Monsters & Robots- 20 Year Anniversary
Classic Albums: Monsters & Robots (Buckethead)
Good evening everybody, in today’s video we’ll take a look back and celebrate Buckethead’s most significant album, ‘Monsters & Robots’.
This year ‘Monsters & Robots’ celebrates its 20 year anniversary.
According to google, Wikipedia, all music and a bunch of other websites, ‘Monsters & Robots’ was released 20 years ago today, on April 20th 1999. (4/20)
On this same day 20 years ago today WWF wrestling legend ravishing Rick Rude died and the Columbine thing happened…morbid.
However, after spending way too much time researching, I found out that google, Wikipedia, all music and all those other website are wrong! ‘Monsters and Robots’ was not released on April 20th 99…it was released September 21st 99.
So, the internet is wrong, there was no need to mention Rick Rude and Columbine and there was no point purposely postponing this video just to release it today on April 20th. Fuck you internet.
Good evening everybody, despite having hundreds of album credits to his name, most longtime Buckethead fans will agree that ‘Monsters and Robots’ is right up there with the best of them.
With powerhouse songs like jump man, night of the slunk, jowls, revenge of the double man and scapula, the album was an instant classic among fans, is Buckethead’s bestselling album to date and it lead to Axl Rose wanting Buckethead to join GNR.
Upon its release Buckethead toured with Primus to promote the album and released his first ever music video ‘The Ballad of Buckethead’ featuring Primus singer and bassist Les Claypool. The video had its tv debut on MTV’s 120 minutes.
2 months later the video was nominated for ‘best new artist clip’ in the ‘modern rock’ category at the 1999 billboard music awards.
Unfortunately Buckethead didn’t win… the award went to the band ‘Lit’ for their song ‘My own worst enemy’.
And just to show what we were dealing with that year, the award for band of the year went to the backstreet boys, creed won the rock group of the year, Ricky Martin was the male artist of the year and Mariah Carey won ‘Artist of the Decade. Ah, commercial award show, don’t ya love em?.
The majority of the tracks on ‘Monsters & Robots’ were co-written and produced by Les Claypool along with longtime Buckethead friend and drummer Bryan Brain Mantia.
(Brain interview)
With Monsters & Robots, Les was like ‘Hey, let me make an album’. So he made Monsters & Robots for Buckethead.
The album also features the occasional vocals from funk legend and one of buckethead closest friends, Bootsy Collins.
Not to mention the now famous line “Whats up slobbies”.
Whilst most people assumed this to be Buckethead (myself included) after researching I found out that it is in fact Buckethead’s nephew. So, there ya go
As for the songs themselves:-
Jowl’s pays tribute to Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
Scapula features samples from the movie ‘Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’.
The song Jump Man is a tribute to basketball great Michael Jordan.
The Shape Vs Buckethead is a reference to Halloween’s Michael Myers. Who’s credited as ‘The Shape’ in the Halloween movies and Revenge of the Double-Man is a possible reference to a 1967 british spy movie, features samples from the video game sinister and It’s also a reworking of the song ‘Torture Tunnel’ from Cobra Strikes album ‘The 13th Scroll’.
So with classic songs, a music video, an award nomination and a call-up to Guns N Roses, Buckethead’s bestselling album ‘Monsters & Robots’ is by far his most significant and one of his very best.
So, if you haven’t heard it yet, “What are you waiting for”.