A Rad Guest Post By Sir Millard Mulch
Buckethead’s fans think he is a unique, underground artist with pure intentions. This is not true. Buckethead is a strategic advertisement for himself.
It has nothing to do with his music and everything to do with his visual appearance — the same scam as every other Rock Star. He’s an accidental genius phenomenon of masterful marketing tricks; on a higher level than any mersh band on the radio could conceive of. After all, if he didn’t have a BUCKET ON HIS HEAD and a weird mask, no one would give a fuck what he did.
His performances are merely a spliced-together collection of visual gags, one after the other. He does the stretchy guitar strap thing, he breakdances the robot, he throws toys into the audience, he plays blindingly fast atonal blasts of laser-beam licks, then plays some heavy metal riffs… then stands around uncomfortably. Can anyone think of anything else? You can count his tricks on one hand.
Try and pick him out from a crowd with only your ears, without having known about the bucket on his head — if you think you can find anything unique in what he does, you have a very limited music history / listening vocabulary. Try and play one of his songs on a piano and see how bored you are with the outcome. He is a sideshow freak to gawk at for amusement, and nothing to take seriously as a real artist. He is not an artistic phenomenon, but a social / advertising one — and just because he has not gone Triple-Platinum (yet) does not mean he is not one of the bad guys in this War. He’s one minuscule step away from having his own reality show on MTV — and if you don’t believe me, ask yourself why Axl Rose hired him to replace Slash, and why he AGREED to it!
If you go to the following site you’ll find The Official Guns & Roses Buckethead Shirt: (Please Click Me). Does anyone need any more proof of his “pure childlike intentions?” Rumor has it that $13 Million dollars have been spent on the production of the new Guns & Roses album, Chinese Democracy. What do you think Buckethead’s cut is — and why would he be involved in such a contrived and obviously mainstream endeavor if not for the money? Make no mistake — this is a business, and Buckethead is a very cunning businessman to have gotten this far.