September 16, 2004 Meat On The Street I'm not particularly a huge fan of street teams. While I think the basic concept of a band wanting to promote their work via their fans is fine, it's the fans themselves who actually carry it out that annoy me. For example, last year I had the priviledge of attending a rock concert by A Perfect Circle during their preview tour for The Thirteenth Step. Once the musical performance ended, I proceeded to exit the building. No sooner did I step out the door than some street teamer stuffed a Thirteenth Step postcard in my face. "Here! Go buy this when it comes out!" Now, I don't consider myself a genius by a long shot. But wouldn't it make just a tiny bit more sense to advertise A Perfect Circle at a place where there's a single person who hasn't heard of them? Wouldn't it stand to reason that pretty much everyone at the A Perfect Circle show already knows who A Perfect Circle is, and has already made a decision whether or not they intend to purchase the new A Perfect Circle CD that you're desperately trying to pimp? You think? Then there's the "e-teamer", a variation of the street teamer with the added bonus of pure, unadulterated laziness. The e-teamer, instead of actually going out and interacting with others, opts to copy and paste a link to the band's website anonymously on every single internet message board they can find, and then disappear like a fart in the wind. Their parents, I'm sure, are very proud. Now that I've established my views on street teams, here's an e-mail I received the other day:  While I don't care much for street teaming, I do derive some kind of perverse pleasure from the idea of a profanity-laced installment of the Meathead Perspective posted on a bulletin board next to yard sale advertisements and a Little League sign-up sheet. So I figured that if there are actually people out there who want to print these things out and do sick, sick things with them, I guess I'll try to help out a little, because it's a great opportunity for me to be nice and be a total bastard at the same time. Printing directly from a web page looks crappy, especially when it's this one. So what I did was make Adobe? pdf versions of several Perspectives I feel suck slightly less than average. The pdf files are much more streamlined and suitable for printing. So suck on that. For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the Adobe pdf format, odds are you already have the Adobe Reader program, which reads pdf files, on your computer. If not, you can "easily" download it (depending on how high the doctor was holding you when he dropped you as a baby) here. Don't worry, it's free, you fucking cheapskate. Once you've downloaded and opened the file, simply print to your favorite little printer, and voila. Instant crap. You can download the pdf's here, or from the Archives page (if you're a heathen PC user, right click to save): "Winning Souls For Trent" (8/11/99) "Nails In Space" (10/20/99) "What's The Deal With Leo?" (11/17/99) "Learn Some Manners" (1/12/00) "Walking The Walk" (3/15/00) "Please Stop Stalking Me" (8/16/00) "A NIN-mas Carol" (12/25/00) "All That Could Have Been" (8/21/01) "Yeah, Right" (3/31/02) "Trent Thinks He's Hot Shit" (9/17/03) Now that you've undoubtedly printed ten thousand copies of each one, what are you going to do with them? Well, as those two girls, whose names I forgot already, said in their lovely letter, you can "accidentally" leave them behind in any number of public places. But use common sense (those of you who have some, anyway) and don't do shit that will get you in trouble. Don't throw them into wildlife preserves. Don't stick them on cop cars. Don't attack the President with them. The Meathead Perspective is not a cause worth getting arrested for. Worth dying for or renouncing Christ for, maybe, but not going to jail. Here are a few other suggestions: • Give a copy to anybody you know who might remember who Nine Inch Nails is (I'd say there are approximately 10 per metropolitan area) • Print out one of each, staple them all together, and keep in the bathroom (where they'll serve more than one purpose). • Print out several hundred copies of each, and use in lieu of newspapers per the instructions in the September 14th update (below). • Mail copies to John Malm so he will have something to read in prison, in between ass rapings. • Cut up the pages and rearrange the words so they're funny. • Give them to people at A Perfect Circle concerts after you run out of A Perfect Circle postcards. • Great for paper cuts. • Now's as good a time as any to learn the ancient Japanese art of origami.
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