Huh, that’s sure some graphic tee you’re wearing. Let me take a closer look at the image you’re so casually walking around displaying; seems like it’s a cartoon tabby with hearts for eyes with the words “cat lover” under it. So, I’m guessing you think you’re a cat lover. How ‘bout, if you’re such an aficionado of the feline variety, you name me three insane things that the parasites nestled in your brain have compelled you to do for a cat’s amusement.
You heard me. If you’re such a cat lover, tell me three bizarre, inexplicable actions you have performed because you’re infected with Toxoplasma gondii, the insidious microscopic organism that cats use to control the brains and souls of their owners and also rats.
This shouldn’t be so hard, buddy. You think it’s cool to walk around with a cartoon cat on your shirt and not be able to immediately mention how you feel compelled by parasites in your brain to walk repeatedly into a door just to make your pretty little kitten happy for a moment? Well, it’s fucking not, poser.
I bet you’ve never even woken up out of a dead sleep to sleepily stumble to Petco, buy 75 cans of wet food, slap a cashier across the face for no reason you can explain, get arrested, and spend your time in jail skittering across the floor like a braindead rat. That’s what being a true cat lover is all about.
And how about this? You name even a single time that you’ve collected all the loose fur your cat, President William Henry Hairysson, shed and turned it into a Jamiroquai-like hat that you wore to church and then got excommunicated for.
Literally, name one single time.
Honestly, people like you give parasites a bad name. You act like putting a fucking lame-ass feline on a shirt proves that you actually love cats. You probably don’t even like cats. A loser like you would be lucky to respect cats for their many fine qualities.
Now, I gotta get out of here, because the toxoplasma coursing through my brain and destroying my nervous system is telling me that I need to rob a bank and use all the money on shiny, shiny pieces of foil that President Hairysson would love.
1991 was an incredible year for Kiedis. With “Blood Sugar Sex Magic” topping the charts and his role in “Point Break” garnering praise, it seemed like there was no medium in which he couldn’t fail upward. Then came brain surgery. Kiedis opened up about his short-lived medical career in his autobiography “Scar Tissue.”
After the Blondie singer worked on David Cronenberg’s body horror masterpiece “Videodrome” she started telling friends “Now I want to do something body helpful, like brain surgery.” The results were infamously a disaster. At the time she was sensitive and highly defensive about her botched brain surgeries, but she was able to joke about it in a recent interview:
Ludacris turned to brain surgery as part of a method-acting exercise. Though his portrayal of Tej Parker in “2 Fast 2 Furious” was generally well received, Ludacris wanted to bring his performance to the next level:
“Transitioning from The Police to a solo career was easy because it only meant I could do band meetings on Thursday nights when Stewart Copeland normally has his bowling league. Then going to acting was easy because acting is just singing without singing, ini’t? I thought to myself ‘Well, brain surgery, you don’t even have to act to do that!’ Even now saying it out loud it sounds perfectly logical, but for reasons I still can’t explain it’s just not in the cards love.”
It’s not Joe’s fault really. Jim Jarmusch loves working with musicians with little to no acting experience, and in order to get the best possible performance out of them, he works hard to bolster their confidence on camera. A little too hard. Between every take on “Mystery Train,” Jarmusch would grab Joe Strummer by the face and say “Look at me. You are the smartest man in the world. Every brain surgeon on earth is dog shit compared to you. I don’t even know why you’re in my movie, it’s beneath you, you should be out doing all of the brain surgeries.”
If you thought this founding member of The New York Dolls was scary as the ghost cab driver from “Scrooged,” you’ve never had a loved one on his operating table with their brain exposed. That’s real fear.
Flea can play the hell out of a bass, and can even flush out a scene or two in “The Big Lebowski,” but when it comes to practicing medicine, he doesn’t know his blood sugar from his sex magic.
“Mr. Waits showed up to our hospital with one of those plague-era bird masks and a rusty bone saw asking if we had any brains that needed a tune-up. It’s not standard procedure to let an amateur attempt complicated brain surgeries with antiquated equipment, but he had just crushed it in “Mystery Men” and we wanted to see if he was a triple threat. He did so badly, we actually wound up banning the entire cast of “Mystery Men” from practicing medicine at our hospital for 5 years. Eddie Izzard was understandably furious, but as doctors, we have a duty of care.”
“For a while, I was chasing an EGOC, you know, when you win an Emmy, a Golden Globe, an Oscar, and a Cushing Medal for achievements in neuroscience? I show up to this hospital and I says ‘Let me take a crack at it.’ They gave me some push-back, but when I told them David Chase originally wanted me to play Tony Soprano they let me go ahead. I did okay. Messy though. Plus everyone I touched that day died. Anyway, come to find out it’s not EGOC, it’s EGOT, the T standing for Tony Soprano. So there goes that dream.”
It’s hard to believe that someone fresh off the heels of “Austin Powers: Goldmember” felt confident enough to attempt surgery on the human brain with no prior experience or training but that’s what happened. There’s a reason you don’t see the other members of Destiny’s Child anymore.
At the height of his film career Elvis occupied a tier of celebrity that simply doesn’t exist anymore. That and the fact that he was constantly surrounded by his Memphis Mafia yes men, it was only a matter of time before the King’s hubris brought him to the operating table. Elvis completely butchered every brain he laid a scalpel on, but his cronies would always convince him that his patients not only lived but were fully cured of their neurological ailments and actually stronger than they were before.
If she could turn back time, we like to think Cher would undo all of the harm caused by her short-lived medical practice. The only patient to have their brain operated on by Cher and live was “Moonstruck” co-star Nicolas Cage, and there were clearly a few leftover parts when she put him back together.
“Sure I tried my hand at the cranial arts. Got some resistance from some of the ‘real’ docs. One of em had the nerve to ask if I actually knew how to do brain surgery. I shoot back ‘I don’t gotta know, my character does Jack.’ That got him bout as shook as a rattlesnake in a mongoose factory, he steered clear of me after that. By the time I was done with that brain, it looked like hammered shit and smelled twice as bad. I lost the patient, but I’ll tell you the same thing I told that yellow-bellied no good sonofabitch review board: If I hadn’ta done what I done, he woulda turned vamp!”
At the height of his fame it was hard to say “no” to ol’ blue eyes, be you a beautiful woman, a movie producer, or even the chief of surgery at a hospital. An associate close to Sinatra recently opened up about the crooner’s first and only attempt at the craft of brain surgery:
“Think about it, if me, the guy who wrote ‘Cop Killer,’ can go on to play a cop on TV, I can do anything. The trick is to write a song condemning the thing you want to do. I reassembled Body Count, and we got to work on this dope-ass track called ‘Neurosurgeons Should All Rot in Hell.’ I played it for the chief of surgery at St. Christopher’s and he’s all ‘Well, that’s one dope ass track, let’s see what you got with a scalpel.’ I don’t know why it works, it just does! Anyway, lot of people died, but that’s the game, you know what I’m sayin’?”
Will Smith found so much success in acting that people tend to forget he was a rap artist first, and at the dawn of the Willenium, he briefly caught the neurosurgery bug. The infatuation was short-lived:
The artist formerly known as Marky Mark has come a long way. After becoming Hollywood’s top leading man, the former hip-hop star felt like he could do anything, but a funky bunch of attempted brain surgeries left him eating humble pie.
While never quite reaching the status of leading man, the former Black Flag singer has turned in a lot of competent supporting performances in a lot of films. Slowly but surely, his success as a working actor bolstered him into believing he might be meant for a higher calling. You guessed it, brain surgery. The hardcore punk icon got candid about his foray into neurosurgery on his most recent spoken word tour:
Bowie was a master of self-reinvention, so it’s no surprise he gravitated towards acting. From his celebrated run as The Elephant Man to “The Man Who Fell to Earth” to his lighthearted cameo in “Zoolander,” Bowie proved he had just as much range as an actor as he did as a musician. Then, after portraying Nicola Tesla in “The Prestige,” Bowie began taking an interest in science.
Iggy Pop has dabbled with acting since the mid-’80s, and has gone on to work with auteur directors such as John Waters and Jim Jarmusch. After his noteworthy performance in “Dead Man,” the veteran punk rocker decided brain surgery was the next logical step. From the get-go, his methods were extremely unorthodox.
Bad Religion’s 20th anniversary coronation was a rhubarb crown of raw mediocrity. Plagued with mid-tempo songs , and produced by Greg Graffin’s idol turned nemesis Todd Rundgren, Bad Religion entered the new millennium sounding like a band long past their prime, and even longtime fan Fat Mike hated this album. Only listen to it if you have a thing for masochistic punishment.
But even if you are into such masochistic punishment, you’d be better served by looking at the album cover for previous release “No Substance.” And there’s no substance indeed on this album, with uninspired songwriting and barely audible vocals, this album is more useful in cd form as a surface to snort shitty, stepped on coke off of, adding substance, but who buys cds anymore?
First album to feature fedora mummy/charisma vacuum Mike Dimkich replacing long time axeman Greg Hetson, and Jaime Miller replacing Brooks Wackerman when he got a pay raise via membership in a bigger band (Avenged Sevenfold). This album contains some rock-solid Bad Religion songs while breaking no new ground for the band as a whole, like a comfortable but too familiar long term relationship. Maybe the band should have joined the Navy after “True North” after all.
Written following the second coming of Brett, and their second holy trinity (“Process of Belief,” “Empire Strikes First,” and “New Maps of Hell”), to keep things fresh for the album, the band collectively agreed to use less big fancy school words,and instead settled on using clever wordplay and alliteration instead. Not classic quality, not shitshow, a nonchalant release that’s a notch above the rest, but faaarrrr from second (or even third of fourth best), thus begins the notation of mid-level “Bad Religion” releases.
Home to mega single “American Jesus,” the fan favorite title track and soulful ballad “Struck a Nerve” (dat guitar solo, Greg Hetson you’re in rare form, chef’s kiss). The rest of the album is a mix of attempts to add variety to the Bad Religion formula, ranging from the catchy, slinky alternative rock of “All Good Soldiers” to the cold and lifeless “Kerosene” (keeps me warm my ass, I’d rather rely on global warming).
The First Bad Religion release without the songwriting duo of Graffin/Gurewitz, and the first album with punk legend Brian Baker on guitar, this mostly solid selection of songs fooled both the band and the general public into thinking that the band would be just fine without Brett. And while the good songs on this album are pretty sweet, Greg Graffin was starting to noticeably drag without his songwriting partner, leading to this mixed bag of “Punk Rock Songs.”
Deciding to make a record that would piss off their fans (as was the style at the time), Bad Religion decided to make a space rock record, which was so derided at the time that it made Jay Bentley quit the band, and it’s the only album he doesn’t play on (he later rejoined when the band disowned the album). Existing as a legend for the longest time, since the band refused to repress, reissue or recognize this album until 2010, and it’s a shame, because this album rules. The black sheep of Bad Religion’s Discography, filled with bouncy synth’s, concept songs, and lyrics that look to the sky instead of the world around them, bringing listeners “Into the Unknown.” together.
This album features some live staples, the shortest song of their career in the aptly titled “52 Seconds,” and continued the general hot streak of 2000s Bad Religion. Plus “New Maps of Hell” ended up being a Nostrodomausly accurate description of post 2020s Earth. We’d say more about this record but we need to research them to discover if hell could be any worse, answering the age-old question for punks young and old once and for all.
Some would say that it’s blasphemous to rank this part of the Bad Religion “Holy Trinity” (the other two being “Suffer” and “No Control”), but this is a Hard Times ranking of a band with a literal “crossbuster” for a logo, so a little blasphemy is par for the course. But hey it’s an album so good that the worst song on it became not only a minor radio hit, but a live staple, and virtually every song going through the live rotation at some point in time, and even features punk legend Keith Morris on backing vocals for one song, so not bad for the worst of holy trinity after all.
Late Career Bad Religion once again showing you young whippersnappers how it’s done, adding yet another revolutionary album into an already legendary career. This album also served as the first to feature longtime guitarist/co-songwriter Brett Gurewitz on lead vocals for one track, to pretty rad results, and the last to feature longtime guitarist/hype man Greg Hetson, and drum Satan Brooks Wackerman, who left for more Satanic territory.
Hot off the release of “Process of Belief,” Bad Religion was firing on all cylinders. Fueled by the burgeoning anti-Iraq War movement, Bad Religion released yet another banger of a punk record that was not only instant classic, but genre pushing. Instrumental march intros, guest rappers (and they said “Into the Unknown” was weird, pffft), and riffs and solos that would make any NWOBHM fan cream their leather pants, this album proved that Bad Religion were a timeless punk band.
An album that’s older than most of our readers. It was written, recorded and released when the band was still in high school, Bad Religion’s debut was pure, raw hardcore goodness with a beautiful sense of melody, courtesy of a pubescent Greg Graffin’s more nasal delivery compared to future releases. Establishing the band’s sound and satirically cynical but equally brilliant take on the world around them, inspiring hundreds if not thousands of snot-nosed punks to do their best preacher impression to this day!
Despite the title, this was not a mid 2000s Will Ferrell comedy, but Bad Religion’s (Gasp) major label debut, leading to many fans uttering the now antiquated cry of “sell out” accusations against the band. But within under 5 seconds, you not only realize how wrong they were, but that the band was sounding meaner and punker than ever, truly going “Against the Grain.” Unfortunately this would also be the last Bad Religion album of the 20th century to feature guitarist/co-songwriter Brett Gurewitz, as he left the band within a fortnight of its release to focus running the then-booming Epitaph record label, leaving an unfillable gap in the songwriting team.
Released after the fall of the Berlin Wall and after the rise of grunge, this album saw Bad Religion march confidently into the ’90s with no small aid from powerhouse new guy on drums Bobby Schayer. Demonstrating that the band were more then one trick pony, “Generator” saw the band breaking new ground by slowing some their songs down and adding more varied songwriting, since they weren’t spring chickens, but fine roosters, worthy of the Fenix TX song. For Bad Religion, and the ’90s seemed like a time where humanity had a fertile plot and a party that would never stop…
…until tragedy struck on 9/11, and thus the world was once again steeped in turmoil. Fear, uncertainty and ennui ensued, but just as luck would have it, Bad Religion, once again not only blessed with a, pardon our pun, new power “Generator” drummer in young gun Brooks Wackerman, but the “Return of the King,” one year before its scheduled box office release when Brett Gurewitz returned to the band (if only a glorified studio guy). The combined reunion of the Lennon/McCartney of punk, mixed with a youngblood drummer sacrifice conjured one of the best Rock’n’Roll COMEBACKS of all time, leaving to an album full of some of the most poignant, energetic and straight up soulful songs of their career, and low key some of the best punk guitar work this side of Thrice’s “The Illusion of Safety”.
The kids these days with their Sum 41s, in my day we had Bad Religion’s “No Control,” an album that was both a full “Half Hour of Power” AND “All Killer No Filler.” Lightning fast all the way through with mid-tempo songs that the band was legally obliged to provide, lest they be sued if a fan “Suffered” a heart attack while listening. Fun fact this album has such raw adrenaline contained within, it directly led to decline of cocaine use into the ’90s, since buying this record is cheaper, and a renewable source of adrenaline.
This album dictated the shape of punk to come, before “the Shape of Punk to Come” (Refused) was released, back when punk was still punk. From the rip roaring “You Are the Government”, the Slacker anthem of “What Can You Do,” and the satanic sounding chant of the title track’s bridge (which becomes a different language with enough LSD) “Suffer” perfecting the blend of melodic and hardcore (resulting in melodic hardcore). Hell, they even innovated the one two three four count up to TEN on “Part 2 (The Numbers Game),” and bands for generations continue to generate songs that shoot for, but never reach the heights of this record!
