I’m writing this on July 23rd, 2021, around 9:00 pm Japan time. As I right this, the Opening Ceremonies for the 2020* Summer Olympics are underway. Like everything else about these bastard games, the Opening Ceremonies have had their fair share of controversy. Originally, Japanese musician Cornelius was going to be the composer for the event. However, after some pretty vile aspects of his personal life were unearthed, he was shitcanned.

So now, instead of music from the guy who abused handicapped children, they’re using music from video games. Nerd Twitter is, obviously, nerding out at this. “Yay Chrono Tigger music at the Olympics OMG wow!” And hey that’s great I’m really happy for all of them. But the Opening Ceremonies are also using music composed by Koichi Sugiyama, the Dragon’s Quest composer who, rather infamously, has been a longtime Japanese war crime denier, vocal racist, and proud homophobe who likes jokes about gay kids killing themselves.

The Olympics aide countries in committing human rights violations, ignore rampant genocide, are sexist as hell, and engage in anti-LGBT policies on the regular. So really, in the grand scheme of things, this ain’t shit. But I’m still surprised they didn’t even think “hey, we just had to fire a guy because he made handicapped people literally eat shit, we should really vet the music we’ll use from this point on.” Or hey, maybe they did and they just decided that Sugiyama laughing at the idea of gay kids committing suicide, and his constant racist nationalist rhetoric was just a-okay and what the Olympics stands for.

I feel it’s safe to assume that Ryuichi Sakamoto turned the Olympics down, or we would be hearing his music right now. But was Hosono busy too? How about Towa Tei? Shit, call the guy who makes music for Perfume. Fuck, I’d take SMAP at this point. Ridiculous.

Anyways, in happier news, I was banned from YouTube! Seriously. It’s not that big a deal. It’s kind of annoying because I have to make another YouTube account just to subscribe to channels, but my own YouTube channel wasn’t exactly a vital part of my online presence. I had less than 200 subscribers and my biggest videos were rips of Bleachers’ B-sides. Whatever.

I was banned because I made the mistake of sharing clips from the movie Urgh! A Music War, upscaled to 4K. I figured that it wouldn’t have been an issue, since you can literally watch every single scene from Urgh! on YouTube already. But maybe the 4K part irked someone. It was taken down less than an hour after I uploaded it.

I put a lot of work into that upsale. Bought a pretty expensive program to do it, worked really hard to edit it all together, and was really proud of it. I really want people to see it. Thankfully, Internet Archive. Go get it before you can’t anymore. I’m sorry it’s like 40GB, but 4K is big.

It looks REALLY REALLY GOOD though. Trust me. Holy shit. You can practically tell what Danny Elfman ate for dinner.

Now some angry music.

Be Your Own Pet
Blow Yr Mind (Battles Tapes Version)
The Beast Within (Battles Tapes Version)
Bummer Time (Battles Tapes Version)
What’s Your Damage? (Battles Tapes Version)
I know I’ve extolled the virtues of BYOP on this blog before. They were one of my favorite bands of the late 00s. I still mourn that breakup and secretly (or not so secretly) wish that they’ll somehow get back together and release a new album. It could happen, they were babies when they broke up. I bet the oldest person from that band is like, 35 years old, at most.

These alternate versions of tracks from their final album, Get Awkward, are bonus tracks on the Japanese version of that album, which I found used for next-to-nothing this week. It was a good day.

Don’t watch the Olympics, listen to punk rock.

(Photo, taken by me, is of Jemina Pearl of BYOP at Lollapalooza about five seconds after she vomited a mountain of watermelon on stage.)