Popular Culture Explained

In accordance with federal legislation prohibiting discrimination, after a lengthy & expensive legal battle to prevent me from contributing a monthly column presenting views contrary to all antiMusic represents, I am pleased to announce the launch of your new favorite feature on the antiMusic: a lone voice of sanity in the insanity that's antiMusic, the place where you can come for reliable advice on what to think, the Veridical Polemic a.k.a. "I'm Always Right" column with Dolly Doppelganger! Read my words and obey them if you want to be right all the time, just like me!

Originality in the entertainment industry is not worth taking the time to achieve. It is also not worth the effort. How appealing is the idea of staring off into space, wracking your brain trying to come up with the perfect musical phrasing, the never before uttered chorus, the idea for a movie plot that isn't based on a cartoon, another movie, or someone else's work? Forget it, hard work is hard, and way too time consuming. Anyway, if a movie kills at the box office that has aliens from outer space coming to earth, or stories about car thieves, or doomed love stories, scriptwriters that really care about the people they are seeking to entertain, who really want to give people what they want would acquiesce to the insatiable demand of the ticket buying public & churn out more of that. If 4 or 5 boys or girls singing & dancing in unison sells 80 bazillion copies, if drop tuned guitars with more than 6 strings growling seductively is what's tearing up the musical world, then that's all people want to hear. When the public has clearly spoken, it is the height of arrogance to try to lure them away from what they find comfortable by presenting something strange & different. People clamor for whatever the hot product of the moment is. They want to look cool, just like everybody else. They want to be defined by commonality, not by something as threatening as the unfamiliar. Look at Japan. That country is a model of unity & sameness. Everyone reads graphic novels, even middle aged businessmen. Everyone eats oriental food, and that is the most delicious cuisine on the planet! Everyone takes school & studying so seriously that high school kids will commit suicide if they don’t make it into the right college, or if they do poorly on exams. That's a dedication to excellence found only in utter & total conformity! Today's American society is absolutely lacking this ravenousness to be the best, and test scores prove I'm exactly right. The solution is absurdly obvious: eliminate all originality, at all costs. There is many great new ground breaking imitations out there of products that already exist. I suggest that we the people of this global community seek out all the copies, and delight in their characteristics & properties rather than the originals that inspired them. It shows incredible boldness and bravery to replow ground already opened up by someone else & to do it with the unflinching determination to stick with the plan even in the face of rude & rabid opposition from people trying to upset the status quo by pushing originality and attacking copies. 

This antiMusic website is especially guilty of this serious charge. All that pushing of originality just isn't fair. After all these years of Civil Rights rhetoric, still a chasm exists between the talented & talentless. Not all people are equally blessed with the ability to create things out of their own imaginations. How can this inequality be remedied? It is a matter of truly equal rights to encourage & enjoy a copy rather than an original. To pursue someone's version of something someone else came up with first. Average people are the most creative when they have someone else's riffs, words or plots to work from. Where would we be today if some well meaning teacher had told Eli Whitney or Al Einstein or Ben Franklin, or internet inventor Al Gore that they couldn't build upon what others had already established? What if they had to start at the very beginning: rediscovering gravity, the motion of the planets around the sun, or explaining the seasons before they could move onto their own inventing or day dreaming? We'd all still be huddled in rudimentary shelters, trying to figure out how to keep warm without burning the house down & having to eat the entire cow the day we killed him. Look at how advanced our culture is because of people using other people's ideas to guide their own! My proposal is controversial, but I believe it's really the best for the country. 

When the children of today, little vegetables in training, sit all day long watching TV, their brain cells are being given the finest workout available to mankind. Kids in the 1800s didn't know about forensics, or due process, or internal affairs, or what life as an ER physician consisted of, did they? Oh, sure, they were incredibly advanced in agrarian pursuits, they could determine the height of a flagpole by the length of the shadow cast on the ground, they had a vocabulary typical of a college graduate, but these archaic skills are no longer needed in today's technological society. Kids in the 1800s wouldn't be able to fill out a simple 1040 form. They would be helpless behind the wheel of a typical car, & they'd probably use a computer to dry laundry on. Therefore kids today need to watch more TV. Parents who resist this directive need to be incarcerated, and their children raised by more culturally friendly adults with the maturity to not try to push some agenda onto the helpless kids. I know for a fact that a neighbor of mine doesn't have cable TV! Her kids are being deprived a wholesome upbringing like typical American kids, and that's a form of cultural abuse. She is denying her kids a need as basic as food or shelter. She is ignoring their right to become culturally educated in such a way that they can compete in a global economy. Yet when I call the Department of Children & Family Services, I am told that not only is this is not illegal, it is not negligent. The fact that her kids are ignoramuses who can't name even one show on MTV, who have no clue who won the Nickelodeon Kid's Choice Award in any category, and who have never heard any songs performed by any of American Idols is something she should be deeply embarrassed about. My hope is that by exposing her little indoctrination plan she is forcing her little lambs through, that some appropriate action might be taken to protect her kids, or that the outcry of the internet audience against her will shame her into doing the right thing and calling the cable company now! 

It's families like that who threaten our future of entertainment. Where are tomorrow's movie writers going to come from? How will we be able to take our grandkids to movies about what really excite us, cartoons & TV shows from our childhood, alive & dancing on the big screen? What will our children's children jam to, if not songs that incorporate familiar tunes & ways for instruments to sound in them? Lyrics that contain ideas & wordings we cherish need to be reexamined by someone new, to bring a fresh newness to the trite. Maybe we missed an idea or a meaning in what we've all heard so many times & love so dearly. Television shows need to continually churn out proven formula following hits for success & high ratings- those ratings, after all, reflect what the country wants to watch. If people continue to attempt & strive for originality, life is going to be boring, unfamiliar, unappetizing and scary. Would you rather spend the night in some distant cousin's freezing cold, rank smelling hunting lodge in the middle of nowhere, with no electricity, or phone, & terrifying mysterious noises keeping you up all night, or in your own cozy bed? That's right. What's familiar is what's the best & the best for us. 

Finally, the majority of people truly don't want originality in music, television, or movies, and they prove this with their wallets. Witness the popularity of MTV, Clear Channel Radio and all the sound alike bands gracing the dial everywhere you turn. The same basic 3 chords get played & played well, it's just different guys playing them, with different effects and different arrangements. Pop music follows trends, too, whether boy bands or untalented but photogenic former Mickey Mouse Club girls. TV follows trends, such as reality TV shows. When people see a good show on TV about cops solving a crime, for instance, they need & want & will seek out another cop show to jump to during the commercials. People don't like differences, people like distinctives: same basic show just with different characters, locations, crimes & solutions. Movies follow trends. The current spate of movies based on superheroes over the past couple years bears this out.  "The Incredible Hulk", "X- Men", "Spiderman 1 & 2" "Daredevils", "The Incredibles", "Hell Boy", and more to come! People just can't get enough of those superheroes based on a cartoon lately! The next time a movie comes out exploring a new idea, just wait till one of the movies based on that idea comes out & watch that instead. By doing this you will strike a decisive blow for equal rights, and establish your support of people who are talent challenged. Show the world that originality is grossly overrated, copying is the great equalizer. Besides, deviation from what is the norm could threaten our very existence! Read on to find a chilling proof of this.

An example from Ancient Egypt will have to illustrate my last attempt to reason with you people reading the antiMusic site. Remember all those pictures you've seen of ancient Egyptians decorating pyramids & art?  Everyone had the same slim build, with their feet going sideways, while their face steadily looked at you, shoulder length smooth black hair on everyone, you know what I'm taking about. Well, a new Pharaoh came to power that went along with those depictions at first, but then a virus like sickness seized him, leading to his own destruction. You see, he decided that he wanted nothing but originality, in all aspects of Egyptian life. Originality in religion- only worship the sun, not the Nile, not the Pharaoh, not the corn. Originality in the location of the capitol of Egypt- travel the countryside & make some effort to see your government at work! And worst of all- originality in the style of art. No more slimly built guys all doing the same thing, all clones of each other. For the first time in Egyptian history, the common people saw that their leader, who they had worshipped as a God prior to this new mental illness taking over the captain of their ship, wasn't an athletic, perfect looking deity that was superior to them in every way like the art of the day in all its homogeneous glory had proclaimed. But he was a guy entirely like them, a little fat guy with male pattern baldness. This was too much to take! The new capitol was burned to the ground, the new temple for the sun & examples of art destroyed and the new Pharaoh was very fortunate to have been able to escape with his and his families lives intact. They had to flee the country and live as illegal aliens in hostile lands, & my guess is they spent the rest of their lives weeping over their stupidity in trying to tamper with people's entertainment & attempting to force originality on them.

This is a lesson you originalists would be wise to heed! The fair & respectful thing to do is leave people's entertainment the way they like it, not the way you think they should have it. People have a deep, fundamental need to be treated like one of the herd, led by people much smarter than them. Not only is there no sense in challenging people with originality, but people really don't want that, anyway. Don't be so rude, all you originalists! Be considerate! Quit trying to shove your differentness down our throats, alright! We don't want it, we hate it & you can’t do anything about it! Besides, there's more of us than there is of you and the sooner you assimilate yourself into culture the way it is supposed to be, the sooner we can all be friends & enjoy the popular version of everything a lot more than the obscure stuff you like!
 

Your turn. 

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Posted by Brad:
This was fantastic. My day is much better.