It was just a dumb quote. Try running it in reverse:

Dee Dee King?

I like Ghost. They have metallic moments but overall I class them as a hard rock band, which is fine because we have a shortage of old school hard rock today.

I thought that quote was hilarious. As evidence of the health of the "indie rock scene in Chicago," he cites a list of hip-hop and R&B artists. That's like me saying the "death metal scene in my town" is thriving, and providing a list of salsa bands as proof.

Limousines. First class plane tickets to LA and NY. Brushing shoulders with showbiz A-listers at corporate HQ. Multiple big money offers. And this treatment was for unsigned rock bands playing clubs. We're so far from that business environment now we might as well be on another planet.

Punk seems almost designed to be an attempt to catch lightning in a bottle. When you catch it, great. But it doesn't happen much, and vast amounts of worthless dreck are produced chasing that lightning and missing it.

Overcompensation. 2000 was the era when rock critics were finally tacitly admitting they had missed the boat on Black Sabbath and heavy music in general in the 70's and 80's. So when nu metal became a sensation, the critics didn't want to miss that boat. Of course real fans of heavy music were well aware of how bad…

Punk's sloppiness is interesting/exciting only in rare cases. Far more often it's just lazy, lackadaisical, and dumb. Punk is the most hit-and-miss formula in the history of pop music, and it misses a lot.

The ending of the movie adaptation of Apt Pupil was a hundred times better than King's original ending. Kid goes on a shooting spree? Blech. The movie ending is quite good.

Nah, it's Danzig. I enjoy metal and I've always found Danzig insufferably cheesy and juvenile. Never have I found anything to like or respect about his body of work.

If we're being pedantic, it ought to read "who are DISINCLINED to give a shit."

YouTube seems to have a pretty good algorithm for music search results. Punch in any popular artist and you'll find many similar artists along the right side of the screen, some of them fairly obscure. Click an obscure one and you get a new list of suggestions even more obscure. Keep doing that and before long you…

It is kind of funny to imagine Van Halen giving away their blockbuster debut album for free, but that's what would happen today. They were unknowns, and unknown bands don't get heard unless they give away their first batch of songs for free.

People should rediscover Madness? That's an argument for Skynet, not musical gatekeeping.

This: "The mopey, middlebrow bloat of all these songs"

Whatevs. It's a great low-brow party-rock record afflicted with bad lead singing.

It's a crying shame that Motley Crue didn't have a better singer than Vince Neil. Shout At The Devil could have been a trashy classic with Sebastion Bach singing on it.

Lots of Emerson, Lake, & Palmer.

Cool As Ice?

Fargo is a better movie than any of these and has lots less embarrassingly dated kitsch in it — which, of course, disqualifies it as a quintessential 90's movie. Pulp Fiction on the other hand …