...and then he writes for Loudwire.

A Web site (magazine?) called Loudwire posted their list of the most anticipated rock albums of 2013. The first question we have is "anticipated by whom?" Because if the answer is "people who love music," then we've got some major problems here.

10. Motley Crue

Really? The tenth most anticipated new rock album. Really. Look, we're not saying Motley Crue aren't hugely popular, clearly they are. They sell out gigantic concert venues and will probably continue to do so for a long time. But is anyone really looking forward to new Motley Crue music?

Diehard fans, maybe, but are there enough of them to make this the number ten most anticipated album of 2013? "Girls Girls Girls" may take you back to 1987 and fond memories of your youth, but it's now been over twenty years since grunge killed hair metal stone dead. Motley Crue's next album is going to change that? Come on.

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HEY. HEY, GIRL. OVER HERE. HEY.

Rewind: So Chad Kroeger and Avril Lavigne Are Engaged: How Should You Feel?

Boy, that Avril Lavigne/Chad Kroeger engagement announcement came out of left field, huh? Who knows which other terrible music makers are secretly seeing one another right now? Why, it could be anyone! Even...

Ke$ha and Scott Weiland

How They'll Meet: Weiland's Duffel-Bag-Full-of-Miscellaneous-Pills dealer gets pinched by the cops, so he's forced to use a different guy, who accidentally books a simultaneous appointment with a certain glitter-smeared dance-floor darling. It's a meet-cute straight out of a Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks film; the epic binge that follows, somewhat less so.

How Long They'll Last: Two weeks before the marriage is annulled by the state, as neither party can be considered legally responsible for themselves.

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Do what now with the cookie?

"Hipster."

The word is older than you think: it pops up in an old Seinfeld episode where Jerry refers to Kramer as a "hipster doofus." It even predates that by many years. A few years ago, it was convenient shorthand to refer to someone who overcompensates, who tries too hard to be unique and interesting and winds up a caricature.

Common usage, unfortunately, has utterly ruined the word's usefulness; just as "emo" came to mean anything sad, "hipster" now refers to anyone with an even slightly artistic bent.

Wearing a concert shirt from last night's Death Cab For Cutie show? HIPSTER. Found a vintage pair of eyeglass frames that were unique and you thought suited you? HIPSTER. Get bored and draw on your shoes? HIPSTER. The word has lost all meaning and therefore all usefulness.

Well, there are two sides to that coin. There's another phenomenon, that of the broseph, a.k.a. dudebro or bro-dude, which is the polar opposite of the hipster.

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Rocks Off covered Eric Clapton's "Layla" and several other awful updates in January.

Sometimes an artist hits it big with one great song. Real big, real fast. Before they know it, they're the hot-button item, on the lips of the hip and influential across the world.

Of course, a sudden rise to fame is usually followed by a meteoric collapse, and if not that then a much more gradual but no less saddening decline. Just taking an example from this very list: Nobody in their right mind could say that Motley Crue was a one-hit wonder. Yet once grunge killed the hair-metal excess of the '80s, the Crue tried everything they could do recapture the heat they had in their heyday. Quite unsuccessfully, might I add.

Now, obviously they're still hugely successful and can pack a stadium full of nostalgic suburbanites, but do you even know if the Crue are still writing and recording new music? Do you care? I had to look it up, and it's kind of my job to know that shit. (Yeah, I know, Craiggers: you're eagerly awaiting Saints of Los Angeles Part 2. Yes, I'm sure the 2008 album is underrated. Just go with the premise here.)

So what do you do when the natural cycle of rise and decline has you yearning for the days of relevance? Why, you go back to the well, of course. You dig up a big hit, hopefully your biggest, and update it for a modern age. Hey, people loved it once, why wouldn't they love it again?

Here are several reasons why they wouldn't.

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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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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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