This is pretty crazy if it’s true, but I can’t say I’m surprised; Yngwie Malmsteen is using copyright infringement as an excuse to force YouTube into pulling down videos that poke fun at his weight.

From a forum thread written by YouTube user “adam02″ on Ultimate Guitar:

Yngwie malmsteen, has issued a DMCA copyright infringement takedown notice against a video I recently uploaded on youtube, as a result YouTube automatically remove the video and email you that it’s been removed: You are essentially guilty until proven innocent. Which is unfair.

Now here’s the real clincher! All the video contains is a recording I made of my right hand drawing a cartoon image of Yngwie Malmsteen in my room. No music apart from a cheesy silly intro which I made.

It doesn’t take an experienced solicitor to realise that there is no copyright infringement going on whatsoever. Here is a thumbnail from the video: you be the judge!

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We at MetalSucks have dealt with the paradoxes involved with conducting a poll to determine great guitar players (read our 25 Best Modern Metal Guitarists poll here)! So we get that in a unweighted vote, the top-ranked axemen may just represent those liked by the largest number of voters; i.e. a dude who we agree is pretty good may score higher than each of our individual favorite dudes.

So when Rolling Stone magazine enlisted a who’s-who of classic rock personalities for their 100 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time cover story, we prepared for some wacky aberrations. Let’s check out a few of the RS list’s inconsistencies:

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Last month Vince gave you the heads up that Mr. Yngwie Malmsteen himself was gonna sit in with The Roots on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (The Roots serve as Fallon’s house band); well, that momentous occasion has now occurred, and our friends at Metal Injection have, very helpfully, edited all of Malmsteen’s clips together, so you can just see his parts of the show. The entire thing totals less than three and a half minutes, but Yngwie fits in all the Yngwesomeness he can in that time — in fact, one point, I’m reasonably certain that they had to cut him off ’cause he wouldn’t stop shredding. So, good to know the old boy hasn’t let all those cheeseburgers slow him down any.

Side note — Holy shit, Yngwie Malmsteen played with The Roots. Never thought I’d see that happen.

-AR

Admit it: this picture makes you SO FUCKING HAPPY.

Recently, my friend sent me a YouTube link to a Bee Gees cover group. Excuse me, tribute band. That is the proper way of addressing them, as Mark Wahlberg taught us in Rock Star. I don’t like the Bee Gees. I don’t like disco. Disco is kind of terrible. Disco blows dogs for quarters. Disco is never amazing, especially not when KISS attempt it. To say I was a little confused would be an understatement. But my friends aren’t totally clueless to what I listen to, so I gave it a shot. It turned out it was a heavy metal Bee Gees tribute band. Okay, it was a little bit awesome. Weirdly enough, it worked. I only like thin-voiced men screeching when accompanied by equally high-pitched guitars, and that’s basically what heavy metal “Stayin’ Alive,” was. I turned it off about halfway through because, well, I still have my limits, but it kind of makes you stop and go, “Huh!” Metal just makes everything sound better.

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It’s kind of unbelievable to me that twenty some-odd years later Yngwie still does the whole shtick with the leg kicks and such, but man, bless his soul. If today’s emo or deathcore are the modern equivalents of ’80s hair/shred, as some have claimed, I’ll take Yngwie’s whole shpiel any day of the week.

Metal Insider is reporting that Yng-Yng The Great is going to make an appearance on February 3rd on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, and better yet, that he’ll be sitting in with house band The Roots. No word yet on whether ?uest Love will be donning his mink coat.

-VN

While most new releases have trailed off into Christmas Music oblivion, there were still a few notable new metal albums trickling in last week. After the jump, a look at the meaningless sales numbers generated by new ones from After the Burial, Metallica, The Chariot and Yngwie Malmsteen with a look at a few other charting releases as well (take a look at the tags below if you wanna know who). Snarky commentary included, natch.

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A day after Cosmo Lee slammed The Faceless for not writing actual songs he’s redeemed himself with an ace interview with Yngwie Malmsteen… another guy whose detractors argue doesn’t write actual songs, but I digress. When it comes to shred there’s no one better or more outrageous than Yngwie — or as his new album title would suggest, more Relentless — and as such I’d expect any interview with Malmsteen to be suitably ridiculous. I confess, I got the same PR interview pitch about Yngwie that Cosmo did, but I was too chicken-shit to do the interview; what would I ask? “Tell me about the fur coat you wore for your Japanese Philharmonic performance”? “Tell me about your Ferrari collection.” Turns out I didn’t have to ask the latter, ’cause Cosmo got Yng-Yng to talk about Ferraris anyway:

If one day you suddenly went deaf, what would you do?

Well, that would be a terrible thing. I would spend my time driving around Ferraris, I guess.

Perfect answer. A+++ would do business with again! Head on over to Invisible Oranges to read the full interview and watch a few videos of endless neo-classical shred, natch. The new album Relentless is out now; I haven’t heard it, but I’ll bet it sounds a lot like Yngwie.

-VN

Yngwie Malmsteen is intrinsically funny yet undeniably awesome. For example, may I remind you all of this:

I don’t care who you are: you can say Yngwie is laughable — and you’d be correct — but to deny his talent, and jealousy of said talent, would be an outright lie!

It goes without saying, then, that any new Yngwie material is good both for some laughs and some genuine ooo’s and aah’s. In the case of his forthcoming new album Relentless, due November 22nd, we don’t even need to hear any of the music before we get some good lulz time in. Sez Malmsteen on the new album via a press release:

The album title really says it all.  The drive to surpass my own accomplishments can best be described with one word – RELENTLESS.  After all these years of composing and playing music, I still am passionate about pushing myself to the limit – to the highest, most demanding level of playing possible.

YES! Bring it on, Yngwie!

-VN

How many of you actually listen to guitar solos? How many of you actually pay attention to the musicianship involved in a project? How important is that for you? I’m curious to hear about this from musicians’ and non-musicians’ perspectives.  I know that for me, as a listener, amazing technicality alone is only interesting for about two minutes, and then my mind wanders.

Actually, it’s more like ten seconds now. When I was a teenager learning to play guitar (still learning, by the way), I could stomach shred records in doses. Usually, there would be that one cool track where it was obvious that some feeling and time went into the composition. The rest of the album would be wank filler. There’s some exceptions, like the first Yngwie record or Jason Becker’s Perpetual Burn, but by and large that is a boring-ass genre. I can’t geek out to that stuff. I don’t care about the Olympics, let alone the Guitar Olympics. Boring!

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Gene Simmons is the lowest of the low when it comes to putting his name on a product for a buck. The dude’s attached his likeness to everything from Mr. Potato Head dolls to coffee to toothbrushes, and he even attempted to sell his own kidney stone (no word on how that turned out). Mr. Witz proves the stereotype that Jews are money-grubbing scoundrels true and gives us a bad name (ok, so I’m cheap too… so what) even he does unequivocally like to rock n’ roll all night and party every day.

But nothing tops the sheer absurdity of this Yngwie Malmsteen humidor. Look at the fucking thing! Who would buy that? At least it’s useful though, unlike a fucking KISS Mr. Potato Head. I’m not really the cigar-smoking type except for once in a blue moon, but if someone <ahem> were to send me one of these <ahem> I could think of a certain sticky green substance that’d be perfectly suited for storage in such a case.

-VN

So Borivoj Krgin eh? [Krgin runs Blabbermouth.- Ed.] Here’s my story about the man…

He signed SYL. Without Bori, there would be no current anything for me in terms of my metal career. He rocked me hard. And Nevermore, Stuck Mojo etc…

He let me sleep on his couch for three or four months while I was writing City. He was (is) a good friend.

Blabbermouth is a site I go to almost everyday. I would bet any metal musician who tells you they’ve never been is full of shit. It’s incredibly hard to resist reading things about yourself that are either flattering, or make you look like a total douchebag.

The thing is:

He doesn’t make the stuff up. Any jackassery that I have been quoted as saying, I really did say. Blabbermouth changed the way we do interviews by making us accountable.

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For this week’s edition of Malmsteen Monday we’ll dial it down a notch but by no means relent on the fun. “Forever One” from 1994′s The Seventh Sign, showed Ying-Ying’s soft and tender side, and the video showed his desire to always be the center of attention despite poor Michael Vescera’s strong vocal performance. I’m mystified (but titillated) by the mysterious broad in the leather jacket, stone-washed jeans and studded bra; chicks like this were the only reason anyone watched hair metal videos in 1994. If you can’t wait to get your shred on, the ball-ripping solo starts at around 2:50 (complete with acoustic shred intro!)

-VN

Watch this and try not to laugh, I dare you. If not for the ridiculous, errm, apreggious from hell (which are actually pretty standard Yngwie fare), but for Ying-Ying’s completely useless, uninformative and accidentally hilarious spoken intro. Happy Monday!

-VN

Rather than the usual aural assault, this morning I decided to tune my radio to 89.9 FM (WKCR here in NYC), who are celebrating the life of Johann Sebastian Bach all week during their annual “Bach Fest.” And it hit me: this man may single-handedly be responsible for heavy metal, having composed the blackest of black music some 250+ years before Black Sabbath.

I’ve been trying to convince metalgf for some time that modern metal (much of it, anyway) is an extension of classical music, and listening to Bach this morning drove that point home. Bach — even moreso than many other classical composers — is the quintessential forefather of metal. His shit is just so raw, evil-sounding, and full of emotion, and because his pieces are primarily solo works on the organ you can hear the melodies front and center. To further support my claim, I paid a visit to the bedrooms of America via — where else — YouTube, to find some modern metal renditions of the most famous tunes by our favorite Baroque composer.

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Here’s the cover art for Yngwie’s new album, Rising Force. Note how both the title of the album and the image are, to put it mildly, insanely phallic:

I take back. It’s 2008 and no one can get away with this shit.

If you listen carefully, I think you can actually hear “Ripper” Owens weeping in the distance.

-AR

Just when you thought the bowels of YouTube had been dredged for the absolutely most ridiculous, cheesy, over-the-top Yngwie video imaginable, along comes MetalSucks reader Ray Hill with… this.

A fucking plus.

-VN

Congratulations to MetalSucks commenter Jim, who won himself a copy of Shai Hulud’s new CD Misanthropy Pure and Aletheian’s Dying Vine by coming up with the funniest caption for last week’s photo caption contest for the photo pictured at right:

“The secret government project to produce a genetic supermutant by splicing Ted Nugent’s DNA with Ann Coulter’s produced this being known as Superdouche. However, it still felt short of the targeted level of doucheiosity, which was believed to be in the Gene Simmons range.”

Nice one, Jim. This week we have a very special photo — MetalSucks reader Susan Helene Gottfriede sent us a frenzied email asking why the hell we didn’t post anything snarky about the picture that recently surfaced on TMZ.com of Yngwie Malmsteen showing up in court with his stage clothes on. Frankly, the only reason we didn’t post is that we couldn’t come up with anything. So we bring it you.

Our prize package this week is from Metal Blade Records, featuring Goatwhore’s A Haunting Curse and The Black Dahlia Murder’s Nocturnal. All you have to do to win is come up with a funny caption for the below photo of Yng-Yng and post it in the comments. Go!

“I call it ‘Arpeggios From Hell.’ And the reason for this is because it has the most… um, extreme arpeggios that I ever come up with!”

In awe that this video has 1.3 million views? Consider the Japanese sub-titles. And make sure you stay with it to catch Yngwie’s facial expression at the end.

-VN

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I hereby promise this will be the last of an unprecedented run of three posts about Yngwie Malmsteen within the past week; but unscrupulously ousted ex-Iced Earth singer Tim “Ripper” Owens has been tapped to front the band of the fur-coat-wearing, orchestra-conducting King of shred, Yngwie himself. After being ditched by Iced Earth late in 2007 in favor of original singer Matt Barlow at a point when the band seemed poised for a great comeback run, Owens was left down and out. Keep in mind this is the same dude who recorded and toured with his favorite metal band of all time, only to have his life bastardized and turned into a really shitty movie — AND be fired when that lead singer, some dude named Rob Halford, wanted to come back to his old band too. So needless to say, the dude deserved a break.

And he’s gotten it. While a gig with Yngwie may not be as cool as the Anthrax gig Axl suggested, it’s certainly something. No word yet on whether fur coats will become part of Owens’ repertoire.

-VN

It’s a well-known truism that scores of past-their-prime guitar virtuosos are still huge in Japan where emphasis on musicianship is appreciated more than here in the States. But palying with a full symphony orchestra in front of thousands? Yngwie Malmsteen is a bonafide guitar God in the Land of the Rising Sun. The sheer audacity factor in this video is stunning — bad-ass Yngwie, in leather-pants, studded boots and a fucking fur coat — strutting his stuff with an entire symphony orchestra backing him up. If you actually doubted for a second that Yngwie doesn’t in fact think he is a God, the expressions on his face and pseudo-conductor hand-mannerisms say it all.

-VN

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