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The World According to Scott
This is the section of my site that is strictly reserved for my opinions, my beliefs, and whatever I feel like talking about at the moment. It's updated generally on a fairly regular basis, so check back to see what the most recent things on my mind are.
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Kathryn is going to be working with the promoter for the Musefest festival doing some of the marketing & publicity. I've gotten asked to write a 500 word feature on one of the bands that will be playing, Lost Sailors, for the magazine that is produced about the bands for the event. This ought to be interesting.
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This weekend is the Ithaca Festival. Should be cool. We haven't had the chance to catch all of it in the past few years, so we're looking forward to it. Our friend Aaron Raitiere will be playing on Friday afternoon. We saw him open for Edie Carey at Juna's Cafe last weekend.
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We have tickets to AFI on 7/7 in Rochester, NY. They're playing at the Water Street Music Hall. I'm pretty psyched about this. I bought their "Sing the Sorrow" album out of curiosity, & pretty much haven't stopped playing it since (for a review, click here). The show had originally been scheduled for 5/13, but the date got changed at the last minute (3 days for the gig). While that was a bummer, at least it wasn't cancelled. This should be interesting, because this will be the first time in a long time that I've been to a club show for a major band.
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Got to visit the Six Mile Creek Winery last week with Kathryn & some friends. Cool place.
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Jessica Lynch has "no memory" of what happened to her. Now her parents have been told NOT to discuss their daughter's situation, as it's "still an ongoing investigation." And, a number of the Iraqi employees who were working in the hospital she was being held in have been interviewed & claimed there was no resistance given to the soldiers who arrived to "rescue" her, & that they even chose to not use keys that were offered to them, & opted to break down or shoot through doors instead. Jeez, does this seem fishy to anyone out there, or is it just me?
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Against my better judgment, I watched the MTV: Icon Metallica show last night. Now, I've been a Metallica fan since 1987, when I was 19 years old. What exactly does this mean & why should you care, you ask? Well, now that Metallica are being treated as some sort of cultural icons, no one really seems to remember that they weren't always as popular as they are today. In fact, only the people who really knew who Metallica were, were the only ones buying their albums & listening to their music. No one on a mass appeal type of level even paid any attention to them until they released a video for the song "One." Then, that same year (1989 was when the video was released, the album "...And Justice For All" came out in the fall of '88), they were actually headliners doing an arena tour. I saw them that summer in Weedsport, NY, & remembered thinking that I was really surprised that they had gone from being an underground band that only people I knew listened to, to being a major touring act.
And then, in August of 1991, they released the "black" album, & nothing's ever been the same since. Suddenly, everyone wanted to bang their head & mosh & claimed that they were "metalheads." It was fairly disconcerting I thought, to see the same types of people who up until that point very recently had made fun of, or never would have even considered listening to music like that, claimed they were fans.. Odd... In any case, I've never really understood why they chose to change their sound in order to appeal to a larger mass audience. Metallica had already proven that it wasn't necessary to do that in order to conquer the metal world, but they did it anyway. Then, in June of 1996, they released the "Load" album, which I thought was absolutely terrible & a very conscious effort to sell out even more. I've been pretty skeptical of everything they've done after that, although I did like their "Garage, Inc." album of covers released in 1998.
Metallica was a band that used to be about pride in being exactly who you were, regardless of what everyone else thought. And by being that way, they brought the mountain to them, so to speak. So, being a supporter of the band since my late teens, I have been disappointed again & again by what they've done over the last few years - the whole Napster thing, Jason Newstead getting so fed up he had to leave the band, & then seeing James Hetfield heading to rehab. All I could do was roll my eyes & think, "What's next for these clowns?" Well, after watching the show last night, I think I feel a little differently about the whole thing.
The show was a combination of other performers giving brief testimonials about what Metallica has meant to them, as well as having other bands play cover versions of their songs. In between these segments, they aired interview footage with all the band members, including former bassist Jason Newstead, & I was pleasantly surprised to see that what they were saying was honest, open, & not actually very flattering to themselves. They actually shared what went wrong with the band, & how they've reached the point they're at today. I will admit, I was impressed, & these guys haven't done a single thing in a long time to impress me about anything. They played a brief medley of some of their own stuff at the end of the show, followed by a new track of the upcoming "St. Anger" album entitled "Frantic." The tune rocked, & was reminiscent of old-school Metallica, which gives me hope.
As Jason Newstead himself said on the show, "We should all be rooting for Metallica." If he can say that & believe it, then it gives me hope that I will feel the same way, & see one of my favorite bands come back rocking like they originally always did. We'll see on 6/10/03 when the new album hits the shelves. I've got my fingers crossed that it's as good as I hope it's going to be.
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