Brainjackin: Let’s Play

Didja know, there are yewchoob channels where all the person does is play video games?  Sometimes they do it straight, like, only the sights and sounds you would see if you were playing the game on your own, with their invisible hand on the controller.  Other times they do a voice over, with varying degrees of snark or foolery.  Other times, they have a face on the screen – either their actual mug, or a cartoon avatar of some kind.  Originally these were called “let’s play” videos.  I’m not hip to the current lingo.

I wouldn’t know about these if it wasn’t for my husband and his perpetual search for distractions.  He introduced me and I have enjoyed many hours of diversion as well.

Let’s play videos evolved into the more recent generation, which is people running live video streams on a place called twitch.  They play the game live while the chat runs on the screen yelling nazi memes and throwing fractional bitcoins at the players.  idk, never created an account over there.  But it’s all good.  Time marches on.  And there are still plenty of let’s play videos on yewchoob to choose from.  I favor John Wolfe.  Currently he does most of his gaming content on his second channel, which is something he had to create because yewchoob’s algorithms are crap for the liddle guy and even the middle guy, which is where he finds himself these days.

Before James? Stephanie Sterling came out, and before she?they? became too doomy and repetitive for me to watch (hence my lack of awareness of current pronouns), they occasionally did this kind of content for their own channel.  They were especially focused on playing the shittiest games polluting steam and itch.io.  A fan made collections of the best excerpts from those videos, and I include one below, for your delectation.  The Lenny Kravitz near the beginning is from Neil Cicieraga’s amusing remix.  Enjoy.

edit to add cw:  for the none people who still care, this does have a ton of ableist language.  technically some of these are horror games but the horror content has trouble breaking thru the wall of mangled medium.

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Be Still and Know

I was in the parking lot of home despot, when I saw this sign at a distance.  Initially I thought it said, “I AM GOD.”  Strange place for fundie horseshit, I mused, until the actual product was revealed: “FARM FRESH SOD,” where the words farm and fresh were de-emphasized.

I had been primed to see these words by this ornament dangling from the rearview mirror of my ride’s coach:

Sit still and know that if you misbehave, jesus will fuck you up.  Bes’ believe.

I like to mix the ideas.  KNOW THAT I AM SOD, THE FARM FRESH GOD, like a parody of this jam:

If you haven’t thought of that song since your homeboy in college DL’d a midi of it in 1989, you’re welcome.

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Ya Talk Too Much

When I was a kid in the ’80s, the children in the halls and on school buses would chant song lyrics, especially raps.  Janet Jackson, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, and Run DMC all had their time, sometimes with alternative lyrics, like the “batman smells” versions.  This song was especially popular.

The place I heard it the most was in the mouths of other babes four decades ago, and I’m only seeing the video for the first time now.  I love the use of white people in this video.  It’s like these guys are the sensible cool mans in a world of weird posers and art freaks.  They gots my number.

In more ways than one.  In the latest FtB Poddish Sortacast, I spoke way too much.  I had proposed the topic so it was kinda my time to rampage, but still, rude.  Nonetheless, I thought I did a great job elucidating my perception of the world and the shituation we’re in.  This is not a good video to watch if you’re one of the people my doomerism policy is designed to protect, so don’t watch it if you’re one of them.  Anybody else, have at it.

Am I foolin myself, or did I come off like a big ol’ smartypants?  I lost the bead a few times, but when I was on, I was on.

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Yankee Doodle Fvck the USA

I’ve mentioned my pants before, in an article that was no doubt much more entertaining than this one will be.  When I was a wee child I got some 4th of July themed underwear, which meant I was wearing 4th of July themed underwear for as much of the year as they continued to fit my growing ass.  I remember little snare drums like you’d see in front of a juvenile revolutionary war reenactor, betsy ross flags, fireworks.  Something in this imagery interested me enough to remain now as a sliver of a memory.  I found out about “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and other patriotic hokum, and thought this was all in good fun.  Yay, freedom!  My country ’tis of-

I don’t remember when, specifically, I started to get the facts.  While history classes tended to stop before Vietnam, sometimes the textbook itself would have a section we just magically never got around to, and maybe out of boredom I read ahead.  Sometimes I’d just happen to be around while a movie about Vietnam was playing.  War is the impossibility of reason something something.  Maybe it was the inevitable question raised by the parts of history they didn’t manage to skip – what actually was wrong with white people that slavery and Jim Crow were things?  The Trail of Tears?  The Japanese Internment?  Seriously, white people?

4th of July underwear on my baby ass, made me feel some type of way.  America the beautiful.  Three cheers for-

Brainjackin: The Normal

There are some things in life I only know about because of my husband’s evil influence.  Once upon a time he got on a jag of listening to a musician known as Fad Gadget, aka Frank Tovey.  Good lookin’ guy, passed too young due to a congenital heart defect, made wacky art-influenced electronic music.  While he was digging that guy, he told me all sorts of other adjacent things.

It starts with a guy named Daniel Miller in 1978 releasing an indie electronic track called “Warm Leatherette,” for his solo project The Normal.  That song did well for the indies, inspiring Grace Jones to do a more successful cover of it in 1980.  “Warm Leatherette” is very basic, even crude, and has lyrics that are just basic bitch fanboying about J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash.  You know, the one that was portrayed in cinema some years later, with James Spader and Holly Hunter getting their rocks off by experiencing car crashes.

Meanwhile, Miller established the soon to be ultra-successful Mute Records.  One of his other projects there was a silly little album of classic rock and roll covers as The Silicon Teens.  According to wikipedia Miller provided the vocals, but they do sound rather like his friend Frank Tovey, who posed as the band’s singer.  Who actually sang?  Dunno.  But Mute Records had all sorts of interesting artists.

Of primary interest to my man, Frank Tovey’s Fad Gadget, who had several cool songs, most famously “Ricky’s Hand,” “Collapsing New People,” and “Lady Shave.”  Did Collapsing New People make you think of Einstürzende Neubaten, whose name means Collapsing New Buildings?  No coincidence, that band was also on Mute, and the song was about them.

That’s not what made Mute a gazillion dollars.  That would be Depeche Mode.  I love those guys.  Once upon a time they were young men, and there’s a picture of lil’ Dave wearing a Fad Gadget T-shirt.  At least, I remember seeing that somewhere.  Might be misremembering it.  Anyway, the world wouldn’t have all that great Depeche Mode music if it wasn’t for these weirdos, and if it wasn’t for The Normal, and if it wasn’t for Warm Leatherette.

Join… the car crash set.

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Simile Songs

“Human Cannonball” by the Butthole Surfers and “Chewing Gum” by Amyl and The Sniffers both feature similes at the end of the chorus.  Not sure why else I’m associating them tonight.  Incidentally both of these artists are problematic (former much more than the latter), cancel at will, but I like things about their work.  Even within these songs there are things to offend, while far from their worst in that regard.  Prominent ableist language in the second video, if you’re one of the three people who are still bothered about that.

I would like to know if I’m missing something about The Sniffers by not being Australian.  Is that band conservative-coded and/or nazi-friendly?  Amyl appeared on a rap track by some dudes who sounded like they were complaining about graffiti.  On the other hand, hard to imagine them lining up with any party down there besides the Sex Party.  I ask because I’m liking them, and wanna know if I should nip that in the bud while I’m new.

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Mah Spoon is Too Big

Hey who remembers Don Hertzfeldt?  His early masterwork circulated in low quality bootlegs for a long time, having been released just in time for massive expansion of the internet, to be downloaded at 320p a quarter bazillion times.  Edgy wiggly cartoons.  Funny voices.  Violence.  Amusing nonsense.  More importantly, artistic use of the medium.  I don’t think Adult Swim even existed back then, tho it was young enough to have been influenced by Matt Groening and MTV’s Liquid Television.  Content warnings:  This shit be violent, including against children.  Very brief fatphobic joke.

I am rather fond of this little film.  Don has more -and more important- works, tho sadly his personal website bitterfilms.com is no longer as artistic as it used to be.  I imagine some kind of hassle came along and broke the cool navigation and format stuff he had done, and he didn’t feel like struggling against that particular river.  One of these years, I want to make a cool personal website again.  I’ve purchased bebemelangedotcom but it is presently nothing at all.

During a window of time when I happened to be majoring in animation at art school, Don teamed up with Mike Judge to produce a thing called The Animation Show.  I attended one of those events and got his signature in an old sketchbook.  Good times.

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Helters of Skelter

At the risk of giving a few fractional pennies to some miserly old jerks, assuming any of these videos are allowed through the ever-shifting wall of copyright shenanigans to be playable as embeds, behold:  one of the heaviest songs of all time, Helter Skelter, by Whomever & Pals.  This is a tune, and as I’ve been saying about tunes lately, good ones transcend their origins to become standards – insofar as we’re allowed to have those anymore.  A good tune sounds good even when divorced from its original context and style, like Hendrix covering Dylan.  Dig the original, and then let’s consider how it holds up to the manglings of cover artists.

Helter Skelter, by Some Bros

There are people who happen to be doing a cover, and there are literal cover bands.  This first example is one of the latter – the kind of people who make a living playing casinos and smaller venues for ehh dollars, by giving the audience exactly what the fuck they want.  The bands that originate songs often play those songs in concert however they please, riffing and changing them up.  Cover bands know you wanted to hear every Yo and Ungh and Grunt in the exact same time and tones as the album version, and they do this job very competently.

Helter Skelter, by Magical Mystery Doors

OK, good job.  But too faithful!  This doesn’t get us anywhere near the spirit of the original, which is a heaviness that comes from the soul.  They tried to bring a new flavor to it by medleying with Zepp, but this only highlighted the fact these guys are incapable of innovating on preexisting material.  Or unwilling.  It isn’t a true medley; it just stops and starts.  Even so, I respect the hustle.

To me an artist should bring their signature style to a cover.  With the most successful bands – the Hall of Rock alums – the style is what we want from them.  I found Bon Jovi doing a cover live and eh, the vocals were a lil’ jovey, but it was too faithful, not interesting at all.  Aerosmith fared better only by merit of Steven Tyler’s vocals being so distinctive.  It was equally low effort.  To me, Mötley Crüe did a much better job.  They crüed this shit more than anybody on the list brought a style of their own.  That said, with this particular band, how good of a thing is that?

Helter Skelter, by Mötley Crüe

Siouxsie and the Banshees likewise bansheed their version well, tho I think it’s much less heavy than it should be.  U2 were in high asshole mode on their cover, fucking up the lyrics on purpose.  Raw talent made it almost tolerable, but not fucking quite.  Bizarrely, I found some other covers that fucked up the lyrics in the same way as Bono.  Were they covering the U2 cover?  Gross.  Rob Zombie’s duet with Marilyn Manson had decent production quality, which is better than most of the videos I’m posting, but it was an uninteresting waste of time.

Pat Benatar did a fine job but was, again, too faithful.  But that got me thinking about lady covers, and this one was pretty damn good.

Helter Skelter, by Dana Fuchs

That said, maybe as I was watching this I just wasn’t in the mood for a raggedy throat blastin’ rock broad, as much as that’s a very cool thing to be.  Respect, but it wasn’t for me at the moment.  Still, I carried on with the ladies.  Now forgive me, the quality of sound on this next video is just horrid.  But I thought they did very well for high schoolers.  I hope they are high schoolers.  Like the more virtuous and experienced ronk dragon above, these kids brought something new to the song.  Not as much, not as showy, but it’s there, if you listen close thru the painful crappiness of the video.  It’s most obvious on the solo.  Shreddin’.

Helter Skelter, by Heiress

Let’s pull away from horrible ass quality and back into the realm of actually good sounds.  Here is another young-ass group of youngsters fronted by a lady, doing a good job of it.  The arrangement is, again, bringing some original spirit to the cover, and so it becomes obviously superior to the cover band version.  However, while the singer has a great voice and does well, she doesn’t make it very interesting.  I have a suspicion if I could hear the above girl thru the grime, her voice would be a fifth as powerful and skilled as the below girl, but I’d like the performance better.  But also, the band did a great job of making this one distinctive and heavy.

Helter Skelter, by Hündersins

Here’s another indie band with good modern production value, and this is an interesting one to me.  I think there’s a name for this genre they’re working in and I’m not familiar enough with millenial ronk to put my finger on it.  You can hear the influence of pop punk like Blink 182, but it’s more hardcore.  Was MCR like this at all?  Is it called hardcore?  Some other kinda core?  Whatever the case, it’s distinct.  He sings so clearly and nicely, it’s kinda funny in contrast to the rest.  He isn’t vamping, isn’t playing into his own ego or enjoying the art of the impression too much, and I appreciate it.  Also, props to the drummer’s t-shirt.

Helter Skelter, by Joker’s Hand

Is it bad that I also like these boys because the lead singer is very beautiful to me?  Probably.  That is a freakin’ beautiful young guy.  Mwah.  Even so, they were definitely getting away from putting an interesting spin on it, edging closer to that cover band approach of just being very competent.  Close, but their genre predilections and his nice singing helps them clear that trap.

I had to save the best for last.  Here’s the thing most of the coverers did not understand.  This song is about the instruments as much as – or even more than – the vocals!  I did not find what I wanted when I was seeking a cover for Helter Skelter on this occasion.  I was hoping to hear a deconstruction, a reconstruction, maybe an industrial or electronic version.  Still, in making the cover instrumental, Asterism made it rock harder than all of the above.  Get dusted, y’all.

Helter Skelter, by Asterism

So fucking heavy.  And u kno what’s funny?  Asterism is apparently a cover band.

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It’s a Kind of Magic

I find myself lusting for magic again.  I may have mentioned before that my soul is forfeit because I made an ill-considered deal with the devil while walking home from a shift at Pizza Hut in the ’90s:  Show me magic is real and you can have my soul.  Why make such a foolish deal?  Because the world can seem so very dull and pointless.

I can’t tell you why it feels to me like magic would make it interesting and worthwhile.  There’s evidence a lot of people out there feel this way, especially those who are able to fool themselves into believing, at least in fits and starts.  Probably cultural damage of some kind.  It doesn’t really make sense.

Some people have very magical thoughts, like they’re the center of reality, important and big in some way.  It isn’t always a good feeling; you see this a lot with paranoia-flavored mental illnesses.  Tough to feel OK with life when everybody is out to get you.

I didn’t really want to write about that.  I’m just trying to put a finger on this feeling again.  The place it’s most relevant to me is in the creation of art.  I can’t make myself believe in some cult bullshit or mainstream religion either.  I can’t eke a transcendant spiritual feeling out of the things that I do believe, in my heart of hearts.  All that stuff just overwhelms in a bad way.  But fiction, that’s another thing altogether.

This feeling connects to other thoughts I’ve had in the past, as expressed through blog posts on The Doors, on levitation, on action, on Faust.  Is it wrong to want the weirding way?  To be a scanner, or if I’m ready to go, to get scanned?  I want my will to move the world, just a little bit.  Push.

I am reminded now of the Floaters-themed personal ads on my levitation post, and how they should be updated to reflect my current name.  Here I go…

Cancer, and my name is Bébé
And I like a lover who gots somethin’ extra in their jayjays
Whether that’s a big belly or a dingly dang dongus
There’s no way you and I can go wrongus
when you
Take my hand, come with me baby, to Love Land.
Let me show you it’s queer and/or gay
Sharin’ your love with Bébé
I want you to Float On… Float with me baby…

Way off topic.  The important thing is that y’all tell me how you do it.  Projecting your will like Charles Gray in The Devil Rides Out.  Stop holding out.  Slip me the runes.  I can handle it.  It’s time.

JUST GIVE ME THE PRIZE!

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