Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? (2 page)

If only the rest of the world could understand that people who just happen to have all been born in the same country are, perhaps, not some strange homogeneous Other. Sure, we Americans have never managed to tell any of you people apart, but c’mon! Have we no flesh? (And plenty of it, quite often.) Do we not bleed? It’s a simple matter of divorcing the idea of the American state going around doing all the bad things from the people who live under it. They aren’t the same thing. And we didn’t even all vote for Idiot Boy. That map of the States after the 2004 presidential election—the sea of blue down the coasts, the red down the middle—didn’t tell the whole story. In most of the blue states, nearly 50% voted red, and vice versa. We are a diverse people.

So now, more than ever, our foreign brothers and sisters, we ask you to demonstrate solidarity with our fine (if often quite fat) people—perhaps by watching some Adam Sandler films while eating string cheese. We as a human race must remain confident in the potential of the American people. We believe they are deserving and capable of human liberty. If we would just pull our fat fingers out of our fucking asses. We thank you.

ARCTIC MONKEYS

Listen, we here in America are grateful for the first British Invasion. Without it, we’d be a nation of folksingers, which means we’d also be a nation of sensitive ponytail guys. That said, UK, can you quit forcing the Arctic Monkeys on us. We don’t care how many
Spin
lists they top; they’re bratty, sloppy MySpace poseurs who are so preciously calculated, they make the Strokes look like the Ramones. They receive praise for stuffing their lyrics full of social realism, but they’re a bunch of teens from the suburbs. Their social realism is having a fake ID rejected. The only innovative thing the Arctic Monkeys ever did was put their music online . . . the same as every other unsigned band. Oh, but they got rich off it. So they’re what, the musical equivalent of LonelyGirl15?

Of course, everyone’s middle-of-the-road nowadays. Even New Wave guitar-tykes who sing state-of-the-nation songs about prostitution. From occupying the cutting edge of Western social advancement (in terms of sex, class, race, peace, the big stuff), albeit often not that seriously, many bands now seem to find the cutting edge a bit, well, sharp. And, unfortunately, quite edgy.

Right alongside the Monkeys are the Kaiser Chiefs, who were apparently mildly perturbed to hear that the local police played “I Predict a Riot” before heading out on Friday nights. But this is hardly in the same league as Reagan appropriating Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” There wasn’t any message there to rewrite. Anyway, it’s surely the Kaisers to a T:
American Idol
indie, the perfect soundtrack for people who don’t really like music, but do like to beat up on drunks.

Of course, the Kaiser Chiefs are just one of the New Wave of Careerist Bands Whose Careerism Makes Them Nowhere Near Interesting Enough to Sustain a Career. It’s often all in the name. Franz Ferdinand—music bloggers’ previous “Greatest Band Ever to Live; Listen to Them, Then Clap Your Ears Until You Go Deaf Because There Is Nothing Else You Ever Need to Hear” titleholder—is in reference to neither a dead archduke nor a disco-dancing German man (what,
Franz Ferdinand
doesn’t evoke that image in your mind?). The band only chose the name because, according to bassist Bob Hardy, “Mainly we just like the way it sounded. We liked the alliteration.” Lead singer Alex Kapranos added, “Basically a name should just sound good . . . like music.” Sorry, but no. A name should “just sound good,” fair enough, but the music? The music should kick motherfucking ass. Or at least be more interesting than the name.

ARGUMENTS BETWEEN EQUALLY OBJECTIONABLE CELEBRITIES

When Tommy Lee calls Kid Rock a “jealous no career having country bumpkin.”

Or when Kid Rock punches out Tommy Lee.

Or when Christina Aguilera attacks Britney Spears, calling her wedding “trashy” and “pathetic.”

Or when Britney Spears calls Christina Aguilera “scary.”

Or when
The Hills
’s Spencer Pratt describes castmate Lauren Conrad as “the douche, the psycho.”

Or when Keith Olbermann declares Bill O’Reilly “today’s worst person in the world.”

Or when Jacques Chirac says George W. Bush “is so stupid it’s amazing he can eat stuff.”

Or when Donald Trump labels Mark Cuban a “loser.”

Or when Donald Trump brands Richard Branson a “total failure.”

Or when Donald Trump declares Rosie O’Donnell a “fat slob.”

Or when Rosie O’Donnell writes that Donald Trump is a “slug.”

Or when Danny Bonaduce throws Johnny Fairplay over his head, face-first, knocking out a couple of his teeth.

Why don’t you all just play nicely?

ARTICLES IN NEWSPAPERS REPORTING POLLS IN MAGAZINES

For example, saying that Duran Duran’s 1995 release
Thank You
is the worst album of all time, according to a poll by
Q
magazine. Or that Matt Damon is the sexiest man alive, according to some publishing monkeys. Reading a magazine does not constitute gathering the news. It constitutes reading a magazine.

What next? Maureen Dowd’s new column reveals “Woman Finds Happiness with Sister’s Widower . . . riveting True Story in
Glamour
. . . Of course they still miss her . . . And the next thing they knew, they were having sex.”

B

BABY NAME BOOKS

Nobody has ever found a good name in a baby name book because most of the entries are things like Hadrian, Dylis, Mortimer, and Binky. Oh yes, and Adolf.

The UK’s Collins Gem version genuinely points out under the entry for Adolf/Adolph that “Adolph and the latinised form of the name Adolphus have never been common names in this country and received a further setback with the rise of Adolph Hitler.”

Setback? I’ll say.

BAD BOYS

“We know it’s wrong, but they’re just so . . . so . . . likely to commit random acts of violence! Yeah?”

Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil. Britney Spears and Kevin Federline. Kate Moss and Pete Doherty. Pamela Anderson and every man she’s slept with except Scott Baio. It’s official: For today’s thrill-seeking chick, a bad boy is the ultimate accessory. Essentially, if your man has never been charged with assault while dealing out meth from his Harley, is he even a man at all?
Booooring!

In
Observer Woman
magazine, British socialite and ex-Mrs. Noel Gallagher, Meg Mathews, revealed: “Bad boys are always the most attractive . . . When I look back at all my exes, they’ve all of them either been in prison or rough-and-ready or rock-and-roll. The last one was in prison for 10 months. I thought it was great. I thought I was in
Married to the Mob.
I used to go on the visits all dressed up.” And if she was really lucky, he’d shiv her initials into his cellmate. Oh well, at least this finally explains the popularity of
Prison Break.

Next week: “My new man is Radovan Karadzic. He’s been on the run from the UN War Crimes Tribunal for murder, plunder, and genocide since 1996! Genocidal Bosnian Serbs? That’s hot!”

BAR TOILET ADS FOR BAR TOILET ADS

REACH AN AUDIENCE OF THOUSANDS
EVERY DAY!

IT’S CLEAR WHY 12,000 PANELS LIKE THIS ONE CAN REACH AN AUDIENCE OF 15 MILLION.

It makes a nice change from photos of women going insane thanks to Axe Body Spray, or begging pleas to please watch Spike TV. But it’s not a good ad for ads, as they have no ads, just ads for ads telling you how effective their ads would be, if they had any. Which they don’t. And that’s not a good ad for their ads . . . them not actually having any. Adman, you’re a bad adman, man.

BLACKBERRIES

What exactly the fuck do you think you’re doing to yourselves?

BLING

Louis XIV was big pimping. Imelda Marcos is a powerballin’ bee-yatch. Zsa Zsa Gabor? The motherfucking bomb.

By the late 1990s, hip-hoppers had abandoned all pretence of fighting the powers that be. Instead, most had become the kinds of cartoon money-grabbing capitalists that could slip neatly into a Soviet propaganda film—except replacing the bushy mustaches and top hats with hos. Once it took a nation of millions to hold them back. Now it takes a nation of millions to hold their coats.

The word was
bling
—a coinage from New Orleans rapper B. G. of the wonderfully named Cash Money Millionaires collective (hmm, definitely a money theme developing here) to describe light glistening in diamonds. His 1999 U.S. smash “Bling Bling” portrayed a fantastic world of Mercs, platinum rings, diamond-encrusted medallions, helicopters, and drinking so much fine booze that you end up vomiting everywhere (bet you didn’t know that was cool, did you?).

In a startlingly widespread display of Stockholm syndrome, the ideal for urban kids suddenly involved transforming yourself from ordinary human into monomaniac money machine. By 2004, the Roc’s PR Strategy, a business plan for Jay-Z/Damon Dash’s
^*
Roc-A-Fella music/clothing/ booze/jewelry corporation, was laced with terms like
mother brand, brand equity,
and
product seeding.
Dash described himself as “a lifestyle entrepreneur. I sell all the time. Whether it’s music or sneakers, it’s all marketing, marketing, marketing, 24 hours a day. My whole life is a commercial.” Clearly these new capitalists are better than the old ones, though. They don’t get rich off the backs of others—they do it just by being fly.

Oh, hang on: Ultimate blingster P. Diddy—who produces his own custom-made Sean John diamond-encrusted iPods—destroyed his image as a shrewd businessman in December 2003 when confronted by Lydda Eli Gonzalez, a nineteen-year-old former factory worker from Honduras. She asked him how come the people who made his $50 Sean John T-shirts were paid 24 cents per shirt, limited to two toilet breaks a day, and forced into unpaid overtime. Puffy said he didn’t know anything about it. It’s okay, though: When he looked into it and discovered what she said to be true, Diddy did right and made sure the factories’ conditions were improved. Possibly among the improvements: diamond-encrusting each employee’s sewing machine.

For all but a handful, of course, bling is a glaring lie: 50 Cent’s 2003 album
Get Rich or Die Tryin’
should more accurately have been called
Highly Unlikely to Get Rich, Far More Likely to Die Tryin’.
But as Public Enemy’s Chuck D recently claimed: “Hip-hop is sucking the nipples of Uncle Sam harder than ever before.” What he failed to report was how P. Diddy actually manages to suck the nipples of Uncle Sam and his great mate Donald Trump at the very same time. That makes four nipples. But then, as we know, he is quite a guy.

JAMES BLUNT

James Blunt is the perfect singer-songwriter for the busybusybusy generation who don’t have time to consider what a song might actually mean. Literary conceits swallow up valuable minutes that might be spent . . . oh, we don’t know, cracking up or having a really massive latte.

Given these constraints, the smartest, sharpest title for a song about a woman being beautiful is surely “You’re Beautiful.” And why call any song that concerns the pain of saying good-bye to a lover anything other than “Goodbye My Lover”? From this perspective, it’s hard to see why anyone gets stewed up about this songwriting game. It’s quite straightforward. A fucking monkey could do it.

“Goodbye My Lover” was the emotional core of Blunt’s huge-selling debut album
Back to Bedlam.
As the title implies, the song in no way involves saying “hello” to a lover. The situation departs from the pleasures that come with welcoming a lover almost completely. It could equally have been called “Farewell My Lover.” Or “See Ya! My Lover.”

Blunt—the “epitome of 21st-century chic,” according to Britain’s
Daily Mail
—has probably said good-bye to quite a lot of lovers. If the tabloids are to be believed, he can’t keep it in his trousers: sort of like a posh-rock Charlie Sheen. But those were merely casual lovers. The lyric of “Goodbye My Lover” explores the crucifying angst of losing a woman whom Blunt apparently “pretty much considered the one.” Interviewed on
James Blunt at the BBC,
the queen-guarding balladeer called the story “very tragic.” And, in many ways, he is right.

The song begins by questioning whether he failed his departed lover, before his thoughts turn back to the early flowering of romance, depicting himself as some sort of victor (that would be the army background, presumably). His powerful presence caused his new lover temporarily to lose her sight. So he decided to take, not forcibly but with a certain righteous zeal, what he considered his property by an everlasting, possibly even divine, covenant. Continuing this reverie, Blunt imaginatively plants his mouth over various parts of his ex-lover’s body before recalling how they would both sleep under the same sheets. This is the reason he can then claim intimate knowledge of her physical odor. In the chorus, he repeatedly bids his lover farewell before revealing she was probably the only woman for him in the world. The implication is that he can never love again. That’s it. He is spent. Good-bye to love, perhaps.

The second verse finds the war-hero-turned-singer still urgently envisioning his former girlfriend and imploring her to remember him, too. He has watched her at various times, he reveals, while she was crying, while she was smiling, and also while she was sleeping (but not for that long, he also assures her—not so long that it would become fucked up). You see, he would happily have sired offspring with this woman and spent all his born days with her. Actually, you know what? If she isn’t there, if she has definitely disappeared for good, then he is genuinely unsure about whether he can carry on living. It’s almost “Don’t leave me or I’ll kill myself!” But it’s not quite not that, either. Self-harm, possibly?

The chorus then repeats the claim that she was his only hope. Everything is ruined. And so on. We’re nearing the end now, but he must still detail the haunted nights; the nights when, lying in bed, he actually feels her hands. Honestly, it’s like she’s really there. She’s not, though, as we hope we’ve established. At the song’s climax, he brings out what we have already surmised: that this heartrending experience has left him an empty husk. To emphasize this point, he repeats it six times.