A kid is frequently just a lock waiting for a key. In 2006, I found my key when I discovered Rob Zombie. I became obsessed with his music: he was the only thing I thought of for about a year.

I went deeper on him than anyone should go without a fedora and a $200-a-day-plus-expenses account, making it my business to know about every obscure B-side, every film soundtrack contribution, and every guest appearance. I knew that “Dragula” was originally titled “West of Zanzibar”. I knew about the infamous La Sexorcisto promo cassette which contains extra samples cut from the final album because of usage rights (here’s some of it). I knew which scenes in House of 1000 Corpses were filmed in Rob Zombie’s apartment after the budget ran out. I even defended Educated Horses on internet forums, which is like waving a saber and making a Banzai charge for a nation that has already surrendered. An early version of this site was named after a Rob Zombie track.^[1]I had a recurrent dream where Rob Zombie and I hang out. Picture this: he’s in the studio, just a shambling mountain of hair. I’m a kid, down on the floor, untangling XLR cables. I hear … Continue reading

At a certain point, the key no longer fit the lock.

What happened? I grew older, and listened more broadly to metal and punk. I heard the original issue: things like Killing Joke and Ministry and Siouxsie Sioux made Rob Zombie seem like a plastic knockoff with a ‘made in China’ sticker. I noticed things about his persona which suddenly struck me as lazy or shlocky or contrived. As late as 2009, I would have still cited him as my favorite musician. But I’d officially become that fan: the one who writes one word of love for every nine words of criticism.

In 2010, I had to face the facts. Rob (after a few years of making unwatchable Halloween cheapquels for Dimension) had returned to music with Hellbilly Deluxe 2. I listened to the lead single “What” and didn’t like it. Then I streamed the album, and found myself skipping around with a weird mix of disinterest and panic slamming in my chest. Things had shifted, and I hadn’t known it.

Yes, “Sick Bubblegum” and “Werewolf Women of the SS” made me smile. “Mars Needs Women” grew on me. The rest just seemed like overly complicated and fussy arrangements of nothing. Boring. Longeurs from a fading shock-rocker who once grabbed and chokeslammed your limbic system. Huh, I thought to myself, I guess I’m just not a fan of this guy anymore.

Around the same time, I’d noticing a trend of fans being unusually prone to turn into haters further down the line (and the bigger the fan, the bigger the hater). The defining example of Fan-to-Hater Syndrome is DawnOWar, an obsessive Manowar fangirl who knew the band since the 80s, ran their website for years and years…and now has no involvement with the band beyond trashing them from every social media website that will platform her. From her Facebook page:

Manowar canceled Detroit! I see this as a victory! Maybe Manowar fans are finally going to stop letting the band rip them off.

Manowar fans complain endlessly about Joey wasting time on stage with his endless stupid long-winded speeches, so hes decided to go on tour without a band and charge $50 for the privilege of seeing him do just the part everyone hates the most. I feel like now is a good time to let your tomatoes start rotting so theyll be ready for throwing when he comes to your town.

This group is not very active but disgruntled Manowar fans PM me all the time to tell me whatever stupid thing the band or the fans did today. I quit working for Manowar at the end of 1999 because they’re jerks. Thank goodness I don’t have a need to still discuss it ad nauseum. Because thats shit that happened to me 15 fucking years ago. But I set up this group to unite the people who do have a need for this discussion. Because they are assholes, you have been suckered out of your money, and they havent been good since 1987. So post that shit here. Its what its for. Don’t PM me to tell me theyre jerks. Believe me, I know. I’ve known for 15 years. Thanks.

I never ended up disliking Rob Zombie this much. But the “fan to hater” pipeline has cast-iron welds and seldom leaks.

I think fans turn on their idols for a few reasons. Hyperfixated fans tend to be extremely aware of flaws in their God. It’s the scribal priest’s lot to copy translation errors in the Torah, after all. They also are extremely aware of the unsavory parts of their idol: the stuff that gets swept under the rug. Every famous person has scandals and drama in their past (or present): the superfan’s dubious reward is to sooner or later discover where these skeletons are buried.

Also, most musicians have public personas that are partly fake: they neither represent who the artist truly is, nor survive close scrutiny even on their own terms.

A gay listener seeking “representation” can’t avoid noticing that all of David Bowie’s public relationships have been with women, that all of Katy Perry’s public relationships have been with men. Depressed introverts always turn out to be media-savvy hypemen and self-promoters behind the scenes. Quirky oddballs always turn out to be quite sane and normal. The persona is often what attracts the fan in the first place: but the more you stare, the more fake and hollow the persona becomes (and where does that leave your love?)

Obviously Rob Zombie’s “thrifted from a Halloween store on November 1” aesthetic is a shameless, gleeful celebration of fakery in all its positive forms. That’s not an issue. But other things about his life might also be untruthful. There was a fascinating Reddit comment that I sadly can’t find now (referenced here) kind of picking apart his often-told “I was with a travelling carnival as a kid and saw a man get murdered with a hammer” story, arguing (believably) that it was implausible for such an event to happen in a small community without being reported in the news, and that some other parts of Rob’s given history are also unlikely to have happened as he describes them (that they are heavily embellished, at best). I do not know the full truth of this, but no star can help but to be a real person, and usually a far more boring one than the one they pretend to be.

While I never hated Rob Zombie like DawnOWar hates the band that she once loved enough to name her internet handle after, I quickly realized I was no longer very interested in him. This was part of a growing process—one that inevitably led to me quite enjoying Rob Zombie again. Such is the path of enlightenment.

Anyway, shall we discuss the album?

It finds Rob re-convening with most of the same guys who gave us the all-filler-no-killer midsterpiece Educated Horses: drummer Tony Clufetos, producer, and (most worryingly) guitarist John 5.

I have mixed feelings about John 5. He is a guitar virtuoso but not a compelling writer of riffs or melodies, as any of his fourteen or so solo albums will demonstrate. His bluesy, elaborate, tasteful style never meshed well with Rob’s vocals. (Happily, Mike Riggs and his simple caveman style are now back in the band, and the three songs released from the upcoming The Great Satan sound absolutely fantastic.)

Rob is not really a musician. That’s an important detail to understand. He arranges and produces and makes loops and supplies the overall artistic vision, but he does not actually write music. I remember this quote from Astro Creep 2000 guitarist Jay Yuenger on Rob’s songwriting “process”.

Later, around the time we were making Astro-Creep and after, Rob started to really hate anything with any kind of melody in it – he was always saying, “Can’t you just go ‘chunka chunka’ there?”, and I’d say, “This isn’t a drum, it’s a GUITAR, it’s got NOTES” He’d want to use techno loops for everything, cut all the music out of it, and that was a situation which went from difficult to impossible.

So that’s the outer limit of Rob’s musical skills: telling guitarists to go “chunka-chunka”. He is heavily constrained by the musicians he chooses to work with. Fun guitarist equals fun record. Boring guitarist equals boring record. This album has John 5, hence it is quite boring.

The album has little of the fun electronic/industrial loops that characterize the classic White Zombie sound. It’s just straight-ahead heavy metal for the most part. It is a bit more elaborate and arranged than Educated Horses, and there’s a primal heavy whallop that’s nice to hear again after acoustic guitars or whatever.

But it’s ultimately just not fun. It’s dated and unengaging: a churn of guitar sludge, over dry drum beats that move at a sauropod’s pace. It simultaneously sounds empty and overstuffed with surface details.

Tedious Down/Black Label Society backwash like “Jesus Frankenstein” and “Virgin Witch” and “Burn” scream and vulcanize with guitar overdubs: flashy fretboard wizardry that ultimately feels like car keys being jangled in front of your face: these songs have nothing interesting going on at a structural level. The riffs are lazy bluesy affairs that sound like things any beginner guitarist could come up in their second or third month of playing. The drumming is pedestrian. The musical ideas are all obvious, borrowed, and done to death. Listening to this music feels like wandering through a dry and parched desert.

“What” is stale Misfits worship with a blaring farfisa organ and a lo-fi, bitcrushed-to-fuck vocal track (another trick Rob has used since the White Zombie days, though now it finally grows old). It seeks to conjure a live and raw monster-punk energy, but Scott Humphrey’s overbearing wall-of-sound production does not ever feel like a band playing. It’s as unconvincing as the fake crowd noises in “Jesus Frankenstein”.

“Werewolf Baby” rocks out with bland and instantly-forgettable slide guitar that kind of sums why John 5 didn’t work in this band. Yes, he supplies some “diverse” elements (Rob was fond of stating that his guitarist could play any style of music), but it’s always the most generic, lifeless version of whatever that thing is. Want bluegrass picking that’s boring? Banjo strumming that’s boring? Arpeggio runs that are boring? John 5 is your huckleberry.

“Death and Destiny Inside The Dreams Factory” is just “What” again. A grim studio confection trying to imitate a live band playing—trying so hard you can see sweat dripping from the sound engineer’s fingers. More distorted vocals. More random guitar overdubs and punch-ins to disguise a lack of ideas.

The three songs I mentioned earlier are pretty good and basically pull their weight. “Werewolf Women of the SS” is a fun “Misirlou” knockoff, though (like the rest of the album) it feels a few bpm too slow. “Mars Needs Women” and “Sick Bubblegum” slap pretty hard. I also don’t mind “The Man Who Laughs”, which is nicely arranged and strung. It avoids Rob’s longstanding distaste of guitar solos by giving Tommy Clufetos a…drum solo. Talk about out of the frying pan.

Real talk, though: there is no “Dragula” and no “Scum of the Earth” and no “Electric Head Pt.1 (The Agony)” and no “Black Sunshine”. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but it doesn’t even have a “Let It All Bleed Out” (one of Educated Horses‘ rare Ws). If you like any of the above music, keep moving, traveller. Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Nothing beside remains.

Rob himself was seemingly dissatisfied with the album. In 2011, he released a new version, with some new songs. All are quite bad.

“Devil’s Hole Girls And The Big Lack of Inspiration” is a faded Xerox of “Superbeast” with some snarls and attitude but no real hooks or catchiness. There is nothing else to say about it. I hope nobody had to give up too much of their Sunday afternoon to get this one recorded and in the can.

“Everything Is Boring” is a rare piece of social commentary—musically it’s a drab miserable slog, as unwanted as black water regurgitated from your shower drain (and equally unpleasant to wade through). The socially-aware lyrics fail to land, as both the song and the album exemplify everything Rob is complaining about.

The reissue also removes the drum solo from “The Man Who Laughs” (possibly because Tommy Clufetos was out of the band). It is replaced it with several minutes of almost transcendentally uninteresting mandolin strumming (presumably from John 5) that literally sounds like those AI-generated “10 hour Appalachian folk mix to relax to” flooding Youtube.

The matter of “worst song of the album” is resoundingly locked up by “Michael”, which is basically unlistenable and a career lowlight. “Mama, why do I want to kill you?” Oh, shut up. This song is hateful. This is what cancer has regular early prostate exams to detect.

Rob has released better music both before and after this album (though far more in the “before” column, if we’re being honest). But it did introduce me to certain realizations about art and fandom, and for this, I am thankful. Intense fascination can disappear in an instant (or sour to hatred), and probably only stems from emotional problems. Go listen to your inner child: they’re probably less dull than “Cease to Exist” and “Everything is Boring.”

Helloween’s 2007 release sees them reborn for the second time in as many decades. They became the power metal Jesus, except they did it twice. Which makes it even better. (With due respect to J-Man, is it too much to ask to die two or three times, just to put the issue beyond doubt? One resurrection may just be luck.)

It’s among their most aggressive albums. Although it doesn’t have the downtuned crush of The Dark Ride or the demented aggression of Seven Sinners, it’s still a fury. Guitars are thick and rip at you like hypersonic winds. Every song seems on the verge of stripping its bolts with sheer energy. Charlie Bauerfind gives it a rough-and-ready “too much” production style that the songs really lean into.

To be clear, Gambling is not a full return to form. There are still too many cooks per square inch of kitchen, some blatantly weak tracks, and far too much fiddling with the dials (the syrupy keyboard tone Matthias Ülmer attempts on “Final Fortune” is a self-conscious modernism that doesn’t make sense with the raw Marshall tone of the guitars). And the album cover is, of course, decrepit. The pentagram on the floor doesn’t even match the one on the roulette wheel. Satan’s leaving their asses on read.

2007 was also the year I began listening to power metal. My first Helloween song was “As Long As I Fall”, this album’s lead single. And I hated it. About two years later, I gave the band (and this album) another try, and realized it was the worst song on the album. There’s some truly sublime stuff on here.

Opening song “Kill It” is so simple it makes “Mrs God” from the last album sound like progressive rock, but it thrashes hard and destroys your neck. The black metal-inspired bridge (??) is a creative idea that absolutely works, which is not something I say often about the band’s creative experiments.

The greatest track of the album—perhaps the greatest post-2000 Helloween song—is the fast and melodic “The Saints”. Someone should piss-test this song. It just isn’t normal. It just explodes out of the gates with heavy, modern riffwork, the verses contort and build, the chorus is straight out of 1989, and the duelling guitar solos showcase every trick Sascha Gerstner and Michael Weikath know as they swing axes at each others’ heads. Anything you could possibly enjoy about Helloween, past or present, is in this song. A marvel.

The lyrics seem to be referencing legal corruption, and are delivered with snarl and bite by Deris. The microphone probably had to be destroyed after he expelled so much venom onto it. He was an unusual choice to replace Michael Kiske, but tracks like “The Saints” make powerful arguments that he was the right choice.

Sascha Gerstner’s “Paint a New World” and “Dreambound” are more speed material, with the second being the better of the two. Deris’s “The Bells of the Seven Hells” is an agitated uptempo thrasher with a diabolic vocal performance. “IME” is another great Deris-penned track, full of angst and piss and rage.

A large pile of bonus songs round things out, some of them better than the actual songs on the album. “Find My Freedom” is a great faster track. “See the Night” opens with “Born into a neighborhood that ain’t exactly rich / Never knew his father and his mother was a bitch!”. Which is, uh, better than I could write in German, I suppose. “We Unite” is another fierce, barnburning anthem.

On the other (more limp-wristed) hand, “As Long As I Fall” opens with an insipid keyboard tinkle that sounds like it was recorded to test sound levels and an awful buzzkill of a chorus. “Helloween plays Christian rock” is kind of a Roko’s Basilisk for me—a concept I don’t need in my head. It’s Deris’s songwriting at its worst, just as “Kill It” sees him at his best. “Can Do It” is another “Heavy Metal Hamsters”—a songwriting well the band continually draws from, never with any success. A blandly brainless KISS-style party rock song, it’s better skipped over. Grosskopf’s “Heaven Tells No Lies” is Kim-Kardashian’s-ass-sized album filler that bounces around for seven minutes. “Fallen to Pieces” is a ballad with a fast section questionably integrated. “Final Fortune” is just a flat line of cliches. There is no way this song took any longer for Markus Grosskopf to write than it took me to listen to.

There’s about 35 minutes of good-to-great material on Gambling with the Devil. And the weak tracks mostly tend to be “filler track” rather than “Helloween playing ska or nu metal”. The house did not win. Not this time.

Okayish romantic comedy—I don’t have any opinions on it, which is why I’m pounding out a review on it late at night. My voice must be heard.

Um…let’s see…a few funny jokes, it was nice to see Julie Andrews again, and Anne Hathaway is a dime. Not that I was swayed by her physical aspect. You might have been, you lech, but as for me…(adjusts bowtie, slicks back hair, applies a spritz of cologne, screams through a megaphone at passing group of women)…I jack it to women with ASPIRATIONS and PERSONALITIES!!! It was a shock (in a “seeing your teacher outside a classroom” way) to see a John Rhys-Davies role where he’s not a dwarf.

But as The Princess Diarrheas Number 2 ended, I was left with a burning question.

Why does Genovia have so many orphans?

A secondary plot point (in a movie which struggles to even have a first plot point) is that Anne Hathaway wants to turn a summer home for the Genovian royalty into a house for the nation’s orphans.

Orphans?

Genovia is described (in the first film) as a country “between France and Spain”. As you’d expect from such a place, characters have names like “John” and “Blake” and everyone speaks in a vague British accent. It appears to be a tax shelter for rich people. Yet it has orphans by the cartload! Racially diverse orphans, too!

Where did they all come from? Was there a Genovian genocide or Holodomor? An ethnic cleansing, purged from the pages of history? Has Anne Hathaway inherited a throne of bones?

I began investigating the issue, and what I uncovered was shocking.

Spoiler: it involves sex and death.

Where Genovia’s Orphans Came From

Let me explain exactly what happened to produce these orphans. It wasn’t pretty.

(Warning: I am about to get explicit. Sensitive readers are advised to adjust their monitor’s gaussian blur so that my words are censored.)

Sometimes, Daddy Rabbit loves Mommy Rabbit a lot. “As much as I love playing Raid Shadow Legends™®© and growing my personal brand with SquareSpace?©™®“ Oh, even more than that, dear reader. Even more than that. Daddy Rabbit loves Mommy Rabbit soooo much that he puts his redacted inside her redacted. Except it’s never that simple. First he drives her to lovers’ lane and asks if she’s ready to do redacted. Mommy Rabbit says “I think so, but please be gentle”. Then Daddy Rabbit gently suggests that maybe they could try redacted as well? Mommy Rabbit says “oh no, I don’t do redacted, I’m not that kind of girl,” Daddy Rabbit says “but all the cool girls at school are doing redacted, and it doesn’t even count as redacted, so technically you’ll still be a redacted.” Then Mommy Rabbit says “um, this is a lot, why don’t we just start with redacted?” So they start having redacted and minutes later, Daddy Rabbit says he redacted and she asks “but didn’t you use a redacted?” and he says “yes but the redacted came off and then I redacted” and she says “oh redacted” and then her ankles swell up like the Hindenberg and her complexion goes down shit creek and when Daddy Rabbit asks if they can do redacted again Mommy Rabbit crams an entire jar of pickles into her cavernous slime-dripping maw and screams “NOT NOW, YOU’RE ALWAYS SO CONTROLLING AND YOU NEVER HOLD SPACE FOR MY EMOTIONS SO STOP DARVO’ING ME WITH TOXIC ABUSIVE NARCOPATH RED FLAG GASLIGHTING BULLSHIT, OHMYGOD FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK WHY ARE MEN” and Daddy Rabbit must accept that his days of redacted are sadly over.

That, essentially, is how a baby is made.

“But the Genova orphans aren’t babies!” You might be arguing, detecting a flaw in my argument. “They’re children.”

Ah, that’s where you need to consider the big picture. Babies don’t stay babies forever. They grow up to be children, and then adults. (Unless you leave them alone in the bathtub because you were watching pro gamer Philip “ImperialHal” Dosen frag the fuck out at the ALGS Grand Finals, then sometimes they don’t quite get there.)

We have every reason to believe that the orphans of Genovia were once babies, which logically necessitates (barring rare cases of parthenogenesis) that sex was involved in their creation.

Yes, it’s disturbing. Yes, we both wish the truth was other than this. But the evidence cannot be ignored, and we need to tackle it head on.

The adorable little plot devices you see in the film were created through sexual intercourse. (!!!)

Your Point? I Already Know How Babies Are Made

Wow, good for you, sweetie! I’m glad you know! Want a pat on the back? A gold star on your homework?

Guess what, buttercup, lots of people don’t know. That’s who this is for! Do you barge into kindergarten spelling lessons and complain to the teacher “stop wasting time, I already know that c is for cat!”

Maybe not everything is for you, hmmmm???

Face it: not everyone lives in your jacuzzi bath of privilege, where you can just know shit any time you want. Some people are born without skin, brains, spinal cords, and exoskeletons. I know a kid who was born with his eyeballs backward. You think you’ve got it rough? His optical nerves are dangling down in front his face like a pair of disturbing tentacles, and his corneas, irises, pupils etc are pointing at the back of his skull. You can imagine how hard it is for him to read. A team of doctors must surgically remove his eyeballs, write a few words in glow-in-the-dark paint against the dark wet bone of his occiputs, then gently reinsert his eyeballs, over and over. They can only fit a few words inside his skull at a time, and reading anything is hellishly slow. His school assigned Moby Dick, and four years later he’s only up to “With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword”. At the rate his his hundreds of surgeries are bankrupting the medical system, it’ll be a million years before that kid learns how babies are made. But one day he’ll be ready, and maybe he’ll learn it from here. That’s who I’m writing this for. For him. The kid with backwards eyeballs. Not you. Get fucked!

In any case, I’m only getting started.

The children are not just any children, they’re orphans. Merriam Webster defines an orphan as…

a child deprived by death of one or usually both parents
ex: He became an orphan when his parents died in a car accident.

Also, Merriam Webster offered these as the top most recent searches. US politics is going well, I take it?

To summarize, the parents of these children are D-E-A-D. That’s the bare minimum to qualify as an orphan. No exceptions. “Well, my Mom’s dead and my Dad lost an arm in a logging accident, can I squeak under the wire?” Nope, two dead parents, or GTFO. Yeah, doesn’t sound so good now, does it? Everyone wants that #OrphanGang street cred…until they find out what’s involved.

How did they die? That’s not important. What is important is that when Mia Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldi confronts the teeming orphan krill, she’s confronting adolescent specters of death, catapulted into the earth by rampant fucking. This is the dark underbelly of the Genovian crown.

It’s no surprise Anne Hathaway never returned to the franchise. The erotothanatic compulsion of sex and death invoked by The Princess Diaries is best not dwelled upon for any length of time. Frankly, I’d rather find Mia’s name on the Epstein flight logs.

“Kissing children. Hugging orphans. What a vulgar, low, despicable, political trick!” – John Rhys-Davies