While many people could easily point out aspects of the music industry that suck, there’s one thing gaining traction lately that really needs to stop: creating and applying musical genres based solely on a group’s lyrics.

Music is sound. It’s a combination of many things, not just words. Placing all of the focus on the lyrics is detrimental to the rest of the music, and often wildly misleading when trying to describe the musicians’ overall sound.

For example, I’ve seen scores of music bloggers referring to bands as “Viking metal”…just because they’re metal bands who sing about Vikings and Norse mythology. That’s not enough; a band would still need to use classical Scandinavian musical stylings and extreme riffs in there, otherwise any metal song about the legendary northern warriors would instantly be considered Viking metal based on the lyrics alone. If that’s the case, then Led Zeppelin’s famous “Immigrant Song” is Viking metal. Ridiculous!

Next we have Swashbuckle, who are often referred to as “pirate metal.” Technically, this is incorrect: Swashbuckle may perform in pirate costumes and write lyrics about nautical nonsense, but they’re a thrash/death metal band. (Full disclosure: I’ve written about Swashbuckle for Musician Photo Journal, and even I’ve fallen prey to using the term “pirate metal.”)

Drifting away from metal, we have “nerd rock.” This is rock or punk music wherein the lyrics deal with topics such as comic books or video games. Again, it’s a piss-poor genre; just because your band sings about something that might be geek-related, that doesn’t change the riffs on your guitars, now does it? Case and point: look at “I am the Law,” a thrash metal classic by Anthrax. Using modern standards, this song would be classified as “nerd rock” because the subject is Judge Dredd, a comic book character. Clearly, this is wrong; no one would ever consider an Anthrax song to be nerd rock! So why are other songs with nerdy lyrics given that rubber stamp?

We all know the real reason for these misleading genres: money. If you advertise your group as a rock band, even though you happen to sing about Star Trek, you won’t get far. Promote yourself as a nerd rock band, however, and science fiction convention planners will be knocking down your door. Furthermore, nerdy lyrics and the like are often used as a cover to hide many bands’ lack of musical skill. Fanboys are much more likely to give a crappy rock band a free pass if they’re singing about Batman than if they were performing Top 40 songs.

I still think a band should stick to its guns and forgo these fake genres. Your music should always come first before selling out, but that’s not a popular opinion these days.

There’s been a disturbing trend in right-wing politics lately, and that’s attacks on education. Conservatives’ complaints of “liberal bias” in colleges and universities have been around for a while, and they’re generally just as false as their infamous “liberal media” claims. In recent years, however, the anti-education contingent has really grown in strength. Scientists, economists, and other educated people are routinely heckled and smeared by the likes of Fox News, simply because they arm themselves with facts. With the popularity of Fox, talk radio, and the Tea Parties, millions of people believe — and are raising their offspring to believe — that education is something to be avoided.

Seriously…how the hell did this happen?! It’s flagrant stupidity on a level I can barely understand. Why would you ever want to shit on improving one’s mind, and instead reward the opposite, which is idiocy?

Most of the complaints I’ve seen don’t focus on public schools, as for the most part, it’s required by law for children to attend them. The exception is homeschooling, but even though that’s been slightly on the rise, it’s not as widespread as the anti-college sentiment. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; there’s boatloads of conservative pundits and politicians who have had excellent educations, yet they turn around and bash the very system that taught them.

Another part of these anti-education views is the increasing role of fundamentalist religion in the United States. Just look at how politicians and religious groups have tried to ramrod complete nonsense like intelligent design into taxpayer-funded public school programs! It never fails to amaze and anger me that people want to supplant rational thought and factual information with superstition, and that’s the very antithesis of a proper education. To return to the subject of homeschooling, there’s a lot of parents out there who feel that public schools are “too secular” at best and “evil” at worst. Thus, they homeschool their children according their religious beliefs, and this is another level of insanity. How can you expect a child to function in the real world when you’re consistently decrying the facts at home?

My theory is one shared by many others: conservatives and über-religious folks hate the educational system because it teaches people to think for themselves, and that may lead them to question these same politics and religions. As well it should! You should question and learn about everything, be it right or left, god or godless. The whole point of a good education is that you can make your own well-informed decisions borne out by facts, not hearsay.

Do you need a college education or higher learning experience to succeed in life? Not necessarily. But dismissing education out of hand is idiotic, no matter which side of the political fence you sit on.

I find Twitter to be a very useful tool for promoting this blog, as well as my other one. Furthermore, posting random tweets about my activities and interacting with others can be fun, too. However, Twitter does seem to be getting a little out of hand. Stereotypical Internet users and abusers are mostly to blame for this, but the company itself does not get off scot-free.

I do understand that at its core, Twitter is simply an extension of the user’s ego. When you tweet about your activities, you’re hoping that other people care enough about you in order to follow you and actively read what you have to say. This same principle applies to other online services like personal websites, photo galleries, social networks, and of course, blogs. Advocating your activities and projects via Twitter is an excellent idea, as it gets your point across with brief bits of text.

With every positive comes plenty of negatives, unfortunately. There are aspects of Twitter that are becoming more and more popular…and exponentially more annoying. Some of these are memes that start with one or two users, and eventually infect most of the userbase. (We’ve seen this happen with email and forums in the past.) Others are just virulent outgrowths of the service itself.

For example, the number of followers. I’ve noticed far too many people who are obsessed with how many followers they have. That’s the ultimate in narcissism, nothing more. When it comes to celebrity Twitter accounts, the problem is multiplied tenfold. As if their egos weren’t inflated enough!

Next, the spambots. Twitter’s done a decent job blocking them and deleting obvious spam accounts, but the shit still gets through. I’ll post something about my Mac, and I’ll get five or six responses within the next ten minutes from random accounts trying to sell me Apple crap. All fake, of course, but their existence is nonetheless aggravating.

Then there’s Twitter’s tagging system. As it was originally designed, it allowed groups of users to relate their tweets to one another. For example, for those users who watched the World Cup, placing a #worldcup tag on their tweets made them easier for other soccer fans to find and follow them. Twitter even got in on the act by appending a soccer ball image to those tags! However, like most other good intentions, the Internet community rapidly sent tagging down the toilet. How many tags have you seen that are actually relevant to the community as a whole? I’d say about 10% of them. Most of them nowadays are nonsense words that are lucky to have anything to do with the tweet itself, let alone the entire Twitter community.

Even worse, look at all of the miscreants who type out entire phrases in tag form. Not only is this a glaring misuse of the tagging system, it’s egocentric and it spotlights the user’s inability to use proper grammar, spelling, and sentence structure. Come on, if you’re going to bother typing out #omgihadamassivesandwichforlunch, then just write “OMG, I had a massive sandwich for lunch!” like a adequately intelligent human being. Periods, spaces, and commas are your friends. Tagging is for categorizing similar tweets, not expression!

My biggest complaint about Twitter, by far, is livetweeting. Holy shit, is this annoying. In case you’re unaware, livetweeting is when a user tweets, nearly in realtime, their thoughts and opinions on a specific event, like a concert, film, or television show. Not only is this a massive feeding of the user’s ego — “Look what I get to do, while you only get to read about it in short bursts!” — it’s also extremely rude. Livetweeting a concert is rude to the band, as you’re essentially telling them that your social life is more important than the hard work they put into their performance. Livetweeting movies are even worse, as it’s incredibly distracting to other people in the audience. Look, if your followers gave a shit about the movie you’re seeing, they’d go see it themselves! We don’t need your play-by-play, Madden. Plus, if you’re livetweeting a film or show…you’re almost certain to give away spoilers. Thanks a lot, dick. I’ve had to unfollow quite a few people because of this. Spoilers nonwithstanding, few things are more irritating than seeing my feed clogged up by the same user posting twenty or more tweets in a row.

I’ve spent enough time complaining about many Twitter users’ irritating behavior. I will admit that some of my friends have been guilty of these offenses in the past, and when this happens, I do bring it to their attention. (Politely, of course.) Anyway, user excesses are clearly not the company’s fault, but I do have a separate set of concerns that apply to them. Twitter as a business is naturally trying to boost its own growth and bottom line. It’s been adding many new features to the service over time, like lists, suggestions on who to follow, verified users, geolocations, APIs, et cetera. However, like Facebook before it, some of this stuff is crossing the line into serious security issues. Verifying a user is a great idea, as followers can be confident in who they’re following, but it also means Twitter owns some serious personal data on you. Foursquare, another popular service that many people use in conjunction with Twitter, is practically an open invite for someone to stalk you or rob your house.

I can’t help but wonder if it’s only a matter of time before Twitter piles on the extras so much that becomes a bloated cesspool. At that point, I may elect to leave rather than deal with the spam, unwanted features, and invasion of privacy.

What, you don’t think this could come to pass? Well, remember that even MySpace used to be tolerable…

Why is it that in this day and age, some comic book trade paperbacks are still missing issues?

I first ran into this annoying problem in the early 2000s, when I found some Starman trade paperbacks on the cheap. When checking the indicia to find out which issues each volume contained, I was surprised to see that many issues were missing, seemingly at random. In truth, the excised issues were simple one-shot stories that didn’t factor heavily into the core Starman tale…but that’s not the point. If I’m buying trade paperback collections of a series, I want the entire series, not bits and pieces! (The Starman problem has been corrected in the omnibus editions…but I can’t afford those.)

The same thing happened when I was catching up on Green Lantern Corps. I discovered that issues #21-22 were never reprinted. This makes no sense; the story in those two issues featured Alpha Lantern Boodikka, and she’s been increasingly important as the book’s moved forward. It’s possible that these two missing issues will be reprinted along with the current “Revolt of the Alpha Lanterns” story, but then you’ve got issues being printed out of order. The Green Lantern trade paperback Rage of the Red Lanterns has this exact problem: it reprints Green Lantern #26-28, #36-38, and the Final Crisis: Rage of the Red Lanterns one-shot. But what about issues #29-35? Those were reprinted in the Secret Origin trade paperback, which came out before the Rage of the Red Lanterns collected edition. Stupid, isn’t it?

Speaking of which, I was thinking of picking up a few Green Arrow collections, starting with Kevin Smith’s “Quiver” storyline from 2001. Well, screw that: not only is that series of collections missing random issues here and there, but two of them actually got printed in reverse order. Volume three, Straight Shooter, contains issues #26-31. Volume four, The Archer’s Quest, contains issues #16-21. That’s just lazy.

“Best of” collections are exempt from this complaint; by their very nature, they’re designed to pick and choose from the best stories a particular comic book has to offer. But for numbered collections of ongoing series, there’s no reason why we can’t read every issue in the order in which they were originally published. This is especially important nowadays, as the average price of a comic book is around four dollars. Many fans buy some series solely in trade paperback format (in my case, Invincible and X-Factor). If issues are missing, then we’re not getting the entire story, rendering the entire process moot.

When I go to the gym after work, I often watch the local news on the televisions attached to the cardio machines. The news is fine, but the advertisements in between the reports thoroughly disgust me, often to the point of changing the channel.

Lame commercials are nothing new, but as we’re rapidly approaching election season, an overwhelming majority of the ads are for political campaigns. Specifically, we’ve got our state primaries coming up very soon, so the candidates for governor, Senate, and Congressional positions are making their final pushes to sway voters and secure their parties’ nominations. Why does this bother me? Because the ads are nothing but attacks, hit pieces, and smear campaigns.

Ads aired earlier in the spring and summer did indeed discuss critical issues. Those are what’s really important, so why not just stick with that tactic instead of this lowbrow mudslinging garbage? The candidates are all behaving like children.

Instead of talking about important issues at hand, such as the state economy, unemployment, infrastructure, et cetera, the candidates would much rather smear one another. Usually, this is done by pointing out “lies” in one campaign, and claiming that the opponent would never do such a thing. (Guess what: that’s probably a lie, too.) I understand that candidates can and should defend themselves from false claims, but doing so by viciously counterattacking is just sinking to their opponents’ scummy levels. It’s a sad indicator of just how low political discourse in this country has fallen.

Just in case any of my readers decide to run for political office, here’s some friendly advice. I’m one of those rare voters that casts their ballot based on multiple issues that are of critical importance to my state and country, rather than single issue, special interest nonsense (like gun rights). The serious issues are of utmost importance. However, personal conduct does carry some weight. If the centerpiece of your campaign is to smear your opponent rather than discuss the critical stuff, then it’s unlikely I’m going to vote for you. I’ll take a beleaguered underdog who can actually help my state over a shifty blowhard any day of the week.