RC@5: Sorry for the Delay by 340ml

Record Club covered this album five years ago. I gave it another listen this week. Here are some thoughts.

Sorry for the Delay

340ml

Week 83: August 30-September 5, 2020

It's weird to me that, in the past five years, I have not heard about 340ml a single time in the wild. I have not spied their name mentioned in passing in any of the millions of words in music criticism or journalism that I've read in the last half decade. I have not heard a random song of theirs on the radio or in a grocery store or anything like that. I have not seen any of their songs on playlists, and the algorithm has never handed them to me or anyone in my vicinity. They've only been mentioned on the insular PoYB, that's it.

This isn't, like, unbelievable, that something like this would happen. It's actually quite thrilling when someone brings an album to Record Club from an artist that I've never heard of before. I love when that happens. But most of the time, it's under the assumption that it's my fault that I'd never heard of them. Usually, I learn about them through RC, and then continue to hear about them through the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. But it's reasonable to believe that a blog contributor picks randomly or arbitrarily and it happens to be a band that isn't really all that well known outside of this blog's area of coverage.

What I'm saying now is that I still get a little uncomfortable over this idea, that someone or something could pass through and then be forgotten. I have a constant and unending compulsion to hang onto everything that was ever important to me. 340ml, for one brief week, was important to me, and so I wanna keep 'em around forever.

Perhaps I'm writing about all of this now, for this five-year retrospective specifically, because of what spawned from my Sorry for the Delay review. Instead of doing my usual "1000 words about nothing" thing that I guess I wasn't all that great at in 2020, I forwent the words and bought a picture from a redditor. I paid a chick from Pittsburgh to draw me on the back of a cat [on the way to the studio]. She did it, and I thought it was a nice little bit. But then, a year later, we came up with another bit, and Kailyn—now given a name and blog attributes—was added to the roster of RC characters.

And then, of course, years after that, I went through the rest of her favorite albums of all time. The outro to that mini blog column featured me grappling with the idea that I was going to have to live without answers, that Kailyn was gone, that there was nothing I could do, no amount of blogging, to bring her back into my life, after drawing me on a cat so many years ago.

So now I'm relistening to Sorry for the Delay for the first time in a really long time, and I'm remembering the band, and I'm remembering Kailyn, and I'm remembering other random shit, like Sunny's "340ml of rum" bit, and Stephan apologizing for his late review by texting me "sorry for the delay" and having that joke go completely over my head for a couple days until it struck me. Music is good for remembering. I don't ever want to use it to forget.

RECORD CLUB PRESENTS: Kailyn's Dozen, Week #12 of 12: Me and My Gang by Rascal Flatts

Hi Kailyn. This is Joe from Philadelphia. Hope all is well. My apologies for hitting you up out of the blue again. I don't have an art request this time, though I do hope that you're still creating and finding joy in your art.

I'm just doing my due diligence and following up on an email that we exchanged a few years ago. I told you in June 2021 that I was asking people about their favorite albums of all time, and you were nice enough to send me a list of albums that you said were your favorite. Over three years later, I have finally become acquainted with all of them, and wanted to share with you some of my thoughts. Like you are with your art, I have personally found that listening to and talking to friends about music is the thing that brings me peace and joy. So thanks for indulging me.

Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park — I feel like I was pretty judgmental on the big hits by Linkin Park in my youth, so it was cool reconnecting with it and finding that the sound has aged real nicely. There's probably always room for a little teenage angst no matter how old we get.

Masterpiece Theatre by Marianas Trench — Sometimes I get real down on pop music, but then I have Marianas Trench to remind me that sometimes pop music can masquerade as rock music. There were some catchy tunes on this thing. Maybe a little thin, but it's pop music! That's okay!

Don't You Fake It by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus — Completely forgot about "Face Down" before you reminded me of it through this album. Holy hell... this is a good track. Like Linkin Park, it was interesting reexamining it as an adult. Kind of intense themes!

Meteora by Linkin Park — Okay, so is it wrong to say that this is better than Hybrid Theory? I have no idea, and it's too late to get a sense online as to which album is generally considered their best. That one song with the flute was neat. I wasn't expecting that on a Linkin Park album.

Red River Blue by Blake Shelton — Your country music picks were a cool challenge for me. I don't hate country music generally, but there is a certain substrain that I can't stand. I would probably include Blake Shelton in that category. But! I found some stuff to like here! That honey bee song was goofy fun!

Boys Like Girls by BOYS LIKE GIRLS — Now emo and pop punk are a lot easier to get into than country music for me, and listening to this album was like putting on a warm pair of slippers. "Head over Heels" was a highlight. I know you had said that some of these albums had standout songs for you, so I listened to albums trying to pick out which were the best songs, wondering which ones you had on your playlist.

Steal This Album! by System of a Down — Duuuuude... this might have been my favorite on your list. I was familiar with System of a Down, obviously, but the deep cuts were pretty wild on this album, and I wish I had gotten into this band earlier. The singer is nuts. I love it.

Avenged Sevenfold by Avenged Sevenfold — I was not expecting this album to be so varied. It starts like weird nu-metal but ends with basically a Broadway showstopper in the same vein as Pink Floyd's The Wall? Absolutely fascinating album.

American Tragedy by Hollywood Undead — Holy shit, this one made me laugh a lot. I don't know if it was supposed to be a parody of rap rock or the real thing, but I don't think it matters. Some of the lines that Charlie Scene drops are outrageous. Those lines have been stuck in my head ever since. The one about peeing the bed on a sleepover? A twisted genius.

Stadium Arcadium by Red Hot Chili Peppers — Damn, two hours of RHCP is a lot for me. Lots of fluff here surrounding the big hits that we all know and love. "Torture Me" was my takeaway deep cut.

Relapse by Eminem — Still not really sure what to make of this one. Eminem seems to be rapping in a fake Jamaican accent for most of it? I don't know if I like it... but I also could totally see how this album would be very influential for a new generation of shock rappers.

Strummin' on Garth by Brooks Jefferson — What in the world? Does Brooks Jefferson not actually exist? I played this album and realized that it was all Garth Brooks covers, and that Brooks Jefferson was a shadow entity. I might need you to explain this one to me.

You Get What You Give by Zac Brown Band — Like I said for the Shelton pick, this really isn't my cup of tea. But I've listened to the ten-minute "Who Knows" so many times. That's the one.

Stand Up and Scream by Asking Alexandria — Can't say I'm too familiar with this type of music. Guttural metal noises? Mixed with twinkly EDM rave beats? I was more fascinated than enthralled. Or maybe enthralled with how fascinated I was. This felt comparable to Hollywood Undead, in that I was really happy exploring it, without actually liking it, if that makes sense.

Me and My Gang by Rascal Flatts — Pretty good!

Thanks again for the good picks. If you're still out there listening to music and exploring new favorites, feel free to hit me up any time and chat. If you are busy and/or think that it's weird that a stranger is reaching out to you years after you made recommendations, then feel free to ignore this email too! Regardless, thanks again. I hope life has been great for you the past few years. Take care.

Joe

This is my final signal sent outward toward Pittsburgh and toward my once-internet-friend Kailyn. I don't know if it'll ever reach it's destination, but I still transmit with hope that she will one day hear me and wonder what I'm doing with my time. I will probably not tell her that I wrote twelve blog posts about her.

While it's disheartening to know that this short-lived blog feature will never gain the closure it deserves, I will still sleep soundly knowing that I at least made an attempt. I think sometimes about what happened here, and why she doesn't respond to emails. It could be anything, any reason, serious or petty. Maybe she got a new email address because her old one was hacked. Maybe she has a filter set for "art request" because she is actively trying to distance herself from her old hobby. Maybe she's dead! I know her last name and don't see anything about obituaries on google so probably not, bus still! How sad would that be?

Whatever the reason, we can now simply say that Kailyn no longer exists. With the ending of this blog column, she reverts back into the ether from which she originally came. A spirit who haunted the blog for three months with bizarre, nonsensically-arranged music, we now put the idea of her to rest. The Kailyn we know, the one constructed here with hot glue and felt, is gone. Unless she responds to my email, in which case, KAILYN'S DOZEN PART II!!!!

We have one more album from her list of favorite albums. I described the album as "pretty good" in the email because I hadn't heard it yet at the time I composed the email, but didn't want to leave it out. In the week since, I have of course listened to Me and My Gang the requisite number of times and am here to dutifully tell you about it briefly, while weakly tying its themes to the overarching theme of this blog series, which is... not really all that well-defined. But the beauty is in the attempt, so let us attempt, one last time.

Me and My Gang is not that good, and Rascal Flatts are not that good. I don't feel the knee-jerk reaction of needing to explain my thoughts on country music for this one like I did with Zac Brown Band, because Rascal Flatts are more pop than country. They follow the same format as early Taylor Swift—pop is the sheet cake, and country is just the food coloring. "Cool Thing" and "Stand" are especially Swiftian. Except they can't write hooks as strong as the young Swift, it seems. Too many sappy ballads. Too much bullshit.

Oh sure, there are stabs at country. I actually kind like the meta-country exercise of "Backwards," which attempts to describe a typical country song in reverse. I don't like the song but I appreciate the concept a lot. Most of this other shit is just boring. It's not offensive in any way, so I guess I can see how the more banal of your Average Music Listeners might be attracted to it. But it's definitely not my thing. Most of these albums have not been "my thing," but that often doesn't stop me from appreciating them on at least a sociological level. I can't even do that with Rascal Flatts. Too vague and generic.

As a reminder: I do not download or listen to bonus tracks, but I am usually aware of their existence, especially if one of those bonus tracks on any given album is objectively more popular than the songs on the album proper. So yes, I am aware of the existence of Rascal Flatts' cover of Tom Cochrane's "Life Is a Highway" for the Disney Pixar movie Cars. And no, I certainly did not listen to that shit this past week (heard enough of it while I was at Disney World this past April, to be honest). The fact that this is Rascal Flatts' most popular song by many metrics renders this band a fucking joke. I like a good joke, but I don't like contributing to it.

I only bring this up because, as we've discussed in prior weeks, Kailyn most likely put together her list of favorite albums based on choosing random songs that she likes and then writing down the album from which those random songs originally came from. There's enough evidence to support this theory, but now here is one more piece. Be honest with me: how likely is it that Kailyn really enjoys Rascal Flatts' 2006 cover version of an already dumb country-pop song crafted for a dumb kids movie about talking cars, and that's why this album was in her email and subsequently on my life of albums that I'm forcing myself to listen to? How likely? Very likely, would you say?

I would say extremely likely. And that just makes me shake my head in dismay. It makes the distance between me and Kailyn feel a lot longer than 300 miles. It makes me feel like we have nothing in common, me and her, besides, I don't know, a love of silly pictures of me riding a giant cat. And I start to wonder what the fuck I'm even trying to accomplish here, by pretending that there is not a huge gulch separating us and our respectively beliefs. I don't believe that Me and My Gang should be anywhere fucking near a Favorite Albums All-Time list. And if I don't believe that, then what else would we disagree about?

I don't meant to disparage the time I spent listening to the music that this column forced me to listen to. I actually cherish that time dearly. There is absolutely no other time and space in my life where I would be listening to an artist like Hollywood Undead or Blake Shelton or Avenge Sevenfold and attempting to be gracious and compassionate in my take on their music. This was a great opportunity to try to see some of my least favorite music from some fresh perspectives. As an amateur music critic, I am eternally grateful.

And I don't see why I can't apply that same mindset to another human being too. Of course someone who compiles such a list of favorite albums is not going to be someone with whom I see eye-to-eye regarding music. But there's still so much room for empathy here on a basic human level, even through the music I don't like.

For example, maybe I'm wrong about the Cars thing, and maybe the song that she liked from this album was "Ellsworth." It's actually kind of a touching song about a grandma with dementia whose passion for life only lights up when you mention the town she grew up in. Maybe Kailyn likes this song because she had a grandparent like that and can relate. It wouldn't matter if I think the song is less effective as sung by song grease-slick fraudster country-pop stars than it would've been from someone more authentic. It wouldn't matter in that case because I too had a grandparent like that, my own paternal grandpa who would get really excited toward the end of his life when you mentioned his old stomping grounds of Fishtown, Philadelphia. The music is important, you see, but the quality of the music isn't. It's what the music does to you, the listener.

I do seriously wonder if I'll ever cross paths with Kailyn again in my lifetime. I've done all I can do at this point to force it, so now it's up to fate and happenstance to do the work. In all likelihood, this is the end of the road for us as friends, internet friends or otherwise. But you never know, man. Life is fucking weird and wild. You just never fucking know.

Even if it doesn't happen, and even if this really is it and I never think about Kailyn ever again, I will still cherish this time with her ghost. I think she taught me a lot about what it means to interact with someone who likes the music you don't. It was good practice, anyway, for all those future real-life friends who also listen to Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and Eminem and phony Garth Brookses. Music is important because it brings people together. It shouldn't drive them apart. And even if you can't agree on what is good and what is bad, you can at least agree on the power of music in general, and use it as a tool to find that common ground.

GRADE: 2 pukes out of 5

A PICTURE FROM KAILYN'S OLD INSTAGRAM THAT BEST ENCAPSULATES THE EXPERIENCE OF LISTENING TO THIS ALBUM:

THE COMPLETED LIST, IN ORDER OF COVERAGE:

• Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park
• Masterpiece Theatre by Marianas Trench
• Don't You Fake It by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
• Meteora by Linkin Park
• Red River Blue by Blake Shelton
• Boys Like Girls by BOYS LIKE GIRLS
  
• Steal This Album! by System of a Down
• Avenged Sevenfold by Avenged Sevenfold
• American Tragedy by Hollywood Undead
• Stadium Arcadium by Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Relapse by Eminem
• Strummin' On Garth by Brooks Jefferson
• You Get What You Give by Zac Brown Band
• Stand Up and Scream by Asking Alexandria
• Me and My Gang by Rascal Flatts

RECORD CLUB PRESENTS: Kailyn's Dozen, Week #11 of 12: Stand Up and Scream by Asking Alexandria

To quote the first lyric of the second song on Asking Alexandria's debut album, Stand Up and Scream: "OH. MY. GODDDDDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!"

To quote the second lyric of the first song on that same album but that same motherfucking band: "FFUUUUCCCCKKKKK THHISSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!"

No, this is good. I needed this. I needed to dislike an album like this in the twelve weeks that we are hanging out with the ghost of a girl I'll never meet. I can't go through this insane nonsensical list of albums and say good things about all of them. Yes, of course some weeks were better than others. No, I didn't like music from the likes of Blake Shelton or Hollywood Undead. But at least those albums had some semblance of redemption hidden deep within them, waiting to be uncovered by some bored blogger for no reason other than to be a mischievous prick. This, though? This has none of that. It's real bad, folks. Real bad. I do not like it. I do not.

I just... I can't take this shit seriously. Never have and never will. When Record Club reviewed A Day to Remember, I had nothing good to say about it, and I stand by my assessment. I said that the emo parts were fine and that the metal breakdowns sounded like a fucking joke and that there was just this wide fucking gulf between me and the people in my life who enjoyed this music, a gulf that I would never be able to cross no matter how many Miller High Lifes I drank shirtless in a tiny Cape May bungalow. And so you take that opinion, and you bring it here, and see what Asking Alexandria is all about, and I say this: Stand Up and Scream sounds like a fucking parody of Homesick by A Day to Remember. A parody! Of something that I already thought sounded like a parody to begin with!

The final song on this album is called "When Everyday's the Weekend." The grammar is bad—it should be "Every Day's" not "Everyday's"—but that's the least of my concerns. The most of my concerns is that breakdown halfway through. This is where Asking Alexandria flips the script. Instead of a guttural metal-growling breakdown, it becomes... a twinkling synth-led rave-up. What the fuck, man. What the fuck. This is so goddamn stupid that you just have to laugh. Honestly, that's all I can do. I can laugh and then sit back and marvel at what led me to this place in my life. All the tiny details and converged in this one moment, all the minute choices that I made in my life and the times when there was no choice but life randomly happened to me anyway, all of it leading to this one single moment in which I am sitting at this dining room table playing a card game with my four-year-old daughter listening to the most disgusting caricature of shitty metalcore bullshit I've ever been witness to. This world is almost too beautiful in its utter chaos. I am in awe.

Here's something optimistic I'll say about the journey here: I am at the point where I am very rarely sincerely turned off by the music I'm listening to. Yes, this shit sucks, but I'm not miserable listening to it. I think there was a time in my life when it would have made me upset, how bad it was. Maybe that gear is the normal gear for a normal person to operate in—they hear something that they don't like and they aspire to take themselves out of the position in which they must hear that thing. Not me, not anymore. Call it sadistic if you must, because maybe it is. But I'm at a place in my life that I can just take this punch on the chin and laugh it off. This isn't just bad, it's funny. And isn't "funny" a good thing?

When it comes to music, I am open to all experiences, is basically what I'm trying to say here. And being open doesn't mean being appreciative of all music. Those are two different things. It's taken me so long to get to this point, to be able to tell the difference between the two, to be able to distinguish them in real time, to feel that switch click in my brain as I recognize both that something sucks shit and that my life is immeasurably better because I am hearing it. God, I just fucking love music so goddamn much, and I am thankful for every stupid minute, including the 48 of them during one single listen through Stand Up and Scream.

There is a temptation to call Kailyn an insane person. I recognize the temptation as valid, but I won't give into it. First, because if I'm going to call for a straitjacket and a padded cell, then that would be undermining the initial question—"what is your favorite album?"—which is a question designed to have no wrong answer. Her answer wasn't wrong. No, it wasn't wrong even when she listed fifteen albums and those fifteen albums make no fucking sense together in one person's brain. If I'm saying she's insane then the implication is that she is wrong, and I would never fucking say that. But this is insane. It's insane, right?

More importantly, I refuse to call it insane because whatever she was doing or thinking at the time, it led me here, to this place, a place where I am extremely happy and content and just really fucking excited to be listening to a fucking terrible album and writing about it in this very strange and maybe slightly off-putting context. Listening to Stand Up and Scream by Asking Alexandria was very painful, due to the ludicrous mix of crass third-wave emocore and a moron's idea of pigfuck metal with a healthy dash of spritely EDM for irony's sake... but it was also life-affirming in a way. I don't like this, but I can hear this and smile. I don't want this to seem like I'm bragging or like I'm better than anyone who might hear this and say "I don't like it because I don't get it" and leave it at that, so I'm going to tuck it down here toward the bottom of a blog post that I doubt many people will read: I've reached music nirvana, where I can listen to something, and as long as it's real, as long as the artist intended for it to be art and not some crass moneymaking bullshit capitalistic artless gutless endeavor, then I'm going to appreciate it in the pit of my soul, on that level, just love this shit because it's music and because music is awesome. It feels so goddamn good, to find peace like this. Even amongst the terrible music from this terrible band.

Thank you Kailyn. We have one more week to hang out and then this thing is through. OH. MY. GGGGGGODDDDDDD!!!!!!!!!!!!

GRADE: 0.5 pukes out of 5

A PICTURE FROM KAILYN'S OLD INSTAGRAM THAT BEST ENCAPSULATES THE EXPERIENCE OF LISTENING TO THIS ALBUM:

THE FULL LIST, IN ORDER OF COVERAGE:

• Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park
• Masterpiece Theatre by Mariana Trench
• Don't You Fake It by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
• Meteora by Linkin Park
• Red River Blue by Blake Shelton
• Boys Like Girls by BOYS LIKE GIRLS
  
• Steal This Album! by System of a Down
• Avenged Sevenfold by Avenged Sevenfold
• American Tragedy by Hollywood Undead
• Stadium Arcadium by Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Relapse by Eminem
• Strummin' On Garth by Brooks Jefferson
• You Get What You Give by Zac Brown Band
• Stand Up and Scream by Asking Alexandria
• Me and My Gang by Rascal Flatts

RECORD CLUB PRESENTS: Kailyn's Dozen, Week #10 of 12: You Get What You Give by Zac Brown Band

There's been a lot of chatter over the past few months on PoYB from various parties about the value of country music and whether old biases are still applicable and if there are country songs worth listening to in 2024 and whether this genre is just pure shit all the way down. So I figured I could use this space to give a brief State of the Union address, where I tell you definitively where I stand on the subject of country music, at least in this point in time.

I believe, as I have for some time, that the genre is bifurcated. There is Americana, which chases the artistry of old country, outlaw country, that sorta thing, while not necessarily sticking to the subject matters of those old songs, but finding new ground to cover using tried-and-tested country sounds. This is the country music that I like. Then there is pop country, which chases the formula of the modern day country song that seems to have found lots of commercial success, and which eschews many older country sounds in favor of sleeker, more modern, more pop-leaning aesthetics, and sticking to a more narrow range of subject matter. This is the bad country.

I've believed this for maybe a half-decade now, when I start getting into the former type, the Jason Isbell type of music, all that stuff. But what's changed recently is that I am starting to really, really, really fucking despise the latter sort of country music, the pop shit, the boilerplate generic bullshit that I am forced to listen to under certain circumstances. Can't stand it. It's the type of music that instantly makes me lose respect for you if you indulge in it in any way beyond irony or alcoholism.

The integral part of this argument is that my hatred is not a blanket emotion, and it does not cover all country music. To say "I dislike country music" would be disingenuous. I just really fucking hate a certain breed of country music. And that particular breed is undoubtedly the most popular, and thus my hatred of it tends to be more public-facing than my love of the good country music. And it's hard to distinguish between the two sub-genres beyond a simple gut reaction to hearing something and knowing which is which without being about to describe it, which seems unfair to country music but that's just the way it is.

My gut is telling me that Zac Brown Band makes music that is of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad country music. I did not like this album.

Another name that people call pop country is "bro country," but I don't think that this name encapsulates all of the bad country. There is certainly a strain of country that consists of young male artists who make "country" music for other white people who are too afraid of Black people to listen to anything besides country. But there are pop country musician who operate outside of this definition whose music also sucks shit in very similar and perhaps less racist ways. Zac Brown is not bro country. Zac Brown is undeniably pop country.

It's funny, because avoiding the specific bro country tropes means that Zac Brown is able to say with a straight face such things as: "If I hear one more tailgate-in-the-moonlight, Daisy Duke song, I'm gonna throw up." Which is very funny, because, to my ears, Zac Brown Band traffics in the same goddamn subject matter that I hear in every goddamn bro country song on earth. Whisky and livin' the good life and chasing after a pretty girl. I'm not saying that these subjects automatically make for a bad song. They don't. I love the idea(l) of livin' the good life just as much as anyone. But there isn't anything more to it than this, is the problem. Talk about cliché.

It was very interesting listening to this album alongside Johnny Blue Skies' newest album, Passage du Desir. "Johnny Blue Skies" is the new stage name for Sturgill Simpson, but I intend to take the name change seriously and consider this a brand new project. Still, I know it's Sturgill, and so I know that this is the "good country" that I spoke of earlier. But then so it was also pretty interesting to hear a couple songs that, had I not known any better, I might be tempted to slip into the "bad country" category.

Consider "Scooter Blues." A catchy country song about relaxing in a calming locale and kicking up the feet and grabbing a cold beverage and just relaxing, man. I can close my eyes and hear one thousand country songs on the radio that could cover this ground. A simple reading of it would be that Johnny Blue Skies is trafficking in pop country. The more enlightened among us know (or could pretend) that the deeper level to the song is the idea of escapism made literal, how "disappearing" is a metaphor for easy living and also a deep-seeded desire by a man who changed his whole goddamn name in an attempt to become someone different and gain some semblance of anonymity. Which is a meta take that you do not see in pop country. Stripping all that away, though... are we really going to say that Johnny Blue Skies is all that different than Zac Brown Band?

I don't know. All I can tell you at this juncture is that I like what I like and I hate what I hate, and that you shouldn't let tens of millions of words on a blog fool you into thinking I know what the fuck I am even talking about. I like Johnny Blue Skies. I mostly don't like Zac Brown Band. I think that "Chicken Fried" sucks shit (but is blissfully not on You Get What You Give). I know that I want to strangle myself with a pool noodle every time we're out by the pool and my parents play 92.5 WXTU.

I wonder how Kailyn found herself here. I know it's probably just the same ol' bullshit about her liking a Zac Brown Band song and randomly choosing the album its on as one of her quote-unquote "favorite albums." Honestly, on days like today, I'd prefer that. I'd prefer it to the idea that this poor woman was subjected, poolside, to country music so often that Stockholm syndrome started to settle in. Because that would result in me losing respect for this person I will never meet.

What I'd prefer is to believe a best case scenario, and that is: Kailyn has exactly one song on her playlist by Zac Brown Band, and that song is "Who Knows," and that was the song that she liked so much that she'll randomly name the album it's on as one of her favorite just to get some fucking Philly creep off her back. If she loves "Who Knows," then we can share some common ground here. "Who Knows" is the one. A ten-minute barn-burner that, if you ask me (and who's asking?), it sounds like Dave Matthews Band attempting to play ska. Brown even yells "pick it up! pick it up!" at the 4:15 mark, so I'm not going crazy with that descriptor. Marvel at that drum solo! You ever hear a drum solo like that in a fucking bro country song? I haven't.

So here's something that I'm willing to concede to, even though I've talked shit about it in the past. Saying you like an album based on one song? Sounds like bullshit, but in certain cases, I concede that it's the right move. But only if the song is that fucking good. I don't like You Get What You Give as a whole, but I'm sure glad I listened to it, because now I can say that I like one single Zac Brown Band song, and like one song makes it all worth it. And if Kailyn only likes one song, and felt the need to lie to me about liking the whole album, well then I say let bygones be bygones, because "Who Knows" makes a million lies and a million acts of deceit worth it.

Other than that, though? Fuck this country noise.

GRADE: 2 pukes out of 5

A PICTURE FROM KAILYN'S OLD INSTAGRAM THAT BEST ENCAPSULATES THE EXPERIENCE OF LISTENING TO THIS ALBUM:

THE FULL LIST, IN ORDER OF COVERAGE:

• Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park
• Masterpiece Theatre by Mariana Trench
• Don't You Fake It by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
• Meteora by Linkin Park
• Red River Blue by Blake Shelton
• Boys Like Girls by BOYS LIKE GIRLS
  
• Steal This Album! by System of a Down
• Avenged Sevenfold by Avenged Sevenfold
• American Tragedy by Hollywood Undead
• Stadium Arcadium by Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Relapse by Eminem
• Strummin' On Garth by Brooks Jefferson
• You Get What You Give by Zac Brown Band
• Stand Up and Scream by Asking Alexandria
• Me and My Gang by Rascal Flatts

RECORD CLUB PRESENTS: Kailyn's Dozen, Week #9 of 12: Strummin' on Garth by Brooks Jefferson

Look, I'm going to say something, and it's going to seem like hyperbole, but I swear that it's not. I mean this with all my heart. I am not exaggerating. I promise. Here you are:

This album is the most batshit crazy response to "what is your favorite album" that has ever been made.

I don't make it a practice of judging people for their tastes in music, unless you're dishonest about your music preferences (say, for political reasons), or if you're, like, glibly listening to music made by rapists because you don't have a problem with rape. If you're listening to music because you want to listen to what you enjoy and because it gives you pleasure to listen to it, then I am not gonna be the guy to give you shit for it (joking around is on the table, but it's never mean-spirited). But if we're assuming that Kailyn really does consider Strummin' on Garth by Brooks Jefferson to be one of her favorite albums of all time, then... I mean, I don't even know what to do. I have to judge her, right? Or at least question her intentions?

This has nothing to do with whether the album is good or bad. With Brooks Jefferson, quality is almost besides the point. No, I take issue with this choice mostly due to the fact that Brooks Jefferson doesn't even fucking exist.

Let's start from the beginning. Here's where I was when I was doing preliminary research on which of Kailyn's albums to choose for Record Club. After figuring out that the album was called Strummin' on Garth and not "Strummin' On" as Kailyn originally typo'd, my first question was: who is Brooks Jefferson? So naturally, if you have that question, you google it. Except, 999 times out of 1000, a search for a musician brings you to their Wikipedia page or their own website or their Instagram or something like that. But for Brooks Jefferson, all the search results reflected my question back at me: Who is Brooks Jefferson?

So immediately, something is off. I find the album on Spotify and Apple and Amazon but almost nowhere else. It exists as an album that's streaming but that doesn't exist outside of that, which is fucking weird, right? I'm looking at the tracklist, and I don't know much Garth Brooks but I am familiar with the song "Friends in Low Places," and there it is. So then I start googling the titles of some of the other songs, and I figure out that this is a Garth Brooks cover album. Weird, but not unheard of that an artist would cover another artist for a full album. But usually it's just presented as an artistic statement, ya know? Think about when Cat Power covered a Bob Dylan live album last year. Shit like that. It's meant to be it's own thing in addition to being connected intimately to another artist. But Strummin' on Garth didn't seem like that at all. This just seemed like an artist who covered Garth Brooks 21 times and put those covers on streaming and then disappeared into the ether. It still doesn't answer the question: who the fuck is Brooks Jefferson?

There is probably more confusion than there would be for other artists, because Garth Brooks has had an alter ego before—Chris Gaines. This is Brooks' former "rock persona," created so that he could explore music outside of country music. He released one album under this moniker, but it's not like the whole thing was a secret. The name "Garth Brooks" is right there in the title! And so, because of this I guess, some people online speculate that Brooks Jefferson is actually Garth Brooks in disguise. Their reasoning is that Garth Brooks is famously against streaming, and so this would be a way to put his music online without backtracking on his anti-Spotify stance.

I don't buy it. There are many reasons I don't buy it (including the fact that Garth Brooks is too busy putting together seven-album CD packages to be exclusively sold at Bass Pro Shops). But one is that it doesn't really make sense logically that Brooks would rerecord his music to put on streaming, since that seems like a lot of work, and if the streaming cash flow was that much of a big deal to him, then he'd just put his music on streaming. Right? I mean, I hate streaming as much as the next fucking guy, but if I'm poised to make millions of dollars off of it, then there are really only two options here—stream it and get that cash, or don't stream it and hold fast to your morals. There's no third/middle option that makes sense. Secretly streaming under the moniker "Brooks Jefferson" means that you are both callously dismissing your previously held beliefs while also losing out on a bunch of money. It would be a lose-lose proposition.

My take on it is less whimsical then "secret persona!" and is way more cynical but does seem to follow Occam's razor in that it's the simplest explanation. The simplest explanation is that the structure of Spotify makes it ripe for swindlers to take advantage of the passive consumer, and so Brooks Jefferson is one of those swindlers. He's just some fucking guy, some musician who can do a serviceable Garth Brooks impression, and has recorded cover songs, and has put them on streaming to take full advantage of the fact that Garth Brooks himself is not on there.

Imagine you're a tepid Garth Brooks fan, in that you like some of his songs, and you want to play his songs during a family gathering, to be played in the background. But you don't really give that much of a shit about music, and so you have no idea what's up with Garth Brooks vs. Spotify, and you search "Garth Brooks," and nothing comes up. But because of the "Brooks," you get "Brooks Jefferson," and you see that all the songs you recognize are there, and you hear that those songs are mostly like the Garth Brooks songs you know anyway, and so you play it. You play the songs because you don't give a shit, you just wanna hear the pop-country songs from the '90s and '00s that you know. That's what we call around these parts an "average listener." And there are enough average listeners out there that the dude behind Brooks Jefferson—whoever he is—is getting paid.

I don't mean to make it seem like I'm the only person who gives a shit about the fakery of this endeavor, like it's me vs. a countless hoard of average listeners who could not give less of a shit about any of this. There are breadcrumbs that I followed to get to my current cynical position. I listened to this four-minute clip from some radio show in which they were discussing the matter. You don't have to listen to it (unless you wanna hear their background music of "Never Gonna Give You Up" while you hear these two jabronis yuk it up), because they more or less reach the same conclusion. One of their correspondences indicates that he "went down the rabbit hole" looking for answers, and found the name "Dylan Miller" as a possible face behind the name Brooks Jefferson. They apparently sound alike, when you listen to Miller's stuff on streaming. It could be. Ultimately, though, it doesn't matter if Dylan Miller is real or a mask behind a mask. It's still all a fabrication, a hoax made in pursuit of grabbing every spare dollar off the dirty corporate floor of the music streaming conglomerates.

Which brings us back to Kailyn, and the fact that it is fucking INSANE that anyone in their right fucking mind would specifically choose Strummin' on Garth—a glorified covers album made cravenly in pursuit of a bottom dollar by a completely fake artist—as one of her favorite albums of all time.

Again, I'm not blasting the music. I actually think this is fucking hilarious, musically speaking, because I'm not familiar with Garth Brooks, and this is my first real exposure to a lot of his best-known songs. There is somewhat of a concerted push from at least one Yearlong Song Challenger to make us appreciate this type of stadium-sized '90s country music, but I don't need convincing. I don't think it's bad. I don't like it enough to actively seek it out, but it's not bad, especially if the artist is at least apolitcal, if not making dog whistles toward progressive ideals held close. This is not a matter of me saying "well now I can appreciate Garth Brooks a little more!" I don't need to do that. I've hit my ceiling when it comes to appreciating this dude's music. I just think it's extremely funny that, because of the bonkers choice of favorite albums by a stranger I'll never meet, the only versions of some Garth Brooks songs I'll know after this week are made by some fucking con artist who only made this shit to steal the money and attention of the normies on Spotify. It's beautiful in its twisted backwards ugliness, the whole fucking thing.

If we're using Occam's razor on ol' Brooks Jefferson, then we might as well use it for Kailyn as well. Under the guidelines constructed under this makeshift twelve-week sojourn in the musical mind of a stranger, we must be kind to Kailyn. It would not be kind to come to the conclusion here that "Kailyn must be henceforth confined to an insane asylum," or even "Kailyn must have shitty taste in music if not only is she choosing Garth Brooks songs as some of her favorite of all time, but she's choosing a thin-veneer xerox copy of them as one of her favorite albums of all time!" I'm not interested in making such claims. I am interesting in figuring out the mysteries that are surrounding this pick, and I think, beyond the mystery of "Who is Brooks Jefferson?", the most pressing mystery to be solved is "How did Kailyn end up including this on her list of favorite albums?"

Occam's razor reminds us of something we previously discussed—how Kailyn chose albums based on a couple of songs, and not the albums on a whole. But now I'm actually trying to picture Kailyn physically putting together this list for her stranger-pal in Philadelphia, and I'm picturing her scrolling through a playlist on Spotify and picking out some songs that she likes. It could be that she didn't even think about it all that much, she just picked out some songs, and wrote down the albums to which they were attached. I think it's very likely that she saw the song "Friends in Low Places" on her playlist, and then absentmindedly wrote down the artist and album that was attached to that song on Spotify. It's not that hard to imagine. I personally would not have given any of this even a second of thought for the entirety of my life if someone hadn't specifically told me it was their favorite album and I had a blog on which to parse through that claim. Seriously, it would have gone in my eyes and out my ass and I would have forgotten about it within another 30 seconds or so. So why shouldn't Kailyn be afforded the same opportunity to not care?

Well... I mean, if we're saying that—and we are, because there is no other explanation, fucking none—then that means that Kailyn didn't care about... me. I guess. I don't mean to write that and make it seem like I'm sad over it. If that was her reaction, then hers was the normal reaction. It would be normal to receive a low-stakes request from some guy whom you interacted with briefly two years prior and to react with general disinterest. What's abnormal is someone taking the answer to that request and building an entire blogging cottage industry out of it, spending months parsing through your answer, trying to pick up clues that are supposedly there, and ultimately forming judgments on you that have absolutely no basis in reality no matter which way you turn. That would be the abnormal thing to do. Not caring? Totally normal.

And so we rest on the idea of Kailyn not caring. That's fine. Honestly, it's easier to swallow than the reality in which someone sees Strummin' on Garth by Brooks Jefferson and claims that this must be one of their favorite albums of all time. For that to be a serious answer to this very serious question would mean that my universe is going to completely just fucking implode and then cease to exist and that I would disappear in the blink of an eye, so thoroughly has everything I ever cared about been debunked. So we can't have that. Let's just say that Kailyn doesn't care. That's easier.

I care, though. Which, obviously, is the problem.

GRADE: 0 pukes out of 5

A PICTURE FROM KAILYN'S OLD INSTAGRAM THAT BEST ENCAPSULATES THE EXPERIENCE OF LISTENING TO THIS ALBUM:

THE FULL LIST, IN ORDER OF COVERAGE:

• Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park
• Masterpiece Theatre by Mariana Trench
• Don't You Fake It by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
• Meteora by Linkin Park
• Red River Blue by Blake Shelton
• Boys Like Girls by BOYS LIKE GIRLS
  
• Steal This Album! by System of a Down
• Avenged Sevenfold by Avenged Sevenfold
• American Tragedy by Hollywood Undead
• Stadium Arcadium by Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Relapse by Eminem
• Strummin' On Garth by Brooks Jefferson
• You Get What You Give by Zac Brown Band
• Stand Up and Scream by Asking Alexandria
• Me and My Gang by Rascal Flatts

RECORD CLUB PRESENTS: Kailyn's Dozen, Week #8 of 12: Relapse by Eminem

I don't know if I like this one, but there certainly is a lot to talk about. Thanks Kailyn! You are a complex and complicated person!

Let's start with remembering (or imagining) my reaction to seeing Eminem on the original list that Kailyn sent me. It's an outlier, right? It's the only straight-up rap album on here (and no, I'm not counting Hollywood Undead, which is just too preposterous to really count as anything besides, like, a Weird Al-style take on rap). More striking was how she worded the item on the list: "Pretty much all Eminem albums but tbh, I really enjoy Relapse (it gets a lot of hate)." All Eminem albums?! The man had eleven LPs at that point (the twelfth is imminent)! And she's specifically pointing out the one that "gets a lot of hate"?! I didn't understand it.

That line felt radioactive to me, and I knew for certain that I could not, under any circumstance, choose the album for Record Club back in the fall of 2021. Too much baggage with Eminem himself and people's personal histories with his music, too much baggage with an album described as "get[ing] a lot of hate," too much baggage with people's aversion to albums that clock in at over 76 minutes! The main goal of this limited blog series is to try to build a human being out of her Favorite Albums list, and a secondary goal is to learn about some new music that I would have never listened to otherwise, but a tertiary goal is to put some of these albums out of their misery, and write about them so that they can never be chosen for Record Club. I feel like it's kinder to euthanize them here than throw 'em into the arena and let the wolves tear 'em apart.

Just about two years after Kailyn told me that she liked Relapse enough to consider it one of her favorite albums of all time, I read the entry in Stereogum's The Number Ones column about "Crack a Bottle," the late-career #1 hit for Eminem that is featured on Relapse. Tom Breihan did not like this song at all. Gave it a rare 1/10 score. Called it "one of the most viscerally unpleasant sounds that will ever appear in this column." Which is all fine and good; I had never heard the song before, and wasn't beholden to any opinion either way on the thing. But something Breihan mentioned about Relapse as a whole rung a bell for me. He wrote: "Relapse might be Eminem’s worst full-length, but it was still a big deal when it came out. As far as I could tell, its main audience was the kids who were too young to remember when Eminem was good." He also mentioned that the Odd Future gang were outward proponents of the album, which tracks.

This rung a bell because of Kailyn's opinion, and everything just kinda fell into place from there. Kailyn is younger. I mean, I was young when Eminem was at his commercial peak, so Kailyn would have been, approximately, an infant. And the general understand of the younger generation vis-à-vis humor is that their gags are more violent and surreal, and so a Gen Z friend is going to out there on the web making meme jokes about suicide and so of course they are going to find a perverse empathy with an Eminem album that seems to solely consist of murder fantasies and bad accents.

I should say here that I am not the Eminem expert here. I have a clear memory of borrowing The Slim Shady LP from my pal Jim M. on a six-hour drive for a Boy Scout weekend trip and feeling like I taking a drag of a cigarette or looking at a porno mag or something. Many years later I'd revisit the album and cringe at basically everything, and I haven't really even tried to engage with this dude at any point since. That Eminem posse cut from Bob's YSC write-up was the first Eminem song on my iPod, and Relapse adds to it. My take is that his shtick is extremely grating and that, combined with my low opinion of the general tastes of humans, means that I am not really surprised that he is one of the most famous rappers of all time.

And then so it's extremely interesting that my first actual attempt at engaging with this man's music at album length during my adult life ends up being an album that—beyond the gratuitous violence and absolutely absurd and nonsensical and possibly racist accents—sincerely makes strides at covering a subject that is personally important to me at this point in my life. Sobriety. Gilson commented a few weeks ago that there is no wrong way to talk about sobriety, and Slim Shady really pushes that maxim to it's motherfucking limit. From the very start, with the skit involving Jimmy McNulty as a devilish therapist, it's clear that this is going to be about Eminem's sobriety, yes, but in the most irreverent way possible. This allows room for some meta humor, which I appreciate, and some truth-veiled-as-a-self-debasing-joke, which is definitely my style. Even the absurdist shit like going over-the-top hard on an already-dead-at-that-point Christopher Reeves kinda worked for me. It's like... when you think that everyone hates you, you sing about how people hate you. That's how you turn it around. I get it.

Doesn't mean it's great music, but I appreciate what he's doing here. I'm somewhere halfway in between a 1/10-worst-album-in-the-discography and favorite-album-all-time. Some catchy stuff and some deft lyrical finesse and some outrageously unfunny murder bits and maybe three minutes worth of rapping in Marshall Mathers' regular accent. There's 76 minutes of music here and some of it works and a lot of it doesn't and all of it adds up to a very intriguing album, which is totally fine with me. For a blog project like this, I'm going to appreciate intriguing and baffling grab-bags more than pure-cut quality anyway. Gives me more to write about.

In the kindness I hope I've showed toward an album that may or may not deserve it, I see a bridge. A bridge over the divide between my music and Kailyn's. Let's set the record straight here, 2/3rds of the way through this project—Kailyn and I have very different tastes in music. I'm fine saying that I liked this album as a cultural curio, but "favorite album of all time" seems like insanity. That's been the case for all of these albums, honestly. Even the ones I liked (System of a Down, Linkin Park). It's not a fine line between like and love. Liking something has breadth, and loving something has depth. I've liked most of the albums Kailyn loves. You see the difference.

However, I cannot deny that I understand Kailyn just a little bit more through my attempt at understanding Eminem's first sobriety album. I don't think Kailyn is sober too, that's not what I'm saying. But I think that there's value here in meeting the deadly serious and responding to it with the absurd, and though I don't think that these are the words that Kailyn would use to describe Relapse, I do think that she feels it, subconsciously. There's value in taking personal adversity and churning it and mixing it and turning it into public adversity. Seems easier to deal with your problems if you're advertising them honestly. That's my thoughts on it, anyway (clearly, since I've written approximately four millions words about my own adversities on this blog).

And who knows! Maybe Kailyn's art was her way of dealing with her own personal shit too. I've never thought about it this way until right this second, so bear with me. Maybe these pictures, the sketches of random shit and loving drawings of Pokémon and one beautiful picture of a sexy bearded man riding a giant cat, maybe they are all in service of dealing with her own emotional needs. The comparison isn't perfect, but in this light, I think we can see why it makes sense that Kailyn would like this album, the shock-rap chicanery of Relapse by Eminem. An emotional release from a cage through the performance of that cage. I fucking get it.

GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5

A PICTURE FROM KAILYN'S OLD INSTAGRAM THAT BEST ENCAPSULATES THE EXPERIENCE OF LISTENING TO THIS ALBUM:

THE FULL LIST, IN ORDER OF COVERAGE:

• Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park
• Masterpiece Theatre by Mariana Trench
• Don't You Fake It by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
• Meteora by Linkin Park
• Red River Blue by Blake Shelton
• Boys Like Girls by BOYS LIKE GIRLS
  
• Steal This Album! by System of a Down
• Avenged Sevenfold by Avenged Sevenfold
• American Tragedy by Hollywood Undead
• Stadium Arcadium by Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Relapse by Eminem
• Strummin' On Garth by Brooks Jefferson
• You Get What You Give by Zac Brown Band
• Stand Up and Scream by Asking Alexandria
• Me and My Gang by Rascal Flatts

RECORD CLUB PRESENTS: Kailyn's Dozen, Week #7 of 12: Stadium Arcadium

I'm not sure why it took me until the halfway mark in this project to go back to the original email and allow Kailyn herself to spell out her intentions. Seems like something I should've had on hand for the beginning of this twelve-week sojourn in the musical mind of a stranger. If you missed it, say, because you couldn't stomach the idea of reading 1,800 words about the late-'00s/early-'10s rap-rock outfit Hollywood Undead, then I'll reprint her key words here: "Sadly I love too much and don't really have favorites, but I can list some of my favorites if that works? Well at least albums in which I love more than a couple songs (I'm notorious for listening to just a few songs from a ton if different people/groups) lol."

I can't stop thinking about those words as I listen to Stadium Arcadium, the 2006 Red Hot Chili Peppers album that stretches past the two-hour mark. I am the opposite of Kailyn in that I revere the idea of "the album" and find the idea of stripping an album for playlist parts to be appalling under most circumstances, and even I can tell you that this album is waaaay too long. And I believe that its absurd length serves as definitive proof to the idea that Kailyn's words lay out in clear terms—there's no fucking way she listened to this whole thing, either often or ever.

It's difficult, still, for me to wrap my head around this idea, that someone could claim that an album would be "my favorite album" without listening to the entire thing, but I think in this case, due to the circumstances, it's quite possible. Look, there are at least three songs here ("Dani California," "Snow (Hey Oh)," and "Tell Me Baby") that still get radio airplay (especially since stations like Radio 104.5 seem contractually obligated to play RHCP once every 20 minutes). Being familiar with these three songs alone would be enough to qualify Stadium Arcadium as a "favorite album," at least according to Kailyn's own standards. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying that this column functions by trying to figure out what Kailyn is thinking, and in this case, she is literally telling us how she thinks, and I believe we should listen.

If we're assuming that this is the case, that Kailyn doesn't often bother to listen to two hours of Red Hot Chili Peppers in the album's order and can still extrapolate that this is one of her favorite albums, then it's almost not even worth it to do so ourselves, right? I mean, I did it. I listened to this fucker back-to-front maybe five times, which is way more than it deserves. What I'm saying is that maybe writing about some of the highlights that I found would be like pissing into the ocean. To what end would it serve to say that the ska-style horn section on "Torture Me" was a real delight, or that late-album cut "Storm in a Teacup" feels like a real fine distillation of the tougher/meaner/still-goofy RHCP sound before they were radio darlings? At a certain point, it feels like I'm being unfair to this poor woman. No one needs to listen to the entirety of Stadium Arcadium, and the fact that I did, multiple times, makes ME the loser, not her.

Something I may not have ever really considered until now is the fact that "what is your favorite album of all time?" could be an incredibly intimidating question. I'm always preaching about how "your favorite album says something about you" but always forgetting that not everyone wants to reveal themselves that intimately all that often, especially, if you consider this case as an example, to a motherfucking stranger on the internet. "What is you favorite?" should maybe be used for friendly, intimate moments, and not an opening lobby directed toward someone you want to know better, since it can be off-putting, and kill a blossoming friendship in its tracks. I wonder if there is any credence to the theory that Kailyn never responded to my most recent email because the last email I had sent crossed a personal boundary, and she didn't want to put herself through that again.

And I get it! I mean, I'm kinda like that in other arenas. It would be like if someone asked me "Who is your favorite movie director?" The true answer is that I don't have one because there are very few directors whose work I've seen the majority of, let alone the entirety of, and I'd be unqualified to answer. The given answer would be "Richard Linklater" because I've seen some of his stuff, and the films I have seen have been really good at worst and life-altering at best, and so yeah, fuck it, it's Richard Linklater, if you really need an answer. I would still feel intimidated though, and nervous that my answer would give the wrong impression of me as a person. Imagine, for instance, the questioner responding with something like "lol isn't that the dude who put Alex Jones in a movie?" Or, maybe worse: "lol, instead of asking you more questions, I'm going to write on my blog for twelve weeks straight and make assumptions about you based on Richard Linklater's filmography." (Actually, I'd love to read that last one. If anyone is up for it, let me know, I have a blog for you.)

What I'm circling around to here is that I have listened to a lot of Red Hot Chili Peppers this week, and that is technically Kailyn's fault, because she said it was her favorite, maybe based on false pretenses, but still, my point is that I should, and do, have some grace when it comes to her decision to name this album, regardless of the how or why. Everything about this is unfair to Kailyn, up to and including asking the question of her in the first place.

Here's what that grace looks like to me: Forget about everything else, and concentrate on the fact that this album is pretty good, and that there's not a chance in motherfucking hell that I would've attempted this thing had it not been for Kailyn's list of favorite albums (and my own self-destructive blogging tendencies, sure). I can't say that I'm walking away from Stadium Arcadium with a newfound ability to take Red Hot Chili Peppers seriously. They are still mostly a joke to me. And maybe my kind words henceforth are a result of Stockholm syndrome, but whatever! I think that there is a great display of songwriting talent here. A bunch of hooks embedded in the nooks and crannies of this two-hour beast. It all sounds exactly like Red Hot Chili Peppers, and I wasn't expecting otherwise, but there was enough here to get behind in a low-key way that I'm saying, yeah, sure, they made the right decision to go long with this one.

Will it ever be one of my favorite albums? Absolutely fucking not. But we're not here for that. We're here to understand Kailyn a little better via her favorite music. And I think we got a little closer today. Some empathy was built, and the foundation is strong enough to hold. Thanks for the good times, internet stranger.

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5

A PICTURE FROM KAILYN'S OLD INSTAGRAM THAT BEST ENCAPSULATES THE EXPERIENCE OF LISTENING TO THIS ALBUM:

THE FULL LIST, IN ORDER OF COVERAGE:

• Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park
• Masterpiece Theatre by Mariana Trench
• Don't You Fake It by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
• Meteora by Linkin Park
• Red River Blue by Blake Shelton
• Boys Like Girls by BOYS LIKE GIRLS
  
• Steal This Album! by System of a Down
• Avenged Sevenfold by Avenged Sevenfold
• American Tragedy by Hollywood Undead
• Stadium Arcadium by Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Relapse by Eminem
• Strummin' On Garth by Brooks Jefferson
• You Get What You Give by Zac Brown Band
• Stand Up and Scream by Asking Alexandria
• Me and My Gang by Rascal Flatts

RECORD CLUB PRESENTS: Kailyn's Dozen, Week #6 of 12: American Tragedy by Hollywood Undead

There it is. There's the hilariously bad album I was waiting for.

It's okay! They can't all be winners! I'm honestly surprised that we made it this far without an album sounding like this. Sure, Red River Blue was mediocre at best, and didn't have much in terms of stone-cold hits, and was a little icky if you considered the politics it implied. Sure, Avenged Sevenfold succeeded only by deftly clearing the earth's-core-level expectations. But Kailyn hasn't picked a wildly terribly album until now. I'm talking so bad that I couldn't stop laughing, that kind of bad.

And let's be fair, laughter is good. It's healthy. Doesn't matter if you're laughing at or with, as long as you're laughing. It adds years to your life. Thank you, Hollywood Undead. Thank you, Kailyn.

Here's the deal with these guys—it's a mix of *NSYNC and Linkin Park, but under the guise of horrorcore. It's boy-band-ish, technically speaking, because there are five members, and none of them play instruments. Instead, their roles are "lead vocals," "rap vocals," and "hype vocals." They are nü-metal because of the harsh sounds that are twisted into a sort of dark pop sort of thing... I'm not good at describing that, but you'll know what I'm talking about when you hear it. And then the horrorcore thing is mostly pertaining to the lyrics, which are crude and violent, with "raps" about drinking and fighting and killing and homophobia. Weird fucking combo, man. So weird when they switch from rap to "harmonizing" as a group.

But, like, "nü-metal Backstreet Boys" sounds like an absolutely absurd description, to the point that I had to do some light research before writing this just to make sure this wasn't supposed to be some sort of oblique parody of either or both genres. When I say that this sounds like some bullshit the Lonely Island would cook up, I mean that as an insult to both Lonely Island and Hollywood Undead. But it's true! It's all true! This shit is very silly! Take for instance, this back half of a verse from HU member Charlie Scene on the second song of the album, "Apologize":

"Don't invite Scene over, he pees at sleepovers

He asks your sister out just so he can cheat on her

What a creep loner, shit, I couldn't sink lower

You just got a mean boner from a Charlie Scene poster

If I'm popping a wheelie, it's 'cause I'm jacking your bike

Got my middle finger raised as I'm running red lights

I'm known to punch 'em in the dick at the end of a fight

And I'll never say I'm sorry at the end of the night."

I don't know what to make of this. I can't take it seriously but it's so fucking goofy and so densely packed with insane bullshit that I also can't help but respect it. That line about cheating on your sister? Probably the dumbest brilliant line I've ever heard. And the dude is talking about himself! There is another part in the next song, "Comin' In Hot," in which Scene attempts to rhyme "Home Alone" and "Macaulay Culkin," but has to twist the surname into sounding like "Col-CONE" to make it fit. Later in that verse, he says "We drink so much Goose, we're turning into geese." I just... I don't know what to make of any of this. I really don't. I always speculate about something being so bad that it becomes good again, but Charlie Scene's rapping is the clearest, best example that I've ever come across.

And this is all ignoring the framework under which we've come to this batshit album! That this is one of a 20-something female from Pittsburgh's favorite albums! And I'm supposed to be making assumptions about this poor girl based on the fact that she listens to American Tragedy by the early-'10s rap-rock band Hollywood Undead! How?! Why?!

This makes me wish that I had had the foresight to choose American Tragedy for Record Club instead of Masterpiece Theatre. That would have been fun. It's always more fun when you're taking swipes at an album in a vacuum. I could've written a mean 1-puke review for this fucker, and had a great time. Nate would have either been extremely upset or nobly contrarian. Sunny would have done the work to prove that this was indeed actually a parody. Not sure who else would've written that week. Looks like Sam was writing regularly around that time. I feel like American Tragedy would've been an excellent vehicle for Sammy's patented grumpiness. And we all could've pretended like this thing fell out of the sky instead of having been handed to us by an unassuming artist-turned-tax-attorney who didn't ask for any of this.

Here's the thing, though. Here's the rub. Exploring music is way more fun when you feel something in the extreme. Doesn't matter if the emotion is hilarity and disbelief, as it is here. I don't remember feeling anything about Marianas Trench, and that was to it's detriment. Sure, ask me which is a better album, and I'm taking Masterpiece Theatre every fucking time. But if you're asking me which album I'd prefer to listen to and write words about it at gunpoint? Well, I think American Tragedy is the winner.

And I know what that says about me and I know what that says about music, but I don't really know what that says about Kailyn. We've already talked about the range of her list, how impossible it might seem that Blake Shelton and BOYS LIKE GIRLS and Hollywood Undead are all chilling right next to each other... impossible until you remember that most people don't really think about shit like "favorite album" all that much or at least not as intensely as your typical PoYB denizen might, and so a list like this doesn't make sense because it doesn't have to. It's random. We've already talked about that, and how boring that is, and antithetical to the point of this twelve-week exercise, and so let's instead run through the typical reasons again. Why might Kailyn love Hollywood Undead's American Tragedy?

1) She heard it during a pivotal life moment. This is a big one for people who don't think about music below the surface. Maybe she was on a trip with a friend and that friend played for her their favorite rap-rock band.

2) She knows someone in the band, or someone she knows knows a member, or some other direct or indirect personal connection to the personnel that would give her an excuse to check them out.

3) It started like a joke but eventually stopped being funny. Maybe her friends were passing it around, but the ironic love turned into true love after some time passed.

4) This is still a joke. Kailyn added it to the list to fuck with me.

5) This is the wrong album. Originally, she wrote "Hollywood Undead by Hollywood Undead," but that doesn't exist. They don't have a self-titled. So I took my best guess here, and maybe my guess was wrong.

5) Kailyn legitimately loves all kinds of music and makes a point to get into various genres to strengthen her character and spirit.

And why not? Why not that last one? That's how I see myself, so why wouldn't I trust others to feel the same and listen to music in that way too? Forget about percentages and probabilities, and how it's statistically more likely that Kailyn is an "average listener" who doesn't really give a shit about music beyond what was spoon-fed to her by life's circumstance and the algorithm. Forget about that. I need to think the other way. I need to believe that Kailyn is one of the special ones. I need to believe that she gets it. I need to believe this or else my soul is gonna take a bullet. I need to believe or else I'm gonna be like Charlie Scene and threaten to cut my wrists... metaphorically speaking, of course.

But if I'm thinking that way, then the problem reverts back to: why is this album on her list so fucking bad? Say Kailyn "gets it," okay, but then this choice is just too preposterous to factor into the theory that she gets it. Can you say with full honesty that you are "into music intensely" and also say with full honesty that you love Hollywood Undead?

Probably not... but that's forgetting that Kailyn never made that fucking claim in the first place. Go way back to the first email about this. Let me quote her here: "Sadly I love too much and don't really have favorites, but I can list some of my favorites if that works? Well at least albums in which I love more than a couple songs (I'm notorious for listening to just a few songs from a ton if different people/groups) lol." So there you go, man. We're halfway through this project and we're finally getting some answers here. She actually doesn't care about albums. It's exactly like the probabilities suggested. Kailyn is an "average listener," in that she doesn't listen to albums. Oof. This realization hurts.

I'll get over it, though. Even if we can know with almost certainty that Kailyn doesn't "get" music like we strive to here at the blog, at least the world makes a little more sense. There's comfort to be found in the clarity of knowing that it's not some unknowable mystery here, but that it is instead just some person randomly throwing shit onto a list based on some songs that she knows and puts on the dreaded Playlist That I Put On When I Want to Listen to Music©.

Because this album is very bad. Seriously, have you guys listened to it yet, maybe while I've been prattling on about some stranger half a state away? It's insane how bad it is. Have you heard the back half yet? Songs like "Bullet" and "Pour Me" drop the nü-metal shit altogether and turn into straight-up pop ballads. It's fucking hilarious. This is an album that thinks it's a great idea to transition right from the autotuned sad-boy song "Pour Me" directly into "Tendencies," the finale, in which Johnny 3 Tears rap-yells about having sex with dogs. Truly incredible stuff here.

The best part about all of this is that it's all made up. Hollywood Undead are too ridiculous to be real, and my vision of Kailyn was fake too. And so maybe we can just have fun with it. If I ever meet Kailyn in real life, I will probably not tell her how much I thought this album was hilariously awful. Why, though? Why am I writing it here but planning not to speak my truth in real life? That's the thing, though. There is no real life. We're all phony, and we're all just trying to feel something to pretend like we're real. And if I get to listen to an album in which a white guy in a hockey mask sing-raps about pissing on himself and shooting people with guns, then yeah, man, I guess I'm feeling something, and so I guess I'm real. If anything, we can thank Kailyn for that.

GRADE: 1 puke out of 5

A PICTURE FROM KAILYN'S OLD INSTAGRAM THAT BEST ENCAPSULATES THE EXPERIENCE OF LISTENING TO THIS ALBUM:

THE FULL LIST, IN ORDER OF COVERAGE:

• Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park
• Masterpiece Theatre by Mariana Trench
• Don't You Fake It by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
• Meteora by Linkin Park
• Red River Blue by Blake Shelton
• Boys Like Girls by BOYS LIKE GIRLS
  
• Steal This Album! by System of a Down
• Avenged Sevenfold by Avenged Sevenfold
• American Tragedy by Hollywood Undead
• Stadium Arcadium by Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Relapse by Eminem
• Strummin' On Garth by Brooks Jefferson
• You Get What You Give by Zac Brown Band
• Stand Up and Scream by Asking Alexandria
• Me and My Gang by Rascal Flatts