I have been listening to some albums which I should have been listening to when I was a kid, but which I was
not, because I was playing computer games instead. Gosh, the internet is good if you have
broadband. But music loses some of its desperate power if there is no money involved, because the exchange of money makes everything seem more valuable and intense; insert
lewd comment here.
Some of these albums involve loud guitars; it is odd now to note that the metal music of the 1980s has become normalised, such that the music of modern American teen pop stars sounds heavier and sonically more impactful than the music of Def Leppard, a band which was once held up by the media as an example of the kind of bad influence that would drive the children of the 1980s to a life of deliquency, which did not happen.
2. Greatest Hits 1, 2 and 3 - Queen
Queen is a rock band stroke hard rock band with elements of heavy metal from Middlesex in England, although the group's lead singer was actually from Zanzibar, where a lot of people had to stand on it because pollution was causing the sheep to become uppity, and Zanzibar is now part of Tanzania, which is on the Eastern coast of Africa and borders Rwanda and Uganda, which rhyme! Freddie Mercury's parents were Iranian, but he was born at a time when Iran was on our side; I do not know why they moved from Iran to Zanzibar. Perhaps it was better to spend a week with someone who loved them for what they were than years of loneliness. Tanzania has a population slightly smaller than that of Ethiopia, and it is also slightly smaller than Ethiopia.
{pause}
In fact, according to the CIA World Factbook, there are millions upon millions of Ethiopians, and so I don't understand what all the fuss was with Live Aid at all. There are seventy-three million of them. They aren't dying at all. There are millions of them. Don't fear the reaper.
There is an island called Mafia which is off the coast of Tanzania. In real life, Mafia is an acronym for "''morte alla Francia Italia anela!''", which is Italian for "death to the French is the cry of Italians!" or "died to Italy France it gasps!" if you use Babelfish. Aneli is a Russian model who appears naked on the internet; go on, use Google's image search, she has a formidable balcony. I have just learned that 'poitrine' is French for 'chest'. Oh, I don't want to write about Queen, I want to write about something else, anything else, I want to look at pictures of Aneli and imagine what it might be like to meet a woman my age in real life. Would she like me? If not, could I dominate or intimidate her so much that it wouldn't matter? There is a lot to be said for the notion of a world in which women do not have brains, and are instead like apples or plants in the ground; things to be plucked, used and thrown away.
Queen. Judging by this greatest his compilation, the band seemed to produce a lot of ballads, and some extremely unconventional pop songs. Another One Bites the Dust and We Will Rock You are basically the title phrase repeated a few times with a stomping beat; along the lines of Rock and Roll Part II by Gary Glitter.
In fact Queen is boring, that is my official opinion, and I dislike the group. I actually like them less than I do before I heard Greatest Hits 1, 2 and 3 because I had been sold on the media's packaged image of Queen, as a ridiculously over-the-top and iconic rock legend etc. But the band's songs, in reality, are mostly mid-tempo ballads with bits of rock here and there, and the group's inability to create a song which flows naturally without going off with orchestral harmonies / Brian May on the guitar is pathological and autistic; it was funny with 'Bohemian Rhapsody' but they kept doing it over and over again, and I despise mental illness and the mentally ill. Yes, you bash your head against a wall; I hope your skull splits open and the insides come out like egg yolk.
Greatest Hits III is by any measure a terrible album. You disagree with so many things I say, but not this. I don't even have to describe it; you know it is terrible.
3. Powerslave - Iron Maiden
Iron Maiden is a heavy metal band from London in England. The band is not a speed metal or a thrash metal or a metal or a rock or a hard rock band, or anything except for heavy metal. It is a heavy metal band. Iron Maiden was very popular in the mid to late 1980s, and the band is still popular nowadays; as with all heavy metal bands, they do not attract much mainstream press attention and are part of an extremely large parallel world of music. Unlike Def Leppard, Iron Maiden is true metal, not false metal. Iron Maiden is easier to like, in my opinion, because the band is quite silly, and their brand of epic rock music at least has some ambition.
Powerslave is middling. It is generally faster than Pyromania, which is a good thing. The standard of musicianship is a lot showier and the band can play quite complex arrangements in sync with each other, without going out of time. Def Leppard's music seems a lot simpler in comparison. Perhaps the children who listened to Iron Maiden when they were younger are now mathematical geniuses, because of the 'Mozart Effect'.
In fact the guitars of Iron Maiden sound as if they were sequenced, like Metallica, with a computer. Although I am not a follower of heavy metal, I can nonetheless determine a difference between Metallica and Iron Maiden and Def Leppard; Def Leppard wrote songs about rocking all night long and were basically a pop band aimed at the mass of consumers who buy pop records, Iron Maiden wrote songs about demons and World War II and were aimed at young teenager boys, whilst Metallica had a degree of angst and were aimed at older teenage boys.
Of the three groups, being Metallica, Iron Maiden and Def Leppard, only Def Leppard wrote and sang songs about sex, or at least had an emphasis on sex that went beyond the purely cartoonish into the realms of suggesting that the members of the band actuall did have sex, and that sex was both something men wanted to do and were able to do and it was good for them to do so. Iron Maiden is a boy's band, the members of the band are boys, and although they are aware of sex they are not actually physically dominated by it as men are dominated by it.
It gets in the way, see.