Jeff Gerstmann is Still Alive

Sentence case in a title? God, I’m slipping.

Anyway, I mentioned it everywhere else, so I assume that most of the people interested in hearing about it have heard about it, but just in case (and because this is the only place I feel that talking about it doesn’t feel like me using something else I do to shamelessly self-promote), the fourth Midnight Brown album, “Deadly Electric,” is now available over at midnightbrown.com.

I wasn’t at all sure how it would be received. It’s definitely one of those cases where you work on something for a really long time and totally lose perspective on it. Was it funny? Too serious? Total garbage? People seem to be enjoying it more than I initially expected.

Also, I can still listen to it and enjoy it. I know a lot of bands are in that mindset where once they’ve finished something, they can’t listen to it anymore. But we wrote stuff that I enjoyed, stuff that we thought was funny at the time. So the entirety of the Midnight Brown catalog sort of sounds like one big, weird, coded diary to me. But the actions of the time when those songs were recorded get hazy over time. The specifics get replaced with general feelings. Makes the whole thing seem a bit more distant. Makes me realize that I’m a pretty different person than I was when we started writing this stuff back in 2004.

That might be the most whiny, self-important thing I’ve ever typed. Christ.

Anyway, here are some quick, short factoids about Midnight Brown songs.

- “So why did you do it? Dope? Revenge?” is something that a cop said to my current roommate after he got arrested. It was the funniest shit ever.

- “where were you on the night that your conscience caught up to you?” is a tribute to LL Cool J. If you’ve heard a fair amount of LL Cool J, that should actually be pretty obvious. Also, I had been drinking quite a bit when we recorded, which is why the rapped breakdown is so bad off-kilter. Also, that verse was poorly written and wasn’t practiced a lot beforehand. If I had wanted to do it “right,” I would have removed a few syllables here and there to make it flow better. But I actually like that it sounds like some kind of awful rap that some shitty poet would deliver when he was called in to “perform” in the middle of some bullshit New Age song about… hemp rights or something. Except it’s mostly comprised of LL Cool J lyrics/references.

- Chris bought that cat belt buckle off of eBay. It broke relatively quickly.

- “The Freezersuits” was originally meant to sound like a lost level from Rez. That’s why it’s so long and broken down into subsections.

- “Baristacratic” and “go! go! vietnam” are inspired by the same person.

- I was extremely pissed off/distraught about something I really had no right to be pissed off/distraught about when we wrote “FFF.” By the time we were done, I had come to terms with that. If you’re paying attention, “Summer of Angst” tells you what “FFF” stands for.

- “President of the Mall” contains a largely accurate description of the location of the shops in the Santa Rosa mall. Actually, I don’t know if the Great Steak is there anymore.

- The cover of Tommy february6’s “Kiss One More Time” is probably the longest I’ve ever spent on one song. It had to be right. It was also a fucking bitch to sing. Eventually I took part of it down an octave to make it easier on my voice. Also, I still don’t know what any of the words mean, but a Japanese friend told me that my pronunciation was pretty good, which was nice to hear. If you make a slight speed correction to the original video for the song, you can line our cover up directly with the video… which is fucking creepy as fuck. I tried uploading it to youtube, but it got automatically pegged with a copyright violation.

- “Intro (Dope)” has so few lyrics because I felt like anything I had to say over it would just take away from what I liked about it.

- The same is true for “RadiOIactive,” but in retrospect, we should have written actual lyrics for that.

- I don’t know why so many songs directly reference Ric Flair. I am not an especially big Ric Flair fan.

- I do know why so many songs directly reference Les Onaka. We think Les Onaka is awesome.

- I’m envious of rap guys that can tell a story in a song. “army of tom f. wilsons” is an attempt to do that. I’m not especially happy with it.

- “A Filthy Classic” is about Pat O’Brien. Well, the chorus is, anyway.

Anyway, I guess that’s enough for now. Thanks to those of you that are actually interested in this level of detail about those songs. I don’t think we ever thought there would be any sort of audience for the stuff we were making when we started making it. We’ve talked a bit about what to do next, and I think I want more live instruments. Maybe I’ll tune my guitar… aaaaand learn how to play it.

Let’s look back on 2008 and 2009 as the years when the mainstream world thought “man, maybe I should get a blog” and then followed it up in ‘09 with “and by blog I meant Facebook/Twitter account.”

It’s sort of funny, now, looking back on the time when I was setting this page up and a lot of other people I know were setting up something similar. Then I got employed again, some people moved to other parts of the country, other people stayed in their respective parts of the country, and life continued forward. Still, there was something almost magical about that time, and I’ll always remember it. Now, posting full entries to a personal blog feels archaic and pointless, especially when I consider how many other places I can use to get the sort of info I’d save up for this blog out there in shorter forms.

But back in… I don’t know, late 2006 or something, me and Chris started work on what will soon become Midnight Brown’s fourth album, which is still called Deadly Electric. We started making music immediately after releasing the previous album, Dope/Revenge. But after writing around two or three songs, everything pretty much went bad in our respective lives for entirely different reasons. Well, maybe “bad” is a harsh way of putting it. Everything went “angsty.” There.

There’s actually a lot of stuff about that time in my life that I don’t want to get into. That made it pretty hard to sit down and write a bunch of songs, because any time I tried, they were coming out… well… mad emo, or something. We did some writing here and there, but I mostly just started writing instrumental tracks and never putting vocals to them. During the creation of Deadly Electric, I’ve probably written around 250 half-songs, either a few lyrics that got typed up and forgotten or tracks that vary from just dumb, four-bar drum loops to tracks that just need lyrics.

We haven’t really revisited any of that stuff lately. Things are much better all around these days, and when we sit down to write, we start from scratch. I feel like I’ve got a few good creative outlets and I’ve surrounded myself with people I really enjoy spending time with. Some of that’s a matter of public record, but despite whatever weird pictures I may post on Twitter of me in bars with friends, I enjoy a little privacy, too.

That’s why Deadly Electric is still so weird to me. Even though the songs aren’t actually about the things and the people that were around when they were written, a lot of those songs remind me of really specific things. Some of them make me feel pretty stupid, sort of like writing about it right now does. Some of them make me feel relieved that all that stuff is so far behind me now. And some of them are influenced by knives and horse racing, just like most of the older stuff was.

Actually… most of the songs on the new “record” are totally dumb, similar to how the ones on the last three were. The real difference is that they just make me think of very different stuff than those older songs do. I don’t know if any of that will come across when other people are listening to it. It certainly doesn’t mean that the songs are any “deeper” and “realer” than they’ve been in the past. There’s certainly some production on it that I’m proud of, though. Right now Cop Knife, Roll Them Shakers, and LNS are probably my favorite songs. We’ve got 13 finished tracks, and we probably just need one or two more before I feel like it’s long enough to call an “album.” Some people piped up and said we should sell it, but that doesn’t sound like an especially great idea.

Though not as weird as the notion that we’ve already got a good name for a fifth album.

Spent all my credit card reward points (and about another $900 in cash) and picked up a new video camera. It’ll probably mostly get used at work, for instances where we need a smaller camera that an idiot like myself can use. I shot a bunch of stuff at Wrestlemania with it, just to sort of break it in. It’s a Sony HDR-XR520V and so far, it seems great. Definitely better than the $130 Polaroid video cameras I bought off Woot, but those cameras have now become, like, disposable. Maybe we’ll strap them to skateboards and roll them down a hill or something.

So, uh, since the people who might still be RSS’ing this blog are probably the only people who would care… probably going to shoot some sort of “points related” video with that camera in the near future and post it over on this giantbomb.com web site. You may have heard of it. It’s about video games and hamburgers and nudity and S-rank.

I don’t know if it’ll become a regular thing, because editorially, that entire site is like one big points report sort of thing for us. We’re a group of guys, saying what we mean about video games and having fun while doing so. Recording a video designed to be “frank discussion” becomes a little redundant at that point. But let’s see how it goes. If I can get some free time at home this week, I’ll try to at least get it recorded.

After something like a decade or so of hosting, the kind soul that’s hosted suburbanallstars.com has finally decided to stop hosting people for free. So I’ll be transitioning that domain to a different host in the near future. midnightbrown.com also points to that machine, so expect a bit of downtime there, as well, as I fumble my way through changing hosts.

I should probably take this opportunity to consolidate all of my domain registrations under one roof, too. I think I’m spread between three different registrars at the moment.

Welp, the bank that I owe a few hundred grand to for this house failed today. You know what that means… FREE HOUSE!

AW YEAH! Wait, are you saying it doesn’t mean that they’ll all just go away? And that I’ll probably have to keep paying money to the company that’s taking control of the old bank? Crap.

My receiver woes are at an end, and I’ve gone Onkyo. It’s the TX-SR606, brushed aluminum to be exact. It was an extra six bucks to get a shiny one, obviously totes worth it. Setting it up was crazy easy, and being able to go HDMI end-to-end eliminates a lot of unnecessary steps from the process. Between the new receiver and some new front speakers, games sound crazy. Totally hearing things I’ve never heard before, like more nuanced engine noises in Burnout Paradise. It’s pretty cool and feels like it’s worth the investment.

The only problem with all this is that it sets off a chain reaction of spending. I have a set of new front L/R speakers from Aperion Audio, and I have a new subwoofer on the way, as well. I think that by the end of all this, I’ll be able to shake the entire neighborhood apart with this setup, a move that will surely lower the property values in this neighborhood even more!

Gah, I’m talking about home prices just as much as I’m talking about hot speakers. If that’s not a clear sign that I’m slowly turning into an adult, I don’t know what is. Then again, it’s hard not to pay attention to all this stuff these days, since it’s everywhere. I bet it’s a really interesting time to be enrolled in an economics class. Lots of modern examples of things going bad to (hopefully) learn from.

“Sir, why is it still so hard to figure out which home theater receivers are right for me?”

That’s the IM-based cry for help I sent out to a friend this morning after finally realizing that I wouldn’t be able to come to any conclusion on my own. Here’s my situation:

I have a rapidly aging home-theater-in-a-box setup made by Kenwood. It’s a standard 5.1 deal, nothing ultra fancy. It’s done a fine job for the past, like, seven years or so. But I’m looking for something more, something that will handle 1080p video and has at least two HDMI inputs, as well as component ins (for my Wii) and perhaps an S-video (for my DirecTV receiver).

Right now, I have to run HDMI to the TV and use optical audio to my receiver. Since I only have one optical port there, I have to run the optical cables out of my 360 and PS3 into an A/V switcher that I used to use when everything was using component. It’s messy, using more cables than I’d like and making switching everything on take some time.

I also don’t want to spend a zillion dollars. Last time I looked, something like this was around 700 bucks, which seems too high of a price to pay for mere convenience. I figure I’ll save my money for when I want to get some new home theater speakers instead. I’m pretty sure I blew out my subwoofer at some point and figure I might as well replace everything while I’m at it.

I’m sort of surprised that there isn’t some sort of big gaming-focused article or section of a site out there devoted to addressing this topic comprehensively. You’d think that a retailer would put something like this together, even if all us gaming-focused sites are too busy covering games to really nail the peripheral stuff.

Considering the fast-paced world in which we live and the entertainment medium that I choose to follow, it’s probably no surprise that I’m not much of a reader. Actually, I’m not much of a viewer anymore, either. My television viewing has gone down to maybe one or two shows that I follow religiously, and one of those–Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job–is edited like a well-considered ode to ADD.

But I do still buy a couple of books a year, like the occasional wrestling autobiography (which I usually forget to read) or books about Japanese graphic design (which are notable for their pictures). I am, however, always a sucker for a good non-fiction book about various aspects of hip-hop. But I guess I never knew why I had this thirst for hip-hop knowledge. I started listening to it sometime in the early-to-mid-’80s, when a relative exposed me to some sort of K-Tel breakdancing compilation. My love for the music would be solidified a couple of years later when I picked up Raising Hell and Licensed to Ill and made completely unbreakable when, as an 8th-grader, I got my hands on Straight Outta Compton and Eazy-Duz-It.

Jason Tanz, a Brooklyn-based writer, has done his share of thinking about hip-hop, and the place of white people in it, with his book, Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America. While I don’t really expect most readers to feel as I do, many pages of this book felt more like a mirror in my hands. Tanz relates stories of his own induction into the world of hip-hop and backs it up with plenty of interviews, some inspiring, some (like the time he spends with a bunch of confused wannabe gangsters from Canada) downright embarrassing. The book also briefly touches on the marketing forces at work behind hip-hop, how they subvert it for their own twisted needs, and how the artists are more than happy to oblige–which taps into the scary culture-bending science behind marketing, another topic that has my clicking the BUY BOOK NOW button once or twice a year. So anyway, yeah, loved the book.

Of course, it also helps that the author, like myself, found himself recording and releasing rap albums in the mid-90s. As I transitioned out of Headboard and started the Suburban All-Stars, Tanz and his posse were probably already thinking about how best to shout rhymes into a Mac’s internal microphone as they formed a group called Commodore 64 and released an album that still has some beats on it that I wish I had made called K-Minus Initiative.

Three tracks, which I’m guessing must be long-lost tracks from some never-completed second album, recently got posted onto last.fm. Sounds like they did the right thing and got something that more closely resembled a real microphone. You know, there’s a reference or two in the tracks that make them sound a bit newer than the typical “long-long track” would be.

…it’s stuff like this that makes me want to hook up my mic.

This line is in EB/GameStop’s top slot copy for why you should buy Fable 2.

“You can even get married and have children or take Smokey Robinson’s advice and shop around.”

You know, it wasn’t until someone injected Smokey Robinson into the conversation that Fable 2 made any sense to me at all. THANKS for putting it all in such a clear and relevant perspective, EB!

Of course, all this is coming from a guy building a site where most headlines are even more obscure references than that one… hmm…

Speaking of said site, it’s awesome. It’s coming together so, so well. And quickly, too. It seems like there are like five or ten new things about it that blow me away every day. And everything I think of and worry about, the guys building the site have almost always thought of already. Like we said on the podcast this week, look for something to show up the week after E3.

A handful of you have been posting comments here asking about Points! videos. We are effectively building a site where the editorial tone makes the whole thing like one big installment of Points!. It’s freewheeling and from the heart, but respectfully so. I don’t really see me recording any videos at home in the near future, because anything I would say here, I can say on Giant Bomb instead.

Though I was thinking of maybe doing a live stream from my bedroom. That might be funny. And by funny I mean sad. Funny/sad is funnier than funny every single time.

Next week I’ll be in Los Angeles for E3, which is actually pretty thrilling. After covering this trade show in a very specific way for the past several years, it’s going to be fun to try something different.

Of course, there are games there, too. Maybe I’ll write up a list of games I desperately want to see more of at some point, but I can tell you that any such list starts with Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. Apparently MKvDC will also be at Comic-Con. That was almost enough to make me go to San Diego, but this whole “putting a site on the Internet” thing is pretty important, too.

Oh, last thing. I got this via a Kane’s Wrath press release earlier today and thought it was pretty awesome.

• Game with Developers – Sign onto Xbox Live Friday night from 7 PM – 10 PM ET and show off your multiplayer skills against members of the EALA development team, including:

·         KWDevJim: Jim Vessella, Lead Producer

·         KWDevAlan: Alan Newton, Tester

·         KWDevJason: Jason Savopolos, Tester

·         KWDevJeremy: Jeremy Feasel, Designer

·         KWDevKeith: Keith Schaefer, Producer

·         KWDevWes: Wes Eckhart, Development Director

·         KWDevNick: Nick Clifford, Lead Tester

·         KWDevGreg: Greg Kasavin, Producer

·         KWDevMario: Mario Grimani, Development Director

Now that’s a Game With Fame if I ever saw one. 

Just finished Metal Gear.

Yeah, it’s awesome.

- Sitting in the Vegas airport, writing about Capcom games on my laptop that’ll post on Tuesday. Impressive lineup.

- Scanning the airport’s free wi-fi network for shared files.

- Hoping my 7:35 flight doesn’t get delayed.

- Noticing some stiffness in my left thumb, which indicates that I don’t play arcade games nearly often enough anymore.

- Wishing I didn’t throw away the Burger King cup I had, so that I could go get a refill.