I’m hopped up on medicine. Cut me some slack.

Anyway, they get around the problem of not sucking live because they’re a techno band by turning the entire concert into a series of mashups of their songs, which is awesome in my opinion. They do a fantastic combination of “One More Time” and “Aerodynamic” on one track. In another, they put “Around the World” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” together in a way that makes the separate songs sound incomplete after hearing them put together. What I’m saying is that they do an excellent job of toeing the line between keeping the songs familiar enough that the fans can sing along and be pumped that they’re playing “That one song that they love” and changing them enough that no one feels like they’re just listening to the CD.

It’s called “Alive”. Go pick it up.

Whew! My jaw is a little bit sore from sucking Daft Punk’s dick for the last hour! I think that’s my cue to go eat a few more popsicles and take another nap!

But before I go, here is a video that you ungrateful assholes won’t watch of one of the songs off of the CD that I just spent an entire entry getting weepy about.

Bedtime. For the forth time today.

(In celebration of my impending 10 year high school reunion, I have decided to start putting up videos of music that I listened to as a senior in high school and attempt to justify my love of them. Some of it is still pretty ok, some of it is terrible. Either way, here it is.)

My original plan was to start with Limp Bizkit, but here’s the problem: I planned on mentioning that the first time I heard Limp Bizkit was at a Sugar Ray concert. I feel like with both bands, I have to immediately follow up the statement “I liked them in high school” with “WAIT, WAIT! LET ME EXPLAIN!” I thought about waiting a week before explaining why I had paid money to see Sugar Ray, but my manhood was too threatened to let that sit.

So, anyway:

On my last day of Jr. High school, one of the tech lab teachers let me take home a Commodore 64 computer, which was badly dated even in 1995 when he gave it to me. My entire summer before starting high school was spent in the basement, dicking around with BASIC on my sweet ass C64, trying to trick a girl I knew into letting me do it on her face, and listening to KTCL. I can still almost smell the cool breeze that blew in my window at night after everyone had gone to bed and I was still plinking away at my Commodore and watching Conan O’Brian.

Let old Grandpa Johnny wax nostalgic about KTCL for a moment, if I may: KTCL used to be an independent station that played a lot of music that you couldn’t hear otherwise, and if you were willing to sit through a lot of strange things, they would usually play some pretty cool stuff that other stations didn’t play.

In a strange coincidence or maybe just a celebration of my high school graduation, KTCL changed their format to “A 45 minute repeating playlist of alternative hits from the early 90′s” the year I graduated. Needless to say, I would rather fuck a dog than listen to KTCL anymore.

…ok, that’s probably not true. I mean, unless I had to listen to it for a really long time. Like, 10 years, nonstop. Then…well, I’m still not sure. Look, you know what I mean.

Anyway, that summer, listening to KTCL, I heard Sugar Ray for the first time. They played “Mean Machine” and was a fan.

Here’s the video for their first song:

This video really only kind of does the song justice, mostly because during the last guitar part, he screams “DON’T FUCK WITH IT!” in the unedited version. Who am I kidding, though. You didn’t know that there was a guitar part at the end, because you didn’t watch the fucking video, did you? I could tell you that at 2:54 in the song the drummer takes a dump on George Burns’ grave, and you would never know if I was telling the truth or not.

Whatever.

Here are a few more videos from their first CDs:


Sure, it’s not as hard as Pig Destroyer or anything, but they rocked pretty hard.

(I have to pause for another story for a moment – During a New Year’s eve party that one of my old girlfriends and her friends threw, I hijacked the stereo and put on Mean Machine and started blasting it when midnight hit. I’ll never forget how much fun Kevin and I had rocking out to it, or the disgusted, angry looks on all of her friend’s faces when I did it. There was one girl in particular that was especially irritated by everything that I did. I still have a very vivid mental image of her face, with that sour look on it like she just took a bite of a turd sandwich, because I saw that face pretty much every day for nine months. I could discuss the fact that the suffering of others seems to heighten my enjoyment of music, but we’ll save that for another day.)

Anyway, After two albums of rocking pretty hard, Sugar Ray realized that the music that they were playing wasn’t making them a lot of money or getting them laid, so they decided that it was time to start sucking.

All the way to the bank.

In a boat that was floating there on a river of 100 dollar bills and my tears.

Those motherfuckers.

Nonetheless, I will always have fond memories of rocking out to their music during my senior year of high school.