Million Dollar Itch

The streets of the San Francisco Bay Area are littered with reminders that America is far from the shiny, happy reality that Madison Avenue attempts to sell us. Prostitution, crack cocaine, Mexican brown powder heroin, and flesh-eating bacteria fill the back alleys behind the modernized Norman Rockwell-via-Disney fantasyland of Fisherman's Wharf, Union Square, and all the other tourist traps. San Francisco's affluent, upwardly mobile types step over decaying homeless people while racing to the latest restaurant that doubles as a shrine of false sophistication. The land of opportunity is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, and Million Dollar Itch provide the perfect soundtrack to the decline of Western civilization.

Million Dollar Itch's past is a bit obscured by a lack of biographical information, but rumor has it that the group was formed when singer/guitarist Johnny Darkness and drummer Brian McCarthy were in drug rehabilitation together. Once out of rehab, MDI became a reality. Soon afterward, bassist Stephen Beacham was added, as well as a keyboardist who was eventually replaced by Ron Heckert. MDI's sound is that of night terrors and extreme paranoia. Postindustrial culture, sans the Temple ov Psychic Youth dreadlocks and crusty conformity, provides the foundation that MDI builds upon with hints of new wave, metal, and Dead Kennedys-inspired lyrics. In fact, Johnny Darkness' vibrato often sounds like the bastard love child of Jello Biafra and Stevie Nicks.

MDI released Angry America in December of 2007. The album holds up a mirror to the obsessions of contemporary American culture: worshipping fame rather than intellect; war profiteering filling the coffers of centralized banks rather than humanitarianism. MDI projects the sad daily reminders that the San Francisco Bay Area is not an artistic utopia teeming with compassion, but rather a reflection of a very sick and angry society that desperately needs a tune-up.