"The more serious that an artist takes themselves, the easier it is to lampoon them, because it doesn’t take much to pop the bubble of pretentiousness."

"And thankfully [Nirvana had] a good sense of humor about it, too. But there are some songs that people are just, like, waiting for the Weird Al treatment: 'Oh, Al’s going to step in and, like, take this down a peg.'... [S]ometimes my parody didn’t work so well, because I was parodying something that was already perceived as not all that serious.... Most artists in pop culture are very serious.... But I always like to make sure that the artist and songwriters feel respected."

Said Weird Al, quoted in "How Weird Al Spoofed Himself/In a new bio-pic, the singer applies his talents to a surprising subject: his own rise to stardom" (The New Yorker).

Al reveals that the reason Daniel Radcliffe was chosen to play the lead in the bio-pic is that he'd done this...

 

"With a libretto written by... first-time opera makers, the show has Rousselle largely mumbling, rather than singing. Her mumbles are then translated..."

"... for the audience using supertitles.... Despite the opera’s central character being named Blake, 'the only reason people are going to see this is because of Kurt Cobain’s celebrity,' [said a Cobain biographer].... The idea for making 'Last Days' also had little to do with Cobain as a person, said [Oliver] Leith, the Royal Opera House’s composer-in-residence.... [Agathe Rousselle, who plays the Cobain character] best known for starring in the horror movie 'Titane' as a woman sexually attracted to cars, said... [s]he was bullied at school and one day one of the school’s popular girls threw a CD of Nirvana’s 'Nevermind' at her, sneering, 'That’s the kind of thing you weirdo would listen to,' Rousselle recalled. When she got home, she immediately played it. 'I lost my mind to it,' she said.... [Rousselle] said the opera was not about Cobain, but bigger issues like how 'becoming a myth will kill you' and 'the absurdity of being famous and wanting to disappear when you’re recognizable to pretty much everyone.' The opera could have been made about Amy Winehouse or Janis Joplin and still made the same points, she added."

From "A Kurt Cobain Opera Examines the Myth, Not the Man/The creators of 'Last Days,' an eagerly anticipated opera about a grunge star’s final days, insist it’s really about how society treats its icons" (NYT).

The erstwhile naked baby on the Nirvana "Nevermind" album cover has lost his lawsuit.

The Guardian reports. 

But don't go looking for big ideas about parents consenting to photographs of their children or whether a photo of a naked child is necessarily "child pornography." Does everyone with that album in their home possess child pornography?!

The case was thrown out because of the statute of limitations. He had previously filed a case that was thrown out after he failed to respond in time to the defendants’ motion to dismiss. He refiled, but that turned out to be too late.

I especially like the 1991 segment — mixing the "hello"s from "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with Uncle Leo's "hello" and the "hello" from Jerry's girlfriend's bellybutton.

"The Seinfeld Theme Mixed With A Hit Song From Every Year Seinfeld Was On TV": 

"Spencer Elden, who appeared as a naked baby on one of rock music’s most iconic album covers – Nevermind by Nirvana – is suing the band, claiming he was sexually exploited as a child."

The Guardian reports. 

.... Elden alleges the defendants produced child pornography with the image, which features him swimming naked towards a dollar bill with his genitalia visible.

If that's child pornography, a hell of a lot of people are in possession of child pornography!  

Elden, who was four months old when the image was made, says he has suffered “lifelong damages” from the 1991 album cover, including “extreme and permanent emotional distress with physical manifestations”, plus loss of education, wages, and “enjoyment of life”. The lawsuit claims the image is “sexually graphic”, and says it makes Elden resemble “a sex worker – grabbing for a dollar bill”.

Is a naked penis "sexually graphic"? The photo is framed to draw attention to the baby's penis. There's also that "sex worker" theory: The baby is portrayed as money hungry, reacting to the dollar bill that's the bait on a fishhook. But he's only trying to grab the dollar, not required to do anything sexual to get the dollar. We're asked to believe that if you do something while naked, you're doing something sexual. 

It claims Elden was never paid for appearing on the cover, and that his parents never signed a release form for the image, which was shot specifically for the album cover. It has previously been reported that Elden was paid $250. Elden is seeking damages of at least $150,000 from each of the 15 defendants, plus costs, and asks that the case be tried with a jury.

Oh, pay the model! Good lord, must this poor man spend his entire life reaching out for the money you dangled in front of him? And yet, millions of people have loved the Nevermind baby, and I presume would have celebrated Elden and loved his status as former naked baby. Did he suffer? Extreme and permanent emotional distress? 

In 2016, Elden... said: “Recently I’ve been thinking, ‘What if I wasn’t OK with my freaking penis being shown to everybody?’ I didn’t really have a choice.”

We are all former babies who didn't have a choice in all sorts of things — posed in all kinds of photographs — often naked. It dilutes the meaning of pornography to throw in all nudity. The great art museums are full of nudity, including the nudity of babies (notably Jesus).

"25 years ago today, on September 21, 1993, Nirvana released its third and last studio album, In Utero..."

"... the defiantly raw and noisy follow-up to Nevermind, their much slicker breakthrough album... And if you really want to feel old, think about this: In Utero is an older album today than the Beatles' White Album was on the day In Utero was released!"

Writes my son John on Facebook, with audio and commentary on various album cuts. [ADDED: Also presented in blog form, here, where it's easier to read and enjoy.] Example:

“Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” is one of my favorite Nirvana songs, with manically oscillating guitar noise over relentlessly thumping drums. Most of the song is not quite “radio friendly,” but it gets most melodic in the bridge, with Kurt Cobain offering uncharacteristically straightforward advice: “Hate, hate your enemies/Save, save your friends/Find, find your place/Speak, speak the truth.”

As I wrote in the comments over there:

“Hate, hate your enemies/Save, save your friends...” made me think of a book I just read, which identified that sort of thinking as one of the "three great untruths" that are ruining the American mind...

The book is "The Coddling of the American Mind," which identifies "The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People." From Chapter 3 of the book:

The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently. We are all descended from people who belonged to groups that were consistently better at winning that competition. Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict. When the “tribe switch” is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves. A basic principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds,” which is a useful trick for a group gearing up for a battle between “us” and “them.” In tribal mode, we seem to go blind to arguments and information that challenge our team’s narrative. Merging with the group in this way is deeply pleasurable—as you can see from the pseudotribal as you can see from the pseudotribal antics that accompany college football games.

But being prepared for tribalism doesn’t mean we have to live in tribal ways....

It's not easy to forget that Kurt Cobain committed suicide, but, reading those lyrics, I feel that it's worth reminding you that he shot himself to death less than a year after writing that.  It's hard to know, reading lyrics, whether the writer is speaking in his own voice or inhabiting a persona whose views he hates. Lyrics Genius, annotating those lyrics, says:

Kurt Cobain was not about forgiving one’s enemies. In his personal journal, he wrote:

John Lennon has been my idol all my life but he’s dead wrong about revolution… find a representative of gluttony or oppression and blow the motherfuckers [sic] head off."

And then he blew his own head off, and somebody else blew out John Lennon's heart.

ADDED: Perhaps the Cobain suicide expressed the terrifying old realization: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

"There is a movement here, called JBPWave, which are mixes of Jordan Peterson over this music. This one is an explanation by a British journalist, of what’s happening."

That's a quote from I don't know who, passed along to me by a reader I do know, and linking to this:



ADDED: "This music" — according to the email — refers to "Lofi," defined as "a new offshoot of hip-hop." My understanding of the music term "lo-fi" was not something new or growing out of hip-hop. I remember it as something from the 1990s that grew out of indie rock... but, obviously, the same word could be used independently by 2 different things, either out of ignorance, a desire to confuse, or based on a belief that the earlier usage was more or less dead.

I looked up "lo-fi" in Wikipedia, which confirmed my understanding:

During the 1990s, the media's usage of the word "indie" evolved from music "produced away from the music industry's largest record labels" to a particular style of rock or pop music viewed in the US as the "alternative to 'alternative'". Following the success of Nirvana's Nevermind (1991), alternative rock became a cultural talking point, and subsequently, the concept of a lo-fi movement coalesced between 1992 and 1994. Centered on artists such as Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, Beck, and Pavement, most of the writing about alternative and lo-fi aligned it with Generation X and "slacker" stereotypes that originated from Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X and Richard Linklater's film Slacker (both released 1991). Some of the delineation between grunge and lo-fi came with respect to the music's "authenticity". Even though Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was well known for being fond of Johnston, K Records, and the Shaggs, there was a faction of indie rock that viewed grunge as a sell-out genre, believing that the imperfections of lo-fi was what gave the music its authenticity.

In April 1993, the term "lo-fi" gained mainstream currency after it was featured as a headline in the New York Times. The most widely-read article was published by the same paper in August 1994 with the headline "Lo-Fi Rockers Opt for Raw Over Slick"....

Rap is only mentioned in the "See also" links at the bottom of the article, as Cloud rap ("Cloud rap (also known as trillwave or based music) is a microgenre of hip hop music... typically characterized by its 'hazy,' lo-fi production") and SoundCloud rap ("SoundCloud rap is a music genre that originated on the online audio distribution platform SoundCloud... characterized as 'simplistic, subdued beats, often with snippets of strings and sometimes complemented with emo chords, paired with lyrics that ping-pong between braggadocio and nihilism, with lots of sex and odes to heavy narcotics').

Anyway, as to the use of Jordan Peterson's voice in that music, it reminded me of the time, back in 2005, that my voice — recorded by a student in my Federal Jurisdiction class — was used in a music recording. I love the musical repurposing of spoken word recordings. The very best thing in that category — as far as I know — is Glenn Gould's "The Idea of North" (which I dragged into the conversation last month (about a man who wouldn't listen to the news)) and also back in 2015 ("The country I come from is called The Midwest The North") and in 2009 ("It suddenly dawned on Conan O'Brien that the Palin speech is 'a poem'").

It was kind of short, that thing of making a thing out of shortness.

Twitter acquired Vine in 2013, and now they're packing it in. Twitter lives on, struggling, making a go of 140 characters, but Vine, those loops of 6 seconds, is done.

It was sweet for a time.

To skeptics who sweated our ever-eradicating attention spans—and to creators who were accustomed to telling stories over the course of minutes and hours, not mere seconds—Vine must initially have seemed like a low-brow Beelzebub, a goofy lark for people who wanted instant, swiftly forgettable gratification. But what users and viewers soon discovered was that, by isolating and repeating small moments, Vines could be kind of brilliant: They could amplify a joke, heighten a weird moment’s dream-like goofiness, and make the banal seem beautiful—sometimes all at once.

Like this:



And this:



That's all. It's over. It was always almost over. And now it's really truly over. You're free, at long last, at short first.

25 years ago today: 2 incredibly great albums came out — "Nevermind" (Nirvana) and "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" (The Red Hot Chili Peppers).

My son John puts together a blog post that's so much better than anything I'd be able to say... and I love these albums primarily because he played them and we watched the videos on MTV:

These albums came out a little too early for me to pay attention to them at the time, when I was just 10. But when I started getting into music and playing guitar a few years later, these were two of the very first albums I got, and they both shaped my approach to music.

They're both the kind of album you listen to straight through, over and over, not skipping over any tracks, because each one feels essential, from the hits to the songs you might have forgotten about but are happy to hear when they come on (Nirvana's "Lounge Act," RHCP's "My Lovely Man").

When I made a list of "the 40 greatest grunge songs," I ranked "Lithium," from Nevermind, #1....

Meanwhile — that same day! — the Red Hot Chili Peppers were putting out a 17-song funk masterpiece, Blood Sugar Sex Magik. "Give It Away" captures the essence of the band: gleefully sexual, deceptively simple, rhythmically infectious....

It's hard to imagine a better song-with-video than "Give It Away" — still completely enjoyable after a quarter century...



... the height of cosmic glee hitting the market the same day as that quintessence of dramatic gloom, Nevermind.

The Crack Emcee is on the radio...

... right now. Listen here. [UPDATE: The live broadcast is over now. But you can stream or download it here.]

NOTE: He's there to talk. There's also music that's not his. Don't let me confuse you into mistaking Elvis for Crack.

AT 10:20 CT: The music part is over and Crack is talking now.

AT 10:43: They are going through some kind of countdown of greatest recordings of all time (from the "psychedelic soul" view point), and I like that the Little Richard song is "Rip It Up." That's my favorite Little Richard song. AND: Trying to retrospectively add a Little Richard tag to this blog, I discover a hidden reference to Little Richard in the dialogue from the Beatles' movie "Hard Day's Night": "Have you no natural resources of your own?... You could learn more by gettin' out there and living!"/"Out where?"/"Any old where! But not our little Richard. Oh, no. When you're not thumpin' them pagan skins you're tormenting your eyes with that rubbish."

AT 10:50: Crack gives a shout-out to "Meade and Ann."

AND: Actually the countdown is of Uncle Ray’s Top 100 Albums. You can see the whole list here. Little Richard's "Little Richard, “Here’s Little Richard," is #78, and I don't know the criteria for picking the track from the album.

11:10: After Uncle Ray says he loves on-line trolls, Crack disagrees and says: "It can get very dark." And the next subject is Nirvana, because Nirvana's "Unplugged" is next on the list (at #74). Crack expresses great appreciation for Kurt Cobain, "including the way he took himself out. He was very definitive about that." The album cut playing is "All Apologies."

11:25: Discussion of the n-word. (NSFW on the music that follows.)

11:42: After Ray played Meatloaf (which I had to turn way down), Crack said: "Meatloaf is the perfect example of why The Ramones were so necessary."

11:45: Crack finds more misogyny in Led Zeppelin than in rap.

11:55: Ray says Crack will be back next week "unless you get a job," and Crack says: "You're as bad as people on line."

Take a sad song and make it... sadder.

"Hey Jude in Minor Scale. Smells Like Teen Spirit in Major Scale. The Final Countdown in Major. Beat It in Major. Losing My Religion in Major."

That's all digital manipulation of the original recording. Presumably, cover versions changing from major to minor or the other way around are very common.

ADDED: My son John IMs me that my presumption is wrong and offers this excellent demonstration of why it's a bad idea:



(If you don't know what that's supposed to sound like, here's the original.)

Paul McCartney performs with what's left of Nirvana — Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and Pat Smear.

At the Concert for Sandy Relief, they played a new song:

It was a stomping riff like a grunge homage to the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” and it looked like Mr. McCartney was having fun belting lyrics like “Mama, watch me run/Mama let me have some fun” as the band bashed away. 

Would Kurt Cobain have approved? On the one hand, why should that matter? He checked out. But also:

The Beatles were an early and lasting influence on Cobain; his aunt Mari remembers him singing "Hey Jude" at the age of two.

That was Paul McCartney he was imitating.

"My aunts would give me Beatles records," Cobain told Jon Savage in 1993, "so for the most part [I listened to] the Beatles [as a child], and if I was lucky, I'd be able to buy a single." Cobain expressed a particular fondness for John Lennon, whom he called his "idol" in his posthumously-released journals, and he admitted that he wrote the song "About a Girl," from Nirvana 1989 debut album Bleach, after spending three hours listening to Meet The Beatles!

So maybe he preferred John, but Paul's the closest you can get to John these days, and there was quite a bit of Paul on "Meet The Beatles."

Proto-blogging in 1816.

From "The Last Novel," by David Markson:

Keats stayed up all night on the occasion when he actually did look into Chapman's Homer — and then composed his sonnet so swiftly that he was able to messenger it to a friend to read before breakfast.

You read something quickly. It inspires you to write something quickly and then to get it out instantly to be read. That is blogging, and Keats got as close to that as one could in 1816. But he was reading George Chapman's translation of Homer and writing a sonnet that people will read as long as there are people who can read. That's all very grand, compared to blogging. To counterbalance, the blogger gets the instant writing out to thousands, and Keats only got his poem out instantly to one person.

But would Keats have read Homer and written a timeless sonnet if he could have blogged?

***

I read the first 82 pages of Markson's book out loud as Meade drove the TT up to Fish Creek, Wisconsin and back — via Whitefish Dunes — Thursday and Friday. I stopped reading at page 82 last night at about 9 when the last of the daylight failed. The book is composed entirely of snippets like the one quoted above, and if I'd gotten to the next snippet, it would have been:

Fish feel pain.

Ah! The fish theme! How apt!

Actually, I'm lying. Lying out of love of aptness. For your sake, dear Reader. That fish snippet is at the very bottom of page 82. It was the second to the next one. The next one was really:

If it were up to me, I would have wiped my behind with his last decree.

Said Mozart — after a demand by the Archbishop of Salzburg for more brevity in his church compositions.

There's another Mozart one that led to some laughter and conversation. On page 21:

I wish you good night, but first shit in your bed.

Reads another Mozart letter to Anna Maria.

***

Let me get the jump on the comments and say yes, I know that Kurt Cobain sang "It's okay to eat fish/'Cause they don't have any feelings." And yes, these days, on hearing "Homer," one doesn't think of the Greek poet anymore, one thinks of "The Simpsons." That's what TV and blogging and everything modern has done to us. 

"The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself..."

Reports the NYT:

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

Wow. Great. Of course...

“The big question is, can this be developed in a responsible way, in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible?... No one knows how this will work.

ADDED: If Afghanistan needs a new national anthem, there's always the greatest grunge song of all time.

"It's okay to eat fish 'cause they don't have any feelings..."

... or, oh, maybe not...

***

Song lyric in the post title comes from this:

"Bad for You" books.

The NYT Book Review this week has a theme: "Bad for You." I don't think the individual books are anywhere near as interesting as collecting them together like this makes them seem. For example, one book is about email -- don't you know you can get yourself in trouble via email? -- and even with Dave Barry writing the review, email is a dull topic. Don't tell me, let me guess. People hit the "send" button hastily, writing lacks the emotional cues of a face-to-face conversation, and blah blah blah. NYT writer Gina Kolata has written a book about our fatness -- "Rethinking Thin" -- that is reviewed by Slate writer Emily Bazelon:

Kolata ends on a quixotic note, by wondering if perhaps Americans weigh more for the same reason that we’re taller on average than we were a century ago — because we’re in better health. Maybe the extra pounds even help contribute to this well-being.

What's "quixotic" about another repetition of the idea that fat people are actually healthy? I suspect this is the sort of thing you say in a book about fat to appeal to the people who would buy a book about fat. If we're getting fatter all the time for the same reason we're getting taller, why does that mean we're more healthy? It seems to mean we have steady access to food, and our bodies evolved to deal with scarcity, so we're really good at using food, loading up when we get the chance, and storing it away for a famine. When the famine never comes -- which is good -- it's bad. Nirvana! Is Nirvana -- the band -- bad for you? Benjamin Kunkel reviews Everett True's "Nirvana":

[I]t is difficult to hold on, from year to year, to all the strength and pain of being young. It is also difficult to remain quite so completely confused. Yet there is honor in confusion — since figuring out how you feel usually means abandoning one of your truths. And the adolescent, like the artist transformed into a commodity, is right to be confused: right to want to be popular; right to be contemptuous of popularity; right to hate the faults in himself that make his popularity undeserved; and right also to hope that winning a deserved popularity might actually redeem, for a time, the entire category of the popular.

There, now, does that help? Should you listen to your Nirvana records again, or do they embarrass you? Would you read a bio of the band? Camille Paglia reviews Jon Savage’s "Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture":

Savage amusingly juxtaposes the earnest social prototype of the “muscular Christian” with the capricious iconoclasm of Arthur Rimbaud and Oscar Wilde. Missing, however, is the Romantic lineage of these writers in Théophile Gautier and other aesthetes : not everything in literature should be interpreted as a direct response to current events or social conditions.

Amuse me with juxtapositions and then piss me off by failing to juxtapose something that my capriciously iconoclastic mind juxtaposed. Here's a review of "The Joys of Drinking." Barbara Holland has written a book about the history of alcohol use, and she's putting a positive spin on it. The Constitution's framers drank a lot, people socialize in bars, etc.

[Holland] can’t abide our current era of moderation. Hip urbanites, she writes, “turned drinking in moderation into a high-class avocation.” Wine tours caught on and microbreweries arrived. The devotees “aren’t drinkers. They’re connoisseurs and critics, priests of ritual, sniffers and tasters, discerning scholars scowling thoughtfully into their glass. Fun has nothing to do with it. ... In the metropolitan haunts of the highly sophisticated, the cocktail is no longer an instrument of friendship but a competitive fashion statement, or one-upmanship.”

Is that moderation? You can have different kinds of attitudes and tastes and still drink a lot. And hasn't there always been a high class and a low class approach to drinking? I don't get it. This review, by Robert R. Harris, is just not critical enough, but it is studded with tasty nuggets of information, gving me the feeling the "Bad for You" themed Book Review is just here to entertain us, to play the "most-emailed" list game to win.

"American Idol" -- It Came From the Nineties.

The theme tonight is the nineties. I'm thinking of all the great Alternative Rock songs early in the decade, but no... that's not how it will be! Bo Bice sings some chaotic, unmusical Black Crowes song. He tries to make us like him by wearing a huge, floppy black-and-white cowhide-patterned hat and by dancing on the judges' table, something you know Simon will experience as appalling. Jessica Sierra does a Leann Rimes song, and it's completely dull. My mind wanders. Oh, it's over. Good. And Anwar sings "I Believe I Can Fly," making the beginning astoundingly singsong, then doing some Stevie Wonderish high notes to try to distract us from the mediocrity of it all. Paula lays it on thick -- so disgustingly that I'm writhing on the floor gagging. Anwar raises a fist in victory and it's all so terribly unreal that I'm hoping for Simon to slam Anwar, even though Anwar seems to be such a sweet guy that you don't normally want anything bad ever to happen to him. Simon agrees with Randy about the complete inadequacy of the low notes, reminding the voters not to fall for the glorious high notes but to penalize poor Anwar for the really bad half of the song.

Nadia's hair is back to full-on Nadiosity, and she sings "I'm the Only One." Didn't Nikki McKibbin sing that in Season 1? I'd say she's a lot worse than Nikki, as an exciting singer. But after what happened to Nadia last week, I bet the judges try to help her. Randy damns her with the faint praise she always gets: you're not the best singer in the competition, but... Simon likes her but is critical of the song: it's not melodic. Which has been my problem all night: unmelodic songs! Was that some 90s trend? Also, let me say something about the words:

Please baby can’t you see
My mind’s a burnin’ hell
I got razors a rippin’ and tearin’ and strippin’
My heart apart as well

Is this the way to convince your lover to come back? I'd say it's time to get a restraining order! That's just ugly!

Here's Constantine! I started liking him last week, you know. And in his interview, he's talking about Grunge. Finally, something that really says 90s! But what is this cheesy love song? It doesn't seem grungy at all! What kind of a bait-and-switch is this? "I Can't Make You Love Me." I don't get it. I was expecting Nirvana or at least Pearl Jam. But this is Bonnie Raitt! This isn't Grunge! Paula and Randy love it, but Simon likes him too! "Classic pop star." So much for Grunge!

Nikko... It's this song, which I've never heard before -- or never been conscious of hearing. Total nonsong. Randy raves. Paula raves. Simon thinks it was a good copy of the original. Eh...

Anthony Fedorov is driveling something about the way you look tonight, which focuses me on the horrible green shirt he's wearing tonight. Ooh, he's awful! "I want to be nice," Simon says, "because I like you"... but he isn't nice -- quite appropriately!

Carrie Underwood sings "Independence Day," and they all love her. Simon tells her she has "that It factor -- and that's what it's all about." Does nothing for me.

Scott Savol. Aaarrrggghhhh. Singsong beginning. Weird high-low stuff. What is this song? It's all over the place. It's this. "Ambitious song... all right" ... "I was swaying... vibing it... you got my heart" ... "Get real here. Whoever wins this competition has to enter the real world."

Vonzell goes last? She does an old "American Idol" favorite, "I Have Nothing." I never need to hear this song again. The judges like it!

So what do I think of tonight? I think they were in a completely different 90s from what I remember. There was some great music, but they didn't sing any of it. These bellow-y ballads? I hate them all! Who should go? They all should go! If I ever motivated myself to dial the telephone and try to save anyone -- which I don't -- who would I vote for? Oh, Vonzell, because I like her. And Constantine, because he's sweet and self-effacing. Who would I kick out? Carrie, because the Powers That Be like her too much. Anthony, because he hurt my ears. Anwar, because that singsonging thing was lame.

UPDATE: Adam at Throwing Things seems to share my basic take on the contestants. Plus he says a lot of funny things. I especially liked: "Nikko -- Welcome to Charles Grigsby/Rickey Smith World; Population: Three."

UPDATE, WEDNESDAY NIGHT: So Jessica's gone. That's what I predicted. Well, either her or Anwar. And Anwar came in next to the last. It's striking how well the voters get it. The show itself was boring tonight. There was another dreadful group sing.

How many ways is this not a Nirvana reunion?

Entertainment Weekly reports:

John Kerry is touting his diplomatic skills as a reason to vote for him for president; for example, he's managed to reunite the surviving members of Nirvana for their first public appearance in more than a decade. Dave Grohl announced that he and Krist Novoselic will both attend a rally on Tuesday in Las Vegas, in the parking lot of the Stardust casino, to kick off a Kerry campaign bus tour aimed at motivating college students in the last couple weeks before the election. Bassist-turned-activist Novoselic, who has a new book out, Of Grunge And Government, will speak, and Foo Fighters frontman Grohl will perform; alas, they're not expected to perform together.