This is an old, unedited “Where’s The Street Team” as I turned it in to my editors at Magnet Magazine. A far better version appeared in print last year.

INTRO

This is the one year anniversary of Where’s The Street Team. Frankly, I feel a little under appreciated. I’m no martyr, but a Hawaiian-themed potluck (all low-carb) in my honor might have been nice, or a brand new Pontiac Vibe (Teal), or at the very least, the director’s cut of Daddy Daycare on DVD. Want to know what I got? My editors filled a used padded envelope with CD’s and strapped it to the back of a feral dog. They then pointed in the direction of my home, which happens to be 1006.55 miles from the Magnet offices (that potluck still would have been a nice gesture). Or at least it this my best guess, as I just got the package today and the column is due TOMORROW. No respect. Let it be known that several homeless people rifled through its contents and PUT EVERYTHING BACK.

ENTRIES

HELMET
Unsung: The Best Of Helmet (1991-1997)
The asphyxiating, testosterone-vomiting hate rock of yore has little relevance other than its hand in hatching the nü-metal scene. Sucker-punch bass, grinding or quasi-metal guitars and someone barking lyrics about licking the inside of a vacuum-cleaner bag or abducted children. It was the soundtrack to the early-90s heroin scourge that left an indelible pockmark across the underground music scene as cat litters went unchanged for months on end. Helmet were at the frontline, and even more so than their contemporaries, probably created the most poorly aged music of all time. Though not indicative of Helmet’s overall sound, I challenge you to find a less savory (yet creepily prescient) moment in rock than “Just Another Victim,” the collaboration with Hour Of Pain for the Judgment Night soundtrack. Credit Interscope with some impeccable timing on this one. Uh, I jest. Page Hamilton was always a hoot, with the constant John Coltrane name-dropping and the Glenn Branca ensemble membership. Congrats. My groundskeeper was in a Branca ensemble. Helmet riff equals John Coltrane? No, Helmet riff equals the mental image of being raped in a locker room.

VINES
Winning Days
When trying to drum up something disparaging to say about these future
cable-TV installers, I found out Craig Nichols is 27 years old. Whoa.
That’s really old for a guy whose entire career is based around some
chair-tossing and, oh yeah, fronting Silverchair Round Two. Fame is going to chew this little nimrod up into a thousand pieces, and it won’t be pretty. 100% ignorant man-child and none of the mysterious and frustrated genius that the press loves to trump up. Mmmm…I’d be frustrated if I had a 68 IQ and was in a holding pattern of poorly written grunge pop and scripted, night-by-night, Sprite Remix-sponsored destruction. But if I had a 68 IQ, would I even know any of this?

DIZZEE RASCAL
Boy In Da Corner
Not hip because it’s good. Popular because white people are afraid
they’re missing out on something. Oh, and why hasn’t this been called out for sampling almost an entire Billy Squire song?

COURTNEY LOVE
America¹s Sweetheart
MELISSA AUF DER MAUR
Auf Der Maur
Yes, we all know she sucks, but has anyone ever sucked for so many different reasons? The pickin’s are far from slim: Her trying to upstage mourners and vie for attention at Joe Strummer’s funeral, the fact that she considers herself a female role model (the message being that it’s ok to be a wildly irritating junkie whore), her unscrupulous hording of the Nirvana back catalog, an entire career of sub-mediocrity written by other people, oh, and she’s more than likely a cold-blooded murderer. Pure evil walks the earth on many levels. You have low-profile evil, which would be a Freon-inhaling animal torturer living in the proto-sprawl of Wichita, Kan.; then you have high-profile evil, which would be Love. This comeback album of fabricated vitriol and slack celebrity statements is the rock and roll equivalent to a 45-year-old divorced dad showing up on casual Friday with highlighted tips and head-to-toe Fubu. America’s Sweetheart will flop like a fish if there is any justice, but you see, the past 10 years would dictate that public common sense and Love aren’t bedfellows.

Melissa Auf Der Maur, bless her soon-to-be forgotten heart, did the
smart thing with Hole: She bit her tongue and waited until the band broke up. Had she jumped ship, she might’ve ended up like her predecessor, Kristin Pfaff, dead in a bathtub of a “heroin overdose.” Auf Der Maur’s solo album sounds like the mid-90s came back and took a big shit all over the place, but it’s a shit that’s nonetheless easily hosed off into obscurity. Bad album? You have one guess.

ATMOSPHERE/SLUG

Back in the Fox Network’s docu-tragedy heyday, I missed “When Wiggers Discover The Thesaurus.” This is easily the worst thing to happen to the backpack since the suicide bomber. Rock might be a young man’s game, but count this as perhaps the least dignifying hobby for someone over 30.

ICARUS LINE

Along with the content of this column, Buddyhead is proof positive that caustic music writing is creatively bankrupt. Buddyhead employ dockworker’s slang (plenty ‘o references to female genitalia) to make fun of sluggish targets like nu-metal and pop punk. Nothing too close to home is ever breached - home being the indie-rock ghetto - including their flagship band The Icarus Line - and The Icarus Line toured as openers for A Perfect Circle. Being a “confrontational” stage act is the new bisexual, or the new metal or whatnot. No wait, I’m awake. Really, I was just examining the backs of my eyelids while this incoherent, soft, matching-outfit (the one-sheet calls this “their trademark”) rock implosion stumbles through sloppy emo that hey…..just might jump off the stage and swing a guitar at you. Enter GallagherCore. Positive reviews have crowned them the next Drive Like Jehu, I’d like to crown them the next band having to pay back a major label advance by working at Kinkos. There must be an award somewhere for being this loud while your sound goes nowhere.