upst--rs
upstairs
I'm a poet from Philadelphia. Everything you need to know about me can be inferred from these posts.
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DAPPER AFRIKA
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jijoni
an-abounding-sentiment
If The Fates Allow...
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Bro what. Thought this was literally just a sh*tposting meme.
THERE SHOULD BE AN AWARD FOR BEST CASTING DECISION EVER MADE
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It's kind of crazy that if you go to "song radio" on Spotify for "I Hear You Calling" by Gob that it also populates Treble Charger's "Brand New Low". There must be a fairly decent number of people who just play these two songs from these bands because they were both on the NHL 2002 soundtrack ... and Spotify's algorithm reflects that weird minutia that only those people would know. 😂😂
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Chuck D is the Ted Williams of rap ... he doesn't have home runs that Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds have, but he's still the game's best hitter. It's crazy that he's been this good, this consistently, for this long.
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mix; [sic]; nix
somewhere, a gaze
wakeboards through
a soul for the first time;
eye whites start to Martian-
ize their whites out, red
rivers like whiteout;
say there already are enough
wet planets in the universe;
a Venus smile
flashing back, until
the colors invent
a new way to blind.
you'll draw a grid
on a scrapbook page
around the shrapnel of
your best shots, shot;
kodak moments tic-tac-toe'd,
divided by an algebra
where the x's and o's
always cancel, equal zero.
even Orwell would be
impressed, you think,
by the way we blackwhite shoeboxes,
in closets that could have
their own national anthem, with
hugs and kisses that could have
their own national anthem.
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(MT)
it was the year
nobody read iambic
pentameter into
our scars, again.
every bed and break-
fast served alphabet
soupçon; so even the pro's
went missing from
our hosts' prose.
we spent our nights
navigating inner
states; the bends
in the road like
a genuflection before
an empty vessel.
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obsess; control
you weren't always
more howard hughes
than howard hughes
the clouds crunching
data; it never rains
outside your self again.
days, every day, become
a silver screen none of the actors'
tongues can worm on;
you keep cutting
the film until it's silent,
until its crawl
comes to a stop.
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Staircase at Super Potato Video Game Store In Akihibara Japan
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Definitely getting into this Vanilla Ice nu-metal. 😂
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I remember reading something about Jani Lane hating "Cherry Pie". Here's an article from loudersound.com, published the day before the ten year anniversary of his death:
Oddly enough, many of Jani’s problems seemed to stem from his greatest success. He felt regret over his belief that, despite his integrity as a songwriter, he would only be remembered for one song, the enormously successful 80s [sic] anthem, Cherry Pie, which he downplayed as “a gimmick”. In a VH1 interview he shared his disdain for being known as the “Cherry Pie guy” stating, “I could shoot myself in the fucking head for writing that song.”
According to the band's bassist, Jerry Dixon, their sophomore album was already complete when the label, Columbia Records, asked for "an upbeat anthem kinda like [a] 'We Will Rock You' chanting kind of song", and "Cherry Pie" was the result.
It's unfortunate that this is what the band is remembered for. I think Lane himself is quite a good artist, and his unreleased solo album "Jabberwocky" has some great depth to it; e.g., the track "Comfortable with Sad", which is almost as poppy as it is existential. Another great track was finished and released on MySpace, eons ago, as "Sinners' Road" (the demo is called "The Deeper End").
That being said, Warrant kind of did deliver the dumb hit Columbia was asking for with the song lmao.
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…🎶
youtube
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"
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#like a dragon infinite wealth#like a dragon: infinite wealth#yakuza#sega#ryo ga gotoku#kazuma kiryu#video game quotes
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#like a dragon infinite wealth#like a dragon: infinite wealth#yakuza#game gear#sega#ichiban kasuga#video game quotes
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No; this is definitely a green flag. 😂
Got a POWERFUL new business card holder. This is vintage merch from 1999. It says "I'm here for business," but also "Something is wrong with me."
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Keep the small rules, break the big ones
Keep the small rules, the small rules are the easy ones
For the people who will tell you how to live
The small rules are the only ones they care about or understand
When the leader singer of a punk rock band daylights as a community college history professor and sprinkles in subtle Orwell references exactly like you expect he would. I love this sh*t.
(Also The Secret Police, from one of their EPs; "so many things happen, when you're not around / you know it kind of makes me want to write it all down . . . say goodbye to your diary / and hello, to the Secret Police") ... great track, equal parts melancholy and infectious.
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#like a dragon infinite wealth#like a dragon: infinite wealth#yakuza#ryu ga gotoku#sega#yu nanba#video game quotes#fashion tips
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You know what, IDGAF what anyone says; Vanilla Ice is an appropriate vehicle for nu-metal existentialism. Weirdly, it is perhaps both despite and because of this song and the artist's mediocrity that is just works.
You gotta look at it through the Vanilla Ice meta, man. ☮😂
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