Pop rulez!!!!!!!!!

For the most part, my musical taste is fairly narrow. Metallica? The greatest band of all time. Back in the "Ride the Lightning/Master of Puppets/...And Justice For All" days, no one could touch them. Not even close. In Flames? The best band on the face of the planet at this time. They never let me down. Brilliant.

...

A Thalia song just came on the Pandora station I'm currently listening to. I tried to understand just a tiny bit of it but failed miserably. I clicked "next." I like music in American, the language of the free, thank you very much.

Anyway, I like metal. A lot. I've loved it for many moons and let's face it, what's more metal than a tall-ass, orangutan-armed, skinny kid from southwest Minnesota? Barely anything because, dude, I wear Iron Maiden shirts. I am so totally not a poser.

But no matter how many bone-boiling and blood-crushing masterpieces of metalli-tude I hear, there's still one thing that makes every fiber of my being coo and purr like some bizarre, science-fiction hybrid of a baby and a cat (I call it a kitten).

Pop music.



So help me magnificent Zeus, I fucking love pop music. It's my silver bullet. My garlic. My... gun. I'll head bang and act like a complete and absolute idiot when there is a solid metal tune on, but god help me if a beloved pop song starts blasting out of the speakers because I will sing all the words and act like a complete and absolute idiot. Ok, so maybe that part isn't that different. I've often wondered where I acquired this bubblegum-pop love and in all the thinking I've done, I can really only blame one thing--- the school bus.                                           

Now, contrary to what you might think, and if you're standing up 1) who stands up while on the internet and 2) you better sit your ass down because what I'm going to reveal to you is going to severely weaken your lower limbs, I haven't always been into metal. To give you a little breather to repair your no doubt shattered sense of reality, I present to you this funny cat picture.

Fantastic. 

Like I said, I wasn't always into metal. Back in my elementary-school days when I was but a slightly shorter young man, I barely knew metal existed. All of my musical exposure came from the finest radio station in the history of anything transmitted through a wave, Marshall, Minnesota's 99.7 KKCK. Do you think I'd have the wonderful memory of brushing my teeth and serenading myself in the mirror with every single damn lyric to The Spice Girls' "Wannabe" every night for weeks if not for KKCK? Nope. Do you think I would've had the chance to longingly stare into space and sing Savage Garden's "Truly Madly Deeply" while doing some on-the-fly remixing, transforming the chorus lyrics to, like, totally express how my heart felt at the time? 

I want to stand with (insert a certain red-headed, fourth-grade crush's name here) on a mountain

I want to swim with (insert a certain red-headed, fourth-grade crush's name here) in the sea

Nope. So, thanks to the combination of KKCK and a decently-long bus ride, I was injected with a ton of pop during those formative years. So much pop, in fact, that I specifically remember a conversation between my metal brother in arms Mr. Eric Meyer and myself while riding bikes across Highway 14 near the Corner Store in Tyler (how ridiculous is my selective memory?) It went something like this---

Alex: "Eric, I have to admit something. I actually really like The Backstreet Boys and N*Sync."

Eric: "Uh, ok. You still like Metallica and stuff, right?"

Alex: "Oh yeah, totally."

The thing is, I was actually thinking, "Metallica? I never really liked Metallica." I can't believe I actually thought that. It was painful to even type.

Within a year, I was a full metal convert, swearing by the likes of Metallica, Megadeth and In Flames. But the love of pop still glowed deep down inside me. It wasn't until I started writing my own music, however, that I finally realized why I like pop so much.

1) Pop reminds me of those bus-ride days when the most stressful moment of the day consisted of waiting to see if our gym teacher was going to let us play battle ball.

2) It takes a ridiculous amount of skill to write a successful pop song. You can scoff all you want at the legions of mostly-fake pop stars out there who, ahem, "sing" their songs, but the writers behind them are musically brilliant. The first rule of pop songs is write for your audience. Why include Dream Theater-like progressions and technicality when the vast majority of listeners won't appreciate or enjoy it? I'm a Dream Theater fanboy and the last thing I want to hear on a pop radio station is a twelve-minute guitar solo. Writing a focused, three-minute song that will slay the charts and dig deep into the brains of listeners for weeks on end is tremendously difficult. As the kids say, props to whoever can accomplish that feat. 

So, to honor my love of pop but still stay true to my metallic-soul, I want to take a stab at covering a pop song in a totally metal way. This is nothing new. From Children of Bodom's stunning rendition of "Oops! I Did It Again" to In Flames covering an old-school Genesis track ("Land of Confusion"), there have been quite a few metal bands that have had their way with a pop song. 

Here's the problem--- I don't know what song to do. Backstreet Boys? Christina Aguilera? Hannah Montana? Taylor Swift? The possibilities are endless. So, Shredders, here's what I need to you do. I need pop song suggestions that I can turn into heavier versions. I'll pick what I think will be the most fun to record and, yep, record it so you can all here the end product. I repeat, I'm going to record the best suggestion. So, if there's a pop song you'd love to hear me take a stab at, let me know! Comment with your choice, por favor. I'll choose the best one in a few days and get right to recording it. 

With your help, this is going to be both awesome and utterly ridiculous. A win/win, really.

Post your pop song suggestions!