The staff at a TV station in Berlin did an office lip dub of Peregrine’s Everything’s Under Control.
An office lip dub is one of those things the young people do nowadays. It is, at least, preferable to some of the other things young people are into in that it doesn’t appear to involve promiscuity or scarification or amphetamine abuse in any overt way.
Because school bullying, emo music and the interwebz turn kids into mass murderers and suicides.
After having ridden the outrage they built up and stoked, detail by gory detail, for as long as they could, giving self-promoting pop psychologists and shameless politicians alike their chance to say something insensitive and inappropriate, sensible media types are now chiding us for credulously believing such nonsense and seeking scapegoats for more complex issues.
Yes, that would be the same media that has been beating up the story for the past week.
The Herald’s entertainment reporter Emily Dunn tut-tuts:
From Black Sabbath to goth-rocker Marilyn Manson and the disaffected pin-up boy Kurt Cobain, the dramatic lyrics and costumes of the dark music genres have always been a more tangible enemy than the behavioural and mental health problems that contribute to a young person’s decision to stop living.
Ah yes, that old chestnut. But surely the media and our fearless leaders would never attack the easy targets, rather than addressing the complicated and harder-to-solve issues, for cheap points-scoring or page hits?!
Personally, I’m with Denis Leary: we need to put more messages into heavy metal and emo records:
Kill the band, kill your parents, then yourself, ok!? Make sure you get your whole head in front of the shotgun. Thank you for calling!
But if being bullied at school, internerdism and a love of dark music are to blame, it can only be a matter of time before I kill myself and/or a whole bunch of other people. Then when I do, the media can go into another feeding frenzy about how I warned everyone in my “blog” - a form of electronic communication popular with the young people - and how come nobody saw the warning signs?!
Sorry for the dad joke, but I heard that awful song Listen with Your Heart on the radio in a cab yesterday and it occurred to me that technically speaking, you can’t listen with your heart any more than you can:
At a recent(ish) Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS concert, the casts of Avenue Q and Fiddler on the Roof got together in a fine example of the “replace regular words with Jewish words for humorous effect” school of comedy. ‘You live on Avenue Q’ becomes ‘You shlep/kvetch on Avenue Jew’. Hilarious!
I was forced listen to this on the radio while in the queue at the supermarket. Imagine the hubris, the chutzpah of two Australian nobodies trying to cover a Peter Gabriel-Kate Bush duet.
Then imagine just how badly they murdered it, like the talentless, clueless Z-listers they are.
Then imagine them dying slowly and painfully on top of a fire made of all the CDs ever manufactured of this abomination and all the iPods that ever had it stored in them.
Ah, that’s better.
I’ve been told this a nerdish quality, but there are times when someone poses a rhetorical question that I find impossible not to answer. You may also remember in the past I have advocated the death penalty for R&B music, partly as an aesthetic disagreement but more because of the twisted values it imparts to young people.
Having switched the gym for the swimming pool, I no longer have regular opportunities to sample the latest contemporary children’s music. So this may be a little out of date, but I only recently came across this song, called Don’t Cha by the Pussycat Dolls.
The verse starts out with the singer addressing a man who, it rapidly becomes apparent, already has a girlfriend. The gist of her argument is that since it’s obvious we are attracted to each other, there’s no reason we should not fly in the face of however many thousands of years of human evolution through which we learned to defer or deny our animal impulses in order to achieve longer-term or loftier goals . . . and have sex. (But, you know, promoting infedelity is a great way to sell goods and services, so it’s an ideal line of thinking for an R&B song.)
Went to see Tripod at the Metro tonight. Now I just thought I enjoyed their musical talents, great harmonies and clever, whimsical and piss-funny lyrics. But judging from the complete absence of fashionably (or even well-) dressed people at the gig, it appears being a Tripod fan makes me a complete nerd.
I will, of course, admit to having been a nerd in high school, although I never needed glasses or owned a pocket protector. I was in the chess and computer clubs, did the lighting and sound at school plays and wasn’t very good at sport. Guilty. But I have outgrown my nerdly ways, aside from liking They Might Be Giants, and am almost never nerdy these days. Or so I thought.
Decoder Ring’s soundtrack for the movie Somersault still makes me melancholy after two years.
Wandering home from the pub munching on some chocolate and a cab pulls up in front of me. The driver asks for directions to a street I didn’t know. I recognise the passenger as the lead singer in a band I’ve seen live a few times. She says her phone is dead and she can’t contact her friend and asks if I live nearby and have a Nokia charger. As it happens the answer is yes to both, she tells me to get in and I direct the cabbie to my place. The fare on the meter is already hefty; apparently they have been driving around for half an hour trying to find the place.
The cabbie waits outside and she follows me into my house, obviously a bit wobbly, plugs in the phone and waits for it to come to life. In the meantime, I tell her I’ve seen her band and she’s surprised but very pleased. She calls her friend, who gives me directions. She tells her friend I’m some totally random but lovely guy. On the way out, she keeps saying what a nice house I have.
I direct the cabbie to her friend’s place, which is convoluted . . . it’s Newtown after all. On the way she hands me a cabcharge slip. She tells me I must come to their next gig. We get there and the friend comes out and takes her inside. Then the cabbie takes me home and I sign for the now very large fare. That’ll take some explaining back at the office, I’m sure.
I wonder if she’ll remember me.
It’ll be hard to write this without sounding like a boring old geezer complaining about how the young people these days dress funny and listen to awful music that sounds like noise. So I won’t bother trying.
Young people these days dress funny and listen to awful music that sounds like noise. At least this is the impression I got from Parkshite yesterday.
That top-secret government Paris Hilton cloning project is obviously going great guns. And the country’s hairdresser skills shortage has reached crisis judging by the obligatory two choices of topiary - fauxhawk or longish and unkempt - on all the young men. (Obviously this crisis requires urgent federal funding.) The young men were also uniformly dorky and about half of them wore t-shirts with funny slogans that weren’t funny.
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