Culture Mush

Well, it’s official. It seems like Axl Rose and Guns N’ Roses might actually be ready to release Chinese Democracy to the masses. However, judging by some of the feedback I’ve seen, not everybody is impressed. I guess when you take 14 years to complete an album and your band is legendary, expectations run rather high. All in all, I like the track, but it’s definitely no Welcome To the Jungle. I’ve added it under all these words for your listening pleasure.

According to the label, November 23rd is the release date for the album. Chinese Democracy is a 14 song album co-produced by Axl Rose and Caram Costanzo. It will be available on CD, digital download and vinyl through Geffen and Black Frog. Pre-orders begin today, so it looks like we might have a chance to hear this entire thing before Axl goes bucknutty and scraps the entire project once again.

Call me crazy, but I think we’re about to finally see a multiplatinum album on the charts. I think the only thing that Americans have been more anxious to see in recent times, is the departure of George Bush!

I know, I know…I’m wasting a lot of time talking about this Sarah Palin woman who won’t even be a thought in our minds in 2 months, but the “newsbreaks” about this woman are getting crazier by the day. Topic of the day: The Newsweek cover of Sarah Palin that features an un-retouched headshot photo.

This week’s Newsweek magazine features an untouched photo of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin along with the headline She’s One Of The Folks (And that’s the Problem). As you can see, Andrea Tantaros argues that “It highlights every imperfection that every human being has. We’re talking unwanted facial hair, pores, wrinkles. This is a gross slap in the face.”

Now I’m a UNLV Fine Arts graduate, so I’m sure my observational skills are far more evolved than these literal political experts. Maybe the correlation between words and imagery is lost upon the true elitists of society, but wouldn’t an untouched photo of a naturally attractive woman help the public relate to her as one of the folks a lot more than a heavily photoshopped image that shows nothing but artificially flawless skin and false perfection? In my opinion (which is correct 100% of the time, 70% of the time), this cover in an artistic sense is genius, correlating it’s words with a matching image. Mrs. High and Mighty with her high society status and beauty pageant past, has charmed the hoozeymawhatsits off of our rear ends, donchaknow…and she now is looking like one of us if our faces were magnified times two. Talk about a headline making sense: Now that we can see her flaws, we can all see that she is in fact, one of us!

In terms of a press move, this is about the smartest thing that could have been done by Palin and the Republican Political party. By running this cover and stirring up this fake controversy, the Palin buzz continues as it is on this blog, and the focus is taken off of the poor race that her superior is running.

After a debate that was free of fireworks or anything that will change the minds of voters, nothing can spark a campaign’s fire like some TMZ style smut that the public loves. Aside from that, free airtime on heavily biased news networks that diverts our attention away from the real issues at hand, never hurts a party that is clinging to a race by a thread.