Category Archives: Music

Playing Cops for Real, Playing Cops for Pay

About a month or so ago (is time extra wibbly wobbly for anyone else? Months and weeks collapse into a few hours and some days seem to last weeks?) Darin from Punk Rock Karaoke saw that I am an old school punk, and he offered me an opportunity to join him and his band to sing a song of my choice.
 
I am not musical at all. Like, I love music, and I sing along all the time, but I’m not a singer or a musician, so I was like OMG YES and then that voice in my head I try so hard not to listen to was all THEY’RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU! But I was all shut up, voice. It’s punk! I can totally fake it.
 
So I did. It was the single scariest thing I’ve ever done, creatively, in my life. I can not even begin to tell you how far out of my comfort zone this took me, and how happy I am with the result. It was so much fun, and I can’t wait until I can do it live with the band.
 
Here I am, singing the Dead Kennedys classic, Police Truck, with Punk Rock Karaoke:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AK-sHrCyUY

and the sky was all violet

Earlier this week, I wrote this on my Facebook:

It was so long ago, the exact time is fuzzy. Maybe it was Fall of 1992, or early Spring of 1993. My friends and I were *deep* into Mother Love Bone, Soundgarden, Hole, and Nirvana.

My best friend, Dave, and I fancied our 20 year-old selves to be quite sophisticated, musically speaking, and we professed a specialized understanding and appreciation for Kurt Cobain’s lyrics that the people we disdained as “mortals” couldn’t even begin to fathom.

Sidenote: I’ve been listening to massive amounts of grunge and riot grrl for about a month, and I can honestly and embarrassingly admit that 20 year-old me wasn’t *nearly* as insightful, wise, and sophisticated as he thought he was. He really needed to shut up, and he did *not* have the understanding and appreciation of this music that he thought he did. I know this because 46 year-old me is finding things in these lyrics and albums that younger versions of me weren’t nearly mature enough to see.

So it’s late afternoon, and Dave and I are walking up Veteran in Westwood, to the loft that I share with Hardwick. On our walk, we pass a frat house. On this particular day, this frat house is blasting Nirvana’s “In Bloom” out of its open windows. Kurt Cobain screams, “he’s the one who likes all our pretty songs/ and he likes to sing along/ and he likes to shoot his gun/ but he don’t know what it means / knows not what it means / when I sing it.”

Dave and I look at each other, and the pure, unfiltered, raw and unadulterated CONTEMPT we have for the people in this frat (which I deliberately call a frat because it annoys the douchebags who join fraternities to meet other douchebags) can move mountains.

“These fucking guys,” I say, gesturing dismissively at the house.

“They don’t even know he is singing about THEM, man!” Dave finishes my thought.

It is only now, two and a half decades later, that I realize Kurt Cobain was singing about ALL OF US.

Oh, twentysomething Wil, you are such a privileged little white boy, and you have so much maturing to do. You’re doing the best you can, but … just slow your roll, kid.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on my twenties this week, as I have immersed myself in the music I loved then. I’ve been unpacking a lot of what and who I was then, and how he relates to who I am, now. One of those reflections inspired me to write this, today:

Continue reading… →

radio dot wil wheaton dot net

I’ve been experimenting with a Shoutcast music stream that Mysterious Kevin helped me set up. I have a bunch of different playlists that I rotate through, including 70s punk, 80s metal, 90s ambient electronica, and 90s grunge. I mix in a bunch of random weird and strange files that I find online, including excerpts from Star Trek Power records, ancient European commercials, audio bloopers from various TV shows, and other things you’d expect to find on a mixtape. If you’ve ever heard my podcast mixtapes, you know what to expect.

You should be able to listen to this in any browser, or you can download the .pls file to stream in VLC or the media thingy of your choice. I also think this little player thingy should work right here. If I configured it the way I want, it should even be playing AUTOMATICALLY LIKE MAGIC (I reconfigured this so it doesn’t autoplay, based on your feedback.):

The current playlist (which I expect to keep live all week) is the 80s metal collection. It features some Sabbath, Maiden, Van Halen, Metallica, Scorpions, and stuff like that.

Unrelated: this new WordPress composer (BLOCKS AND BLOCKS AND OTHER BLOCKS IS HOW WE DO IT NOW) is really weird and makes me feel like a very old man who used to hand-code blog entries in raw HTML. I’m sure it’s very powerful and flexible when you get used to it, but right now I feel like I’m writing with someone else’s hands.

ALSO UNRELATED: The Star Trek cruise was amazing and deserves its own entry, but I’ve been decompressing and catching up on work since we got back, and I haven’t had time to sit down to properly compose my thoughts.

RELATED: Van Hagar sucks.

Oh, and also…

this is brilliant

When we worked on Next Generation, Brent Spiner and I would sit at our consoles on the bridge, and make up lyrics to our show’s theme song. I vaguely recall coming up with some pretty funny and clever stuff, but nothing that held together as perfectly as this, from the weirdos over at meh.com:

…and then Pete Townsend says, “Can anybody play the drums?”

I was thinking about reinstalling Rock Band again recently, but I decided that, even though I really loved playing it back in the day, I am at a point in my life where I would rather spend that time actually learning an instrument, instead. I have played bass guitar and ukulele in the past. I also played guitar in the way that every lame college dude does, which means I never learned any theory, but I memorized some guitar tabs and chords, and sort of faked my way through a few songs for friends who were either too polite or embarrassed to tell me how bad I was.

I was sort of thinking that doing it as a game would be fun, so I gave Rocksmith guitar a try, but after about two hours of different game modes, it’s not for me. It was like all the frustration of Rock Band or Guitar hero, but without any of the fun of pretending that I was a rock star. I may plug in my old bass guitar (which is now a vintage instrument because I’m old) and try that mode, but for now, I’m going to try something different.

I have always wanted to learn to play the drums, and I was pretty good at the Rock Band drums when we played all the time, so I decided to pick up a small, inexpensive, student kit, and use YouTube videos to master the basics. While I was shopping around about a week ago, there was a shiny little kit on sale at woot, and it had more pieces and cost less than the three piece kit I was looking it, so I bought it. It was delivered today.

I’ve been putting it together, which is really fun, but murder on my old hands and knuckle joints, so I took a break to write this dumb post about the new experimental hobby thingy I’m doing: Is it possible for a 45 year-old dude like me to learn how to play the drums, using only the resources available online?

I intend to find out. I’ll document the process here.