Kids Today!

Back in our day, we didn’t have any of yer fancy iPods and ringtones and downloads. We didn’t have the luxury and convenience of your scrotum-rings and your World Wide Web logs. When we wanted to steal the new Uriah Heep album, we couldn’t just troll the Internets for it, we had to do it the old-fashioned way — by hiking to the store (uphill, both ways) and shoving 12” of vinyl under our sweaters (which we had to knit ourselves). That’s why you sniveling whipper-snappers don’t appreciate the real value of music. Or Uriah Heep. Now get the hell off our lawn!
 
 
 

Suge Knight

Here’s some advice: If Suge Knight offers to bail you out of jail, wait for a better offer. After doing this for Tupac Shakur, the bullying head of Death Row records molded a talented 24-year-old rapper into a doomed gangsta cartoon, fanned a preposterous coastal rap feud (fuck the Bering Strait, too, while we’re at it!) and steered his young star on a confrontational course that ended in a bullet-riddled BMW 750. Whether or not Biggie Smalls’s subsequent murder was related, Knight drafted a tragedy hip-hop never got over.
 
 
 

“The Star-spangled banner”

Here’s an idea: Let’s have the theme song for the world’s biggest and most diverse democracy be: 1) boring; 2) violently militaristic; and 3) next to impossible to sing. Not enough? OK, now let’s bring in Roseanne Barr to perform. She’s too busy? Get me William Hung!
 
 
 

Neverland Ranch

It’s not as though everything was hunky-dory for MJ before he moved here. But somehow, the star’s retreat into a llama-stocked, Ferris-wheel-equipped, 2,600-acre Southern California funny farm in 1988 didn’t help his psyche. Wacko Jacko may since have emerged from his rustic Xanadu — dangling a baby off a balcony here, facing child-molestation charges there — and moved to Bahrain, but the great pop star he used to be has been lost forever in this multimillion-dollar shrine to childhood.
 
 
 

Ecstasy

As if convincing countless innocents to spend nights crushed into dilapidated warehouses, waving glowsticks and bouncing along to the same monotonous groove wasn’t bad enough, ecstasy also taught a generation of dance-music auteurs that songwriting was as easy as looping a beat, then taking a nap.
 
 
 

Madonna’s British Accent

Finding God

Once the Big Guy gets under an artist’s skin, the work tends to suffer. Al Green went from making the sexiest music known to man to making gospel albums known to nobody. Mase quit hip-hop for the ministry, and when he returned, his skills didn’t come with him. The less said about Bob Dylan’s born-again albums the better, but the idea of Jehovah’s Witness prince proselytizing door-to-door in purple pumps still brings a smile. Esther, née Madonna, caused quite the mishegas by hopping aboard Kabbalah’s Judaism-meets-New-Age-hooey bandwagon. And Cat Stevens loved Islam so much, he named himself after it when he converted and then quit the music biz in 1979. Silly rock stars — you’re supposed to be the ones being slavishly worshipped!
 
 
 

The Age of 27

For most of us, the Bermuda Triangle of morbidity lies between the ages of 50 and 53, after which, if you dodge cancer, heart disease and other bullets, you’ll probably live for decades. For rock stars, the year to fear is 27 — the checkout date for Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones and blues legend Robert Johnson among others. Honorable mentions to Nick Drake (at a wizened 26) and Tim Buckley (at a boyish 28) — who were, after all, eccentric.
 
 
 

Whitey

There are people who believe that this creature — call him “honky,” “ofay” or the “blue-eyed devil” — was created 6,000 years ago by an evil scientist named Yakub via genetic experimentation on an island called Patmos in a … lab or something. These people are music critics. In the first half of the century, Whitey took the kaleidoscopic music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and begat Lawrence Welk and the couldn’t-be-more-appropriately-named Paul Whiteman. In the latter, he took Little Richard’s gender-bendy, crypto-porn shout “Tutti Frutti” and begat its wan, Wonder Breaded anathema, Pat Boone. We see the Beast’s essence everywhere. There he is, a beefy blond youth in a Von Dutch cap, spilling keg beer as he shifts weight from one Teva to another to a Bob Marley song — something he calls “dancing”; there he is, performing as Michael Bolton and Vanilla Ice or singing through the narrow, goateed visage of A.J. McLean. The dreaded character George Clinton christened Sir Nose D’Void of Funk has had an anti-Midas touch on music for decades now, whether it’s rockers copping the sexiness but not the subtlety of the blues in the ’50s or lemon-faced mooks hijacking hip-hop’s vigor to express the torments of suburban males who can’t get laid in the ’90s. White folks: They ruin everything.
 
 
 

“Colonel” Tom Parker

Meet the Slobodan Milosevic of artist management: Before Suge Knight, Lou Pearlman or even Allen Klein came the “Colonel” — inventor of ruinously exploitative rock management. Getting his hooks into Elvis in 1955, the Dutch con man artfully steered the King away from making music (which he had something of a knack for) and towards the likes of Clambake, Kissin’ Cousins, Kid Galahad and the 30-odd other Hollywood forgettables he made instead of recording or touring for most of the next decade.