Tenacious D Week: Big Finish

Well it's three pm, time to lug the gear,
Gotta get it on the stage.
My muscles flex, my f!ckin' sweat will save the day.

When I check the mic, I f@ckin' check the mic,
I f#ckin' checka-checka one, two, three.
I plug it in, I make a sound as good as can be.

Cause the rockers rock, but the roadies roll.
Gotta take the mic because I take control.
Gotta get that $hit up on that f%ckin' stage.

Because the roadie knows what the roadie knows,
And the roadie knows that he wears black clothes,
And he hides off in the shadows off the stage.

Because the roadie
Looks a thousand miles with his eyes.
And when the crowd roars --
--Brings a tear drop to the roadie's eyes.
Tears of pride.

Because he brought you the show,
But you will never know.
He's changing the strings
While hiding in the wings.
No matter how hard, the show must go on.

Then a beautiful girl come to me.
She say, "Hey, can I s^cka your d&ck?"
I say, "Yays, I am in love."
Then she quickly say, "I s!cked your d@ck.
Now give me [sic] that backstage pass.
I do not want you roadie; I want KG's ch#de."

I'm standing at the threshold of your dream$;
Without me there'd be no sound from those @mps;
Without me there'd be no !ights on the stage.
But you don^t applaud for me.

No, I am the r*adie:
Lonesome warrior searc#ing for his soul.
No, ! am the roadie;
I make the roc# go.

Roadi3... Roa9ie... R0adie...

End of story. (Punctuation mine.)

Anyways, I hope you've enjoyed The 2nd Annual Tenacious D Week as much as I have, though I find that hard to fathom.

Tenacious D Week: A Closer Look At "Roadie", And Kelly Clarkson

I think we can all agree it's in E, and it pulls that old bit where it flirts and flips between E major, E minor and, of course, the old open E. Examples of this flirting and flipping can be found in "Behind Blue Eyes", "Seasons", "Summer Breeze" (Hippies!), and much of the music of Paul Hindemith. (Hugo gave me a copy of the full orchestration of Mathis Der Maler in Paul's own hand. Turns out the Nazis weren't fond of his unpatriotic music and his hatred of Nazis' hatred of Jews, so he had to write it out himself without the benefit of a publisher.)

So, long story short, no measure notation: E D/F# E D/F# and on; but then a really nice progression that's nothing more than C to A to E, then C to A back to C back to A to E. But the cool thing is, the C is a Cmajor7, and the A is an open A9, which means the B natural in the Cmajor7 becomes the 9 in the open A.

Lyrics: amplifiers, sweat, something about a blowjob, and, of course, a young man's love of music. And blowjobs. We'll talk more about this tomorrow.

As for Kelly, it really is all about singing the right note, and singing it right in the middle of the note. And pipes. Hope this doesn't hurt anyone's feelings, but Kelly was and has always been the real deal. I'm still convinced that Justin was a cardboard cutout prop the whole first season. That is until From Justin To Kelly, one of the most misunderstood works of genius in the history of the art of the taking of pot. Watching that sober must be akin to that waterboarding next-level shit Tricky Dick Torture Ticker Cheney was so fond of watching whilst bathing in the afterbirths of aborted anti-freedom haters. (Just spitballing here.)

Tenacious D Week: Wait Wait Don't Kill Me

Peter doesn't necessarily buy it, but because he thinks there's not much there he knows that that's precisely the point, which means everything.

At first listen, the lyrics seem banal and gratuitously hate driven, so one may retreat to the music, which really is first rate. But then something happens with regard to the lyrics, and they become neither hate-driven nor banal. Not exactly funny, per se, but, rather, honest in a way that's both ridiculous and upsetting. So, well, real.

Let's just get something straight right now: Kyle is an above average guitar player, and gets a sound out of his acoustic that's almost enviable.

I think it's fair to say that Tenacious D is congruent artistically with Spinal Tap. Christopher and Michael are very good musicians. But Jack is a really good musician, and is more invested in Tenacious D than Chris and Mike were in Tap, or The Folksman, for that matter. And though Spinal Tap is more sophisticated, Tenacious D, at least for me, ends up being more authentic, for better or worse.

No, Jack. Metal never died. It just went gay for awhile there.

Tenacious D Week: Fresh Air On The G String Of Rock

Terry loves it but doesn't get why or how there's nothing there.

I first noticed the entity that I'm currently talking about inside of Jack Black in a little movie called Bob Roberts, a Tim Robbins movie about a guitar-wielding asshole-savant whose most famous song is "The Times They Are A-Changing Back", at a small art house movie theater in Hardwick, Vermont, with one Tia, in the winter of '92 or so. (It was Hardwick, wasn't it?) Jack plays a closeted psychotic Young Republican bent on the total destruction of all things not Bob Roberts. You can't help but notice him in the movie despite the relatively small role because it seems he could almost kill you with nothing but his thousand mile stare of death. Almost an anti-Bruno before Bruno was even born. (It's worth noting here at this point that Bob Roberts' campaign manager is also Laura Palmer's father!)

I can live without most Jack Black-driven movies; he has what I call "The Brad Pitt Syndrome", namely, that Jack and Brad are better in movies when their roles are supporting rather than starring. The one exception that proves the condition is Richard Linklater's head-banging love note to those of us who still own all our vinyl. Which makes it nothing short of a coincidence that Jack stars in animated features also starring Brad's future wife. [cue massive head-spinning brought on by euphoric moment of realization]

Got off the bean pole a little bit there. Which only proves that when Jack Black acts, he does better when he plays some twisted version of himself as opposed to some version of somebody else's notion of "Jack Black".

Which begs the question: Just exactly who is Jack Black?

Man. Anyways, Jack Black is what all the lead-singing closeted faggots from the 80's hair bands wish they had been, namely, an Ozzie that can actually sing. Well.*

Casting against a certain type of vocal flexing

*I.e., David Bowie-esque

Tenacious D Week: "Roadie" On Letterman

Dave doesn't really get it, but he knows something's there. And it might or might not be worthwhile to research the family-unfriendly version from the actual album.

Jack Black isn't a good singer. He's a great singer. He's also quite barely sane.

Tenacious D, for better or worse, is quickly becoming The Dan Band covering Spinal Tap, but completely devoid of anything resembling irony, were that ever to happen, which, now, can never happen, mercifully, making that particular problem "unsolvable".

(Sorry. Just finished William "Bill" Gibson's Neuromancer. I have no idea what just happened. In the book.)

Hi/Lo Fidelity All Stars

Half Wits And Nuance

Remember when I told you guys that I told mom I'd move closer to my nieces in order to better protect them from their parents? Well, turns out not only was I not joking (too "sick" at the time to understand that), but I may have outflanked them. Unwittingly. Like there's another way for me to outflank anyone, especially without archers.

Full disclosure: I was already familiar with the link one of my nieces sent me on behalf of one of my nephews.

"Mom-agers"*: Dina Lohan Versus Kris Jenner

Kris sets Dina's hair on fire while Dina shoots at it, exploding. 5 killed.

First of all, Today Show writers (Oh! Good one!), if you're going to do a play on words, it has to sound like an actual word without being that word, e.g., "Linsanity", or "celebretard", or "refudiate".

So I"m watching this documentary on nomadic yak farmers in rural Tibet (somewhat redundant, I know), and it got me to thinking. When the revolution comes, and it will come, and you find yourself in a ditch fending off homophobic bigoted evangelical robot cannibals, whom do you want next to you in that ditch: Mongolian farmers who can make gunpowder from petrified clay and livestock dung, or someone who kind of sort of designed a handbag that also functions in a pinch as a birth control device that clearly doesn't work?

I SO WANT THAT HANDBAG!!!?!!!

*The hyphen really sells it.