"Guitar Methods" Guest Columnist is Angry ;-)

How can any self respecting guitar e-zine possibly include Britney Spears in the mix? How can shredders of self-proclaimed "god-like" proportions abandon the cardinal rule and speak the names that could unleash hell, without being taken away in a black helicopter and tortured to death by angry Dobermans? After all, when you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss eventually stares back.

Well, to be honest, we do so only because the following article is bloody funny, and because the author is a close friend. Check it out!

Does MTV Eat Its Young?

written by harley warren, reprinted with permission:

Britney Spears is MTV’s fault, and MTV is the 30 year old mistake of a drug induced, wealth hungry, vanity-stricken music industry. Furthermore, Music Television is solely responsible for the degradation and eventual demise of our species as a whole. Let me explain why.

I so hate to use the 30 seconds of time I have in my life which could be better spent picking a scab or committing ritual seppuku, but someone needs to point out that Britney Spears must immediately dive into a waterless, Olympic-sized pool for the betterment of mankind.

Firstly, any artist with even the slightest tendency towards life’s many excesses should never be permitted to sing a song like “Oops I Did It Again” and expect to escape a good public flogging every time she is spotted at the drive through of McDonalds dropping her babies. Furthermore, when she decided to have 2 kids, why was there no self-respecting personal adviser around to tell her that a freaking bikini is NOT the best fashion choice at the VMA’s - if she isn’t planning on spending 8 hours a day in a gym for the rest her life?

I will cut the poor, young multi-millionaire basket-case some slack, because even with the obviously over-prescribed Valium dose she had taken before her performance at the VMA’s, she is nothing more than an illegitimate child in the first place, spawned from MTV’s continual rape of the music industry. Yes, these days few things make me proud of the industry of which I belong, but I’m always quietly optimistic when a person like Kanye West says he will now ban MTV from his presence. Aside from the more obvious reason I am ecstatic at his decision, I have a new found respect for his upper-middle class “street cred”. Standing up to the giant malevolent beast that is the video music industry with his sling-shot of a career, well, that takes some serious stones in my book.

My apologies to Christina and Justin, but how morbidly appropriate that the talent pool of 2000+ would exist almost exclusively from the Mickey Mouse Club, circa 1970 something. Nowadays, for every Christina or Justin there is approximately 7500 Paula Deandras (feat. Lil Wayne of course) littering our musical experience like those stupid little toy dogs that pee everywhere, no matter how much you beat them.

I only know what every self-respecting music veteran knows about the pre-video era. I know that there were plenty enough drugs circulating in the music business in the late’70’s for musicians, songwriters, and producers of the time; and I know that they were all sedated enough to be spoon fed that wonderful new aspect of “brilliance“ called the “music video industry“. After all, what self-respecting musician wouldn’t relish at the thought of being on TV, making a kazillion more dollars, and getting more poonani than a sex addict? I do blame the artistic community of the day - but only for falling asleep at the proverbial wheel. It was MTV that put them in the driver’s seat of a brand new Lamborghini.

Yes, gentle reader, it was the dreaded Music Business Executive, the “behind the scenes” leech that knew proper music like I know proper fish mongering. It was he who got naked somewhere, rolled around in a combination of jello, prostitutes, and champagne screaming “Screw art, there‘s money to be made!!!” To his myopic purview - MTV would birth an entirely new industry, employ thousands of otherwise unusable idiots, and after all, commerce is king, no? Sad - that’s the word for it. Sing it with me now… sad, sad, sad… la la la. After all, since when is commerce and art supposed come in that specific order? Isn’t it supposed to be art and then commerce? When art is dictated by greed, greed becomes the seminal form of said art – and with that epiphany I give you the evolution of “Gangsta Rap”. Please tell me in what horrible alternate universe am I in that kids find it cool to hero-worship someone bragging about having all the cash necessary to kill anyone he wants, defile the sanctity of womanhood with strategic use of the words “bitches” and “ho’s”, and suck the class right out of the latest Mercedes Benz by tricking it out to sickeningly overexerted proportions? I will tell you what alternate universe I belong to, The MTV Universe, and I’m sick to death of it.

Had someone mercifully foreseen this abuse of creative power, proceeded to do the humane thing and disembowel said record exec/ MTV “Imp-etour” like a stuck pig at a barbecue, we may have been spared the inevitable byproducts of the MTV perversion. I’m sorry, but the extent of idolatry in our music business today is pathetic. As a result, we get toxic waste byproducts the likes of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and all those other happy-crappy knuckleheads who’s only purpose in life should be to correctly remember that I don’t want onions on my cheeseburger.

Yes, instead of changing the tires on my first car, Poison was sarcastically playing on my car radio, stabbing tiny needles of sound towards me when I got my first flat in the middle of nowhere. And later in life, when Jessica Simpson should have been properly cleaning the counters in the kitchen-diner where I had my first drunken 3 am bowl of chili; her video was on my TV as I suddenly realized I had to wretch, vomit, and crap for 14 or so hours from Botulism. Allow me to digress; now that I think about it maybe it wasn’t food poisoning after all that turned my insides out. Maybe it was just that dumb ass song “These Boots Are Made For Walking“, or the knowledge that a great deal of money had been wasted making it into a not-so-clever, bad strip tease + squeegee video, to further cheapen my already miserable existence. In fact now that I think about it, maybe I got sick simply from knowing that a producer somewhere in this world had enough moral depravity to have gutted 10 virgins on an altar of Satan - for only that would garner the necessary permission to resurrect such a miserable song from the 9th Circle of Hell.

Let’s face it. We have to come to societal epiphanies and eradicate past mistakes, otherwise we end up with evil and perverted concepts like Nazism, radical Islam, or most recently, reality TV. When we don’t acknowledge our faux pas, we move through our lives not fully understanding that which we have been cheated from, such as the joy of creative evolution. Oh - and we also end up with genocidal lunatics like Hitler and Bin Laden, but that is besides my point. Music is a language that requires its’ visual representation come from the listener’s imagination alone. When you take that requirement away, music becomes less important and opens the door to everything that is bad in the world.

No one was ever supposed to attach 4 minutes of ubiquitous thong shots, weird old men standing with pitchforks, or wannabe artsy-looking windowsills (in any combination) to a piece of aural artwork and then assume it was clever. Here’s a newsflash - it was never brilliant. Why did recording artists ever give the burnt out, disenfranchised film industry wannabes of the world a chance to corrupt the beauty of their music? Three letters folks. M(oney) T(itties) & V(enereal disease). By doing so time and time again, MTV and the evil, three legged monster-child it spawned (called the Video Music Industry) outright murdered the importance of popular music, simultaneously stunting the growth of a genuinely important art form.

Please excuse me if this article gets sidetracked. You see, I write this column from the front of my TV as the movers pack up the contents of my office, and I‘m too damned lazy to turn it off. As a result I’m inexorably distracted. I am in this condition, of course, along with preparing to cancel my credit cards and move house 2 or 3 times a month under cover of darkness, because I know that once this article is published MTV executives will most certainly dispatch 6 highly skilled assassins, (or perhaps 50 Cent), to come and kill me.

It is possible that without Dire Straits bowing to this 3 headed whore-Goddess in the early 80’s, droning on and on about “wanting their MTV”, there would be no war now, no famine, and no need for fossil fuel. It’s even more likely that in the absence of MTV, the stand-alone “music business” could have evolved to influence us beyond the need for any sort of verbal communication and led us to an Utopian wonderment of just glancing at each other, instantly knowing what is and what is not appropriate to permanently tattoo on your body.

Maybe not, but let’s face it, the music industry is lazy. When it comes to making money, the executive motivation is that doing less and less should be worth more and more. There is an argument out there somewhere stating that most of humanity’s technological breakthroughs are the direct result of laziness. There has to be. If not, I present the argument here and now. I give as examples the automobile, because we were obviously too lazy to take care of our horses; the gun, because we were too tired of stabbing other people to death; and most recently the text message, because statistically it takes more brain cells to communicate via proper conversation. It only begs to differ that in our laziness, we relished at the opportunity to have our imaginations spoon fed to us by useless MTV producers, as opposed to sitting down, turning off he TV and using our own brain power. This is why when MTV launched 30 odd years ago, we gloriously sat in oblivion like proper morons while a new, faceless demon sucked away our souls and gave people like Britney Spears a nice, tall platform to fall from.