Cardinal Copia from Ghost

Always go with Patti

American Beauty/American Psycho by Fall Out Boy is Transgender and Bisexual!

requested by anon

Queen: Live At Wembley '86 (1990)

Recorded Live at Wembley Stadium July 11th & 12th 1986

Hollywood Records

AC/DC - Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Joan Jett, 1977

Ozzy Osbourne - The Ultimate Sin 27/01/1986

Today's compilation:

Monsters of Rock 1998 Hair Metal / Hard Rock / Arena Rock /Heavy Metal / Pop-Metal

Good lord, this had to have been one of the most heavily advertised albums of all time, man. I don't know how much ad money the Razor & Tie label shelled out for all of their 'As Seen on TV' comps back in the day, but the commercials for Monsters of Rock and Monster Ballads were fucking inescapable throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, especially. Like, you'd be watching something on cable, and the commercial for this album would come on, so then you'd change the channel, and the same commercial would be playing on there too! And then you'd just force yourself to sit through it, and eventually, through repetition, the entire sequence of little song snippets that gets played throughout the ad would become a permanently etched medley inside of your goddamn mind, destined to haunt your soul for the rest of eternity:

🎶Cum on feel the noize, girls rock ya boys…my, my, my, I'm once bitten, twice shy, babe…poison!…*synths from Europe's "The Final Countdown"*…round and round, what comes around goes around, I'll tell you why…she's my cherry pie, cool drink of water, such a sweet surprise…we're not gonna take it, no! we ain't gonna take it…she's only seventeen, seventeen…here I go again on my own…I'm no fool, nobody's fool, nobody's fool…so hold on loosely…🎶

Now, the hair metal era may have been the dumbest and most ridiculous period of mainstream rock that we've ever borne witness to—and it's very difficult for me to think of another commercially successful subgenre in which rank stupidity has been such an inherently defining trait—but thanks to a combination of my own nostalgia for these damn Razor & Tie ads and my sometimes weird and ironic affinity for bad shit, after listening to this album, there is really nothing more that I want to do than hitch a ride back to 1990 so I can live out a super corny fantasy as a badass suburban high school senior who cruises through town in a boxy, red sedan with the windows down as these silly songs blare out of my speakers 😎.

But like I said, I am also under no illusion here; I'm fully cognizant of just how patently absurd so much of this music was. And when it comes to the pinnacle of pure trash, I really don't think anything ever quite managed to top Warrant's signature 1990 anthem, "Cherry Pie," which is obviously on this album. Like, have you heard or thought about this tune recently? It really might be the single-dumbest song that's ever been recorded in human history. And as the single-dumbest song that's ever been recorded in human history, it has thankfully and, I guess quite fittingly, been memorialized in some way, since…*checks notes*…you can currently go see the pizza box that its lyrics were originally transcribed on at the Hard Rock Cafe in Destin, Florida… 😭.

🎶I scream, you scream, we all scream for her Don't even try, 'cuz you can't ignore her!🎶

Also, Winger's "Seventeen." Yikes; you can probably guess what that one's about! Talk about songs that haven't aged well at all 😩:

🎶She's only seventeen (seventeen) Daddy says she's too young, but she's old enough for me🎶

Yeah… This one's catchy and all, but, um…no. 👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎 Really glad we've finally realized as a society that, at the very least, fully-grown adults singing lustily about minors is a very unacceptable thing to do. I mean, it took way too long for us to get here, but at least we've finally made it to this point, right? And I think "Cherry Pie" is probably about a minor too, by the way, but that's also up for debate 😑.

To be clear, though, not every song on this album is embarrassingly dumb and/or skeevy hair metal. I happen to think Living Colour's alt metal classic, "Cult of Personality," is a genuinely great banger. And I also dig the southern rock smoothness of a song like .38 Special's "Hold On Loosely" too; but most of the rest of these are just pure dunderheaded hair metal classics, and a key, overarching feature of this stuff was just how fucking maximally mindless it all was. It's hard to put a finger on what exactly allowed this madness to spread so widely and flourish for nearly a whole-ass decade in the first place, but thank goodness grunge came along when it did and dethroned this stuff from its perch as rock music's top subgenre in the early 90s, because, seriously, this shit was so excessive and outrageous.

All that being said though, and as good and necessary as grunge was back then, I can't help but imagine what a kick-ass time it would probably be to have almost any one of these Monsters of Rock songs come on at the bar while you and everyone else around you are in a highly intoxicated stupor; like, "Black Hole Sun," "Man in the Box," "Interstate Love Song," "Even Flow," etc., might be total jams in and of themselves, but songs like those are probably not gonna do the same trick as something like Alice Cooper's "Poison" can in that type of situation. I mean, when you're fully committed to annihilating some brain cells, it's good to have music that's way ahead of you in order to accompany your experience, right? 😅

Highlights:

Quiet Riot - "Cum On Feel the Noize" Great White - "Once Bitten Twice Shy" Alice Cooper - "Poison" Europe - "The Final Countdown" Ratt - "Round and Round" Warrant - "Cherry Pie" Whitesnake - "Here I Go Again" Winger - "Seventeen" Living Colour - "Cult of Personality" Twisted Sister - "We're Not Gonna Take It" Judas Priest - "You've Got Another Thing Coming" Cinderella - "Nobody's Fool" .38 Special - "Hold On Loosely" Autograph - "Turn Up the Radio"

Kiss // I Love It Loud

I love it Loud, I wanna hear it loud, right between the eyes Loud, I wanna hear it loud, don't want no compromise

Per Errikson (ghost) plz

More than the battle of life with death, and perhaps the whole world! The true story of the Immortal…

Film Director Russell Mulcahy asked the band to write the theme music for their debut feature film, under the working title Highlander, and in early 1986 the band Queen finally gathered in the studio. The musicians watched the working version of the film and lit up so much that they decided to record the full "soundtrack". The director gladly agreed, because he thought that if anyone could do it, it would be "Queen", because they wrote powerful hymn songs, and this was exactly what was needed for the film.

The first song recorded was "A Kind Of Magic", which he composed Roger Taylor and for whom at the BBC Studio Russell Mulcahy shot a video clip. The action captured the musicians, as it was not clear what they were doing - participating in the creation of a film or recording their next album.

More powerful tracks were recorded for the film 

Brian May was inspired by the scene in which the immortal Connor MacLeod picks up his dying wife. On the way home, he made the first sketches of the future hit. It is worth noting that it sounds in the same episode of the picture (later the song was included in some parts of the TV series "Highlander").

Brian took the title "Who Wants to Live Forever" from the movie "Flash Gordon", for which Queen composed the entire soundtrack. The song was recorded with the participation of a symphony orchestra conducted by Michael Kamen, who also worked on the music for The Highlander. In the picture, Freddie Mercury sings the whole song, but on the record the first verse and a few more lines are performed by May.

When Freddie died, the song "Who Wants to Live Forever" acquired a special meaning for his fans. Rumors immediately spread that it was originally dedicated to Mercury, that he sang it, anticipating an imminent death, and so on. However, researchers of the Queen band claim that Mercury did not yet know about the terrible disease when he recorded the song. Therefore, it is unlikely that he could seriously think about death, even if he did not feel well.

According to Roger Taylor, he was so drunk during the filming of the video that he did not remember his parts: "It was a long, boring shoot, and terribly serious. She seemed a little religious, so I can't say I was attracted to her. I really like the song in the context of the movie "Highlander", with all the filming of the highlander and his wife, how she gets old, and all this is filmed in the mountains, it seemed to me very beautiful and touching."

Of course, the message song, the testament song "The Show Must Go On" is one of the greatest songs in the history of rock music. The composition "Who Wants to Live Forever" can be considered a kind of prologue or preface to this immortal work.

21st Century Breakdown by Green Day is Genderfluid and Gay Cinthean!

requested by @whxtsername-lol

After the Flesh by My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult from The Crow Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Cassette Tape (1994).

Queen: Live Killers (1979)

The material for this album was recorded on the Queen European Tour January-March 1979.

1991 Hollywood Records Reissue on Compact Disc.

Hollywood Records

Ghost - Impera

I should have done this months ago. I mean this album is over a year old now, but better late than never. I don't really feel a need to get too deep into the details on this album; it's been out for 15 months and has been discussed extensively. It feels weird to be writing about an album this late in the game. This isn't meant to relitigate old discourse about it that's basically finished at this point, I basically just want to add my two cents about why I feel the way I do about it and why I still want to talk about it. But anyway...

It was no accident that Impera, came at the end of the longest gap between full-length releases for the Ghost, specifically well after the COVID-19 pandemic took its stranglehold off live music. The band was on a holistically upward trajectory for the past decade, bigger sales, bigger sound, and, critically, bigger crowds. 2015's grand Meliora was already such a practically unrecognizable size-up from the spooky retro rock of their debut just 5 years earlier, and the band made their aspirations clear with each release LP and EP afterwards. Popestar introduced for the first time in the band's self-aware campy lore a new frontman not tethered to the mic stand by the excessive garments of the satanic pope, but rather youthful, limber, and lively, more mobile and able to herd and rally the band's increasingly larger crowds. And the subsequent full-length, Prequelle, committed to this new turn fully. If you thought Opus Eponymous was too silly and over-the-top, then you weren't prepared for the full-on arena rock parade that was Prequelle. Prequelle was and still is the campiest album Ghost has ever released. The band was fully aware, and it was on purpose. Soaring group choruses, lighter-waving power ballads, swinging dance numbers, sax solos. Ghost were making a B-line for the arenas, with the big songs to handle the crowds of those magnitudes. And it worked; it worked because Ghost's songwriting masterminds put in the work.

Pop songwriting is both easy and hard. The tried and true format is and simpler is usually better. It's not rocket science. The challenge, however, is not just writing a pop song, it's writing a great pop song. And Ghost applied a perfectionist approach to chiseling out killer hooks and sing-along melodies from the brilliantly simple fun arena rock anthems of Prequelle, and the results spoke for themselves. And then 2 years later it all stopped.

It stopped for everyone. And going off their consistent release schedule up to that point, Ghost probably would have had the follow-up to Prequelle out a year earlier, but there was no way they were going to put out an album in the height of the pandemic because Impera was absolutely made for the stadiums. When the touring industry rebooted and Impera dropped a year later though, it was clear that Ghost had made the most of their indoor time.

A natural continuation from and combination of the previous two albums, Impera harnessed the grandeur and bombast of Meliora and the infectious campy fun of Prequelle into the most arena-ready batch of songs the band has ever put forward. I got the sense that this album completely achieved Ghost's artistic goal that they've been building toward for the past 10+ years, and by the end of the year, with my numerous replays of it, I couldn't help but concede that Ghost had outdone themselves. Impera is their best work. Ironic that the band reaching a new summit would be with an album about the precarious rise and fall of empires.

Hard to say now if that theme foreshadows a fall from grace for Ghost, obviously I hope not. For as much as they play into their gimmicky image, Ghost are not in danger of losing their throne due to fans tiring of their goofy novelty. No, the image is the icing on top of the solid compositional foundation and not the other way around. It will take actual creative fatigue, a major misstep, or series of missteps to derail the Ghost train. Not to say a band nosediving from their peak isn't a tale at least as old as Metallica, but maybe that's why Ghost picked the theme for their magnum opus, to remind themselves to not go the way of the Roman empire, or Coldplay. And hey, it's not like anyone would say no to the job security of a career like Metallica's or Coldplay's either, however undeserved it may be. But more likely is that the lyrical content was inspired by the present moment. I don't think anyone would argue against the current times being historic to say the least.

I won't get into it too deeply because it's really not that complicated, but also I could spend a gratuitous amount of time going into every detail of why each song is so great. Impera really is the sum of a great many little details that show how much time and care was put into making every song complete on its own and within the context of the rest of the album. The whole album is a cohesive, fun, glorious exhibition of everything Ghost, and they made that clear from the soaring high note that Tobias Forge opens "Kaisarion" with. And like Prequelle, Impera runs the gamut of chugging metallic heaviness like on "Watcher in the Sky" to the soulful ballads and power ballads of "Darkness at the Heart of My Love" and "Respite on the Spitalfields", following a similar flow to the previous album that works as well here. Also, Prequelle may be the campiest album Ghost has ever released, but "Twenties" is definitely the most over-the-top cheesiest campiest theatrical-ist song the band has ever made, too cheesy for some fans even. Personally, I'm here for it, and I can't imagine being surprised by it either; I mean it's Ghost, a cartoonish horn section over chugging heavy metal grooves and comic book villain vocals isn't that giant of a step up from the corniness of "Kiss the Go-Goat", "Ghuleh / Zombie Queen", "Rats", or "Dance Macabre". The other singles, the marching "Hunter's Moon" and the snare-driven rhythmic "Call Me Little Sunshine", are also textbook arena rockers, and I personally love the throwback to the more retro staccato keyboard motifs of Opus Eponymous on "Griftwood".

I played the shit out of Impera all of last summer and I'll probably play it again this summer, it's that fun. Like I said, Ghost have topped themselves, and every band that reaches what feels like their likely peak has that existential crisis of where to go from there if the only way to go is down. A lot of bands, either due to the pressure of future expectations or not knowing what to do next, make a big leap of faith into the unknown. Or they try in vain to replicate the lightning in the bottle that propelled them to the top over the course of the rest of their comparatively stale career. Ghost may not have anywhere higher to climb on the mountain they've chosen to ascend, but I think they can maintain a longevity at this elite level if they maintain the focus on meticulous song-writing while ensuring not to fall into the trap of formulaicness. Like I said, Ghost is not built on the satanic pope outfits or the Papa Emeritus lore or on the anonymity they started with that the lawsuit from former members eliminated. Ghost is built on the song-craft, and that doesn't wear out. The question now is, will Ghost wear out or get lazy, or do they have the stamina to keep up this level of attention-to-detail and dominate another decade? I certainly hope they can muster the latter. Here's to another decade of Ghost, in the twenties!!!

Also yes, this was my favorite album of the year last year.

-

It kind of sucks to say that another band's bad album is partially what lit the fire under my ass to write this because it kind of implicitly takes away from the excellent work Ghost does, but a big part of why I'm writing this now is indeed because of the band that all the big online magazines that shill for major labels are hailing as the next Ghost this year: Sleep Token.

I already made my gripes with that band's latest album known in detail in a previous post about that album, but in short, I really don't like the push I've been seeing from a lot publications for this groveling adoption of the most fleeting of pop trends into metal in what feels like desperation for broader cultural prominence. There's nothing "innovative" or "forward-thinking" or "more mature" about whoring out to the whim of trends calculated to appeal to the lowest common denominator in a bid for a shortcut to relevance. I don't mind when bands incorporate pop elements into their sound to spice it up or even writing a more straight-up pop song; like I said, pop songwriting is a challenging art, and that's part of what Ghost does so well, and what many bands who metalheads probably don't consider "pop" at all also do. What I do mind is when bands like Bad Omens or Bring Me the Horizon or Wage War try their hand at the kind of mind-numbing, middling bullshit that Maroon 5 and Charlie Puth feed to inattentive half-listeners in grocery stores. It's even more offensive when these bands know they can do better, and Sleep Token is the worst offender as of late in this department. Sleep Token is the lazy, unsustainable shortcut via the hollow gimmick of referential pop trend-hopping within metal presented as "genre-bending" to broader relevance that Ghost, by contrast, have earned through tireless improvement of pop songcraft over the past decade.

I speculated at the end of my post that this fawning over Sleep Token might come from an anxiety over metal as a genre not having anything left to offer broader culture. And I think the short-term focus inherent within capitalism that all these publications (which are basically marketing wings of labels) are beholden to is what makes the possibility of a drought so scary for them. The driving forces behind Loudwire and Metal Injection don't exactly permit the patience for what is likely just a natural lull in creativity, because to them that's a loss in productivity, and that's next to sacrilege. I also speculated on my own anxiety about metal as a genre running out of steam, but taking a step back and looking at the broader history of any genre existing longer than 10 years, there are waves, peaks and valleys, times of plenty and times of want, drop-offs and revivals. It's the circle of life, and we've seen it with metal already, and with subgenres within metal. And also, if the time is near for when metal bottoms out in a way it doesn't come back from and effectively "dies" (as much as any genre in the internet age can die), so what? If metal dies, it will not go into the ground with any unused potential, it will be because the very active and passionate community will have completed music, gotten all the achievements, and exhausted everything possible to with the genre except retread old ground. But I know that it won't be brought back or kept from the brink by bands writing songs for car insurance commercials.

This got a little tangential at the end here, but I think it's worth distinguishing (since so many people draw parallels between them lately) the genuine pop appeal of Ghost that Impera embodies so excellently and the cynical pop appeal of Sleep Token. Leaving aside the riveting discourse about whether Ghost qualify as a "metal band" or not, they unquestionably represent the genre to the unfamiliar, and I don't think metal needs the kind of submissive pop crossover appeal of Sleep Token when it has the emphatic pop crossover appeal of Ghost at their creative peak.

Anyway, Impera is a masterpiece, thank you Ghost!

9/10: AOTY 2022