William Neuheisel

I’m about halfway through Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota by Chuck Klosterman, and I have to say, it is surprisingly good.

One highlight so far is the chapter analyzing early heavy metal music videos. The discussion made me nostalgic enough to go look up these videos on YouTube, which was REALLY entertaining, mostly because they are so utterly ridiculous. There was one exception that I had forgotten about though, and that was the video for One by Metallica.

Anyway, here is a collection of most of the music videos mentioned in the book, if you’re interested.

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Brendan O’Neill wrote a great column last week about Bono’s antics at the G8 Summit and the harm that he is actually doing. I won’t rant here about the subject; the article pretty well captures how I feel, but I will share my favorite bits:

“Bono has become a one-man state; more than that, he’s a one-man cross-border supranational institution. He presumes to speak for millions, not on the basis of a democratic mandate but on the basis that he – mystically, magically, and because Africans are apparently too poor and destitute to speak for themselves – really, really knows what Africans want. Thus we have the utterly bizarre spectacle of a rock star putting pressure on leaders who were elected by millions of people to do what ‘I WANT’ in Africa.

“They used to call it colonialism when a white man from over here decided that he represented the interests of the black hordes over there. Now they call it ‘passionate and serious crusading’