OBAMA VS ROMNEY: IT’S DEBATABLE

Emergency opinion from Team Def Chief Political Batshit Scientist, Lucky Bensonhurst

The first of the POTUS debates is over, and everything has gone exactly as I predicted.

Granted, my prediction was along the lines of this: “Romney and Obama will say everything they’ve been saying for the last year, and that regardless of their actual performance, the party faithful from both sides will not only declare their own candidate the winner by a landslide, but also that the Opposition got his ass kicked all the way downtown.”

So I think I nailed it. Except that the second bit is more true for Romney than Obama.

Or so the Internet says. Indeed, the Internet is a-dither over polls declaring Romney the winner of this round – much to the surprise of just about every hardcore liberal in the country who were sure that Obama would hand Mitt his ass back to him. Even William Rivers Pitt is wondering just what the hell happened to El Jefe’s mojo.

Then again, that disappointment is easy to explain – hardcore liberals frequently made the mistake of assuming that Obama is as far to the left as they are. Which is probably why they expected him to speechify his way to victory and/or body-slam Romney’s lying ass Jon Stewart Style and end the election right then and there. Or something.

So what really happened?

Theories abound.

My own theory is that Obama deliberately pulled his punches – possibly because he was trying to make himself look like the reasonable one in this discussion (which would work great against pretty much every other Republican POTUS candidate this season except for the Mormon ones – who knew?), or possibly because Team Obama figured he could jiu-jitsu his way to victory by letting Romney do what he’s done all through campaign – punch himself repeatedly in the nuts and hand Obama all the ammo he needs to take him down.

That didn’t happen, though by many accounts it could have. Maybe Obama is saving all that mojo for the last debate.

Maybe it’s all Jim Lehrer’s fault.

Or damn, Hovis, maybe it really was the altitude.

Either way, for all the dithering over Obama’s performance, I can’t see it helping Romney that much at this stage.

It’s hard to tell, of course – we’re in post-analysis Media Circus mode right now, and pundits will make hay, as they do. But taking a macro view, I don’t see anything from the debate that would cost Obama the support he already has – and he has a lot.

But as I’ve said before, so far the election has been Obama’s to lose, and it’s safe to say that, in terms of political logic, Romney has bought himself a chance to get back in this. Liberals will complain he got it by lying his ass off. Which is true. So what else is new? No one ever became president by being honest – not even Obama.

But here’s a thing: Romney isn't likely to get away with that again. Obama may have held back in Round 1. But there’s two more debates to go, and you can bet Team Obama will be watching the tapes and rethinking their strategy. 

L. Bensonhurst

LISTEN TO IT #64: THE STAR MACHINE WILL HAND YR ASS RIGHT BACK TO YOU

Continuing yet again with the Old Guys Are The Future Of Music meme: 

Bob Mould, as you may know, is my hero. His distinctive guitar sound has been probably the biggest single influence on me as a guitar player, regardless of where he’s deployed it – in Husker Du, Sugar and as a solo artist. I want to be like him. If that involves being gay, so be it. I’m cool with that.

Fandom!

That said, I’ll be the first to admit his solo work can be patchy, particularly since his "comeback" in 2005 after spending several years writing electronica and wrestling scripts. Body Of Song was a decent warm-up for the excellent District Line, but 2009's Life And Times didn’t really work for me. It was good, but it didn’t really grab me by the collar and punch me repeatedly in the face like I know Mould is capable of doing. (That’s a good thing, BTW. Don’t judge.)

His follow-up, Silver Age, is out now. And Jesus Christ, is it a kick in the head.

It may be the product of Mould playing old Sugar material on tour between albums, but either way Silver Age is practically a Sugar reunion album, only with Mould as the only original member left. It’s got everything a good Mould album should have – snarling lyrics over loud angry guitars with lots of open chords for maximum harmonics that sound like they could put you in the hospital if you touch yr stereo speakers.

Better yet, the songwriting is some of the best of Mould’s career. It may follow a familiar template, but it’s a hell of a template – ten songs and not a dud on here.

Listen to the opening track. If you dare.

Sure, I’m biased. So what? I’m biased in every episode of this series. Sue me.

In that sense, I’ll admit that people who don’t get Mould will continue to be unimpressed. For the rest of us – or at least me – I think this is easily Mould’s most kinetic and exciting album since Sugar’s Beaster EP, and his most awesome solo effort since Black Sheets Of Rain.

As a fanboy, I’m pleased to know he can still do stuff like this. Hopefully I’ll still feel that way once the euphoria wears off.

Play it loud,

This is dF

JOAN JETT AND LITA FORD: CONTRAST AND COMPARE

Between a recent Lita Ford post and the fact that Joan Jett recently turned 54, I got to thinking about this.

Like a lot of people my age (outside of Los Angeles and Tokyo, that is), I heard Joan Jett and Lita Ford before I heard the Runaways.

And of course I heard Joan Jett first with “I Love Rock’n’Roll”. I thought she was great, and I eventually got a copy of the album and listened to it a lot, and then when her debut album was re-released to capitalize on the success of ILRnR, I got that one too, and the next few albums after that.

Hit song aside, I knew some people in high school who didn’t like her, and the reasons can probably be summed up by a comment I remember clearly from a guy I knew in art class: “She’s the kind of girl who’d run around in a lesbian street gang that wears leather jackets with a shark’s fin on the back.”

My kinda dame.

Anyway, it was shortly after high school that Lita Ford had her breakout hit on MTV. 

It was nowhere near as popular, but I also liked it, as I liked quite a bit of The Metal at the time. And hey, Hot Leather Chick Playing Guitar.

Then she hit it big a few years later by going pop-metal and covering a Generation X song.

I didn’t like it quite as much. It was okay, but I felt the same way I felt when Heart re-invented themselves as an 80s pop-metal hair band – which is to say, it wasn’t broke, so why fix it? Or more accurately, it wasn’t broke, so they broke it so they could fix it. 

Anyway, it’s interesting (to me) to look at how Joan and Lita chose different directions musically, and the results thereof – not in terms of units shipped or chart positions, but just in terms of output and legacy.

Obviously, Joan has become something of a rock icon in her own right, and has maintained a reasonably steady career since the 80s in one form or another. By contrast, Lita’s career peaked in the 80s and faded in the early 90s.

I do chalk that up in part to their musical styles. Loud 4/4 rock can find an audience in any era (since its invention), as opposed to most 80s metal, which sounds horribly dated and took a back seat to grunge in the 90s – by which time Joan was getting a lot of respect in riot grrrl circles. She also got a lot of DIY cred for the fact that her first album was released on her own label, Blackheart Records, because no major label took her seriously (according to legend, 23 labels rejected it).

On the other hand, unlike Joan, Lita took time off to have and raise kids. So that should be taken into account. 

Meanwhile, Lita Ford has been mounting a comeback. She released an album in 2009, which wasn’t all that well received, and has a “proper” comeback album out right now. It’s called Living Like A Runaway, which may be shameless reference to the resurgence of interest in The Runaways, but hey, it was her band too, so she’s entitled.

And it does sound like a return to basics – it’s metal(ish), but more like the Donnas variety than (say) the Crue variety. I can’t say I’m that into it, but as hard-rock records go, it’s good.

Still, I have to say, my heart belongs to Joan, if only because she's the one who landed a guest spot in Bloom County. 

FUN FACT: I saw Joan Jett and the Blackhearts live once – at Summer Jam ’82 in Memphis, TN. Even from the cheap seats, she was great, and for my money stole the show. 

Who did she steal it from, you ask?

Why, Survivor, Kansas and the headliner, REO Speedwagon.

The 80s – you had to be there.

Do you wanna touch,

This is dF

EDITED TO ADD [later the same day]: It's been pointed out to me that Lita's “Kiss Me Deadly” is not the Generation X song. This is true – it's actually by Mick Smiley (the guy whose main claim to fame is having a song on the Ghostbusters soundtrack). I have no idea why I thought it was the same song – I had a distinct memory of seeing Billy Idol's name in the songwriting credits on that particular Lita Ford album, or reading it somewhere at the time, or maybe some radio DJ said it. Anyway, Idol had nothing to do with the album, and probably nothing to do with Ford at any time in her career.

In my defense, I haven't listened to my copy of Generation X's sole LP in probably 15 years.

Thanks to bedsitter23  for the correction. And apologies for deleting his original comment to this post that prompted this correction. 

About that:

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE: For those of you wondering why this is appearing in yr Friends Page feed again, that’s because when I went back to Dreamwidth to add the above correction, the editor kept sticking in embed code I didn’t want in there, embedding most of the text into the three videos and making the whole post unreadable – and going into HTML more to delete the embed tags did not work because as soon as I went back to Rich Text it stuck them right back in again – all of which was getting crossposted to LJ – thus forcing to delete the entire post and start from scratch, thus wasting a good chunk of my Friday night.

Thanks a bunch, Dreamwidth.