Most of you know about the Super Mario Bros video games. Super Mario is in the Guiness Book Of World Records as the best selling video game of all time, with Italian plumber Mario & his brother Luigi. There was even a movie made based on the game, starring Bos Hoskins, John Leguizamo & Dennis Hopper. Here is Theirry Gomez, a classical & flamenco guitarist from Quebec City, doing his version of the Super Mario Bros theme music. This is a difficult piece to do but he does it so well.
Day: July 30, 2007
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Finally the municipality authorities of Greater Cochin have woken up and smelt the stink of a ton of waste! Today, after many days of waiting & holding our noses in disgust at the piles of garbage being stacked on top of each other in numerous locations across town, the row of trucks have come to take away the trash. It is thought to be so bad that the streets might start smelling of the rotting garbage, that all schools, colleges & government offices were closed for the day! Great, but the rest of us harmless folk have to bear the stench, eh?
About bloody time too, as my fellow citizens of this wonderful city will say. In certain areas you are forced to dump the garbage on the side roads since the waste bins are overflowing and they have started flowing onto the streets. When you go in a car on said roads, it makes maneuvering through the piles the garbage like going through in a video game with hurdles & obstacles.
Hey Stoopid – Alice Cooper
Alice Cooper released Hey Stoopid in 1991 and this album along with Welcome To My Nightmare are the two quintessential Alice albums. Well, for me atleast! I consider this album to be a classic, although I am surprised that it didn’t do as well as I used to think. But most hardcore Alice Cooper fans think that Hey Stoopid had better songs than his 1989 smash hit Trash. The album has guest performances from guitar gods Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Vinnie Moore & Slash and also Nikki Sixx & Mick Mars from Motley Crue. Lyrical themes involve strictly drug use/addiction and love/sex. The opening track & title song, Hey Stoopid, is about dumb people who contemplate suicide or a druggie who thinks that narcotics is the answer. The emphasis on ‘Stoopid’ is to show how dumb the singer thinks the two characters are.
Love’s A Loaded Gun is about taking revenge against a cheating lover, with a really cool chorus and some killer guitars. The implication is about killing the cheating woman & the guy she is sneaking out to see; having watched unseen from afar, the protagonist, shoots both of them. Snakebite is about sex and sleeze Alice style. Burning Our Bed is a song about a broken relationship. Dangerous Tonight is a song about sex, or like I would put it, the deflowering of a virgin. My favourite song on the track, lyrics wise, is the ballad Might As Well Be On Mars about estranged lovers and a man pinning for his former lover, but who has moved on in her life, that the guy might as well be on another planet.
Feed My Frankenstein is the most well known of the songs, the video having been heavily promoted on MTV & Alice singing the song in the film Wayne’s World and it being included in the soundtrack album. It features a hot, molten guitar solo from Satriani. This is another favourite Cooper track for many. Hurricane Years is about wild times. Another song about sex & love is Little By Little, while Die For You is a wonderful track about lost love and how the singer would have given up everything for the love of the woman. The sleeze returns in the form of Dirty Deeds, while the autistic character/ alter ego ‘Steven’ in the album closer Wind Up Toy, who appears in an Alice song after a 15 year gap. “Daddy won’t discuss me, oh what a pain I must be, Mommy couldn’t stand having such a wind up boy, doctors want to check me, Poke me and dissect me, What do they expect? Feelings from a wound-up toy?”
With such a collection of great heavy rock tunes, I would have have expected it to be a huge hit but I consider it a classic. Here’s Hey Stoopid.