|
One of the curious effects of YouTube–and, indeed, of the World Wide Web in general–is that the faint, vaporous memories of one’s cultural youth need no longer be so faint; type in a few search words, and you can empirically refute or verify some bonkers notion that’s been rattling ’round your brain. Such as: Did Richard Branson really appear in the video for the 1980 XTC single “Generals and Majors,” a video viewed just once, in one’s early teens? On the evidence of the video posted above: Yes indeed, that really was Branson. At 2:40 in the clip, the Virgin chief’s trousers fall down, Benny Hill-style. Not until the heyday of Sean Combs’s Bad Boy label would a label boss again make such an oafish appearance in one of his artists’s videos. May 15, 2006 More Rock Snobbery »
|
Rock SnobberyFilm SnobberyFood SnobberyWine Snobbery
Read more from the Rock Snob's Dictionary » 
Monthly Archive
|
|
Ramone, Dee Dee. Junkie bassist and principal songwriter of the Ramones, né Douglas Colvin, who, more than nice Jewish boy Joey Ramone or arch-Republican Johnny Ramone, came closest to realizing the romanticized ideal of authentic punkness—much as the similarly depraved DENNIS WILSON was the only Beach Boy who really surfed. Neither his OD death just months after his 2002 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nor his sordid past as a rent boy (as chronicled in his tart but unremittingly grisly memoirs, Lobotomy and Legend of a Rock Star, and in the Ramones song “53rd and 3rd”) has deterred today’s garage-punk youngsters from upholding Ramone, along with his pal Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls, as the coolest people imaginable.