chilidogsunday
Chili Dog Sunday
This is the reappropriation of the long dormant List of Things that Piss Me Off into an amalgam of rants, raves, and ramblings, written by Corey.
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The American Scream (For Help)
Here’s a thought for everyone to ignore because you probably won’t take the time to read this:
I’ve seen a lot of posts trying to explain the mass shooting that took place yesterday. It happens every time. From those who want to push for gun control to the lazy explanations claiming it’s a matter of parenting.
Let’s be honest with ourselves—it’s probably way more complex than that.
It’s true that these types of mass shootings in developed countries are an almost exclusively American problem. Statistics have shown that the US has no more violent crime than other developed, first world countries, but because we have easier access to guns than most, those crimes quickly result in much more murder. This is not opinion. Therefore, yes, some type of additional restrictions would likely help the problem, but if you’re looking for an absolute solution, you won’t find it there.
Is it parenting? Probably a little. But how do you propose we change how other people raise their children? If you can’t answer that question, you won’t find a solution here either.
It’s a mental illness problem, though, right? Then why did the current administration roll back restrictions on how easily people with mental illness are able to purchase guns? Seems a bit counterproductive, eh?
I also see people trying to profile the shooter. Is he/she black? White? To what religion do they belong? What’s their motive? How does that solve anything?
While those may be relevant questions, the challenge we need to accept is how we respond to the answers we get. Are we helping change the hatred, desperation, etc. that resides in our society or do we return to belittling and dehumanizing our political opponents on social media and vilifying races or religions or social classes without the slightest effort to understand people who are different than us?
We live in a country that largely ignores the common citizen. We devour useless information and give fame and fortune to those who don’t deserve it while condemning those who struggle to survive on a daily basis as our misplaced sense of self-righteousness tells us they don’t deserve our help because we assume they’re unwilling to help themselves.
We place value on status rather than on the individual. A fast food employee doesn’t deserve to earn a living wage if such and such other vocation we feel is more valuable to society doesn’t earn a living wage. Meanwhile the companies we work for maximize profits by reducing costs which includes our pay, then holds these jobs hostage by demanding tax cuts just to hire American workers, and our government obliges because these companies contribute campaign dollars.
But if you want that really good paying job, you’ll likely have to get a degree, so you’ll have to take out a loan. You begin your true adulthood saddled with debt you may not ever pay back.
Of course, that’s assuming you received a quality education in your formative years, but our governments continue to gut public educational spending, and often base their contributions on the value of homes around that school.
Oh, and you better take damn good care of yourself, because god forbid you need to go to the doctor; that’ll cost you big too.
Tangential as that may seem, the commonality here is priority. This country spends an impossibly huge amount of money and a very small portion of that ensures the general welfare and happiness of its own citizens (and that portion is dwindling), then the people in power tell us to blame each other while they sell their policies to the highest bidder.
So is it any wonder why we keep killing each other? We are a nation of 325 million people and a hefty fraction of us are either mentally unstable, helpless, desperate, hateful, undereducated, poorly parented, or undervalued. Couple any of those with an almost insane accessibility to guns and you have an extremely volatile mixture.
“The care of human life and happiness, not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” -Thomas Jefferson
If we want to continue calling ourselves the greatest country in the world, we better start proving it.
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I’m, like, little kid giddy about today... you know, if little kids got giddy about brewing their own beer. #firstbrewday #brewday #sohappyitswarmertoday #gottastartsomewhere
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The Sequel the World Never Knew it Needed
“Rookie of the Year 2″
Last we saw of Henry Rowengartner, he was only a few months removed from playing for the Chicago Cubs and striking out Barry fucking Bonds as a 12-year-old thanks to some superhuman tendon healing from a shoulder injury. He had reassumed the life of a run-of-the-mill adolescent, playing ball in the sandlot with his two twerpy pals.
Fast-forward five years, Rowengartner (now played by Tom Holland--you know, the new Spider-man (because we can’t bring back Thomas Ian Nicholas for obvious reasons, least of all being that he went and played a total tool in the “American Pie” movies immediately after playing Rowengartner, causing everyone to tragically link the two characters as one)) is now a high school senior and is pursuing a dream of returning to the big leagues, working his ass off to make it as a legit prospect and not the beneficiary of some serious Wolverine-esque healing powers.
However, having forfeited his amateur status by signing with an agent and subsequently becoming a professional athlete at the age of 12, he is ineligible to play high school or collegiate athletics, a ruling which he tries to appeal in front of the state athletics board to no avail.
While the ruling doesn’t break Henry’s spirit, per se, it makes the path to pro ball that much more difficult. Maybe he can get an exemption to play legion ball, but scouts are reluctant to consider him a serious prospect due to the fluky nature in which he made it five years ago.
Henry struggles to cope with this stigma and nearly considers giving up his dream, until his mother (now played by Diane Lane) falls ill or gets into a car crash or something similarly catastrophic. She pleads with him to continue to pursue his dreams, yet he remains reluctant, until she dials up a favor to an old friend, Chet Steadman (Gary Busey reprises his role), who offers his help and connections to get Henry a tryout with an independent league team.
Henry, now an outfielder with some serious hitting chops, crushes the tryout and makes the team. His mother recovers and is released from the hospital in time for his debut, which Steadman also attends.
Henry's nerves get to him at first as he struggles at the plate for the first few at bats, until a critical plate appearance in the late innings. The manager considers pinch hitting for Henry but decides to stick with him. Good thing, because Henry crushes a home run to win the game.
“Nice swinging, Rook.”
Roll credits.
I’ve had worse ideas.
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The World’s Smallest Generation Gap: Emo v. Scenester Butt Rock
I usually hate being the elitist music critic who bashes other people’s tastes, but I’m willing to make an exception occasionally, even though I’ll be the first to admit I don’t pretend to know everything about music.
I’m not some hipster audiophile who boasts bookcases filled with thousands of LPs ranging from Elvis to obscure thrash or whatever. I really don’t have the time or the money for that shit. Pardon me for enjoying golf. Call me a poser; I really don’t give a damn. I’m a fan and a musician myself, so I like to think there’s some precedent.
So when I saw a video on Facebook the other day, a video compilation of songs “all former emo kids will remember,” it made me feel a way I can’t quite describe--sorry(?), angry(?), sad(?)--all I know is that with each passing song/video clip, I refused to believe that THAT was what constituted “emo” these days.
To me, emo was still a part of the punk genre, whether the hardcore elitists wanted to admit it. It was soft-ass, pussy shit, and if you liked it you were embarrassed to admit it and subsequently ostracized by the purists, but it was still good for what it was (again, call me a poser, I don’t give a damn). It still bordered and reflected the commercial pop-punk of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. The mid-90s commercial success of bands like Green Day, Blink-182, and the Offspring paved the way for pop-punk like New Found Glory and Sum 41, which in turn opened the doors for bands that rode the fence like Jimmy Eat World and Alkaline Trio. (There’s also that short-lived ska craze in there that I think we all selectively forgot.)
Sometime after that, though, unbeknownst to me, the genre got wrung through the Hot Topic assembly line and warped into something completely unrecognizable. It was no longer about the music. It was a fashion statement, a swoopy-haired, eye-liner wearing fashion statement. Therefore, by today’s standards, all you had to do was look the part, and that’s what I saw in the video: Papa Roach, Breaking Benjamin, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, etc. It even included the shittiest Green Day and Blink-182 songs ever created (”21 Guns” and “Miss You,” respectively). I’m surprised they didn’t include some Daughtry just to really get my blood boiling.
I got into a lot of emo bands because I wanted to expand my tastes beyond punk. It was always sappy; that was sort of the point. And, yeah, I get it, things evolve. Genres bend. The lines were already pretty blurred back then between pop-punk, indie rock, and post-hardcore. But in that moment, watching that video, I felt that the reasons I got into punk from a counterculture standpoint had been hijacked. I saw nothing of the pure expressionism that I enjoyed so much back then, just Ken dolls clothed in black, brooding at each pan of the camera.
It’s probably just a product of the constant revolving door that is the music industry. Once something becomes popular, it immediately becomes oversaturated with copycats until its forgotten almost as fast as it was discovered, like when celebrities die and years later we can’t remember if they’ve passed on or not.
Or it could be that my frustration and subsequent obsession is a product of misguided nostalgia caused by getting older and no longer being a part of the “it” generation. Regardless, I still refuse to believe that, in the span of only a few years, a genre that I enjoyed so much can bend so greatly as to allow in bands that I quite literally despised.
So for my own sake, here are 35 great emo songs that I still remember:
Alkaline Trio - “Southern Rock” (2000)
The Anniversary - “All Things Ordinary” (2000)
Braid - “First Day Back” (1998)
Brand New - “Am I Wrong” (2001)
Brandtson - “The Escapist” (2004)
Bright Eyes - “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” (2002)
Copeland - “California” (2003)
Daphne Loves Derby - “Hammers and Hearts” (2005)
Dashboard Confessional - “Saints and Sailors” (2001)
Dead Poetic - “August Winterman” (2002)
Death Cab for Cutie - “A Movie Script Ending” (2001)
Emery - “Miss Behavin’” (2005)
Further Seems Forever - “Snowbirds and Townies” (2001)
Gatsby’s American Dream - “Theatre” (2005)
The Get Up Kids - “Ten Minutes” (1999)
Hey Mercedes - “Que Shiraz” (2001)
Jets to Brazil - “Sweet Avenue” (1998)
Jimmy Eat World - “For Me this is Heaven” (2001)
The Juliana Theory - “Into the Dark” (2000)
Kill Hannah - “Kennedy” (2003)
Mae - “Embers and Envelopes” (2003)
Motion City Soundtrack - “My Favorite Accident” (2003)
My Chemical Romance - “Headfirst for Halos” (2002)
Nightmare of You - “The Days Go By Oh So Slow” (2005)
Ozma - “Domino Effect” (2001)
Piebald - “American Hearts” (2002)
The Postal Service - “Sleeping In” (2003)
The Promise Ring - “The Deep South” (1999)
Saves The Day - “Rocks Tonic Juice Magic” (1999)
Smoking Popes - “Megan” (1997)
Something Corporate - “Hurricane” (2002)
Straylight Run - “For the Best” (2004)*
Sunny Day Real Estate - “The Ocean” (2000)
Thursday - “Understanding in a Car Crash”
Weezer - “No Other One” (1996)
*Interesting note: this song features backup vocals by Nate Ruess, who gained worldwide notoriety eight years later with his band fun. and their album “Some Nights.”
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Here’s the Thing About Fascism
“All politicians do is lie.”
I hear this all the time, and, yeah, OK, I agree for the most part; they fudge facts, skew stats, and present half-truths in order to seem more appealing to their voter base.
Yet, it seems plenty of Americans are now stating this as an absolute, a cynical thought that has disenfranchised them from the democratic process, either by choosing not to exercise one the most important rights they’re given in voting or by searching elsewhere for unqualified candidates.
For several months now, I’ve seen interviews online asking who people are voting for and more often than not, people voting for Donald Trump give similar reasons: “He’s honest” or “He’s not a politician” or “He’s speaking his mind.”
If you’re politically informed, you won’t need me to explain why those statements are ironic. If you’re one of those Trump supporters, you need to have said irony beaten over your dead horse of a head.
The fact-checking website politifact.com now has a page that compares all five remaining presidential candidates (Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and Republicans Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and Trump) based on the rating the website has given each statement the candidates have made. Here are the abbreviated results:
Clinton: Out of 174 statements, 51% were rated True (24%) or Mostly True (27%), while 14% were either False (13%) or Pants on Fire (1%).
Sanders: Out of 78 statements, 51% were rated True (15%) or Mostly True (36%), while 14% were False. He was given no Pants on Fire ratings.
Cruz: Out of 101 statements, 22% were rated True (6%) or Mostly True (16%), while 37% were either False (30%) or Pants on Fire (7%).
Kasich: Out of 61 statements, 51% were rated True (25%) or Mostly True (26%), while 18% were either False (13%) or Pants on Fire (5%).
Trump: Out of 117 statements, 9% were rated True (3%) or Mostly True (6%), while 61% were either False (42%) or Pants on Fire (19%).
I know I’ve covered this in a previous post, but it bears repeating that the person Republicans view as the most trustworthy, is flat out spewing falsehoods over half the time!
I posted a link to this article on my Facebook page, and wouldn’t you know it, a doubter decided to respond, saying that he didn’t believe Hillary Clinton could possibly be rated that high, to which I replied back that it is quite literally a fact-checking website, the sole purpose of the site is to seek out truth, so to argue against its findings is to argue against fact.
There’s a great quote by Isaac Asimov, an American professor of biochemistry and science fiction author, in which he states, “...Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
Fuckin’ burn, right?!
But, seriously, Asimov was right! And he wrote that 36 years ago! Nothing describes the popularity of Donald Trump better than that statement.
Remember the premise to The Terminator?
A self-aware Artificial Intelligence system called Skynet gains power by spreading through computers worldwide, refuses to be shut down by its creators, and ultimately creates an army of cyborgs via automated manufacturing to destroy the human race for its own self-preservation.
Or for you younger folks, how about The Avengers: Age of Ultron?
Tony Stark creates an artificially intelligent system in hopes of saving Earth from evil, only to see this system manifest itself as Ultron, who decides the only way to save Earth is to destroy humans (you know, because we’re hateful beings who wage unending wars over religion, exhaust our natural resources at unsustainable rates, have caused the extinction of literally thousands of creatures throughout history, and generally don’t give a shit about these things or each other--so maybe he had a point).
I only bring it up because a few days ago, Microsoft launched its newest creation: a Twitter chat bot named “Tay” that was designed to Tweet and respond like a teenaged millennial girl. But if the thought of an A.I. chat bot Tweeting about things being “totes cray cray” wasn’t scary enough, Microsoft had to shut it down after only 24 hours because trolls had caused Tay to “malfunction” and spew Hitler-loving, racist and genocidal Tweets into her feed.
Twenty-four hours! That’s all it took to manipulate an artificial intelligence bot enough want to kill people.
But ignore the amount of time it took to elicit these responses, the main thing to focus on is the fact that Tay was able to manipulated because it may be her most human trait. Hatred isn’t in anyone’s DNA; it is taught to us, or it is cultivated through fear.
American history is wrought with conspiracy theories. The many theories on the JFK assassination. The faked Apollo 11 moon landing. The alien spacecraft that crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico and is now being housed at Area 51. Our own government being involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And, of course, most recently: President Barack Obama is a secret Muslim from Kenya.
When New York and Washington, D.C. were attacked on September 11, 2001, Americans found a new enemy in the world: Islam. Following several other attacks around the world and the subsequent creation and rise of ISIS, our hatred for Islam grew.
So when the “birther movement” began demanding that the president release his birth certificate to prove his citizenship, all the scared white Christians began accusing him of being a Muslim too. (My own mother claimed he was essentially a double agent for the Muslim Brotherhood who would eventually bring Sharia Law to the U.S.)
And who was at the forefront of this movement? None other than Donald Trump, of course.
Eventually, Obama released his birth certificate and, naturally, skeptics called it a fake (”My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”).
But before this whole shit show transpired, a huge rift grew between the right and left wings.
After the economic collapse of 2007, Americans began to become acutely aware the government was screwing them over. Bailouts were handed to the very banks that caused our Great Recession, and our military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan had seemingly failed to achieve anything of significance after over a half decade of involvement and trillions of taxpayer dollars laid to waste.
Much of this frustration led to Barack Obama’s election as President in 2008, but the bailouts continued and Obamacare was introduced and right wing blowhards like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, the Koch Brothers, et al had more than enough ammo to convince the frustrated masses that wasteful government spending was a uniquely Democratic fault (never mind the fact that Obama’s auto industry bailout is now widely regarded for having saved the industry and that Obamacare’s two main goals--providing health insurance for more Americans and lowering the inflation rate of premiums--have both been achieved).
People began calling Obama a socialist, comparing him to Hitler (because, you know, attempting to provide health care to millions of uninsured Americans is basically the same as genocide), and utterly ignoring the simple fact that none of this had anything to do with socialism or Hitler (”My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”).
These people had no problem helping the Bush administration pay for his wars, the bank bailouts, the various other corporate subsidies, a $5 billion loan to a British energy company who was going to use the money to build five nuclear plants in China (?!?!)--you get the idea--but when their tax dollars were allocated to help lesser fortunate Americans, they blew a fuse.
(Never mind that we stick a fucking fake Santa outside every goddamn Walmart during Christmastime asking for monetary donations to help lesser fortunate people, but seriously, God forbid it come out of their pockets as a “tax.”)
Naturally, these folks began blaming the unfortunate for all their problems. They didn’t want their “hard-earned money” going to people who refused to work, even though a person earning a yearly wage of $50,000 contributes approximately $35 PER YEAR to food stamps, a far cry from the hundreds or thousands contributed to paying for a bloated military budget that dwarfs every major first world country COMBINED, or the amount contributed to helping the government pay for corporate subsidies, or to fill loopholes created by tax codes that allow American companies to operate overseas.
Hence, the Tea Party was born out of this misguided rage, and it didn’t take long before their anti-tax, rage orgy combined with the Islamaphobic birthers to form one of the single dumbest and racist movements since the South tried to secede from the Union before the Civil War.
Understanding the Tea Party is like a two-year-old understanding quantum physics. Maybe I just stopped trying when, after years of trying unsuccessfully to prove Barack Obama was not born in the United States, they began touting for president their darling, a Texas senator named Ted Cruz, who WAS BORN IN CANADA TO A CUBAN FATHER.
The Tea Party movement is steeped in racism, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. They had no issue with wasteful government spending when it was done by a white president. They had no issue with welfare and food stamps when it was created by a white president. And they have no issue with potentially electing a white candidate who wasn’t born in the U.S. So, basically, they’re either racist or they’re too stupid to comprehend basic hypocrisy.
So what’s the point in all of this?
Manipulation. The Propagandizing of America. Exploiting the fragile belief structures of a generally uneducated populace and letting the dominoes fall into place when they’ve trusted the people they swore not to trust.
It wasn’t long after Ted Cruz mobilized people against taxes that he went after homosexuality. As a devout Christian, he claimed he and his fellow Christians were being persecuted by homosexuals, that gay marriage was an outward attack on their religious beliefs. And people followed blindly, ignoring several facts about gay marriage: 1) It doesn’t outwardly effect any of them, 2) Marriages actually bring in additional tax money, and 3) If you’re in a grand majority, it’s nearly impossible to be persecuted for anything!
Add in the simple fact that the First Amendment of the Constitution says that no law shall be made respecting the establishment of religion or prohibit the free exercise thereof (not anywhere does it specifically state “Christianity”), and now Ted Cruz and his Tea Party cohorts are none other than fucking anti-Constitution, fundamentalist authoritarians who likely have no clue who, where, when, why, or how a democratic system of government should function, how they should collect and spend money, or how to tell the difference between a sneeze and a wet fart.
This is where Ted Cruz and Donald Trump do not differ. Their magical crusade of saving America is shrouded in a blanket of faux patriotism, claiming they’re the victims of a fascist, anti-American regime that has led us astray with its world takeover scheme of granting affordable health insurance, whereupon we would be led into certain apocalyptic demise if we don’t change our path and support the son of an immigrant who hates immigrants or a guy who claims to be the most honest candidate yet has proven to be the most dishonest.
But they’ve found their angry mobs, hungry for the anti-government feast these two buffoons provide in spoonfuls. These disenfranchised mobsters come, like poor Tay, with a clean slate into a world ready to exploit their naivety and ignorance. And without consideration of logic or to the contrary, they dine like royalty.
And ultimately one thing becomes clear: If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything (”My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”).
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Music Saved My Life (And Other Cliches): Part 2
Regret sometimes comes in spoonfuls and other times in cement truck loads.
I was expelled from college in fall of 2008 (I think?) for failing too many classes after I had spent five and half years attempting to get my undergraduate degree. People have done a lot more than me in a lot less time, I can assure you that, even though you probably didn’t need reminding.
The memories of my time at college--and the several years that followed--are hazy at best, a jumbled chronology I’ve never quite been able to place in order.
(If I could, now, take a moment to praise another Facebook trait that’s helped me along the way: the “On This Day” app, which has allowed me to form some semblance of a timeline of my life.)
From what I can piece together, this is how it all went down:
I entered college a promising student: a high school GPA of 3.4 and an ACT score of 27. They even gave me an academic scholarship ... And I proceeded to fuck that opportunity up in unprecedented fashion, like a convict who commits a new crime a day after being released from prison.
I declared my major as accounting, shortly thereafter realized accounting sucks, and subsequently drank myself into careless oblivion the rest of the year after morphing myself enough from punk kid to generally tolerable stiff who enjoyed partying enough that people overlooked the keen social awkwardness. Ultimately, this led to me monumentally tanking my first year to the sweet tune of a 0.50 GPA. How they didn’t kick me out on the spot, I’ll never figure out.
It’s been increasingly apparent to me over the years that when I’m involved in something I’m not particularly interested in, it gets treated to an unparalleled dose of “out of sight, out of mind.” In this case, my classes and major became the victim, and my focus became booze and sex, though I really only managed to conquer one of those on a regular basis. Like fucking exponentially more regular basis.
After a random close encounter on my first night on campus (she nearly puked on me and I ran for the hills), it wasn’t until I took a trip to see my high school ex at her college that I actually got laid. So, yeah, my first sexual experience of college wasn’t even at the college I was attending. (To further out-do myself, my second sexual experience of college wasn’t even with a girl who attended my school.)
Regardless, she and I saw each other one more time during our first semester, and being that I was miserably lonely at my school, I had hoped to rekindle the flame, only to be shot down. Somehow I knew it before she had said for sure, and the drive home from that second visit was accompanied by repeated listens of (7) The Used "S/T” (2002). Despite the fact that I now consider a lot of the lyrical themes kind of corny, it was always the raw emotion in it that I liked the best.
As that year wore on and I became the tolerable, socially awkward stiff who became significantly less awkward and stiff when he was drunk, I gained some friends and actually got laid by a girl who went to my school, several times in fact. It was so clearly so special to each of us that a while later I was told she fucked a guy while I was passed out on the floor of her dorm room.
Anyways, after the year was over, I attended the graduation party of one of my older friends from home and met another girl. We started dating and she eventually moved in with me as I was living in an off campus apartment. She liked the same music as I did and had also attended that Hey Mercedes show in the Rave Bar years earlier.
Things were never that serene, though we dated for a year straight (and then continued fucking each other on and off for the next decade). Our ups were marked by (8) Death Cab for Cutie’s “Transatlanticism” (2003) and our downs were roiled by (9) "The Opposite of December ... A Season of Separation” by Poison the Well (1999), a band who I had taken a liking to at that year’s Warped Tour.
During this time, I changed my major to writing. I’m not sure what, at that time, drove me to choose that particular major, but I’m sure I had a good reason. I mean, I had (and obviously still have) a knack for it. I had dabbled in a failed attempt to create a local ‘zine in high school and did pretty damn well in my English courses along the way, so I must’ve just decided what the hell.
I joined the student newspaper and became the default sports editor (due to lack of competition), and by the end of the year I squeezed out a far more familiar 3.4 GPA.
It was upon an early arrival to one of our long nights of newspaper production that introduced me another band that I grew to love. Our layout editor was already hard at work and, with the room to himself, was free to play whatever music he chose.
I said I liked it and asked who it was.
Later that year, I heard the title track of their newest album on a Madison-based radio station. Holy shit. It was (10) Killswitch Engage’s “The End of Heartache” (2004).
The next several years were stagnant. I tore myself apart attempting to be two things at once: the punk I thought I still was and the guy who wanted to like everything so he wouldn’t be shunned from friends, parties, and girls. I listened to Rise Against while doing homework but danced to rap songs at parties in hopes of scoring.
I went through a classic rock phase during the summer I worked for the local ESPN Radio station and got really into the Doors. After I got expelled from college, I got really into reggae for awhile, and, I guess, tried not to give a shit about anything. Right before I joined a band again for the first time in five years, I started listening to a shit ton of metalcore and post-hardcore and all those other stupid fucking subgenres kids like to dream up names for when they refuse to be called screamo.
And after my last long-term relationship ended before my tenure in college did, my dating patterns reflected these phases in music: I found one that suited me for a bit, then moved onto the next but still strung the first one along in case I needed a jolt of something different.
It was a reflection of how much I thought of myself, mostly subconsciously, because deep down I fucking hated myself, and it took me years to figure that out.
In a related topic, I was working two jobs to try and support myself, moving to and fro from living in apartments with friends back to living with my mom, feeling like a loser.
At one of those jobs, I heard a song on the satellite radio that led me to reclaim a long lost part of myself I thought I’d lost. It wasn’t EXACTLY a punk song, but it was damn close, like a Bouncing Souls song covered by Bruce Springsteen or vice versa.
I found out after some extensive searching it was the title track to (11) The Gaslight Anthem’s “American Slang” (2010).
It was around this time that I spent most of my nights hanging with my buddy Jake, who I had met through one of those jobs and recruited me to be in his band. This was long after the band broke up, and we passed the time getting drunk and taking turns jamming on the guitar and slamming on the drums.
We had the idea to start a punk band, though, since it was just the two of us getting shithammered and fucking around, nothing materialized of it... Until one day a friend of ours asked us if we would fill a slot in his annual benefit show. He knew we needed a guitarist (since I would eventually play bass as I had in our other band), and recruited one of his old bandmates to join.
We agreed even though the show was less than a month away.
Somehow, we managed to pull together one original song and four covers to play one terribly atrocious first show. The pity claps were deafening.
Nevertheless, we stuck with it and gained more shows. Slowly I creeped my way back into the punk scene and explored much more than I ever had before. By chance, I stumbled upon a song called “The Obituaries” in which the chorus lyric goes “I will fuck this up, I fucking know it.” Holy shit. So simple, yet so profound.
So here I was, at 27 years old, drooling over a song the same way I had when I was 17 and first listened to “From Here to Infirmary.” I eventually listened to the rest of (12) “On the Impossible Past” by The Menzingers (2012), and drooled further.
My band may be small, but I’ve played with, met, and become good friends with people who have toured and travelled the world and met people I’ve revered since before I could drive a car.
It’s extremely humbling, bordering on embarrassing, that I hold in the highest regard a record by a band who once played gracious host to my friends when they were on tour. Or that the same friends almost once ran over the lead singer to my favorite band.
So while regret may come in spoonfuls or cement truck loads, so does humble pie. Anyone would remiss to deny either. Sometimes they’re equally refreshing.
(Note: Yeah, I know a lot of this rehashed a bunch from the post a week ago, and I apologize slightly for that. Consider this a theatrical retelling. A creative reinterpretation. Hollywood does it all the time when they decide to reboot a movie franchise after only a few years. So fuck it.)
“12 Albums” Honorable Mentions:
Arcade Fire “Funeral” (2004)
The Bouncing Souls “Maniacal Laughter” (1996)
the Doors “The Best of” (1985)
Dustin Kensrue “Please Come Home” (2007)
Every Time I Die “Hot Damn!” (2003)
The Format “Dog Problems” (2006)
From Autumn to Ashes “Too Bad You’re Beautiful” (2001)
The Get Up Kids “Something to Write Home About” (1999)
Green Day “Kerplunk” (1992)
Killswitch Engage “Alive or Just Breathing” (2002)
Lagwagon “Duh” (1992)
The Lawrence Arms “Apathy and Exhaustion” (2002)
The Methadones “This Won’t Hurt” (2007)
Rancid “...And Out Come the Wolves” (1995)
Rise Against “The Sufferer & the Witness” (2006)
Strung Out “Another Day in Paradise” (1994)
Thrice “The Artist in the Ambulance” (2003)
Thursday “Full Collapse” (2001)
Vanna “Curses” (2007)
Weezer “Pinkerton” (1996)
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Music Saved My Life (And Other Cliches): Part 1
Social media is an awful pain in the ass. It absolutely astonishes me how much contrived, inane bullshit is shared on Facebook and Twitter. A Google search is just a couple of keystrokes away, still thousands of false memes and posts get shared as fact on a daily basis.
But for every hundred dog shit posts I see, there is the rare share that actually causes some sort of emotional and intellectual response, hence social media becomes something like a classic movie villain or antihero with that one redeeming quality.
Then it was perhaps with some residual nostalgia leftover from last week’s post detailing my musical journey that caused me to focus some time on this particular post that has been recently circulating on Facebook:
Name 12 albums that have stayed with me but only 1 per band/artist. Don't take too long and don't think too hard. Tag at least ten friends to do the same thing, including me, so I can see what you put. No compilations. If I tagged you, I nominate you to put up your list!
And then the person names their 12 albums, yada yada ... you get the idea.
A classic, overly sentimental MySpace-era blog chain exploited by elitists to either boast their prowess in musical knowledge or show off their appreciation for the deep cuts.
OK, so that describes me a bit, but I also consider myself to be an outsider of sorts. (And, also, fuck the “don’t think too hard” part.) I may play in an alternative punk rock band today, but I don’t own any Ramones records. I never “grew up” on the Ramones. By the time I learned who they were, I had heard “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “I Wanna Be Sedated” chewed up and spit out by every shitty cover band that played the fucking side stages at the county fair each year.
My first band, the Kenobis, fashioned ourselves after three- and four-chord Ramones-style pop-punk, we covered “Beat on the Brat,” and yet I couldn’t name the members of the band (they were all named Ramone, right?) or list off any of their record titles.
It was long before then, though, that I had gotten into punk music without knowing a damn thing about it. And whereupon this musical journey of discovering my 12 albums started.
(I interpreted this as to mean 12 albums that either a) could be an album I could listen to front-to-back any day of the week, even now, b) an album that had a lasting effect on me emotionally, or c) represented a particularly important time in my life.)
I was a sophomore in high school and spent most of post-homework hours downloading songs off of Napster--yes, Metallica songs, too (the Black Album would’ve made my list had I continued listening to it post-2000), since I was into heavy metal at the time.
I was a bit of an outcast at school. I desperately tried to be included, but I got pretty fed up with that, so I searched elsewhere and stumbled upon a group of dudes who were into punk and ska, although I couldn’t for the life of me tell you the exact course of events that led me to be a part of their group.
Shortly after, I was attending practices for their ska band and essentially roadie-ing for them, all while gaining a vast new knowledge of punk and ska. I still didn’t know anything about it, but it was fast and fun and a lot of the lyrics had to do with being a loser, so that was cool.
(Here’s where I’ll state for the record, though, that Green Day’s “Dookie” was the first CD I forced my parents to buy me, so you could say my taste for punk started earlier, but I was 10 at the time and also liked Everclear and Alanis Morissette for fuck’s sake. Disqualified. The subsequent explosion of punk and ska acts that broke through to the mainstream had only a minor effect on me, to the point where, years later, when someone introduced me to a certain song, I’d be like, “Oh, shit, I’ve heard this before!” like a fucking clueless tool.)
Being thrust into the ska scene like I was, records like “Losing Streak” by Less Than Jake and “Keasbey Nights” by Catch 22 had immediate pull. But if you’ve ever listened to ska for an extended period of time, you’ll grow bored with it. I can’t even remember the last time I listened to those albums. Hell, I even liked Mustard Plug (who my friend once booked to play a show in my small hometown in Wisconsin when we were still in high school), but nowadays I can’t fathom why.
And any idiot knows if you want to find easily accessible punk music in those days, you needn’t look any further than Epitaph Records and Fat Wreck Chords, so NOFX’s “Punk in Drublic,” Lagwagon’s “Duh,” and No Use For A Name’s “Leche Con Carne!” joined all the ska bullshit in circulation in my 1988 Chevy Beretta’s CD player.
But none of those others could compare to (1) “Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues” by Strung Out (1996) and (2) "Don’t Turn Away” by Face To Face (1992). It was the speed of “Wasteland Blues” and the hooky melodies of “Don’t Turn Away” that roped me in from the start, and I still consider them to be two of the greatest punk albums ever.
At some point in here, my friends wanted me to go to a show in Milwaukee. It would be my first show, and I’m convinced to this day they only wanted me to go because I was the only one whose parents would let them drive in Milwaukee. It was also around this time that one of them gave me a CD of the band we were going to see. The band was (3) Bad Religion and the album was “Suffer” (1988). The show also marked the first time I ever bought a band shirt.
Up to this time of my life, I lived a “straight edge” lifestyle, which was to say I was a sheltered high school student who didn’t know how awesome it was to have a beer or smoke weed, so basically I was just an idiot. I’m not sure exactly what did it, but it probably had something to do with me losing my virginity (before a Pennywise show, by the way), that I decided to change all that, so I got drunk for the first time, I smoked weed for the first time, and I also first listened to (*gasp*) “emo” (or at least what I thought was emo--nowadays it doesn’t even come close).
Vagrant Records was the foremost authority on emo bands in those days and a forbidden laughingstock to those who truly considered themselves “punk.” I rejected the thought of listening to any of these bands from my faux moral high ground until a friend of mine asked me to burn her a copy of (4) Alkaline Trio’s “From Here to Infirmary” (2001), during which I listened to it, and after which I’m fairly certain I downloaded their entire back catalog of songs, including rare demos.
This is the exact moment of my life where I pretty much began to reject all preconceived notions about ANYTHING. Alkaline Trio wasn’t emo, and fuck any elitist shitbag who said it back then. It was pop-punk at its best, before it got muddied down with too many bands trying to sound like New Found Glory, who I’m sorta, kinda not ashamed to admit I got into for awhile (and maybe, sorta, kinda still am).
I went to my first Alkaline Trio show, the Vagrant America Tour, where they headlined alongside Saves the Day. The openers? A one-man acoustic act called Dashboard Confessional and a local-ish band called Hey Mercedes, whose members had at one time formed the band Braid, a certified giant amongst early emo groups.
I liked Hey Mercedes enough to catch them the next time they came through Wisconsin, headlining a small show on one of the intimate bar stages at The Rave in Milwaukee. It was arguably the best show I’ve ever seen--although I hold a tender spot in my soul for small shows so it’s a biased opinion for sure--so I bought their album (5) “Everynight Fire Works” (2001).
With my new outlook on music, I started to dive into other subgenres and found hardcore. I once enjoyed heavy metal, so it was probably only a matter of time before I stumbled across bands like Snapcase and From Autumn to Ashes. Most of my time up to this point had been discovering older albums by still active bands, now I was finding fresh albums from bands just a tick outside the genre.
When I encountered the first devastatingly awful breakup of my life, it was probably no surprise that I chose (6) “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence” by Glassjaw (2000) as the album to carry me through it, for better or worse.
It was at my high school graduation party, that I decided I should--and somehow could--play guitar and joined the Kenobis.
This lasted about a year before one, or all, of three things happened:
I eschewed my punk aesthetic because I had become an outcast at a small, private college. My roommate was listening to shit ass butt rock like Saliva, and he didn’t fit in, so I was pretty much fucked wearing nothing but Alkaline Trio and NOFX shirts.
My expanding taste in music drew me away from a band that desperately wanted to sound like Screeching Weasel, except for the part where ...
... The last thing we recorded was, bewilderingly, a ska EP. By this point, pretty much all taste for ska had fallen by the wayside, so I was disinterested at best in this detour.
So what’s a guy to do?
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Exit Strategy
I think I speak for all sane people when I say the thought of President Donald Trump makes me want to dip my head into a boiling pot of oil.
Prior to this circus stunt of a campaign, I’ve never given two thoughts about Donald Trump. To me, he was the bloody punchline in the shit-stained underpants of reality TV, a billionaire blowhard with the kind of idiotic catchphrase only an egomaniacal, shameless capitalist could create.
And he’s still a punchline, except nobody seems to notice, and it’s terrifying.
It’s easy to see why Trump’s 2016 campaign has been so successful. Popular cynicism within America generalizes that all politicians are not to be trusted, so naturally the disenfranchised voters have gravitated towards Trump, who they view as unapologetically honest, despite having 80 out of 102 statements rated “Mostly False” or worse by politifact.com.
They laud him as willing to speak his mind, yet somehow give him a pass when his mind spews a vicious mixture of bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, and blatant racism with ideas bordering on nationalistic fascism.
Then, when former known members of the Ku Klux Klan endorse him, you realize they love him not only because he’s willing to speak his mind, but because he’s speaking thoughts on a national scale that have been deemed taboo. He’s made it OK to hate.
So the sheer numbers by which his supporters have turned out is troubling when you consider the rhetoric involved.
But what’s most troubling to me is the history of Trump’s political career.
He ran for president during the 2000 election cycle as a member of Ross Perot’s Reform Party. A self-proclaimed conservative, he renounced his membership to the Republican Party to run as a Reform Party candidate.
The differences between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 are astounding.
In 2000, he promised universal health care, something Republicans have championed against ever since the enactment of the Affordable Care Act. He also proposed a one-time 14% tax on the wealthiest 1% of Americans in an effort to erase the national debt, which sounds more like a plan suited for a candidate like Bernie Sanders. And he also claimed on several occasions that his choice for a running mate would be Oprah Winfrey, certainly a far-fetched notion when you consider the rate by which Black Lives Matter protestors are being escorted out of Trump events by angry mobs of rage-filled white folk.
He also accused his opponent for the Reform Party ticket, Pat Buchanan, of being obsessed with Adolf Hitler. That’s right: Donald Trump, the man who, 15 years later, would propose a measure to banish an entire religion from American borders, once accused another candidate of Nazism.
So what are we to make of this?
Could it be that he’s fallen off the deep end of conservatism as time passed? Or is this some sort of con? A way to drive his name deeper into our culture?
It’s probably best to assume the worst. Either one is dangerous given the fire he’s ignited under the most shameful groups of people this country still possesses.
But herein lies the ultimate problem facing America in the 2016 election: When push comes to shove, and we desperately need to keep this man out of the White House, will Sanders-supporters back Hillary Clinton and will revolted Republicans cross party lines?
I, for one, am a vehement Bernie Sanders supporter, and I have been toiling with this dilemma for the past few days. Despite Clinton’s experience in both American and international politics, I will have a difficult time voting for her should she receive the Democratic Party’s nomination, which seems increasingly more likely after Super Tuesday’s primaries.
I’ve never had an issue voting third party and have done so twice out of the three elections in which I’ve been able to vote; however, if pre-election polling numbers indicate a close race come November, I will have a choice to make: Follow my principles and vote for whom I believe to be the best person for the job or vote to obstruct the worst person for the job?
I suspect it won’t be the only tough decision ahead as we wait to see if the Republican Party actually allows this charade to hijack their party.
What a time to be alive.
[Note: I thought about writing this as an entry to the list but thought better of it due to the seriousness of the post. I’ll let Andy Borowitz make the jokes about this stuff.]
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Just a Number a.k.a. The Rebirth
It’s 10:30 pm on a Friday night. I’m at home, in my favorite chair, drinking 16-ounce Miller Lites and aimlessly scrolling Facebook. A particular post catches my eye, as I notice a former college roommate of mine has been tagged in it (no, we’re not Facebook friends).
Curiosity guides the cursor over his name and instinctively clicks. He’s an accountant now. Good for him.
Me? I dropped out. I was expelled, to be precise (poor attendance leading to poor grades, go figure).
I once aspired to be an accountant too. I once aspired to be a great variety of things after concluding that accounting wasn’t for me: Journalist, radio host, screenwriter, brewmaster, et al.
Has my reflection got me feeling envious?
Do I wish I could change the past?
***
Shortly after I graduated high school, I joined my first band. We were a punk band called the Kenobis, named after iconic Star Wars hero Obi-Wan Kenobi. I played rhythm guitar and we so fucking badly wanted to be Screeching Weasel.
We played a couple shows, wrote a shit ton of crappy, rip-off pop-punk songs, and recorded two albums’ worth of songs in less than a year before I decided I just wanted to be a college student; or, again, more precisely, get the college “experience,” which of course meant doing a shit ton of drinking and weed and desperately looking to get laid, to no avail.
I was a punk kid who dyed his hair and wore nothing but band shirts at a tiny-ass, private college surrounded by absolutely no one I had anything in common with. I was just lucky to meet people who allowed me to get drunk with them.
So being a punk who didn’t give a shit about being judged, I obviously faced the four-year prospect of being ostracized with my head held high, right?
Hah, wrong.
This insecure fuck just conformed. I became everything everyone else wanted. I went to frat parties and dated a sorority chick, became editor-in-chief of the student newspaper (after I switched majors from shitty accounting to far less lucrative and far more ambiguous writing) and got to speak one-on-one with a commencement speaker on a private jet from Washington, D.C. (and it wasn’t even for my graduation!).
By the time I got expelled, I was rooming with football players in an apartment that became a regular party house, and nearly everyone knew me, for better or worse, probably far more worse than better.
Following the expulsion, I struggled to find a job. With my self-respect shot to hell, I wasn’t too picky of the women with whom I maintained relationships.
As I somehow managed to survive until 24, salvation came from an unlikely source: an 18-year-old kid named Jake that I swear could’ve been my goddamn clone, started working with me.
He said he was in a band and his bassist just quit. I said I used to play bass (“used to play” meaning I knew enough about guitar to bullshit my way through playing the bass and that I had once owned a bass guitar long ago before I sold it for rent money).
Nonetheless, I got an audition which I bullshitted my way through and miraculously scored the gig, mainly because I learned the songs quick enough even though I couldn’t improvise for shit.
At the time, I thought we kicked ass, but in retrospect, we probably sucked dick. Where we failed at sounding like the heavy metal bands we wanted to sound like, we succeeded effortlessly in sounding like the butt rock we hated. But I didn’t care, since somehow I managed to have genuine fun for the first time in a long time.
About a year after I joined, the guitarist broke the band up but recruited the drummer and me--leaving Jake on the outside and extremely unhappy--to form a three-piece post-punk band that would last all of about a year as well.
Following a reconciliation, Jake and I formed a new band, along with our friend Ryan, called Shiny Side Down, named for our affinity of smoking hookah and the unproven theory of placing the tin foil shiny side down over the bowl so as to reflect heat over the shisha. My only ambition: party and write a shit ton of crappy, rip-off pop-punk songs.
Four years, two lineup changes, and a 15-month hiatus later, the band is still active (minus Jake and Ryan; plus Rob and Jon). We just recently moved our practice space into my basement:
We have reinvigorated our sound. We’ve gotten much more technical, a far cry from writing crappy, rip-off pop-punk.
It’s full of life. It’s hooky. It’s fucking rejuvenating.
***
I hate the word epiphany. So much so that it should probably go on my list of things that piss me off. It’s absolutely aggravating to use. It’s boring and cliche. It’s like a dude saying sex is good. Well, no shit. As a guy, almost all sex is good. Bad sex only happens when a dog starts licking your feet mid-coitus or something.
Still, sex may not always be the same, but it’s almost always good, and there’s not really another word to describe it. Much like the word epiphany. There are certainly different levels, but using words like “realization,” “insight,” or “enlightenment” just won’t do the situation justice.
Regardless, about a year after we formed Shiny Side Down, I had an epiphany. I was desperately trying to make things work with a girl, when I abruptly stopped and asked myself, “Why?”
I sent her a fond farewell text and left it at that. It was as if I punctured a hole through the darkest clouds in the sky: Despite the fact that I was working two jobs at 50 hours a week to make ends meet, I was happy, so why did I need to worry about frivolous desires?
(Yes, I’m perfectly aware most people learn about and conquer these nuances in life far earlier than 27, so forgive me for being late to the party.)
Only a few months later, I met a girl who I’ve been lucky enough to have spent the last four years with.
***
So, it’s 12:45 am on Saturday morning. I’m still in my favorite chair and had several more 16-ounce Miller Lites.
Am I feeling envious?
Of course I feel envious to a degree. The guy’s probably making bank at his fancy accounting job. It’s why I wanted to be an accountant. It’s why my parents wanted me to be an accountant. So I could make some good fucking money. It’s like when you used to (or still do) dress up for Halloween, and you think you’ve got on the greatest devil costume you could’ve created and some dude walks by in a flawless cosplay Wolverine outfit, built like a brick shithouse and sportin’ some claws you could mistake for real adamantium.
Do I wish I could change the past?
At 31, I’m not married, I have no kids, and I play bass and sing in a punk rock band. I’m sure some buttoned down dickweed views that as immature. But I’m pretty fucking content to play in my band instead of sit in a cubicle. I might not be making as much money as Mr. Cubicle, but playing shows to people who dig the music you created is way fucking cooler.
And had I become Mr. Buttoned-Down Professional, I wouldn’t have all that I have now, which may not seem like much, but to me it’s all I need.
A lot of the stuff we do while growing up may seem like a good idea at the time, and we may even miss parts of it when we’re sitting around on a Friday night writing lengthy, drunken blog posts, but all those times, good or bad, will help shape the person you are. It’s up to you how to use your experiences. Thankfully, mine taught me how to create a better future, rather than rebuild the past.
That’s what our song, “Apartment 16,” has meant to me. It’s about all the wild shit we did when we were younger and how it serves as a reminder that it’s not always a bad thing to live with no consequences.
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The List: Christmas
There are enough reasons I can come up with for me to not procreate: I'm not responsible enough, financially and mentally, to run my own life properly, so I probably shouldn't be shaping another life; and I have not the patience to deal with the tantrum-throwing, pants-shitting, and disobeying that is inevitable with any child. But there's another reason why I shouldn't have kids: I don't want them to be deprived of Christmas.
You didn't see that one coming did you? Compassion? From me?
As a child, Christmas is the fucking cat's pajamas. You get thrown into bed early so "Santa" can come and drop your presents off, then you wake up at like 4 a.m. and make an absolute mess of the living room, unwrapping all sorts of awesome shit you won't enjoy in 11 months, forcing people to buy you the newest awesome shit.
But I hate Christmas way too much to want to celebrate it anymore. Sure, I like seeing my family, but I enjoy seeing my family any time of year; I don't need to dress nice and pretend that some arbitrary day in December is any different from the rest of the year.
I will save the bulk of my "religion" argument for another day, when I decide an appropriate manner of approaching the subject. However, I will say this: I call Christmas Day, the day generally reserved as the commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ, "abitrary" because it is really not Jesus' birthday, and that several studies have pinpointed the actual birth of Christ to have happened sometime in April. But that's the same month as Easter, and if there's anything we know about Christians, they have a burning desire to remind us of their faith all the time, so having two of their most celebrated holidays in the same month just wouldn't do.
And because of the selfishness of the Christians, their beloved holiday has become a monster unlike any other holiday on the calendar.
You can speak on the "Hallmark Holiday" that is Valentine's Day, but when do we send the most amount of cards? When do we dress ourselves in gaudy--often matching--outfits with our immediate family for a picture that undoubtedly become an equally gaudy piece of mail?
Thanksgiving--a holiday that I have only slightly less of a beef with, for reasons probably to be written eventually--is generally perceived as a time for family, and, obviously, giving thanks to what luxuries, immaterial and otherwise, we are fortunate enough to have. But this idea also fits with Christmas, which is part of the reason I believe Christmas will someday make Thanksgiving obsolete, which I won't mind, save for the reason it's made obsolete.
Think about it. The day immediately following Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year, and it's because of Christmas. The final Thursday in November is now nothing more than Black Friday Eve, a nationally recognized day off of work to confirm budgets for the following day of unrivaled consumerism.
The idea of gift-giving alone is enough to despise. Must we have a specific date on the calendar to bestow our generosity to our loved ones? Can we not be charitable the other days of any given year? Why must we have holidays that, in essence, do nothing more than remind us to be selfless?
Besides, have you ever been to a store at 4 a.m. to join the masses congregating to the cathedrals of slashed prices? "Christmas cheer" is not a term I'd choose to describe the general demeanor of the droves of bargain hunters. How many of us simply use the sales as an excuse to buy shit for ourselves?
But it's so much more than that!
It's the music and the carols, of which there are scientifically proven (probably not) to be only 14, yet have been covered for approximately 14,755,642 different Christmas albums by artists to whom I would not pay 10 cents to purchase anything from the rest of their catalog.
It's the incessant need to decorate your property like it's a fucking strip club just off Las Vegas Boulevard.
It's the hundreds of terrible movies, the worst of all being "A Christmas Story," which, as everybody knows, is the only one amongst the wretched group to have it's own 24-hour marathon on cable television, during which, if left on in the background, will make you honestly believe you've heard nothing but screaming children for precisely 22.34 hours of said 24 hour day; and, as I was so inclined to state in the introduction to this entry, I can't fucking stand screaming children! Anybody who actually enjoys that filth, should no doubt have a future in the day care industry.
And, finally, it's Santa Claus. Yes, the jolly old fat fuck who dresses like a circus clown and supposedly delivers gifts to every single home on the planet in the span of, oh, about six hours. (Excluding the heathens like myself, of course, who get nothing but lumps of coal, which we then use to throw at people who received better gifts.)
The Santa Claus myth (sorry to burst your dumbass bubble, believers) is quite an anomaly actually, if taken in context with the religious roots of the holiday. It's quite common knowledge that the Christian God is a forgiving god, yet the mascot we parade around in our malls owns a list singling out the "naughty" people as undeserving of presents. Of course, you could say that Santa Claus is a representation--albeit a far less severe one--of the concept of heaven and hell, but if God is forgiving, then the heaven and hell model is bullshit anyway; thus, Santa Claus's little fucking naughty and nice list is bullshit as well.
Do me a huge favor, and tell your children from the beginning that you're the one giving them presents. It'll save them the impending heartbreak of finding out later you lied to them for the bulk of their childhood, and when they ask why all the other kids still worship a fat ass in a red suit, you can boost their ego by telling them, "It's an irrational mirage less intelligent families create to shut their dumb children up while the parents get balls deep in a gallon of eggnog, trying to forget they just credited the confounding amount of spending during the previous month to that crimson-suited obese man."
If you want your kids to love you, tell them you gave them the XBox 360. They'll appreciate it when they're older. Trust me; I have absolutely no experience in the matter.
So, for creating thousands of mindless and soulless patrons of a consumer society, providing countless hypocrisies, and, worst of all, spawning Christmas music and "A Christmas Story," the dreaded end of the year holiday has made the list.
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The List: The Grammys
I don't necessarily make my distaste for pop music a secret. Hell, I blasted Lady Gaga in one of my first posts to this site. So it's probably only natural that I equally blast anything that celebrates the unoriginality and banality of pop music, namely the Grammys.
They are supposed to be the equivalent to the film industry's Academy Awards or the small screen's Emmys, but only a fool of the utmost ignorance would consider the Grammys to be the foremost authority on music's best. This should be obvious after they gave last year's award for Best Song to Beyonce for "Single Ladies," which is arguably the most annoying song ever created. (Actually, they gave the award to the half dozen or so people who actually wrote the song, which troubles me because that means there were a half dozen people who thought they were writing a good song.)
By my understanding, the nomination processes for the Grammys and Oscars are similar in that anyone can submit material, whereupon it is send to a panel of voters for actual nomination to each category. But I believe that, while the Oscar is the ultimate honor bestowed upon anyone in the film industry, there is a gluttony of artists who could not give a fucking rat fart about winning a Grammy.
But that could be a sort of "chicken and egg" situations--as in, does the artist not care because they're being snubbed or are the snubbed because they don't care?
So while films such as The Hurt Locker, Slumdog Millionaire and No Country for Old Men are certainly the cream of the crop of the film industry and rightfully deserving of the honors, in the music industry, there are "Best of" awards being given to imitative, unimaginative pop artists.
If you think I'm basing my argument solely on a personal hatred for these artists, you're only half right. Contrary to popular belief, my opinions often reside somewhere in the realm between fact and common sense, though I've become increasingly positive that common sense is less common than originally thought.
To help convey my point, I've enlisted the genius of metacritic.com, a site that collates reviews of albums, films, games, etc. and provides a numerical score based on information from the review to obtain an average from 1-100.
Last year, Taylor Swift's Fearless brought home the Gramophone for Best Album. Metacritic's aggregate score? A 73, based on 14 critics reviews. To her credit, that score was the highest among the five nominated albums. If you didn't pay attention last year or understandably forgot what the other albums were, here they are (with scores in parentheses): The Fame by Lady Gaga (71), The E.N.D. by The Black Eyed Peas (60), Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King by Dave Matthews Band (67), and I Am... Sasha Fierce by Beyonce (62).
What about this year's nominees? Arcade Fire, who I actually think are worthy of this honor but will likely not win, received a score of 86 for The Suburbs; country trio Lady Antebellum, who have already won a Grammy, received a 63 for Need You Now; Eminem's Recovery got a 62; Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster received the second highest score of the five nominated with a 77; and Katy Perry's Teenage Dream scored just a 52.
A 52?! Seriously? They couldn't nominate anybody better than Katy Perry? In comparison to film, the movie Just Wright, starring Common and Queen Latifah, scored exactly a 52. Do you think that flick would ever gain a nomination to the Academy Awards' most prestigious category? Even The Twilight Saga: Eclipse scored higher. (Suffice it to say that average would be lower if my review was taken into account.)
In fact, on Metacritic's scorecard of critics' top ten lists, only Arcade Fire shows up on any of the top ten lists. The album is actually ranked number one. But will it win? I suppose there's a chance. After all, in the last couple years, the Grammy has been given to a relative dark horse pick, like Robert Plant and Alison Krauss over the likes of Lil Wayne, Ne-Yo, and Coldplay in 2009 or Herbie Hancock over the likes of Amy Winehouse and Kanye West in 2008.
But my heartless, heathen gut says the award will be given to Lady Gaga. Why? Because there would be too much uproar and too many narrow-minded, clueless Gaga fans in a fit, all yelling, "Who the hell is Arcade Fire?!" You know, aside from being a band that has yet to release a critically panned album and whose only claim to fame thus far has been allowing their amazing song "Wake Up" to be played during the trailer of the movie Where the Wild Things Are. But, hey, we can ignore the fact that the song became renowned five years after its original release and is probably lending to the band's prospects in this year's Best Album race.
And not surprisingly, my two favorite albums of the year were omitted from the nominees, even though both The Gaslight Anthem's American Slang and Bad Religion's The Dissent of Man received favorable scores of 80 and 77, respectively.
But who the fuck has heard of those bands? Never mind the fact that Bad Religion has been together for 30 years and released the quintessential punk album Suffer over 20 fucking years ago!
Am I saying the Grammys panders to the masses of imbecilic music "fans"? YES! Of course I am.
Katy Perry's Teenage Dream moved 162,000 copies in its first week, while Gaslight Anthem's American Slang moved just 27,000. That's a big difference when you're talking about potential viewers of a television awards ceremony. Who would tune in if Against Me! was performing? Not as much as if Justin Bieber was.
That's the big difference between the Grammys and Oscars, though. If the voting was left to the public, I'm sure The Dark Knight would've been handed the trophy for Best Picture. Instead it wasn't even nominated. So perhaps we should instead liken the Grammys to the MTV Movie Awards, where common principles of greatness are ignored to please the public consensus.
Maynard James Keenan, frontman of the band Tool, once said of the Grammys: "They cater to a low intellect and they feed the masses. They don't honor the arts or the artist for what he created. It's the music business celebrating itself." In a nutshell, that's my point, as well.
There's a big difference between industry and art, and the Grammys ignore the latter in favor of the former, and, thusly, are rightfully deserving of a spot on the list.
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The List: Hunting
Sometimes I feel I let my father down, and not only because I dropped out of college or stopped playing sports before my senior year of high school.
No, I think I feel I've disappointed him by never enjoying the things he did. Working on cars is a great example. My dad can fix just about anything on a car; I've at least got the ability to change tires. But perhaps the thing that rifted our relationship the most was my disinterest in hunting.
(OK, yes, since I'm writing it here, it's a little more than disinterest.)
Picture a 14-year-old version of me, sitting at the foot of a tree, wrapped in a thick, blaze orange jacket with a blaze orange beanie pulled down so much that it nearly covers me eyes, which are conversely almost sheltered from below by the jacket. I am surrounded by a partially cleared forest and a blanket of white and every so often the procession of fogged breaths is interrupted when a gunshot rings in the distance.
Some who know me may find it hard to imagine me in this context. But being that I was a 14-year-old with no courage and no sense of self, there I was, shivering and bored as fuck.
About five hours after that vision, thoroughly frozen through five layers of clothing, my father gave into my pleading and walked back to the truck to warm up and eat lunch. On our way back into the woods, we saw a deer, and I shot it. My first kill, a crowning moment for any young hunter, right?
Wrong. All I could think about was, "That's it?"
All the preparation, the hours and hours of trudging through the woods a month earlier to find just the right spot to sit; the wake-up call at 4 a.m.; the walk through the woods in pitch black, following nothing but the reflective thumbtacks on the trees marking the way to our stand; the sitting in near below-zero temperatures for hours on end. All that for five seconds worth of excitement?
Oh, but there's more. Now you have to gut it and drag it out of the woods. How fun. It kind of reminds me of paying bills: Two weeks of anticipation for that wondrous sheet of paper with the words "Pay to the Order of:" followed by your name, only to watch yourself stuffing three sheets of your own paper with some incorporated assholes' names behind "Pay to the Order of:" into envelopes, with nothing but a bank statement to confirm you've just pissed away hours and hours of your life.
Don't get me wrong, I really don't care if people hunt. I'm not some radical PETA activist. I do support moderate gun control only because I think most human beings are idiots and putting a gun in their hands is like playing with matches in an oil field.
If people get enjoyment or feel accomplished by trying to outsmart an animal with a far less advanced brain than theirs, that's their prerogative, and who am I to judge, even if I do think it's like winning a debate against Sarah Palin?
And now that I've gotten another barb in on her, here are some other things that piss me off about hunting:
People who call it a sport: It's not a fucking sport; shooting something is not a sport. I have enough trouble calling boxing a sport because it's the most pointless activity ever created. What child do you ever remember saying, "When I grow up, I'd rather shoot things for a living than play third base for the Yankees!"? That's years of therapy waiting to happen.
People with "Born to Hunt" bumper stickers on their lifted trucks: As if the lifted truck wasn't reason to believe the person behind the wheel is a complete tool, the bumper sticker's the smoking gun.
Hunting shows/DVDs: These things are filled with the people that call it a sport for one, and two, most of these things are filmed on game farms, where there are copious amounts of animals to shoot at, yet they still act like they've outfoxed their target. If you show up to the Republican National Convention, you're going to find some God-loving, homophobic anti-abortionist who still thinks there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Common sense is not a science.
Hunting has also given millions of people I wouldn't trust with a pack of gum the right to own several deadly weapons. Like I said before, I don't mind certain people owning some guns. Why don't I mind? The zombie apocalypse, of course. But to give just anyone a weapon is foolish. If there are two things in this world I think should require IQ and general assessment tests, it's reproducing and owning guns.
However, once again I'm tiptoe-ing on generalization/stereotyping. Being a hunter doesn't mean you're a social stigma; it just means that you're a few select (non-curse) words away from being an asshole. For example, if you told me you hunted, then added, some time later, the phrase, "...from my cold, dead hands," you are, indeed, an asshole.
So, for rendering days worth of my adolescence useless and for spawning millions of gun-toting douchebags, hunting has its own spot on the list.
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As if the psychotic Qur'an burning idiot in Florida didn't tell us all we need to know about the United States' religious tolerance, we have a school in North Carolina preventing a 14-year-old girl from getting her education simply because of her nose piercing, which is a sign of her body modification-based religion.
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The List: Reality TV
Let me start by saying that over the first couple rants, I've gotten into a trend of describing the items on the list as unintelligent or void of mental stimulation, and while I really do believe that and feel no guilt in saying it--in fact, I'm running out of synonyms for "stupid"--I get the feeling that some readers may think I'm implying that people who do enjoy the things that piss me off are dunces and below average thinkers.
Now, I haven't gotten any feedback on this topic, so I'm just going to be proactive and tackle it anyway. I do not mean to imply that. Perhaps these people are completely aware that "Twilight" is campy trash and simply choose to enjoy it regardless. In fact, I know several people who would fall into this distinction.
However, I do wish to imply that those who are unaware of this simple truth or those who claim Lady Gaga is the best thing since sliced Madonna may need to rethink their life choices and wish damn hard for a do-over.
So, with that said, let me add another item to the trend of senseless shit: Reality television, which may just piss me off on another level than the rest of them.
Consider this: If reality television is, in fact, "reality," then do tell why there is such a thing as a "reality TV writer."
Actually, forget it; I can answer it myself. It's because it's not fucking reality!
A little over a year ago I attended a presentation by a former contestant of the popular reality TV contest "Top Chef," during which he divulged a few secrets from the show. Though he would not reveal too much, he did state that the amount of filming the show does allows the producers to edit the clips to however they see fit. For example, if the show wants to add drama, perhaps a juicy rivalry, they will edit the tape accordingly, and two contestants will henceforth be considered enemies.
This is what happened to him, although he claims he does not harbor ill will for the person he was pitted against and, in fact, still is in contact with that person.
Reality TV is really an illusion of reality.
One I love to poke fun at is "The Real World" or "Jersey Shore," which are essentially the same thing. Here are several mid-20s adults who are given free housing with the exception that they must work at a boardwalk shop. Aside from that, they are given free reign to do what they want (and $10,000 an episode as of season two for each "Shore" cast member), which results in partying, fighting, sex, and jail time.
And this actually comes as a shock to people? What did you think was going to happen? I've never done cocaine before, but I guarantee you if I was thrown into a room with six scantily clad women--they could even be ugly as sin--and a kilo of blow, I'll be snorting off a titty in no time; it's The Deserted Island Theory.
No repercussions. The only incentive to staying in the house would be the free $120,000 a season paycheck. Where else were these douchebags going to score that much a year?
But that's reality. People are given six figures to get drunk and pick fights, whereas I work 40 hours a week to make enough money so i can get drunk and pick fights.
What about "Survivor," another one of my most despised "reality" shows? This is a show that deserts several people in a supposed remote area to survive, finding food, water, and shelter for themselves. The winner gets paid a million dollars.
The newest season will take place near San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. I did some research, and there are approximately 18,500 people already living in and around San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua; do they each get a million dollars? No, yet CBS is going to give a million dollars (A MILLION FUCKING DOLLARS!) to some asshole who is forced to take a shit in the woods for the first time in his life.
But still, the first player voted off on "Survivor: All Stars" was still given $25,000. That's more than I make in a year.
Sadly, reality TV may just be the epitome of an American Dream redux: making as much as you can for doing as little as you can.
It used to be you had to work as hard as you could for years before you could sit on your ass or play round after round of golf everyday. Now, if you're willing to surrender your dignity for a few weeks, you can become rich by doing nothing more than acting like the dickwad you are.
Or you could go on a show like "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" and answer "Spain" to the question "Which country is closest to the tip of Florida?" and be penniless, shamed, and a dickwad.
Therefore, for making United States citizens seem ever more arrogant to the rest of the world and for turning us into lackadaisical, unindustrious chumps, reality television has made it to the list.
(As an aside, I can't promise this is the last you'll hear from the world of reality TV.)
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The List: "Twilight," Part Two: The Movies
I suppose it takes a guy who's very comfortable with himself to admit that he's read all four Twilight novels and viewed the three movies released. It would take me being insane to admit that I actually liked what I read and saw.
In Part One, I think I gave an overwhelming case as to why Stephenie Meyer's novels piss me off. I even went as far as saying that the books are, in a sense, much worse than the movies.
Who the fuck am I kidding?
The books can't compare to the movies when it comes to inane stupidity and sheer disregard for the audience.
I also said in Part One that movies are a visual escape during which the viewer is often not obligated to think, the really great movies actually do, and it always comes back to the suspension of disbelief.
The film must be written well. The screenplay must do more than simply outline the plot and provide the actors with their lines; it must also provide the director with a valuable guideline as to how each scene should be presented on camera and dive deep into the relationships the actors will be portraying on screen.
The film must also be acted well. The words and relationships presented in the screenplay must, without a shadow of a doubt, be executed properly and believably on camera.
The film must also be directed well. The filmmaker absolutely has to get the most out of each of his/her actors--lines must be timely, emotions have to be shown, and believable relationships must be created.
The three Twilight films thus far have done none of these things: Melissa Rosenberg's screenplays are actually worse than the novels, failing to draw any life whatsoever from an already bland set of novels; the acting is so awful that Kristen Stewart has her own designated space on this list; and the directing can only manage to provide a flashy camera angle once or twice, which might be more a testament to the cinematographer than anything.
Above all, however, it is the acting that pisses me off the most.
Fans always argue to me that Stewart's portrayal of Bella Swan is exactly how it's supposed to be (an awkward outsider), to which I usually reply, "How? Robotic, unemotional, and boring?"
Sure, Stewart is all of awkward, but to portray awkward and just to be awkward are two very different things. Being an incompetent, monotonous actress causes the others around you to suffer, and, yes, I've seen "Remember Me" and Robert Pattinson is not as bad of an actor as he is alongside Kristen Stewart, even though that movie is a travesty (for other reasons entirely).
And Taylor Lautner is just as bad. He delivers his lines in the same robotic fashion as Stewart. But there's no question why he's there once he removes his shirt for the hundredth time.
(I think it's safe to say we can start giving that a Bill Simmons-style moniker like The Gerard Butler Theory: where an actor creates a successful career based solely on their good looks while the world completely disregards the fact that nobody can honestly admit said actor ever turned in a solid performance.)
When actors have that sort of effect on a movie, there's no emotion traded between the characters; therefore, there is no connection for the audience to make, and the suspension of disbelief is lost. You're no longer watching characters live out an extraordinary story; you're watching actors on a screen go through the motions they get paid to do.
Ultimately, as the movies have progressed, the action scenes have become more prevalent, and I can come think of two conclusions: The filmmakers have realized they are working with stiff and maladroit actors and have adjusted according ("less talky, more runny"), or they simply decided to omit 75% of the back-and-forth love triangle scenes from the books.
In any event, it's quite obvious that, by the way each of the filmmaking elements failed, instead of attempting to make quality cinema and perhaps expand a story to places where the novels could not, the creators only wanted to capitalize on a pop culture phenomenon at the height of its popularity. Let's face it, this franchise was destined for huge box office numbers, and the creators of these films rushed them along without regard to great filmmaking.
They've left us with movies so brainless and unintelligible, they rival a Sarah Palin speech.
And when I start comparing you to Sarah Palin, you know you've got a spot waiting on this list. Welcome.
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The List: "Twilight," Part One: The Novels
Like a lot of people, I can be a bit obsessive compulsive. It's not that extreme like having to pat my head three times and say a hail mary whenever I hear someone say "vagina," but the tendencies are there, mostly concerning keeping things orderly, like my DVD collection (it's alphabetical, and I will know at first glance if it's been tampered with).
Out of all the compulsions I possess, the one that troubles me most is my need to continue series (of books, movies, etc.). With movies, if I love the first movie, I usually end up purchasing every sequel created afterward, regardless of how terrible the follow-ups were (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen). With books, if I start a series, I force myself to finish them.
So when I was coerced by an ex-girlfriend of mine to read The Twilight Saga, I felt obligated to read all four.
I'll admit, when I first started, I didn't know a whole lot about the series. In fact, I didn't know they existed until after the big screen adaptation was released into theaters--side effects of being a 26-year-old male, no doubt. I was aware that the series was about a girl who falls in love with a vampire, and I knew that a lot of adolescent girls wet their beds over it.
And, admittedly, teenage girls and I don't always see eye-to-eye on what's cool. They see a movie starring Channing Tatum and are dazed by his hunky good looks, unaware that he continuously butchers every scene in which he shows up. They line up at music stores to scoop up the newest release from some former Disney Channel star, and I think about the people that actually wrote the songs who aren't pretty enough to be on stage in a pop group.
But my ex was 22 years old at the time, and she enjoyed them, so perhaps I was wrong to disregard the series. After all, something that gets so popular can't be that bad, can it?
Yes, it fucking can.
She begged me to watch the first movie with her, to which I regretfully agreed. Then she promised the books were better, so, like an idiot, I read them. And while I'm saving the movies for Part 2 of this rant, I can say that the books were no better than the movies, and in a sense much worse.
I believe there is a valuable difference between movies and novels as forms of art. In my opinion, movies stimulate the senses, while reading stimulates the imagination. When I'm struggling to find words or ideas for my own writing, I turn to a book (or a crossword puzzle, but that's neither here nor there). When I'm in the mood for mindless eye candy, I pop in a movie because that's what most films are: visual escapes where the viewer is often not obligated to think.
Contrarily, reading demands the use of the imagination to project the words from the page to a scene in the mind. When the words become ineffective, that projection sputters and ultimately dies.
Stephenie Meyer possesses not the means to sustain intelligible interest over the course of the unbearably fucking long 700-page span she presents in her novels. Her diction is simple and by the end of the first novel I could tell she had an abnormal adoration for the words "glower" and "incredulous," using the two liberally and often times several times on the same page (like me and curse words, but I'm not trying to write fiction, thus, making it okay to say "fuck" five or more times in this rant, or so I keep telling myself).
Meyer's is not an example of smooth writing. Her style creates lapses in the imagination as the reader stumbles over the sentences, thinking, "Didn't I just read this?" These lapses sabotage the suspension of disbelief and create an utterly unenjoyable read.
I suppose there are also times when this causes me to question the novels' intended audience as well. Meyer's simple, pubescent level of word choice would leave one to think the audience is pre-teens. Yet the amount of sex implied and the topic of child birth is universally agreed on as a taboo subject for pre-teens.
(As a point of clarification, I'd like to express that I'm not in favor of sheltering children like those book-burning fucks who think great literature like Catcher in the Rye and Cat's Cradle should be kept out of the hands of our youth. I think overprotective parents are dumbasses and not only set their children up for culture shock but also prevent them from creating an individual mindset and autonomous opinions. Therefore, I am in no way trying to say that children shouldn't be allowed to read the series, just simply stating that the style and topics conflict; if an author is to treat the reader as an adult capable of making intelligent decisions, then the diction and style must follow.)
But that's another consequence of Meyer's series. Is the intended audience too old for its style or too young for its content? Or is she just a terrible fucking writer? Has she authored a series of books that has been intended to an older audience and completely screwed them over in terms of quality and intelligent fiction?
And how is it that older men and women have become so enthralled in the series? Is Twilight simply nothing more than a replacement for a cheesy romance-starved generation fed up with Danielle Steele?
Yet, perhaps the answer to all these questions is as simple as the one I implied in the Lady Gaga rant: Maybe people aren't interested in mentally-stimulating media anymore; they're pleased by the mundane and thoughtless nature of Lady Gaga or Twilight.
A co-worker of mine actually asked me once to give a reason as to why I read, saying, "Why don't you just watch the movie? It's over in, like, an hour and a half, and you don't have to spend hours reading."
After the urge to throw the nearest blunt object subsided, I realized society had just bent me over and reamed me a new asshole.
However, if the situations were reversed, and that co-worker had asked me to give a reason why I did not read, I would've looked that person in the eye and said, without hesitation, "Stephenie Meyer."
Welcome to the list, Miss Meyer, your silver screen cohorts are next.
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The List: Lady Gaga
While creating this list, there were the very obvious additions and there were the extremely trite additions. There were things that I felt would've left me with more explaining to do had I excluded them, and others I knew would be disagreed upon and need a great deal of justification. But all of them had one thing in common: They were all things that I felt required the additional attention of being included.
Except one: Lady Gaga.
Why give the world's biggest attention whore another spotlight? I'm the weak parent who caves to their screaming, mid-tantrum child; the Krispy Kreme franchisee who opens up shop next to a Curves; or the strip club owner handing out free passes to an addicts anonymous group.
Oprah would call me an enabler.
But with someone or something seemingly so ubiquitous, how can one ignore it? Her style is unmistakable, her appeal undeniable, her music tops the charts, and every part of her existence is fucking nauseating. Following the long list of pop queens including Madonna and Britney Spears, Lady Gaga has stormed the music scene like the Black Death on Europe in the 14th Century.
And why not? Simple beats accompanied by simple hooks and simple lyrics for the passive, fickle music fan.
What kills me, however, is how someone who claims to be so well-read (she has a a quote from early 20th Century poet Rainer Maria Rilke tattooed on her arm) can write such mindless lyrics. Take this particular gem, for example:
"Let's have some fun, this beat is sick
I wanna take a ride on your disco stick"
Now, that is what I call poetry. (At the very least, there's still no competition with the Black Eyed Peas over vacuous lyrics.)
Gaga is quoted on her website as saying, "It's not cool to hate pop culture," and I suppose she's right. I'm not cool. I don't have 5 million followers on Twitter. I'm also not a flamboyant, narcissistic sellout who panders their self-proclaimed genius for monetary gain. So what the fuck would I know about being cool?
Here's what I know about being cool: It's an abstract and ambiguous concept that most people associate with popularity, about which a person who creates for herself an image of anti-establishmentarian feminism should not give a shit.
I consider her the pop star equivalent to every kid who wore all black and dyed their hair and refused to wear name brand clothing (including myself) in the name of pariahdom. She prances around in her gaudy outfits, shunning society's norm, silently screaming, "Look at me! I'm different! LOOK AT ME!" The paradox of it all is that the people who strive to prove their individuality by such means do so by succumbing to another trend; the people who struggle to maintain an air of perspicacity concerning societal structure end up failing to provide any distinction from said structure whatsoever.
This is Lady Gaga, in a nutshell--very much unlike the nutshell-shaped outfit she will undoubtedly don at some point. People see her draped in nothing but plastic bubbles and think, "Wow, this person must be interesting." These people are fucking idiots.
(As a side note, I know a lot of people who listen to Lady Gaga, and while I don't condone that sort of behavior, I will apologize for corralling them into the "fucking idiots" generalization.)
Bjork tried to be different by wearing the infamous swan dress to the 2001 Academy Awards and was chided for it, yet Gaga is lauded for her similarly outrageous style, which she has, in all its pretentious glory, on display daily, not just on the red carpet.
In this day and age, if you're not being controversial, you're going unnoticed.
But she's not blazing any trails, and that's ultimately what pisses me off the most. As much as she'd like to think she is a trendsetter simply because she "paid her dues" in the New York music scene, as it states on her website, she's nothing more than a run-of-the-mill pop star.
The music? Been done countless times before. The fashion? Have you ever seen Elton John's wardrobe? The careless attitude and Yankee Stadium middle-finger waving? She's a fucking poor-man's Amy Winehouse.
However, as with most other run-of-the-mill pop stars, the people who hate them will simply just have to wait until their 15 minutes are up.
In the meantime, welcome to the list, Gaga.
(Notice the fact that I didn't even mention the sex appeal, though she's still is only a six even after the "make-me-look-a-little-bit-more-like-Christina-Aguilera" nose job.)
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