I link to my old pages too much.

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I remember, a year and pieces ago, I was trapped in a car for several hours going toward a sinister destination and the radio operator gave me a break from the same dumb cds I’d heard countless times recently and instead brought up a station comprised of songs I had heard countless times not recently. Or recently, but in the context of a “retro” or “throwback” media item not indicative of society’s tastes in general for anything other than retro throwbacks.

So, almost every 1980s song I heard in that car started with the exact same DIP DAH DIP DAH DIPN DOT drum introbe. There were a good (well, adequate) few years when I was convinced the 1980s music I used to like was of a nearly consistent higher quality than the modern rubbish constantly flinging itself at me. This was maybe 1998 – 2001ish. Now I realize it’s pretty much all simplistic repetive formulaic nonsense. Thank you, culture of regurgitation, for not permitting me to not be reminded always! And yet still I identified “Electric Avenue” in under two seconds, even though it’s doubtful I’d heard it more than three times prior to then. But then, most of these are the sort where when you’ve heard them once you’ve pretty much heard everything it can throw at you three times. They have minutes to fill. OUT! IN THE STREET! Also, Private Idaho, which only has two past exposures. While preferable to moment without an end!, some trashy ska song I heard one time –under unusual circumstance not involving a radio station or the particular set of tiresome CDs I’m used to being tired of– and probably never will again, whose obscurity likely means you will not hear it ever, and there’s no sense in complaining about it, or letting my complaints about detract from the more prevalent threat, I forgot how this sentence started.

[x4]! That’s not even a song, it’s an arena chant. What a bad bad band. DEET DEET DEET DEET DEET DEET great beat, guys. I hope you don’t get sued by birds. I’d love to hear it for five minutes and then another five minutes when the next track starts. Over that I’d like to hear a basic note sequence three times followed by a fourth that’s slightly different.

This is not good. I’m forming this sort of opinion on all possible things. My tastes are impossible to satisfy. It may be unreasonable of me to expect to be satisfied. Why, were I in the business of employing double-negatives for my business I might go so far as to suggest that I cain’t get no- ARRRRRRRGH I HATE THAT SONG TOO!

Somebody who I was aware of once linked those who were aware of him to an abysmal Naruto-branded vague contextless clipfest and I couldn’t concentrate on how abysmal it was because the music bothered me so much. It was a garbage techno remix of the first half of everyone’s favorite “scary” disgraced public domain orchestra piece that isn’t Ride of the Valkyries, In the Hall of the Mountain King, but artificially elongated by using extra repetitions which made it totally intolerable. People can’t comprehend music with more than a bit of variation in too short a period, and they’re too weak to write new music, so they dumb up old stuff to suit their needs. Yes, I know that. Overclocked Remix is almost ten years old, isn’t it? But this one baffled me… It’s not as if that particular Peer Gynty excerpt is an article of music that’s hard to make disgusting by pairing with unimaginative drivel.
12-21-2010: that video is no longer there and I have forgotten what it was! I was deliberately vague in describing it for better effect so now nobody can know!

A theatrick trailer for the 2009 feature film Bride Wars, oh right, nevermind that first of all is from Bride Wars, but also shows the scene where the brides have had enough bride trade sanctions and start fighting, physically. So we’ve already seen the one bride war, and we realize the plurality in the title is inaccurate, and the movie hasn’t come out yet. The war is over. Dragon was robot And it’s just dumb fickle text-messaging marriage-enthusiasts, more concerned with wearing just the right window curtains on just the right day in November with just the right irrelevant flowers and just the right conflict-seeking redneck cousins in attendance than the serious legal agreement they are entering into, and will inevitably suffer from entering it with fickle goals and expectations, and they have that music. You spend 30 million dollars on the awful thing and you can’t pay a person to write as many seconds of proper fight music.

Somebody should have told the director that.

I wish I could show you that this was also the talk show clip, but just that one scene, in its entirety, with that music, and then with the audience having to applaud afterward. The pinnacle of the film, that which the whole thing should be building up to, and it was still awful, and the publicity campaign (henceforth referred to as “you”) showed it for free, with the expectation that this would encourage me to run out drop dollars to see that movie whose lame apex you just showed lamely (“you” now reverts to its previous owner). It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen. It was even sadder than going quite out of one’s way to create and arrange a comic strip to fit in a specific published book format and then putting it on a free, formless web page because it ended up only being kind of good. It was yet more sad than spending many hours of many days writing the sort of pointless thing whose climax might be a description of the climax of Bride Wars. I would avoid anybody who did both those things, though.

And now I am quite sad. I am sad that this sequence of thoughts is only about one third over. I was unprepared for realizing that I dislike the music I grew up with every bit as much as the music kids “today” are growing up with and that kids before me grew up with to bring so many of my other resentments together.

JUST ONE A THOSE DAYS!
 

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