I know I am not an old fart.  I know that I have not “lost my cool” or what­ever.  Still, I keep run­ning into lit­tle reminders that try to tell me oth­er­wise.  Case in point–a few weeks ago, Kate and I were stay­ing at a hotel up in Port­land with cable access (some­thing we choose not to have at home).  I liked watch­ing VH1.  I like watch­ing VH1 more than Mtv.  Back in the 80's, I loved Mtv and would make fun of any­one watch­ing VH1 because it was for adults and losers, with lots of “easy lis­ten­ing” type stuff.  A few week­ends ago, I found Mtv painful to watch and embraced VH1 (mostly a show they kept play­ing a lot of called “I Love the 80's”).  If you had told me then that I would drop Mtv in favor of VH1 in 15 years, I would have laughed in your face.  I do not really care that I was watch­ing one over the other, nor do I feel uncom­fort­able or uncool about the choice.  I just thought it was an inter­est­ing change.

Speak­ing of change.  At some point I stopped lis­ten­ing to KROQ (the local “alter­na­tive” sta­tion) with­out real­iz­ing or mak­ing a con­scious effort to do so.  The music started get­ting crap­pier and more main­stream.  “Alter­na­tive” stopped being alter­na­tive and just another ClearChan­nel com­mod­ity.  Now, I lis­ten to the news in the morn­ing and var­i­ous MP3s or net radio sta­tions (that specif­i­cally cater to goth/industrial, 80's, jazz, dark-ambient-industrial, or what­ever) when I want music.  We even set up a nifty stream­ing radio sta­tion at work that has a sam­pling of all of our music col­lec­tions on it, so you end up list­ing to a pop­u­lar 80's song fol­lowed by old jazz, fol­lowed by some crazy techno, Scot­tish bag­pipes, funky 70's, a song from Cow­boy Bebop, then an indus­trial song.  It is rather mind-blowing, but really cool.

Now, speak­ing of music, I did not real­ize that Pig­face even had a new album until I saw it men­tioned in Turnip's jour­nal.  (This is sim­i­lar to the Radio­head thing the other day–I had no idea they were work­ing on a new album).  I down­loaded it a cou­ple of hours ago, then picked it up from Tower a few min­utes ago.  This par­tic­u­lar iter­a­tion of Pig­face band mem­bers is pretty cool!  Okay, and I was an extremely happy mon­key when I heard Penn Jil­lette on the last track.  That guy needs to be in more songs.  In fact, he has an entry on All­Mu­sic that lists the var­i­ous albums he is on, includ­ing a num­ber of Res­i­dents albums I do not yet have, and I am going to make it my per­sonal mis­sion to seek out all Penn songs. 

Of course, “The Horse You Rode In On” does not get the title of the all-time best “fuck you” in the uni­verse.  That title is still held by the ver­sion of “Stig­mata” on Ministry's live album, “In Case You Didn't Feel Like Show­ing Up.”

I keep get­ting closer and closer to get­ting a sub­scrip­tion to AdBusters and get­ting their Cor­po­rate Flag.  I was hov­er­ing over the pur­chase but­ton ear­lier today and looked for it in the mag­a­zine rack at Tower and Bor­ders while I was out.  I think I am going to either really love it or really hate it, but I kind of want to pick up an issue to know for sure.  Maybe I will just order a sin­gle recent back-issue online.  Okay, done.

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Tagged as: 80s, ministry, mtv, pigface, radiohead, vh1