Even though Mason Lankford said, "There will come a day when we forget the Rapture ever even happened," Rocks Off is keeping an eye out for signs of our impending Armageddon. We were wrong last time, but we're totally right this time!

Don't you never say no bad words about Chris Gaines.

​We'd more or less forgotten about Garth Brooks, who took country music to the mainstream in the late '80s and early '90s. He became one of the top-selling artists of all time, and claimed fans from all over the world, but the strain of his career took its toll and he quietly bowed out of recording and performing as the millennium dawned.

And no, it had nothing to do with his Chris Gaines album, you close-minded philistines. Fun fact: Brooks' only U.S. Top 40 pop single is actually "Lost in You" from The Life of Chris Gaines.

Sorry for the vehemence. We were big into Brooks when we were in middle school, and there's still a place in our heart for the man's music. "In Lonesome Dove" from Ropin' the Wind is one of our favorite songs to this day. We'd link to a YouTube video for it, but there doesn't seem to be one. So instead we'll send you over to the song we blatantly ripped off from "In Lonesome Dove" to write. (We just added a wizard.)

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Photo by Marco Torres

​Boondocks owner Shawn Bermudez was arrested and booked at the central jail Saturday night when Houston Police Department officers responded to another noise complaint at the popular Montrose nightspot.

Tuesday afternoon, Houston Police Department Public Information Officer Jodi Silva confirmed to Rocks Off that Bermudez had been arrested and was processed at the downtown jail for a Class C misdemeanor.

According to frequent Rocks Off photographer and contributor Marco Torres, who was at Boondocks Saturday to hear legendary New York City turntablist DJ Spinna, who had been brought down by Red Bull for the event, Boondocks' managers and DJs had been warned during an HPD stop at the club February 17 on a previous noise violation complaint that "next time someone would be arrested."

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Mason Lankford said, "There will come a day when we forget the Rapture ever even happened," but Rocks Off is keeping an eye out for signs of our impending Armageddon. We were wrong last time, but we're totally right this time!

Eva Rinaldi

​Brace yourselves, but rapper Snoop Dogg smokes marijuana. Snoop was arrested last weekend, at the same border checkpoint that picked up Willie Nelson two years ago we might add, for possession, which he freely admitted because he is Snoop Dogg, and at this point he might as well. His court date has been set for January 20.

Now, we're one of those people who has never smoked marijuana in our lives, but we're not some kind of virulent anti-drug crusader either. We've got friends who smoke, and most of them manage to get up and go about their day to day lives just fine. Plus, arresting someone like Snoop for having pot, when his having pot has given us so much great music over the years, seems like a pointless endeavor. Plus, it just reaffirms that the world is going to end soon, and as usual we can prove it with a deep look at the Book of Revelation. Here's Johhny...

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​We here at Rocks Off are fascinated not only with the end of the world, but with the people who are convinced that they're going to see it. We spend quite a bit of time playfully using the light-hearted headlines from Yahoo! News about the music industry as a springboard into the Book of Revelation, but, and don't tell anyone this, we don't really think that any kind of apocalypse is imminent.

Russian composer Alexander Scriabin did. Not only that, he wanted in on the ground floor, and he wanted to write the soundtrack.

Scriabin, who would be 140 today, is the poster child of the Russian Symbolist musical movement. He was big into Chopin, our favorite original goth nocturne master, and liked to link atonal qualities as well as mysticism and a theory of chords as colors into his poetic compositions.

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Photo by Jason Wolter

Jason Isbell (left) and Amanda Shires (right) are both more deserving than Chorney.

​The small world of Americana music is all a-twitter over New Jersey woman Linda Chorney's nomination for a Grammy in the Americana category. In case you haven't been following the story, Chorney discovered a way to game the system and managed to convince quite a number of Grammy voters (who obviously are a little under-educated and under-exposed to the Americana genre) to vote for her tepid album, Emotional Jukebox, to get it on the final ballot in spite of it not having sold a single unit so far according to Sound Scan, the official industry tabulator of album sales.

According to interviews she's given, Chorney seems to have very little working knowledge of Americana or the artists in it. The Americana Music Association, which normally issues a boilerplate congratulatory statement to all the nominees, has not done so this year and speculation is that the association is not happy about Chorney's nomination since she is not a member of the organization and has never attended any of the annual events.

Frankly, we don't care if she's a member of the AMA or not; what bugs us about Chorney's gameswomanship is that she has knocked a number of exemplary albums out of a chance to win. And we'll bet she hasn't heard a damned one of them. So here's a list for you, Linda, of people you are basically screwing over. Like we said, do the right thing and withdraw your nomination.

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Mason Lankford said, "There will come a day when we forget the Rapture ever even happened," but Rocks Off is keeping an eye out for signs of our impending Armageddon. We were wrong last time, but we're totally right this time!

White House Photo Office

The Beach Boys with Ronald and Nancy Reagan

​In honor of their 50th anniversary the Beach Boys are reuniting in order to put out a brand new album and undertake a 50 city tour. Personally, we couldn't be more excited about something new from Brian Wilson and the crew. Pet Sounds has withstood the test of time as far as being considered one of the greatest albums of all time, and even George Martin admits that the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was a an attempt to equal the brilliance of the album.

So, we have much to celebrate and look forward to, it's just sad that we aren't going to have long to do it because the full return of the Beach Boys is the sign we've been looking for to prove that the end is nigh.

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​The comments sections on several articles about Linda Chorney, the woman who gamed the system and social networked her way onto the final Grammy ballot in the Americana category, tend to be pretty negative, although Chorney's publicist, husband and a few friends are trying to staunch the flow of irate bile that has gushed like BP's Gulf well last year.

Lonesome, Onry and Mean has been following Americana music since long before we first went to work in country radio in the early Seventies, and we've never witnessed anything quite as shameful as Chorney's calculated internet march to the Grammy ballot. We were revolted by our first listen to Chorney's tepid folky Emotional Jukebox. We can think of a handful of women in Houston who could kick Chorney's musical ass with one arm behind their backs.

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The subtle front page of Chorney's website.

​As if the Grammys didn't have enough credibility issues, NARAS, the organization that controls the process, has left a loophole large enough for a complete unknown to manipulate her way onto the final ballot in the Americana category.

The news broke two days ago in Variety that virtual unknown Linda Chorney had employed the organization's interactive Grammy 365 site to connect with voting members and get her music heard. Somehow she got enough members to vote for her to get her album Emotional Jukebox on the final ballot with Emmylou Harris, Levon Helm, Ry Cooder, and Lucinda Williams, who have collected among themselves 23 Grammys.

On one hand, we have to applaud Chorney for her effort and determination and for her ability to work the system to her advantage. On the other hand, after hearing her music, we want to projectile vomit.

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​Yesterday, about a half-dozen of my Facebook friends forwarded a gloom-and-doom listicle from a site called Buzzfeed entitled "12 Extremely Disappointing Facts About Popular Music." Now up to over one million hits, the doom-and-gloom piece is subtitled "This is the saddest thing you'll read all day!!! You let this happen! You!!!"

Okay leaving aside the fact that it was far from the saddest thing I'd read all day -- that would probably have been the deaths of the final two of the four children of that homicidal dad in Bay City -- it's difficult to conclude that the article was anything other than dishonest, a compendium of misleading BS, cherrypicked facts, and apples-and-oranges comparisons purporting to show...what, exactly? That people suck? That music is in the toilet as never before?

If that was the article's intent, it fails on anything other than the most superficial analysis. Let's examine its contentions point-by-point.

1. Creed has sold more records in the US than Jimi Hendrix

Okay, that sucks. But in Jimi's heyday, rock was young and only young people were listening to rock. Also, there were close to 100 million more people in the America of Creed than there were in Jimi's America. And note it says in the US only. Because he had to go overseas to make his name, Hendrix is hugely popular in the UK. Today, a black man with his looks and lyrical and instrumental talent probably would not have to go to London to make it. Witness the later success of the far-less-talented if somewhat similar Lenny Kravitz.

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Mason Lankford said, "There will come a day when we forget the Rapture ever even happened," but Rocks Off is keeping an eye out for signs of our impending Armageddon. We were wrong last time, but we're totally right this time!

Master Sgt. Jeremy Lock, USAF

​It's been a while since we predicted the end of the world. Too busy living to get busy dying, you understand? Still, we saw something today that made us drag out the scrying pool and the Book O'Revelation.

Wyclef Jean is a man we've always liked, whether it's his solo work or his time with the Fugees. We knew that in addition to his excellent artistic endeavors he was a passionate supporter of Haiti, even running for president of the nation last year. He led the charge to raise funds to help the country after a devastating earthquake, collecting $16 million in donations for disaster relief.

However, a Sunday New York Post article investigated Jean's charity and found that less than a third of the funds actually made it to Haiti. Millions were spent on questionable contracts and at least one Florida firm that received $1 million does not appear to actually exist.

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