Monkstyle.net

I had this dumb idea for a post today and decided to do it nonetheless. The idea is a battle of sorts between bands in my music collection with tenuous connections. The first battle is between bands that feature the word ‘Black’ in their name. Lets meet the contenders:

The Sabbath are an English rock band credited with inventing Heavy metal and ranked by MTV as ‘the Greatest Metal band of all time’. Originally formed in 1968, they have a had a total of 24 band members, the most famous of which is Ozzy Osbourne (seen above on the right).

Black Flag are widely considered to be one of the first hardcore punk bands, and hugely influential. They appeared at the end of the 70s and flew in the face of the then current trend of prog rock and the upcoming trend of New Wave. They are renowned for their tireless touring and DIY ethic, much of which is chronicled in Henry Rollins memoir Get in the Van.

Big Black was a noise rock band fronted by the acid tongued Steve Albini in the mid-eighties. Their offensive style of music (lyrically and sonically) won them few mainstream fans and Albini wouldn’t have it any other way. Their use of a drum machine would later influence the Industrial genre.

The Black Eyed Peas are a Hip Hop group out of LA who released their first album in 1998. Originally they made good music and mocked sellouts (see the video for BEP Empire) then they hired a skank called Fergie, sold out and started writing pop songs for teenage girls about ‘Lady Lumps’.

Presentation

This one is actually hard to call. BEP are easily ruled out now that they have joined the ‘celebrities that dress dickheads club’, but Black Flag and Big Black are both known for their nihilistic (American) punk attitudes towards fashion and aesthetics. I was going to give this to the young Ozzy Osbourne for this trademark theatrics but then I found this picture.
Winner: No-one, jeez we’re off to a bad start

Overall musical ability

BEP suck and Black Flag are all about music by non-musicians so it’s down to Big Black and Sabbath. I’m going to give this one to Big Black for Albini’s songwriting and elite producer skills.
Winner: Big Black

Best ‘Best song’

According to my iTunes, BEPs best song is the aforementioned BEP Empire (FAIL), Black Flag’s best is Rise Above and Big Black’s best is Bad Penny, but the winner without a doubt would have to be Black Sabbath with Ironman.
Winner: Black Sabbath

Most Influential

While Black Flag influenced loads of bands (one of them Big Black), Sabbath has to get the gong here for inventing Metal.
Winner: Black Sabbath

Cage Match (with band members aged in their prime)

We can assume that BEP would go down pretty quickly after a few flying headbutts from a young Henry Rollins. Sabbath would be too drunk/stoned to fight and Albini is a skinny nerd, so it’s no real surprises that Black Flag would win a cage fight, they spent their career getting into fights with their fans, the police and occasionally both.
Winner: Black Flag

Overall Winner: Black Sabbath

So there you have it. Why not celebrate by listening to Paranoid right now… or you could just listen to Wolfmother… it’s all the same.

Barring my time spent in the depths of the shire, I’ve had a pretty interesting six months. Here are the photos from that time from my iPhone.

Stormy Darwin wet season day

Sunset at Nightcliff Pool, Darwin

Outback Tash

Leaving Darwin [Hooray]

Photoshoot for our wedding

Central Park NYC

Obamamania in Tokyo

Back in Australia [Shelley beach]

Moving in to Smutherland

Goofing around at new job

Return to the spot where we were engaged

House hunting (unsucessfully) in Summer Hill

I got Prototype on Saturday and have been playing it on and off to relax. It captures the feeling of being a super-hero more than any actual superhero game has managed in the past. The experience of running and jumping around the New York skyline is like nothing I’ve played before.

The game follows the angsty exploits of Alex Mercer, who woke up in the morgue one day with crazy super powers and no memory (original, I know). Not co-incidentally a virus has infected parts of the Big Apple, turning people into zombies, and a private army has been called in to wage war. Never mind the zombie apocalypse, all Alex cares about is finding the people who gave him powers and punching holes in them.

The following are some of the crazy things that I have done so far:

1. Driven a tank through/over busy NY traffic
2. While running at great speed and being chased by a huge mutant creature, I picked a rocket launcher off the ground, jumped 10 stories into the air, spun around and rained rockety goodness down upon my pursuer
3. Stood calmly on a tank while it raced around trying to shake me off, flattening many cars and innocent New Yorkers in the process
4. Thrown cars at helicopters
5. Thrown the burning shell of a helicopter at another helicopter
6. Karate kicked helicopters until they explode
7. Punched tanks until they explode
8. Grabbed an enemy soldier, run up the side of the Empire State Building to the very top, and threw the soldier out to sea
9. Thrown zombies at a helicopter until it exploded

This Penny Arcade comic just about sums it up.

Poor Michael Bay is giving up on the Transformers franchise (I hate that term) because he’s sick of being the butt of explosion jokes:

I need to do something totally divergent, something without any explosions. It’s easy to go shoot an art movie in a winery in the South of France, but people have no idea how hard it is to create something like Transformers. They (the critics) review me before they’ve even seen the movie.

Full interview here.

Off the new album ‘Farm’ which is out in a week or two. It’s an awesome clip, be sure to view it fullscreen.

The clip for Been there all the time is worth checking out as well. I love that I live in an age where Dinosaur Jr has a YouTube account. Awesome.

I finally got a couple of rolls that I’ve had hanging around developed, with disappointing results. I was charged $56 to get the rolls developed and scanned. I need to sort out some homemade 120 film scanning contraption asap. See the pics here.