Hit!: Gene Simmons (left) looks simply divine in a lemon yellow ensemble equally at home in the boudoire or whipping up a shitwich in the industrial grade fast food kitchen
Whoo wee, girlfriends!—you know there’s nothing more satisfying than dishing the dirt on celebrity fashions. It allows you set aside such trivialities as the quality of an artist’s work to focus instead on their wardrobe choices as filtered through the lens of your own bad taste. The World-Class Shitty sales & marketing department suggested today’s post, believing that it would “dovetail” well with WCS’ already established mandate of reviewing CDs we’ve never listened to by major label shit-floggers. They also used the word “synergy” a couple of times, but by that point I was paying more attention to the heartburn I had contracted from the sickening 99 cents a slice pizza the cheap fucks at WCS Corporate served at the lunch meeting.
Axl Rose—Diss!
Axl’s get-up of white nut-hugging bike shorts topped with a matching white leather jacket with the sleeves pushed up Sonny Crockett-style seems like it should be a winner. Unfortunately, this photo was taken in mid-September and wearing white after Labour Day is a serious fashion faux pas.
James Hetfield—Hit!
If you follow the world of fashion as closely as Hetfield and I do, you’ll know that black is the new black. You’ll also know that sculpting your facial hair to look like a flying v is unimpeachably metal. When you factor in Hetfield’s increasing resemblance to the hillbilly who showed poor Ned Beatty some some ’southern hospitality’ in Deliverance, you know he’s got it goin’ on!
KFC’s Famous Bowls—Hit!
The most hygienic thing about the KFC Famous Bowls is probably the matted dreadlocks, and the t-shirt with the weed-smoking rasta skull is stone class.
Liam Gallagher—Hit!
Liam Gallagher actually has his own fashion line, which is like Coco Chanel having a Brit-pop band that wrote sing-a-long anthems for lager louts. Here we see Gallagher modeling a fetching Mao-esque smock. The Mao-smock also doubles as an apron and is available with “Kiss The Cook!” emblazoned on it for whipping up shitwiches at weekend backyard barbecues.
I’m going to be on vacation for the next 10 days or so, so consider this video my out of office auto reply:
Welcome to World-Class Shitty’s Extra-Value Meal Blender, where I strive to give you more heat lamp damaged music news for your fast food dollar. Of course, I do realize that you’re paying exactly zero dollars for it and keep that in mind when it comes to quantity, quality control and hand washing. Today’s exhumation of the week’s music news was carefully culled from the Internet after literally 15 or 20 minutes of exhaustive research at sites such as rollingstone.com and nme.com. So, for your music news nourishment I serve up for you this week’s Extra-Value Meal Shitwich Smoothie—bon appetite!
Jim Morrison’s Ghost Haunts Bearded Dude
Ghosty apparition appears in this 1997 photo taken at Morrison's grave site in Paris
Rock historian Brett Meisner had this photo taken of him at the site of Doors’ singer Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris’ Lachaise cemetery. An unmistakeable image of a man in leather trousers with his arms out-stretched can be seen on the right of Meisner. According to The Daily Express the photo is not a fake.
Meisner believes that he is now being haunted by the ghost of Morrison, and says that since his visit to the cemetary his marriage broke up and a close friend died of a drug overdose.
You may discount this chilling and compelling evidence, but I personally have experienced something similar to Mr. Meisner. Here’s a photo of me and the ghost of Jimi Hendrix:
Tony "Player Hater" Powell haunted by the ghost of the right-handed guitar playing Guitar Hero avatar of Jimi Hendrix
Now you may find this hard to believe, but shortly after this chilling photograph was taken, Hendrix’s avatar’s freaky ju-ju caused me to get a speeding ticket from the po-po and ingest day old sushi which gave me the runs something fierce. Not sayin’, just sayin’.
This Just In: P. Diddy is an Asshole
P. Diddy effortlessly causes a global pandemic of the douche chills
Hip hop mogul P. Diddy lost a ring he claims (for insurance reasons—nudge nudge, wink wink) was worth $20, 000 while he threw fake hundred dollar bills into the studio audience at BET. Apparently, Mo-Money-Mo-Problems P. Douchey had mixed in a few real $1 bills with the photocopied crap and the audience went wild. In the melee, Diddy lost his ring and had the building shut down and entire audience searched in an effort to get it back, which he never did.
If I had caught any of P. Diddy’s bullshit money or found his ostentatious ring I would have, like Andy Samberg, thrown it on the ground!
Album Review:
Kiss
Sonic Boom
Roadrunner
Getting excited about a new Kiss album is like getting excited about a new Stephen King novel. Even if you thought books such as It and The Dead Zone were pretty wicked, by the time Gerald’s Game and Needful Things came out it had become obvious that reading the barcode on the jacket was more entertaining than anything between the covers.
And so it is with Sonic Boom. In accordance with strictly enforced World-Class Shitty review guidelines, I have not suffered through the indignity of actually listening to Kiss’ latest steaming aural shitwich but it’s obvious to anyone who hasn’t spent the 33 years since the release of Destroyer huffing Pam cooking spray that creatively Kiss is a spent force—a force that could at its best be spent on a 4-pack of Chicken McNuggets®. Indeed, Kiss’ artistic quality has always been inversely proportionate to it’s financial success much as McDonald’s culinary quality has always stood in diametric opposition to the company’s financial health.
Even visually the two corporate entities have a lot in common:
Lick It Up!
Like Journey, Foreigner and other washed up bands that nobody cares about anymore, Kiss have signed a deal to sell their latest CD exclusively through Wal-Mart, which seems like a match made in heaven—so long as your idea of heaven looks like this:
Sonic Boom is no doubt a huge serving of soulless corporate bullshit ladled out 30 years past its best-before-date with a careless slop onto a styrofoam plate. It is indeed fitting that “Kiss” is an anagram for “Shit”, or would be if the “k” in their name were a “t” and one of the “s”es were an “h”.
Harper: "I am the dufus/Goo Goo Ga Choo"
As a band, the Beatles have always been pretty much unassailable. As songwriters and musical innovators, they paved the way for much of the best of modern popular music. Their approach to recording and the idea of using the studio as an instrument changed the way people thought about records and recording and raised the bar to a height that has rarely been matched, let alone exceeded, over the past 40-odd years. Culturally, as well, the Beatles were at the vanguard of the Swinging Sixties and marked a shift from the more socially conservative post-WWII years to the more libertine attitudes of the Sixties.
So it was with awareness of all this musical, sociological, political and cultural baggage in mind that I viewed the video of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s performance with cellist Yo-Yo Ma of “With a Little Help from My Friends” at the National Arts Centre Gala in Ottawa on October 3rd. As traumatic as the incident may have been, I am pleased to report that despite Harper and his televangelist hair’s best efforts last weekend, the Beatles’ legacy is still intact. Here’s a video of the performance:
Harper’s performance appears to have been well received despite the glaring irony of a neocon stooge to the power elite co-opting a tune by a band who were once considered to be at the forefront of the counterculture. Then you’re hit with the whiplash reverse irony of the song he chose to sing being “With a Little Help from My Friends”, presumably because “Baby You’re a Rich Man” lacked subtlety. I’m sure the fat cats in the banking industry which he bailed out to the tune of $25 billion and those in GM which got another $9.5 billion of taxpayer moolah were chuckling knowingly as they listened to Harper while lighting their Cuban cigars with thousand dollar bills.
Harper protests for the right to have game-show-host hair and the right not to live up to his country's Kyoto commitments
Now, Harper isn’t the first soulless neocon parasite to try to soften his image with a musical publicity stunt. You may recall when the Iron Lady herself, Maggie Thatcher, was short-listed as a replacement for Scott Weiland in Velvet Revolver.
Thatcher:"Libertad---both the VR album and the general concept---is highly specious"
Thatcher was never officially confirmed as the new VR vocalist so I can only assume that things didn’t work out and maybe that’s for the best. Although she hasn’t been Prime Minister since 1990, there’s surely still an essential role for a woman of Thatcher’s stature to play in fucking over the people of Britain.
Sweet Sue's Chicken In a Can is slated to perform Sweet Home Alabama. "There's good chicken in Alabama, I think Mr. Young knows that, too"
Fall officially arrived yesterday afternoon and with it comes the new fall TV season. I assume there will be a new season of American Idol coming down the shit pike, but truthfully I don’t really know as I’ve never watched the program and have no idea what their broadcast schedule might be.
But for the sake of this blog post I’m assuming that the lowest common denominatorization of music that is American Idol is soon going forward to pollute the airwaves once again with their kitschy, cloyingly saccharine shit-taculars. And what’s a shit-tacular without a preview at World-Class Shitty? Nothing, that’s fucking what!
Sweet Sue’s Chicken In A Can
As already hinted at above, Sweet Sue’s Chicken In a Can will be performing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”.
A disturbing harbinger of what will likely happen 20 minutes after ingestion
The authenticity of the chicken’s performance of the legendary long-haired Southern rockers’ hit will no doubt be bolstered by the long strands of hair clinging to the gelatinous canned bird.
Arby’s Beef ‘N’ Cheddar Sandwich
Enjoy a beef 'n' cheddar sandwich at your local Arby's gastrointestinal disorder pub
In an unorthodox musical choice, Arby’s Beef ‘N’ Cheddar Sandwich will be singing G.G. Allin’s “Pussy Summit Meeting”.
Wendy’s Chicken Club
The cheese in the chicken club looks a lot like the slime that Dr. Peter Venkman got covered in in "Ghostbusters"
Wendy’s Chicken Club will be performing a version of Ray Parker Jr.’s 1984 hit “Ghostbusters”: “If there’s something weird/And it don’t look good”. Yeah, pretty much the whole Wendy’s menu, Chicken Club.
McDonald’s Sausage Burrito
"Do the Tijuana two-step without ever leaving your God-awful suburb"
McDonald’s Sausage Burrito is scheduled to be performing “La Coca Rocha”, which is so obvious it’s bloody brilliant.
So check your local listings and tune in to the next season of American Idol whenever and where ever to get your much needed dose intestinal distress.
Sometimes when I’m looking at a record cover I find myself wondering who the cover models are. Did they know that their image was going to be on a record that sold millions of copies? Did they have any sense that the cover art would become iconic? Well, in my quest for answers, I did some sleuthing and found out who all those people are. And, surprisingly, the same name keeps cropping in regards to numerous covers—Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly!
O’Reilly, of course, is to journalism what Dr. Pepper is to medicine or Mayor McCheese is to politics, but I had no idea he also dipped his toe in the murky waters of album cover modeling. In fact, given the sheer number of covers O’Reilly has graced, it’s fair to say he’s waded in all the way up to his cottage cheese ass.
When O’Reilly is not bullying the family members of 911 victims or making up publications like The Paris Business Review off the top of his head in order to bolster his phony statistics and score points against a guest on his show, he is allegedly sexually harassing female coworkers. So it is really a testament to the man’s work ethic that he finds time to model for album covers in his busy schedule. Let’s take a look at some of the records that O’Reilly has graced.
O'Reilly angrily and loudly claimed "shrinkage" due to the pool water, but the victim of his alleged sexual harassment said "Nah, that's about right."
"(What's The Story) Bill O'Reilly?" No, the real story, not the self-serving bullshit you just pulled out of your ass
O'Reilly might not beleive in what you say but he'll fight to the death for your right to say it.....Just kidding!
It's like Ice-T sang on "There Goes the Neighborhood": Bill O'Reilly "is too hardcore/This shit ain't cool!" As usual, Ice-T was right.
I can only assume that O’Reilly’s parents saw fit to give him the initials B.O. in an attempt to indicate that regardless of the level of his personal hygiene, O’Reilly’s presence is as odious as that of the smelliest vagrant. O’Reilly has worked hard all his life to live up to his name and to justify his parents’ belief in him. Here’s a video of O’Reilly acting like a prize twat when he was host of tabloid TV show Inside Edition.
WCS SmackDown: Kanye West VS Barack Obama—This Time It’s Presidential
Kanye West: West is such an important man that aliens chose his head to inscribe crop circles on in an attempt to communicate with the people of earth
VS
Barack Obama: Yes we can (give all your money to Wall Street criminals)
Welcome to another episode of World-Class Shitty SmackDown. It’s been a long time since WCS has pitted two competitors against each other Thunderdome-style—where two men enter and one man leaves. It’s my pleasure to bring you what looks to be an exciting battle between two American heavyweights: arrogant, humorless, ass-clown Kanye West and President Barack Obama.
Kanye West
On Sunday, West rushed the stage at the MTV Music Video Awards and grabbed the microphone from country artist Taylor Swift during her acceptance speech for best female video. West’s interruption was to let everyone know that “Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time” and he thought that she’d been robbed. Extra-hilarious asshole points go to West for the fact that later that evening Beyonce did win the award for Video of The Year.
There are currently teams of scientists around the globe working feverishly to find the reason why Kanye West is such an insufferable douchebag. Much like the mapping of the human genome, it is hoped that The Kanye West DoucheGene can be isolated and used to benefit humanity at large. Possible applications include putting an end to shitheels from the suburbs in leased Navigators and Ed Hardy clothing coming into your neighborhood on a Saturday night to get drunk and give a show and tell in utter fucking imbecility.
Barack Obama
In an off the record portion of a CNBC interview today, Obama called Kanye West a “jackass”. ABC employees listening in on the feed posted the President’s comments on their Twitter accounts and the story was out.
Now, when the President of the United States takes time out from discussing pressing issues like the economy, Afghanistan and Iraq in order to call a self-important entertainer a “jackass” for his behavior at a music video award show, then you know that the world is truly a pretty fucked up place.
“Remember Where You Are—This Is Thunderdome, And Death Is Listening, And Will Take The First Man That Screams.”
As a provider of music content for World-Class Shitty and their numbered parent company, I go out of my way to avoid listening to the music of Kanye West, Taylor Swift and Beyonce. Also, as I’m not an American, I didn’t vote for Obama so I really have no dog in this fight. But the Thunderdome rules are clear—two men enter, one man leaves. So let’s go to the post-fight analysis.
Both fighters gave it their best and there were no knockout punches thrown. However, West’s massive ego and lack of sensitivity protected him like a forcefield of assholery, so it was very hard for even the President to land a blow that had any impact. Therefore, the winner of the third installment of WCS SmackDown is…Kanye West!
Let’s celebrate West’s victory in the Thunderdome with the song that ends the South Park episode “Fishsticks”, which, of course, was all about what a humorless twat Kanye West is.
Radio Friendly Unit Shifter: Cobain's avatar performs unspeakable acts in Guitar Hero 5
You have likely already got wind of the the big stink blowing about the Kurt Cobain avatar in the new version of Guitar Hero. Apparently, you can ‘unlock’ the Cobain character, allowing you to use his image to perform songs other than “Lithium” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, the two Nirvana songs included in the game. Here’s a video which shows Kurt singing Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name”.
As Courtney Love controls the Cobain estate, she appears to be responsible for Kurt’s posthumous humiliation at the hands of Activision. Love, however, fervently denies any knowledge that the company was going to allow Kurt’s avatar to be used to play lame cock rock, even going so far as to bizarrely blame Dave Grohl for the whole debacle on her Twitter page:
“you can assrape dave he was always a bad seed and is stillriding the shit while i take bullets if theres a hell hes going. im not.”
However, according to Activision’s Tim Riley, Love was very involved in the decisions and the process of designing Cobain’s avatar. Riley told Rolling Stone:
“Courtney supplied us with photos and videos and knew exactly what she wanted Kurt to look like. She picked the wardrobe and hair style, which turned out to be the ‘Teen Spirit’ look, then we went back and forth over changes — some subtle, some not so subtle… She was actually great to work with. She got back with comments pretty quickly.”
Personally, I’ve only played Guitar Hero once, about a year ago, and though I did lay down some pretty wicked leads on Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” on the beginner level, the whole thing didn’t hold much interest for me. It reminded me too much of the dudes in the 20th Century Box documentary on the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal who make guitars out of cardboard so they can play air guitar to Iron Maiden songs.
In the interests of research, however, I did play Guitar Hero 5 in order to try out Kurt’s avatar in unlocked mode in order to see what I could make him do. I’m sure many of you will be shocked and saddened at what I discovered.
"You take the good, you take the bad"---actually, just the bad.
Yes, unfortunately it’s true. In unlocked mode, I was able to get Kurt to play the roller-skating Tootie on “The Facts of Life”. In the episode, Tootie thinks that Blair might be smoking pot and though conflicted, eventually tells Mrs. Garrett of her suspicions.
It turns out that Blair was smoking weed, and Tootie’s intervention was instrumental in getting her expelled from the fancy private school she attended. It’s all downhill for Blair from there—a future of spiraling drug addiction and sordidness awaits her. And it’s all thanks to Tootie as played by Kurt Cobain’s avatar.
Kurt Cobain forced to perform as a greedy Wall Street douchebag
As undignified as being forced to perform Bon Jovi songs and star in episodes of “The Facts of Life” may be, it pales in comparison to the humiliation of being cast as Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
Again, in unlocked mode, it is possible to make a suit-and-tied Cobain take billions in tax-payer funded bailout money, then announce unexpected second quarter profits and set aside $18 billion for employee bonuses while sitting on stacks of moribund securitized debt paper.
Watching Cobain parrot Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good speech” is truly disturbing and a troubling post-script to his legacy.
McCurry, where the "McRing of Fire" is always on the house
Malaysian curry restaurant McCurry won an eight-year legal battle over trademark infringement against fast-food mega-corp McDonald’s yesterday, according to The Guardian. A judge in Kuala Lumpur ruled that there was no evidence to indicate that McCurry was, by the use of the “Mc”-prefix, trying to mislead people into believing that they were in any way associated with McDonald’s.
This case is not the first time where McDonald’s was unsuccessful in their attempts to bully local restauranteurs. When McDonald’s first entered the Jamaican market in 1995, they sued a restaurant in Kingston that also called itself McDonald’s in an attempt to force the business to change its name. Instead, a Jamaican judge ruled that the US chain would have to operate under the name “The Golden Arches” in Jamaica—a defeat for the company for sure, but still much better for them than had the court imposed a “truth in advertising” clause and mandated the American McDonald’s be called the more apropos “McIntestinal Distress”.
“Sure”, you’re saying to yourself, “this is all mildly diverting, but isn’t this blog supposed to be about music?” Well, nominally, yes. But even more, this blog strives to be the nexus where fast food and popular music collide. Where, as with Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, the DNA of the culinary and musical clusterfuck becomes so intertwined that any examination of one is bereft of context and meaning without an examination of the other. And to that end, I’d like to discuss a few more trademark infringement cases that McDonald’s has filed against some musicians.
McDonald’s v. MC Hammer
Certainly the precedent set in the McCurry case will be favorable to Mr. Hammer’s defense, but he will have to have a legal dream team working for him in order to convice a judge that “Exhibit A” isn’t cause enough for a ruling in McDonald’s favor:
Too Shit To Quit: "Exhibit A" clearly shows MC Hammer infringing on Ronald McDonald's image like a motherfucker
Unfortunately for MC Hammer, however, poor financial decision making over the years has ensured that not only does he not have enough money to pay for a top flight lawyer like Jackie Chiles, he doesn’t even have enough to buy an order of Sausage, Egg & Cheese McGriddles®.
McDonald’s v. Tim McGraw
Country “artist” and backwoods yokel Tim McGraw has a pretty good defense against McDonald’s claims of trademark infringement and the bank balance to back it up with the best legal counsel money can buy. According to McGraw’s statement of defense, his name is not intended to invoke images of steaming shitwiches (though it does), but rather of that hero of the old west, Hanna-Barbera’s Quick Draw McGraw:
"Exhibit A": If the cowboy hat fits, you must acquit
McDonald’s countered McGraw’s compelling evidence with a desperate Hail Mary, whereby they sought to have the court force McGraw to change his name to that of Quick Draw’s vigilante alter-ego, El Kabong, in order to avoid brand confusion.
McGraw’s attorneys have rejected the compromise on the grounds that, although McGraw does have a goodly collection of capes, he does not care for El Kabong’s hat.
McDonald’s v. Tony McCarroll
In 1999, former Oasis drummer Tony McCarroll sued Oasis for £18 million, arguing that he was owed a piece of their new five-album Creation Records deal. He later accepted an out of court settlement of £600,000 minus £250,000 in lawyers fees. The settlement was also in lieu of any future royalties. Tabloid headlines like “Is This The Most Stupid Man in Showbiz?” followed, with one reporter commenting that “what Tony failed to realise was that he effectively held a lottery ticket which would mean he’d carry on winning every year.”
Unfortunately, McCarroll has got the same legal team representing him in his battle with McDonald’s as he did with Oasis. In fact, McCarroll’s lawyers have gone ahead and accepted an out of court settlement that would force Tony McCarroll to change his name to Carol Burnett.
Furthermore, McCarroll will have to pay Ms Burnett £250,000 to use her name and another £250,000 to his lawyers for negotiating the deal. He will further be legally obliged to patronize his local McDonald’s five times a week until he dies. Luckily for him, given his projected trans-fat intake, that won’t be too long.
Are you the misogynist dope-fiend, the compulsive fornicator with the "Linda Richman" do, the gormless exhibitionist, or Mick Mars?
It’s been a pretty eventful week here at World-Class Shitty. On Thursday, for some reason WordPress saw fit to put my post about monkeys & Metallica on the front page—or whatever it’s called—and my quiet little cul-de-sac briefly became an eight-lane Interstate with everyone throwing their fast food refuse on my lawn. Of course, the suits at WCS International Corporate Headquarters were over the moon, as it means that our quarterly ad revenues are way up. Those greedy fucks haven’t deigned to give me an increase on my rate of pay, however, which currently still sits at $0 per hour.
Now, on to new business. In an effort to maintain the half-assed standards that World-Class Shitty Corporate HQ takes such pride in, I’ve developed a personality quiz that will teach you things about yourself that you never knew, and further, never wanted to know. As with all good quizzes, the options for answers are limited to just four choices, all but guaranteeing that the answer that you would really choose is not there, requiring instead that you pick the answer that is the least ill-fitting.
After I made my “Which Member of Motley Crue Are You?” quiz, I was disappointed to find out that WordPress wouldn’t allow me to embed the code here. However, I was able to figure out an ineffectual workaround by taking some screenshots of the quiz to post here and then supplying a link to the site where you can try the quiz for yourself. So begin your journey of self-discovery…if you dare.
Interpreting Your Results:
Tony "Player Hater" Powell