Things I Like/Dislike About Ron Howard And His Family: Clint Howard, "(New Wave) Dog Day"

It's hard just to look...

Project: The 1983 song "(New Wave) Dog Day", by the Kempsters

Howard Involved: Clint... lead singer of the band

Description of Project: Dear God. Clint Howard, world's coolest ugly guy, our most clearly personified example of nepotism, was the lead singer of a rock band named the Kempsters. Currently opening for the Who, the Kempsters have achieved multiplatinum... nah I'm just kidding. They're a simple instance of a rock band getting a shrivel of the spotlight because a member is (arguably) famous. The song is called "(New Wave) Dog Day", and it's a by-the-numbers punk song from the '80s.

Clint Howard's Role In Achievements/Failures: Sorry Clint, "(New Wave) Dog Day"'s flaws are all on you, buddy. You'd expect the song of a Clint Howard to sound pretty ragged, but it actually is sort of bouncy with a simple surf-rock structure. The guitar lick is pretty catchy, and the rest of the instrumentation is fairly tight. The reason that "(New Wave) Dog Day" is terrible seems to solely rest on Mr. Howard. As a lead vocalist who doesn't play an instrument, you need to be able to sing, and sadly Clint Howard has pipes that even Chad Kroeger would even shake his empty head at. The song is performed in sort of a snarl, with Howard repeatedly mugging in the video and barking orders to the millions of people watching. As the rest of the band plays their instruments dutifully, Clint dances around them like a goading monkey, commanding his troops with unsightly bravado. The lyrics aren't too savory either: "Acting this way too long! I don't tell the room to run! I'd blow out my brains to get away from the pain, but it wouldn't be much fun!" is a sample verse, and sung/talked by Howard, it's unlistenable. I mean, I don't wanna take potshots at the guy, but c'mon, he doesn't contribute one good thing to the song.

Interestingly, I enjoy watching "(New Wave) Dog Day"'s makeshift video for several reasons. First of all, Clint Howard has hair: it's orange like Ron's and stringy like Bozo's. Also, the enthusiasm from the rest of the band is pretty surreal. You can sort of tell that they fucking worship Clint, and think he is the coolest guy in any room. I'd also like to point the drummer's facial expression at 1:13, because it terrorizes my dreams regularly. Everyone's wearing referee-esque black-and-white stripes, and Clint is sporting some spiffy suspenders. Finally, the dancing that Clint Howard performs in the video is absolutely worth giving the video a look. He sort of spaz-dances, but in an assured way: constantly shaking the mic that he's holding in his gnarled hand and weaving from left to right, as if to pounce at any second, Howard is admittedly awkward but is enjoying the hell out of himself. My personal favorite part is at 1:27, where it looks like he's lost control of his shoulders and is trying to see how far he can go with that development.

Like/Dislike: Oh hell, how can you NOT like this? The song sucks, sure, but that was a given. Howard knows that the band is bollocks, but you know, he's really having a ball with his soon-to-be-departed hair. Plus, there's a reason that this will go down in history: it forever dispells the myth that you have to look good to be the lead singer of a band. If you show me a picture of someone you think is uglier than Clint Howard, I will proceed to tear up the picture and direct you to my laptop's tiled background of a Clint Howard picture, which shall burn your eyes with the heat of a thousand suns. No, Clint Howard is ugly's spokesman, and he was the lead singer of the Kempsters! Sure, it immediately doomed the band from attaining any kind of success, but it still has to be looked at as groundbreaking. Clint Howard basically does whatever the hell he wants, and if he wants to be the lead singer of a shitty punk band, no one can stop the man. No one should. He continues to be an inspiration. "(New Wave) Dog Day" makes me like Ron Howard and his family significantly more.

Yeah, we'll see. Just wait until I discuss "Lady in the Water".

Overrated: Every Song on Robyn's "Robyn" Except "Be Mine!"

Konichiwa, bitches!

I first heard that Swedish pop singer Robyn, who scored a couple forgettable hits in the U.S. with "Do You Know (What It Takes)" and "Show Me Love" in the late '90s, was still alive in 2005, when Stylus Magazine (R.I.P., homeboys) praised the hell out of her new disc. They named "Robyn", which was apparently a huge hit in Sweden, the fourth best album of 2005, unthinkably (to me) pushing it above "Illinois" and "I Am a Bird Now". They also put the album's lead single, "Be Mine!", at #4 on that year's singles list, and basically called it a perfect pop song. When I read these year-end lists, Stylus had already exposed me to the beautiful pop tendencies of Annie and Hello Saferide, so needless to say I was anxious to hear an album like this, which they so clearly loved. So I looked for it online, and dammit, I couldn't find the thing anywhere.

So I waited and waited, and kept searching for the album. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and after a while I resigned myself to never finding the album and stopped searching for it. Then, by some genius stroke of luck a few weeks ago, I found it, and eagerly downloaded it. I was really, really excited for this thing. When it finally landed in my iTunes, I listened to the whole thing straight through, starting, of course, with "Be Mine!".

And after weeks of dealing with "Robyn", I've realized that Stylus got it half-right: "Be Mine!" is an absolutely fantastic song, arguably one of the best of the decade. The rest of "Robyn", though, sucks.

Well, SUCKS is a harsh word, and the album certainly is not terrible. Maybe it just sounds a lot worse to me because I built it up so high in my mind, especially after hearing "Be Mine!" But there's nothing here that connects to me. A lot of the tracks are examples of faceless glitch-pop, with uninspired arrangements and simple lyrics. Also, the personality Robyn establishes on the album -- girl in control! victim of love problems! -- is just tired and downright annoying at points. Half-decent songs like "Bum Like You" never fully develop and repeat their choruses until they're driven into the ground. Other tracks such as "Who's That Girl", which Stylus' Jessica Popper praised as "one of the best electro-pop singles I've heard recently", simply fail at everything they try to accomplish. The chorus is trash, the synths are distracting, and the line "Good girls are pretty, like all the time/ I'm just pretty, some of the time" reeks of a concept that hasn't panned out. "Good girls are happy, and satisfied/ I won't stop asking, until I die." Yeah, Robyn, you're unique, you're freaking amazing, you kick ass, we get it.

But that's what most of "Robyn" is: telling us, and not showing us. Witness "Konichiwa Bitches", which is basically a list of ways Robyn is fucking better than you. She will take you on if you rumble in her jungle; if you mess with her on the North Pole she will ice you, son; saw you in half like a magician, as well as count you out like a mathematician (...?); she's even more sweeter than a cherry bomb (...???); and finally, you have nothing on her, because, alas, you knows you a bum. This song sucks, and delves into creepy David Banner territory with the line "Cummin in your mouth, make you say 'yum, yum!'" Like "Konichiwa Bitches", most of the other songs on the album are just musically boring. It's as if Robyn dodged a trip to the Synth Store and instead rummaged through Kylie Minogue's garbage, pillaging from her rejected beats. Ideas are half-complete, and the structure of each song is so similar that it's difficult for one to stick with you. I don't know, maybe I'm just not hearing something that Stylus did, but Robyn feels like a caricature, and "Robyn" feels rushed. I mean, it's got "Cobrastyle" on it! It can't be that amazing.

But fuck it, if I saw "Robyn" in a record store (and apparently it'll be available in the States soon), I'd probably buy it, just to own "Be Mine!" on some sort of disc besides the multiple mix CDs I've made for myself and others. This song will blow you away. I've tried listening to other contemporary, and personally beloved, girl-pop songs like Annie's "Heartbeat" and The Pipette's "Pull Shapes" and I keep coming to the conclusion that "Be Mine!" is ten times better than them. Every time I hear Robyn declare "It's a good thing tears never show in the pouring rain" over those racing strings as the curtain goes up and the song begins, my heart skips a beat. The song is pure sugar.

What's remarkable about "Be Mine!" from a contextual perspective is that it basically achieves what every other song on "Robyn" fails to. Robyn is still the strong-willed heroine from the rest of the disc, but the song's admitted vulnerability adds a different shade to her two-dimensional persona. The voice is quivering, not assured, and we realize that Robyn actually is human. Jesus, Robyn really wants the guy she's singing about. The lyrics are very direct and all the more powerful because of it. "You looked happy, and that's great... I just miss you, that's all," she says, wide-eyed and full of regret in a spoken-word bridge. And compared to the dance-mongering blips of the rest of the album, the strings on "Be Mine!" sound urgent and indispensable. Building as the song progresses, they cut deepest into you at the chorus, then spiral back down. The chorus doesn't disappoint, either: it may be the song's most simplistic section lyrically, but the line "But you never were, and you never will, be mine" is the song's emotional climax, and the refrain is vital rather than stiff.

So I can disagree with Stylus' overall analysis of the album, but I can't disparage them, because I never would have discovered "Be Mine!" without them. Maybe I'll never understand what they saw in "Robyn", but I give them huge props for giving me another piece of pop magnificence.

TV Me: "America's Psychic Challenge"

And I have seen Hell, and it was on Lifetime...

So I had a pretty shitty weekend. Went to the Eagles game (they got F'ed in the A), lost in fantasy football, saw "American Gangster". And although "Mighty Joe Young" is on TBS right now and things are improving, what I really wanna do is vent right now, so I'm going to turn my attention to the disturbing fascination the Lifetime (television for women) network has started to develop for psychic shows.

There was a terrific episode in season six of "South Park" that dealt with Jon Edward, who was the popular television psychic around that time. I won't go too deep into the episode, but it basically showed that Edward was using cold-reading techniques to trick people into believing he had a special power. At the end of the episode, he gets taken aboard an alien spaceship and brought to an intergalactic awards ceremony, where he wins the honor of "Biggest Douche in the Universe", to his whiny chagrin. The best part of the episode was actually the commentary on the DVD of season six; most of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's commentaries are uncensored and hysterical, but this one was particularly special. Parker explained why he believes that people like Jon Edward, who fake telepathy and profit off of the misplaced beliefs of others, are the absolute worst people in the entire world, and he was dead serious about it. Parker says something to the degree of, "there is nothing worse that you can do. Nothing."

I used to think that Parker was exaggerating, but after watching the first episode of "America's Psychic Challenge", now I'm not so sure. The show hurt me and offended me on every level. Usually the only show on Lifetime to do this is "The Nanny". Not anymore.

The basic premise of the show is simple and silly: group four psychics together and make them jump through hoops to see who is the most legitimately "psychic". Already the show is flawed to me. If you're, ya know, legitimately psychic, aren't you just COMPLETELY psychic? In other words, couldn't you just perform all of the activities the show has lined up without breaking a sweat because they all require simple psychic ability, which you apparently possess?

But no. With the use of some wacky voice-overs and tool host John Burke, "America's Psychic Challenge" inadvertantly disproves that none of its contestants are fa real. On the show's first episode, we meet blonde girl Jackie, bald dude Jamie, creepy lady Karyn, and bespectacled gal Zenobia, who all are 100% positive that they are psychic. However, they all fail the first exercise miserably. Burke takes them, like a douchebag, to an almost-empty hospital, and they have to use their powers to guess which one room out of thirty holds a person sitting in a chair. The correct room is 215, and I kept waiting for one of the psychics to walk into the hospital and casually say, "Duh, the guy's obviously in 215." Unforunately, all four contestants guess wrong, although bald dude Jamie is really really happy because he guessed 214, which gets him 10 points. Wait... what? But... he guessed the wrong room...

Later, the contestants are taken to a room with a big wall in the middle, and are challenged to guess which "celebrity" is behind it, using only their minds and a folder with a picture of the celebrity in it, which they cannot open. Okay. The "celebrity" is Lisa Williams, who happens to have her own psychic show on Lifetime! Suddenly I'm thinking, "Oh great, all of these idiots are gonna guess it right, because they're psychic and she's psychic and she'll obviously help them by sending them brain signals." But again I was wrong: not only did they not have to guess what specific celebrity was behind the wall, but all they had to do was vaguely describe this person. Things such as "The eye, I see something with an eye..." and "Something with music, they have some involvement with music" were said. Lisa Williams was impressed: "Yes, I WAS involved in some way with music!" she uttered, astonished. Creepy lady Karyn did not understand the test, so she got visibly frustrated and started standing very close to John Burke. She later professed a deep resentment for the test, begging for me to say, "Hate the player, not the game!" and my friends to eyeball me strangely.

I should at this point mention that, before each commercial break, us TV watchers were given our own psychic tests! One of them featured four face-down playing cards, and a voice-over asked, "Can you locate the jack of diamonds?" Another showed a woman walking down the street and the voice-over smugly prodded, "Where is this woman from? Washington, Minnesota, or New York?" The answers were revealed after the commercial break; my friend got the second one correct, so she left the room to pursue a career using her own psychic ability.

None of the preceding events on the show are very dumb, but none could be classified as offensive. It is unfortunate, then, that the show's third segment tested my faith in humanity as a whole. Like an idiot, Burke led the four psychics to the residence of the Martinez family, whose son had been killed in a drive-by shooting a few years earlier. The family decided that they wanted to reach out to the psychic community, as a sort of last resort to bring the boy's killer to justice. The challenge for the contestants (and I'm not making this up, I swear to you, all of these things happened) was to walk around the residence and use their psychic abilities to identify as much as they could about the death, about which they had been given no information. They each walked around the living room and front yard, closing their eyes and taking guesses about the nature of the death. Bespectacled Zenobia got the closest, saying that the death was a murder that had occurred in the yard, while the other three psychics were pretty much way off. The Martinez family, watching the psychics on a video screen, started tearing up with emotion. They liked Zenobia so much that they decided to bring her back for a private reading, which was (of course) captured for us to see. When asked about whether their son was okay in the afterlife, the confident Zenobia assured them that he was, and that he was very "proud of his family". The Martinez family then asked whether or not the killer would ever be brought to justice, and Zenobia said that she sees a courtroom in the future, and that progress would indeed be made. The family, fully relieved, hugged Zenobia and thanked her from the bottom of their hearts.

This scene made me start to agree with Trey Parker. I don't care if these lying nutjobs want to flaunt their psychic powers in childish little tests (that they couldn't even kind of pass), but why the HELL would you allow people trying to find a little more screen time tinker with the emotions of a family still grieving from the loss of their son? And why would you then broadcast this shit as Lifetime original entertainment?? This is the business of profiting off of the vulnerability of people grasping at straws for answers, and it's deeply shameful. Don't these people secretly know they can't talk to the dead, and that it's all been just an act? How can you do something like this?

After the challenge, two "winners" were crowned, and it was announced that they would move on to the quarterfinals of the show. I'm guessing that this process will be repeated until the show has found someone either legitimitely psychic and all-knowing, or really fucking good at guessing things. But for me, it's already down the drain. Lifetime (television for women), I don't care how many quips you allow Bea Arthur to release on your network, this is just inexcusable. "America's Psychic Challenge" isn't even fun to make fun of... it's just sad.

Although I do enjoy an occasional ribbing of host John Burke. Man, that guy's a dickwad!

Good Songs People Forget About: Third Eye Blind, "Never Let You Go"

That girl IS like a sunburn...

I've always addressed Third Eye Blind in a similar fashion to the way I react to Matchbox Twenty, or Smash Mouth. They seem like nice-enough guys who amicably trotted out a few huuuge rock songs in the mid- to late- nineties, and these songs were either overstated in their happiness or pensive in their emotion. Okay, come to think of it, Smash Mouth were just always on the bright fucking side, but as for 3IB and Matchbox Twenty, you could either smile or cry. Matchbox had "The Real World" to brighten yer day, and "3 A.M." and "Push" to shove you to the ground. Third Eye Blind was even more black-and-white to me: on their first album (the one everybody bought), "Semi-Charmed Life" redefined happy-go-lucky, while "How's It Going To Be" and "Jumper" were Mope City. On their second album (the one nobody bought), "Never Let You Go" brightened the mood, and "Deep Inside Of You" killed it. I think you get my point. These bands operated in one vein or the other, and this worked because, after luring in the masses with their inoffensive ditty, they got them to "relate" with their pseudo-ballads. I could also talk about the Goo Goo Dolls, but who the hell ever wants to talk about the Goo Goo Dolls?

Like I previously mentioned, Third Eye Blind's second album, "Blue", didn't sell very well, and this is not due to the quality of the songs, but because "Never Let You Go" never connected with a wide-enough audience, so "Deep Inside Of You" went unnoticed. Oh, they got some radio play, sure, but nothing even close to "Semi-Charmed Life" and "Jumper" levels. This time around, Third Eye Blind's bait didn't work, so they didn't have anything to reel in. It's a damn shame, for two simple reasons: "Deep Inside Of You", if not as hooky as "Jumper", is still a better-written song, and "Never Let You Go" is the best song Third Eye Blind will ever create, and one of the best pop songs I've ever heard. Take another listen. It's perfect.

It's physically difficult for me to talk about just how right Third Eye Blind got it with this one, because all of the elements of this song are indescribably flawless. In order to understand how catchy, fun, dumb, honest, relatable, and positive this song is, you just have to listen to it. But I'll try my best to replicate the feeling into words, I really will.

The whole effect of the song can be summed up within the first eight seconds: a guitar strums a few simple chords, then an electric guitar barrels onto it before the drums kick in. Singer Stephen Jenkins can be heard letting out a "WHOO!" as the cymbals crash down, as if the celebratory exclamation was the only way he could formally react to the small musical climax. God, there's already so much joy in this song before one lyric is uttered.

The verses? The verses are irrelevant, my friend. Yeah I know, that's silly, but it's true for this song. Each one is composed of four lines, and the lines are usually no more than six syllables. Witness verse two: "You say that I've changed/ And maybe I did/ But even if I changed/ What's wrong with it?" Hack writing, you're thinking. And that's understandable, but you're missing the point: if Third Eye Blind could have just made this song three and a half minutes of the chorus, they would have. The verses are placefillers with gee-golly lyrics, just so there's SOME gap between the blissful chorus. Personally, I think the simplicity of the verses adds to the divine sing-along effect of the song, since nearly everyone can figure out the lyrics after a listen or two. Less big words, less chance to screw up!

Oh then there's the chorus, which is soaked in Stephen Jenkins' glorious, glorious falsetto. He starts by simply outlining that he will, in fact, never let you go, and repeats this three times just so you're not confused. Jenkins sings these lines with such boyish charm that you can't help but think, hey, he WON'T ever let me go, what a great/devoted guy! Then he ALMOST says it a fourth time, but transitions into, "I never let you turn around your back on each other/ That's a good idea, break a promise to your mother/ Turn around your back on each other". More rocking-out falsetto, and it's perfectly delivered, with the words "turn" and "good" stretched out for added effect. The chorus is repeated many, many times, and instead of getting sick of it, you grow to love it a little more each time.

It helps that the song's structure is more complex than the verse-chorus set-up. After the second chorus, there's some fist-pumping guitar work, and Jenkins comes in with the bridge, "And all our friends are gone and gone/And all the time moves on and on/And all I know is it's wrong it's wrong/ And all I know is it's wrong..." The last part is echoed, and cuts straight to the third verse, which is only guitar and vocals. This is obviously the "sensitive" part of the song, and Jenkins' words of hope ring out with severe vulnerability. The sunny chorus then bowls it over, reassuring you, the listener, that everything will indeed be okay.

After about nine more choruses, you get to the end of the song, which is still shocking to me to this day. The guitar riff plays out one more time, and then... Stephen Jenkins starts sort-of rapping!! But it's not whiteboy Bubba Sparxxx rapping, no, not at all. Jenkins playfully fucks with the theme of the song and talk-sings about... well, everything. The stupid things! The mood rings! The bracelets, and the beads! If I meet somebody and they don't know every single word to this breakdown, it's difficult for me to befriend them. It's my favorite part of the song, it's your favorite part of the song, it's the best thing Third Eye Blind ever recorded, it's the best part of ANY song...? No, probably not, but I cherish it as a piece of pop heaven.

So why wasn't this as revered as "Semi-Charmed Life"? Because it doesn't have that intangible element that makes it instantly identifiable to a large number of people the way "Semi-Charmed Life" had that "do, do, DO! do, do, DO, DO!" part. Listening to "Never Let You Go" now, though, I just find it depressing that there are no more songs like this on FM radio. If you want rock, you have to be insufferably ironic (Panic! at the Disco, Fall Out Boy to a lesser extent) or middle-of-the-road tough and awful (Nickelback, Hinder) to make the pop station. I know these things work in cycles, so I'm guessing we're about 2 years away from the next onslaught of boy bands and the newest incarnation of Britney Spears, and hopefully they will also bring the happy-go-lucky modern rock bands back to the charts. I know you hated Smash Mouth, but c'mon, is HINDER better?

Third Eye Blind is playing in Philly in less than two weeks. Trading in my indie cred for one night to see them wouldn't be that bad... right?