28. FUCK (Barbara Hendricks. Georges Pretre - Orchestre National de France / Poulenc - Gloria, Stabat Mater)

Holy shit, this is fucking great. This fucking rules. I just listened to this for the first time in years and this owns, it totally owns. It goes BA, BA, BADA and it's got this part where the chick just goes apeshit. The band owns too. I mean, the orchestra. This is fucking great French music. Holy fuck, I think I just pissed myself. I'm listening to the "Qui sedet ad dexteram patris" part and I better move my laptop or else I'm gonna shock my pud! Yep, I pissed myself. My daughter just said her first words! They were "What the fuck is this fucking awesome shit you're playing?" Whoops, definitely electrocuted my cock just there.

Francis Poulenc was a French guy and he did "Litanies a la Vièrge Noire" and "Quatre Prières Pour Une Temps de Penitence" but those are fucking guano compared to this. And I like those pieces! I sang them in college! Afterwards I would get drunk with all the other faggots who sang them with me and sing em again! They were that good! This is better! Holy shit, I just remembered: we sang this too! My balls just dropped AGAIN. My balls had already dropped once (hence existence of daughter) but listening to this absolutely fuckeriffic piece by "Les Six" member Poulenc has caused my balls to drop A SECOND TIME. Now I gotta be careful when I walk to the "Simply Catfood" store else I'm gonna be playing bocce with my testes.

This has some really cool dissonance in that one part and a couple of others and it's got this fucking awesome theme that goes BA, BA, BADA which I referenced in the first paragraph and basically every asshole that came after him ripped him off and they can all SUCK MY DICK. If you do not download this I will come to your house and pee on you. I will rip up your newspapers and shit in your oven. This is so cool I think I'm going to go out and BUY IT. Even better: I am going to put the fifteen bucks or however much a CD costs these days in a pile with a note that says "TO FRANCIS POULENC FUCKING IN HEAVEN" and burn it, that way he'll get it in the afterlife (he died because after he wrote this his cock became so huge that when he got an erection all the blood went to his cock and deflated his head). Wow, what a neato-burrito heavy fugginay piece of 17th-level paladin style AWESOME.

27. Crush That Hippie, Hand Me the Pliers, I Think I'm Bowie

A while ago, during one of the Decades That Didn't Happen, I lived with a guy whose name I won't tell you, because I would have to be a total asshole to reveal that kind of information. Let's just call him Lichen Almighty; he had a real name that he didn't use (except on paychecks) but in normal everyday discourse he wanted you to call him this intensely hippyish name.

Now, Lichen was, in fact, a hippie. An unregenerate hippie. Although he didn't grow up in the 50's and 60's, so he could never be a real hippie. That suited him just fine, because, as a rule, Lichen HATED hippies. He hated the swirling, empty-headed lot of them. He called them 'blissninnies.' It struck me that Lichen was the best kind of hippie, that rarest kind of hippie: the kind that actually THOUGHT about the boilerplate peacenluv before he puked it up by rote.

In between knife hits and the occasional bump of the very worst Central Virginia cocaine (which invariably had been stepped on more often than a Burger King doormat and could always be counted on to bring on a two week sinus infection), Almighty Lichen and I would talk about how the 60's were one of our culture's biggest lies. Then he would whip out his acoustic guitar, but by then I was usually drunk enough to let it pass.

Which brings me to the Firesign Theatre: four hippies who simply were not buying it. Any of it. The wholesale swallowing of a readymade counter-culture. The lack of critical thought. Peace and love as buzzwords. Of course, being hippies in the era of Nixon, they were shooting back at both sides. And in one dense side-long piece, entitled "Le Trente-Huit Cunegonde," they posited an alternate version of the history of the United States that manages to surgically maul both Leary and Kissinger, Me Generation and My Lai. Fuck Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky: this is what your history teacher didn't teach you. Have a knife hit on me and listen with headphones.

26. Very Loud It Play (Butthole Surfers - Double Live)

There was a day when a man would have been frightened to see the Butthole Surfers. And that didn't make him less of a man. Better men than you shit themselves when they smelled the Surfers' tourbus come to town; women would spontaneously abort and the fetuses would get up and do security for the show.

Part of why it is so hard to believe is because the Surfers have been so god-damn [i]awful[/i] for so long now. Anyone remember Weird Revolution? Electriclarryland? (To be fair, "Pepper" was a great song, probably their last great song.) Independent Worm Saloon? You do? Wow, do you have a music blog?

But there was a day when people didn't know what to make of these motherfuckers, and that day is captured perfectly here on Double Live. This was back when Matter magazine ran a one-page on them where the band played up the backwoods vibe, frowning their way through dinner in New York ("What the fuck is this lin-gwine stuff?") and boiling life down to waking up somewhere, getting stoned and drinking beer, and leading the author to opine that they very well might have room-temperature IQs.

The cassette I had of it was type written, with some sort of child with an exposed spine reaching out to the audience on the cover; it came out on their own Latino Bugger Veil Music and the instructions were "very loud it play." And this is exactly what you should do. These people were not stupid, as Corey Rusk will bitterly tell you. They did have musical tastes that ran 'dumb' to the indie tastes of the day; they didn't name their dog 'Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad' for nothing. If anything, this might be the cassette that got me listening, however infrequently, to classic rock again. Leary's guitar is prime psych throughout, and who is Gibby Haynes, after all, but Ted Nugent on drugs? Many drugs? All drugs?

(Broken into four pieces.)

25. The Link Between Deviant Sex and Religion Finally Explained. (Ultra Vivid Scene - s/t)

This Blog Entry is the First True Explanation Linking the Above Concepts Ever. Don't Be Fooled By Imitators (Like That Fuck, Hieronymous T. Shitbird).

Let's face it, shall we? There is a reason that some people masturbate over the concept (and indeed, sometimes the execution of the concept) of the leather nun. I'm doing it as I type this missive; in a cave in the Appalachian Mountains, next cave over from Eric Rudolph's in fact, Osama bin Laden is busy pounding it to a pirated copy of "Sisters in Black 12" he shoplifted from a Stop'n'Go. Alan Greenspan gets 'irrationally exuberant' (to coin a phrase) at the thought of Sister Mary Elephant with a cat o' nine tails. Mohandas Ghandi, Leo Tolstoy and Leonid Brezhnev all badgered the witness, beat the bishop, buffed the porpoise while thinking of those stern Sisters of Mercy.

And why not? Why the hell not? Religion is submission. I even think there's a religion [i]called[/i] submission (although it doesn't have nuns, much). And who's in charge of religion? Nuns.

Notice I'm talking about Catholicism. That's because Protestant religion is a misnomer. Protestantism is more of a country club. Why? No submission. Point set and MATCH, motherfucker.

While were at it, the French were right: orgasms ARE 'the little death.' And who is in charge of who gets to go where in the afterlife? Nuns. They let Saint Peter park the cars. Nuns have the organization, and those rulers they smack on tables. Yowch!

Nuns are Brides of Christ. So when you're whacking off over one dressed like Catwoman (the nun, not you, possibly), you're committing a DOUBLE SECRET SIN. You're coveting AND spilling your seed. So you're TWICE the pervert. That's freeing. Knowing that you're such a sexual badass will allow you to drive five miles an hour over the speed limit and eat that second helping of blondie pie.

In summation, the act of strumming on the old ban-jo while clenching an alb between your gritted teeth is not only normal, it is beneficial. It allows us to walk our submissive sides around the block without the potential heartache of your friends and loved ones asking about that new whip welt.

24. NATSUMEN - NEVER WEAR OUT yOUR SUMMER xxx !!!

NATSUMEN are a recent and very elusive Japanese band that describe their music as "“Japanese Progressive HardCore JAZZ Aggressive Improvisation ROCK". As far as I know they've released two albums and an EP and were perhaps broken-up some time last year, although their website http://www.natsumen.net/ seems to be advertising both a new show and a new record (?). The band was formed from the ashes of BOaT, a similar Japanese band. All the members have names like A×S×E and KO1 TSUTAYA, and all played in various other bands before joining NATSUMEN. Their other album, Endless Summer Record, is much closer to a sort jazzy post-rock and noise, almost in the vein of Ground Zero, while NEVER WEAR OUT yOUR SUMMER xxx !!! - unquestionably badass title - is firmly acid jazz. From the start it's wild as hell and almost feels like a live performance at some points. Pretty much motherfucking fuck ass badassery here.

This one goes out to my acid jazz mate Milde, see yer in four months or so all!

Click here to download.