Not Rocking a Million People

This is how it works: newspaper or news show, you know the evil MSM, does a story riddled with factual inaccuracies. The story then out there, bloggers go wild, give cries of (depending on one's political affiliation) "liberal bias"/"corporate cave in", and demand scalp. Retraction is given, mistakes acknowledged, scalp proffered, and bloggers do victory dance.

So it's time for bloggers' powers to activate.

On the way into work, we were reading the Chron's Peter Hartlaub's highly enjoyable piece on used CDs and how they can reclaim one's cheesy musical past, something we could definitely relate to, when we looked at the accompanying photos of the cheesy musical past he is reclaiming. Shown are cds of Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell", Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet," and Guns N' Roses mighty "Use Your Illusion II." But it's not what he listed that got our goat, it's the captions. Because he has "Rebel Yell" coming out in 1990, "Slippery" in 1999 (!), and "Use Your Illusion II" as coming out in 1997.

Great googly moogly!

It's not just that Peter is the culture writer and thus should know his culture. Or that the Chronicle supposedly has copy editors who should correct this, especially because it takes just a few seconds to get release dates via Google. But these things are all embedded in our cultural DNA. We all know "Rebel Yell" (1983) came out in the glory days of MTV when MTV made it safe for rock stars to be cartoon-like and not in an era of X-ed out Manchester bands and Black Power rappers. And Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet" (1986) virtually created Hair Metal, something they couldn't have done in 1999, unless I missed the alternate take of "You Give Love a Bad Name" feature the Bonster in a backward baseball cap trying to rap. And by 1997, Axl was on his third or fourth version of G n' R while "Chinese Democracy" was only a rumor, not a full-fledged semi-mythical yet-to-be-released magnum opus. Plus, everyone can remember that the video for "Don't Cry" (1991) featured an unknown and still alive Shannon Hoon and that their bloated, overwrought videos were so ridiculous in an era of gritty black and white videos of alienated kids shooting themselves in school that it helped hasten their demise.

So Peter Hartlaub, consider yourself served. Just remember, there's only a fine line between getting Billy Idol's musical era incorrect and reporting on fradulent WMD reports passed on by flirty Vice Presidential aides.

And "Slippery When Wet" over "Nevermind?" That's blasphemy.