The Rock Star crystal ball

I think Augie and I may need to bet a $7 Comic Con pretzel on the eventual winner of Rock Star: INXS.

Here’s how I think it’s going to shake out:

I like Marty, but he wants to be Eddie Vedder, who is, you guessed it, not right for their band, INXS. He simply cannot scream and howl his way through INXS songs, despite the fact that he howls and emotes very well indeed.

J.D. has talent, but no one even half-watching the show is unaware that he’s can be an insufferable SOB. INXS is a group that has been too tight for too many years to suffer inserting a jerk like him into the mix, in my opinion. J.D. needs to front his own band, where he can be the boss. The winner of this contest will be the low person on the INXS totem pole, and I can’t see them thinking for a moment that he’d fit into that position. (The same goes for Ty, incidentally, who needs to stop making faces when INXS gives him fairly mild criticism and suggestions. They’re not doing it to generate ratings buzz, they’re doing it because they’re trying to find a good match for the band.)

At this point, honestly, I think it comes down to Mig and Jordis as the final two. Other than her huge misfire on “Dream On,” she’s pretty much nailed every song she’s attempted, and in a very wide range of songs. The only question is whether or not she can sing things in the INXS mode. She needs to be tossed some songs by the Killers, the Bravery and so on to see if she can work that sort of thing.

Mig’s skills are finely tuned from his West End work, but unlike the rather studied way Ty performs for the most part, Mig really seems to be putting his heart and soul into things. While Dave Navarro is slipping too much into Paula Abdul mode recently (and Brooke Burke is being directed to do some of the more annoying Ryan Seacrestisms from American Idol), he was right when he talked about how affecting some of Mig’s performances have been. I also think he exudes the sort of slick modernity that INXS has always had as part of its image.

In a face off between Jordis and Mig, I think it’ll go to Mig, unless Jordis pulls off another dazzling surprise of a performance. Of course, she’s done that several times this season, so I’d say it’s far too early to write her off.

This sure beats American Idol, in any case, on every level.

The out of print Fritz Leiber

Attention publishers: If you’re going to print Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, either bite the bullet and publish the stories in a giant honking omnibus edition or publish all of the collections back to back to back.

It seems like every time someone gets around to republishing these amazing stories, they run out of money halfway through, meaning used book stores are clogged with versions of the first few books, but you can’t find the final stories for love or money.

And, of course, the fact that you can find so many copies of the first books means that reprints of them don’t sell, meaning that money isn’t forthcoming for the later editions … it’s a vicious circle of suckitude.

This is just a grim sight to see when looking for Leiber books, in the naive hope of finding the later books for sale.

Nouvelle Vague

Although I enjoy funny or tongue-in-cheek songs, I always feel a little silly about enjoying outright novelty songs. Why, I’m not sure; surely I’m entitled to listen to any sort of music I enjoy. But the fact remains, if a song has, as its primary virtue, a video with the lead singer dressed up as an obese version of Michael Jackson, I’m inclined to give it a pass.

But other than Green Jelly’s “Three Little Pigs,” I haven’t enjoyed a novelty song for a very long time. So it’s with a bit of befuddlement that I find myself enjoying songs by Nouvelle Vague, a French band that covers punk and New Wave music. (You can listen to them on the amazingly amazing Morning Becomes Eclectic here.)

I’m not sure what it is about hearing them cover the Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk to Fuck” as a breezy bossa nova tune that makes me grin ear to ear — although shifting the song from a male singer to a female one subtly changes the lyrics, in my mind — but it does. Even better than that, though, is their reinterpretation of a classic for those who graduated high school in the 1980s: “Melt with You” by Modern English. This stripped-down performance is a real reinterpretation of the hyper-earnest original. So not only is it funny for people my age (eek, I have a “my age” now), it actually makes you appreciate the song itself, as though listening to it again for the first time.

My musical tastes have been undergoing something of a transformation in the last year or two. French people singing ’80s New Wave as a bossa nova tune isn’t somewhere I expected to end up, which just goes to show, I suppose.

Maybe they’re not novelty tunes at all. In which case, ignore this post and just go download “Melt with You” from iTunes.

Death by Cherry Coke

According to this site, it would take the caffeine 441 2/3 cans of Cherry Coke to kill me.

Now I know to stop with 440 cans at a sitting.

(Source.)

Liz Phair on Wisteria Lane

Liz Phair will be covering the Rolling Stones’ “Mother Little Helper” on the Desperate Housewives album, hitting stores on September 20. It’s got a pretty amazing line-up of female artists, although given the number of “TBA” tunes at this hour, it’s pretty clear that this is only a soundtrack in the loosest of senses.