The Touchtunes Assassin

In many American bars, you get a vivid daily reminder that life, at its most meaningful, is still an epic battle between the rockers and the poseurs. Everyone’s looking for street cred and the best way to establish it in a bar is through what used to be called the jukebox. Now it’s called Touchtunes and a lot of poseurs have it on their phones and when they get off from work at Walmart they want to drink happy-hour beer and play the kind of music that is generated without musical instruments and has lyrics that include, “I’ll cap yo’ ass” and “She’s a fine white girl.”

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Hippety-Hop To The MP3 Shop

There are a bunch of groovy rock songs that talk about how “rock will never die” or how “you can’t kill rock & roll.” I wanna believe the concept and more than once I’ve screamed, “Fuck, ya!” when I hear those words and the badass guitar riffs that go with them. It turns out it’s not really true. Rock & roll is slowly expiring because the people who dig it and make it are expiring … so bye-bye Miss American Pie.

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Battle Of The Bands

THE COMPLETELY-BIASED, BEST 108 MUSICAL ACTS OF ALL TIME

What follows is a completely biased, flawed list of the top 108 musical acts of all time. Music – in this view – is predominantly defined as classic rock and heavy metal derived from the blues, so those types of acts dominate the list. Still, many acts that stray from this formula are included because they are simply too good or influential to leave out. So where does the bias come in? Essentially everywhere. If I don’t like an act they simply aren’t on the list regardless of what society says, including vastly overrated acts like U2, Guns N Roses and ZZ Top, limited-shelf-time acts like Blind Faith and acts that are obscure within their sub-genre like Johnny Winters (blues) and Gerry & The Pacemakers (British invasion). At least I tried. Feel free to start an argument about it. (Edited December 27, 2017.)

See The List