Mel Gibson, do I have a job for you!

Who, me? Crazy? I made Passion of the Christ! It's about Jesus!


Stoners and trippers of the world united way back in the day when it was "discovered" that playing "Dark Side of the Moon" simultaneously with the first hour of "The Wizard of Oz" would seemingly create a soundtrack for each scene. It seemed like one big stupid lie--which takes you to the root of it all: What idiot just happened to be listening to the Floyd while watching a muted Wizard of Oz? That's the 70s for you, I guess.

Let's face it, everyone loves conspiracy theories. We all want to be Fox Mulder, living life by the saying "I want to believe" no matter how dumb or far-fetched the topic. Anyone who writes convincingly enough with a few seemingly pertinent clues can cause a shitstorm overnight. For example, one of my favorite recent conspiracy theory essays had some paranoid geek convinced that the Facebook is some government spying tool to keep tabs on radical students (hence the "Political Views"), tying the creator of the Facebook to a bunch of conservative hotshots. You know what? You need to just relax, buddy. You know, go have a coffee with a friend, play a little beach volleyball, watch reruns of Designing Women, and when you're all settled, please shut the fuck up.

Music conspiracies usually catch a reader's eye a little more often because some artists are just pretentious and self-involved enough that they might actually create some sort of mystery out of their albums (read: Roger Waters). One that comes into mind is Tool and A Perfect Circle frontman Maynard James Keenan, who, according to many self-proclaimed experts, created a Fibonacci sequence puzzle out of the album "Lateralus." Looking at Tool's fan base, I'd like to think they're reading a little too deep into their gaunt and scraggly hero's "art," but I wouldn't put it past Maynard to be that ridiculously over-the-top.

According to some drunken hipster named Claudia, there is reason to believe that Spoon's "Gimme Fiction" is in fact sequenced backwards, with the new order of songs creating some sort of amazingly cohesive album. Apparently, each song has a little instrumental part near the end of it that references the previous song. This was unofficially refuted by many intrigued fans and some indirect comments by lead Spooner Britt Daniel, and has since led me to new words to live by: never, and I mean NEVER, trust a drunken hipster.

The final conspiracy I'd like to cover--one that definitely caught my eye--was the belief that if you re-order each song on the Pixies' "Doolittle" according to the order of the songs shown in the liner notes, you get the album "the way they originally intended." When I nerdily attempted, the only thing that really interested me was the fact that "No. 13 Baby" is indeed track 13 on the "real" version. The reason I'm not convinced is that I can't see Frank Black and Co. so into themselves by their second record that they decided they needed some sort of cryptic statement to prove themselves. Oh, and the fact that Doolittle is already incredible to begin with.

This just proves that when people are into an album enough, they're always left wanting more--the b-sides, the live versions, the rarities, and the really stupid conspiracy theories. Can't the original work be good enough for you? Christ, people.
I'll be back later, I'm busy rotating Peter, Paul and Mary for this really nifty deviled eggs recipe.