Adele

Michael Jackson

So this postumous MJ concert/rehearsal/whatever film is coming out. Even the title, "This is It", sounds a bit like an apology.

I'd like to play pop-culture psychic for a moment if I may. I'm guessing Michael wasn't really all that capable of singing or dancing near the end of his life. Therefore the handlers probably gave him less-than-dazzling choreography appropriate to a man in his condition, and intended to pad out the stage show with a lot of filler. They're pumping the advance sales of this film by hyping it as a limited engagement, because word of mouth is going to be blistering. Brace yourself for the Phantom Menace of concert films. It's probably not going to be a catastrophe on the order of the caricature I just drew, but still. Not pretty.

Classix Nouveaux

Today I'd like to take you back to a magical, forgotten time, a time we called the "Eighties".

This was a time when MTV used to show these things called "videos", which were like these short films that promoted this thing called the "music industry". And the way it worked was, you would watch these videos, and that's how you decided which music you were going to "purchase".



I guess I'm not very metal for having thought this was cool, but I just dig the hell out of this crazy nut. As rock gimmicks go, "Transvestite Nosferatu playing a mirrored Gibson Explorer" is pretty much irresistible to me.








BEHIND THE SCENES BONUS FEATURE:
My daughter saw me working on an earlier version of one of these drawings, and decided to help me out with it:

Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney has a new album out with one of the guys from Killing Joke, and it actually sounds punk rock. 

It's always interesting to me how McCartney searches for a collaborator like an Elvis Costello, or anyone who can lend his work the edge that he used to rely on Lennon for. I heard a bit of his last album; most of the songs start promisingly and then instantly sound like he doesn't know where to go with it. The New Yorker ran a profile on McCartney last year, and the writer observes him seeming somewhat frustrated in the studio. He's got the means to hire the best session guys in the world, but he can't find a collaborator who can intuitively plug in to what he hears in his head.

His wealth aside, reading the New Yorker piece I felt bad for him. This guy who everyone knows seems so profoundly lonely. (It can't have helped that his ex-wife was on a scorched-earth campaign at the time.) He tries to be somewhat unpretentious, living and working right in London. He walks the streets with the self-preservation instinct of a military convoy in Fallujah, dodging the cell-phone cameras (and he has to wonder when it's going to be a Mark David Chapman reaching in a pocket). Everyone he meets wants a hunk of bacon off his back. Who could you really be friends with if that's your daily experience?

The loss of John Lennon hangs heavy over the whole piece.  He clings to the small comfort that the two of them had managed to renew their friendship a little while before the murder.

Nick Cave

When I was first dating my wife I was intensely jealous of Nick Cave. 

I didn't know much about Cave besides that my slacker friends from the early 90's were all into him, and like with their enthusiasm for hard drugs I sort of regretted my inability to share in it. Faith used to love to work Nick Cave into any conversation she could, and she had a photo prominently displayed of Nick and Blixa Bargeld, smoking cigarettes and looking achingly cool in a way that no mortal boy could ever hope to live up to. When you're young and head-over-heels about a new chick, you're capable of viewing a 50¢ postcard as legitimate romantic competition, I guess.

Fast forward more than ten years, and I'm playing Mr. Mom this weekend so that Faith and a few other middle-aged housewives can spend it getting their punk rock on with Nick and... and whatever that is that he's let happen to the top part of his mouth.