In Which Lemmy Is Most Likely God

Trick Question

by HANSON O'HAVER

Airheads
dir. Michael Lehmann
92 minutes

In the early 1990s, a group of men set out — unknowingly, as these feats invariably are unknowable — to make the most tumblr-ready film of all time. The result, 1994's Airheads, was received as a disaster, both critically and commercially. It opened in 11th place, grossing less than $2 million. Only in hindsight, as the internet enters its fifth year of nineties revisionism, can the film's accomplishments truly be celebrated.

Airheads stars Brendan Fraser, Steve Buscemi, and Adam Sandler as members of a struggling rock band, the awkwardly named The Lone Rangers ("How can you pluralize The Lone Ranger?"). Adam Sandler's character, Pip, is a hint at his later mastery of the 'grown man talking in baby voice' archetype. Fraser, as a non-time traveler and Buscemi, as a surprisingly svelte non-psycho, play somewhat against type. What the band lacks in talent and cohesive sound they make up for in ambition and fake UZIs.

The plot is as follows: Desperate to get their demo heard by A&R execs and radio disc jockeys, they sneak into a radio station. With much prompting from realistic-looking plastic firearms (which are secretly filled with hot sauce, in lieu of bullets), they force a Hawaiian-shirted on-air personality to play their song. (Notice how bands in movies about bands trying to make it always have one song. See also: That Thing You Do.) But then! A discarded cigarette causes their demo reel to malfunction, and the band decide to hightail it out of the studio.

They have second thoughts about leaving upon realizing that the building has been surrounded by members of Hollywood's Finest. Instead, they head back into the studio, lock the doors, and, this time, really take everyone hostage (the previous interaction had just been one of those quotidian fauxstage situations). Because this whole thing happens on-air, a group of heavy metal aficionados join the police in the parking lot, in an expression of solidarity with the Rangers.

One of the hostages, a mustachioed, pre-Seinfeld fame Michael Richards, reveals that the radio station is about to change formats, from hard rock to adult contemporary. This invokes Stockholm syndrome from the hostages. Eventually, a clever but evil (signifier: he has a goatee) A&R executive negotiates a deal with the band, as do the police. Next comes a minor prison sentence and an At Folsom Prison-esque concert. The film ends with one of those "what happened next" slides that doesn't make sense for a fictional movie to have: "THE LONE RANGERS served three months for kidnapping, theft, and assault with hot pepper sauce. Their album, LIVE IN PRISON, went triple platinum."

In 1994, I was not concerned with things like youth culture and authenticity and how the former views the latter. Consequently, I'm not sure how this movie was perceived by its intended audience. That said, if its box office reception is any indication, it probably wasn't seen as an accurate representation of The Way They Lived Then.

After all, by 1994, heavy metal was completely finished (at least in today's memory of 1994; in reality, metal bands were still going platinum). As a point of reference: grunge hit Reality Bites came out six months before Airheads. The Lone Rangers are, undoubtedly, a metal band. They reference Tommy Lee and places like The Whisky. Yet they wear pieces of flannel (one gets the feeling these were added by a panicked market researcher) and take on an unmistakable slacker vibe. This intergenre awkwardness is perhaps best illuminated by the fact that the soundtrack features 4 Non Blondes covering Van Halen. Thus that the film wasn't successful in 1994 shouldn't be surprising; what is weird is that Airheads isn't particularly popular today.

Readers with even passing familiarity with tumblr know that platform exists almost primarily to blog (and re-blog) an endless cycle of pictures of semi-nude girls, nude girls, stills from old movies, memes, and band photos. Because we're caught in a 90s revival (Read: early 90s revival — no one is wearing Miller's Outpost or listening to Backstreet Boys. Yet.), a huge percentage of tumblr's images hail from that time period.

Airheads would seem to be a perfect match. Off the top of my head, here are examples images from the film which, if blogged, would get hundreds of notes: Brendan Fraser's girlfriend in a leopard leotard; Adam Sandler; Brendan Fraser shooting hot sauce from an Uzi into a microwave burrito; Steve Buscemi looking tough; A screen shot of the scene where a metal fan admits "I used to wear corduroys!"; Steve Buscemi's eyes (the internet loves Steve Buscemi); Michael Richards in a fake mustache with subtitles about his hemorrhoids; the band playing in prison uniforms; the list continues but you get the point.

It's a mystery, then, that Airheads isn't omnipresent in the way that pictures of girls who are naked in places where they shouldn't be naked are omnipresent. The best barometer of tumblr success is the existence of a "Fuck Yeah ____" blog; as far as I can tell, there is no Fuck Yeah Airheads. (There are "Fuck Yeah" tumblrs for, among other things, candy, dreadlocks, Fight Club, hot girls, hot boys, Glee, dykes, and Chron's disease.)

There are two possible explanations for this. A: The internet doesn't like Airheads, presumably because it is a bad movie. This is possible, except when has quality control ever stopped the internet from embracing anything? Thus we're left with option B: The internet doesn't really know about Airheads. This seems unlikely (doesn't the internet know about everything?), but a quick survey of my friends on tumblr just confirmed: They're mostly unfamiliar with the Airheads. In which case, if they ever get around to watching it, tumblr is in for a treat.

Hanson O'Haver is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about Lou Reed's album with Metallica. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Degenerated" - The Lone Rangers (mp3)

"Curious George Blues" - Dig (mp3)

"Bastardizing Jellikit" - Primus (mp3)

"I'm the One" - 4 Non Blondes (mp3)

In Which We Invest Everything In Lou Reed

Try It At Least Once

by HANSON O'HAVER

"I would cut my legs and tits off/ When I think of Boris Karloff" is how the Lou Reed/Metallica (henceforth: Loutallica) album, Lulu, begins. Immediately it's clear that this album is going to be something of a head scratcher. This is solidified :50 into the song, when Metallica's James Hetfield enters and begins repeatedly singing the words "Small town girl" in his best Nickelback impression.

By the time Lou Reed sings "Me I'm happy/ 'cause I got my little nappy" and you wonder if that's slang or if the aging Mr. Reed is genuinely happy because he got to take a nap (maybe Laurie Andersen plans lots of activities?), you have two choices: put on Loaded (or Kill 'Em All, depending on which band brought you here) or drop the 'hows' and 'whys' and just go with it. If you at all care about interesting music, choose the latter option. Remember that image macro that made the internet rounds a few years ago of the bear surfing on a shark, shooting a gun with the text "Meth: Try It At Least Once"? Loutallica is kind of like that.

Lulu has been called Lou Reed's follow up to Metal Machine Music, his 1975 album composed entirely of four LP sides of guitar feedback. His motives behind Machine — was it a "fuck you" to fans? To critics? His label? — remain unclear, and he doesn't even claim to like it ("If you made it past Side 1, you're stupider than I am"). What's critical is that it was released into a totally different market.

In 1975, a listener could only afford to buy a finite number of records, which meant that they looked to record reviewers (see: Robert Christgau's Consumer's Guide) to tell them what was good (e.g. worth their money). In 2011, music is free; the only investment is the time it takes to listen. Which means: it's less important that an album is good in the long term investment sense (Lulu mostly isn't), and more important that an album is interesting to the point of being worth listening to for however long you choose to listen (Lulu definitely is).

While critics usually talk about how interesting an album is in the text of a review, there's really not a uniform system in place to reflect this in any given score. This is the fundamental problem of music criticism in 2011: How can critics give an album one score that reflects two different criteria? For example: Lulu is both sonically worse and infinitely more interesting than Wilco's latest, the bland but competent The Whole Love. Which gets a better review?

More realistically, Lulu is the follow up to Berlin, his 1973 rock opera filled with drugs and sex and spousal abuse, an album whose depressiveness is only matched by its ambition. It's also a sort of follow up the onstage banter during the live Take No Prisoners version of "Walk on the Wild Side", in which he talks shit on music critics. A key line in a Lulu's second track (and first single), "The View", is "For worship someone who actively despises you", a sentiment that either describes a relationship between the song's characters or critics' relationships with Lou Reed.

"The View" is also the most jarring song on Lulu and inspired numerous jokes, perhaps the best among them being "I didn't know Lou Reed worships his fans." Get it? (Because people hate it.) That "The View" was released as the album's single is proof that either the artists involved in the album have no desire for it to have any sort of success (with fans or critics), or that they have no idea what their fans want. It's also not hard to imagine that Lou Reed knows it will be received terribly and that Metallica doesn't, as evidenced by Lou Reed saying things like (to GQ) "I've loved Metallica since I was a kid."

Artist Seldon Hunt told Pitchfork editor Brandon Stosuy that Lulu sounds like Woody Allen yelling a joke in your ear at a Limp Bikzkit concert; "The View" sounds like Woody Allen and Limp Bizkit singing a round. Lars Ulrich hits a cymbal for the duration of the song, and it culminates in James Hetfield yelling "I AM THE VIEW I AM THE TABLE I AM THE VIEW I AM THE TABLE I AM ALL THIS I AM THE ROOT THE PROGRESS THE AGGRESSOR I AM THE TABLE I AM THE TEN STORIES I AM THE TABLE I AM I AM I AM I AM I AMMMMMM." It's nutty.

There are things I want to say about every song on Lulu: "Iced Honey" is a genuinely great song. Were it the only Loutallica song, people would be freaking out about how good it is. "Junior Dad" sounds like the title of a long-lost Mr. Show sketch. It's 20 minutes long, and the back half is just a keyboard drone. The second silliest moment on the album comes near the end of the song, when the music gets quiet and Lou says "Get the coffee, turn the lights on/Say hello to junior dad". The silliest moment is at 3:30 during "Pumping Blood", when Lou yells "C'mon James!"

I have thought about Lulu more than almost any other album this year, with the possible exception of Drake's Take Care.

Hanson O'Haver is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. He tumbls here and twitters here.

"Mistress Dread" - Lou Reed & Metallica (mp3)

"Iced Honey" - Lou Reed & Metallica (mp3)

"Satellite of Love" - Lou Reed (mp3)

In Which We Try To Get Filthy, Creepy and Weird

A Day at the Beach

by HANSON O'HAVER

We are living in a golden age of television. Television is no longer just a mindless tube for you to sit in front of while you ignore your kids and eat Hungry Man dinners. No, television has now become a way to explore and examine society in such a way that was once left to sociologists. The crowning achievement of this new intellectual pinnacle, of course, is MTV's Jersey Shore.

Jersey Shore is essentially the Real World without the token gay and black people, and with more Italians. This has angered Italian groups, who have compared the show to minstrel acts, and who say that it perpetuates negative stereotypes about Italian Americans. Maybe, but it is Italian Americans who star in the show. If it was Brits in pasta-face, that would be offensive. But as is, their argument is comparable to if people said that Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown show was racist. Sorry, but Jersey Shore is not offensive, because its stars are eight people who are stupid and just happen to be Italian. If its theme was that its stars are stupid because they're Italian, that would be different.

The premise of the show is that four women and four guys from places like New Jersey, Staten Island, Long Island, and uh, Staten Island travel to Seaside Heights, New Jersey, to have a summer with, "guidos everywhere, hot girls, and house music." They all refer to themselves as guidos and guidettes, which is weird because I assumed that it was a derogatory term. Maybe it's like n-word, where only self-identifying group members can legitimately use the word? In any case, the cast, from memory, is as follows:

nicole keeping it realGUIDETTES

Angelina, who refers to herself as "the Kim Kardashian of Staten Island."

A girl with black hair with blonde streaks in it that I think is named Jenny, but who goes by JWOWW.

Sammi.

A girl named Nicole who goes by Snookie, but whom everyone calls names like Snickers and Snuggie. Even though everyone on the show is supposed to be Italian, I have a suspicion she might be Turkish. Also, she's the kind of short where a person's not a midget, but still shorter than any normal person. Like Danny DeVito.

GUIDOS

Vinnie, who wants you to know that he graduated college and that not all guidos are dumb. Spoiler alert: he's really dumb.

Ronnie, the buffest guy on the show, and also the most likable.

Petey, a DJ. I think he's secretly some kind of Latin.

Mike, who is maybe the least likable person on television. Confusingly, he refers to both his abs and himself as "The Situation."

Some of the highlights of the first two episodes include:

The guys bring home "sluts" and "whooores" back to the house, which displeases the girls. Btw, if someone could make a ringtone of a girl from Staten Island saying the word 'Whores,' I think they'd make a fortune.

Sammi hooks up with The Situation, but then ditches him for Ronnie, because Ronnie is hot. This makes The Situation unhappy, because it disproves The Situation's assertion that (I'm paraphrasing) "it's not a matter of if I'm going to hook up with Sammi, but when I decide to hook up with her."

Vinnie gets pink eye, from (he thinks) dirty dancing with a "fat skank." While this is not a possible way to contact pink eye, the situation provides for comedic gold. Especially when Vinnie doesn't let pink eye stop him from going out: he just puts on his white-framed sunglasses, so that no one can see his eyes.

Snookie brings home a "decent looking guy" from the club, who proceeds to throw up. At the exact second he throws up, the soundtrack changes to heavy metal riffs.

Snookie threatens to leave, but no one really pays attention because she's boring and MTV probably wishes they casted someone else in her spot.

Jenni is informed that she hooked up with Pauly the night before.JWOWW says she would never cheat on her boyfriend, because what she has at home is better than anything on the Jersey Shore. In the next scene, she cheats on her boyfriend with Petey, who, she tells the camera, has a pierced penis.

Angelina says she would never cheat on her boyfriend, because what she has at home is way better than anything on the Jersey Shore. In the next scene, she cheats on her boyfriend with a beefcake she meets at the club.

Sometimes the show has a weird after-effect on it, where it's made to look like it was shot on film. There is no explicable reason for this.

Also, one of the ads that plays during Jersey Shore is as follows: A stressed-out woman yells at and dumps water on her young children. Her husband walks in the door, and she tells him just can't do this, and needs some alone time. In the next scene, she is sitting on a park bench, watching The Hills on her cell phone, and she is happy. Then the screen tells you to buy this new cell phone.

This show is probably the best thing to air on MTV since whenever the first Real World aired. Actually, I just made that up and I was like 2 then, but still, the show's really good. Fuck those people who are like, "Waah, MTV sucks now, they never plays videos anymore, it's all just scripted reality shows." This is a good thing. Music videos are boring. Plus, do you really want to listen to any of the bands whose videosMTV would play? Of course not.

Scripted reality shows, on the other hand, are super entertaining. Also, it does not matter if Jersey Shore is scripted, because the people in the show clearly talk like they are on reality shows even when they're not on camera. It's not like these people would become genuine if you took away all the MTV staff. As anyone whose been to college or high school in the past five years can tell you, there are people whose entire lives are like MTV shows. These are the people who, when they have problems with their friends, sit down (usually in a circle) and stage a friendship intervention. Through shows like Jersey Shore, the viewer is able to see how this part of society lives. They live ridiculously.

If you're still not sold on the show's brilliance, read the following quotes, all of which come from the first episode:

"After I have sex with a guy, I will rip their head off."

"I am the Kim Kardashian of Staten Island, baby."

"My abs are so ripped I call them the situation."

"Let's get filthy, creepy, and weird."

"Seriously, when I bring girls back here they're gonna melt in their pants."

When Snookie went into the jacuzzi in her thong: "At least wear a thong bikini, that's a little more classier."

"They're sluts, and sluts should get beat."

"That's how we know we're classy girls. We've been living in the house with these guys for two days and we haven't even done anything."

Hanson O'Haver is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. He last wrote in these pages about this art installation. He blogs here.

"Nowadays" - Eels (mp3)

"Unhinged" - Eels (mp3)

"Paradise Blues" - Eels (mp3)