MetalSucks

Some unorganized observations about this video by Australian shredder lady Orianthi, sent to me by Zena Metal:

• Is that a sequined PRS? Good lord! Hideous.
• What’s with the guitar neck protruding out into all the shots? Is that an attempt to relate to the Guitar Hero generation? If so, how come none of it matches up with the song??
• She can definitely play!
• Nice dive bomb at the 3:00 mark.
• Apparently she was to be Michael Jackson’s guitarist for his This Is It shows. Eddie Van Halen… Steve Stevens… Slash… Orianthi. Hmmm. That’s some pretty righteous company.
• So many 12 year old dudes are going to have raging hard-ons for her. 12 year old Vince would’ve been ALL over this!
• All things considered, this isn’t bad. It’s middle of the road guitar/power pop made for tweens. Even if not for the shred it’d still be alright. If kids are listening to this over Ashley Tisdale, that’s a step in the right direction. But hey, this coming from the guy who genuinely enjoyed Avril Lavigne’s first record… so don’t trust me too much.

-VN

In no particular order…

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So, as previously announced, Eddie Van Halen was on Two and a Half Men last night. At least, that’s what Allyson at Bring Back Glam tells me. I missed it, because I was watching Gojira. And because I love myself.

But Allyson has the cameo clip, which is below. It’s as cheesy as you’d expect.

So… I guess the question is, would you use the shitter right after EVH warned you that you might wanna wait a beat? Would the smell of his poo floating into your nostrils disgust you, or are you such a sycophant that you’d think “Yeah! Eddie’s poo molecules will now forever be a part of me. History and I have finally intertwined.”

These are the kinds of things I think about.

-AR

Eddie Van Halen is apparently going to appear on the shitcom Two and a Half Men this fall. I’m assuming the storyline will have something to do with him confusing the chubby kid from the show with his chubby son.

Not a Van Halen.

A Van Halen.

Eddie Van Halen joins a long line of hard rock musicians appearing on terrible television shows, including Anthrax, Slash, and Sebastian Bach.

-AR

There’s something reassuring about knowing that people one sometimes considers cooler than him or herself were not, in fact, always so cool.

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At the risk of sounding disrespectful: we cannot look at Michael Jackson through rose-colored glasses just because of his untimely passing. The dude was, to put it mildly, a weirdo, and probably very, very crazy. And the fact that he is now dead does not change that fact.

That being said, back when the guy was slightly less crazy (or, at least, the general public was less aware of his craziness), there’s no denying that he was major talent who had a huge impact on music. Denying this fact because of his later follies is just foolish. And even though I’ve been listening to metal since before I had pubes, I freely admit that I owned a copy of Thriller long before I owned a copy of Reign in Blood.

Jackson apparently had some kind of affinity for hard rock guitarists, or, at least, had someone in his camp who did. Besides employing Jennifer Batten for years, Jackson worked with Eddie Van Halen (”Beat It”), Slash (”Give in to Me”), and Steve Stevens (”Smooth Criminal”).

For the usual dumb reasons, none of the videos for these collaborations are embeddable, but you can easily find them on the net. In the meantime, here’s Jacko and Slash:

On a more cynical note, except at least one, if not more, of these guitarists to start exploiting their relationship with Jackson for publicity any second now.

-AR

One of the most disappointing aspects of Guitar Hero: Metallica was that you have to play with nu-’Tallica, not the Burton or even Newstead-era band we all know and love (I’m told older versions of the Four Horsemen are available as “unlockable content,” but there’s only so many hours in the day and these snarky blogs ain’t gonna write themselves.). That being said, at least the makers had the good taste to not pretend that Robert Trujillo was in the band when they recorded Master of Puppets.

Now comes this 56-second bootleg clip of Guitar Hero: Van Halen, taken at recent nerd fest videogame convention E3. At first I was like “Sweet! Look, it’s DLR and EVH when they had long hair! CLASSIC HALEN ROOLZ!!!!”

And then I saw Fatty Ding Dongs Van Halen. Who not only wasn’t in the band during the early days of VH, he wasn’t even, y’know, FUCKING BORN YET. This like when the band tried to replace their cover art photos of Anthony with ones of Fatty Ding Dongs; even Axl Rose isn’t a big enough douche vag to try and completely re-write history. Bogus. Fucking bogus.

That all of this comes in the midst of EVH claiming and Michael Anthony denying that Anthony actually quit the band, and, well, it’s enough to make you wanna listen to fucking Chickenfoot. Christ.

-AR

Scars on Broadway didn’t work out. I’m still not entirely sure why. There seems to be some consesus that their album sucked, but I didn’t think so at all (and neither did my colleague Sammy O’Hagar, who reviewed the record). In any case, it’s a moot point, because at the end of the day, all any of us really want is for System of a Down to get back together already.

And I suspect no one wants that more than drummer John Dolmayan, who apparently auditioned to be the new drummer for Smashing Pumpkins. Because there’s really only two possible reasons he might have done this:

1. He’s bored.
2. He’s broke.

For the sake of humor, let’s assume Dolmayan is broke.

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Inarguably one of the greatest, most influential, and most ripped-off guitar players of all time, the deity we know as “Eddie Van Halen” turns 54 (!) today. Yes, some of his latter day career choices have been kind of mind boggling (in a bad way), but anyone who saw him on VH’s most recent tour knows he’s still the fuckin’ man.

So here’s to Eddie! And here’s a clip of him erupting back in’83:

-AR

Only, not really.

Lest there was any doubt that Diamond Dave and the Super Van Halen Bros. kissed and made up for the love of the Benjamins, the 2008 tour rider unearthed by The Smoking Gun proves otherwise.

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You’d almost expect Eddie Van Halen to be a staunch Republican. Look at the facts: he lives in California, is rich, is a dick, and he and his woman both do work in the magical world of porn, which means giving a big thumbs up to the McCain/Palin ticket would be just hypocritical enough to “make sense” the way Ted Nugent being a conservative or Chris Robinson marrying a conservative’s daughter “makes sense.”

Apparently though, this isn’t the case: John McCain has been using the ‘91 VH “classic” (a.k.a. my least favorite Van Halen song that wasn’t originally sung by Gary Cherone) “Right Now” as part of his campaign – and Eddie objects enough to actually call former co-worker/current nemesis Sammy Hagar, reports Rolling Stone.

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Wow. If that picture doesn’t get your dick hard, nuthin’ will.

So. If there’s money to be made doing something, someone will do it. Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth didn’t really just kiss n’ make up one day, and it’s not like they had some driving creative desire to do another Van Halen tour; it’s all about the Benjamins, homie.

And why should Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony not get a piece of the poundcake? A lot of people (like me!) who would normally never pay for a Sammy Hagar solo album or a Michael Anthony solo album are considerably more likely to pick up a project that re-teams the two, because amongst our deepest, darkest secrets are the facts that we once thought that Kevin Smith was funny, that we like to choke ourselves while masturbating, and that we don’t get angry when someone chooses “Runaround” on the jukebox. So, of course, sisters are doin’ it for themselves, as Michael Anthony writes on his blog:

“Sammy and I are working on a new project with a couple of good friends, and it is going to be totally KICKASS!!, so stay tuned.”

Part of me thinks that maybe my April Fool’s joke is on me and a Velvet Hagarevolver record is now gonna be a part of the really real world; I mean, ditch that dude who isn’t Izzy and slide Duff McKagan over to rhythm guitars, and you’ve just given birth to the band most eagerly anticipated by anyone who has ever thought the confederate flag was cool, seriously considered date rape, or is from the state of New Jersey.

But I’m probably getting ahead of myself; “some friends” are probably just Sammy and Mike’s kids. Which is fine by me. If there’s one thing I’m achin’ for, it’s some serious shit slinging in the press between Andy Hagar and Fatty Ding Dongs Van Halen.

-AR

[thanks to: Saul Hudson]