It's country music time again in Framed! Regular readers know that we love all types of music, but there's always been a special place in our heart for country. And our featured artist, Gretchen Wilson, is bringin' it with her 2006 song, "California Girls."

Unlike the more famous Beach Boys' song of yore, Gretchen's "California Girls" aren't something to emulate--instead, they're "skinny little girls with no meat on their bones" who wear phony smiles and are afraid to eat fried chicken. Why, we oughtta! Humorously enough, it all takes place on a suspiciously Californian-looking beach, too.

Well, leave it to Gretchen to tell it like she thinks it is. She's nothing if not the real thing: her mom was only 16 when she had Gretchen, and Gretchen grew up without a dad, living with her mom in trailer parks in rural southern Illinois. We think she's walked enough of the walk to entitle her to her Bible-and-flags patriotism and down-home values. So please enjoy this great country artist and let

Longtime readers of the rock press may recall that this blog met Metallica way back in the day, long before they became peevish and crotchety. They were opening a Detroit-area show for W.A.S.P., a hair metal band whose very existence has since been wiped from human memory. We don't really remember very well because we got drunk with Blackie Lawless, but we're sure they were outstanding.

That was over 20 years ago, and no one's happier than Framed that Metallica now has the #1 album in the United States. Their astonishing Death Magnetic--certainly the finest record released in the last five or six weeks!--grabbed America's imagination and actually made its chart debut at #1. Mister, that's a low number!

To help celebrate, this week's Framed is all about their last album, St. Anger, a much-overlooked disc that...are we missing something here?...also debuted at #1. Well, we'll look into it.

This week's vid, the title track off St. Anger, was shot at California's San Quentin State Prison,

Hello again, readers, and welcome to this week's very special Framed. For the first time in the history of our award-winning blog, we would actually prefer that you watch this week's video over reading this week's captions.

Yeah, it's the best video we've ever had. Seriously. 

Don't get us wrong, we'd like you to read the captions, too. But if your time is limited, watch the video first.

This week we honor Europe, a mid-'80s hair metal band that--to our mind--recorded the definitive metal song and video with "The Final Countdown," a stupendous, some would say bombastic, song/keyboard riff that should be your ring tone right now! The lyrics, ostensibly inspired by David Bowie's "Space Oddity," combine a certain astronomical naïveté ("We're heading for Venus and still we stand tall / 'Cause maybe they've seen us and welcome us all") with... well, little else, really. But Europe was from Sweden, which is almost like another planet, so let's cut 'em some slack.

We're keenly interested in

New Wave music--a movement that breathed life into the moribund late 1970s and early 1980s--produced any number of ingenious, talented musicians, including Elvis Costello, the Ramones, Television, Talking Heads... really, the list is a long one. 

This week's featured artists, Men Without Hats, a Canadian group with an ever-changing lineup, belonged to a different group of New Wavers... what can best be described as the heavily-synthesized side of New Wave. Bands like A Flock Of Seagulls, the Thompson Twins, and everyone's favorites, A-Ha, were not only into synthesizers, they also liked bizarrely unthreatening and uninteresting names.

It was quite a time to be alive!

Like many of the synth bands, Men Without Hats had one big, big hit--in their case, "The Safety Dance," which hit #3 in Billboard in 1983. This week's video, "Pop Goes The World," was their highest-charting follow-up,  getting to #20 in 1987. 

We're keenly interested in what modern viewers make of Men Without Hats and