I made a few tribute songs to artists who are no longer with us.  This one is for Pete Steele, who gets a trilogy.

It’s surprising how many of the 90’s artists didn’t make it.  How many of them are still around?  Billy Corgan is one of the few I listened to when I was young who is still alive and has some relevance.  I’ll have to get back to him in a minute.

Type O Negative was fairly successful in the mid 90’s, with the song Love You to Death getting regular airplay.  Their best songs were usually too long for radio though, and IMO they lost most of what was great about them when they switched to shorter, radio friendly pieces after the album October Rust.   The music became too depressing after October Rust as well.  I’ve been through their entire discography, and don’t remember anything from the last three albums – but October Rust is easily one of the best albums of the era.

Pete Steele was a guy with everything going for him.  He was a 6′ 8″ muscle bound rock star with a good face and a big dick (well, I haven’t seen his Playgirl pics, but the topic comes up when people talk about him).  He died with his cat.  If I remember the story correctly, he needed to go to the hospital, but his cat was dying, and he chose to stay with his cat instead of getting help for himself.  So they died together.

I watched an interview where he said his girlfriends always left him because he had a smothering style of affection, which is the inspiration for the Vampire Trilogy.  When you’re a vampire, they don’t get to leave.  He was so close to the answer . . .  Some women can’t be loved, until they’ve been “Loved to Death.”

I put him in the same category as Tesla and Newton – super geniuses who are too different for the love of mortal women.  If Pete hadn’t been a physically impressive rock star, he probably would have been as loveless as they were.  I suspect the common thread here is Aspergers.

Anyway, I wanted to get back to Billy Corgan, because he’s been making a claim lately that the CIA and MTV collaborated to kill rock music and prop up rap music.  Through most of my career in the entertainment industry (I have worked professionally), I believed that success was a matter of having the right idea and being able to perform well.  Also, that some artists are so much better than others that they can sit on a spike of wealth and fame while 99.999% of everyone else who is trying is down on a flat line.  In recent years, I’ve come to bitterly accept that the western entertainment industry is just propaganda used to push destructive ideas on the masses.  The superstars were the ones who agreed to be part of that system.  Vanilla Ice wasn’t a “one hit wonder,” he saw what the industry was about, and walked away.  Lizzo wasn’t a real star, she was propped up to push harmful health choices.  But something has changed, and her new album only sold 2,600 copies.  And rap has taken a nose dive –  No Rap Songs Are in the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 40 for the First Time Since 1990. 

So what does the entertainment industry really look like?  I’ve got decisions to make.  I went back to college to get an engineering degree with the idea that manufacturing would be coming back to America, enough to compensate for my age, but one (or both) of those things hasn’t turned out to be true.  It looks like I will still be facing an uphill battle after graduation, instead of a slam dunk.  However, the traffic for this site has shot up, which is making the webcomic seem like it has potential (that it probably doesn’t actually have).  I’ve got about two months before college starts – should I bump up the plans for this comic, in the hope that it will be something by the time I graduate?  I don’t own a camera or a microphone, except for what’s in my cheap phone.  It wouldn’t be wise to invest hundreds of dollars into video making, without knowing if the site’s traffic reflects real interest.  It may be people searching for something else and bouncing.  So I need to establish fan interaction before investing to create content that fans (who really exist) might not even want.  The music is something that can be fun for me to do, but it doesn’t appear to be working for anyone else.  I don’t want to make another mistake like that.