drad dog: Fuck you, you smug, douchebag troll

[kayaker]

@cochrane

You know who else is an annoying douchebag? Kelsey Grammer. Fuck you, Frasier!

Kelsey Grammer’s gramma is dead, otherwise I’d add, “Fuck you, Kelsey Grammer’s gramma!”

[Mr.Nylock]

@Kimballkid

I’m annoyed that you can’t spell grammar.

With so many variables in play, it’s always difficult to tell which exact one is causing the annoyance. I find it very annoying.

[Colibri]

@Ukulele_Ike

I honestly had no idea so many people hated drad dog.. I kinda like him. He’s a music snob, but fuck it, I’m an all-around snob.

drad dog isn’t a snob, he’s a poseur.

And a douchebag.

[WordMan]

@Colibri

drad dog isn’t a snob, he’s a poseur.

And a douchebag.

I respect the distinction and appreciate your nuance.

:: picks up The ModPhone::

Hello, Mods? As the OP, may I ask you to update the thread title? To add “Poseur” right before “troll”? If you get a chance. Thanks.

::Hangs up ModPhone::

Tee-hee!

[scabpicker]

@Ukulele_Ike

I honestly had no idea so many people hated drad dog.. I kinda like him. He’s a music snob, but fuck it, I’m an all-around snob.

If they knew anything about music or could back up anything they spout, then they might aspire to be a snob. drad dog is instead remarkably ignorant of commonly known facts about their heroes, and can’t back anything up. The best they have is some claim that they “were there”, therefore you can’t know any better than themselves. Seriously, they’ve posted that sort of bullshit in response to me more than once, and I’ve never caught a hint of irony. Sadly, the facts are that they were merely alive at the same time, far away from the people being discussed, and drad dog never knew any of them. Ya might as well cite Winston Churchill for being an expert on delta blues.

Plus, the dipshit can’t even get whether they’re acting the part of snob or not straight. This nitwit’s tried to insult my taste for being too lowbrow and narrow, then later tried to imply that I was some sort of person who only loved the critic’s darlings. Both times it was an obvious attempt for them to try to change the subject and make me defensive after they’d lost the argument. I guess in their mind, I’d just proven that their heroes had feet of clay, and they tried to turn the tables. 'Course, the joke was on them. Not only do I have the self esteem of a typical bass player*, I long ago realized that even on the rare occasion when my tastes were popular they weren’t universally so. Oh dear, someone doesn’t like my entertainment, what ever shall I do? Oh wait, it’s that ignorant asshole? I wouldn’t normally care, but I find it hillll-arious now.
*Very low, but steady and durable.

[yevgeny]

@cochrane

You know who else is an annoying douchebag? Kelsey Grammer. Fuck you, Frasier!

I heard Kelsey looked into his family tree and found out he had an uncle in the Third Reich. Yeah, the guy was a real Grammer Nazi.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

I don’t know the subject of the OP from Adam, but it amuses me to bump this thread so the title is at the top of the Pit. So I am. Also, I’m kind of “meh” about Tom Petty.

[Ukulele_Ike]

@WordMan

Ukulele Ike* - sharing a little Snob Love from Brooklyn! Are you saying you identify with his inner hipster?

*i like to abbreviate usernames if they come across as nicely-intended and fun. I was getting ready to reply to your post, and typed out “Uke Ike” but then mentally said it out loud. :eek:

Just one of the little booby traps I like to use to seed my lawn…(evil chuckle).

Please, call me Uke.

[Crazyhorse]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

I don’t know the subject of the OP from Adam, but it amuses me to bump this thread so the title is at the top of the Pit. So I am. Also, I’m kind of “meh” about Tom Petty.

That was the genius of Tom Petty. He never wanted or expected more than “meh” and he mehed his way to great success without ever compromising or changing with the current fads of the day. Through punk, metal, glam rock, rap, hip hop, house, trance and all the rest he continued to do exactly his thing, sold a lot of albums and sold out a lot of shows, and contributed a track or two to the soundtracks of the lives of millions of people.

<bump>

[WordMan]

@Ukulele_Ike

Just one of the little booby traps I like to use to seed my lawn…(evil chuckle).

Please, call me Uke.

Oh, Uke!

:bump:

Crazyhorse - I would argue Petty could claim a small amount of…Americana?..in his music that helped his stuff stay acceptable through fashions. A little Wlico, a little CCR, a tad of Mellancamp, and ultimately a dash of Dylan, which I hadn’t seen coming until they toured for two years.

:bumpity bump bump:

[Jackmannii]

@Colibri

drad dog isn’t a snob, he’s a poseur.

Snobbery isn’t all that bad if it’s actually based on comprehensible standards.

“I’m far too sophisticated to accept the work of someone who appeals to mass tastes”, not so much.

[kayaker]

bump

[WordMan]

@kayaker

bump

You know what I would call someone who took the time to bump a thread just to poke a troll?

I’d say they were being Petty.

[bumpity bump bump bump]

[kayaker]

Hah!!!

[Crazyhorse]

@WordMan

Crazyhorse - I would argue Petty could claim a small amount of…Americana?..in his music that helped his stuff stay acceptable through fashions. A little Wlico, a little CCR, a tad of Mellancamp, and ultimately a dash of Dylan, which I hadn’t seen coming until they toured for two years.

A good example of this can be found in “Free Fallin’” - an arguably Dylanesque and Mellancampish piece.

In An Ode To Tom Petty, writing teacher Roy Peter Clark shows us exactly why someone like Dylan recognizes Petty as the *underrated *talent that he was while somoene like drad dog - unable to hear beneath the surface of what to an untrained ear sounds like just another simple little ditty - thinks he was overrated. (and should go fuck a cactus)

I find these lyrics haunting, profound through and beneath the surface of sound. Most important for our purposes, this piece of short writing is efficient beyond measure, so economical, in fact, that it leads us to the edge of a great abyss.

*She’s a good girl, loves her mama
Loves Jesus and America too
She’s a good girl, crazy ‘bout Elvis
Loves horses and her boyfriend too*

Stories have few essential requirements, but one of them involves the identification and evolution of a human character, formed on the page by a quilt of what Tom Wolfe called “status details,” or, more commonly, character traits. Petty doesn’t offer us much in his first stanza in the way of particularity. He asks us to settle for a litany of common, almost clichéd characteristics. God, mother, horses, form a kind of baseline, drawn, as we will learn, by a greatly flawed narrator, another staple of modern fiction…

*It’s a long day livin’ in Reseda
There’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard
And I’m a bad boy, ‘cause I don’t even miss her
I’m a bad boy for breakin’ her heart

A story needs a setting, and this one serves in both literal and symbolic ways. Poets know that place-names are powerful, and Reseda, a working-class suburb of Los Angeles, has the sound of “receding” in it, a kind of annihilation by subtraction. That freeway runs a little too close for comfort. Usually, the poorest folks in town live closest to the highway or the airport or the railroad tracks, a kind of lifeline to freedom that remains inaccessible.

Just below the surface here is the joke that California is so cluttered with people and traffic that the freeway is not free at all but a clotted artery of the body politic, a society all revved up but going nowhere. That last line reverberates with some kind of dark humor and self-effacement, as Petty leads a great band known as the Heartbreakers.

*And I’m free, I’m free fallin’, fallin’*

In this simple chorus, Petty puts into play some very sophisticated moves, both poetically and musically. I experience it as a form of binary energy, an on/off switch, a double helix of language in which the words alliterate, form connections, but then break away at the level of semantics and narrative.

A free fall is a common expression of physical weightlessness, a state in physics and art where an object or person seems to defy gravity even while plummeting to the ground. Petty, quite dramatically, puts his vocal range to good use, hitting his highest note on the elongated vowel of “free.” But each time he repeats “fallin’,” the notes go down in pitch.

*All the vampires walkin’ through the valley
Move west down Ventura Blvd.
And all the bad boys are standing in the shadows
All the good girls are home with broken hearts*

This is my favorite stanza, linked and separated by alliteration. The first quartet includes “vampires,” “valley,” “Ventura,” and even “Blvd.,” where those v’s pile up like crashed cars in a smoky fog. There is even time and space here for what critics call intertextuality, the evocation of one text by another. “Though I walk through that valley of the shadow of death,” reads the Twenty-third Psalm, but here the allusion packs some irony. Instead of comforting and consoling, the world of the narrator is gloomy and tragic, haunted by the walking dead of the San Fernando Valley.

*And I’m free, I’m free fallin’
I wanna glide down over Mulholland
I wanna write her name in the sky
I wanna free fall out into nothin’
Gonna leave this world for a while

In this final stanza the voice of the narrator tells a story of despair, of drug use or suicide perhaps, of escape from responsibility and the requirements of love. And yet the diction is a language of light, those liquid L sounds in “glide” and “Mulholland,” the creativity and romance signified by skywriting, but then comes the nihilism of “free fall out into nothin’” and the painful euphemism of leaving the world “for a while.”

We can make the interpretation of this text even more granular in the tension between the names of those iconic California streets, Ventura and Mulholland.

If that initial capital V looks like a valley, with all its symbolic connotations of depression and despair, that M is its counterpart, two mountain peaks with a valley in the middle, a launching place in the hills above Hollywood, a land of dreams and of lost boys and girls.

[Enter_the_Flagon]

@kayaker

Hah!!!

Hah?

[septimus]

drad dog was unfamiliar to me, but I just stumbled on the following post in another thread and recalled that he was the subject of a Pitting.

America is now serving the worst catastrophe in its history since the Civil War. Why should we worry about a petty musician when the country and perhaps even Western civilization is under a severe threat?

**Please reserve all your anger for Trump, the GOP and the millions of ignorant Americans happily leading this country to perdition.

[SIZE=“5”]I reject this Pitting.[/SIZE]**

@drad_dog

He is serving an administration where racism is endemic. He is actively participating in the administration to protect it’s flanks, and if you look back this (Flank protecting) has been racist very often.

He is lying about a woman who he doesn’t know in any sense, who is black, from the podium, while representing the white house to Americans.

It seems like the only thing he really remembered from that speech that day was that she was black. And that seems to be enough for a lot of americans now. He was exploiting that in a despicable manner. This is evidenced by the lies.

She feels she was the victim of racism and would call it out. I don’t have a problem.

This is the loss of one important adult in the oval office though. Actually it’s just a warning that he was not the adult we thought he was. I don’t think he can serve much longer. I’m having my doubts about huckabeesanders too. It’s a shit show.

[Crazyhorse]

@septimus

I reject this Pitting.

Lighten up, Francis. Condemning the shit show that US politics has become doesn’t grant some kind of immunity from being pitted for being a pretentious douchenugget. Are you really having trouble finding discussions about Il Douche and his merry men in relevant threads?

You know who would have agreed with you about Trump though? Tom Petty. That’s who.

Tom Petty himself was open about his political views. Petty did not constantly speak about his politics or use his politics to sell his music, but he never hid his fairly progressive political views. In his recent tour for the 40th anniversary of his band, Petty showed a number of photos of a diverse group of women while he sang the song, “American Girl.” And whether he intended to or not, Petty sent a message of support to transgender people by showing a photo of late transgender actress Alexis Arquette hours after Trump sent out a tweet about banning transgender people in the military.

When Petty did speak out, he did not mince words. He called the war in Iraq “shameful,” and added, “The guy lied. And he continues to do so. I can’t understand why he’s just not run out on a rail.”

Petty once threatened to sue George W. Bush for using one of his songs, “I Won’t Back Down” for a campaign rally. He sent the presidential candidate a cease-and-desist letter.

In contrast, Petty appeared to be thrilled when President Barack Obama played the same song in 2012 at the Democratic National Convention. Petty told Rolling Stone, “I got chills… They knew it would be OK. I’ve had a chance to meet the president and talk to him about the music he listens to.”

He wasn’t afraid to wade into emotionally charged controversies. When asked what his song, “Playing Dumb,” was about, Petty said it related to sex abuse within the Catholic Church. “If I was in a club, and I found out that there had been generations of people abusing children, and then that club was covering that up, I would quit the club,” Petty told Billboard in 2014.

Petty said that too often, Christians endorsed violence. “I’ve nothing against defending yourself, but I don’t think, spiritually speaking, that there’s any conception of God that should be telling you to be violent,” Petty said.

Petty’s song wasn’t subtle in its message to the Catholic Church. It mentioned the pope’s “red leather loafers” and men of God:

Well let’s light a candle for every kid
For every soul that was done away with
For every confession that wasn’t on the level
For every man of God that lives with hidden Devils

It wasn’t the only one of his songs that was clearly about an actual news event. Petty said that the song, “Learning to Fly,” was inspired by images he saw of the Gulf War on television.

He also wrote about a readiness to learn new things in his memoir, Runnin’ Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Petty writes that people should always be prepared to learn something new and keep an open mind to other perspectives:

You will never be told when the next bit of education is coming or where it’s coming from or who the teacher will be. That information will only reveal itself after the fact. All that you can do is leave a little room there for the next lesson to come through. Someone will be carrying it. You just leave the door open a crack.

This openness to learn new things may have helped Petty understand where he went wrong and change accordingly without any defensiveness. Two years ago, Petty told Rolling Stone that the marketing for his tour “Southern Accents” in 1985, which featured a Confederate flag, was a “downright stupid thing to do.”

“People just need to think about how it looks to a black person. It’s just awful. It’s like how a swastika looks to a Jewish person,” Petty said.

Some of Petty’s music feels new again in this political moment. Most people can understand a feeling of resentment. And if there’s anyone who should feel resentment over injustice, it’s the most marginalized people in America. Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s “American Girl” is a great example of how relevant Petty’s music is today. The Handmaid’s Tale, a story that people have turned to in their grief over the Trump administration, with its increasingly authoritarian statements and its assault on women’s reproductive rights, ended its last episode of the season with the song.

[WordMan]

@septimus

I reject this Pitting.

This is serious? Really? I’m Colin freakin’ Kaepernick now because my protest against messageboard douchebaggery is supersede-able by the greater cause of Presidential douchebaggery?! Did you just get up from the Colts-Niners game, sir?

Dude.

Fortunately, I’m a Niners fan (Redwood City back when it was plain, baby!), and admire his actions.

What about the fact that drad drag and Donald Trump are both smug, douchebag trolls?!?! Hunh?! Hunh?! I am *doing America a service * I tell you, highlighting this behavior in this specific, perfidious manifestation.

You’re welcome, America.

ETA: Crazyhorse - bludgeoning folks with text is never pretty, but I appreciate the intent all the way.

[Maserschmidt]

Wow. When you start dipping less frequently into SDMB - as I have - you miss a lot of undercurrents and history. As best I could tell, drad dog was just some guy prolly named Goddard who had interesting musical tastes, but clearly he’s pissed off a lot of people.

It’s hard to keep up with the internal politics of this place.