William Patrick Corgan Covers Miley Cyrus

I mentioned Billy Corgan two weeks ago when I featured Zwan, but he was on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon last night and sang Miley Cyrus' Wrecking Ball backstage:

Kinda makes it seem like a good song, too.

A Reason To Finally Like Miley Cyrus?

A head above anything else in 2014, Against Me!'s Transgernder Dysphoria Blues was an impactful and goddamn amazing record (that could have used a bit more distortion on the guitars, so it wasn't perfect). By far the best record from last year, and I'll fight Kanye West to prove it if I have to.

Miley Cyrus, well, enough about her already. Except she did perform on this, and at the same backyard-party/fundraiser event, performed Androgynous with Laura Jane Grace and Joan Jett, so there's a double-dose of street cred right there, gathering funds for kids ''facing homeless youth, LGBT youth, and other vulnerable populations''.

Decent stuff.

So is this:

Video Of The Week: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Sometimes, simple is better. So is playing to your strengths, something Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are experts at.

This song, Higgs Boson Blues, from their terrific (though not as catchy as previous releases) album Push The Sky Away is built around one simple groove, but layered and textured with multiple levels of restraint and taste captured brilliantly by directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, and cinematographer Lol Crawley.

The hirsute men comprising The Bad Seeds (currently Warren Ellis - not the comic book writer - Martin P. Casey, Conway Savage, Thomas Wylder and Jim Sclavunos) are capable of rocking out with the best of them - they are, in fact, among the best of them - but they are just as adept at holding back and letting Nick Cave unroll his storylines where they need to go.

In this case, from Robert Johnson's selling his soul to the Devil (for better guitar skills) through to current-day Geneva, home of CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) where the so-called ''God-particle'' (Higgs-Boson) was discovered, he weaves a cautionary tale that the only certainty we have about the future is death, and we will get there anyhow, no matter the path taken, and that everything in between is at best a discovery, at worst trivial (death of a pop icon, hereby represented by Miley Cyrus, pre-VMAs/naked meltdown, ironically), and the middle just tragic (the fatal shooting of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis).

All told through a golden voice meant to lure nubile young females into dark places.

Twerkin' Beethoven

I would tell Miley Cyrus to put that in her pipe and smoke it, but I'm afraid she'd try to, literally, smoke Chicago burlesque artist Michelle L'Amour, who puts the ''ass'' in ''classical'' in this fine, uh, interpretive dance version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.



Ok, so it's not twerking, but it's definitely something. And, sure, the video is a year old, but who needs a reason to watch a live performance that includes dancing, classical music, and someone wearing a bow tie?

Poor Miley Cyrus!

So it's been a long fucking while, eh? I know there are tons of more important stuff to be taking on, but, I need to start somewhere...

So I'm in my boxer shorts and t-shirt, waiting for a friend to tell me if he's coming over or not, and I stumble upon this very funny piece of non-news: Miley Cyrus, daughter of Billy Ray (the achy breaky heartbreaker from almost two decades ago, now going the Jon Bon Jovi washed-up-singer-turns-actor route) and pop star of the moment, was given the cold shoulder by none other than Radiohead at the Grammys.

She couldn't take it, so she left - didn't even stay to watch them perform.

If, really, they were her favourite band in the whole wide world, then she might've tried reading up on them once in a while... we're talking about a band that:

- after making it big with the song Creep in 1993 (the third time it was released as a single, by the way), stopped playing it, a few times even replying ''we're not a fucking jukebox'' when it's requested live

- after releasing one of the best, if not THE best, rock record of all time, OK Computer, in 1997, pretty much stopped making straightforward rock music altogether

- as a matter of fact, their next record, Kid A, could well have been made by an electronica/experimental/psychedelic act

- from Kid A onwards, during their live performances, Jonny Greenwood, the band's best guitarist, possibly among the best rock guitarists in the world for the past decade, pretty much stopped playing guitar on stage, playing with bleeping machines and transistor radios instead...
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So... regardless of what anyone thinks of Miley Cyrus talent-wise, intelligence-wise... she is still a modern day bubblegum pop star, bred for kids, hoping to stay long enough to make a dent in pop the Aguilera/Spears/Simpson way.

I'm not sure Radiohead would give Coldplay the time of day at the Grammys. So, sorry, Miley, but what you represent is of no interest to Radiohead, and even if you weren't you, with everything that implies (family history in music, starting out as an actress rather than a singer, having your own fucking wing in your dad's mansion, etc.), they probably wouldn't have wanted to meet you anyway.

It's not you, it's them. And it's also a little bit you.