Various Artists - Mayor of the Sunset Strip Soundtrack

A quick synopsis of the movie is an order for this review: This documentary shows how Rodney rose to fame as an influential DJ on K-ROQ in LA, introducing many punk and indie bands over the radio. The fact that he had such an influence on music baffles me - Rodney’s other main accomplishments are being buddy to the stars and maybe doing some occasional coke in Studio 54. Other than that, he is kind of a sad man with an extremely grating voice, not much in the looks or intelligence department and barely any personality. But it made for a fairly entertaining documentary, mostly for the many star cameos. If you didn’t see this movie, there is no reason you would want this album. Many of the tracks are from some major acts of the era, like X’s “Los Angeles”, Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out for Summer”, the Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated” (of course), Blur’s “Parklife”, David Bowie’s “All the Madmen” and Starsailor’s “Good Souls”. If you are fan of music, I can rest assured that you have heard these before or already having these in your collection. If you don’t, I would rather pay my own money for you to own them than have you own this soundtrack. Without having seen the film, I think this album would be even more horrendous. Nearly half of the tracks are audio snippets from the documentary, some are from his D-list celebrity friends and some from Rodney himself. It’s not like the movie was so amazing that I would want to relive these moments. In addition, there are several “novelty” songs on here as well, such as an ode to Jennifer Love Hewitt sung by a mentally deranged homeless friend of Rodney’s, as well as a track of the film score with more audio clips played over it, and also “I Hate the 90s” with Rodney sing-talking over a bad guitar track. Oy vey. The two tenths of a point are for the track of Chris Martin of Coldplay singing a live version of “Yellow", which is always nice, and the Dramarama track which I secretly like. (I would never be able to live with myself if I actually purchased a Dramamrama album). If you are Rodney Bingenheimer, the score for this album will be 5.0. If you are anyone in the human race that is not Rodney, please don’t ever look directly at this cd, much less let it grace your stereo. [www.firstlookmedia.com]