Someone needs to make a Shelbyville joke in here somewhere.

It sounds pretty much exactly like one of Elliot's improvised 'listener mail' songs from The Flophouse.

holy crap thank you! I usually find the whining about website changes a bit overwrought, but my fuck do I hate the new googlemaps.

I'd like to suggest that this feature make a point of including a non-fan in the roundtable. Not in terms of someone necessarily being contrarian or negative, but just in terms of someone who can approach the music directly, without the years of emotional memories and expectations weighing so heavily on things.

Yeah but that just begs the question. A culture that was afraid of the "satanic imagery" found on rock album covers created by a bunch of drunk, blue-collar guys trying to make a buck is a culture that is whackadoo.

Yeah, it's so strange to think that he was viewed as a legitimately scary, subversive and dangerous figure in the 80s. What a strange decade.

Blame the Futurama cameos.

You're right that it's easy to overstate things and make a boogeyman out of Tipper Gore. But all of the hand wringing about rock music lyrics was coming from a *really* crazy place at that time. We were in the midst of culture wide satanic panic on multiple fronts, and there had recently been lawsuits against bands…

That's actually a pretty perfect description of him.

Counterpoint: He wrote this:

Man, do NONE of you know anything about the Meatmen? This is all exactly his schtick guys, and has been since about 1982.

Wow, you just really brought me back DingLBerry!

This will be lost down the comment rabbit hole at this point, but I just wanted to make sure Dennis Perkins knows he's not alone!

I never warmed to AJFA and it was basically the point where I began drifting away from being a fan of the band more generally.

That's really not about politics per se though. Sarah Palin is objectively a loon and George W. Bush at the very least gave the impression that he was in way over his head. Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy got needled plenty since they had some interesting baggage and reputations as booze/poon hounds.

People are always quick to point out the fallacy of the "the show used to be funnier" trope, but what has made me lose interest in SNL is that it just seems so damn toothless. It may not have been reliably funnier back in the day, but I feel like the show at least used to be marginally more subversive and anarchic. …

If you want to feel even older (and also even sadder about the dissolution of Gene and Dean's band and friendship), check this video out of the two of them sharing simpler times in 1987:

It's not relevant to the thesis at hand here (where genuine or even borderline harrassment is taking place), but I think in at least some milder cases people enjoy the attention, and they - consciously or not - leave the door open just a crack so that they continue to get it.

Yeah, I'm still excited whenever I see Heller's byline on a story, but I've been increasingly skimming through these punk articles as they feel more and more like band-name-word-salad to me. And I say that as someone who was at least somewhat involved in the hardcore scene in the 80s and early 90s.

That was an episode of mythbusters. It started by showing that flushing the toilet basically unleashes a volcano of germ mist into the air, and finished with showing that even a toothbrush kept in the next room still showed traces of fecal matter eventually.