John Madden retires.

Breaking story for the two of you who don't look at Yahoo every day. The guy responsible for the Madden in that football game you play every year is calling it quits! John freakin' Madden leaves the booth after three decades of service and he has been an entertaining man at the very least and the most distinctive voice of football at the most. In tribute, here is a fine speech he did when he was inducted to the Hall of Fame in 2006.




We'll miss your commentary, John, because I wouldn't want anyone else to tell me that 90% of football is half mental.

Ok, let's face it.

Music currently sucks. Badly.

Let me explain: I looked at the release charts mere moments ago, noted that Metric, k-os, Neil Young, Mastodon, The Decemberists, Kelly Clarkson, and Handsome Furs have all released albums in the last month, and I have cared nothing to listen to them in their entirety. And I like most of these artists (Mastodon not so much, but they're hipster-friendly metal so they get mentioned). And I wonder to myself why I am not excited to hear any of their new material and I suspect there's a major chance that I might be so uncaring that I don't really want new stuff from groups I know. 

However, I think that it is a failure on the label system's part.

Almost all of these acts have a major label tie-in, and none of them have been given enough of an opportunity to really promote the quality of their new material. Only Clarkson had a heavily talked about release, and in truth, Nostradamus doesn't have to tell you that after My December didn't destroy sales records despite being pretty good that Clarkson's next record would be more bland pop jams about life sucking without a guy and about the power of men helping women versus the empowerment and emotion of a woman being a woman.

I'm also "friends" with k-os on MySpace and didn't know he had an album out until this moment, which might be a failure on one Kevin Brereton's part but is more likely a failure of the label's part. (Which as I write this, Wiki is wrong again as the record is set for April 14th in Canada with no U.S. date announced.) But nonetheless, there is a clear problem here that I'm noticing. The blogosphere isn't nearly as concise as of late in terms of introducing "hot new music" to people's ears, and I'm certain of this because Wavves is okay, but not that great and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are a fine band that has been the only thing new that this year has also been great.

Maybe my lament is that these albums are probably good and probably not great. Ah well.

I admit the greatness of Mötley Crüe.

Yes, I realize that this is a little bit of a massive left field in comparison to my uber-indie elitist whiny music tastes. But the Crüe is plain awesome. And not in that guilty pleasure way, really, because I'm admitting it and I don't feel guilty about it in any way. I'm only guilty of gaining enjoyment out of a band that once wrote "When we started this band/All we needed, needed was a laugh/Years gone by...i'd say we've kicked some ass". Yes, yes you have.

The greatest video of all time, the one for "Home Sweet Home", in which beaches, bikini clad women and multiple uses of the phrase "I'm on my way" are used.
Video for "Kickstart My Heart," which appears to be about cars. Now who would've thought that?
Video for "Live Wire". What was the point? I don't know.

This was clearly my high point in music criticism.

The Greatness of Bully Beatdown.

Last week, some channel called Music Television produced and released a show that almost made up for the fact that this channel brought us The Hills, The Bay, Laguna Beach, The Seafoam Lodge, and whatever other shows have spawned from vapid people talking about vapid things. This show is simply called Bully Beatdown.

Bully Beatdown's an easy concept to grasp. You get a bully, in the case of episode one, this guy who just knocks out his older brother constantly and looks like a coyote with human features. He proclaims himself THE REAL BULLY at least once and brags about his ability to knock anyone out. So naturally, host Jason "Mayhem" Miller must put this man in his place.

The show's also got a simple idea. You put the bully in the ring for two rounds with a mixed martial arts-trained fighter and if he can survive without tapping out or without getting knocked out, he earns money. Each round has $5,000 on the line which when he taps out (worth $1,000 a tap) or gets knocked out (worth all $5,000), the person bullied gets the money.

Enough of pure explanation, here is why this show is great. First off, the two brothers here are amazingly goofy. The bullied older brother has the strangest and most amazingly stupid haircut in history. And the younger brother is described by Mayhem as "having the body of a meathead and the personality of a douchebag." The younger brother brags constantly, in more entertaining fashion, about how he will take down anything in his path, including the MMA fighter that he must fight at the show's end.

Another positive for this show is that they never spend too much on the small things and get right down to the fighting. They simply show why the bully is a bully and why the brother wants him to get beat down. And then they simply show the fight, complete in all of its MMA glory. And it totally works because it does both of these amazingly simple ideas in a way that's greatly entertaining.

The show is great because it is amazingly simple. It reminds me a lot of what made Pimp My Ride such an awesome show, because, you get what you want out of it. You want to stare at a car's interior with random TVs thrown in the trunk for whatever reason? Then, there you go. The same formula worked with Cribs and it's working in spades here. Mayhem Miller is a goofy guy much like Xzibit was a goofy guy on Pimp My Ride.

Simply put, you want simple greatness on television, you flip it to MTV for some Bully Beatdown. Nuff said.

A great find.

Former NBA player Paul Shirley reviews Animal Collective for ESPN.com - This really happened.

And this was very very very awesome. That is all the verbage that is necessary for such a piece.

Overhyped.

(Part of this was written three months ago. Part of this is awesome.)

You think I'm going to mention Chinese Democracy in this blog entry, don't you? Well...no, not really. I'm sort of in the middle about Chinese Democracy as an album, but an album like that would never match the hype of people thinking it would be the best record ever. (For the record, it's got all the good and bad parts about the Use Your Illusions with less Slash. You decide if that's a good thing.) And plus, this is a record that's not tailor-made for this topic at all, as its hype has been built since long before the internet.

No, this references the internet's effect on building an artist or band's profile in the world of popular music. And while more mainstream examples like Katy Perry were destined to be famous without the internet (and calling random guys gay for some whiny reason), this year produced a fair amount of new names that were solely built on good word of mouth and in turn, solely built to disappoint.

- Vampire Weekend

Early in 2008, the blogosphere gave a bunch of preppy kids from New York a bunch of insane hyperbolic praise about their band's self-titled record. Vampire Weekend went from guys who made reasonably catchy music to the apparent saviors of returning African sound into music, the same sort of thing done by groups like Talking Heads back in the late 1970s and 1980s. Their self-titled album was an album with a few good songs ("Oxford Comma", "Cap Cod Kwassa Kwassa", "A-Punk") and a bunch of meandering and mediocre songs squeezed into a brief piece of recording. The Talking Heads comparison is borderline ridiculous, as vocalist Ezra Koenig has none of the neurotic flair of a David Byrne, nor do their painfully clever lyrics match the nicely pinpoint ones from the Heads. That and preppy white kids apparently are so insanely crazy for African tribal rhythms, or they could have just listened to a post-punk record or two maybe for that musical inspiration? Again, they're not bad, but they're not anything special by any means.

- Girl Talk

Hipsters love liking music because it's "different" or a "new style" of music. Girl Talk's entire reliance is on generic rap lyrics mixed to a variety of sounds, mostly bands like Yo La Tengo and Radiohead for indie kids to go "Hey, I know that song." It's funny, indie kids will take the piss out of the jukebox culture of your regular bar where every other song is a familiar track from a bygone era. Whether it's Quiet Riot or Eagle Eye Cherry, it's perceived as crap. And yet, Girl Talk's entire appeal comes from indie kids who hate rap music and yet loooooooooove when rapping is set to "15 Step" for some crazed reason.

- Dan Deacon

No square reason, really. His brand of electronic music's just kind of annoying, though. And really? Two 8-level records in a row, Pitchfork? Crazy men.

- all of those British bands that got a modicum of attention over here in between the breakout of Coldplay and the breakout of Arctic Monkeys

Franz Ferdinand has all but proven that they won't ever have a good album ever again, quite honestly, with how weak Tonight was and the fact that I can roughly remember two good songs on the first record. Keane went from sucky dreary rock to sucky dreary U2 clone to sucky crappy disco band...which, yeah, bad progression. Kaiser Chiefs only made awesome on "Ruby." The Futureheads are a good singles band, but that's not really a valid substantiation for hype. And easily the most interesting is The Bravery...which I'm told isn't from England at all, but rather New York City. Bleh. Britrock in the 2000s has had a horrible go.

Chris Cornell makes me not want to listen to music ever again.

Trent Reznor's Twitter:

"You know that feeling you get when somebody embarrasses themselves so badly YOU feel uncomfortable? Heard Chris Cornell's record? Jesus."

For over twenty years, Chris Cornell has been a part of music in one way or another. His band, Soundgarden, was one of the penultimate Seattle grunge bands that gained massive mainstream acceptance and their albums weren't half bad, either. Cornell then joined with three former members of Rage Against The Machine to form Audioslave, which had nothing of the quality of Rage, but wasn't a bad band, either. Their music was fine diversions that worked on rock radio, and their first album was even pretty great, as mentioned before in this blog.

Squashed in between that time was two solo records that showed Cornell's evolution (or devolution) as a creative artist. He did a record that became an underground classic in 1999's Euphoria Morning and then did a mostly mediocre record in 2007 with Carry On.

Now this all brings us to this point, to 2009's Scream and to where everything has went wrong at a quick rate. Stifled by creativity, Cornell's best move is to apparently do the same songwriting style, only replacing his rock roots with the sounds...of Timbaland.

I will say this, I have liked a lot of Timbaland's past stuff. Timbaland's evolution of Justin Timberlake from boy band bopper to the modern-day Michael Jackson was amazing and he produced two fine albums out of a guy that seemed doomed to go the Nick Carter route. Timbaland's production on Nelly Furtado's record didn't create an amazing record by any means, but Loose was decent for what it was. Of course, Timbaland lost his way with critics on Shock Value, a disastrous solo record that, among other things, forced the horror of OneRepublic on the world.

So, Timbo's been licking his wounds and Cornell's been directionless since the aforementioned “other three from Rage” left him to his devices. So what do both men do? Cornell lets himself be the backdrop to another Timbaland record where nothing changes. Of course, the project is referred to as a Chris Cornell solo album, despite the fact that this could be any person letting the hitmaker producing his samey beats over the music. Here's a sample of the...failure in store.

Now, I feel going on about the music or its sheer terribility is a little bit redundant. So, I will pose a question...would Kurt Cobain have ever done this? Has Eddie Vedder thought that the last thing his songs needed was a punch of electro? I haven't heard Scott Weiland's last solo record – laughably entitled Happy in Galoshes – but did Weiland think that the big thing missing from his songs was Just Blaze or Scott Storch? Did the lady from Veruca Salt want Lady GaGa's production team? I suspect the answer to all of these questions is no.

Again, I don't hate Timbaland, I just hate Cornell forgetting that being a patriarch of grunge should avert him from embarrassing himself for top 40 play, and especially in such a horrid fashion that completely doesn't fit his voice or style in any way shape or form. I also hope that a bunch of 90s acts aren't up next. I don't need to hear the vocalist from New Radicals being a backup vocalist for Christina Aguilera.