Idolator Presents Five Not-All-That-Ridiculous Ways To Celebrate Rocktober
Congratulations, world! You somehow made it all the way to Oct. 1, 2008, which means one thing: It’s time for Rocktober to start. How will you celebrate? Some people are linking to YouTubes of Who songs. Others are hoping that you’ll have a hankering to hear the Divinyls and Foreigner within the same span of time. One guy who got the coveted domain name “rocktober.com” is even saying that we should bring back Metallica Monday, although I know of a few people who might disagree with that idea. Which is why I have five Rocktober-celebration suggestions of my own, all of which are located after the jump.
1. Listen to your entire iTunes library, A to Z. Surely most of the readers of this site have 31 days’ worth of music around their house, if not on their hard drives. (OK, a recent cull caused my iTunes timer to drop to 28.2 days, but I have more than enough CDs that I haven’t yet imported to make up the gap.)
2. Travel through the David Archuleta corn maze. Sure, he’s about as “rock” as the OneRepublic guy, but this maze, located in David’s home state of Utah, has an undeniable appeal, thanks to kitsch factor of getting lost in his eyes being way too high. If some metal fan would like to step up to the plate and make, say, a maze out of the Slayer logo, I’ll be happy to spend a chilly October night fighting my way through that instead.
3. A weekend getaway to Kate Pierson’s motel. The rooms are pretty cheap (the six-person Lazy Lodge, which has its own swimming hole (!), will only set each of your friends back a hundred bucks), the toiletries are collected from Kate’s jaunts around the world with the B-52’s, and the kitchens have all the cocktail fixings you’ll need. And the upstate New York location is especially good for those of us who missed All Tomorrow’s Parties a few weeks back, cough cough.
4. Open a pool based around betting on which awful musicians with new albums coming out will warble “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America” during the baseball playoffs. A glance at this page of upcoming releases reveals that baseball fans will probably be greeted by the vocal chords of Kenny Chesney*, Chris Cornell, and the Hinder guy soon, while AC/DC and Oasis are among the “not bloody likely, but wouldn’t it be awesome” contenders.
5. Spend all your waking moments obsessing over what music’s “October surprise” will be this year. A year ago last night, Radiohead coined the phrase “the Radiohead model” by digitally releasing In Rainbows 10 days after it was done. A few weeks later, OiNK got turned into crispy bacon by the UK authorities. So what’s going to happen this year? Will Kanye West, Bruce Springsteen, and the Arcade Fire announce a mini-tour in support of Barack Obama? Will Thom Yorke let the world know that he thinks Sarah Palin is “not all that bad, plus she’s got right nice glasses”? Is Apple going to call the major labels’ bluff and shut down iTunes? Or none of those things? Let’s play futurist!
* Trust me on this one. He’s a lock. I would put down money on it in a heartbeat.
