Countdown to Excrement
People are morons. I woke up yesterday to see a story all over the news about “an unidentified object” crashing through a New Jersey couple’s roof. Guess what, guys? It’s a ROCK, and your state still smells funny.
As if that wasn’t idiotic enough, I then go on the net to find this update from Dave Mustaine regarding the upcoming Megadeth offering, UNITED ABOMINATIONS. In it, Dave writes:
“…just know that every note on this record is being gone over with a fine tooth comb, like I did on COUNTDOWN TO EXTINCTION, and suffice to say, I should have been doing it this way for the last four or five records.”
Mustaine may have gotten his drunken ass kicked out Metallica, but he clearly still shares their talent for bullshitting the fans into thinking that this, the band’s latest offering, really, honestly, hand-to-God, swear on my mother, WILL be the return to form we’ve all be waiting for.
At least Metallica create hype in a more honorable fashion; the whole MTV Icon thing may have been pretty lame (Limp Suckit? Suck 182? AVRIL LAVIGNE? Great metal bands, these are not), but they weren’t wrong in more or less proclaiming themselves one of the most important and influential metal bands of all time. And even if playing MASTER OF PUPPETS in its entirety at festivals across Europe really does turn out to be a ploy- well, it’s the best ploy I’ve ever seen.
But Mustaine, time and again, seeks to do little more than re-write his past- and what’s worse, he consistently comes off as a whiney little bitch. Back in ’04, when the Megadeth mastermind was hyping his LAST comeback album, THE SYSTEM HAS FAILED, he blamed the crappy quality of his mid-to-late 90’s body of work of former Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman, accusing Friedman of “trying to turn Megadeth into an alternative band.”
Then, just a few weeks later, he posted on his own website a detailed history of Megadeth in which he basically blamed former bandmates,former managers, and former record executives for the shittiness of his recent output.
Let’s forget, for a moment, that Mustaine is metal’s most notorious dictator; even Hetfield and Ulrich occasionally let Kirk Hammett contribute SOMETHING from time to time, and the list of revolving muscians who have come and gone through Megadeth is rivaled only by Guns N’ Roses- except that Axl actually tends to give credit where credit is due.
No, let us pretend, for a moment, that maybe there really was a time when Mustaine, like, say, Britney Spears, allowed his managers, label, and hangers-on to boss him around and tell him what was and was not fit for a Megadeth record (and if that IS true, Dave, it’s not very metal of you).
That still wouldn’t negate the fact that Mustaine is, well, a cry-baby and a manipulator of facts. In the excellent Metallica-themed documentary, SOME KIND OF MONSTER, Mustaine is seen meeting with his “little Danish friend,” Ulrich, and basically crying that being fired from Metallica was the worst thing that ever happened to him, and his life since has been a series of dissapointments. “Everything you touch turns to gold,” he tells the Metallica drummer, “and everything I touch backfires.” The filmmakers astutely point that Mustaine has the most ass-backwards conception of what it is to “backfire” of anyone on the planet; just because Metallica sold 90 million records doesn’t negate the fact that Megadeth have sold 15 million (if you combined the record sales of every Lamb of God album produced up to this point, I think you’d have about a million albums sold; Exodus have been around at least as long as Megadeth and I don’t even know if they could boast those kinds of numbers).
As soon as Mustaine saw the film, of course, he realized how embarassing the footage was and tried to have it pulled from the film. He blamed his comments on, of all things, September 11 (yeah, like that’s not offensive), all the while admitting that he signed a release allowing himself to be filmed- in other words, that no one duped him into making such emotionally raw, yet completely idiotic, comments on-camera.
For me, personally, the final straw was seeing VH1’s episode of BEHIND THE MUSIC devoted to Megadeth, where Mustaine proclaimed “I could write Metallica records; I could write music that sounds exactly like Metallica. I choose not to.” Really, Dave? Getting booted from Metallica is the worst thing that ever happened to you, but you choose to do nothing to make yourself as successful as they are?
Dave, isn’t it true that, as the primary writer of every Megadeth album, well, EVER, you have no one to blame for anything but yourself? Isn’t it true that you once turned down the opportunity to have Dimebag play in your band because he wouldn’t join unless you let drummer Vinnie Paul in, too (good call, dude- they only went on to form Pantera, the most influential metal band since, well, Metallica)? Isn’t it true that you’re a lying, back peddling douche?
My words are harsh, I know. But look at it this way: now when UNITED ABOMINATIONS sucks major ass, Dave can blame it all on me.
-AR
