Duped by The Jonas Brothers
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
A few months back, as I looked through the day’s mail, I found that the cover was missing from my Rolling Stone. Turned out that my 16-year-old had hung it on her wall, and then my seven-year-old had swiped it for her own bedroom. There was much screaming, hair-pulling, and gnashing of teeth for the next 48 hours, until my wife brought home a hi-res scan for each of them.
Oh, did I mention that the Jonas Brothers were on the cover? Because that’s pretty important to the story.
Fast forward to last week. I was perusing my stack of promo cds and saw that the JoBros had a cover version of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid on their new disc Lines, Vines, and Trying Times. I normally eschew bubble-gum pop (Hold on – I just really cracked myself up with that pun!), but I loves me some Black Sabbath, and I remembered these kids being kinda funny in a SNL skit with Alec Baldwin, and Alec is really good on 30 Rock, and his cameo in Glengary Glen Ross is pure gold, so I decided to give the disc a spin.
I quickly realized I had been duped. There were exactly –zero-point-zero– Black Sabbath covers on the entire disc. Paranoid is an entirely different song, which they co-wrote. Even worse, I splattered pad thai sauce on my white Rush shirt, the one with their debut album cover art. That stuff does not come out. So now I have that to deal with.
The album is competently produced and engineered, and it’s mastered perfectly for a 128kbps stream played through your cellphone speaker. But the music was… not so good. In fact, I really struggled to find a suitable metaphor for the music. I decided to sleep on it, hoping something would come to me.
The next morning I walked into the bait shop and recoiled in disgust, eyes closed, as I was hit with a wall of dead fish stench that made me dry heave for about twenty seconds. One of the live-well aerators had failed overnight, & about 400 chubs were floating belly up.
Once I recovered from the shock and got the windows open, I smiled for the rest of the morning.
[Edit – I had my bro read this. He didn't get it, and he's a pretty smart guy. I mean, he watches Battlestar Galactica, listens to both indie and prog rock, and wears American Apparel t-shirts. On the other hand, he started reading A Confederacy of Dunces and didn't like it enough to finish it, so his sense of humor is somewhat suspect. So anyway, if you didn't get it, don't feel bad. I'm saying that the music stinks like dead fish.]
