Yee And/Or Haw

Oh, goodie, it looks like all the algorithms are agreeing that I’m interested in the lasted skirmish in the “culture wars”.

See, there’s this country song that is, somewhat unsurprisingly, violent and racist. And as the song gained traction, people pointed out that the violent, racist song was violent and racist.

So the singer responded that the song just represented small-town values, and everyone was like, “yes, we know, small town values like violence and racism.”

And then the singer said the song was about how small town people have each others backs, and everyone else was like “yes, we know, by violently beating up anyone with a different skin color than you on the mistakes belief that they’re going to do crimes and/or burn your town down like you think they did to all the cities during the George Floyd protests except that didn’t happen either.”

And then the argument somehow keeps going, because the bar for plausible deniability for America’s Nazi and Nazi-adjacent communities is so low that even wearing a swastika or quoting Hitler and getting applause for it somehow isn’t enough to settle the “are they a bad person” argument. Because making a reasonable judgment based on blatantly obvious evidence wouldn’t be “balanced”. Or drive engagement metrics.

Fa La La La La, La La La SUCK.

Memo to Christmas: GET BETTER MUSIC.

Or stop getting worse music. Whatever. Just bring the overall average up, is what I'm asking. I don't have anything against Christmas music in principle, as a concept, but the genre has certain limitations and problems that can be summed up in a few short words:

NOBODY NEEDS TO HEAR JESSICA SIMPSON SING "THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY".

Pop stars should not, under any circumstances, record Christmas albums. Period. A pop star belting out a Christmas classic is the worst kind of Christmas music there is. For one thing, it's a blatant money grab. Want to keep those ASCAP royalty checks rolling in long after you're a forgotten punchline on a VH1 retro special? Make a Christmas album, and from that point on, in-store music systems will keep your crap in rotation three months a year, and you'll be able to afford canned pork-n-beans until Bands Reunited gets around to you.

And unless and until you've invented an entirely new musical genre, there isn't a single goddamn thing you can do to The Little Drummer Boy that hasn't already been done. The thing's been covered by more celebrities than Paris Hilton has. Your parumpapumpum isn't any different from anyone else's so stop shoving your parumpapumpum in our collective faces.

While we're on the subject, STOP COVERING JINGLE BELL ROCK, for fucksake. How is that ever a good idea? The original is a piece of shit, a relic of the 50's where old people tried to make a Christmas song with the new hip "rock" sound. Even for 47 years ago, it was safe and tame and stupid, and more importantly, does NOT translate well to other genres, so CUT IT THE FUCK OUT.This means you, Hilary Duff. You're directly responsible for at least one of the nine ruptured eardrums I've suffered this holiday season to date, and don't think I'll forget it.

The only Christmas music worse than pop stars covering the classics is a pop star writing a new Christmas song. The only good thing about them is that when they inevitably suck, there's something new to make fun of. Even the suppposedly "good" ones of the past few decades eventually grate. By December 23, I, for one, am ready to track down the now grown members of that children's chorus from the John Lennon song and deck them in the balls. If I want to hear screeching children belting out barely-coherent holiday lyrics, well, that's why we keep Hilary Duff around.

The only Christmas music worse than new pop Christmas songs are Christmas novelty songs. Especially that fetid pile of elf-turds better known as "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer". Few things in this life are sadder than watching the people behind a borderline-clever novelty moment from 20 years ago and try to cling to fame by turning the song into a cottage industry, complete with animated special. The song ls like the Zeno's Paradox of comedy. Each time you hear it, it's half as funny as the last time, yet no matter how much time passes, it NEVER GOES AWAY.

The only Christmas music worse than "Grandma..." et al are Christmas commercial jingles. You can take your low, low prices, and the version of Winter Wonderland you've set them to, and shove them up your wreath-hole. Jingles like that constitute criminal abuse of studio musicians, and should be outlawed as a result.

The thing about Christmas music is, only about 10% of it gets listened to by choice. The other ninety percent starts infiltrating the public space in mid-November, seeping like an oil spill into every nook, cranny, and baby seal, strangling the musical ecosystem. Change the channel, and you'll hear some of it. Wake up to the radio, and you'll hear it. Go to fill up your tank, it's piped over the pumps. Go to work, and some shithead's gotten a Flash animated Christmas card and is playing it over and over, as loud as they can. And, of course, there's every retail and service establishment in the country.

If you have a Christmas ringtone, by the way, FUCK YOU. You are part of the problem.

We can't escape it, and they keep making it shittier. It's like politics, only with an antler hat on.

Live, From Funkytown, It's YOU ARE DUMB!

Memo to America: DEEP BREATH.

OK. I know the election's got you all squirrely. I know the campaign's been going on forever. That is no reason, however, to take leave of your fucking senses. Get a grip. Of COURSE Ashlee Simpson lip-syncs.

If you give a shit about this, you have a number of mental and emotional problems which I will discuss and dissect in excruciating detail for you, and it's your own damn fault, because if you give a shit about this, you haven't been paying attention since January 1 whan I started this little endeavor.

Here's your first clue that Ashlee Simpson lip-syncs. Her name is spelled A-S-H-L-E-E. A spelling from which it is possible to extrapolate every single useful fact you could possibly need about Ashlee Simpson. She was raised by people who thought A-S-H-L-E-E was the best way to spell that. And felt that way in1985. If you're named "Ashlee" in 1985, it's inevitable that by 2004, you will be caught doing something wrong on national television.

The Simpson parents ought to express their eternal gratitude that it was singing on Saturday Night Live, and not flashing her cooch on Girls Gone Wild, but they can't, because we haven't developed UPLIFT TECHNOLOGY YET. I mean, even assuming that Ashlee is the brains of the family, a little Darwinian backtracking based on available evidence of her and her sister tells us that their parents previous address was most likely 1 Primordial Ooze Lane. Or possibly Tennessee.

Second vital clue that Ashlee Simpson was lip-syncing: ASHLEE SIMPSON'S MUSIC. You know how much Ashlee Simpson music I've heard? The fifteen seconds or so from the lip-syncing clip. And from that, I can determine that even if everything had gone perfectly, there is nothing in her entire repertoire that (a) she wouldn't have lip-synced given the opportunity, or (b) she SHOULDN'T have. Why the hell not? It's shitty pop-rock. If you think this incident exposes the music industry to be a fake, a sham, in which musical acts are assembled out of pretty bits and pieces for broad market appeal, then I say to you, congratulations on your successful revival, and I trust life in the 21st century is more comfortable than the GLACIER you've been frozen in for two centuries.

If, on the other hand, you are an Ashlee Simpson fan, and are traumatized at the news that your idol engaged in a bit of pre-recorded trickery, it's important for you to understand that your eighth-grade biology homework isn't going to finish itself, young lady, so get your ass off that goddamn Internet and hit the books. If you're not a 14-year-old girl, and you're listening to Ashlee Simpson music, you're either a pedophile or the victim of some elaborate, illegal scientific experiment.*

Third major clue that Ashlee Simpson might lip-sync when appearing on Saturday Night Live: She was appearing on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. Has nobody else ever watched this show? If so, it would explain the popularity of Chris Kattan, but odds are it would have gotten cancelled at least a couple of years ago if I were the sole, sporadic audience. People lip-sync on SNL all the friggin' time.

If you really think SNL is some musical institution, where great musicians deliver classic performances, you need to stop smoking crack with Lorne Michaels. I know he has the best crack in town, but that doesn't mean you have to hang around and listen to his bullshit. For every brilliant, memorable song like... like... actually, the only SNL performance I can remember is when the lead singer of the Pogues, drunk off his ass, wandered aimlessly behind the drum set during what was suddenly an instrumental.

But what about the hypocrisy angle? After all, she told "Lucky" magazine she'd never lip-sync! FUCK YOU. Stop holding 19-year-old girls to a higher standard than your own fucking president. A higher truth standard, a higher honesty standard, fuck, a higher grammatical standard, even. And stop reading "Lucky" magazine while you're at it, you freak.

Ashlee Simpson lip-syncs. Big fucking whoop. If this is your idea of a big deal, I hope you never find out that Santa Claus isn't real, and that prostitutes aren't anything like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Or, if you do find out, I hope to hell I'm not walking in front of your high-rise when you get the news. I just bought these shoes.

*This sentence ensures that I will get at least one Google hit for "Ashlee Simpson pedophile", but I can live with that.**

**This sentence will make it two to four hits. So I won't type it again.

Revenge Of BAD CALL FRIDAY

Back in August, longtime readers of this column may recall that I inaugurated a new Friday feature: BAD CALL FRIDAY. It was such a stirring success that it was never once repeated... until NOW. Yes, it's time for another series of horrible mistakes made by celebrities, corporations, and public officials.

We start in Hollywood, where it was announced, a month or so ago*, that John Woo would be directing a new movie based on the venerable property, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. This is what experts refer to as a TRIPLE BAD CALL:

• Last year, they tried to resurrect He-Man with a new cartoon. The cartoon was awful, failed miserably, and was cancelled. Ergo, a new He-Man movie is a BAD CALL.
• Last year, they tried to resurrect He-Man with a new line of toys. The toys were super-crappy, failed miserably, and the line was cancelled. Ergo, a new He-Man movie strikes me as a BAD CALL.
• This year, they had the brilliant idea to make a new movie, based on a popular character, that had been portrayed in a shitty 80's movie by Dolph Lundgren. This film defied all odds by being almost as bad as (or worse than, depending on who you ask) the original, and was a critical and box-office disappointment. One can draw from this the conclusion that a new He-Man movie would be aBAD CALL.

And really, if you're going to take one 20-year-old piece of shit and bring it back with new "talent", why stop there? Remember "Band Aid", the African poverty benefit supergroup that narrowly avoided a trademark-infringement lawsuit from Johnson & Johnson? You know, the ones that put out the "Do They Know It's Christmas" song that has been inescapable for two months a year ever since? Well, they're remaking it. BAD CALL.

I mean, the original is bad enough. Sure, it's generally thought of as the best of the "save the hungry people" charity songs, but look at its competition. Plus, it was mostly British people, and that gives it bonus cultural cachet that obscures its general crapitude. But a remake? And it's not like they're getting the band (aid) back together or anything. No, this time they're assembling an all new "super"group of today's artists to re-record the song!

Farewell, Bono! You've been replaced by COLDPLAY. That's gotta fucking hurt. The only guy from the original Band Aid that's even remotely close to still relevant, and the coach pulls you out of the game so that those whiny "Yellow" fuckers can belt out "Feed The World". Remember Sting? You know, back in the 80's when he didn't entirely suck? Well, pack him into his Jaguar and send him off onto the ice floe, we've got Travis now. Boy George? Boy Schmorge! We've got a whole BAND full of glam assholes, The Darkness! And remember, when the remake comes out, every single time it gets pirated over the Internet, a child in Africa DIES.

And finally, the right-wing simply can't let "Fahrenheit 9/11" die. The DVD's been out for two weeks, which means it's now officially outside the "window of visibility", and gets stocked back with all the other "F" titles in the Documentary section. Most of the discussion of the film happened over the summer anyway; the DVD release really didn't incite any new arguing. But since the right can't just get on with it, today brings us theBAD CALL release of "Celsius 41.11", a movie title so bad and un-funny that it could have only come from pissed-off conservatives.

This new documentary**, written by Lionel Chetwynd, the man that gave us that stunning piece of Showtime fiction about how incredibly brave and decisive Bush was after 9/11, is named after the temperature at which your brain starts to deteriorate.BAD CALL. Chetwynd is quoted as explaining that "You tell enough lies, and the brain starts to die." Again, BAD CALL. I've thought of at least eight different punchlines for that quote in the time it took me to paste it. Make us lead the target a little, Chetwynd! Don't just stand there with a big target on your ass!

The documentary, intended as a "rebuttal" to Fahrenheit 9/11, spends a lot of time talking about John Kerry, which Fahrenheit didn't mention at all. Oops. Let me make fun of Chetwynd a little more, because his name sounds like an 80's prog-rock band, and because he said something else that was realy fucking stupid. ACTUAL BAD CALL QUOTE TIME!

"What was getting to me was Michael Moore's almost preternatural obsession with getting rid of Bush." - Lionel "HO-Scale" Chetwind. If "preternatural" means "beyond natural", and Moore's desire to get rid of Bush is "almost preternatural", that means it's almost beyond natural, which means it's COMPLETELY NATURAL. Along with the similar desires of anyone who's been paying attention for the past four years. Remember, kids. Being a complete dumbass in public is always a.... BAD CALL.

*They can't all be up-to-the-minute topical, you know.

**Note my kindness and taking of the moral high ground by not putting quotes around it.

Piano Whore

Have I mentioned that I hate Billy Joel?

Apart from repeatedly running his car into shit and not dying, Billy Joel has not done anything in particular recently to reignite my hate. But, as I may have mentioned before, the dismal state of Twin Cities radio forces me to wake up to an awful 80's oldies radio station*. And on that station, they feature the two most hatable songs in Billy Joel's entire repertoire. So just about every time I start to forget that I hate Billy Joel, they'll play "It's Still Rock & Roll To Me" between 6:50AM and 7:10AM, and my hate will rise like a phoenix from the ashes.

Do you know why so many musicians die of car crashes, plane crashes, and drug overdoses? It's so they DON'T END UP LIKE BILLY JOEL. Bald and pudgy and feeding of his own past with a friggin Broadway musical based around his greatest hits. You think that's where Kurt Cobain wanted to be when he was 55? At a party for the Tony-award-winning "Entertain Us!"? Me neither.

"It's Still Rock & Roll To Me" is easily on my top five list of all-time most hatable songs. "We Built This City", of course, stands at #1. Every song Rod Stewart has ever recorded, performed, or sung in the shower combine into one giant song that sits squarely at #2. "It's Still..." comes in at #3, because even in my list, it defines mediocrity. The song from the Chicken Dance is at #4, and, of course, Creed's "My Sacrifice" brings up the rear. If you encounter any of these songs, do not try to apprehend them yourself. Seek the proper authorities for containment and hazmat disposal.

"It's Still..." was embarrassing at the time. It's an old fart bitching about new trends and desperately trying to maintain his own personal relevance. And 24 years later, it's some hideous, shambling, genetic freak of a song full of barely coherent outdated references. And that's on top of just generally being an annoying piece of shit song.

I hate "Only The Good Die Young", too, but I hate people enjoying it more. You would think, first of all, that once the guy hit 50, he'd have the common decency to disavow the song for obvious reasons. And everyone could nod their heads, stop playing it, pretend it never happened, and move on. But nooooooo. People keep singing along with it like it's some great rebellious statement.

I'm going to explain this to you all just this once. Since 1977, we, as a a species, have made any number of musical statements about rebellion. And with a few notable exceptions, most by Limp Bizkit, every single one of them is more compelling than "if you abandon your religion, you get to have SEX WITH BILLY JOEL". Got it? You'd be better belting out "Cum On Feel The Noize".

To this day, I firmly believe that my youthful purchase of the "An Innocent Man" cassette tape was a revelatory act of self-hatred. Since then, of course, I've grown and matured as a person, and learned to re-direct that hate outward to all of you, where it belongs.

Astute readers may notice a gaping hole in the center of the Joelhate. As if Billy Joel had, during the late 90's, produced a work of such mind-staggering banality that the entire world now treats it like a suppressed memory of childhood abuse. Unlike the naive young archaeologist or scientist at the beginning of every half-assed sci-fi/horror movie ever, You Are Dumb Dot Net believes in letting ancient buried evil stay buried, and thus does not officially acknowledge the existence of any such work.

* Face it. 80's stations are oldies stations. When we were growing up in the 80's**, there were stations that were playing music from the 60's, and those stations were called "oldies stations". That establishes a firm 15-25 year age range for "oldies" which I am sticking to even if Clear Channel isn't. 

** Yes, I automatically assume that anyone reading this column is the exact same age I am, why do you ask?

Wired

Memo to Wired and music critics: YOU ARE DUMB.

I spent a lot of time last week poking fundies with a stick. Not too much time, of course, because I don't think there's such a thing as poking fundies with a stick too much. But a lot. So I'll try to lay off them this week, just for the sake of variety.

My task is made easier when people who should know better spout something so pretentious, so wanky, and simultaneously so clueless that it make my eyeballs boil with rage. And Wired came through in the clutch. Remember Wired? They've always been pretentious, but they used to at least be ahead of the curve. I distinctly remember reading in their pages about this new technique that would allow you to substitute words for domain names. This Universal Resource Locator, aka URL, aka the web addresses we've been using for years, got a short paragraph in one issue of Wired long before they became ubiquitous.

Now, Wired is a shadow of its former self, and their web version, Wired News, posted an article about a revolution, a revelation, a renaissance in the way people listen to music now. That innovation? SHUFFLE PLAY.

Yes, all of a sudden, music cognoscenti and critics are realizing that because of the shuffle play feature, when you play all the songs in your iPod or on your hard drive, you have NO IDEA what song is going to play next! Astonishing! I believe, even as I speak, that Arthur Conan Doyle is rising from his grave and, pen gripped in decaying hand, is penning a new story in which a legendary detective walks up to these people and utters the classic line of dialogue: "No shit, ME."

ACTUAL QUOTE TIME! ""I have seen the future, and it is called Shuffle." - Alex Ross, the guy who writes about music for the New Yorker, not the guy who dresses up his neighbors in superhero costumes, paints them, and wins awards. If that's "seeing the future", then I'm Nostradamus on steroids, 'cause I figured this shit out before I knew what a clitoris was.

"There is something thrilling about setting the player on Shuffle and letting it decide what to play next. The little machine often goes crashing through barriers of style in ways that change how I listen." - Ross again. What the FUCK?! I can only assume that, unable to find a new music writer, the New Yorker was forced, through occult science and necromancy, to imbue one of its old line-drawn cartoons, COMPLETE WITH OLD-TIMEY TOP HAT, to life. Who calls an iPod a "little machine"? Is Ross secretly channeling Thurston Howell III?

"Their music collection becomes a treasure trove full of hidden delights which the magic of the machine throws up at them. Some users feel that the machine intuitively understands them by giving them just the type of music they want to listen to when they want it." - the appropriately named Michael Bull, who lectures on media and culture at the U of Sussex. Since Bull fails to deride these people as superstitious morons, I can only assume that he's full of himself in at least two separate and distinct ways. Possibly three.

"This is a radically different way of encountering music and one I don't need to tell you is not possible in any other format." - Steve Bowbrick, columnist for the UK newspaper The Guardian, and a man I want to hit over and over again with a stick until he retracts this sentence.

And if that wasn't bad enough, Wired even managed to find an opposing viewpoint that was EVEN MORE PRETENTIOUS AND IDIOTIC. And they found it coming out of the cakehole of a marketing professor. Quelle surprise. "Personally, and I believe I speak for many old farts here, I appreciate listening to music, be it an opera or a pop album, in the sequence in which the artist decided to present it. Temporal order is an important element of how a work unfolds dynamically over time, an important factor underlying the aesthetic effect. Random shuffle pretty much flushes that down the toilet." - James Kellaris, University of Cincinnati. Kellaris then went on to explain the coherent, natural flow between "Who's Got My Back?" and "Signs", tracks three and four of Creed's 2001 album, "Weathered". That last bit may have just happened in my head. I'm not entirely sure.

When Rip Van Winkle* is telling you to wake up and get with the times, you are deeply out of touch and DUMB.

* EDITOR'S NOTE: This joke would also work using "Robert Van Winkle".

The RIAA

Hot off the headlines, another magical prediction from You Are Dumb Dot Net: The RIAA will be DUMB.

I guarantee you that the RIAA will, over the next few days, participate in what I like to think of as the Great American Pastime. Not baseball, no. The devaluing of the fact.

I'd hate to be a fact these days. You think the Bill in Schoolhouse Rock had a shitty life? Try being a fact in 2004. I mean, even assuming you're a LUCKY fact, and don't get pissed on by people with an agenda, the best fate you can hope for is just to be ignored, disbelieved, and occasionally brought up in Internet arguments.

How horrible it must be, then, to be born into this world as a fact. Like today, when the largest ever statistical study comparing illegal file downloading and record sales showed that there's no connection whatsoever between illegal downloading and diminished record sales.

This isn't market research. This isn't asking 300 people whether they're "more likely" or "less likely" to purchase the music they downloaded. This is fucking SCIENCE. This is counting how many times songs from an album were downloaded, then counting how many sales that album had during that time, and looking at the numbers.

And when they looked at the numbers, for six hundred and eighty different albums, guess what? Really popular albums saw an increase in sales as their downloads increased. Most albums saw no change in sales. A few of the least popular albums saw a slight decrease in sales. Sounds mighty different from what a certain recording industry association in America would like you to believe, doesn't it?

You would think that a reasonable organization, when presented with scientific evidence that their viewpoint might be wrong, would take that evidence and adjust their viewpoint accordingly, but they won't. I'm sure the RIAA will go on making the same claims and suing the same 12-year-old girls and such. Because what good are facts?

"Downloading doesn't hurt music sales" can just join the rest of them in the gutter. Oh, look, there's "National security advisors have testified under oath before" right next to "John Kerry didn't vote to raise taxes three hundred and fifty times". They look only a bit worse for wear now, but just give them a few months, and they'll look as abused and bedraggled as "No connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein".

Oh, we're just the facts,
Yes, we're only some facts
And because you keep your head up your ass

It's been a long, long time since
I've been believed by any,
It's been a long, long time since
I've been said by Dick Cheney

And unless you all grow brains somedaaaaay
I'll be stuck down here, smoking crack
While you hear, PR flacks
Lacking facts

Yes, that was an excerpt from "Dumbfuck Rock!", appearing on your televisions about five minutes after my election or apotheosis, whichever comes first.