Sunday, Jul. 18, 2004 - 10:37 p.m.

Queensrÿche

Around two months ago, after my breakthrough in singing high notes, I decided to put my newfound 3 ½ octave range to an appropriate challenge. Could I sing Operation Mindcrime by Queensrÿche? I wish I could say I licked it on the first try, but no, it kicked my ass resoundly. Sure, I could hit any note sung by their singer Geoff Tate, but I couldn't always hit it on the first try, and even when I did, it sounded strained and thin.

Operation Mindcrime has been my favorite album since I was 16. It was my first CD. It's a pretentious rock-opera about assassination, drug abuse, prostitution, and religion. It has really good lyrics and sort of a plot too. I wonder what my neighbors think when I wail the lines, "working live S and M shows", "the blood of Christ can't heal my wounds", "wet and raving, the needle keeps calling me back", and "you're a one-man death machine, make this city bleed". What does it sound like? Well, sort of a Pink Floyd meets Judas Priest. You can hear for yourself.

I think I was sold on it when I saw a TV commercial for it that quoted a review in Kerrang! magazine calling Mindcrime "Mental Metal". This appealed very strongly to my (arrogant) identity as an intellectual that my peculiar family instilled in me. I liked metal and I liked mental, and now I could have both in one!

Suddenly getting a 3 ½ octave range is like getting a Hanzo sword, but then realizing how much training it will take to learn to skillfully weild it. To stretch another Kill Bill metaphor, Geoff Tate is Pai Mei; he tauntingly asks me what my skills are. I say that I can sing baritone, and that I have learned the exquisite art of rap. Geoff laughs. "Baritone? The exquisite art of rap? Why didn't you just say that you had no skills?" I conceded his superior ability, and committed myself to punching those high notes every day until my throat got raw and bloody.

Now, after two months of daily practice, I am arena-ready. I was able to make it through the whole album, delivering what I thought was an adequate performance. I give myself a B (and an A on the low parts). I finally reached the point where if I had sang that in an arena with bad acoustics, a blaring sound system, in front of screaming fans, I would not have been completely embarrassed, and were I a rock star, that performance would not have ruined my career. The screaming fans would have left satisfied.

On a good day, I'm a regular Farinelli. I don't even need to keep these vice grips on my nads. Friday was a particularly good day. After getting through Mindcrime, I still had the drive and the stamina to keep going, so I did 3 Helloween songs, screamed the entirety of the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son album by Iron Maiden, then did "Rock the Nation" by Michael Franti and Spearhead, "Not Crawling" by Mudvayne, "Welcome to the Terrordome" by Public Enemy, and "Willing to Die" by me. I could have kept going but decided not to be utterly insane.

Mindcrime was half of my introduction to radical politics. The other half was V for Vendetta by Alan Moore. I was a Republican when I first heard that album and read that comic. At the time, I dismissed those ideas, consciously, but I think the memes therein gradually wormed their way into my brain. A few years later, I declared myself an anarcho-communist, and the lyrics took on a new, personal meaning for me. If anything, these words ring even truer now than they did in 1988:

I used to trust the media
To tell me the truth, tell us the truth
But now I've seen the payoffs
Everywhere I look
Who do you trust when everyone's a crook?

I used to think
That only America's way, way was right
But now the holy dollar rules everybody's lives
Gotta make a million doesn't matter who dies

Seven years of power
The corporation claw
The rich control the government, the media, the law

The system we learn says we're equal under law
But the streets are reality, the weak and poor will fall
Let's tip the power balance and tear down their crown
Educate the masses, We'll burn the White House down

Religion and sex are powerplays
Manipulate the people for the money they pay
Selling skin, selling God
The numbers look the same on their credit cards
Politicians say no to drugs
While we pay for wars in South America

Fighting fire with empty words
While the banks get fat
And the poor stay poor
And the rich get rich
And the cops get paid
To look away
As the one percent rules America

Spreading the disease
Everybody needs
But no one wants to see
The way society
Keeps spreading the disease

The underground will rise and
Save this world

In track 2, "Anarchy-X", there's a garbled rant through a megaphone. In Operation: Livecrime, they print the words from this:

Do we have freedom?
Do we have equality?
This country is changing!
It is no longer for all of the people!
It is for some of the people!

Years later, I discovered that this bit was taken from the movie, Medium Cool, a fictional film that uses real footage from the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chigago. One scene shows the Illinois National Guard in a training exercise preparing for crowd control. In a simulated town, some of the soldiers are playing the role of protesters. The guy with the megaphone has a lot of fun hamming it up. In the original film, the words are crystal clear:

Guy with megaphone: Do we have freedom?
Pretend protesters: No!
Guy with megaphone: Do we have equality?
Pretend protesters: No!
Guy with megaphone: This country is changing! It is no longer for all of the people!
Pretend protesters: Yay!
Guy with megaphone: It is for some of the people!
Pretend protesters: Yay!

On the album, I thought I was hearing things when the crowd seemed to voice their approval of the country being only for some of the people. Now that I know it was some quasi-fascistic soldiers saying it, it all makes sense.

"Dr. Davis, telephone please, Dr. Davis, telephone please. Dr. Blair, Dr. Blair, Dr. J. Hamilton, Dr. J. Hamilton." I've now heard this in a dozen different movies. I was struck by the absurd incongruity: Queensrÿche cared enough about their album to hire British actors Anthony Valentine and Debbie Wheeler to speak a few lines, but they didn't bother to record their own hospital sounds, and instead used a generic sound effects disc!

On MTV in 1989, Queensrÿche announced a contest: figure out who killed Mary. I came up with the answer: that Mindcrime has basically the same ending as Fight Club--Nikki, Mary, and Dr. X are all the same person. Nikki and Mary sing in unison, "I see myself in you," and notice that they've led, "parallel lives." Nikki confronts Dr. X in a, "room with mirrors." When Dr. X taunts, "you can't walk away now." Nikki can't walk away from Dr. X because wherever you go, there you are. Finally, when Nikki looks into a mirror, he sees the, "eyes of a stranger." On a recent web search, I found out that the official answer is that Mary killed herself, as evidenced by the word "suicide" appearing during the closing credits of Video: Mindcrime, which I never watched. Whatever. My answer is better, and I'm sticking with it.

Pamela Moore, who sings the part of Mary on the album, had a small music career of her own. She sang bluesy rock that sounds like Melissa Etheridge.

Right now, I practice by singing along to the album. Kind of dorky, I know. I tried it a capella, but I lose the tempo, and I start on the wrong pitch. For a better karaoke experience, I would love to sing along to midi instead, but I've only been able to find two so far, a version of "I Don't Believe in Love" where the guitar part has a piano sound, causing the track to have a Tori Amos feel, and a version of "Eyes of a Stranger" where the vocal chorus is played by horns, making it sound like football game marching band.

The first time I was able to nail the second "looking back at me" in "Eyes of a Stranger" (which I half suspected was produced on the album through some kind of audio effect; surely no human male could really do that), I was stunned. It was as though I were hearing someone else. Certainly I could not have made that sound! When I'm using the proper technique, the singing is effortless. There is no singer, only the song.

I've worked a new song into the album: "Shot in the Dark" by Ozzy Osbourne. It matches thematically and lyrically with the rest of Mindcrime, and most astoundingly, the music is stylistically a near perfect match with the rest of Operation: Mindcrime Part of me wonders if it really was a track written for Mindcrime that Queensrÿche decided to discard and sell to Ozzy instead. Mindcrime has songs where Nikki anticipates the assassinations he's about to do, and songs about the aftermath of his assassinations, but conspicuously absent are any songs that take place during his assassinations, and that's where "Shot in the Dark" fits in. I sing it in between "the Mission" and "Suite Sister Mary".

I have not been keeping up with Queensrÿche over the last decade, so I Gnutellaed one of their new songs. The chorus goes, "it's all gone wrong, there's blood on our hands." Damn right. I still can't forgive them for their 1990 song, "Empire", in which they claim that the US is being taken over by an empire of street crime, and the answer is to spend more on law enforcement. I don't know if anyone was swayed by this song, but law enforcement budgets were increased during the 90's, and a lot of unarmed black people got killed. According to The Washington Post, one of the reasons was that in the rush to put a lot of new cops on the street, the cops were not as well-trained as before, and thus less disciplined and more trigger-happy. And as part of the trend in arming cops with the biggest and baddest weaponry, Washington D.C. cops were issued Glocks that had no safeties. I'm still stunned that the band that brought me "Anarchy-X" might have also contributed to the slaying of Amadou Diallo and hundreds like him. Maybe it was Queensrÿche's motherfucking rage for order. As Samuel L. Jackson said in Shaft, "it's Giuliani time."

And for you monkeys out there who only listen to top 40, yes, I can sing, "Silent Lucidity". And I sing it quite well, thank you. I use it to warm up, but it's not one of my favorites.

Mindcrime is the most challenging piece I know of ("Eyes of a Stranger", for instance, has a ridiculous number of bent notes). Once I master this, what's next? Real opera, perhaps. I 'm not ready for the Met. Now that I've got range and power, I want to hone my control. I could work on getting as smooth as Sarah McLachlan. Holy shit, am I listening to myself? I want range, power, and control! I guess I have something in common with the U.S. Military after all: we both seek FULL-SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.

I've been working my high end disproportionately, so for balance, I started singing some Crash Test Dummies songs to work my bass. Anybody know of any other fun material sung in the bass range?

My new landlady told me I sound like Josh Groban. I had never heard of this guy, so I checked out his website. I took him to be a skilled but BORING Andrew Lloyd Weber meets Michael Bolton. What a waste of talent. I was way more impressed by the Flash design on his site than by his music. I'm still going to learn one of his songs, to add to my cheese repertoire of "Laughter in the Rain" and "Copa Cabana".

I had been doing all this in preparation for recording some original metal tunes written by My Very Busy Friend and performed by Guitar God. Now that Guitar God has bowed out of the project, at least for now, I'm at a loss for what to do. This recording was my only active idea for gaining an audience (aside from my delusional fantasy of being discovered by some member of Queensrÿche happening to walk down my alley and hearing me singing) leaving me in the curious predicament of Eminem's Stan: "Oh shit, I forgot, how am I supposed to send this shit out?"

I could always run away to join a Queensrÿche tribute band. I found 8 of them on the Internet: Anarchÿ-x in Italy, Silent Lucidity in Orland Park, Ilinois, Prophecÿ in Irvine, California, Empÿre in Long Beach, California, Promised Land in Virginia, Mindcrime in Houston, Texas, Empire in Akron, Ohio, and Blinded in Port Jefferson, Long Island.

I also discovered that the only thing better than Iron Maiden is…The Iron Maidens! An all-female tribute band! Their singer isn't as good as Bruce (though Bruce can rarely do it live; he's not arena-ready, if the nearly unlistenable Live After Death is any measure) but their rendition of "The Trooper" left me breathless. And the bass player is so cute!!!

But as the hippie told Mr. Burns, "you're livin' in the past, man, contemporize!"

Queens of the Reich
The Slug Queens of Eugene in the official Slug Queens' Throne Room, the wheelchair-accessible bathroom in the Downtown Eugene Public Library (there's even a plaque designating it as such). The Slug Queen I talk about in this diary is Queen Radia, seated, with the pinwheel headdress. The one with the accordion is Queen Accodiana, with whom I did an impromptu performance at her concert in the park two years ago, singing "Smells Like Nirvana."

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