Siddity in the City

I’m still in the thick of a NIN haze, so I’ve spent the last few days doing what any obsessive fan would to prolong the experience: I’ve been Googling, YouTubing and Wikiing the hell out of anything vaguely NIN related.

As is wont to happen, these little digital excursions have led me halfway around the web and back, to people and subjects that surprise. For instance, a YouTube search for live footage of NIN concerts led me to a show featuring Peter Murphy as a guest, and from there to a video of Trent, Murphy, and Jeordie White doing The Normal’s “Warm Leatherette,” and from there to a slew of Grace Jones clips, since she covered “Warm Leatherette” as well.

And I’m not sorry. No ma’am. Any journey that ends with Grace is a success.

(Bear with me. This will all make sense in just a little while. Or not.)

My next innertubes excursion turned out to be a decidedly mixed bag of fun. Wikiing Trent led to multiple mentions of his work with this Saul Williams fellow, who I honestly had not heard of before, because I am old and crabby and stopped adding new artists to my aural repertoire in like, 2003. Your band wasn’t around before the birth of the iPod? Fuck you, hipster! Like that, you know. Crabby.

Still, I was intrigued by the prospect of a collaboration between Uncle Trent, who’s pretty mother-effing talented in a studio, and Saul, the ooooOOOOoooohsospecial activist hip hop artist who happens to have an alter-ego he calls Niggy Tardust. Like you wouldn’t want to get to the bottom of that. So I did. Or tried.

(Saul Williams and NIN @ Voodoo Fest)

I’ll be honest: “List of Demands” has already invaded my mental playlist, but I haven’t really taken to anything else I’ve heard of his, and I fucking hate spoken word. Hate. With the fire of a thousand thousand suns. I hate actual activist pen-to-paper poetry only slightly less. (Sue me for being an asshole. I’m nice to old people, all “races,” animals and the criminally stupid, so I allow myself to hate hippies, poets and vegans with abandon.) I’m not sure even “List of Demands” is good enough to get me to give the rest of Niggy Tardust a listen. Even watching that guy do spoken intros to his songs at Lolla on YouTube had me snarling, “Get on with it, ya yappy fucker!” at my screen.

Still, I had to Wiki Saul. Nothing out of the norm for one of these bicoastal, artsy types. I’m having a hard time giving a damn about his bio. Then I notice he recently married Persia White. You know, Lynn, the hippie/bi/vegan overducated/underemployed slackstress on Girlfriends? Yeah, her. So of course, I had to go from his wiki page to hers…where it is revealed she is not only an actress with the ability to play such multifacted characters as fair-skinned vegan/hippie/tatted friend, hippie/tatted killer, hippie/tatted hot chick, and hippie/activist student, oh no! She is also! A! Musician! She’s in a band! An industrial rock band!

This is, in case you were wondering, where the netular trip begins to really go to shit.

I visited the band’s web site. Her voice is good, better than I had expected, honestly. But oh my god the suck of the…everything else. It’s just generic industrial crap, with generic industrial woe-is-me poetic/lyrical stylings. It’s really kind of awful, self-indulgent dreck.

Which makes wonder who the fuck is letting these people take themselves so goddamn seriously? I mean, really? Nobody stepped in and said, “Look kids. Individually y’all have some apparently marketable talents, but this band? Shit in a cookie jar. Please stop this, for the good of America. Now.”

I’m being cranky. Aside from hating bad poetry and lyrics, I have this thing about marginally talented people trying to be marginally talented in six different arenas and becoming, instead, just irritating fucking people with a lot of talk, and not a damned worthy product to show for it. You know these people: You talk to them and they’re like, an actor, right? But like, also in a band as a lead vocalist? But on Thursday they can be found at local indie cafe doing a “reading” for this new showcase? I want to applaud their determination, but these people mostly annoy me, perhaps because I am one of them, without the nerve to run around being openly mediocre at everything.

Or maybe I just hate wannabe poets. They’re the only people who seem to consistently draw my ire.

…

Whateves, man. Don’t go using evidence of my past rants about everyone and their grandpappies against me when I’m in a good lather over something.