Scope out the drum­mer in this video…

Is it just me or does he have all of the right traits to be one epic Rock ‘n’ Roll drummer?

Even Ozzy would be proud to have someone with his bas­ket of tal­ent onboard.

The upper ech­el­ons have not seen fit to reward me with my own office. This means I share a work­space with other col­leagues; some of whom I get along well with, some whom I…t0lerate.

Cer­tain of them have a rather unfor­tu­nate inab­il­ity to handle silence with notion of con­fid­ence. To quell their fears, they installed an intensely annoy­ing device widely known as a radio.

I stopped listen­ing to most radio shows many, many years ago; more so when it comes to ‘music’ stations.

It is my firm belief that most of the crap spewed forth upon our radio-bearing speak­ers these days is dis­pos­able, idiocratic and caco­phon­ous, at best. To makes mat­ters worse, these ‘songs’ are presen­ted by semi-illiterate and dim-witted jocks who only know how to press the reply but­ton, due to the luc­rat­ive — and neces­sary — record com­pany con­tracts keep­ing the sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship alive by recyc­ling the audial rectal evac­u­ation we’re being exposed to.

If we dis­reg­ard the moment­ary acts per­vad­ing our atmo­sphere and instead con­cen­trate on the out­put they’re extra­vas­at­ing, we are again with an impend­ing sign of our rapid transit to an Idiocracy…the lyr­ics.

Just this morn­ing I was sub­jec­ted to the tor­ture that is cur­rently a ‘hit’. The intel­lec­tual and inspir­ing lyr­ics hit their cres­cendo when the chorus kicked in with a potent There’s A Party In My Pants. Kill me, kill me now.

Are you @#$^ing kid­ding me?!

Yes, we’ve had dec­ades of songs with made-up words, and end­less remakes & remixes, goofy lyr­ics and com­ical vari­ants, but There’s A Party In My Pants is a sad sign of our impend­ing intel­lec­tual doom. Have we run out of decent lyr­ics? Have we reached a stage where the next album will include dir­ect instruc­tions on how to cre­ate your own party and where to upload the video res­ults to?

I am not a prude, nor am I har­bour­ing a grudge against fun, but c’ mon…

Maybe I shouldn’t get so uptight about it. Next week there’ll be a newly-disposable ‘hit’ — that’s made the new teen’ of choice a mil­lion USD — and Party will be long-forgotten.

Rather than foist my lyr­ics of choice upon you, I thought I’d hit up Google for some research and see what the gen­eral pop­u­lous con­sidered not­able lyrics.

Prob­lem #1!

I stumbled across metrolyrics.com’s Top 100 list…

In their Top 10 we find such old school clas­sics as Adele, Nicki Minaj, Bruno Mars and Rihanna.

If we take a gander at the other 90, we find such clas­sic hit­makers as Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Kelly Clark­son, Maroon 5 and Brit­ney Spears.

Baby, hit me one more time!

Oh, sorry, I for­got to add Chris Brown to that list.

Con­fused, I thought I’d try Google once more…

Prob­lem #2!

I typed ‘Greatest lyr­ics’ into Google…

Oh @$%^.

Metal­lica’s record label is for sale — and one per­son inter­ested in buy­ing it is the man who foun­ded Nap­ster, against which Metal­lica fought a legal battle more than a dec­ade ago. Accord­ing to Rock News Desk, Nap­ster founder Sean Parker is in talks to team up with two other private investors to pur­chase the Warner Music Group, where Metal­lica has been mak­ing records since 1984.

Back in 2000, Metal­lica launched legal action against Nap­ster, claim­ing that the pion­eer­ing music file-sharing ser­vice was illeg­ally allow­ing users to down­load Metal­lica tracks without pay­ing roy­al­ties to the band. Although the case was settled out of court, 300,000 users were banned from Nap­ster as a res­ult and Metallica’s image took a tre­mend­ous beat­ing in the eyes of music fans.

Napster’s legal battles con­tin­ued with Warner Music Group and other labels until the ser­vice finally went under in 2002.

Parker, who later became a bil­lion­aire by help­ing to launch Face­book, may now make a bid for his old enemies’ label, which is suf­fer­ing from the same woes as the rest of the tra­di­tional music industry.

Parker was por­trayed by Justin Tim­ber­lake in the recent, Oscar-winning movie about the start of Face­book, The Social Net­work.

Metal­lica drum­mer Lars Ulrich, who was the main spokes­per­son for Metal­lica in the Nap­ster battle, later admit­ted that he wished he had dealt with the situ­ation differently.

Even if Parker suc­ceeds in buy­ing WMG — and four other parties are said to be in the race as well — he might not get to be Metallica’s boss after all. The band’s last effort, 2008’s Death Mag­netic, was its last under its cur­rent con­tract, and it is not known whether the group has re-signed with the label.

Front­man James Het­field told us a while back that the band has yet to decide what its future plans are for dis­tri­bu­tion of its music: “It’s kind of a good feel­ing to feel that you’re free from any piece of paper that binds you to some­thing. But over our career, we’ve learned a lot about record com­pan­ies, the goods and evils of the busi­ness and this and that, and we’re not very focused on that right now. It is what it is, and when it becomes time for us to either rene­go­ti­ate or shop around or do things ourselves or some­thing like that, we don’t know. There’s noth­ing but options, which is great.”

That’s hil­ari­ous irony right there.

That sounds sus­pi­ciously like a dodge of the sub­ject at hands, James.

If Mr. Parker does buy the label, I reckon it’s a pretty shrewd move with a power­ful mes­sage about mov­ing with the times. It remains to be seen whether or not either party extend their claws, but tact will def­in­itely play to both parties’ advantages.

If Lars and the lads have seen the error of the ways, what with the Nap­ster fal­lout and their new-age gen­eric and for­get­table audial fuzz, wtF can’t the rest of the music world catch a hint?

Lest I trample on some record exec’s toes, count­less hours, dol­lars and effort has been put into research­ing the P2P and ‘music redis­tri­bu­tion’ scene and it has been proven over and over that there is sig­ni­fic­ant year-on-year increase in the amount of music dis­trib­uted. Like­wise, the artists who have endorsed and sup­por­ted the online music world have by and large found their fan­base swell­ing to areas and sizes simply unfathom­able by con­ven­tional means.

Lastly, it’s a pretty firm fact that album sales con­trib­ute largely to the cof­fers of the record agen­cies — not the artists. Their income is gen­er­ally from live gigs — sup­por­ted by fans who have heard their music else­where. I’d con­fid­ently bet most often online.

Do you sup­port a pre­his­toric model with artists and record agen­cies who see you as walk­ing credit, or do you sup­port those who cre­ate ori­ginal, last­ing and enthu­si­astic artists?

Scour the ‘net for unsigned and altern­at­ive artists. You’ll be pleas­antly sur­prised to hear there’s a fant­astic new world of music which you’ll remem­ber, love and sup­port bey­ond the scope of one’s radio memory.

Source: thebearrocks.com via The Dirty Cana­dians, again — Thanks Steve. ;]

EDIT: For­got Buddy Rich. Yes, yes, I know…

Drum­ming is an ancient form of music.

Here’s a selec­tion of some of the greatest drum­mers of the last few decades…

How about a ’65 TV spe­cial fea­tur­ing Buddy and Jerry Lewis?

Buddy Rich And Jerry Lewis — \’65 TV special

I couldn’t very well cre­ate a list and not include quite pos­sibly the most fam­ous drum solo of all time — Ron Bushy in Iron But­ter­fly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida…

Ron Bushy in Iron Butterfly\‘s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida

Thomas Lang, an Aus­trian drum­mer is another excep­tion­ally well-known mas­ter. Here is a solo…

Thomas Lang solo

…and a demo’ on stick tricks…

Thomas Lang — stick tricks

Now here’s someone to watch — Dylan Elise — sure to be around for a long time come…

This video was taken when Dylan was just SIXTEEN years old! Filmed at the Taur­anga National Jazz Fest­ival in New Zealand.

Dylan Elise — solo at the Taur­anga National Jazz Fest­ival in New Zealand

Lastly, I present the per­son who might just have been the inspir­a­tion for all of the guys — the king of drum­ming, Rowan Atkin­son…

Rowan Atkin­son play­ing the invis­ible drums

…to para­phrase Crazy Town.

I’ve just been forced to endure the Jay-Z remix tor­ture of Alphaville’s ‘80s clas­sic, Forever Young.

(more…)

…sung to the tune of Bob Marley’s “Jammin’”.

GO GERMANY! 2010 SWC cham­pi­ons [to be]!