When I was in college, I believed my life’s work to consist of two major projects: 1) fundamentally questioning the epistemological prejudices of the 17th-century philosphes (pompous jerks) and 2) bringing back the ’80s. By the time I graduated, I’d seen the US beat Russia in hockey and Hulk Hogan regain the WWF championship. Goal #2 totally nailed. Goal #1 turns out to be a longer deal.
Almost ten years later, the ’90s revival is in full swing like clockwork. I like to think I play a part in this, however small (watching The Fresh Prince on TVLand totally counts). I know I can be a bit of a nostalgia snob, but without nostalgia snobbery, how will the world know it’s not too soon to dust off Hypercolor? That was a trick question, friends. It’s never too soon for Hypercolor. See what I mean?
Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea behind the headline. There’s definitely a MySpace joke in the mix here somewhere. Can you come up with a better headline sticking to these central elements: nostalgia for 2005, MySpace’s current woes, nostalgia for 1991, and something funny about a municipality throwing away everybody’s snow chairs? Do so in the comments. Hint from a nostalgia snob: the (NOT) construction is very, very tricky. As the root of everything snarky and ironically detached about our society, can it ever actually be satirized? Herein lies the problem with this headline. It’s much too late to use (NOT) in a sort of topical way, but as the original of the ironic species, (NOT) also seems somehow immune to further satirization. I’d say it’s the Chuck Norris beard of snarky catchphrases, but not even a roundhouse kick from the Chuck Norris of snark (Jay and Eric, I want you to wrestle for that title) can touch it its lovely whiskers. (NOT) is an untouchable, the great Source Wall of everything we wink about. You leave MC Hammer out of this.
I’ll be honest. When I logged onto The Huffington Post around 1 am this morning, my jaw just about hit the floor (the dog was in the way). I’m still thinking about what AOL’s acquisition of Huffington and the installation of Arianna Huffington as editor-in-chief of most (all?) of AOL’s online editorial content is going to mean for everyone involved. A few things it won’t mean, as far as I can tell:
TechCrunch, Engadget, Movifone, PopEater, Patch etc. are going to become repositories for a particular political agenda. No, they won’t.
The Huffington Post is going to, like, change so much, and in all the wrong ways. It might change a lot, and in some ways, I hope it does. But it’s not going to cease being what it’s been branding itself as for sometime now, a “beyond left and right” (Arianna’s words, not mine) general interest destination with a distinctive point of view and activist spirit. Will it continue to lean “liberal”? Of course. Has that been its main focus for the last year? On political and social matters, sure, but HuffPost has grown in that time to include 21 separate verticals, four of which focus on local news in urban areas. Like I said yesterday, it’s just not the case that the corporatization of the Huffington properties means that Ms. Huffington’s priorities have shifted. They’ve been clear for some time, and were made even more explicit by the merger. The Huffington Post, as a company, wants to cover a wider range of topics and engage a wider audience. It’s been doing that for at least the past two years, and the AOL deal means it can go on doing it in bigger, better ways. If you’re interested in seeing a hot media property complete its evolution from political niche to top-of-mind general interest, news, and information, keep your eyes on Huffington. If you’re looking for the Daily Kos, well, there’s always…the Daily Kos.
Click through to read this morning's post.
I wrote a new post for the media vertical right after reading the merge announcement last night. The editors put it up this morning, and I want to thank them for their quick turnaround. Disclosure: like most of the people creating HuffPost’s content, I don’t get paid for what I do there. I don’t have an agenda, though as a content creator, I obviously do want the venture to succeed. More thoughts on all of this as I have them.
Last Thursday, I had the distinct pleasure of bringing you Part One of an excellent Guest Post by my good friend Jay Trucker. In Thursday’s edition of “Pop Rocks! One Man’s Cover Song Garbage and Gold,” Jay took out the trash like Sid Phillips circa Toy Story 3. (Anyone else catch that cameo? It’s totally him). Today, we have the Hotness.
Pop Rocks! One Man’s Cover Song Garbage and Gold (Part II)
by Jay Trucker, special to The GrizzlyThe Daily Cocca
Cover songs are forever. My guess is that the second song ever performed was a cover of the first. Some of these cover songs are inspired, many are horrifying. Artists who cover well-known songs are disadvantaged in that they are immediately judged against the original, though the instant recognition of a popular cover song often paves the way for radio play and concert sing-alongs. The best covers may pay tribute or put a new stamp on an old standard. The worst are soul-crushing cash-ins. Here are just a few of my personal favorites and least favorites. Feel free to add your own. But for the sake of my sanity, try not to defend Sheryl Crow.
This is my Johhny Cash “Hurt.” That is, this is the cover in which I really liked the original, then fell in love with the cover and couldn’t even listen to the original without contempt any longer.
The Who may have been relatively embarrassing geezers at last year’s Super Bowl, but when I saw them in ’02, Roger Daltry still had the pipes to nail the “looooooooooovvvveeeeeee” crescendo as if his drummer and bassist were alive. Then Ann Wilson had to come and just crush the whole thing. Wilson’s voice adds a depth to the entire song that makes Daltry look like an imposter in comparison.
In case you weren't already jealous of Cameron Crowe.
Sister Nancy Wilson tosses in just enough guitar feedback to keep the rock ahead of the classical in this version, and she can pull off hard rock posturing better than Pete Townshend these days. But make no mistake about it—this song makes the list because of Ann’s voice. She sells the feeling of the song as if she wrote it, and when the mixing board gives her a hand at the end, pushing the finale into the stratosphere, we’re all the better for it. Catch Heart live and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Nothing will ever terrify a child of the 80s the way Genesis’ “Land of Confusion” did. With its deranged Reagan puppets that looked just enough like the actual Reagans to frighten pre-pubescents, “Land of Confusion” would be memorable even if the song weren’t. And I’m still not sure why puppet Genesis is funny whereas puppet Reagans probably sent more kids into their parents rooms at night than the bogey man and Freddy Kreuger combined.
Disturbed, not a band one would typically consider subtle, succeed in their rendition by simply amplifying the heavy guitar licks of the original, which in turn makes the dystopic lyrics stand out more. It helps that, unlike many of least favorite cover nominees, Distrurbed was not forced to heteronormatize the song by changing any he/she pronouns. After all, this world “we” live in, and both man and woman will one day be subjected to the great flood the way the puppet Reagans were in ’86.
Disturbed singer David Draiman gives his typical tortured pet performance on “Land of Confusion,” barking through each line like a dog running to the end of a leash. I’m sure this is enough to make many Phil Collins fans unhappy. To be sure, Drummond’s growl scat is plenty annoying, especially when he’s offering the kind of mad at your dad garbage that Distrurbed often deals in, but when he adds asides like “ooh-ah-ah-ah-ah” or, as in “Land of Confusion,” “nyah-ah-ah” it kind of sounds like he’s possibly, maybe, just a little bit, making a gag of his over-the-top angsty rottweiler act.
The history of “In Your Eyes,” at least, according to Wikipedia, says a lot about the song. Written by Peter Gabriel, the song was first released in 1986, then again in 1989 after it was featured in the movie Say Anything. Gaines recorded a stripped down version as a B side in 1992, then re-released two different versions of it in 2001. Herein lies the strength of the song, especially Gaines’ version—its timelessness. For this ballad about a guy who sees churches in eyeballs, Gabriel abandoned the giddiness that made 80s hits like “Sledgehammer” and “Shock the Monkey” a lot of fun, replacing it with heart-felt lyrics that are just complicated enough to not scream prom song. The original has some world music instrumentation and African yodeling (that exists, right?), which Gaines’ cover does not. See, this is the type of song that thrives on acoustic interpretation. Minus the bits of Toto-sounding keyboard and backup dancers, Gaines’ take lets his voice and the basics of the song do all the work. He proves that “In Your Eyes” does not need world music or exotic stage shows to succeed; its greatest asset is the core of the song itself.
Gaines stopped by my dear old alma mater while touring the college circuit back in ’98, and my then-roommate went to the show, hanging around afterwards just to get Gaines’ autograph for some girl he had an unrequited crush on. That night, I mistook his nightstand for the men’s room, spraying his Jeffrey Gaines autographed poster with recycled Natty Light. Sorry, Tom.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am an unabashed GnR diehard. But I like their version of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” much more than their more revered covers like “Live and Let Die” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
Singing "Salt of the Earth." Irony on lines one, two, AND three, Professor Trucker.
What makes this surprising is that the band itself hates this cover. Recorded for 1994’s Interview With a Vampire soundtrack, “Sympathy” is the last song released by Axl, Slash, Duff, and co. The band hated each other so much at this point, they couldn’t even be in the studio together when they recorded it. Slash said his own rendition of “Sympathy” (ok, his band’s; rumor is Slash’s guitar solo was redubbed by Axl loyalist Paul Huge) sounds like a band breaking up.
But that’s kind of cool, in its own way. A band of junkies covers a song by an older band of junkies featuring Satan as narrator. I’d say there’s a game of one-upmanship going on here, and Guns may have just topped the Stones in debauched sinfulness. Take that one to heart, Keith and Mick.
Oh yeah, and Mick Jagger never could sing. So there’s that.
Honorable Mention
Ugly Kid Joe – “Cats in the Cradle”
Not sure which list this belongs on, but it deserves mention.
Jay Trucker teaches writing at the Community College of Baltimore County and studies Sociology and Education at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He occasionally writes about the Baltimore Orioles for WNST.net and nightlife for the Baltimore Sun blogs.
Jay, I can’t thank you enough for this fantastic double-feature. It’s a huge treat for readers of The Daily Cocca and an ever bigger treat for me. Folks, give Monster Truck some love in the comments so he comes back and see us soon. I bet he’d even take some requests. Oh, and Jay? nWo 4 Life.
And so we meet again, AOL. I remember when you were just a Version 3.0 running on my best friend’s Windows 3 PC. I remember your ubiquitous free disks, first floppy, then compact, the sting of still not having you and the joy of my parents’ new subscription. As Alice Munro might say, you were a friend of my youth.
So much has changed for both of us since we last spent time together. The aughts were a strange decade, weren’t they? Remember adult contemporary radio? I want to say, old friend, that I think your current content strategy makes a lot more sense than your famous move into Old Media did. These are the kinds of deals it would have been perfect for you to make back then, had content streams like The Huffington Post and many of the other sites you’ve since acquired existed circa 1999. Back then, DiaryLand and LiveJournal did not look the forerunners of the world we live in now, but 2o11 means you can party like Time Warner never happened. Great internet New Media properties are everywhere and you’re gobbling them up like Pac-Man on a ghost binge.
I really do think your strategy here makes sense, and I’ll write more about this later. For now, though, I’m going to refer to you in the third person if you don’t mind (AOL, remember Norm MacDonald? Remember me trying to load Oasis videos? You just kept right on buffering!) and share a few thoughts with my readers. Thanks, AOL. You’re the best. I want to close this part of my note to you with some clever mid-90’s farewell construction, but I can’t remember any. I do remember most of the words to “Standing Outside a Broken Telephone Booth (With Change In My Hand),” though, and most of the words to its title.
For all of you non-AOL entities reading this post, I’m curious about three aspects of the acquisition:
Huffington has been positioning itself as a general interest blog for some time now. AOL must value that, and I wonder what that might mean for the editorial slant of the new Huffington Post Media group. Everyone says “HuffPo is liberal,” and maybe its highest profile bloggers are. The general ethos of the site is not a secret, but the addition of many general interest verticals over the past two years really has made HuffPo something other than a political blog. It hasn’t been the sophisticate’s Daily Kos for some time now. But I do wonder if there will be an even further widening of voices and/or interests.
Will HuffPost content be syndicated across AOL’s growing network? If so, how?
Will revenue sharing with bloggers or other kinds of payment become feasible? If so, it will almost certainly be tied to traffic. huffingtonpost.com/christopher-cocca clickety clickety click!
I’ve written a few blog posts over the years about how after everyone stopped using AOL (that is, after people my age went to college and had cable modems and started really roaming the web, only using AOL for email and AIM, and eventually not even those things), we had this sense that we didn’t want our online experience (here comes 2011’s media buzzword) curated by AOL or anyone else. We wanted to get out from under AOL’s channels and interface and boldly surf the web. A few years later, Facebook came along and eventually became a new kind of AOL: it is, for many people, a portal to the rest of the internet. It’s a starting point as much as AOL’s old startup screen, and certainly just as much of a collection of curated media. The key difference, of course, is that this curation is 1) customizable and 2) aggregated by our friends. In a sense, Mark Zuckerberg re-invented the wheel.
Now that AOL is primarily a content company focusing on intelligent, agenda-setting media, it’s recapturing a bit of its old time portal chutzpah. No longer simply a desktop service or even just one extremely useful website, AOL is looking to become, once more, a community where people want to be. Fifteen years ago, AOL was the most successful online Third Place because the nascent social web was about instant messaging in a safe, intuitive environment. With a new focus on bringing together the best digital content and discussion, AOL is reapplying for the job of world’s biggest internet brand. As a communications tool and packaged online experience, AOL was once the place to be. Can its new focus on content, content, content, make it that again? AOL is betting that it can, and betting big. It’s not a bad position. After all, without compelling things to share, what’s the fun of social networks? I don’t care (that much) about what you had for breakfast. I do care, though, about good stories, cogent insight, and the frenetic cycling of news, and I’m not alone.
Whether the generation raised on AOL: ISP as internet aquarium will bite at AOL: content king remains to be seen, but the acquisition of The Huffington Post and the creation of The Huffington Post Media group alongside an ever growing constellation of online properties certainly brings the company closer to its long-lost users than it has been for a while. Even as companies like MySpace, the soon-to-be-jettisoned clunker at Fox Digital Media, also see content and curation as the key to internet survival, AOL seems uniquely positioned to make their version of the model work. Stay tuned, America. You’ll certainly be online.
In this case, I schwicked the design element from an old edition of the real book. Image is from tadfad via Flickr. Want to crank this one out before game time. The Steelers colors are coincidental, though I always root for whatever Pennsylvania team is still in the mix. See previous post for all-original mock-up covers I spent way more time on.
I’m pleased as punch about the first search term. I love Kris Kristofferson, and I not just because I covet his name for my own nom de plume. I’m going to have to go with Chris St. Christopher when I start writing hard-boiled crime novels.
The second search term is here because of my quote from this week’s “The Office,” and I’d like to try to answer it if I could. Mark Zuckerberg’s jet pack is the same place yours is: the government-confiscated files of this guy. That’s the only possible explanation for why this world hasn’t happened yet. I’m pretty sure I have a post somewhere in archives here simply titled “Where is My Jet Pack? Where Is My Flying Car?” (Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down.) Blame Thomas Edison and his smear campaign against Alternating Current. Blame whoever is holding on to those designs for the ion-repulsion flight apparatus. We should have jet packs by now. We should have flying cars. Mssrs. Hanna, Barbera, Disney, and Verne: you promised.
Chris Cocca 