Foo Fighters. Monkey Wrench, Everlong, Long Road To Ruin, and a handful of others are still awesome rock tracks, but… God dammit are their views on medicine dangerous, irresponsible, and disgusting. HIV/AIDS denialists. No. Fuck that shit. Not gonna support it. I’ll put up with artists supporting all manner of crap, but that one just goes too damn far.
A bit in the past, but Frank Zappa.
A brilliant musician, yes, and he remained on to the end. But once his lyrics started turning as scatological as an eight year old schoolboys, it was too difficult to separate that out in order to concentrate on the music.
sadly, the Kate Mulgrew story does not appear to be a whoosh
Was this ever a big thing with them? All I could find is the bassist was into this crap and the band went along with it, but have since cut ties to Christine Maggiore and her Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives organization. Maggiore herself has since passed away from AIDS/AIDS-related symptoms from her untreated HIV.
Not that I particularly care for the Foo Fighters (although they’re fine by me) nor do I really care about a pop act’s politics or whatever, but I had never heard of this until just now. They weren’t particularly vocal about it, were they?
No, she’s narrating a movie called The Principle (warning: annoying autoplay music on website).
Here’s The Bad Astronomer with details. As he correctly observes, you can’t always draw too many conclusions about an actor from the roles they choose, but i’m still rather disappointed that Mulgrew chose to do this.
Eww, that’s so dumb, it restored my PC back to Windows 98. :smack:
And speaking of things from 1998…autoplay music on websites? Really? :dubious:
Harrison Ford- after he pierced his ear.
Not sure if it was the Calista Flockheart thing or that god awful movie with that cardboard actress in Six Days Seven Nights, but he lost his zing, IMHO.
Michelle Shocked.
I used to really like her and saw her 8 or 9 times, I expect. The last time I saw her she played to maybe 350 - 400 people at a relatively prestigious venue but the next time she played Edinburgh she decided there was more money for her in playing a house party with a capacity of 80 (the suggested donation was more than a regular concert ticket to see her), thus ensuring that most of her audience couldn’t see her, even if they heard about the gig… A bit annoying, but a commercial choice…
Then she lost it completely and started making barely comprehensible homophobic rants alienating a lot of her fanbase and causing all her gigs to be cancelled! A year or two on, looking at her website, she’s still posting weird paranoid nonsense and claiming she has dossiers on loads of people persecuting her.
In her earlier days she was treated for mental health issues and it’s quite sad, but I’ve barely felt like listening to anything of hers since.
I don’t see anything anti-heliocentric about this dumb-ass New Newage film. It’s more along the lines of Age of Aquarius and astrology and photon belt nonsense… and hey, it’s a paycheck.
Upthread, post #45.
Missed the edit.
After looking at the BA account, I’d say you guys are all overreacting. It’s just “Mankind is Truly Important” mysto-nonsense, not anything like a genuine attempt to reverse the last 300 years of cosmology. I mean, hate it on a Penn & Teller “newage” level, but getting all het up because it uses an obsolete term as if it means something is pretty pointless.
After a couple of recent threads, I really am kind of fascinated by the vehement backlash any suggestion of “human superiority” provokes. Kinda like those big macho guys who beat up queers, y’know? 
Caught me between edits. I saw the posts a moment after posting.
To me; the whole band was Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlain. Jimmy just loves to bang the drums and will play up with anyone talented. Billy is clearly, undeniably talented. Unfortunately that isn’t all it takes. In the first few albums there was something important to say. Now? Nothing.
For me, in a mild way, Natalie Merchant.
First couple-three albums after she left 10,000 Maniacs, I loved (and I loved the Maniacs’ work perhaps even more), but many of her songs had (seemingly) an axe to grind about various social issues (and kinda always had, really). Then her career (in my perception) seemed to become more and more directly about her perceived quarrels with social and world injustices. She also moved into doing what she wanted to do, which was not pop music, or even alternative. Good for her, I honestly say, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to follow. Uninterested in buying albums devoted to children’s nursery rhymes, and other “neglected” aspects of our musical culture/history.
Perhaps “disenchanted” is more accurate, as opposed to “fell out of favor.”
I wanted to hear her beautiful voice without feeling uncomfortable or guilty. Am I a bad guy for that?
Pretty much, I think, although I was with Corgan even through Adore (without Chamberlain). Jimmy is one of my favorite rock drummers, but after he got fired and rehired, their music just lost the spark for me. Machina sounded like “paint-by-numbers” Pumpkins to my ears. I don’t know how to explain it, but it sounded like a pastiche of the Pumpkins, like trying to make a forced and contrived version of earlier era Pumpkins records as some sort of atonement for the softer (and underrated, in my opinion), Adore. But it sounded like Billy had run out of musical ideas by then. It might just have been me maturing and my tastes changing, but I still love all the pre-Machina albums and listen to them regularly.
Robin Williams.
Yu don’t really need me to explain, do you?
I will add this to the long, sad list that pretty much anyone can make: he’s the biggest thief in comedy. Outrageous, stunningly shameless theft from anyone and everyone, but most especially talented people who haven’t hit it big.
And the sweaty hairy ape thing doesn’t help. Genetic, yes, but for god’s sake don’t flaunt it. Yech.
Y’all will be relieved to know that Mulgrew has now joined Krauss in saying, “Yeah, WTF, I would not have participated in this if I knew who and what it was.”
I feel ya. The social justice thing and even maybe pretentiousness was part of the package when she was making music I cared for but, without that, I can’t find myself holding any interest. A few years ago, my wife saw she was coming to town so we went and it was the nursery rhymes thing which I’m guessing probably 70% of the audience was not expecting. To Merchant’s credit, after 90-120 minutes of that she took an intermission and said “Ok, you let me do that so here’s the stuff some of you no doubt came for” and played another 90-120 minutes of “normal” Merchant material. Still, if I saw she was coming back any time soon I wouldn’t make any effort to see her again.
The good news is that Mulgrew has denounced the film on her Facebook page:
I dunno about Smither, I find his bright coloured rectangles phase much more appealing than his early crazy children’s illustrator night-mare fuel works.
And as for Dobbyn it’s not really his fault that ‘Loyal’ got thrashed to death by the yachting guys. I just hope he’s got huge amounts of royalties for it. I still rate Lament for the Numb as the best NZ album ever.