Posts Tagged Fidel Castro
Rage Against The Machine and Sony Records Declare War on Capitalism
Posted by Keith Spillett in HEAVY METAL MUST BE DESTROYED on June 18, 2014
Reunited rockers Rage Against The Machine have taken another bold stand against capitalism by re-signing with revolutionary record label Sony. The multinational corporate giant has made no secret of their hatred of consumer capitalism and plan to help Rage Against The Machine lead a worker revolt that will bring the current world order to its knees.
Guitarist Tom Morello announced their act of rebellion only moments after introducing the strongly anti-capitalist rock band Kiss during their induction to the Rock’N’Roll Hall of Fame. Kiss, who has refused to sell their lunchboxes, toys, and tee shirts to anyone who openly opposes the Zapatista revolution in Mexico, plan to release an anti-capitalismcore album called “Rockers of the World Unite” through Sony in the fall.
According to Sony spokesperson George Rockwell, “It is obvious that capitalism has failed. We plan on supporting America’s transition to communism by selling Che Guevara hoodies, Mao Tse-Tung denim jackets and Fidel Castro bobblehead dolls. Let’s face it, the only way to destroy capitalism is by using capitalism to sell products meant to destroy capitalism.”
Morello’s contributions to the revolution have included contributing to the soundtracks of Talladega Nights: The Ricky Bobby Story and The A-Team movie. He and bandmate Zach de La Rocha’s music were also a part of the Trotskyite videogame Guitar Hero. Rage Against The Machine’s vitriolic stand against capitalism in all of its insidious forms has even managed to infect the iPod of former Republican Vice Presidential Nominee Paul Ryan, helping him through many difficult workouts.
Sony’s President Ron Boehner has made no secret of their support for “legends of anti-capitalism like Norm Chomsky and Erma Goldman”. Sony’s corporate vision includes turning all of their factories over to the workers by the year 3071 and helping to open more coal plants to slow the effects of global warming.
Tom Morello’s side project, Rage Against The Washing Machine Sponsored By The Whirlpool Corporation, are known for their rock covers of Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson songs. They are currently touring malls throughout the Midwest.
Watain to Cover “Let It Be”; Kill Remaining Beatles
Posted by Keith Spillett in General Weirdness on February 17, 2014
In what may be the most bold and audacious publicity stunt in the history of heavy metal, black metal superstars Watain plan to murder the two living members of the band the Beatles to coincide with the release of their next record “Death’s Dark Darkness Darkens”. However, in tribute to the most famous band in rock and roll history, they also have planned to open the album with a black metal reworking of the Beatles classic “Let It Be”.
Killing both Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney will certainly not be a simple task, especially since the band has announced its intentions in advance. However, according to lead singer and former Mossad assassin Erik Danielsson, getting to Ringo might not be all that difficult. “Honestly, if you look at the guy, he’s about two glasses of wine away from renal failure. He’s in such bad shape, the other day he asked Lemmy if he could borrow his liver.”
That being said, getting to McCartney could be much more difficult. Immediately after plans for his execution by Watain were announced, he moved into an underground bunker guarded by former Secret Service members along with twelve members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. In spite of the obstacles, Danielsson feels that the band’s high level training in urban combat, guerilla warfare and carjacking will allow them to overpower the guards and “have McCartney’s head on a stick on the roof of our tour bus by July.”
Watain are no strangers to assassinations. Guitarist Pelle Forsberg was a member of Seal Team Six, the group responsible for the murder to noted terrorist and blogger Osama Bin Laden. According to recently released CIA documents, drummer Hakan Jonsson orchestrated several attempts on the life of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, including trying to send him exploding cigars and planning a misguided endeavor where Castro would be trapped in his bedroom and drowned in thousands of tons of frozen yogurt.
Danielsson remains confident in the slaying abilities of Watain. “Look, if we could get to Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, Whitney Houston and the drummer from Hanoi Rocks, what makes you think we can’t put that little twerp McCartney in the ground?”
Scientists Discover “Fear Factory” Gene In Mice
Posted by Keith Spillett in General Weirdness on June 11, 2013
A Fear Factory Mouse Attack Captured On Film In Hudson, Wisconsin
Chances are you’ve seen them rampaging through the streets. They range in size from 6 foot 1 to 6 foot 4 and usually weigh between 245 and 270 pounds. They have excessively large foreheads, surprisingly short arms and enormous kneecaps. They are usually relatively intelligent, slightly clumsy, and uncommonly strong. They are Fear Factory Mice and they are the greatest threat to the American Way of Life since the creation of Social Security.
They pour forth from the faces and body cavities of the lower animals and consume all that is in their path. These mice replicate at incredible speeds, often breeding with donkeys and fish. They are capable of incredible kindness and unspeakable acts of cruelty. The wilderness is full of them. They stalk campers and hikers, toying with them by bellowing the lyrics to Fear Factory’s Top 40 single “Martyr” before ripping them apart. Yet, in some cases, they have struck up remarkable friendships with their human prey, occasionally exchanging Tupperware products with their victims before devouring their bodies.
This is why we must, under no circumstances, EVER, leave the house again.
Sometimes, they make their way into cities and battle local Mice Control Workers (MCWs) for control of poultry-themed fast food restaurants. These MCWs are often equipped with the latest in taxpayer funded, anti-mouse laser death rays. However, a swarm of them can quickly overpower a team of MCWs. At that point, the government’s options become limited. In some instances, like in the case of the former city of Phoenix, Arizona in 1998, the full-scale use of nuclear weaponry is the only conceivable way of preserving what is left of the American Dream.
In 1991, when The Great Mousehunts began, scientists were baffled the ability of the Fear Factory Mice to regenerate their wounded bodies and learn from previous defeats. While regular mice would lie in their cages and allow the doctors to poke, prod and dissect them in the name of building a better world for Americans, these Fear Factory Mice would rise up, reassemble their body parts and fight against the scientists, sometimes taking whole laboratories hostage. The mice took to the hills after being decimated in early battles with the Army, but quickly regrouped and, after signing a mutual defense treaty with Fidel Castro and the Cubans, have become a constant threat to commerce and the safety of average citizens.
Besides the significant difference in height and common “sleeve” tattoos worn on the arms of the Fear Factory Mice, it is almost impossible for the average observer to tell the difference between the two breeds until it is too late. Reactions have varied from city-to-city, but the most common response has been to move to high ground and wait for inevitable death. Conservatives have taken to storing up thousands of rounds of ammunition, stockpiling anti-mouse weaponry, praying and watching Bruce Willis movies until it is safe to enter the cities again. Liberals have started community based Mice Awareness Groups (MAGs) and eco-friendly, cruelty-free Mice Education Programs (MEPs) in the hopes of tolerating the animals to death. Until Friday, it seemed as if no one had an answer to the single greatest issue of our time.
However, thanks to the expenditure of billions of taxpayer dollars and the generosity of several of our top corporate leaders, science has, once again, saved us from the abyss of mass extinction. Years of research has led to a breakthrough of fantastic proportions. Without going into all of the science-y type details, it is clear that some mice possess a gene that causes them, upon hearing a Fear Factory song, to become enormous, flesh-thirsty beasts. By simply destroying all remaining copies of Fear Factory’s music, bathing regularly in fresh chicken blood and sacrificing one infant human on a bi-weekly basis, the threat of these killer mice will be eliminated by the year 2039.
Surprisingly, the answer to the great mystery lay in the journals of former President Calvin Coolidge. In his last days, Coolidge claimed to have been visited by men from the future that foresaw the mouse epidemic and gave him a specific set of plans to isolate the Fear Factory Gene and destroy the hordes of ravenous rodents. Coolidge tried to warn several people of the terror that awaited humankind, but no one believed him because his habit of drinking iodine had caused a rapid deterioration in his mental condition. He was killed on the night he planned to talk to a sympathetic reporter from the New York Times when a hummingbird flew up his nose and caused a brain aneurysm.
We were saved because we believed hard enough in the menacing green light, the orgiastic past that explodes from our mouths every time we scratch the surface of reality. The forest advances year-by-year, no matter how hard or how fast we strike our axes against the trees. Sure, the mice didn’t get us this time, but that’s no matter. Tomorrow, we will run away faster, flail our arms harder and eventually slip on the ever-looming banana peel, falling to our collective deaths….
So we beat on, building a better mousetrap, born to ceaselessly regurgitate the past.
Fear Factory….Before They Caused The End Of Life As We Know It
The Curious Case of Tommy James and The Shondells
Posted by Keith Spillett in General Weirdness on November 25, 2011
Tommy James and The Shondells After Teaching The Dalai Lama To Play Good Golly Miss Molly on Guitar in 1964
One of the great, but somewhat forgotten bands in the history of American pop music was Tommy James and the Shondells. Chances are, if you’ve spent more than an hour of your life with the radio on, you’ve heard one of their hits. They were responsible for chart topping classics that ran the gamut from the #1 hit and rock anthem “Crimson and Clover” to the sundrenched, psychedelic classic “Crystal Blue Persuasion”. They had hits like “Mony, Mony” and “I Think We’re Alone Now” which were made into even bigger in the 1980s by Billy Idol and Tiffany respectively. They were responsible for writing the theme song to the television show “Bonanza” and created the entire soundtrack to the Wes Craven’s horror standard “Last House on The Left”. Yet, miraculously, few people know the mind-blowing story of their bizarre careers.
Tommy James (born Thomas Gregory Jackson) came into the world on April 29th, 1927 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. From an early age, Tommy, as his friends called him, overcame great adversity. Tommy was born with several additional limbs, including an arm that jutted out of his back and two additional legs that sprouted from slightly below his right knee. James lived in this awkward and uncomfortable state until he had the additional limbs removed at age 16. By that time, James had become somewhat of a music prodigy. Before the removal of his extra arm, 8-year-old Tommy wowed the elementary school talent show crowd with his ability to play all of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” on guitar while doing a full handstand.
Music was Tommy’s first passion, but it was his skills as a twirler and football player were legendary in the state of Michigan by the time he began considering college. Tommy was a dual threat quarterback who was known for his majestic playmaking ability, as well as the fact that he is the only football player in modern memory to also do the halftime shows for his school. After passing for 427 yards and 8 touchdowns in the first half of a game against rival Warren G. Harding High School, James came out and did a flaming baton routine that is still talked about locals today. Tommy was offered football scholarships to Ohio State, Michigan, UCLA and Notre Dame, but decided to dedicate himself to music fulltime when he turned 18.
Tommy played with several bands but quickly became frustrated with the music industry. On his 26th birthday, Tommy made a decision that would forever change the course of world history. After reading a newspaper article the corrupt dictatorship of Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista, Tommy decided that the cause of freedom was more important then his music career. He packed up his backpack and got on a boat for Cuba that very day. While he was there he quickly became close friends with several revolutionaries, including future leader Fidel Castro. Tommy spent the next ten years working with Castro and an Argentinian doctor by the name of Ernesto “Che” Guevara to overthrow the dictatorship and to bring economic equality to the Cuban people.
Tommy became disillusioned with the Castro regime in the early 1960s and eventually had a falling out with Fidel over Cuba’s alignment with the Soviet Union. He was expelled from Cuba and told he would be executed if he ever attempted to return. Tommy decided he needed to find himself spiritually and moved to Tibet. After spending a year of his life herding yak, he met a group of four American expatriate musicians who lived in the mountain village of Shondelli. While sitting at the foot of Mount Everest and discussing the path to enlightenment, these five men together wrote the song “Hanky Panky”. Knowing it would certainly become a hit, they returned to America with stars in their eyes. Sure enough, Tommy James and the Shondells scored a number one single with the song in 1966.
From 1966 to 1970, the band produced a string of Top 40 hits and became a regular on such shows as American Bandstand. One morning in 1971, Tommy woke up and decided that the craziness and excesses of the music industry were too much for him. He left the scene and opened an exotic pet store in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Shondells, left leaderless by Tommy’s disappearance, knew they needed to take action in order to stay famous. Using a strand of Tommy James’ hair, the band, who had each received PhD degrees in Biology from Harvard University, attempted to clone him. At first, the clone of Tommy James performed well. However, before a concert in Cleveland, Ohio in 1973 the clone went berserk and consumed four Girl Scouts who attempted to sell him cookies backstage. The clone was destroyed and the Shondells were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole until 1998.
After receiving several letters from the Shondells, James, racked with guilt, closed up his pet store and broke the band out of Leavenworth Federal Prison in Kansas with support from 3 members of the Oakland Branch of The Symbionese Liberation Army (who were later known for kidnapping heiress Patty Hearst). The band hid in the mountains of Colorado for 15 years only occasionally returning to cities to sign copies of their Greatest Hits album. Eventually, the band surrendered to Federal Authorities in 1987. However, lady luck smiled upon the band when outgoing President Ronald Reagan pardoned them in 1989 because he errantly believed they had helped smuggle guns and money to the Contras in Nicaragua.
The band relocated to Seattle and began playing slowed down, “grungy” (as they called it) versions of their earlier songs. A song they had created in honor of their good friend actor Martin Sheen called “Smells Like Sheen’s Spirit” was borrowed by a young musician named Kurt Cobain for his band Nirvana. Nirvana changed a few words around and the rest was history. James, who had accidently signed away the rights to the song during a late night card game with Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, never got over his rage about losing the song. Weeks before Cobain’s death, James threatened to “feed Cobain to a pride of lions at The Olympia Zoo”. However, James was never considered seriously as a suspect in the death of Cobain.
After the Seattle years, the band went on to various projects, occasionally reforming for short tours. However, they never recaptured the hit making ability that they flashed so prominently in the late 1960s. Sure, some bands have been able to write catchier pop songs. A few bands have even been able to capture the exciting, frenzied energy they were able to create on stage. However, as far as I know, there are no bands that have lived as surreal and extraordinary lives as Tommy James and The Shondells.
The Tyranny of Tradition 