If you are alt-identified, yet want Kris Allen to beat Adam Lambert in this week’s American Idol finale, then you are complicit in your own oppression. Rebels who want Adam Lambert to lose must just hate themselves.

People like to fuss about sex and sexuality, but the place where Adam Lambert is actually unusual is that it is rare to see new musicians with serious larger-than-life star quality in the spotlight today. I just watched a top 20 video countdown and Eminem was just about the only one who would turn heads in a room he walked into, on force of presence alone. So it is exciting to see someone who has the right counterculture vibe with a mix of subcultures gothic, punk, hard rock, rockabilly, emo, scene and more blended together for something unique and compelling. To anyone who states people like Adam Lambert are a dime a dozen and FOX is just not in-the-know, I have to say there are a lot of people with some of that general sort of style, but not a lot with that vibe and that level of both charisma and musical talent.

To receive the same kudos as someone who comes across more normal and mainstream, I often feel like I have to work at least twice as hard and produce work which is twice as good. I would be fine with this, except for the part where the whole process plateaus early. Allow me to explain. In a way, simple badges of flamboyance and theoretical nonconformity, such as tattoos or unnatural hair color, have become fairly common by 2009. Someone who truly has an artistic and offbeat spirit is still likely to have to be better than the next guy to achieve the same recognition. Unfortunately, people, who identify as somehow alternative or creative or freaky, tend to want to root for the underdog. This means that, as soon as one of their compatriots is about to come over the top and succeed for real, they get an enormous backlash from former supporters. So I see all these people, who were super excited by Adam Lambert’s early successed on American Idol, who are now not into him because he is perceived as the obvious front-runner; they think maybe they like the other final two member Kris Allen because he is the underdog.

Kris Allen is an appealing enough performer. In particular, I liked his performances of “She Works Hard for the Money” and “Heartless”. I most likely would not flip the channel if a music video of his came on. I actually think American Idol fans got it exactly right for the AI8 final two to be Kris Allen and Adam Lambert. (Alison Iraheta might be more demographically similar to Adam Lambert, but Kris Allen is a more ready-for-primetime performer.) Kris Allen is not the underdog to win this contest because he is somehow disadvantaged and just needs a little love and support. Kris Allen is not some sort of stray spaniel puppy in need of a home. Kris Allen is the underdog to win the American Idol competition because Adam Lambert deserves it far far far more than he does. Some of the web chatter about the final American Idol vote suggests more that people want to vote against Adam Lambert for being successful more than they want to vote for Kris Allen for any positive reason.

Opinionated and forthright judge Simon Cowell has stated in interviews that he would like to see Adam Lambert win. Led Zeppelin does not normally permit American Idol to use their songs, but they gave permission for Adam Lambert to sing “Whole Lotta Love”. U2 does not normally permit American Idol to use their songs, but they gave permission for Adam Lambert to sing “One”. When Slash from GNR mentored the Idols, he posted to his Twitter that he was especially impressed by Adam Lambert. When Katy Perry performed on the show, the legend on the back of her Elvis cape read “Adam Lambert”.

It seems like if Simon Cowel, Paula Abdul, Robert Plant, Bono, Slash, Katy Perry, and a host of other notables all feel strongly that Adam Lambert should win American Idol, then he should be a shoo-in sure thing. But he is not. The reason he is not is that inexplicably hot people with smudgy eyeliner and leather jackets and big boots hate themselves. Now nonconformity does tend to get push-back from the overculture, so I understand why many bohemians do not necessarily expect to always get praise. Getting praise, however, does not mean that you lose your individuality merit badge. You should expect to be able to win people over, when they see what you are really like.

No disrespect at all to Kris Allen, but Adam Lambert deserves to win American Idol. Adam Lambert earned the win. I know, I know, rebels figured out that 19E and the powers-that-be want to have Adam Lambert win, so it would be (oi oi) rebellious to vote for Kris Allen instead. A good rebel is ready to take the power, not just cry like a baby over whoever seems to be an authority. Voting against Adam Lambert is not sticking it to the man; it is just building a glass ceiling for your tribe. Hopefully Wednesday night still ends up being a coronation for Adam Lambert.

“Most of us are just living a lie
That’s why we get fucked up every night”
–Buckcherry, “Too Drunk To Fuck”

Please forgive me, but I like to fantasize that my dirty glam rockers are never too drunk to get it on. Well maybe occasionally, if it makes a really good story. But I can’t help wondering if Buckcherry don’t have some kind of problem with women. I don’t mean that I suspect they might not be thoughtful feminists. When, circa 600BC, I masturbated approximately 80,000 times to the “Welcome to the Jungle” video, I never once fantasized that Axl Rose would be perfect for a relationship. Or even an interesting dinner conversation.

The reason Motley Crue did an album like Girls, Girls, Girls is that the job of properly utilizing a pole while dancing is very similar to the job of being a dirty glam rocker. They felt an affinity. Whatever else one might think about the Crue, I don’t think anyone wondered whether they feared the vagina dentata, or worse yet, were frightened of the boobies. As a teenager, I saw Vince Neil ask the New Haven Coliseum (it could have been the Hartford Civic Center, but I think it was New Haven) who was the best piece of ass in the building. I was vaguely unsettled when the biker next to me appeared to be offering up his girlfriend and I went back to my dorm room and wrote an ethnomusicology term paper about how I wouldn’t fuck Vince Neil with someone else’s pussy, but, damn, that was some fine showmanship and entertaining rock and roll.

The thing is that good music should transport one and good musical showmanship should go even further towards that goal. I think the only Motley Crue video I ever masturbated to was “Looks That Kill” (and that was really more about the chicks than the band members), but, as a frontman, Vince Neil had more than a good rock and roll voice and a cute outfit. Vince Neil could rock a stadium because he could sell the fantasy. As alcohol is reportedly Vince Neil’s poison of choice and he has done time for drunk driving and all, I would guess he has had occasion to be too drunk to fuck. But he doesn’t sing about it. The dirty glam rock fantasy is one of a party which never ends, where the titans of rock are always down for one more round. I’m sure Vince Neil has also caught a cold before and been too feverish to get out from under his blankie. But he doesn’t fucking sing about it.

This is why, no matter how expensive Joshua Todd’s ink is and no matter how many sit-ups he does, he will never be as cool as Vince Neil. What kind of emo ridiculousness is it that the record labels are trying to sell Buckcherry as raunchy current hard rock and they turn around and try to foist this whiny nonsense on us? Do the record labels really understand that little about what rock fans look for in a band?

If you are wondering why I actually watched a Buckcherry video on purpose, I confess it is because I heard that Blue Blood hottie Bella Vendetta was topless in it. Don’t bother pushing play on the YouTube version, though, because apparently the part with the breasts is only on Playboy. I thought nudity in a video like this would be pushing the envelope, but I was just disappointed. The naked girls are actually never once in the room with the band and the dressed girls are frankly also pretty far away from the musicians. In fact, the house party Buckcherry are playing in for the vid appears to be quite the sausagefest. All put together, there are only maybe half a dozen females anywhere in the building. They try to get some alt-y MySpace cred by having a somewhat scene-looking girl as the viewpoint character in the video, but she shows up with a homely dude who passes out on her, and I assure you that that is no girl’s erotic rock and roll fantasy.

Apparently, the nude parts of the video were shot in a hotel room far away from the guys in Buckcherry. I know at least one person who has had sex with a member of Buckcherry and didn’t hate it. I’ve photographed this Buckcherry-boning individual naked, so I can affirm that she has girl parts. But what band avoids being present when the video babes are shooting? It is part of the job, when fronting a hard rock band of this stripe, to at least be able to fake like you enjoy the rock and roll party.

Director/pornstar Joanna Angel gamely offers up a press quote about the directors of the Buckcherry video being nice enough to let her shoot some of the breast footage. Now I don’t follow adult film closely, but I’m 100% positive that Joanna Angel has won AVN awards for either her porn direction or her porn performances or both. In my opinion, she is the one doing Buckcherry’s lame directors a favor by providing them with footage of boobies, including her own. Unfortunately, whoever edited the topless bits into the original cut of the “Too Drunk To Fuck” video, didn’t really include anyone’s faces. For example, I am familiar enough with Bella Vendetta’s body that I can assure you she is in the video, but her head is cut off in every shot. WTF? Who directed this this anti-rock, anti-woman, sex-negative video screed anyway?

I don’t generally mind it when dirty glam rockers dehumanize women. They are supposed to be about a certain sort of wild sex fantasy and not necessarily about progressive thinking. But, if they are both shallow and sexist and unable to keep the party going, what is the point?

Finding great new music is always a good thing. It seems like it should happen all the time in this glorious digital age we are living in. I mean, artists can go straight to fans without the intervention of stodgy labels and, because everybody can post their opinion online, the fans can be the ones to say whether they like something or not. That is the utopian ideal there anyway.

When people actually go looking for music today, I think it is actually often more difficult to find what one likes. Somehow modern distribution has made it so that a very few recording artists sell record-breaking amounts of swag and tunes. Many thousands of musicians who would once only have been heard by friends can now get out to hundreds of people who appreciate what they do. But the midlist bands seem to have disappeared. Where are the solid enjoyable bands, in the genres I enjoy, who once could definitely have charted high, but maybe wouldn’t be #1 on the charts?

Without major label support, mid-sized high quality bands can get really lost in a sea of user-generated content on sites like MySpace and YouTube. MySpace, for example, allows fan profiles, so NIN shows up five times on the first page of top industrial bands on MySpace. I enjoy Nine Inch Nails, but what if I am looking for similar bands I am not familiar with yet? More on YouTube in a moment.

Given how popular music magazines once were on the newsstand, why are music websites not more popular online? I know one thing I personally do not like is that most sites devoted to music are owned by one or another record label. While I realize that there are only really six significant media companies in the world and all, these record label-run music sites seem to only cover what is on their own labels. I do not know whether they think it would be unethical to seriously comment on music from multiple labels or whether they are competitive, but there are rarely reviews. There are independent exceptions to this, but most of them are very limited in reach. Generally, the only music news is about who is sleeping with who, who is in rehab, and who is having legal problems for their temper. If anyone has any good recommendations for music sites, I’d love to see them.

I admit that I usually come across new music in one of three ways. Number one, I get a press kit about a band. Number two, said new music is done by a friend of mine or occasionally a friend of a friend. Number three, I see a band play live with another band I already like or found out about via getting a press kit or a friend being in the band.

Today, I thought I’d cruise around YouTube to see if I could find some new bands to enjoy. I quickly discovered that there is no goth-industrial category on YouTube. The options, are rock, pop, indie & alternative, rap & hip-hop, R&B & soul, country & folk, blues, electronic, jazz, classical, world music, religious, and lastly more/other mostly for random soundtrack stuff and nonspecific lip-syncing. It is not terribly uncommon for there to either be no goth-industrial category or for a site like MySpace to have one category for gothic and another for industrial. But YouTube has no punk category either and that seems pretty odd.

So I guess the indie & alternative category is the one goth-industrial music videos would fall under. When I look at the most popular indie & alternative music videos of all time on YouTube, Marilyn Manson does make the front page with “Heart Shaped Glasses“. Yes, I know that if I were a “real” goth, then I would hate Marilyn Manson and say his music doesn’t count. Yes, I know that if I were a “real” Manson fan, then my favorite Marilyn Manson album would not be Mechanical Animals. Yes, I’ve heard that Marilyn Manson may have a bug up his butt about Blue Blood for not covering him way back when or something, but sometimes a PR agency called Nasty Little Man won’t get on everyone’s good side and I really did not care for the first track on Smells Like Children. I would have checked out the others, but NLM sent me a cassette instead of a CD at a time when CDs were the norm. But I digress. If one wishes to debate whether Marilyn Manson’s artistic and political motivations come from the same creative place as Nine Inch Nails and Ministry and Combichrist, that is certainly a discussion and a half. But I’m pretty sure that finding Manson in the indie & alternative category on YouTube means that is the cat where goth-industrial bands would be, if they had any traction on YouTube.

Clocking in higher-ranked than “Heart Shaped Glasses” are My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Boys Like Girls, Boys Like Girls, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Good Charlotte. For me, My Chemical Romance has their moments and I like some of the later styling on their lead singer, and Lord knows not enough bands dress like that today, but I would never have expected that the most watched indie & alternative music video ever would be a song about fearing teenagers by Warner Bros recording artist My Chemical Romance with 54,130,096 views. I occasionally slow down the TiVo fast forward on video countdown shows on FUSE to watch Fall Out Boy videos. I find the stuff by Universal Music Group recording artist Fall Out Boy much more visually interesting than most of what plays on those shows, but they seem to view the world as a bleak place where nobody has anybody else’s back so you’d better just look out for number one. I find Fall Out Boy’s worldview negative in a depressing way. I’m not familiar with Sony recording artist Boys Like Girls. I enjoy Sony recording artist Good Charlotte. I’ve been ironically amused watching them evolve from “Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous” not understanding how any successful musician could complain in the Rolling Stone to “The River” where they realize that Hollywood tinsel is not genuine precious metal.

I suspect that, if I were to go down the whole all time countdown for indie & alternative on YouTube, I’d be seeing a lot of Warner, Universal, and Sony. This is not to say that tools like MySpace and YouTube can not greatly increase the social and professional reach of the individual and the little guy. They can and they do. They just also increase the reach of the big guy.

I’m okay with this. I’ve worked on a lot of successful web sites and magazines, so it makes sense that I’ve learned some things along the way and would be likely to be successful with future media projects. A record label which has worked on a huuuuuuuuge number of successful bands has probably learned some things along the way and would be likely to be successful launching future bands.

But I am troubled by the big guy pretending to be the indie little guy to make sales. Sometimes fans seem to have the notion that, because modern emo music deals with themes of feeling like the underdog, then emo bands must all be underdogs. I know that, in the movies, audiences are supposed to want the person who has worked hard all their life and always been successful to fail and the longshot who just started training to succeed. News bulletin: Warner Bros, Universal Music Group, and Sony BMG are not longshot underdogs looking for their first big break.

Maybe, if consumers did not ask large media conglomerates to be misleading and present faux underdogs, then they would not. Maybe it would be helpful if record labels and bands approached music press like professionals. Maybe it would be helpful if music journalists behaved like professionals instead of like envious gossipy children or corrupt businesspeople. Then it might be easier to find new good music. Or maybe humans are just evolutionarily incapable of adapting to the intense infostream of the internet and we are going to go the way of the dinosaurs and get extinct now.

Sorta felt like listening to some cool new music tonight. Oh well. I wrote this instead. (Note to illuminati: it might be advisable to send me some good new stuff to enjoy (or a gold parachute), before I give all the secrets away.)

Alex Groh is an unofficial sort of cookie monster. He claims to subsist on cookies, jilting his loving refrigerator in the process, and only getting out of bed to draw and get milk for his cookies. This may be exaggerated for comedic effect, but that’s really not a bad quality in a cartoonist. Alex Groh draws a webcomic called Last Words and cookies and the blood of small children are his inspiration.

The comic strip stars the severely psychotic Loc with his trusty kitchen knife. No whining if you get cut. And remember to keep a magnet under your pillow, so your computer can’t come assault you while you are sleeping.

Alex Groh says just because I’m looking at porn doesn’t mean I’m not working and Emo Panda wants you to join him in therapy. Until Emo Panda whisks you away to wherever they hold therapy sessions for comic strips, what did you do for the 4th of July?

There are a few porn movies which most people have heard the names of — Behind the Green Door, The Devil in Miss Jones, and Debbie Does Dallas. Add Cafe Flesh and maybe Caligula to the list if you are a science fiction dork fan like me. You can enjoy smut without ever having seen any of those flicks. You can make smut without ever having seen any of those flicks. But, if you have not heard of them, then you are missing a piece of the cultural zeitgeist that most people are in on.

Adult industry professionals and critics have a number of theories as to why the original Debbie Does Dallas movie was so popular. Some people think it was because a lot of people are hot for cheerleader porn and the Dallas Cowboys (and their cheerleaders) were practically America’s team at the time. I’m not really a football person, so I can’t comment on the veracity of that claim. Some people think Debbie Does Dallas was just a really catchy punchy title that was fun to say. Kind of like Snakes on a Plane, but with, you know, naked people. Some people believe that Debbie Does Dallas rode the initial wave of Betamax production, being one of the very first adult titles available on that videocassette format. Yes, I said Betamax. For those of you who are like “WTF is Betamax?”: It was a videotape format which competed with VHS to be the industry standard when VCR’s or video cassette recorders first came out. Betamax was generally considered to be a higher quality format, but VHS embraced the porno market. Guess which one ended up more popular? A VCR was expensive when Debbie Does Dallas first came out, so being one of the only options for an underserved and overpaid market was probably an advantage. Some experts on adult video opine that Debbie was just really really really incredibly hot. Whatever the reason, Debbie Does Dallas was one of the best-selling skin flicks of all time.

So what happens when a director or producer has the hook-up to make a movie with a decent budget, but they don’t actually have anything much to say personally as an artist? That’s right, they do a remake. Don’t get me wrong. Some remakes are enjoyable. I liked the Dennis Quaid-starring version of the classic thriller movie DOA better than the original, and the more recent one was probably able to have a more interesting and less Hollywood ending because the creative team could excuse it by pointing out that they were staying true to the original. In general, though, I am a fan of artists trying to do something new. I do understand that there are some people in the movie business and in the adult video business who just want to make a dollar and their only question is ROI. I can respect someone who is purely about business, so long as they don’t try to convince me they are something other than what they are.

I’ve never seen the original Debbie Does Dallas in its entirety. By which, I mean I may or may not have walked through a room where it was playing while at a party at some point. I’ve never even seen a boxcover for the — yep, you guessed it — remake of Debbie Does Dallas, the over-heralded recent release of which provided the impetus for this article. Although the current crop of Porn Valley faux auteurs often ask people to praise their films sight-unseen, I feel unqualified to review something I am totally unfamiliar with. So I’m going to let America’s beloved porn journalist Gram Ponante do it for me. Here are some excerpts from his Fleshbot review of the DVD:

“An altporn reimagining of the 70’s porn classic “Debbie Loves Dallas”, [Emo McCry]’s version is not going to make any converts to the altporn stable of stars, all of whom do an amazing job of telegraphing how not seriously they take their jobs. The eye rolling, gum smacking, and bad posture, the delivery of every line as if it had a question mark at the end of it, and the relentless irony of the performances made me think less like I was watching a porn movie than I was substitute-teaching an eighth grade class . . .

Back at Debbie’s place, Cassidey makes James Deen fuck Pixie as punishment for not cleaning the apartment. I don’t understand Altkid anthropology; if Deen had cleaned the house, would he have got to fuck Pixie twice? . . .

In the end, Cassidey gets her man. Punky, played by Alex Gonz, and Cassidey provide a sweaty and messy ending to the movie, real porn as opposed to metaporn, which is a welcome relief. Still, we could hear an offstage voice yell “Two minutes!” as Gonz worked up to his pop shot. I asked [Emo] if things other directors might smooth over – like stage directions – were included purposely in this movie.

“Truth to materials,” he said, quoting the architectural fad that prohibits gussying up building blocks. If that is true, why not have a split screen at all times showing what the crew is up to? What about a CNN news ticker or real-time L.A. traffic reports that would give insight into conditions on the set? Sometimes I think Altporn means never having to admit you’re phoning it in.”

Okay, having seen one other movie (on fast forward) by the same emopompous (I’m inventing words, but only good ones) director, I am inclined to think Gram’s review is probably right, but I’m not really the market for vanilla porn, so it doesn’t much matter if this sort of movie speaks to me. Sometimes Fleshbot runs reviews which are humorous and not wholly positive. Heck, Fleshbot poked fun at us the same week for being excited about award-winner Funkatron wearing a shirt for Blue Blood’s SpookyCash at the Adobe Max 2007 show for the future of the internet. Guess what I did when I read that? I laughed because it was well-written. I said, “ouch,” because it was well-written. I asked a co-worker if I should read anything into the fact that Fleshbot never links BlueBlood.com when they mention it, although they will link BlueBlood.net. We decided it probably didn’t mean anything, but I could always sacrifice a goat later and read the entrails, if I really felt the need. Then I got back to whatever I’d been working on at the time. I definitely did not do what the emopompous director of Debbie Wants a Mulligan On Dallas did.

That kind, friendly, sweet, sensitive (to his own needs), gentle soul who always remembers anything good anyone has ever done for him . . . Okay, I don’t think I can maintain a level of sarcasm here which could remotely communicate Emo McCry’s hysterically overblown ridiculous overreaction. Keep in mind now that Gram had given Emo McCry a ton of positive press in the past and that, although Emo McCry would like to get a discount for being all indie, he, in point of fact, works for a one hundred million dollar corporation. So, as the representative of a hundred million dollar a year business, one of the most established companies in adult, Emo McCry apparently shrieked in a completely juvenile way at Gram, calling and texting Gram’s cell phone over and over again to swear and indicate that he was owed a glowing review whether or not he bothered to make the slightest effort to do a good job. Emo McCry rounded out his businesslike presentation by adding harassing emails to the mix. Oh yeah, and he tried to get Gram fired. Mistakenly believing he actually had the juice to force Fleshbot to fire a popular writer like Gram Ponante over one review the director of a DVD didn’t care for.

The absurd but typical overreaction to the mildest slight is comedy gold. Apparently Emo McCry was under the impression that Gram didn’t even need to view the movie to proclaim genius, which, in all fairness, I know other people have done for this guy. I’m certainly long past tired of theoretically creative people, in this age of hype, who want to be congratulated on their brilliance without having to actually try. I’m sick of being asked to praise (or dis) projects I have not yet seen. How fake is this hype going to get before it entirely kills journalism? How un-American is it for publicists to try to run what journalists say down to the last semi-colon? The most annoying thing to me, as a creative person, is how hyper-sensitive these corporate sell-outs are. They whine hysterically over the smallest imagined insult, even though they are totally insensitive to anyone else’s feelings. Have they never heard that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones? And, if they are going to take money from big business, I think they have an obligation to do a good job. A remake might not be art, but it ought to have good production values and be a quality product. But these emo manchildren seem to think it is their raison d’etre to lash out and try to damage everything and everyone around them. Guys, you are not “sticking it to the man” by taking corporate money and giving, both your corporate masters and the viewing public, laughably amateur productions in return. What are you people spending all that corporate dough on anyway? And, incidentally, companies do not usually grow large by having stupid people at the helm, so they are going to eventually notice you are excusing laziness and poor performance as irony and hipness, whether or not you can convince journalists to say you rock. Sometimes I worry that a small crew of disingenuous ripoff artists have fed the whole scene figurative luminous toxin and it is going to kill everything which matters, but at least we have time to figure out who the murderers are.

At any rate, after all was said and done, Gram Ponante is, of course, still writing in the same humorous style for Fleshbot and the emopomous director of Debbie Does Derivative is still hilarious too. Only Emo McCry is solely unintentionally hilarious. I don’t usually pull aside the curtain, but, if you feel like reading the entire email barrage from an apparently grown-ass man who is very very sensitive, then you should check out where Gram Ponante posted the entire exchange on his site. Perhaps the truth of Emo McCry’s materials is just very painful.

Fueled by Ramen recording artist Cobra Starship is a very modern band. They are currently on tour, opening for Fall Out Boy, along with fellow openers Paul Wall, +44, and The Academy is . . . Cobra Starship’s name sounds like a cross between TheCobrasnake and late Jefferson Airplane. They’ve got a song on the Snakes on a Plane and the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie soundtracks, ringtones available, a Glamour Kills clothing endorsement, and impressively pimped out profiles on all the good social networking sites. They even (I’m sure ironically) cover Lionel Richie’s “Three Times a Lady” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” The CS site itself contains a sort of pseudo-ironic “typical” rockstar history, which is probably actually based on true events but liberally gilded. Band leader Gabe Saporta’s animal familiar-dictated mission is apparently teaching “hipsters to not take themselves so seriously and by telling emo kids to stop being pussies.”

I guess Cobra Starship’s genre is Self-Deprecating Post-Emo? I don’t know. The salient point for Blue Blood readers is that Xanthia Doll appears dancing her yellow-clad booty off in their new video for their long-windedly-named single “Send My Love To The Dancefloor, I’ll See You In Hell (Hey Mister DJ)” from their album, While The City Sleeps, We Rule The Streets. Xanthia says, “I’m so happy I’m in it! It was a lot of fun to be a part of! Just look for red hair and a bright yellow jacket and you’ll see me! Wheeeeeeeeee!!!!!!”

Xanthia’s positive attitude is a lot of fun, but I have to admit that I like my rockstars to truly own what they do. If I were more familiar with modern emo, apparently Cobra Starship’s Gabe tapped a number of big deal emo folks to work on the project. An emo allstar band slagging off emo kids for being pussies is, you know, emoriffically ironic. I’d be more versed in emo if it could stand up and be proud of what it is, instead of hiding behind irony, self-deprecation, and pretending they don’t really mean whatever it is they are expressing. Emo adults need to stop being such pussies.

But the video looks fun with Xanthia in it:

The sex blogger panel at SXSW was entertaining and provided food for thought, but I’ve been having trouble writing about it. I finally realized that the problem with writing about sex bloggers is the same problem bloggers have writing about sex: Specifically, sex and sexuality are very core to self, so even the most gentle critiquing of someone’s sexuality can be terribly hurtful. If any sex bloggers are wounded by what I say here, I apologize, but please keep in mind how you feel when you write about sex with a date who doesn’t like your review.

I attended the Do You Blog on the First Date? panel because Rachel Kramer Bussel was on it. With credits including Penthouse, Bust, and Punk Planet, I think of her more as a writer writer than as exactly a blogger, but she does blog very diligently about both her life and cupcakes, so she absolutely has blogging cred. Yes, I said she writes about “cupcakes” and that is not slang for some depraved sex act you are unfamiliar with. Sometimes a cupcake is just a cupcake and I can’t help loving quality food porn; it is hardwired into my system. And apparently I know now that I am not alone in my longings. Rachel Kramer Bussel’s writing is intelligent and raw. She manages to be very self-aware without injecting pounds of that fakey emo I-don’t-really-mean-it irony. No mean feat and a breath of fresh delight in the current online writing landscape. Especially in the blogosphere.

So I showed up to hear Rachel speak and found out about the other sex bloggers on the panel along the way. The moderator was Mikki Halpin who was a good SXSW selection because of her tome The Geek Handbook: User Guide and Documentation for the Geek in Your Life, although she is also a contributing editor to Glamour and known for her It’s Your World–If You Don’t Like It, Change It book of advice to teens on how to engage politically. Unless there is more than one Mikki Halpin writing from New York City, in which case I feel less informed, but that doesn’t seem super likely. She once was on People’s Court because someone’s mom sued her for putting their picture in her zine. She says Judge Wopner threw it out because the woman was bringing son on national TV, only she didn’t mention what the nature of the photograph was.

Then there was Melanie Boyer who does a dating blog called About Last Night for the Alt Weekly from my old stomping grounds, the Washington City Paper. She has great hair and big jangley earrings and lists a nice writerly assortment of life credits ranging from a Masters in International Training and Education to being a Peace Corps volunteer. She was kind enough to give me a turquoise pair of her signature boy short panties featuring her bird logo on the front and the line “a little birdie told me, About Last Night, dispatches from the morning after” inside.

Next up was Emily Listfield who does the Sex and the Single Mom blog for Redbook of all places. For some reason, I was surprised to see that Redbook was technologically ahead of the curve in the magazinosphere. I found Redbook also annoyingly on top of their pop up advertising technology and keep in mind what far reaches of the web I, uhm, surf. Emily Listfield is best known for her novels which genre-wise fall somewhere between chick lit and noir and I definitely intend to check them out.

I’m less surprised to find out that Glamour has a dating blogger Alyssa Shelasky. After all, Glamour and Wired share a corporate parent. Prior to blogging about her dates for Glamour, Alyssa Shelasky was a staffer for Us Weekly and before that apparently was so impressive a PR pitchwoman that journalists not only wrote about the products she repped, but also wrote about how awesome she was at getting them to do so.

Now you all know the cast of characters, so what are the ethics of blogging about dating? Melanie Boyer, of The Washington City Paper, said she initially thought she would get permission from each of her beaus. She says she believes men think they know the score when they don’t. So now her rule is to tell them what she does immediately and then the gloves are off once she is not seeing them any more, although she never uses names and attempts to be minimal enough on details that her guys are not easily identified. Still, she has more or less accidentally busted out at least two cheating lovers with her blog. Alyssa Shelasky, of Glamour, says that she tries not to humiliate people and to be friendly, nice, ethical, and kind, but sometimes she finds herself saying, “I would have thought you’d be flattered by that and instead they hate your guts and they’re going to therapy.” Rachel Kramer Bussel, of Penthouse Variations, agrees that people tend to “freak about little things.”

In addition to the ethics involved with the responses lovers and potential lovers may have to being blogged about, there are possible repercussions for third parties and other people’s opinions can come into play. Alyssa Shelasky worries about her parents’ response, so she won’t write about more than kissing. She initially thought her readers would be impressed if she talked about partying with Paris Hilton, but she quickly understood that they wanted to see her vulnerable, emotional, human side. Then again, she says she pretty much quits her job whenever she gets hate mail, so being her editor is probably kind of hellish. Emily Listfield’s blog is precisely about being sexual and being a single mom, but Redbook readers apparently can get a bit perturbed about her having sex at all. She understandably feels that her thirteen-year-old daughter shouldn’t know about her mother’s love life and has her friends lie such that “it gets very complicated to have that many realities out there.” She jokes that when your offspring turns thirty is the appropriate age to tell your child you blog about sex. Rachel Kramer Bussel has the luxury of blogging more for herself and thus having more control and says she will remove comments which are just mean and not constructive. She explains that “people really personalize whatever you write about and then they get affronted” and feel like they have to defend themselves.

The combination of invading the privacy of a writer’s romantic partners and having to stand behind whatever is blogged in the moment can be painful. Pretty much everyone on the the Should You Blog on the First Date? panel said they either wish they had blogged anonymously or were considering blogging anonymously. Emily Listfield feels that the anonymity of the women who comment on her blog entries gives them the freedom to really share about themselves and she feels that is a wonderful thing. Having her own name on her words makes Emily Listfield feel that her blog may be “destroying her life.” Alyssa Shelasky explains that Glamour wanted a face for the blog, someone who could promote on television and so forth, so being anonymous was not an option. She did enjoy it, however, when she got a MySpace account, despite feeling like, at twenty-nine, she was too old for it, and was surprised by the really really personal messages she received privately from readers. She felt like it was almost a group therapy evolution which made her like her blog more. Melanie Boyer says that the paper wanted journalistic integrity, so she had to use her name. Although she got a thrill from the whole “there’s that fat nerdy girl from junior high and now she’s a sex columnist” thing, she has found having her name on her blog inconvenient. In almost the same breath that Melanie Boyer makes the very astute observation that “anonymity erases integrity,” she expresses her own longing for anonymity. She doesn’t say whether she thinks her integrity would stay strong in such a situation. Rachel Kramer Bussel has considered doing an anonymous sex blog because she made the interesting observation that her friends who blog more anonymously than she does can be much more detailed without the same fear of upsetting those they blog about. It “makes you reconsider what you say when your name is on it,” she explains.

Pretty much all the sex bloggers agree that the people they blog about tend to be bummed about it and that they don’t much care for being blogged about themselves. Rachel Kramer Bussell says it felt weird to be blogged about by a peer, a woman she was in the same anthology with. Alyssa Shelasky says she hated having one of her guys, BostonBoy, stating his perspective in her comments and she also hated Gawker slagging her. Then again, she says she did get called “dating whore of Conde Nast” which might be a little brutal. Although I couldn’t find that exact phrase on the Gawker.com site, I did find a place where they had re-posted Alyssa Shelasky’s engagement announcement from a relationship which obviously didn’t work out. Ouch. In fact, she says, the only guy in six months who she dates who loved the Alyssacentric blog was on drugs, a “raging cokehead,” and she also had no trouble with a semi-homeless guy she had a three week fling with. Because he had no computer.

At this point in the panel, I apparently passed Forrest Black, who was shooting the presentation, a note which read: “MY BROTHER SHOULD MARRY SHELASKY ONLY HER FACE IS NOT HEART-SHAPED.” (For the non-Luddite savvy, note passing is a sort of low tech Twitter.) My brother is not a homeless coke addict with no computer (and I love my brother) so I guess there is just something wrong with me. I just thought she was awesome, really adept at coming across sweet, but in a way where you could tell she could handle high pressure socializing. I made sure to get her cell number and email, but, alas, reading her blog upon my return from Austin, I discovered that she is already in a relationship. Drat.

Emily Listfield says that “strategy-wise” doing a date blog is very hard because some guys say they won’t read it, but she wonders if they can really avoid that. The panelists all agreed that dating involves a certain amount of deciding what to reveal when and blogging about it messes up the timing on revealing oneself bit by bit. Rachel Kramer Bussel says she finds it problematic that sometimes she is fine with blogging about really personal stuff which is at a deeper level that how well she knows someone she is dating. To be a good blogger, she feels it is very important to “go beyond the surface” and she points out that her favorite blogs to read are not necessarily written by people she would want to be faced with in person.

Melanie Boyer says “ I write every day and it has become like exhaling; it has become my way of processing things,” only reading her entries makes me want to shake her, tell her how good she looks, and give her a mirror where she doesn’t see her junior high face. But she is a little oblivious and apparently still cranky at men for slights which must be far in her past now. Once they opened it up to questions, all of the panelists, except Rachel Kramer Bussel, made some fairly sexist remarks about men and male insight. Most of them seemed to be agreeing on the preposterous claim that men don’t blog about dating, and certainly straight men don’t, until Rachel Kramer Bussel brought up Tucker Max. Perhaps realizing how they sounded, Melanie Boyer made an attempt at a partial save by pointing out that the members of the sex blogger panel all have the perspectives of totally heterosexual women. Except, just from data presented during this specific panel, this is patently not the case. Rachel Kramer Bussel says that “it’s really hard not to internalize stereotypes about sex writing” and that some people look at writing about sex as frivolous, but she disagrees. Alyssa Shelasky says “you have to own it to feel good about it, like anything else,” only one gets the impression that she isn’t planning on being a dating blogger for much longer.

So should you blog on the first date? Going by the experiences of this panel of bright female writers, I’d have to say you probably should not. The question is posed: Does a great writer have to not care what anyone thinks? Going by my own experiences, I’d have to say that is probably true. Ouch. Are all great artists destined to die alone? I guess that is a topic for another article.

Over the years, I think Rolling Stone magazine has maintained a higher standard of journalism than most music rags. The majority of music publications are written by writers in the employ of publicists and most rarely have an article on topics other than a performer’s favorite color or fictional creative process. Although their musical tastes and mine are not always precisely the same, Rolling Stone is usually an example of what journalism ought to be.

A week or so ago writer Elizabeth Goodman did a brief piece for Rolling Stone’s online incarnation where she really blasted Trent Reznor. Full disclaimer: The Nine Inch Nails album Pretty Hate Machine pretty much changed my life. When the “Get Down, Make Love” single came out, I drove from DC to Chicago, partly so I could get it from Wax Trax before it was widely available. Some of this is a topic for another article, but I wanted to fully disclose where I’m coming from on this.

In the recent Rolling Stone piece, Elizabeth Goodman chortled about Trent Reznor not being allowed to be giddy with happiness, being goth and all. Reznor apparently confided to Rolling Stone that he had perhaps taken so long between albums because he had sort of lost his confidence and was too worried what people thought of him. The goth-industrial icon went on to explain that he felt he was developmentally past that and was likely to only improve as an artist. The writer quoted what he said and summed it up saying, “After tiring of patting his own back, Reznor went on to pontificate on another of his recent epiphanies.” A little harsh. Apparently, Reznor’s second epiphany was realizing that he didn’t care much for the twenty bands playing overly-generic, over-produced, whiny-ass emo songs he had heard on the radio and that he couldn’t much tell them apart. (Bad news Trent: most radio stations don’t really have a whole twenty bands in rotation at any given time.)

The artist went on to say that he was suspicious of the motives of why a guy might be trying to start a band today: “Is he trying to change the world and do something different and express himself…or is it because they want to fuck Paris Hilton and be photographed outside trendy restaurants?”

I think Trent is right. The nature of celebrity has changed so much. For example, I used to get so excited when a channel like HBO wanted to come shoot at my punk rock group house and interview me and Forrest Black, even though none of us had cable at the time. But HBO was not secretly trying to set up cameras in my house to catch me breaking it off with a lover or having an argument with a housemate about whose dishes were in the sink. (The dishes were mine; I use plastic now.) At the time, if HBO sent a production crew over, they were going to let me outline which areas were public and which were private, they were going to respect my wishes, and news was a straighforward interview, and not getting photographed with the wrong sex partner in a trendy restaurant.

The really cool thing about the Rolling Stone article is that it has enough rawness to be journalism. The cynic in me wonders if maybe it is not just a very very clever placed article, something designed to appeal to the sort of people who liked Pretty Hate Machine. But Elizabeth Goodman’s article feels like actual music journalism. She didn’t just write the same nonsense bullet points from a publicist which one normally sees in music articles these days. She held my interest. She may not have personally liked Trent, but she wrote her article in a way where readers could actually get a human feel for both the journalist and the journalistic subject.

So, kudos to Rolling Stone and Elizabeth Goodman and Trent Reznor for all still flying the flag.

Incidentally, Trent has been on the cover of Rolling Stone at least twice. I’m just sayin’.

Emo has been around long enough that it should have died a natural death by now. But it won’t go away. It hangs around, moping just out of view, like a skinny wuss with a journal in his messenger bag and tears in his eyes. You tell him to fuck off and he skulks away, but you see him following you again the next day. Emo needs that rejection to keep its heart pure, you see. Ugh, so creepy? Can you believe you ever thought there was something special about emo?

It’s over, emo. We’re done with you. It’s been 20 years. Why can’t you just move on?

Most emo kids are dorky enough to know the enshrined canon and history of emo, which starts in DC in ‘85 or so with Embrace and Rites of Spring. This period in history might as well be the Siege of Stalingrad to most of the grumpy larvae who cry along with Dashboard Confessional, and it’s not really accurate anyway. The first band from DC that I ever heard labeled “emo” or “emocore” was Beefeater, whose absence from the canon is mystifying, since their stance was militant vegetarian and their bass player sported the original emo beard. (Note: I grew up in DC and I saw Minor Threat live, okay, so if you’re under 35 and not a Mackaye, do not come at me with a bunch of noise you read on the web somewhere.)

As a further point, just to illustrate the roach-like endurance of emo themes, please note that emo goes back not 20 years but 200. The original emo heart-throb was Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, author of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Werther was the original emo kid, with his journals, passionate friendships, condescension to mere mortals, pathological narcissism, and of course, his tragic love of an unattainable woman. The book started a craze among the youth of the day, who imitated Werther’s style of dress, godawful poesy, and suicide. Sorrows is still taught as a classic of 18th century romantic lit, and although Goethe went on to write reams of poetry, essays, criticism, and scientific work, in his lifetime he never managed to shake off little Werther. Emo kids are like fucking barnacles.

I’m not going to drone on about which bands are true emo and which bands are plain-vanilla indie and which bands are commercial twaddle and which bands are sniveling shit. I’m not in a position to judge these things, because if something can even be plausibly mislabeled as emo, I probably loathe it. This is because emo is unendurable if you’re not an emo kid.

And what is an emo kid? Besides a pussy’s pussy?

Not that there’s anything intrinsically pussy about singing about the women you’ve wronged or who’ve wronged you. Without ruinous affairs, bluesmen would have had nothing but poverty and whiskey to sing about, a state of affairs that could have left us with no sources for American popular music other than polka. The telling difference between a bluesman and an emo kid is the number of women involved. Bluesmen come by their world-weariness honestly, by having stormy affairs with lots of cruel, wanton, mistreating, yet kind-hearted women. An emo kid can get three albums of endless whinnying out of one woman, who can’t have known what she was getting into. (The other big difference is that a bluesman’s woman would probably love to tell her side of the story. The chick who broke Mr. Confessionals heart doesn’t have to say a word. I mean, shit, who’d dump him?)

No, an emo kid is not a bluesman, no matter how much whiskey you slip into his or her Sprite. An emo kid is made up of many things: goth self-pity and eyeliner, indie kid dork chic and studied dirtiness, a bit of punk self-righteous obnoxiousness, all drowned in adolescent self-absorption.

Because above all, an emo kid is a kid. And the hardest thing to give up about childhood isn’t the freedom, the innocence, or the security (or the illusions thereof). It’s the whining. French auteur Francois Truffaut once said his films focused on children because he was not interested at all in the emotions of adults. This is another way of saying that no one wants to hear grown people whining. No one expects dignity from children, who have an excuse for not knowing that life isn’t fair. But the older you get, the more grating it is to hear you wailing about how much it all hurts. If you get big enough to be punchable, you’d better learn a little stoicism and ironic detachment before they get beaten into you.

Horribly, we must admit that all of us have been emo kids at one point. We’ve all been misunderstood. We’ve all had our hearts torn out and dropped on our Chuck Taylors. We’ve all had our personal notes read before the class. And somewhere in the recesses of our mind, we’ve all written sick-making poetry about it. But we eventually realized that we weren’t alone, and that everyone had felt like this once. And we realized that we were the only ones still whining and sulking. And we shut the fuck up and got on with our lives.

Links of historic interest. Get educated!:

Minor Threat
Rites of Spring
Beefeater
Embrace
The Sorrows of Young Werther