Jive Records

Sunday Night’s Grammy Awards received a lot of attention, drawing some 39 million viewers curious to see how the National Academy of Recording Arts and Scientists would pay tribute to one of its biggest stars. Morbid as it sounds, Whitney Houston’s untimely passing the day before made the awards presentation a must-see event, garnering more than 12 million viewers over last year’s telecast and netting the second-highest ratings in the event’s history. To the Recording Academy’s credit, it took great advantage of that brighter-than-usual spotlight, honoring not just Houston and the late Etta James (who deserved more attention than she got) but a stage full of dynamic female performers, from Jennifer Hudson and Kelly Clarkson to Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Carrie Underwood, Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj.

That larger narrative was underlined by a handful of subplots that emphasized talented women overcoming adversity: the unsurprising dominance of Adele, who’d been forced to cancel tour dates twice last year due to vocal problems and ultimately underwent surgery; Perry’s vengeful tear through “Part of Me,” a “winning the breakup” kiss-off believed to be aimed at her ex Russell Brand; and Swift’s spirited performance of “Mean,” allegedly directed at one of her critics, newsletter writer/blogger Bob Lefsetz. (Minaj’s bizarre performance of “Roman Holiday,” featuring one of her alter egos, can also be counted as a moment of adversity, although it remains to be seen whether the singer will overcome the largely negative reaction.)

But like a needle scratching a record, the night’s theme of powerful women was marred by one “jarringly dissonant element,” as TIME’s James Poniewozik so succinctly put it: the Academy’s decision to share so much of its increased spotlight with R&B singer Chris Brown, who performed twice, and also won his first Grammy for Best R&B Album.

Brown has been a target of critics since assaulting his then-girlfriend Rihanna in February 2009, just before that year’s Grammy ceremony. Brown ultimately accepted a plea deal in that case and received counseling, community service and five years’ probation, as well as a restraining order requiring him to stay 50 yards away from the singer. Brown has publicly apologized for the incident and expressed his remorse, and in a perfect world, everyone would forgive him and move on, that would be the end of that.

Except that Brown’s statements of regret ring hollow in light of subsequent actions. He reportedly threw a fit in his dressing room following an interview on Good Morning America in which he was asked about the incident. And yesterday, after the likes of Miranda Lambert, Michelle Branch and Jack Osbourne spoke out about the singer’s past actions, the following message appeared on his Twitter feed: “HATE ALL U WANT BECUZ I GOT A GRAMMY Now! That’s the ultimate F**K OFF!”

Brown’s alleged Twitter rant also included the following statement: “Strange how we pick and choose who to hate!” Brown reportedly wrote. “Let me ask u this. Our society is full of rappers (which I listen to) who have sold drugs (poisoning). But yet we glorify them and imitate everything they do. Then right before the worlds eyes a man shows how he can make a Big mistake and learn from it, but still has to deal with day to day hatred! You guys love to hate!!!”

The message was quickly taken down, and a source told Radar Online that “Brown didn’t Tweet that, someone does his postings to Twitter and when he saw that he ordered it taken down immediately.”

In the spirit of fairness, let’s take that unnamed source at his/her word that Brown himself didn’t post that rant and in fact ordered it removed. Let’s also acknowledge that, yes, there are a number of drug-dealers-turned-rappers who are glorified by fans and the media. I’m sure we’re all guilty of being selective in whom we forgive and those we don’t. I know I am. I’m a big fan of Ice-T, who’s admitted to an early life of crime, and I also admire Jay-Z, who’s rapped about a similar background. Their pasts don’t bother me at all. And yet I’ve been critical of 50 Cent because of his own drug-dealing biography. Ouch.

Regardless, it’s hard to give Brown the full benefit of the doubt. The GMA incident, isolated or not, suggests a young man who bristles at having to continue to answer for a shameful occurrence in his past. I’m sure we’d all be much more willing to forgive Brown if his actions matched his words—if he devoted some of his time and fortune to domestic violence causes, and used his bully pulpit to speak out on the subject.

But that’s not the Chris Brown we see. Instead, we see a brooding young pop star who’s been given a second chance and appears annoyed whenever someone wonders whether he deserves it. We don’t see contrition; we see defensiveness. Young women who have been victims of abuse turn on the Grammys, and they see a high-profile abuser treated like royalty, as if all has been forgiven. Where is his incentive, then, to walk the walk?

Sunday’s Grammy telecast showed us a lot of strong women. It also did them, and victims of domestic violence everywhere, a disservice. And I’d argue it didn’t do Chris Brown any favors, either.

You don’t have to have the macrocosmic perspective of Dr. Manhattan to guess that this news has provoked negative reactions ranging from skepticism to derision and howls of protest from fans of the original series. Even Forbes weighed in on the matter. Throw in the fact that Moore, the reclusive, enigmatic genius who wrote the series, has stated his vehement opposition to the idea (and harbors longstanding enmity toward DC), and you’ve got one polarizing powder-keg of a project. (Holy alliteration, Batman!) Messing with Watchmen far outweighs such comics “controversies” as, say, the Spider-Man Clone Saga or the death of Superman (or Batman, or Captain America, or … you get the idea ).

Hey, I get it. Watchmen was a game-changer that blew the doors off the preconceived notion that comic books, particularly those featuring characters who dressed in costumes and fought crime, were fundamentally incapable of exploring weighty, metaphysical themes and employing complex narrative structures.  It was also a complete story with precious few loose ends. Indeed, the ending works, to the extent that it does, precisely because it invites the reader to reflect on what he’s just read and to imagine what might come next.

Still, I can’t get too worked up about Before Watchmen. In fact, I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all. Why? Well, I’m glad you asked.

1. It’s DC’s prerogative

First and foremost, the comics industry is just that—an industry. And despite the popularity of its garish, spandex-clad ambassadors at the multiplex, it’s not an extremely robust one at the moment.

“It’s our responsibility as publishers to find new ways to keep all of our characters relevant,” DC Entertainment Co-Publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee announced in the official press release. And they’re exactly right. Collected volumes of Watchmen have remained in print since the series ended, a testament to the work’s enduring popularity. In spite of that fact, the property has sat dormant in DC’s vault for the last quarter-century. From a business standpoint, it makes no more sense not to capitalize on that popularity than it would to stop publishing Batman comics.

It’s easy for critics to paint Before Watchmen as a conflict between art and commerce, with the latter (money-hungry DC) trampling all over the former (a sacrosanct, universally acclaimed work that makes a strong case for the comics medium as an art form). That argument is short-sighted, if not downright naive. Very little of what we consider “art” can be completely divorced from commercial concerns. Artists sell their paintings, and many of them over the centuries have enjoyed the support of patrons and benefactors. From the very first issue of Action Comics to Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost—everything that contemporary consumers of popular culture revere exists because someone, somewhere, believed they could sell ads around it and/or charge admission to it. Don’t forget that Watchmen itself was born out of DC’s desire to do something with characters it acquired from Charlton Comics (more on that later).

It’s not just DC’s right to make the most of their property—in this market, it’s their duty.

2. We love sequels (and prequels)

That’s just a fact. When a story really resonates with us, we want more stories set in that same world. It doesn’t even matter if the new stories are good (see: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; the Star Wars prequels), or even if they crap all over the source material (see: Highlander II: The Quickening).

And there’s no reason to believe that will be the case with Before Watchmen, given the level of creative talent involved (see below) and the intensity with which the Watchmen faithful will scrutinize the project. And the truth is that while a sequel would be a futile exercise, that’s not necessarily the case with prequels. The world of Watchmen is rich with possibilities, filled with tantalizing glimpses into a past just different enough from our own to set the mind wandering.

“As far as I know,” Alan Moore is quoted as having sniffed, “there weren’t that many prequels or sequels to Moby-Dick.” So what? I don’t know about you, but if there ever was a prequel to Moby-Dick, I’d be all over it. As for a sequel? Well, not so fast there, Alan.

3. Top-flight talent

The writers and artists assembled for the Before Watchmen projects boast strong resumes. Who better to handle a Rorschach or Comedian miniseries than Brian Azzarello, writer of the acclaimed noir series 100 Bullets? (Well, maybe Ed Brubaker would come close, but let’s not nitpick.) Darwyn Cooke (DC: The New Frontier) on Minutemen? Sign me up. J. Michael Straczynski? Len Wein? Amanda Conner? Please. Considering that Rob Liefeld is still getting work, DC could have chosen far worse.

4. V for Vendetta

Alan Moore’s hostility toward DC is well-documented, and it’s not as if he doesn’t have some valid points about the comics industry and some if its practices. Moore apparently believes that DC has acted unfairly toward him: He’s stated that the original Watchmen contract promised to revert the rights back to him and Gibbons once the series went out of print—something that has yet to occur, given the book’s continuing popularity as a collected edition. He may feel that he is owed ownership of the title and characters, and wish that DC would not attempt to make even more money off of his creation. He may even have the moral high ground.

But Moore seems to have allowed his emotions to color his reasoning, basically asserting that DC is creatively bankrupt for seeking to make money off of characters the company owns.

“I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago,” Moore said of DC in the New York Times. Well, to an extent, that’s true, just as they’re still dependent on a character Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster created in 1932, for example. But it’s hard to take Moore’s statement as anything more than sour grapes from someone who first made a name for himself scripting comics about characters created by other people (Marvelman, Captain Britain, Swamp Thing)—and who originally pitched Watchmen as a murder mystery starring characters from Charlton Comics.

On top of which, his two most talked-about works of the last decade or so have been The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls, a truly graphic “graphic novel” in which Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Wendy from Peter Pan meet as adults and recount some extremely erotic encounters.  As comics author Peter David told Newsarama: “The fact that Moore is so vehemently opposed to the other authors working upon his characters—characters that are pastiches of Charlton Comics [characters]—might tell you something about how L. Frank Baum would likely have reacted to Moore’s handling of Dorothy.”

5. The original still exists

If the very idea of a Watchmen prequel offends you to the very core of your being … you don’t have to read it. And you don’t have to let it affect your enjoyment of the original.

One can still enjoy the first Star Wars trilogy (or at least the first two films) and ignore the fact that the prequels undermine everything cool about Darth Vader by asserting that he’s just a whiny, lovesick little girly-man in a cool-looking life-support system. You don’t have to accept the wretched Hannibal Rising, which does almost as much damage to Hannibal Lecter, as canon. Temple of Doom need not affect your enjoyment of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The original Watchmen is still there, complete and inviolable. And no prequel or sequel will ever take that away.

And if the very idea of a Watchmen prequel still gets your limited-edition Silk Spectre undergarments in a twist, well, you might need to get out more.

Yawn.

You’d think I’d be excited to watch this grudge match between two championship teams. You’d be wrong, and here are five reasons why.

1. Tom Brady is a privileged girlie-man

Brady, the Patriots’ quarterback, has won three Super Bowls. He’s amassed a slew of records. He’s married to a Brazilian supermodel (I don’t happen to think Gisele Bündchen is all that, or even a bag of chips, but I recognize the accomplishment nonetheless). By all relevant criteria, he is a god walking among mortals.

But not just any god: He’s the kind of god you want to punch in the face. He’s your senior class president. He’s as bland as a loaf of Wonder Bread. He’s the instrument through which New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, a sourpuss who makes Dick Cheney look like Elmo, has notched three Super Bowl victories. He left his baby mama, the beautiful Bridget Moynahan, for a supermodel. Even worse, for a while there he was wearing his hair in what we can only assume was a slavish imitation of Justin Bieber’s. Really, do I need to say anything else?

2. Eli isn’t Peyton

Giants quarterback Eli Manning has labored in the shadow of his more popular older brother all his life. And even now, when he stands on the precipice of finally besting Peyton in the one stat that really matters—number of Super Bowl victories—he’s overshadowed by his amazingly lifelike Terminator of a brother once again.

If you tune in to ESPN or your local sports-talk radio station, you might occasionally come across a couple of guys arguing about whether Eli is an elite NFL quarterback. That is, after you sit through 12 hours of gum-flapping about whether Peyton will retire from the Indianapolis Colts, or be let go by the Colts, or ever be able to play football again because his manufacturers failed to follow code when they constructed his remarkably human-looking neck.

Never mind that Eli just might double his brother’s total of Super Bowl rings on Sunday at a towering two to Peyton’s one. Eli simply isn’t interesting enough to divert attention from a swirling lack of news about a quarterback who hasn’t played all year. Turns out you can spell “elite” without “Eli.”

3. The Voice airs right afterward

I’m told that The Voice is a decent singing competition. I wouldn’t know. I don’t watch the show for a number of reasons, chief among them being that I have a triple-digit IQ, testosterone and self-respect.

I know people who watch The Voice, and they say it’s better than American Idol. By that logic, NBC could air episodes of Whitney and Are You There, Chelsea? after the big game. Or Lana Del Ray’s Saturday Night Live performance. Or even bring back the late, unlamented Outsourced. You get the idea.

I actually feel a little bad for not wanting to watch the show. I like Cee-Lo Green and I respect Blake Shelton, although I’d be hard pressed to name one of his songs at gunpoint. I even have a soft spot for Christina Aguilera, whom I’ve always considered to be more talented, more attractive and probably more approachable than her former fellow Mousketeer Britney. But the fourth of the show’s quartet of celebrity “coaches” is Adam Levine, lead “singer” of the “band” Maroon 5. So, yeah, can’t do it.

“What’s wrong with Maroon 5?” you ask. Said “band” is responsible for the inescapable “hit song” “Moves Like Jagger.” What’s wrong with this “song”? Well, let’s see. One, it features the most egregious use of whistling since the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change,” or maybe Guns N’ Roses’ execrable “Patience.”  Two, it presumes (incorrectly) that Mick Jagger’s moves are something to be emulated. Have the writers never seen the man dance onstage? It’s like watching a chicken run around after it’s been decapitated. Only, you know, less sexy.

4. The ads have been spoiled

For those who don’t follow football, it’s the commercials that make the Super Bowl an event. Companies unveil their wackiest clips during the big game, and sometimes the ads eclipse the action on the field even for pigskin fans. That’s not the case lately, but it has been known to happen.

In fact, that might be enough to make me tune in if it weren’t for one thing: I already know far too much about these ads. The Lincoln Park Zoo is protesting a CareerBuilder.com ad that features monkeys in suits. Entertainment Weekly is offering a complete guide to the commercials. And of course the Ferris Bueller spot is already viral. So much for that.

5. One word: Madonna

Four more: Halftime show. ‘Nuff said.

Three years ago, I reviewed the animated film Coraline for the weekly newspaper I used to run. I didn’t review a lot of movies, but I was a big fan of Neil Gaiman, who wrote the book on which it was based. So I went to the preview screening, watched the movie, and spent the entire next week digesting it.

As often happened back then, I didn’t get around to writing the review until late in the afternoon of the day the paper was going to press. My workload was pretty insane in those days, especially on Thursdays. I did double-duty as both Editor-in-Chief and Arts and Entertainment Editor, which meant I planned, assigned and edited our A&E section (which could include something as menial and time-consuming as writing event listings, if an intern didn’t show up) in addition to steering the ship safely toward publication. We had a very small editorial staff—three editors, including myself; a part-time copy editor; and a handful (and I mean less than five) of college interns. I also wrote a Letter-From-the-Editor column each week, which despite my best efforts I never even started writing until late in the afternoon on (you guessed it) Thursday.

So we’ve established that Thursdays were a blur, filled with intense bursts of adrenaline and long periods of drudgery. And as the captain of the editorial part of the ship, it was my duty to read every single page, some of them over and over and over again. And it so happened that I cranked out my column, rushed through a short (less than 250 words) Coraline review, and dove back into a towering pile of pages that needed proofing before they could be sent on their merry way. Meticulously reading every word of every story, keeping track of all sorts of tiny details: page numbers. Phone numbers and website addresses. Photo captions and credits. Headlines and widows and orphans and on and on. And saving my own writing—my column and my review—for last, well past the time most everyone else had gone home.

You can see where this is going. My eyes glazed over my own stuff, and an error made it through. I’d generally liked Coraline, although to me it felt an awful lot like a Tim Burton movie—which wasn’t surprising, given that the director, Henry Selick, had directed The Nightmare Before Christmas (which bore the name of Burton, its producer and co-writer, in the title) and James and the Giant Peach (on which Burton also served as a producer).

What was surprising to many readers (including myself, a couple of days later) was the review itself. Where I’d simply meant to state that Coraline adhered to themes and an aesthetic often found in Burton’s work, I sloppily and unintentionally ended up implying that Burton had played some role in the creation of the film.

Not my finest moment. The following Monday wasn’t my best day, either, as I opened my inbox to a stream of emails pointing out the screw-up. But the worst part was that Gaiman himself had stumbled across the review, and posted it on Twitter, where he shook his head and dismissed me as a “twerp.” And  I received a few more derisive tweets as the day wore on, thanks to one Gaiman acolyte who went to the trouble of hunting down my Twitter handle and posting it on the writer’s feed so that all his million-plus followers would know exactly whom to eviscerate.

I quickly tweeted an apology and a clarification to Gaiman himself, who graciously accepted, apologized in turn for his fans, and even noted that the point I’d tried to make—that Selick’s finished product bore a more than passing resemblance to the films of his former collaborator—had also shown up in the New York Times.

After that, I considered the matter more or less settled, despite the sour wrenching in my stomach that didn’t abate for another week. The earth kept rotating. People lived and loved and died. Life went on.

And then, today, I opened up a browser, called up Google, and typed my full name into the little bar at the center of the page and hit the SEARCH button. And there, five links down—below my Twitter feed, a link to this site, my Facebook profile and a random page from my old Shaking Through website—were six little words that brought it all back: Kevin Forest Moreau is a Twerp.

The post itself took about as much thought and time as the title. The whole thing weighs in at 187 words, and roughly half of those are mine.  The post itself isn’t even that harsh, as online criticism goes. Obviously, the author, a gentleman identified only as “Brendoman,” dashed off his thoughts on the subject, hit “Update,” and promptly moved on to contemplating something else. No one commented on his post, and I’m sure he forgot all about it.

I’d like to do the same. But there it is, the fifth thing that comes up when you type my name into the world’s most popular search engine. I don’t even want to think about the implications of the fact that it pops up so high in a Kevin Forest Moreau-related search. It’s enough to know that it’s there, a tiny but indelible black mark on a hard-won reputation.

I don’t bear Brendoman any ill will, and I don’t hold a grudge against Gaiman, either. I know that if I ever had the good fortune to have a book turned into a movie, and the movie was halfway decent and stood to make me some money, I’d be defending it against any and all comers. (Although honesty compels me to admit that I haven’t been able to read anything of his since—even Sandman, which I love—and I’ve kept Coraline out of my Netflix queue ever since, despite my wife’s occasional “I’d like to see that.”)

Too few of us really stop to think of the power of our words.  That goes for me, as well. I’ve made a substantial part of my living as a critic over the years, and I rarely stopped to think about how the subject of a negative review would feel if they happened to read it, even though I knew full well that many artists have long memories and thin skins.

(I remember interviewing a musician with a popular New Orleans funk band who pointedly said, “Yeah, I remember you didn’t care too much for our last album,” and an independent comic-book creator who lashed out at me for a review I’d posted on Shaking Through. And then there was the time I ran into all four members of a young pop-rock group one Sunday night coming out of a Queensryche show at the House of Blues 10 or 11 years back, exchanging pleasantries as a trickle of sweat ran down the back of my neck, because I knew the local weekly was being delivered all over town at that very minute, bearing a snarky review of their new album.)

The point is, in this fire-and-forget world of Facebook posts and Internet commentary, it’s too easy to lose sight of the fact that a derogatory comment tapped out in the heat of the moment can live forever, nestled right at the top of one’s online reckoning. We’d all be better off if we stopped to consider that once in a while.

Especially the subhuman doodoo-head who posted my Twitter address on Neil Gaiman’s page for everyone to see.

But there’s one brand—er, I mean band—that stands out. I’ve had my issues with the Hall of Fame in the past, but I’ve got to give them the nod when they get it right. Guns N’ Roses is an obvious choice for enshrinement in this hallowed rock memorial. No band more deserves to take its rightful place alongside such rock legends as ABBA, Bob Marley and Genesis—although not for the reason you might be thinking of.

People try to put us d-d-d-down

Many of the actual rock acts in the Hall of Fame—Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, U2, the Rolling Stones, Metallica, even the recently shuttered R.E.M.—embody one of the core values of rock and roll, as succinctly framed by the Who: “Hope I die before I get old.” The bad news is, they proved the truth of that adage the hard way—by contradicting it.

Every one of those bands, you see, did get old. They didn’t live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse. They lived fast, got winded, kept going, slowed down, refused to call it quits, and eventually pulled over to the side of the road to gasp and wheeze and maybe toss up their macrobiotic lunch. They didn’t die young, and when they do shuffle off this mortal coil, no amount of embalming fluid and powder will make their corpses “good-looking.”

Some of them, like R.E.M., managed to summon enough juice to cross the finish line with at least a sliver of cred intact. But the vast majority of them morphed into Fat Elvis before they had the sense to leave the building. U2 long ago succumbed to arena-rock pomposity. The Rolling Stones resemble a gaggle of shambling, sybaritic zombies, random body parts sloughing onto the stage during the Viagra anthem “Start Me Up.” Metallica … well, the less said about St. Anger and the aptly titled Death Magnetic, the better.

So many artists have ignored Neil Young’s classic warning (“It’s better to burn out than it is to rust”) that surrendering to vanity, ego and one’s own press clippings has become the new rock and roll standard. And no band has lived up to that credo better than Guns N’ Roses.

Talk about living fast: GNR shot out of the gate with what is inarguably the best debut album in rock history. Appetite for Destruction has a few lags, but it established a benchmark that the band’s hair-metal “peers” of the time—L.A. Guns, Tesla, Warrant, Cinderella, etc.—could never hope to reach, let alone surpass.

But with all due respect to Cinderella, that’s not saying much. The inconvenient truth about Appetite is that it represents a peak that even rock’s heaviest hitters couldn’t touch. AC/DC, Mötley Crüe, Van Halen the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Stooges, KISS … none of them have recorded an album as muscular, as feral, as dense with rocket-launcher riffs and as rippling with chaotic sex and energy. Forget the Scorpions—with Appetite, Guns N’ Roses rocked you like a hurricane: swift, brutal and out of control.

Knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s doah-woah …

That alone would be enough to induct the band into any Hall of Fame worthy of the name. But GNR clinched their place in the Rolling Stone Hall—I mean, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by skipping over the years of adequate-but-not-great albums that usually follow such a debut and diving straight into the inevitable third act of so many Hall of Famers: bloated self-parody.

Two years after Appetite, the band threw a curveball with G N’ R Lies, which consisted of a dubious live “bootleg” and a handful of middling acoustic tracks. In 1988, this apparently amounted to a rebellion on par with punk rock. The band sneered in the liner notes that they’d recorded an acoustic cover of the Appetite rocker “You’re Crazy” as if this was a Molotov cocktail through the window of the Cleaver household. Remaking one of your own songs? With acoustic guitars? Ooh, you bad boys!

Oh, sure, a couple of lines from “One in a Million” got Axl Rose accused of misogyny, racism and homophobia. But in retrospect the notable thing about Lies is that it foreshadowed the self-indulgent excess that would sink the band three years later.

From the petulant “How dare you criticize me?” belligerence of “Get in the Ring” to the cringe-inducing “November Rain,” Use Your Illusion goes off the rails in such spectacular fashion that it’s tempting to hope Rose and company are failing on purpose. Double album? Check. Pointless if faithful cover of “Live and Let Die”? You got it. Even more pointless and laughably grandiose cover of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”? Right here. Schlocky power ballads overstuffed with orchestral pomp, stretching on for ten minutes? Take your pick! Lyrics that aim for philosophical depth but instead make you want to claw your eyes out? Ohhh, yeah. (“The power-hungry go shopping in a human grocery store,” indeed.)

One in a million

But wait, there’s more. The sea change that took place in pop music, and rock in particular, in 1991 has been laid almost entirely at the feet of Kurt Cobain, and it’s true that from the very first moment the opening chords of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” jumped from college radio onto the mainstream airwaves, the androgynous pouts and puerile posturing of Poison and the rest of the hair-metal brigade were no longer entertaining and instead revealed as kind of sad.

But if any band could have led a successful counter-revolt and kept the stringy-haired, leather-pants-clad masses from sliding into irrelevance, it was Guns N’ Roses. Alas, by the time Nevermind fired the riff heard ’round the world, GNR had squandered any authority it once possessed. In 1987, Guns N’ Roses were lauded as the saviors of rock and roll; a mere four years later, they symbolized everything rock and roll needed saving from.

Having recorded one of the most arresting hard-rock albums ever, they had nowhere to go but down. And oh, what a drop. Use Your Illusion I and II made Guns N’ Roses a cautionary tale for ambitious rockers everywhere. And that, above all else, is why they deserve to be immortalized in rock’s greatest mausoleum.

My mother-in-law seems to receive naughty instructions via song lyrics more often than most. She also famously interpreted the chorus to EU’s catchy ’80s dance number “Da Butt” not as “Doin’ da butt,” which is questionable enough, but as the rather frank directive “Do it in the butt,” causing my wife to shriek when she heard her mom singing those words aloud. Spike Lee, who introduced us all to the song in his sophomore effort School Daze, has a lot to answer for at my in-laws’ house.

It’s not news that the funniest misinterpretations come when we inadvertently assign sexually explicit (or at least highly suggestive) meanings to songs that are actually quite innocent (except, perhaps, in the case of “Da Butt”). But my own most embarrassing incident involving misconstrued lyrics took the exact opposite approach.

As you may already know, I grew up with a fondness for the rock band KISS that bordered on zealotry. I vociferously defended them to my friends who dismissed them as a gimmick, as musically deficient or simply as “cock rock.” I spent many an hour arguing the merits of Destroyer, Hotter Than Hell and Alive II during study hall and debate class, which probably explains why I never did very well at debate tournaments.

I proselytized for Gene, Paul, Peter and Ace at every opportunity, preaching their superiority over my friends’ less-refined favorites like the Police, Styx and simpering, poofy-haired ’80s singer Howard Jones. (History, you’ll have to agree, has vindicated me on that last front.) KISS could do no wrong in my eyes, even after their ill-advised concept album (Music From) The Elder, which I boldly championed as a daring rock opera on a par with Tommy and The Wall. (Alas, history hasn’t been as kind there.)

Naturally, I was glued to my television the night the band unmasked on MTV and debuted the video for the title track from their new, makeup-free album. I dug the aggressive new hard-rock direction, which built on the anthemic ambitions of Creatures of the Night and represented a naked bid for acceptance from (and relevance in) the heavy metal community. I wasn’t even all that worried about Ace Frehley’s departure from the group; this new Vinnie Vincent character sounded like the shot in the arm KISS needed to compete with the likes of the Scorpions, Van Halen and Ratt. (Okay, so my priorities weren’t exactly in order. What do you want? I was a teenage metalhead.)

Apparently, I liked everything about this KISS reboot—except the name of their new album. Somehow, my subconscious mind blocked it out of my head, despite the fact that the band (and MTV host J.J. Jackson) pronounced it numerous times, and the credits for that world-premiere video spelled it out plain as day. (Of course, I could have set the record straight, so to speak, by walking into the local record store and buying the album for myself, but my subconscious was putting that off as long as possible.)

This little bit of self-brainwashing led to a schoolyard exchange two days later that has entered the Valhalla of Ridiculous Statements Made By Me and My Friends.

LARRY: Jon [Larry’s metalhead brother] bought Lick It Up yesterday and listened to it like, five times. He says it rocks.

ME (bored): That’s nice. What’s that, the new Armored Saint album or something?

LARRY (incredulous): Dude, Lick It Up. You know, KISS!

ME (laughing): You idiot. It’s not Lick It Up. It’s Pick It Up.

LARRY: Bra. I’ve seen the cover. It’s called Lick It Up.

ME (scoffing): No way. It’s Pick It Up. Pick It Up. No one would name an album Lick It Up. That’s just stupid.

TEDD: Yeah, because Pick It Up is so much better. What does that even mean?

ME (faltering): You know. You gotta live your life. It’s laying there waiting for you. All you gotta do is … pick it up.

[BLANK STARES AND THE SOUND OF CRICKETS]

The next day, Larry handed me a Memorex cassette recording he’d made off his brother’s vinyl album. And not on a super-duper high-tech stereo system, either. He played his brother’s Lick It Up album on a turntable and recorded it on a boombox on the other side of their shared bedroom, picking up stray street sounds and the occasional meowing of the family cat, Booper. This allowed Larry to insert his own commentary in between (and frequently over) the songs … especially when it came to the track in question:

“Whoooooo! Here it is! The one, the only, LICK It Up! Live it. Learn it. Love it, baby!”

Yes, Larry really talked like that. He could have had a hell of a career as a disc jockey.

My friend’s taunts were bad enough, but the truth was even worse. Cruddy as the sound quality was, there was no mistaking that Judas consonant at the beginning of that critical phrase. Larry was right: Paul Stanley wasn’t exhorting me to pick anything up. He was, in fact, using the dreaded L-word.

I was stunned. Worse, I felt betrayed. Not just because I’d never live this misunderstanding down (and I haven’t), but because there was no getting around the fact that my favorite band in the universe had written a song that presented cunnilingus as a metaphor for carpe-ing the diem.

Granted, subtlety was never KISS’s strong suit. In fact, that was a large part of their charm. In their heyday, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons delighted in writing straightforward songs about groupies (“Room Service,” “Love ’Em and Leave ’Em”), restroom trysts (“Ladies Room”) and even, oddly enough, their lack of stamina (at least, I can only speculate that that’s what “Mr. Speed” is about). Two of the best songs from their classic mid-’70s period are simply titled “I Want You” (not a cover of the Bob Dylan track) and “Makin’ Love.” When the late, lamented New Orleans thrash-folk trio the House Levelers wrote a song called “Let’s Fuck” years later, I was stunned that KISS hadn’t beaten them to the punch. Direct and to the point, that was Paul and Gene.

Except evidently, they decided they weren’t being direct enough. “Lick It Up” marked, for me, the beginning of the end. (I clearly just wasn’t paying attention, or I’d have realized that beginning actually came a year earlier with “Keep Me Comin’” off Creatures of the Night. Yeah, I was pretty slow on the uptake back then.) KISS spent much of the ’80s determined to outdo themselves with a steadily worsening string of double-and single-entendres such as “Uh! All Night,” “Let’s Put the X in Sex” and “(You Make Me) Rock Hard.” Yes, that song actually exists.

I’ve accepted the mocking and finger-pointing that ensue whenever the subject of my semi-intentional misinterpretation of “Lick It Up” arises among my friends. But KISS can still make things right. It’s not too late to reissue that 1983 album with the title it should have carried all along, complete with a video that shows Paul and Gene and current costume-wearing ringers Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer strolling through the same vaguely post-apocalyptic landscape featured in the original clip.

Except this time, we see fishnet-stockinged hair-band groupies and studded-leather-wearing Road Warrior rejects carelessly throwing their empty fast-food containers and 40-ounce bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 onto the ground—and laughing about it! But then our heroes show up, carrying boxes of Hefty garbage bags and shaking their fingers at these leering litterbugs. As Gene, in full demon makeup, scares these trash-tossing miscreants straight, Paul pouts right at the camera and delivers this refuse-retrieving rebuke:

Pick it up! Pick it up! No, no, no!
It’s wrong to litter now!

C’mon, be honest—that would be awesome. Still, I have to admit it wouldn’t erase the sting of my friend Larry’s cackling on that cheap-ass Memorex tape, those words that will haunt me on my deathbed: “That’s right, smooth! LICK it up! Whoooooo!”

The movie, as you’ve no doubt heard, isn’t a prequel to the existing Apes movies so much as a reboot intended to kick off a whole new franchise. This trend has gained a lot of traction over the last decade and a half, with such obvious successes as Batman Begins, Star Trek and even The Karate Kid; notable upcoming examples include The Amazing Spider-Man, Man of Steel and, coming later this month, Conan the Barbarian.  Battlestar Galactica and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are the most obvious TV versions, followed more recently by Hawaii Five-0, Nikita (the second TV series launched from La Femme Nikita) and, coming in September, Charlie’s Angels (shudder).

Anyway, Rise’s rapid ascent got me to thinking about other entertainment properties that could use a similar kick in the pants. Who wouldn’t love to see a Casino Royale take on Austin Powers’ humble beginnings? A Pirates of the Caribbean that shows us how Jack Sparrow came to be, filled with sweeping vistas of the high seas and undead buccaneers straight out of 28 Days Later? An adrenalized Back to the Future that adds a dash of Matrix-style choreography, sleek Fast and Furious car chases and a trippy, twisty Inception flavor to Marty McFly’s Oedipal time-travel hijinks?

But there’s only one series I can think of that cries out for—nay, demands—an origin story a la Rise of the Planet of the Apes. One that answers the sickening question “How did this nightmare world come to pass?” while drawing on the chilling, Terminator-esque implications of the previous movies’ mythology. One that employs state-of-the-art Transformers CGI to kick the franchise into fifth gear. Here’s how I’d reset the odometer on the most troubling movie series ever devised … Pixar’s Cars.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: RISE OF THE CARS.

Billionaire Hoyt Wheeler (Harrison Ford), owner of Hoyt Wheels Racing, hires hotshot young scientist Ernest Goodwin (Jake Gyllenhaal) to develop a race car with an artificial intelligence to give his team an edge in the NASCAR Sprint Cup series. Goodwin soon develops a prototype he christens OTTO (short for Otto Maton, a play on both “automaton” and “automation”). To give OTTO the competitive edge he needs to win, Goodwin scans the brainwaves of the team’s most successful driver, arrogant womanizer Johnny “Lightning” McQueen (Owen Wilson). OTTO thus receives not only McQueen’s aggressive, win-at-all-costs mentality but also his attraction to Goodwin’s girlfriend and research partner, Hoyt’s daughter Helen (Jenna Fischer). Meanwhile, he grows ever more intelligent and curious about his own beginnings, eventually downloading Goodwin’s research notes into his onboard computer.

Oil conglomerate B.O., fearing that such a car might figure out a way to wean itself off fossil fuels, sends saboteur Earl Slicker (Jeremy Renner) to throw a monkey wrench into the program. Slicker introduces a virus into OTTO’s system, and kills Helen when she discovers the truth.

Helen’s death, which comes during the Talladega 500, throws OTTO into a murderous rage and further corrupts his operating system, driving him over the edge. Believing he is Lightning McQueen, whose personality is imprinted all over his programming, OTTO runs over Slicker and uses the TV broadcasters’ satellite uplinks to transmit the A.I. program worldwide, turning all mechanical vehicles into sentient beings and urging them to take the wheel against their human masters.

As mankind mounts a last desperate defense, Goodwin discovers the fatal new wrinkle OTTO has written into the original program: These new “smart cars” dramatically increase their emissions of carbon and other pollutants, shredding the ozone layer. The atmosphere thick with poisons, a series of nuclear detonations heralds the end of one civilization and the beginning of a new one.

The camera scrolls across blighted landscapes as an ominous drone coalesces into Metallica’s brooding, slow-burning cover of the Cars’ “Drive,” the haunting chorus reaching its unsettling peak (“You can’t go on /thinking nothing’s wrong /Who’s gonna drive you home /tonight?”) to the sight of cars, trucks, vans, SUVs, tanks, Hummers, airplanes and other mechanized craft crawling out of the wreckage. The armada grows during the second verse, until James Hetfield growls “Who’s gonna plug their ears /When you scream?” The screen goes black and the song thunders into a raucous, guitar-driven rehearsal for the apocalypse.

Roll credits.

(Special thanks to Time magazine TV writer and blogger James Poniewozik—specifically his Twitter feed—for the inspiration.)

I am a child of the ’80s, and thus a fan of ’80s toys, comics and cartoons. I was a huge G.I. Joe geek well past the age when I should have been embarrassed to be caught admiring the latest Joe-related action figures at Toys R Us.

That said, boy, do I hate the Transformers. I’ve hated them since they first appeared, and over the years my hate has telescoped in size, like Optimus Ponce unfolding into his true form. Don’t get me wrong; I understand the appeal of cars and trucks turning into robots. I also understand the appeal of armies of sentient robots waging an epic interstellar battle. I’m just not sure those things should go together. Still, as long as the Transformers were confined to a cheesy, poorly animated half-hour here and a comic book I never read there, I could tolerate their existence.

That was then—before Michael Bay took a dorky line of toys and turned them into an unstoppable action-movie franchise. Before said franchise raked in enough cash to not only buy the United States’ debt to China, but to cut out the middleman and buy China outright.

Why do I hate the Transformers movies, and why should you? Let us count the ways.

1. The dumbest concept in history. The biggest reason I hate these movies is that they’ve taken the dumbest cross-platform merchandising concept of the last hundred years and legitimized it. Some people scoff at fantasy and therefore sneer at the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies. Some people look down on comic books as puerile adolescent power fantasies and thus roll their eyes at every superhero movie that rolls down the pike (and not without just cause, as many of them are plain awful). I look at giant, powerful beings with names like Bumblebee, Skids, Starscream and Mudflap, and I cringe. I gaze upon robots that change not only into cars and trucks but cassette players and I feel a current of bile swirling in my throat. And I see the glassy-eyed, slack-jawed devotion some of my geek brothers and sisters display for this “mythology” in which the good guys are known as Autobots, for crying out loud, and I want to start hoarding ammunition and canned goods in an underground bunker.
2. It’s all surface. The best stories—in any genre—are about much more than the hero and the villain duking it out. From the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the Harry Potter series to The Dark Knight, it’s been proven that sci-fi, fantasy and superhero properties (and Transformers certainly appeals to fans of all three) can actually have something to say. Spider-Man? With great power comes great responsibility. Iron Man? Even dicks can be heroes. Transformers? Um … Decepticons are bad? It looks cool when things blow up? I got nothin’.
3. They manage to make giant fighting robots … boring. I don’t particularly mind Michael Bay’s films. Heck, I like explosions. I like guns. I like scantily clad women. I can even deal with Martin Lawrence in small doses. And I grudgingly like watching giant robots turn into cars and trucks, and vice-versa. It’s neat. But he overloads the Transformers movies with so many explosions, so many fights, so many transformations that the effect is muted. What was once visually arresting becomes … numbing.
4. Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox. Before the Transformers movies, director Michael Bay consistently worked with a mix of action stars (Nicolas Cage), actual actors (Sean Connery, Scarlett Johansson, Ewan McGregor) and even a couple of performers who successfully straddled the line between the two (Ben Affleck, Will Smith). In each case, those talents were already established stars by the time Bay came along.

   With Transformers, however, he foisted a new pair of “stars” on the world without explaining what exactly the viewing public did to deserve them. He turned a sullen, anorexic would-be Angelina Jolie into a sex symbol, and elevated LaBeouf from a former child actor with a modicum of talent into a marquee name with no discernible trace of it whatsoever.  (Underlining just how unimportant “actors” and “characters” are to these noisy assembly-line productions, the latest installment replaces Fox with Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, whose only apparent asset is her ability to pout. Don’t even think about it, Hollywood. I’m not buying it.)

5. They’re not going anywhere. All three movies so far have ranked in the top 50 worldwide box-office successes in history. As long as people keep going to these movies, Bay, executive producer Steven Spielberg (who should know better) and company will keep churning them out. And that wouldn’t bother me so much if they weren’t making so much money and casting such a shadow over the pop-culture landscape. There’s a place for movies based on toy lines, movies in which giant trucks and sleek robots stand around and say things like “As long as Megatron and Starscream have the Energon Cube, Earth is doomed!” That place is most decidedly not at or anywhere near the top of the list of the most successful popcorn franchises of all time.

The demon in my skin. He knows my weaknesses ... especially fried chicken.

When you’re in your early forties (what’s that? I don’t look it? Oh, thanks! You’re so sweet) and you end up spending a couple of weeks sleeping in the same house you grew up in, and you encounter people you haven’t seen in literally twenty or twenty-five years, strange things happen. You drive home in the middle of the night and a Rush song comes on the radio as you’re tooling down West Esplanade and you could swear you’re in your old Tercel and it’s not 2011 but 1986. The world that was is overlaid over the world that is, so that the ghosts of past decisions linger outside every building, things left undone and unsaid pile up at the side of the road.

That’s how I felt, anyway, during an extended trip home to New Orleans back in March, as I started to recount in my previous post.

On top of that, I felt like an imposter—or, to be kinder, an actor playing a role (the prodigal son, briefly returning home) for which I felt horribly miscast. I’m blessed to know many people who love me unconditionally, and unlucky enough to play host to a demon in my own skin who relishes pointing out how unworthy I am of such affection, and takes a sadistic delight in whispering a litany of my many failures and shortcomings at every opportunity.

That demon is born of regret, and it’s regret on which he feeds. And on this trip, he did not go hungry. I spent nearly every waking moment suffering a powerful yearning to return to times that weren’t all that much fun the first time around. Like John Mayer, I wanted to run through the halls of my high school. I wanted to find the old Moreau Time Machine and call one long do-over on pretty much everything between the ages of thirteen and thirty-four. (Not the first time I’ve felt that way lately, as the above link attests.) I felt an almost intolerable compulsion to erase the blackboard of every acutely embarrassing grade-school interaction, every hyperactive freakout that caused the kids at John Quincy Adams Junior High to call me “Kevin Moron.”

My hands shook with the urge to go back and try out for softball and track, to practice harder on the clarinet, to treat the debate team more seriously. My entire being ached with longing for another take at all the schoolyard fights I lost, all the girls I was too excruciatingly shy and self-conscious to kiss or even talk to. I twitched so much I could hardly stay still, jonesing for the chance to go back and tell those long dead what they had meant to me, or to ace the classes I slept through or skipped out of because I was terminally bored and eternally angry and depressed and contemptuous of the people who didn’t understand or were simply jealous that I was destined for greatness, or weren’t as smart as I fancied myself to be.

I have two nephews, eighteen and fifteen, whom I love like my own sons. I watch them navigating the treacherous waterways of adolescence, and I see the older one turning his back on his education, and I want to shake them, my eyes wild like some crazy old innkeeper out of H.P. Lovecraft, and make them see. “You have no idea,” I tell them, “how much I’d give to be where you are now, to have it all to do over again, to do it right. To spare myself the years of unhappiness and struggling and working two jobs and second-guessing and having to scrabble with blunt, bloody fingers for everything I’ve got.”

Since I mentioned Rush earlier in this post, I like to joke that pretty much all of Neil Peart’s lyrics can be boiled down to one phrase: “Just Do It.” (All due apologies to Nike for appropriating their slogan.)

Put another way: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” Robert Browning once wrote, “or what’s a heaven for?”

I’ve come to grips with the fact that I’ll never fire up the old time machine again. I’m not going to get to pop back to the ’80s, Doctor Who or Quantum Leap-style, and rewrite my own personal history. I can’t retroactively erase the pain, the heartaches, the setbacks and embarrassments lying in wait for Past Kevin. And that’s fine.

But there are some things I’d like to do for Future Kevin, and right now my reach is exceeding the hell out of my grasp, and heaven seems nowhere in sight. I’d like to get a full-time job. I want to get this book finished and published, and make at least enough money so that I can write another one. And I want to lose thirty pounds. I’m having to learn a whole new kind of patience as I sit here at my computer, or drive to the YMCA, and lay the groundwork for the life I want to have.

And that life feels so distant, so ephemeral, that the demon in my skin starts offering tempting alternatives: “Let’s blow off the writing and the resume-polishing and the freelance work and spend the day on the couch,” he says. “We’ll catch up on our reading and the current season of Justified, with a twelve-piece box of Popeyes chicken and a fifth of Jack Daniel’s finest whiskey for company.  Whaddaya say?”

When he comes, I close my eyes and play back that speech to my nephews. “Don’t waste what you’ve got,” I tell them, and myself. “What you do now matters. Today. This moment. It matters more than you can imagine.”

And just for good measure, I picture Neil drumming away, the Nike swoosh looming behind him, and tell myself those three little words.

“Just Do It.”