Found via the Flickr account of vinyl junkie and album cover lover Epiclectic, this WTF album cover defies any sort of snarky exposition. It’s only appropriate to exclaim, W…T…F???? But rest assured, this record does actually exist. The title of the book on the album cover is “AA For Beginners”.
As a rule, daytime television sucks the air out of a deceased camel. But I have to say, I was totally surprised by this clip from the Ellen show, because not only did she NOT trot out some bad album covers that everybody has seen before a million times, she actually SURPRISED ME as a connoisseur of shitty album art with two records I didn’t even know existed.
Honor Blackman recorded a record? The former Bond girl turns songstress? Or was she always a singer and I just didn’t know it? That album cover isn’t as awful as some, but Ellen DeGeneres does have just as much fun at Honor Blackman’s expense as I would here–her riffs on these records were pretty funny. And I hate daytime TV.
Then again, maybe some producer out there in TV land has been watching this space, and I should consider a lawsuit.
Only kidding–there are plenty of crap album covers and enough jokes to go around for all eternity. Plus, right-wing extremist knuckle-draggers hate Ellen DeGeneres, which makes her a good egg in my book. How could I possibly tilt lances at her when she gives the righties nightmares? Behold three wretched album covers and commentary as featured on the Ellen show:
by Joe Wallace
During the London riots, I heard some horror stories about the effects of indiscriminate looting and burning. Some were true, and some were not.
Fortunately for indie record shop Dub Vendor, the reports of their demise were wrong, as evidenced 
by the picture I found courtesy of Reggae.com which shows Dub Vendor (the shop with the blue sign) coming out more or less unscathed compared to the unlucky tenant right next door.
But SonyDADC didn’t fare so well–it went up in flames resulting in untold numbers of vinyl records being destroyed–including a lot of stock by the awesome Ninja Tune label. Others affected include Sub Pop, Secretly Canadian, 4AD and other names.
According to several online reports, many labels lost “most or all of their stock”. How this affects the bands, the record sellers and the fans? Well, do the math. Indie artists who were counting on all that vinyl now have to figure out not only how to get the records out there, but how to recoup the costs associated with any reprinting needed to get the release to the shops.
Lots of people were screaming in August about “revolution” and how people were getting something back via these riots that they might have felt entitled to…but the burning also wound up affecting musicians and indie businesses too.
This little screed might be a bit late, but it’s also the sort of thing you don’t really think much of when events are literally blowing up–how does the insanity on the streets translate into crippling or destroying somebody’s livelihood–someone you would never make a target of for any reason if you understood what you were really doing?
I was grateful to hear about Dub Vendor surviving the riot for a variety of reasons, and while it’s easy and fun to point fingers at the record industry and companies like Sony for being the clueless dinosaurs they prove themselves to be time and again.
But at the end of the day there are still a LOT of non-corporate, indie friendly people working in and around this business. And when you torch the SonyDADC plant, you’re also setting fire to some of those people’s hopes and dreams, too.
Three The Hard Way featured the triple threat of Fred Williamson, Jim Kelly, and Jim Brown…with a lot of excellent music from The Impressions.
The movie is hilarious–the villian is the same guy who played Doctor Shrinker on Saturday morning TV, which makes every one of his scenes 100% more fun to watch. The premise of this movie is basically that a villian named Feather (yes, really) wants to create a virus that will selectively wipe out only one portion of mankind. Guess which portion a crazy white guy with sinister eyebrows wants to get rid of?
Jim Kelly and company bust heads and take out the bad guys, naturally.
My favorite thing about the movie-aside from, well, everything else, is that the soundtrack basically describes the entire plot of the movie. All the lyrics tell you everything you need to know about the movie–awesomeness abounds.
It’s a shame these three guys didn’t do about 100 of these movies together, the chemistry is great and they would have made an excellent series of crazy-ass movies. Sure, this movie has its share of filler, but as an artifact of good old fashioned drive-in movie making, I give it two thumbs way up…and the Three The Hard Way soundtrack is 100% pure gold.
Check out this clip from Three The Hard Way, with Jim Kelly giving a racist cop the business–and groove to that sitar-drenched soundtrack!