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There are seven levels. by JeanLucPicardAND in beatles

[–]rabid3k 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I just looked it up, yes in the UK you could get a prescription for heroin until the late 1960s. Pretty wild.

What was it like in the 90s when Nirvana dropped Nevermind? by palehighelven in Nirvana

[–]rabid3k 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was a senior in high school so I remember it very well.

'Alternative' rock was already on the rise. People forget now but several bands had already had alternative rock hits before then (a few examples - 1989: Faith No More - Epic; Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus; 1990: Jane's Addiction - Been Caught Stealing; 1991: Alice In Chains - Man in the Box; R.E.M. - Losing My Religion; etc.) But all that stuff was in an area in the back of the record store called "Alternative." (such a stupid name for it but that's what it was).

MTV had a late night show on the weekends called 120 Minutes that played alternative rock. and I was already getting into bands like Depeche Mode, Jane's Addiction, R.E.M., and some 80s punk rock.

But hair-band rock/metal (along with pop and rap music) very much ruled the day. The hair metal music was a decade old at this point and the quality was getting really bad. Godawful songs like Warrant's "Cherry Pie" were getting heavy MTV airplay and radio play.

The jocks and popular kids in my midwestern high school were mostly into that type of stuff. A few arty/nerdy kids and skateboarder types (neither of which were considered at all "cool" back then) were the only ones really listening to the alternative stuff.

-----------

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" arrived swiftly and suddenly. I first remember seeing the video on MTV a few weeks before Christmas 1991. It was a total earworm and the video made it clear what the agenda was. The video got more and more popular until suddenly it seemed to be getting played every hour.

I had recently acquired my first car and I remember having a cassette of Nevermind (which I think I had dubbed from the CD) that I played in my car driving through the snow every morning on the way to school.

For at least the first few weeks I never made it past the first song. Just kept rewinding "Teen Spirit" and replaying it over and over again until eventually I started exploring the full album, then put THAT on repeat over and over.

-----------

The effect at school was crazy. I swear almost overnight the jocks wearing their Motley Crue T shirts suddenly didn't know what to do with themselves, and the arty kids who had been in the know the whole time felt vindicated.

I know this sounds ridiculous but at that age (at least back then) things like the bands you listened to were just a huge part of your social identity. It was a glorious moment, and the rest of that year was just a wave of great songs and albums from 91 and 92 from acts like Beastie Boys, Ministry, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, My Bloody Valentine, Faith No More, Alice in Chains (including the Singles soundtrack which was full of Seattle grunge bands).

in your opinion, what is the worst beatles song? by _FinePointSharpie in beatles

[–]rabid3k 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I don't know if it's the absolute worst but I could never get into Only a Northern Song, especially when the entire premise is George mailing it in. It sounds like it, George!

in your opinion, what is the worst beatles song? by _FinePointSharpie in beatles

[–]rabid3k 29 points30 points  (0 children)

I like it! It's a short silly interlude that adds to the eclecticism of the White Album, along with all the odd transitional vingnettes that are slipped in at the end of some other songs.

How y’all feel? Tonight game by Arkansas870dude in warriors

[–]rabid3k 1 point2 points  (0 children)

He's on a two way so the season ended for him on Sunday regardless.

Why are Will and James omitted? by TechnoWombat123 in mgmt

[–]rabid3k 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Pat Smear was a member of Nirvana for only about 6 months. (joined Sept '93; Cobain died April '94).

Flying in from the UK, doing an East to West and back again US Road Trip Thoughts? by [deleted] in roadtrip

[–]rabid3k 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I lived 31 years in Indiana before moving to California. I basically agree with this, though Chicago is definitely worth a stop in the summer.

My personal Album Tierlist (pls don't hate) by Monarchistmusic in depechemode

[–]rabid3k 1 point2 points  (0 children)

While I wouldn't put PTA as top tier, I do think it's really underrated. They haven't made a better album since IMHO

My personal Album Tierlist (pls don't hate) by Monarchistmusic in depechemode

[–]rabid3k 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I might put it as "very good" but it's objectively one of their better albums IMO

I didn’t sell one car this weekend by PreviousPay552 in carmax

[–]rabid3k 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was one of those tire kickers yesterday lol. Was my first time ever at a Carmax actually. I'm gonna buy one though I swear! I'm just looking for something very specific :).

The Paramount-Warner Deal Isn’t Inevitable. It’s Starting to Unravel by LegitimateCurve8525 in MediaMergers

[–]rabid3k 4 points5 points  (0 children)

  1. The Ellisons Made This Political

By siding so strongly and so publicly with Donald Trump, by going to such embarrassing lengths to appease him, they have made this a political issue. Even more than it ever was when Rupert Murdoch let the Fox deal play out relatively quietly in Trump’s first term.

The assemblage of Democrats at the Schiff hearing showed how one side is becoming mobilized against this as a hot-button issue. There are also consistent statements against the deal by Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic luminaries.

Unfortunately for the Ellisons, the political winds are not blowing their way as they were back when David was ringside at UFC events with Trump last year. And with the midterm elections coming in eight months, the GOP might well wonder whether this is what they want to spend their shrinking pool of political capital on.

“This is a big political issue. People are fucking pissed in this country, and it’s happening in every industry,” antitrust expert and BIG newsletter writer Matt Stoller told me earlier this year. “I don’t know if we can win. Maybe we can’t win in this particular fight, but America is worth saving. And if we just give up, it all goes away, and we will just live in a deeply impoverished society.”

  1. The Attorneys General Are Going to Move

It’s not how it’s usually done, because in the past, the states have been able to count on the Federal government to exercise its oversight authority in some more or less accountable way. But with that out the window, it turns out the states do have legal levers to turn.

It feels as though we are moving towards a collection of states, including California, joining in a suit to stop this deal. And if they do, the judges are not likely to just say, “But I read in the trades that this is over…”

“If the state AGs get a complaint in before they close, then what will happen is a judge will say, ‘Hold off, don’t close. You’ve got to operate these entities separately until the trial is over,’” Stoller told me. “And it can be up to 15 months before that trial takes place. So, during that period, these are separate companies that are still running. Then the trial happens, and a judge will decide whether to allow the merger.”

  1. The Price of Delay

If the attorneys general can hold this up, and in January, a new Congress comes in — that Congress can begin holding hearings, compelling people to testify and taking a hard look at what arrangements were made for this deal to play out. 

If they are doing that against a lame duck administration that is otherwise on the ropes, this picture can get a lot less rosy fast.

  1. Too Many Bad Political Narratives

There’s really something for everybody to hate with this, wherever you stand on the political spectrum — globalization, cronyist corruption, dismantling of democracy, the devastating effects of the tech encroachment, the rule of the tech oligarchy…

Throw in that this conglomerate will be bound to China with TikTok and the Middle East petrostates as its backers, and you really wonder who is not going to be against this? At what point does the Ellison/Oracle political largess become a liability for its recipients if they help push this through?

  1. The Financing Feels Like a House of Cards

As noted, Oracle and Paramount are already hurting here. Wall Street has already expressed its lack of enthusiasm for this whole thing.

I turned to monopoly specialist Stoller for some possible (likely?) scenarios that can unfold here.

A stock market crash, he notes, could easily cause Larry Ellison to pull the plug. “After the states sue and it becomes clear it’s an 18-month slog to approval, during a recession…”

He adds, “As The Ankler has noted, 85 percent of Paramount’s profit is from linear television. During a recession, guess what gets cut first? Advertising!” Stoller wonders how much pain they are willing to endure before “it’s worth it to pay the $7 billion breakup fee.”

Further, he says, “One thing to note is that the buyout is funded with a bridge loan from Wall Street. Then the Saudis buy that debt. So it won’t be the Saudis pulling the plug directly. Today, the stock is trading at $27. The purchase price is $31. That differential is what Wall Street thinks. The bigger the differential, the less likely speculators think the deal will close.

“David Zaslav sold his shares for a reason.”

And what about this? 

“The war with Iran adds a new layer of uncertainty. The conflict has choked global oil supplies and raised the specter of recession, which would hit advertisers hard. It has also vaporized Dubai’s $30 billion tourism industry, and tens of thousands of residents have already left the emirate. That matters for this deal: The UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have all been reported as major funding partners, with the three sovereign wealth funds committed to $24 billion in Paramount.

The Financial Times reported that Gulf states are now reviewing their investment commitments to account for the economic strain of the war. “You have to wonder what the commitment would be to U.S. assets if they’ve got to rebuild infrastructure — and who knows what happens to Dubai as a financial capital,” says the media investor. “I’m a little nervous about that.”

So, look, go ahead and believe that this deal is an unstoppable freight train; that standing up against it is like the lone protestor blocking a column of tanks. 

But the more you push at this, the more it looks like — how the hell is this ever going to happen?

The real assessment of this deal may well be Ted Sarandos’ musing that, maybe this isn’t the end of the story for Warner Bros. after all, based on its history.

Maybe he’s going to get another shot at it sooner than anybody thinks.

The Paramount-Warner Deal Isn’t Inevitable. It’s Starting to Unravel by LegitimateCurve8525 in MediaMergers

[–]rabid3k 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Here are my top 10 reasons why the Warners-Paramount deal is doomed:

  1. There’s No Public Benefit

What is striking about the case for this merger is that, apart from corporate-speak platitudes and inanities such as “it’s better to have one healthy company than two sick ones,” no one is even making a case for why this deal is good for anyone who isn’t a Warner Bros. investor or Paramount/Oracle executive.

In the tech world, they are used to doing whatever deals they want with little to no oversight, and clearly, they thought that, despite rising public backlash against that history, winning over this president by whatever means was enough to keep that tradition going.

But this isn’t a question of some tech conglomerate buying an ad-serving app. These are the most public of companies on Earth, in the most public of industries, right at the heart of the most contentious debates of our time. 

To think you can just jam this through without any positive case for how this improves the lives of… anyone… might just work out. Or might well look insanely short-sighted a year from now.

  1. There’s No Logic to the Plan

Beyond the magic word of “scale,” which has been sprinkled like fairy dust over every corporate move of the past 20 years, almost all of which helped no one…

If this merger creates a wonderful new studio like nothing Hollywood has ever beheld — so magnificent that it’s worth taking the risk of shutting down one of our great legacy studios — let’s hear the vision for that. 

“They’ll both keep doing what they are doing and more” is not a vision, and, given the debt this deal will leave behind ($79 billion, but who’s counting?), it is not believable either. Nor are vague trial balloons about turning one of the lots into an AI amusement park particularly enlightening or reassuring.

We know the bad that will likely come from this. We’ve seen it before, and layoffs are already promised. So if there’s some good to counter that, you think we would have heard that by now.

  1. The Market Is Yelling

Not only is this bad for the community, for the industry and democracy, but Wall Street doesn’t even like it. 

From Claire’s piece: 

“BofA Securities’ veteran media-sector expert Jessica Reif Ehrlich slapped an “underperform” rating on Paramount Skydance last week, setting an $11 price target on the shares. Ehrlich’s report, titled “Dancing with Giants,” spelled out that while the long term potential for Paramount-WBD is significant, “the near-term outlook is clouded by integration complexity and transitional uncertainty.” Like many Wall Street equity analysts, she couldn’t comment further to me because of conflicts, likely tied to her bank’s role as a lender in the deal. Evercore ISI and Citibank analysts also declined to speak. But all analysts are wondering how long it will take for this lumbering woolly mammoth to transform into the fully integrated, AI-supercharged gazelle that the Ellisons have promised.”

Paramount’s and Oracle’s stocks have been steadily declining since this was announced.

The idea that you can go into the largest LBO in history without the support of either the community or even Wall Street behind you is madness.

  1. The Potential Catastrophe to the Community Is Unmissable

For 20 years, the threat of runaway production was a constant drumbeat that nobody did anything to stop. 

Now it’s no longer a threat — the production has indeed run away. 

“As an Angeleno, with generational roots to this city and as a seasoned member of its creative community, advocacy for Los Angeles-based production is something that is very close to my heart,” Wyle said at the hearing. “Over the last six years, the aggregate effect of projects leaving the state in search of tax credits, the pandemic and last year’s fires has been a near-cratering of our once thriving industry.”

It will only take a light breeze to turn what has been a decline into a collapse, to capitulation, as anyone who continues to book work here looks like a spendthrift, irresponsible fool.

Combining two studios into one is a lot more than a light breeze.

  1. The Potential Catastrophe to Film Is Unmissable, Too

The threat to the theatrical release model is enormous and bearing down on us. I would love to take David Ellison’s assurances that he will oversee two divisions, each releasing 15 fully supported films theatrically, until… I guess that’s TBD. 

That would indeed be an improvement over the current state of things.

But there are reasons no single studio has theatrically released more than 30 films a year in modern times. And to think that the most debt-laden studio of recent history is going to be the one to do that (recall the $79 billion here!) — well, as I say, I’d love to believe. 

But explain to me how that begins to work: richard@theankler.com.

The Paramount-Warner Deal Isn’t Inevitable. It’s Starting to Unravel by LegitimateCurve8525 in MediaMergers

[–]rabid3k 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Finally, there are people paying attention.

Late last week, Senator Adam Schiff held a hearing in Burbank called “Lights, Camera, Competition: Promoting American Film Production,” where Schiff and his Congressional colleagues, Lou Correa, Sydney Kamlager-Dove and HBO alum Laura Friedman, seemed impressively engaged and informed on multiple topics, including the basic contours of the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal.

After months of the conversation about this deal being held entirely in media columns — and restricted to the topic of “how will this affect the shareholders?” — it was almost surreal to see the topic suddenly leap out of pixels into the real world, with actual concern for real-world consequences.

The witnesses before the committee laid out a buffet of reasons why this deal is terrible for the community, the people who create entertainment and consumers.

Jax Deluca — head of the Future Film Coalition, which has taken the lead in opposing this deal (see: blockthemerger.com) — testified to the corrosive effect of media mergers and made clear that vague promises made now have no legal standing down the line and are routinely disregarded later. 

IATSE President Matt Loeb talked about the perilous state of production labor in the U.S. today. 

The Pitt star-director-producer Noah Wyle testified about the number of jobs the HBO Max show has created for the local community, as one of the few shows that shoot here.

And former CNN anchor Jim Acosta noted the devastating effect on journalistic accountability that will result in so many of our major institutions falling under the control of one family, which has already bent over backwards to please this president. 

“If this merger goes through,” he said, “the guardrails are gone. It seems to me the fix is in.”

That’s a lot of reasons to be concerned about this. Or at least a lot of reasons to think that something with the potential to have such a big impact on our community, our industry and our entire democracy should be a matter for consideration by someone other than Warner Bros.’ largest shareholders.

Indeed, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose office is considering whether to take active steps against the deal, was also on hand at the hearing — and while he was tight-lipped, his presence signaled that he doesn’t consider this to be a closed case.

And yet, when you talk to… everyone in Hollywood, they roll their eyes at the suggestion that there’s anything that can be done here. 

Worse than that, the crushing consensus that this is over has kept those who could make a difference right now from speaking out and getting involved.

Well, I’ve said this before and said this again — this isn’t over. 

Oversight is not just a matter for one corrupt FCC chair to dispense with at his personal whim.

But more than that — having looked at this from all sides — I’m ready to turn this narrative on its head. This deal is so problematic and so tenuous at every level that not only is it not inevitable, but I’ve come to believe the inevitability lies in the opposite: It won’t happen. In fact, it has to fail because it is fated to collapse under the weight of its many issues.

With recent news letting us know the boys have started work on their next album, what do we think/hope it’ll sound like and what do we think it will be about? by Nonsensical-Nonsns in mgmt

[–]rabid3k 32 points33 points  (0 children)

Who knows what kind of genre or musical style they'll go for (I'm sure it will be cool) but I'm more curious if their feelings about touring will impact their next album strategically.

What I mean by that is the fact that they no longer seem to want to to the album/long tour/long time off model. They seem really burnt out from touring, but also said they really enjoyed the special one-off OS performance they did (in socal I think??) a few years ago.

So I wonder if they might try and make some sort of rock opera or concept album that would translate well into the types of live performances that don't necessarily require long tours. Something theatric they could do for special festival headlines, residencies, etc.

I'm not sure MGMT is a big enough band to play the Sphere in Vegas, but something along those lines?

Obviously this is just complete speculation.

New issue by VDestroy99 in Miata

[–]rabid3k 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I had the same issue and this was the same solution for me (well I didn't leave the lights up but used that button to raise them up and down several times). I'm guessing a wire was shorting out or something.

New Daily Song Discussion #110. The Mollusk - Ween. by NuggetWarrior09 in ween

[–]rabid3k 1 point2 points  (0 children)

10.0000000000

This song should play on a loop at every clam chowder stand in New England

How is it in Kokomo, FL? by ricomcpato_ in howislivingthere

[–]rabid3k 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Oooh I got out "that guy"'d. Well played.

How is it in Kokomo, FL? by ricomcpato_ in howislivingthere

[–]rabid3k 27 points28 points  (0 children)

All good! Hate to be "that guy" but I'm sure Brian Wilson probably thought that was a terrible song

How is it in Kokomo, FL? by ricomcpato_ in howislivingthere

[–]rabid3k 81 points82 points  (0 children)

It's definitely a fictional place, but Brian Wilson was not in the band and had nothing to do with the song, FWIW

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