Didja ever hear the one with Utah Phillips? Not really an Ani record, but still…
10,000 Maniacs did not exactly stick with the boycott of “Peace Train,” as they reissued it on the compilation Campfire Songs. I don’t know if they realized by then that songs have lives independent of their creators, or that Cat wasn’t really a monster, or simply that keeping it out of their catalog was a bad move commercially.
I’m another for Piers Anthony. Thought he was the bee’s knees when I was a teenager. Now I can’t fucking stand him. I was already losing interest in him and his repetitive themes, increasingly strained puns and weird psycho-sexual hangups when I ran across “his” annotated version of But What of Earth? which kinda established him as king of self-important douches in my mind.
I mean Jack Chalker has just as pervasive ( invasive? ) psycho-sexual hangups in his writing, but comes off ( on the page ) as less of a self-important douche. Harlan Ellison is just as a big of a self-important douche, but is a much better writer taken as a whole IMHO and is rather more self-aware re: his periodic assholery. But Anthony has got the whole package going on. Of all the writers I once enjoyed, he ( and maybe Stphen R. Donaldson to a lesser extent ) is the one I gave up on the most completely.
Music-wise, I think Lynyrd Skynyrd most prominently. Played that stuff into the ground as a youngster. But whereas I can come back to other over-exposed artists from that period of my life like ELO, Santana or The Doors, if I never hear another LS song again I’d be perfectly content.
I’ve largely put loud 100 mph jazz fusion ( i.e. Al di Meola, Eleventh House ) behind me as well, but it is more the Donaldson to my Anthony.
For me it was Creed. Loved their music when I first heard it, and within six months I couldn’t stand it. Now I actively skip those tracks on the mix CDs I made at the time.
There was a major overhaul of the AV Club website a couple of years ago, and it was a poorly executed mess. I stopped really reading it that very week, and still only go there for Savage Love.
Joe
self important, pretentious, “serious…” that’s pretty much what ruined U2 and REM for me. “Shhh! This is ART!”
Oops. My tasteless “joke” was purely unintentional.
While I can somewhat see the artist’s point, in that no one wants to put themselves out there in front of 1000’s of people only to be ignored and talked over, they should be thick-skinned enough to know that it sometimes goes with the territory as a professional performer…
I remember seeing Crosby Stills & Nash many years ago at a large outdoor amphitheater (15,000+ people) and because the crowd was too noisy for David Crosby’s liking during one of his slowest, “unknown” new songs, he then proceeded to lecture all of us from the stage for a good 5 minutes about how we obviously didn’t know how to behave ourselves at a live performance in Utah…:rolleyes:
Even Steven Stills and Graham Nash seemed to think he was just making the situation worse, judging by their body language on stage during Crosby’s little rant.
Went to a Shawn Colvin show (was a mild fan) and between every song she trash-talked Brittney Spears for some reason. I mean, she really had a hard-on for her. Grammy winning artist (Song of the Year! for Christ’s sake!) with nothing better to do than fixate on a kiddie pop-star and talk shit between songs. Colvin really came off as sad, pathetic, desprate and petty. It got down-right *embarrasing *after a while, and I was glad when the show was over and I could get the hell out of there.
Kinda takes some of the shine off her music for me now.
Tarantino.
As a high school senior, I saw Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs and I thought: this is it. This is the pinnacle of filmmaking. It does NOT get better than this. Quentin has nailed it; he has set the bar, and nobody is going to clear that bar.
Few years later and Kill Bill, Kill Bill II, the various other schlock he put out, his whole fixation with the SUPERHOTNINJAASSASSINCHICKWARRIORBADASS cliche…and I was finished with him. Now I view him as a hack, and the more I learned about his influences, the more I began to agree with Vincent Gallo’s assessment of him as “a collage artist.”
And Inglorious Basterds sealed the deal for me.
Saturday’s news reminded me of my short-lived interest in Amy Winehouse. When her “Back to Black” CD was released I played it until it nearly melted. Now all I can remember are a few lines from “Rehab” where she expressed her disinclination to partake thereof.
In “F-me Pumps” she sings “Don’t be mad at me / ‘Cause you’re pushin’ thirty / And your old tricks no longer work . . .”
She never got to push thirty.
That’s how I feel about reggae. Any reggae. There’s really only one, maybe two reggae songs.
Without a doubt, mine’s Ayn Rand. As a freshman in college I couldn’t get enough of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and would recommend them to everyone. However, it wasn’t long after that I completely lost interest.