New Rules (of rock n' roll) Vol. 1

Let me tell ya, I LOVE Bill Maher. His show Real Time (I know cool right?) w/ Bill Maher is the best show on television. The last segment of every episode is 'New Rules', and it's always the greatest 6 minutes of intelligent and important comedy I've ever witnessed.

Well... I may not be as smart or as funny as Bill, but I'm easily just as opinionated... so with that, the first installment of a new 4RMUSIC series... that I'll be calling 'New Rules (of rock n' roll)'. (Bill is also more creative at naming things than me) ;-)

In honour of Hump Day, all these new rules have a common theme:

New Rule: Moms, if you buy your 12 year old daughter Miley Cyrus CDs and DVDs, and then let her watch Miley work the pole at the Teen Choice Awards, you aren't allowed to leave nasty messages on my phone when your daughter turns 18 and is doing the same thing in my bedroom.

New Rule: Katy Perry needs to be done with wearing those one piece shorts-and-halter outfits. Hot hot girl, not hot look. Try a mini shirt and a misriff-bearing T or something... yeah it's cliche... yeah it's skanky... yeah it's Brittney (wow I just said the same thing three times), but on you Katy, it'd work... and I promise that the next time you kissed a girl, I'd like it.

New Rule: Chris Martin and Gwenyth Paltrow need to stop having sex. #1 no one needs to picture these to anemic albinos jumping each other's bones (because that's all that's there), and #2, the world doesn't need to be blessed with kids named Tandy or Commodore 64.

New Rule: Kelly Clarkson has to stop releasing singles with sexual overtones. Yuck. Now... I've lived my life, and I assure you there isn't one plain faced chubby girl in the world that wouldn't hook up at every opportunity... and the only time Ms. Clarkson has ever woke up in Vegas, it was under the $1.99 buffet table at Circus Circus.

New Rule: Quit questioning me when I tell you a song is about masturbating. Jackson Browne was not in love with a girl named 'Rosie', Steven Tyler wasn't professing his love for Olympic swimming when he said "back stroke lover always hiding 'neath the covers", Billy Idol couldn't find anyone else in site on a crowded lonely night... so what do you think "my love vibrations" means?!?!?!? and Cyndi Lauper wasn't trying to start a new dance fad called the 'She Bop'. Oh yeah... 'Pump It Up'? Not about cranking the volume on your stereo.

And finally...

New Rule: If you're going to sing about sex, be SEXY about it.
Sex drugs and rock n' roll... right. It only takes a half hour of listening to commercial radio or an hour of surfing indie bands on MySpace to know there's not many getting rock n' roll right, and we live in a day and age where your local Shopper's pharmacist has better shit than your buddy that never sleeps on the other side of town does... but you'd think sex would be pretty tough to wreck.

Apparently not.

Somewhere along the road, sex pretty much left rock n' roll... Through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, guys wanted to pick up a guitar because they were convinced it would get them laid. It did. They wrote about it... in clever and slithery ways... and that vibe had as much to do with what made rock n' roll as the music itself. Girls will always find fame hot, so there's still guys getting laid out there, but something went wrong, and now Gerard Way finds himself in 8 person orgies and then gets up, gets dressed, and writes about how depressed he is. I mostly blame emo... easily the most sexless sub-genre in rock n' roll history. Really, girls have left band guys since the beginning... deal with it. Emo songwriters remind me of that pathetic buddy that breaks up with his girl, so you take him to a club and he spends the whole night whining about it.

This is not to say there aren't some guys trying to inject some actual sex into their music... they're just really, really awful in going about it. When Vince Neil or Taime Downe or Rod Stewart or hell even Mark Farner sang about banging strippers, you could hear that they wanted to do her right (probably so she'd tell her stripper friends), then take provocative pictures of her in sexy poses, and then get right back in there for rounds 2 and 3 and... That's rock n' roll.
When Chad Kroeger sings about banging a stripper, he sounds like he wants to finish up, scratch his belly, roll over, fart, and go to sleep.

Chad, emo boys, et al, you should stick to Dancing With Yourselves.

Chris F'n Real.