Yngwie Malmsteen

Notable not so much for the fact of its existence, but for the barely-veiled ferocity of the author's devotion to his subject, this is my favorite Wikipedia entry.

I stumbled on this article a few months ago (well, obviously I was looking for it, but I nearly fell over after I read it), and while I could talk about the fact that this entry is interesting because its author is using an electronic reference guide as a sort of musico-cultural battle ground, whereby he defends certain values Malmsteen embodies (the figure of the "possessed virtuoso" - implicitly, then pretty much explicitly conjured by the link to the hilarious, drunken death threats Malmsteen issues to a fellow passenger aboard an airplane bound for Tokyo), which values the author obviously feels had lost a certain currency to the "simple," "emotional" leanings of "grunge" (although we should note that while my great-grandmother was eventually killed by a case of pneumonia, she was over 90 years old, and if it hadn't been the pneumonia, it might well have been the next brisk wind that did her in. So too with shred: it's time had come. "Grunge" [or whatever] just happened to be there), the reason it really stuck with me is because it's just so fucking funny that somebody loves Yngwie Malmsteen that much.

It's also kind of sad. Take this:

The most frequent criticism of Malmsteen is that his musical style focuses more on showing technical prowess than on substance, although a comparison between his different solos shows that he rarely chooses to play close to the edge of his skills or speed. Further, some of the lyrics employed in some of Malmsteen's songs have been questioned as commercial or "cheesy", but it is likely that these were merely a tool to gain more exposure and radio play in order to showcase his guitar playing. Instrumental passages such as "Sorrow" and "Far beyond the Sun" are generally considered to be his finest work.

The desperation of somebody just barely able to contain their love for Yngwie Malmsteen in the Wikipedia entry format is almost tragic. Think about the poor, discouraged kid, cheeks dusty with chimney soot, who waits breathlessly for the moment when the box office opens. There he buys his ticket and paces outside the club for days, weeks even, awaiting the hero's arrival, custom single-coil Di Marzio pick-ups aglow, strings like wound lightning, flames shooting from the unholy F's adorning his demon-lute, Malmsteen rolling in like an over-fucked twister. But instead, the evening of the show, the kid finds the axman bruised and incoherent, mumbling in the alley behind the club, ejected from his own show, drunk and disorderly. As the kid approaches, he can see the vomit carapace clinging to Malmsteen's battered, moth-eaten black tank-top, and what suddenly crystallizes from the would-be hero's now-flammable breath, the kid can hear as he gets closer, is an incantatory string of homophobic slurs, a polyglottal prism of profanities, Japanese, Swedish, English, and some untraceable Eastern European tongue.

The kid turns and walks out of the alley, kicks up some dust as he does so, and he can hear Malmsteen cough and choke on it, then vomit again and curse. The kid goes home and cries himself to sleep, and wakes up with his eyelashes bejeweled with salt from his own body. As he gets older, he comes to regard this image as a false memory, undercutting his own recollection of that moment in the alley with knowledge that the music industry had it in for Malmsteen from the start. That man in the alley was nothing but some industry disseminated emblem of everything the world had come to hate, no, envy about Malmsteen. It was a bad dream, a false past, and the kid would dedicate himself, in the years to come, to resurrecting that martyr from his tomb. He got himself a computer, went to college, fought the war, semiotic battles float invisible. And he preached, kicking up the words like dust, hoping to choke anybody who comes near enough to offer rebuke. He misses you, Yngwie Malmsteen. Don't let him down.