To be honest the first season and a half or so are really rough and not very indicative of what the show ended up being. They started out very clearly trying to do a cringe-comedy Arrested Development clone in rural Canada and so you get waaaaaay too many jokes in the first season that are all about Chris Elliott…

Neither here nor there but the makeup and costume artists on Schitt’s Creek really deserved some kind of special effects Emmy (...do they have Emmies in Canada?) for regularly managing to make Emily Hampshire look genuinely worn down and schlubby.  I assume it took a large team of stone professionals.

Yeah, I’m genuinely surprised he didn’t manage to seriously injure any of his touring musicians: he basically tackled Richard Patrick (later of Filter) at the show I saw them at.

This sounds amazing and I’m already annoyed that it’s not available to stream anywhere.

Reznor has been pretty public about the fact that he was a drug and booze-addled mess in the 90s so I wouldn’t rule out some bad stories surfacing from then; unlike Manson he seemed to largely turn into a decent human being after drying out

Yeah, although I always felt like Coil was the better comparison, since Trent was never trying to be as abrasive as Skinny Puppy and from Coil you get the goth/melodic influence.

Yeah, that’s the thing. If you have a choice on the table, you’re going to take “more life” and you’re gonna take it at any cost, especially if you have kids. You’ll do it, I’ll do it, everyone does it.

I feel like that was a take you could somewhat reasonably have about Pretty Hate Machine (in fact I think I recall describing it as “Sony’s My First Coil” which is obviously hugely unfair but also not entirely untrue, also I am very old) but by the time we got to The Downward Spiral it was reasonably clear that like…

Doing god’s work there. :)

LOL, sorry. I’ve usually got a good radar for this but it’s obviously not infallible and the grim truth about internet comment threads is that there’s no opinion so self-evidently terrible and wrong that you wouldn’t expect someone to proudly state it. :)

Lizzo’s stuff may or may not be to your taste, but she is an actual capital-S Singer: she can hold a note, she has a decent range and she has near-perfect pitch.  None of those things can really be said of Manson.

Honestly, now being old enough that I’ve seen a few friends go? If you’re going to get cancer relatively young (which basically always means it’s going to be seriously aggressive), “oops, sorry, better settle your affairs, here’s a morphine prescription” and dead a few weeks later seems like a much better way to go…

Ice-T was definitely one of the weirdest side effects of the 90s rappers-as-actors craze. He eventually settled down and turned into a more or less proper actor, but his early outings are... mannered? Distinct? He’s entertaining to watch (“I wanna kill you so bad my dick is hard”, passim) but you can’t call him good.

I think it’s possible to acknowledge that McGowan did the world a service by shining a light on Harvey Weinstein and was genuinely victimized by him... but is also a deeply mentally ill person who’s life is in no way improved by additional media attention now that Weinstein is in jail.  Let’s all wish her peace and…

Sigh, yeah. I have similar feelings about Paul Bettany — to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever so much as hinted at him doing anything particularly bad to anyone, but he’s besties with Depp and was the other party in all of Depp’s (at absolute best) deeply creepy texts about how he wanted to fuck up Amber Heard…

Autotune has its limits!

About the most charitable I can be on the subject was that he had generally excellent taste in backing musicians and if you can hire Dave Ogilvie and Trent Reznor to produce your album it’s probably gonna sound really good.

She’d made it pretty contextually clear who she was talking about but had never actually said his name -- presumably having his other exes willing to go on the record simultaneously changed the calculus a bit for everyone.

I mean that’s the thing about being 96 — you can be in great shape and it’s still really not surprising if one day you simply don’t wake up. May we all live as long and as well.

Counterpoint: Chumbawamba and Jamiroquai are both infinitely less awful names than “Hoobastank”. But points to him for having a sense of humor about it.