Black Roses (1988)

In the 1980s Americans were afraid of everything: Russia, Dungeons & Dragons, clown vans, even hair metal. That's right, while hair bands were just trying to assure us that it was, in fact, still possible to rock in America, parents from coast to coast were flipping out, convinced that listening to W.A.S.P. would lead to suicide, murder, devil worship, and, worst of all, listening to more W.A.S.P. (Probably in the opposite order though.) Something clearly had to be done, so they arrested that guy from the Dead Kennedys and everyone was pretty much satisfied. Although this did lead to the Dead Kennedys guy inundating us with hundreds of spoken word albums bitching about the whole thing, so, ultimately, who are the real losers here?

Shut up shut up shut up shut up!

Well, in this movie all of Tipper Gore's nightmares come true (except that one where she actually enjoys sex). The band in this movie is so fucking evil that, in the very first scene, their live show turns the audience members into people wearing monster masks. Or possibly actual monsters, it was kind of hard to tell. Either way, they won't be playing that venue again, so they pack up and head for the sticks, where they deflect the adults with a little lite-rock dog & phony show, and then play a series of gigs that infects the town's teenagers with the latex-meets-spandex horror movie version of metal. Fistfights break out, classes are cut, a can of red paint is left in the street with the lid off and someone could have easily tripped over it, possibly ruining their shoes... It's some serious Hieronymus Bosch shit, and it only gets worse: stereos turn on by themselves, a copy of the Mentors' LP Up the Dose bubbles and melts right on the turntable (now no one will be able to listen to classic tracks like "Heterosexuals Have the Right to Rock"), a monster pops out of a speaker and eats a guy, and loitering runs rampant. Can cold-blooded murder be far behind? (Spoiler warning: nope.) Fortunately, there is one teacher who cares, man, so he just casually strolls into the next show with some gasoline and road flares and Great Whites the place. (To the band's credit, even with the venue burning down around them, they continue to rock.) The whole thing is unrepentantly goofy, but there's plenty of violence, some gore, cool rubber monsters, ample tits, a guy fighting a demon with a tennis racquet, and a demon reacting surprisingly poorly to being kicked in the balls when it clearly doesn't have any.

Remade in 2001 as Rock Star.

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Aladdin (1992)

This is one of my favorite cartoons ever: the songs are good, the story is good, the jokes are so good that even Robin Williams can't screw them up, and I'd bone Princess Jasmine in a heartbeat. (And if that fucking tiger of hers bit me on the ass I'd make the bastard into a rug and then bone her again, on the rug.) I'll never buy a copy of it though, because they changed one of the songs for absolutely no reason and that sort of thing just yanks my fucking cock. In the real version of the movie that they showed in theaters, the first song has a part that goes like this:

"Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place
Where the caravan camels roam
Where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face
It's barbaric, but, hey, it's home"

This group called the "Arab Anti-Decimation Committee" (or something) got all pissed off about that though, because according to them people in medieval times (when this movie takes place) weren't violent at all, so obviously it was racist. And they cried so much and so hard that Disney finally bitched out and changed it.

This is my artist's rendition of the Anti-Arab Destination Committee

So that's it then. It's too bad, too, because Aladdin is probably the best Disney cartoon of all time. Thank you, Disney. Thank you for letting the terrorists win.

Adam Kesher "An Allegory of Chastity" (2007)

Music critics really don't care if you listen to them or not, which is fortunate because nobody does. Let's face it, if you're got your mind set on listening to tunes by some crap artist like Bruno Mars or Pearl Jam, you're gonna do it no matter how many self-appointed experts tell you that it sucks ass, and the only reason they even bother is to impress people with how much music trivia they know and how many obscure bands they're familiar with. So lets go ahead and get that part out of the way: this CD sounds like a blender full of New York punk and post-punk set to puree, the racket of which can't drown out the ten-dollar AM radio in the next room that's tuned to the disco station and is cranked up so loud to compensate that it's all distorted with static. It's like a No Wave tribute to Donna Summer. When this Adam Kesher cat occasionally manages to rein it all in he comes closest to sounding like Richard Hell fronting the Members, and while I occasionally dig me some Ricky Hell, I'm not even especially pleased that the Members sound like the Members. I suppose this would've been moderately unusual shit back in, say, 1979, but in the twenty-first century it's just a mediocre noise record that will nevertheless make every know-it-all music critic spooge until he bleeds from the dick because he'll actually get to name-drop No Wave, Richard Hell and the Members all in the course of one review. I do have one major issue with this CD though: the cover. The girl is absolute yum and I got no problem with her (except that she's probably Adam Kesher's girlfriend, and he doesn't deserve that kind of luck), but the lettering is so poorly done that it's kinda hard to read, which totally boned me because I thought I was shoplifting buying a CD by a band named Roam Kesher. Why I felt the need to own a CD by a band named "Roam Kesher" is less defensible, but to be fair, I was pretty baked at the time.