​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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motiontowing.com

​There are eight spark plugs in the Eddie Bauer edition of Ford's 2001 Expedition. Eight. And if one of them isn't working properly - if it becomes loose or stripped or a gremlin sneaks under the hood and gobbles it up (a common problem in Fords) - the whole car is pretty much fucked. Crazy.
 
Goodie Mob had, like, one good guy out of four and they were still pretty good. No matter. Ford Expeditions do not care about the number of hits Cee-Lo's old group had. One monkey stops their show like a motherfucker. I know this because Monday, one of the sparkplugs in my Expedition went wongo on the way from Corpus to Houston.
 
The whole scenario was pretty unspectacular: There was some driving (this is fun enough), then an awful, horrible knocking noise (THUDTHUDTHUD...), then some confusion: Did I just wander over onto those ridges on the side of the road that prevent people from driving into the median?

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* That aren't actual musicals

*eye roll*

​It would be easy to pick out a bunch of terrible musicals to make fun of. First off, most musicals seem stuck in the 1930s, when every song everywhere sounded like a show tune, and therefore stank.

Second, we're afraid of polarizing our audience. You either like musicals or you don't, and we really don't want to wade through a bunch of comments letting us know in excruciating detail why the musical genre is a moving and intelligent art form and who the hell are we to blah blah blah and so forth. So instead, we've chosen to take a look at some of the worst films of all time that deal with music but are not, in fact, musicals.

This caveat is all that kept the abominable Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie off of this list, and thank God for that. We may have had to rewatch it, and no frickin' thank you. Of course, rewatching scenes from the following turd-o-ramas was no picnic either. Hopefully you'll gain some enjoyment from our evisceration of these atrocities so that our efforts were not in vain.

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​This past week, actor Jeff Bridges decided to take the ill-advised plunge that far too many of his thespian brothers and sisters have before him: He released a record. Produced by his Crazy Heart buddy T-Bone Burnett, Bridges' self-titled album sold about 13,000 copies its first week, coming in at No. 25 on the Billboard 200. Luckily for him, it was at least met with good reviews but many more before him have not been so fortunate.

Actors. When will they learn?

Here at Rocks Off, we decided to grade these actor turned musicians on a sliding scale from good to tolerable to skin-crawlingly awful. And we had to leave a few out, so feel free to let us know about it.

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Ed. Note: Remember that "songs about Hell" blog we mentioned a couple of days ago? It's still hot, and here it is.

maximumwage.wordpress.com

The Southwest Freeway and Loop 610, 4 p.m.

​There's an old saying in Botswana: "Shitfire is it hot!" Wait, maybe that was Bandera. Anyway, whatever hemisphere you're talking about, the heat in Texas has been well nigh intolerable. A few more days of 100+ degree temps and Houston will break the consecutive day streak set back in 1980.

It's been, well, almost hellish.

So what's a (progressively sweatier) body to do in such diabolical conditions? When it's too hot even to go to the pool, the best Rocks Off can do is recommend closing the shades, cranking up the A/C, and listening to some songs that remind you just how infernally miserable it is outside.

James Brown, "Hell": "It's hell down here/ And we've got to make a change." Short of cloud seeding or using that alien technology the Army captured at Roswell to realign the Earth's axis, we really don't see how we can...oh wait, forget we said anything.

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Ed. Note: Unlike the Astros' season (darnit), Stapp's concert appears to have been canceled.

Groovehouse

​A few weeks ago, Rocks Off wondered if the real reason our hometown baseball club is having such a woeful season is because the music most of the players use to pump themselves up as they're walking to the plate is absolutely atrocious.

Since then, the Astros have done nothing to make us change our minds. No, they've actually gotten worse. After Wednesday's loss to the Pirates - let us repeat that: The Pirates - they are 25 up and 44 down, 14 games behind the division-leading Brewers, losers of eight out of their last ten and owners of the worst record in Major League Baseball. Can't anybody here play this game?

So what are they doing about it? Besides firing their pitching coach, the 'Stros have evidently decided a grunting, preening, self-conscious '90s rock star might be able to give the team a little inspiration. Wednesday, the Astros announced Creed front man and sometime solo artist Scott Stapp will perform a concert following next Saturday's home game against an actual baseball team, the Tampa Bay Rays.

As even Stapp himself might say, God almighty.

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​Back in December 1998, when Eminem was just hitting MTV and rap radio, we remember people pronouncing his name as "Eee-mine-im," and not the candy-inflected way it actually was. We even made the mistake during our first viewing of "My Name Is" late at night on the video channel and calling a buddy to ask him if he knew who the hell this scrawny white dude was.

Little did we know that Eminem would be a household name in just a few months. A few years later, at the end of 2003, "Caney" West was getting pretty popular, confounding potential fans who hadn't heard his name out loud yet. In less than a decade, his name would be either be "Asshole" or "Genius," sometimes used in the same sentence by the same person.

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Scott Stapp, lead singer of Creed (above), stops at House of Blues tonight on his current acoustic tour. More than likely you have already clicked off this blog, or at least already gone on auto-pilot to call him a fuck-ass in the comments section. We'll wait a sec for you to come back.

OK, the funniest thing to us has always been the split between a group's popularity and the man-on-the-street opinion, or the stray weirdo critic who writes a treatise on how underrated they are, like we have been wont to do.

Cumulatively Stapp's Creed has sold over 35 million albums, while most everyone you speak with on a pop culture level sees the band and their contemporaries like Nickelback (who have clocked almost 30 million in sales themselves), as a two-headed Hitler/Satan character in modern rock music.

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usatoday.com

​The best part about Sunday night's Super Bowl halftime show was that people actually were surprised that it was bad, as if the Black Eyed Peas would pull it off without a hitch and we would all rush to our computers and download their entire catalog in converted reverence. Right when we saw the group come down from the rafters on chains, we already knew we were in trouble.

If you didn't think the Peas sucked before, your mind wouldn't be changed and you were enraptured for all 12 minutes. If you came in already a devoted hater, then you only walked away with a worse impression than you had the day before. If you are among the lucky few that had no idea who they were before or what they sang Sunday, then you believe that the world is on the verge of artistic implosion. And you could be partly right.

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Nooooo!!! Anything but "One Last Breath"!!!

​The headline is promising: "Norwegian Boy Fends Off Wolf Pack With Heavy Metal." Pretty awesome, right?

Picture the frozen steppes of Rakkestad - we're just assuming there are steppes there - and it's after 2 p.m. in the wintertime, so the sun has long since set. A lone young man with burgeoning Norseman features walks home from school, carrying only a backpack and a tribally stylized boom-box.

Suddenly, a pack of wolves crests the hill ahead of him. He calmly turns to take an alternate route, but finds that the wolves have cut off all potential escape. He is surrounded.

Instead of fear, a look of determination crosses the boy's face. Within him is the blood of countless generations of warriors, wild and fierce men and women who tamed this savage land of jagged ice and made it their own. He reaches into his backpack and pulls out a cassette tape as the wolves draw closer, circling menacingly.

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