Top 10 Things I Have Against Glen n Danzig

A lovely lady has read a bit of my blog and asked me exactly what I have against Glen Danzig.

And so...

10. Another lovely lady with whom I work revealed to me yesterday that I have been misspelling Glen Danzig's name. Apparently, his first name ends with two n's. So fuck Glen Danzig for making me look stupid just so he could slap an extra consonant on his name. You are Glen Danzig on my blog, Glenn Danzig. Deal with it.

9. I have absolutely no proof to back this up, but I suspect that "Danzig" may not be his given name. If that's true, then it makes me wonder why he chose "Danzig." It may just be because he thought it sounded cool and somewhat sinister (and it does, there's no denying it). It also may be because - unless I'm forgetting the WWII history that I studied closely for a brief but intense period - the city of Danzig was the first major Polish city to fall the Nazis. Which brings up some questions, particularly considering Glen Danzig made his bones in a punk band and there's an unfortunate but undeniable relationship between punk and neo-nazism. I'd like to think that - assuming of course, that I am right that it is not his given name and that he is naming himself after the city - he chose the name as a defiant middle finger to Nazis and their ilk (as in "I am the spirit of the fallen city and I am coming back to kick your ass").

8. No one else was using his name in the way I use it, so hey, why the hell not. It's like a shot from the dark! You never saw it coming! You try to block my right and OH SHITKNUCKLE! HE'S A SOUTHPAW! I am ninja! Hear me...not.

(7 1/2. WHOA! "I am ninja! Hear me...not." That's fucking good. I'm writing that down some...oh already did. Nevermind.)

7. If you've heard his music, particularly if you've heard his stuff from his Misfits days, and especially particularly totally and absolutely as well as anally (eww) if you've heard the most controversial Misfits song ever, then you know he raped my mother today and it didn't matter much to him. That's pretty fucking low.

6. Glenn Glen Danzig.

5. In the Misfits, there was the song I referenced in #7 ("Last Caress", if you don't know it - and NO, for any of you metalheads, that isn't a Metallica original), there was a song in which he takes on the character of a shunned nerd begging his mother to let him go out and kill all the kids who shun him, and then there's the only Danzig (as in the band Danzig) song everyone knows - "Mother". Glen Danzig has some serious fucking Mommy issues.

4. I heard Sammy Hagar punched him in the face once at an awards ceremony, with no reprisals forthcoming. I'm sure the story is utter bullshit. It was told to me by the same woman who claimed she regularly hung out with Metallica and Megadeth in a New Jersey bar and that she once knocked a drunken Dave Mustaine on his ass for dissing the late Cliff Burton. But the memory of being forced to imagine the fictional fracas is enough to hurt. It's like when they ask Tinkerbell Legolas to tell them what the elves are singing about Magneto Gandalf. "For me the grief is still too near."

3. Hulk could totally kick his ass.

2. Rip Taylor.

(1 1/2. HA! Didn't see that coming, did ya?)

1. I have, in my time, loved the music of exactly three bands enough that you could reasonably argue I worshiped them to a perhaps unhealthy degree. Jane's Addiction, Nirvana, and The Misfits - the latter being originally fronted by Glen Danzig.

I am not going to make an argument that the music of The Misfits is better or worse than that of the other two bands. It would be like arguing whether gravity was cooler than relativity or something. It'd just be silly.

(gravity's way cooler)

What I can say, however, is that my love for the music of The Misfits is somehow purer than that which I have for Nirvana or Jane's Addiction.

By "pure" I mean that out of the three bands, The Misfits are the only band whose music was and is enough for me. I didn't and don't want posters. I didn't and don't want to read every article written about them. I didn't and don't care about any feuds they may have waged with other bands, what critics did and didn't like them, who influenced them or who they influenced. Fuck their t-shirts. Give me their albums.

Likely, this is at least in part because The Misfits lived and died before I ever knew who the hell they were. I had no chance - as is the embarrassing case with my love for Nirvana - to hunt down magazines and books with their pictures and put together obsessive and, to anyone who wasn't an angsty and lonely teen while Kurt still had a throat with which to scream, downright disturbing collages of Kurt, and Krist, and Dave, but mostly Kurt. It wasn't like when I read in Spin that Kurt hated Pearl Jam, and so I decided that I hated Pearl Jam. Or like when I read in the authorized biography Come As You Are that Kurt no longer hated Pearl Jam, and so I no longer hated Pearl Jam. Or like - as you may have noticed and which I honestly just noticed just now while reading back what I'd written - while I would never feel comfortable enough to refer to Glen Danzig as just Glen or even Glenn, I somehow am absolutely fine referring to Cobain as just plain old Kurt. Like he was living downstairs and we hung out and listened to Misfits albums together.

I can't tell you anything about the history of The Misfits. I can tell you their frontman was Glen Danzig and that's about it. I can't tell you the names of any other band member.

They have a song called "London Dungeon." I hadn't heard it in a while and had a strong urge to find it. I didn't find the original but I saw I had downloaded a cover of it along with a bunch of other Misfits cover songs on the tribute album Violent World. Prong covers "London Dungeon" in a pretty uninteresting way, kind of like a more robotic White Zombie, but the lyrics reminded me of what I thought the first time I heard the song. The lyrics made me think that the song didn't refer to an actual dungeon, but that somebody had dissed The Misfits. In particular, that someone had dissed The Misfits for not being more like the bands of the British punk scene. And so Danzig defiantly informed his critics that "I don't wanna be in your London Dungeon! I don't wanna be in your British Hell!"

I mention this not because I'm right. I have no idea if I'm right. I have no real basis for my theory. I have not read a single article on their music.

I mention this because "London Dungeon" is the ONLY Misfits song I have ever bothered to sit and think about, to dissect, and to analyze. That may not mean much to you, but you're reading a blog written by a man who dissects and analyzes FUCKING. EVERYTHING. I made my way through college applying literary theory to Black Lightning and Captain America comics. I am someone who will tell you that I will not read Spider-Man because I'm tired of Jesus Christ swinging around buildings and beating up muggers. I don't watch Batman Begins and think "wicked fx dude!" I watch it and think about how interesting it is that the director and writer used Alfred, Lucius Fox, Ra's Al Ghul, Jim Gordon, and even Carmine Falcone as warring father figures fighting over dominance for the absent father Bruce Wayne tortures himself over. I am a pop culture dissecting machine. I am the Borg. Resistance is silly.

But not The Misfits. I just don't do it. I don't care. I don't know all of their lyrics. I don't care about the lyrics I can't discern. I don't look them up. They sing about zombies and aliens and alien zombies and people who eat brains and complain that brains get tedious after nothing but brains. And they do it all with melodies that sound happier than Bill Clinton in a cigar shop, and subconsciously convince you that somehow the song about the guy who's controlling space zombies is actually a fucking love song. They are fucking beautiful. They are the sole pop culture beast in my life which I leave to mill about the wild as they will without probing them anally or tagging them with electronic locators. I don't dog them like an acting coach about their motivations and goals. I just love them. Unconditionally.

And what happens? They reform. Without Danzig.

The result?

They actually covered "Monster Mash".

Monster Mash.

I'm sure it isn't Danzig's fault. But like I said, I don't know the names of the rest of them, so he's all I have to blame.

(0. Dear Mr. Glenn Danzig. If by chance you read this, which I doubt, I'm just being silly. Except for the long-winded and cuss-tinged sentimentality of reason #1. That stuff's true. Oh, and the Hulk probably could beat you up. If he was real. Which he isn't. But if he was, he could. No offense. I just use your name because I think it's funny to plop a name down in my lists which has absolutely nothing to do with the matter at hand - whether the matter at hand is why women should have sex with me, or why ninjas are better than pirates, or rice, or Batman. Or even fellatio with ice cubes. Please don't hurt me. Sincerely - Someone who isn't really named Michileen Martin and doesn't live where you might find out Michileen Martin lives.)

(-1. Hey, look at the date! Happy Birthday Me. You old fuck.)

(-2. If you want to give me a birthday present, please read yesterday's post. Ladies pay special attention to reason #2. Oh and reason #1)

(-3. I have a tendency to ramble.)