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Rock bands are notoriously illfamed for altering line-ups like how a girl changes clothes. Such is the case with the Misfits and their ever-changing line-up of musicians.
Band History
Misfits was formed in 1977 in New Jersey with Glenn Danzig as singer and songwriter, Jimmy Battle on guitar, Diane DiPiazza on bass guitar and Manny Martinez on drums. During it is introductory six years as a band, the band had so a good deal of changes in it is line-up that it begun to take on the look of musical chairs, with Glenn Danzig and Jerry Only as the permanent fixtures. As of last count, there were a total of 17 official members of the Misfits with as galore as 8 drummers.
The band disbanded in 1983 but was resurrected, in a manner of speaking, in 1995 but only after a series of nasty legal battles for the right to use the name. It was to be expected as, for the duration of the official hiatus of the band, it is influence in the punk rock, substitute rock and heavy metal genres has been with resolute determination established. Thus, any person who will take on the name will have almost instant appeal in the new music market.
At present, the members of the group are Jerry Only (a.k.a. Gerald Caifa) on lead vocals and bass guitar, Des Cadena on backing vocals and guitar as well as Robo (a.k.a. Roberto Valverde) on drums. Music fans may hope that there will be no musical chairs coming up but it is still a possibleness given the band’s rocky history, pun intended.
Studio Albums Released
The Misfits are considered the pioneers of the subgenre known as horror punk or death punk. This musical style mixes punk rock with other musical influences coupled with liberal doses of morbid imagery specially of death, thus, the name assigned to the genre.
In it is more than three decades in the music industry, the band has freed 6 studio Misfits albums, 2 live albums, four extended plays (EPs), one box set, five music videos, one DVD, 12 singles and, sadly enough, one cancelled Misfits album. In a great deal of ways, the band is one of the most procreative and most influential rock bands in the industry.
The following are the studio albums freed in the market to date by the group:
• Walk Among Us- This was in truth the third Misfits album to be recorded (Static Age and 12 Hits from Hell were the firsts) but was the primary one freed in March 1982
• Earth A.D./Wolfs Blood- This was the last album Glenn Danzig recorded with the band and was freed in December 1983
• American Psycho- Released in 1997, it was named after the widely known and esteemed novel by Bret Easton Ellis
• Static Age- This was firstborn recorded in 1978 but was only freed in it is entirety in 1997
• Famous Monster- Long before Lady Gaga’s album, there was the 1999 album by the Misfits
• Project 1950- As befits the name, it is a cover of old songs from the 50s to the 60s
Today, the new Misfits is starting to regain it is popularity amongst music fans, which ought to only serve to reaffirm it is status as one of the leading bands in history.
American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis
Now a major motion picture from Lion’s Gate Films starring Christian Bale (Metroland), Chloe Sevigny (The Last Days of Disco), Jared Leto (My So Called Life), and Reese Witherspoon (Cruel Intentions), and directed by Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol).
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves amidst the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we can not begin to fathom. Expressing his unfeigned self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
From Library JournalThis review is based on the galley issued by Ellis’s primary publisher, Simon & Schuster, before it cancelled the book. The book is now going through the editing procedure at Vintage. There may be a heap of changes in the final version. The indignant attacks on Ellis’s third novel (see News, p. 17; Editorial, p. 6) will make it difficult for most readers to judge it objectively. Although the book holds horrifying scenes, they must be read in the context of the book as a whole; the horror does not lie in the novel itself, but in the society it reflects. In the primary third of the book, Pat Bateman, a 26-year-old who works on Wall Street, describes his architect modus vivendi in excruciating detail. This is a world in which the elegance of a business card evokes more aroused response than the murder of a child. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, Bateman calmly and purposely blinds and stabs a homeless man. From here, the body count builds, as he kills a male acquaintance and sadistically tortures and murders two prostitutes, an old girlfriend, and a child he passes in the zoo. The recital of the brutalization is made even more horrid by the first-person narrator’s delivery: flat, matter-of-fact, as impersonal as a car elements catalog. The author has cautiously constructed the work so that the reader has no way to comprehend this killer’s motivations, making it even more frightening. If these acts can not be explained, there is no hope of shelter from such random, senseless crimes. This book is not pleasure reading, but neither is it pornography. It is a severe novel that remarks on a society that has become inured to suffering. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/90 and 12/90.
- Nora Rawlinson, “Library Journal”
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review“Bret Easton Ellis is a very, very good writer [and] American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel…. The novelist’s function is to keep a running tag on the progression of culture; and he’s done it brilliantly…. A seminal book.” —Fay Weldon, The Washington Post
“A masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious, ambitious, inspiring piece of writing, which has big elements of Jane Austen at her vitriolic best. An essential book.” —Katherine Dunn
“A great novel. What Emerson said regarding genius, that it’s the return of one’s rejected thoughts with an alienated majesty, holds true for American Psycho…. There is a fever to the life of this book that is, in my reading, unknown in American literature.” —Michael Tolkin
“The basi novel to come along in years that takes on deep and Dostoyevskian themes…. [Ellis] is showing older writers where the hands come to on the clock.” —Norman Mailer, Vanity Fair
From the Inside FlapNow a major motion picture from Lion’s Gate Films starring Christian Bale (Metroland), Chloe Sevigny (The Last Days of Disco), Jared Leto (My So Called Life), and Reese Witherspoon (Cruel Intentions), and directed by Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol).
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves amid the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we can not start out to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis Pic
American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis Image
American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis Image
American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis Photo
Sadly, An American Classic
Bret Easton Ellis, more than once, captured the essence of America in the 1980′s. In his books, most notably “Less Than Zero,” Ellis codified the look, sound, and feel of the Ronald Reagan, MTV watching, Yuppie 1980′s. Ellis was not closely as fascinated in showing the flashy glitter of that time as he was in revealing the dark side of excess in an America spiraling into total chaos. In “American Psycho,” Ellis attains the rank of a master satirist, savagely skewering a culture that reduces life to power lunches, Armani suits, personal hygiene, and video stores. Ellis is an American Dickens, keeping a mirror up to the face of America and daring us to look deep into it is depths. Needless to say, the reflectivity is not pretty.
Ellis’s protagonist in “American Psycho” is one Patrick Bateman. Patrick is at the pinnacle of power: he is young, buff, tan, and filthy rich. He works, when he feels like it, at a powerhouse Wall Street firm. Most of his days are filled with parties, dating, dining out, renting videotapes, and buying the best of everything. Why not? Patrick may afford to do whatsoever he wants in an America that not only approves of his behavior, but ardently wants to emulate it as well. There is one slight quirk in Bateman’s well coiffed persona, one small, minutely unpleasing ritual he feels he will have to engage in from time to time: Patrick likes to rape, torture, and murder people. His popular victims are prostitutes and homeless people, though he isn’t above killing an occasional cop or child. That Patrick is, inside, a raving lunatic of epic proportions doesn’t matter as long as he may maintain surface appearances. This he manages to do by keeping up on all the latest fads, doling out fashion tips to those less fortunate, and hanging out with the guys and gals on a regular basis.
The book alternates among power lunches at trendy New York restaurants and stomach churning scenes of murder and mayhem. There is a link amid two such disparate activities, and a close reading reveals these links. In essence, Bateman is caught up in an empty, soul crushing existence. The humans he knows and the places he populates are devoid of any deep feelings. In order to feel, to experience life, Bateman will have to kill (or at least fantasize with regards to killing). Murder is his release from the every day banalities of Yuppie life, the only time when he feels as altho he is taking part in a life activity.
The violence may be extended even further, beyond the confines of Bateman’s character, to show the results of a materialist culture on the humane spirit. Does the best of everything always result in happy, well adjusted humane beings? Are those who have great wealth mechanically deserving of our respect because they are wealthy? Are these wealthy denizens guaranteed pleasure because they may buy the best bottled water, the best stereo system, the best clothing? Ellis’s answer is a resounding, and blood drenched, no. Bateman is not happy with his possessions (at least not beyond any surface pleasure), and actually seems to further deteriorate as he acquires more possessions.
The violence committed by Patrick Bateman is veritably sickening on a lot of levels. Ellis provides GRAPHIC descriptions of Bateman’s murders, rapes, tortures, and yes, cannibalism. Those who read splatter creative writing of recognized artisti value won’t see anything they haven’t seen in horror books printed by little press publishers, but for those not used to horror films and books the violence here will unquestionably become unbearable. The violence is not only disgusting; it is cruel as well. It is the type of violence that seeks to humiliate and debase humane beings, to fetch others down to the dark levels where Bateman resides. However, keep this in mind: how may a book proposing to explore the American soul in the late 20th century refrain from using violence as a major plot point? We live in an exceedingly violent society; to ignore that violence is to be dishonest to any severe try at social satire.
“American Psycho” is an indispensable statement on late 20th century American society. Bret Ellis is to be commended for penning a book that plunges into the murky depths of our country’s soul to expose our paradoxes and our ugliness. Ellis took a lot of heat for writing this book, probably from those who live lives a lot like Pat Bateman’s surface existence. As a final note, be careful in regards to watching the film version of this book. It does not capture Ellis’s purposes in any way, shape, or form.
Dressed to impress on a trip to nowhere
Bret Easton Ellis is a master at describing the anomie of end of the 20th century, but nowhere is that anomie more disturbingly brought to life than in “American Psycho”. The book raised a firestorm when it was due to be released; feminists condemned it as misogynistic trash, and when it was at long last published, it was in a trade paperback version because the publisher which was to publish the hardcover version pulled it to keep away from all the controversy. All hell will probably break loose when the movie comes out, if it is in any way true to the book.
Hilarious
A great, effective book. Ellis tailors his style utterly to fit the task at hand. While the endless repetitions of Armani, Blass et al. felt overdone initially, I in the long run fell into the rhythm and found myself astonished and amused to see Bateman applying the same attention to detail when committing dismemberments and dissections. In a way, such a single-minded hyper-functional style is the finest expression of the uttermost moral emptiness of the book’s plot and it’s special and significant stress on aspect over content.
Something which seems to be overlooked in other reviews is how goddamn funny the book is. I had to take care where I would read the thing, since it’s a touchy sufficient matter to be seen reading American Psycho, to say not one thing with regards to laughing out deafening at it. Ellis is a brilliant writer of dialogue, and the dynamics amid the mergers and aquisitions crowd and their incessant bickering regarding all things GQ make for undeniably comic scenes. And Bateman’s fantastically out of place rave with regards to Phil Collins and Genesis is probably the most modern piece of black comedy I’ve ever seen.
Yet Ellis employs his humor to heighten the overall sensation of uncomfortableness evoked by the book. There is a sure unease that comes from reading American Psycho generally, but if a reader buys into Ellis’s humor, they also will have to reckon with the realization of what it is they have been laughing at.
A sick and brilliant exercise in form, function, and comedy.
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