Cinco de Zombo!
May 5th, 2016
My carefully cultivated diet was completely derailed at work, though not really due to any fault of my own. You see, the company was inexplicably celebrating Cinco de Mayo today, and opted to have a massive tacos and nachos 'engagement event' with us, the plebeians who they deign to allow to do all their hard work so that they can soak up all the profits. 'Engagement event', indeed.
To this day, I still find Cinco de Mayo celebrations in America silly. Down in Mexico, the observation of Cinco de Mayo is perfunctory at best, yet here in America it's become a whole 'thing'. Though honestly, where Americans are concerned, any excuse to get drunk is a good one, and this one in particular lets us (not you and me, but you know) chug Corona ™ and Tequila ™ with impunity.
The really weird thing is that apparently our congress got in on the act, and made it a semi-official thing here, which is probably why the company decided to do the same. Even if, when you get down to it, this was just another opportunity for our sociopathic 'human' 'resources' 'people' to pretend that they wouldn't be just as happy eating us for dinner as they were the nachos.
Anyway. Though I've been doing a darn good job of sticking to my low calorie breakfasts and lunches and dinners, I am weak where nachos are concerned. And, even though I knew the nachos would've been of poor quality at best, I couldn't resist the free nachos being waved under my nose, and I thus made my way down to the poorly prepared conference rooms, and partook of, well, way too many nachos.
All the while, they were piping bad mariachi music over the sound system, presumably to add to the atmosphere of half-hearted cultural appreciation. This is where the true disconnect in my head came from, for my earphones were filling my head with the sounds of Rob Zombie as I sat with my coworkers. To be specific, I was listening to Rob Zombie's brand new album - along with the lousy mariachi music.
The reason I was doing this is because I'd purchased the album, The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser, and had yet to have the opportunity to actually listen to it. Normally I just do a quick transfer of the mp3 files I've bought to the Nexus 5 and go, but lately I've had issues doing so because my USB cables never want to play ball, and this week was no exception.
Really wanting to hear what I'd bought, and finding the usual YouTube ® pirates generally useless in this regard, I had to figure out how the Amazon 'stream the stuff you've bought from us whenever' thing worked on my Nexus 5. This involved installing their black market, off the Google store application, and then using it to install their also-black-market Music Anywhere or whatever program onto the phone.
All of those hoops having been jumped through, I finally got to digest the thing. Sure, it's shuffled randomly and I have yet to figure out how to make that stop, but yes, I have since absorbed the Dispenser into my brain. I was prepared to dislike this album intently, having been sorely disappointed by Zombie's last three offerings (including a shit remix disc), but this didn't happen.
Sure, there's a couple of Zombie's usual kitschy spooky pop culture Mad Libs, and those will be quickly edited out once I get around to pruning the album down to its best tracks on my 'bits I like' playlists - which I do for all my music these days. But actually, this album was nice and heavy for the most part, mixing some heavy, heavy guitar work with some good drums and electronic components.
So if we can just keep Rob Zombie doing more work like this, and make him lay off the orchestral bits and cheesy 60s homages, maybe I won't purchase his subsequent releases with so much existential dread. I just hate watching artists I love fall apart over the years. On the plus side, a few of those have come back, like Faith No More did, so perhaps the future where my favorite music is concerned is looking up?