OK, I have to confess that I’ve never seen this movie. But I’ve seen about one hundred other women-in-prison movies so I don’t think that really matters. Actually, maybe I have seen it–they’re so hard to tell apart that it wouldn’t surprise me.
Around the same era that I was watching women-in-prison movies, I was living in a large house with a bunch of guys. We were in college and poor. We had a radio with a cassette player in the kitchen, but only one of us still had any cassettes. All of them were metal. So I listened to a lot of metal while cooking and eating boxed mac-and-cheese and similar food-like substances.
I don’t remember most of it, other than some Stryper I was already familiar with and some late Blue Öyster Cult. The chief exception was Grim Reaper, who were so over-the-top in their sheer “scary” metal power that they couldn’t help but leave an impression. How do you forget songs with titles like “Night of the Vampire” and “Suck it and See”? How do you forget an album named Rock You to Hell?
Obviously, you don’t.
“Lust for Freedom,” from the Rock You to Hell album, is the theme song to the women’s prison movie of the same name.
While reasonably well known among American metalheads, Grim Reaper was only exposed to a substantially larger audience once. That was on “Beavis and Butt-head,” where Butt-head demanded that they “stop in the name of all that which does not suck.”
Apparently, Weezer edited the video for Grim Reaper’s “Fear No Evil” and used it for “We Are All on Drugs.” The official Universal Music video of the song isn’t that at all, and I can’t find the Grim Reaper version online (update: see below). That’s a real shame–lots of folks have seen the awesomeness of Dio’s “Holy Diver” video, but the “Fear No Evil” video is just as awesome but not as well known as the song wasn’t a hit.
You really have to see this. After all, how many videos are there out there where the band emancipates slaves and defeats the wolf-headed version of the Minotaur through the magic of rock? Two, I guess.
If anyone knows where I can see the Weezer video, please let me know.
Update: Hell, yeah, found it. (WMV format)
Posted by Gordon Winslow 
Black Lips – 
Results show for group two!
I will be filling in for Gordon for tonight’s live blog of “American Idol.” There will probably be a bit more snark, but I will try to keep it objective. I promise not to call anyone a crapweasel.
Back in December when I first saw the list of contributing artists on a press release from legendary indie label 4AD for their charity compilation Dark Was The Night, I was floored. The list reads like a veritable Who’s Who of indie rock in 2009, or at least the folky and/or high profile American/Canadian subsection of it. The disc notably features some great duets between some of the biggest names in independent music today. Here’s the alphabetical list of performers as it appeared on the release: 
Buzz about Bon Iver’s self-released 2007 album For Emma, Forever Ago had already grown fairly loud before it was finally picked up and given a wide release by Jagjaguwar in February of 2008. I remember reading about it on some forum in late 2007 and desperately seeking it out. I was, like many others, taken with the story of the artist who spent a long winter alone in a Wisconsin cabin composing, to borrow from the title of a Dave Eggers memoir, “a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.” But good backstory aside, the music on the album both lived up to and surpassed my expectations, becoming one of my favorite releases of the last decade. However, the story has been repeated so often that it threatens to marginalize the artist and the music itself. Add to that the fact that the music on this record was light years away from anything that Justin Vernon had ever produced before with his previous band DeYarmond Edison, and the question on many people’s lips has been: Can Justin Vernon overcome the sad-boy-in-the-woods mythology of his first release and once again capture lightning in a bottle?
