ShadowTwin Home

Site Links:
Arthur Witles
Who I am - Site info
Music Lost to History Archive
Horoscope Archive
Original Poetry
Pre-Blogger Archives
Stuff I Made
Vacation Photos
My coming of age story.
Programs I use for the site
Email me

Why I don't care:
They are very shiny....

It's fun to hate:
People who bitch about how the band that they listened to in their youth is the best band of all time.

When Shadowtwin reigns supreme:
Any music that is more than a decade old will have to be listened to by the 'current generation'. If the current generation likes, it I will scrap all the teen crap and build a society with decent music.

Music lost to history:
Megadeth-Hook In Mouth-
I gotta be honest on this one. The sound quality is not all that great, even on cd. The reason that I really loved this song was that it was released at damn near the time of the founding of the PMRC. For those of you who are young, that was the reason that we now have to be a certain age to buy certain cd's. I will never forget the chorus of that song:

F is for fighting.
R is for red, ancestors' blood in battles they've shed.
E we elect them.
E we eject them, in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
D for your dying.
O your overture.
M they will cover your grave with manure.
This spells out freedom, it means nothing to me, as long as there's a PMRC.

Now that I no longer have the angst I did in my teens, I find it all a bit frivilous in the grand scheme of things. None the less, this was one of the songs that I really stood behind and probably warped my little mind just a bit more. I think it really was a question of freedom of speach, but we have stickers on cd's now..
The PMRC may have made it impossible for me to buy the albums that I wanted to at the time, but now I can buy any Fucking album I want to any Fucking time. It is for that reason that this one is simply lost to history... my history mostly.

French Toast-
A cute little game that I spent about a minute playing earlier today. It could do without the racial slurs, but it was free, and fun for the minute of playability.

I have nothing slated to write about today. There are a couple of subjects that I would certainly love to get into, yet I am inhibited by the fact that I do not want to name any names (or even imply them through description). If you are reading this post and wondering if one of the inhibited stories was about you, I can assure you that it was not. The inhibited stories were regarding people other than you, and stories other than the ones that you spoke to me. I am aware that the previous does not make for a spectacular opening statement, yet, I also know that someone, somewhere may continue to read.

• This is going to be a very unpopular post, I am sure. I am going to talk a bit about the band Nirvana. I can not find a definite link to an "official site" for the band so you don't get one here.

I have absolutely nothing against the band Nirvana, I was one of the many millions of people that bought their album NeverMind when it was first released. My purchase of the CD was likely fueled by the constant airplay on MTV. They certainly did smash the Hair-Band type stuff that I was listening to into the ground. Nirvana was fresh, crass and angry. They were trying to piss people off with their music, and they did a good job of it. The more the parents got pissed off, the more the kids listened to it. Nirvana was like a drug that you would do in your basement when your parents weren't home, just to get the fix.

I am the type of person that thinks that your name should only appear in the paper/local news at three times; Birth, Marriage and then Death. When Nirvana 'hit', it made me think that maybe there was a bit more to teen aggression than anyone had ever told me about. I followed Nirvana faithfully for the first few albums, I was paying to see shows as well as paying for albums and t-shirts, I was totally into the message that they spoke (whether that was intention or not).

The thing about it is that my infatuation with Nirvana only lasted for a couple of months.

Metallica, who had been releasing albums since about 1982, and who I had also followed pretty religiously, released the "Black Album" later in 1991. I was pretty damn sure (even at that time) that there were going to be no more glam/hair bands, but I was not sure which tangent of music to follow. I tried to get behind Metallica, since they had been keeping me in a cervical collar for the better part of a decade, yet the grungy sound of Nirvana stuck in my head. I do not mean to imply that the one was better than the other, just that I had been listening to the one while I was damn near in diapers and, as such, unlikely to change my musical views.

I went the way of the grunge only until everyone that I was hanging out with started to smell really bad. No offense to the whole 'grunge scene', but you can buy a bar of soap for like fifty cents, and in most cases you really should.

What happened next is that both Nirvana and Metallica started to release a bunch of crap that even my fireplace would not have. Is there something about success that makes you think that you can do anything you want, or do they just get so high that they think they are releasing stuff as powerful as their earlier stuff? The world will never know. The reason that the world will never know is that Cobain killed himself, if you can believe What you see here.

At least Cobain can fall back on the excuse that he is dead, Hetfield continues to write lyrics that are increasingly annoying, and less and less important to anyone. When Hetfield can no longer think of new lyrics, he rips off old songs like 'whiskey in the jar' or 'turn the page'. Metallica then contiues to do horrible re-makes of the songs.

It is kind of funny, to me, that I started this whole thing with the intention of bitching about Cobain's band Nirvana. Yet, as I write it I am talking myself into bitching about the later releases of Metallica.

At least Cobain had the good sense to get out while he was still a superstar, Metallica has gone the polar opposite direction from there. I will not be surprised to see Metallica playing show-tunes the next time I visit Vegas.

I know that I am no one to be bitching, I own only a piece of digital real-estate that is rarely visited, but, truth be told, if the Macarena had been released in 1991 it would have broken the country's grip on glam rock. We didn't need a Super-Star, we just needed an alternative. That is why, I think, we labeled all of the Seattle bands as alternative. They were the alternative to the crap that was on the radio.