Misanthropaea

I Want My (Old) MTV

So the typical traffic accident of Christmas television programming was driving me crazy with the usual parade of useless bullshit – the twenty-four hour benzodipaine cycle of Home Alone, A Christmas Story, and the idiotic Top Whatever Countdowns of 2009 – and, as the coffee maker sputtered and farted to inform me that I could finally enjoy my liquid brown sunshine, I stopped surfing randomly at what turned out to be MTVhit (that’s channel 214 for those of you with Verizon Fios). They were doing a countdown of… well I’m not entirely certain what they were doing a countdown of, but it appeared to be the Top Shit Videos of All Time Ever in the Universe.

I landed on the last moments of ‘Run This Town’ by Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Kanye West, with its very explicit sense of impending gang related violence begging the repetitive musical question ‘S’up?’ and was then regaled with the horrors of the Beyonce, er, hit ‘Single Ladies.’

Now, having spent last holiday season exiled to the ‘hood, I am painfully aware of this particular song. The local Hip Hop/R&B radio station played it every fifteen or twenty minutes every day for months – part of a brain-softening ten song playlist of the worst excuses for music I have ever heard.

Fortunately I had managed to escape the video. Honestly, MTV – the so-called ‘Music Television’ – hasn’t been in the music video (or music) business for years, so who can really give a damn about anything they do? Honestly I was surprised to find that they are not only still broadcasting but that they had branched out into other little MTV clones that also don’t have the slightest fucking thing to do with music.

So I stopped dead in the doorway between my kitchen and living room, steaming hot cup of Kenya AA  in hand, and stared in disbelief at this video. 

What the fuck is this thing? I mean, yeah, back in the 80s you had shit videos like The Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ and the embarrassing primer on How Not To Make a Music Video ‘Gloria’ by the late Laura Branigan, but it’s almost 25 years later! Do all videos suck this badly now? Surely we’ve advanced from the primitive days of the glitter ball and spandex tights!

What was the director’s concept:

‘Okay, Bouncy—’

‘That’s Be-yon-say.’

‘Right. Whatever. I want you to jerk your head, kind of like this, and then run in a little circle as we flash the lights. Can you spread your thighs really wide, maybe squat a little – like this – and waggle your leg fat in a really unbecoming manner? Maybe do something with your hands, like wave them like they’re on fire or asleep or something like that?’

‘How am I supposed to sing?’

‘Singing? Who cares about singing? Ask Ashlee Simpson or Milli Vanilli. Well, it’s just Milli now. Vanilli’s dead. But my point is, it’s all about lip syncing and using electronic pitch correction. Can you waggle that fat for me, baby? Make it look real slutty? Oh, and – here – wear this cool cyborg glove for me, will ya? It’s kind of a shout-out to all my SCA homies.’

Of course the video for ‘Single Ladies,’ where Beyonce and two women dance and run in circles in some netherworld void of black and white, is completely different to the video she did for ‘Ego’ where it’s just her and two women dancing in a black and white netherworld void that resembles a public lavatory.

Lyrically, though, this song with its ‘Wuh-uh-oh, oh-oh-oh’ is simply no match against what followed it – the blistering musical tour de force of Lady Gag’s – sorry, Gaga – ‘Bad Romance’ and its deeply introspective lyrics of ‘Rah rah ah-ah-ah!/Ro mah ro-mah-mah/Gaga Ooh-la-la!’

The genius of this latter powerhouse seems almost to echo the poetic sentiments one finds in such unforgettable krimanchuli classics as Fröken Vega’s CuCu Yodel.

Thank the gods that during a much-needed break for advertisements about all the cool upcoming non-music related programming on MTV I managed to grapple for the remote and discovered that the History Channel was running an all day marathon of UFO files.

Gods bless us, every one…

Great White Way

I was thinking that, when the musical version of Silence of The Lambs premiers on Broadway some day soon, with music by Elton John and lyrics by Tim Rice, some of the musical numbers should be…

1. Eat Your Heart Out

2. Quid Pro Quo

3. An Old Friend For Dinner

4. I’d Fuck Me

5. Girl In A Pit

6. Lotion In The Basket/Don’t Make Me Hurt Your Dog

7. A Fine Chianti

Discuss…

The Great Gig in the Sky

It's not very often that you can say music will never be the same again. I remember being moved to tears at the 2005 Pink Floyd reunion because, as a fan for 35 years, it was the closest I had ever come to the exhilaration of seeing them live. I never dreamt it would be the last time.

Richard Wright, 28 July 1943 - 15 September 2008.

Shine on, Rick.

Classic Rock From A to B

Had I known, in the fall of 1977, that every day for the next thirty years of my life I would hear We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions, I never would have bought the album News of The World. Of course there are a lot of albums I might never have bought, but that one in particular stands out. I don't think there are words enough to accurately or adequately describe how utterly sick to death I am of hearing the same tiny handful of songs repeated ad nauseam on "Classic Rock" radio.

And to the inevitable question, "Why not listen to another station?" well, actually, I do--whenever I can. The problem, though, is two-fold: one, the local National Public Radio station (which is my station of choice 90% of the time) plays no music until approximately 9 or 10 pm and by then it just doesn't really matter unless I'm driving home at that time of night; and, two, the local National Public Radio station (which is my station of choice 90% of the time) plays no music until approximately 9 or 10 pm.  Most of my day is spent incarcerated in a 2500 square foot prison cell disguised as a liquor store with a big clear glassy thing overlooking a sprawling meadow of dirty grey asphalt and, between my co-workers--like Golf Gardner who has to listen to The Oldies ("Super Sixties and Seventies," so they say, but I hear Hurts So Good enough to be suspect of that tag line) and Marky DeSade who feels that it's best for us as a company to be more conservative and go for "customer friendly" (i.e. "safe") music--I am usually forced to listen to sheer dreck for eight to ten hours a day.

To be fair, though, Marky likes to fancy himself a total "Headbanger" and usually the minute I'm gone for the day (as I've heard from other employees) he breaks out his Judas Priest CDs and plays Air Guitar to an adoring crowd of none. Whenever I turn on the local headbanger station, though, Marky will scowl and huff, showing his disapproval and disdain for my choice of stations. Maybe he doesn't like it when I savagely attack the Gay S&M Goth Opera that is System of a Down and that wretched bullshit excuse for a "song" called BYOB. Or maybe he's afraid to rock out in front of me to the Gay S&M Goth Opera antics of System of a Down and thereby belie his Mr Corporate Butt Licker exterior. Maybe he can eat me. (And of course playing CDs in the store is a drag because our cheap built-in speaker system separates the music so horribly that it's like listening to a bad mono mix). But, unfortunately, the one lone radio station that actually plays anything metal spends a vast majority of their time talking about boobs and pot, and when they do finally break into a few scant minutes of music it's generally from the vast collection of tracks on the Metallica CD they own. It's Like Bob & Tom for fifteen year old burn-outs, and not terribly entertaining.

I just wish the local stations would stop fellating their Arbitron sugar daddies and dig a little deeper into the musical closet once in a while. Seriously; Pink Floyd produced more than Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall; The Rolling Stones have more (and far better) songs than Sympathy For the Devil; Old Time Rock & Roll isn't even a fun song at weddings any more; Paul McCartney (either with The Beatles, with Wings, or as a solo act) has had a career that spans over forty years--I think you can play more than Band on the Run! You sorry bastions of the lame and unimaginative should give a listen to the little high school radio station broadcasting in a nearby city--the one that plays everything from Animal Logic to Zebra and everything in between--and perhaps learn a thing or two about what it means to be leaders and not followers hobbling along behind the pack...