In Touch with Middle America

In this month’s Playboy, in between alternate Bush-bashing and baring, a round table entitled “Rip. Burn. Die.” gathers music industry insiders to discuss the problems and challenges within the industry. While discussing exhorbitant concert prices, two known figures offer nuggets of insight into the little man’s mind set:

  • John Mayer:
    We charge around $40 for a ticket, which isn’t a lot of money. Twenty-three year old kids have $40 to spend on a concert. They may say they don’t, but they do.

    (John Mayer doesn’t point out that $40 represents almost seven hours’ of labor at minimum wage. Factor in the convenience fee applied to a ticket, and you’re looking at a full day’s work. Now, imagine you’re taking a date; that’s Monday and Tuesday of your work week, which isn’t a big deal to John Mayer. Now, say you’ve got a family, and you need parking for the minivan, and suddenly you’re not buying any souvenirs or food, and the concert’s not that much of a good entertainment value, but who am I to complain? I’ve already been to one whole concert this year.)

  • Sharon Osbourne:
    We could charge more, but with what’s going on with unemployment in this country, we want to keep ticket prices down.

    (Ms. Osbourne doesn’t mention that unemployment is still at a relative historical low, which means that if she had her druthers, the marked increase in ticket prices would be even more if she weren’t afraid to lose more concertgoers, so she’ll get in a little dig at the current president if she doesn’t have anything else to say.)

Thanks for your insight, celebrities and those whose work provides them with a better-than-middle-class living which apparently has divorced them from fiscal realities here outside the stratosphere.

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Good Morning, Middle Age

Yea, verily, I quote from the book of Bowling for Soup, and the prophets saith:

Debbie just hit the wall
she never had it all
one Prozac a day
husband’s a CPA
her dreams went out the door
when she turned twenty-four
only been with one man
what happen to her plan?

She was gonna be an actress
she was gonna be a star
she was gonna shake her ass
on the hood of Whitesnake’s car
her yellow SUV is now the enemy
looks at her average life
and nothing has been alright

Bruce Springstein, Madonna
way before Nirvana
there was U2 and Blondie
and music still on MTV
her two kids in high school
they tell her that she’s uncool
but she still preoccupies
with 19, 19, 1985

Of course, for we in Generation X, riding in the slipstream of the sonic Boomers, 40 is only the end of adolescence these days. Thanks, sixties generation. Now grow up so we can.

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I Guess Nobody Caught Her In Concert

Okay, let me get this straight. Smash Mouth is not allowed to perform at Fair St. Louis because they’re not family-friendly.

Now appearing at River Splash, Liz Phair.

Perhaps the bookers had not heard the songs “Fuck and Run” or “H.W.C.” (neither of which is particularly work-safe and will earn you content-scanning demerits should you click the links). Of course, I have never heard those songs, but I know Liz Phair might be moderately radio-friendly these days, but family-friendly, she ain’t.

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I Blame Peer-To-Peer Music Sharing

Summer concerts are failing to attract crowds — Lollapalooza is the latest victim of the trend:

Bongiovanni saidticket sales went south about the middle of April, when shows already on sale dramatically slowed and new shows failed to ignite.

“Price has got to matter,” he said. “Ticket prices are elevated to where they are not a frivolous expense.” But industry insiders say it’s not simply high ticket prices and a bad economy that caused ticket sales to drop, but a variety of larger issues, ranging from the lack of exciting attractions to a growing reluctance to patronize the suburban amphitheaters (called “sheds” in the business) where most of the summer tours play.

Quickly, Senator Hatch, do something to force people to pay $75 dollars to sit on a patch of dirt to watch a band play a number of songs the listeners won’t even recognize. Or else music promoters can key the cars in movie theatres’ parking lots to penalize consumers for misusing their entertainment time and money.

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The Truth–REVEALED

As I was at the gym tonight, staring in fascination at these things they call “music videos” which display on screens throughout the gym during time I should have been doing this thing they call “working out,” an “accidental” juxtaposition led me to an insight more startling than the insight that those little stickers which say “Keep away when machine is in use” might prevent pinching-to-the-point-of-near-amputation. Where was I? Oh, yeah, the insight:

Celine Dion is the result of a partially-successful French-Canadian attempt to clone Cher.

Come on, deep in the bowels of the Canadian health system, you know they looked southward sometime in 1968 and said, “What is best of American culture?” and, since there’s French in French-Canadian, they looked to the most, um, flamboyant of music coupled with the most dowdy spouse (which is undoubtedly how Quebec thinks of the other provinces). So they sent their crack secret agents to get a mouth swab from Cher, to ensure her beat goes on, so to speak.

Unfortunately, their cloning technology was limited due to budget constraints and bureaucratic infighting. So the clone, “Celine” (French for Cher), was of smaller stature, and due to limitations in the maintenance budget, underfed. Also, due to the unfortunate accident of her French Canadianosity, she speaks French.

But look how it all adds up. She marries her “manager,” which is to say the lead scientist in the secret project that produced her. Come on, this explains why someone that the French Canadians would consider marginally hot (especially since the basis of comparison would be Alanis Morissette) would marry someone over forty years her senior and would bear his genetically-enhanced children (undoubtedly, clones of David Bowie and Iggy Pop).

Just ask the Canadian prime minister about it if you get the chance. He’ll deny everything, of course, and that will be all the proof you need.

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Pah! I Got Nothin’!

When I read this post at protein wisdom, I wanted to break into song:

Looking out at the words rushing out of my keys
Looking back at the commas gone by like so many speakers’ fees
In ninety-one I was sophomore in English 101
I don’t know what my point is now, I’m just running on

Running on – running on sentence
Running on – running fine
Running on – running outta thoughts
But I’m writing more lines

Gotta fluff what can when you’re paid for each word
Trying not to cut your check by up to two thirds
By twenty-nine, I was pundit one and I called the Web my own
I don’t know when those clause ran into the clause I’m on

Running on – running on sentence
Running on – running fine
Running on – running outta thoughts
But I’m writing more lines

Everything I know, everything I type
People keep on reading my low tripe
I don’t know about anything but me
I can go all night, that’ll be all write
If I can get me a book deal before I leave

Looking out at the words rushing out of my keys
I don’t know how to tell you all just how badly this verb feels
I look around for editors I used to turn to shut me up
Looking into their cubes I see them running too

Running on – running on sentence
Running on – running fine
Running on – running outta thoughts
But I’m writing more lines

Buddy you really stet me
You know the way I wrote was fine
I’d love to stop it now but I’m writing more lines
You know I don’t even know what I’m hoping to find
running outta thoughts but I’m writing more lines

Peh. I got nothing. Apologies to Jackson Browne.

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Perhaps One Should Learn Slang Before Hiring the Band

More kudos to the fools who took a perfectly good Masonicesque Veiled Prophet celebration (seriously) and made it into a family-friendly (called sometimes “public-avoided”) event. The people who bring to you Fair St. Louis, which is an apt description of the city and metropolitan area itself, have rescinded their booking of main attraction Smash Mouth:

Smash Mouth, the pop act that was supposed to deliver a hipper, younger crowd to Fair St. Louis, has been booted from the July 4 lineup. Fair officials dropped the act after lead singer Steve Harwell offended employees of Enterprise Rent-a-Car at a corporate party in Orlando this month. Witnesses said Harwell called audience members obscene names.

Fair St. Louis executive director Rich Meyers said that he received a call from Pete Wyatt, a former entertainment chairman for the fair and an employee of Enterprise, who said that “the performance was the most vile, profane thing he had ever seen.” Meyers said, “We can’t take that sort of risk that there will be that sort of behavior in front of families, especially on the evening of the Fourth.”

I suspect that the target of the profanity, St. Louis Illuminati-level string-pulling Enterprise Rent-A-Car, has as much to do with the abrupt change of plans as the obscenity or profanity itself. But jeez, you happening old dudes, let’s just count up the clues that might have indicated the mindset and style of the group, shall we?

  • It’s named Smash Mouth, which describes a style of speaking that’s sort of, um, colorful.
  • Its first hit album was entitled Fush Yu Mang, alternately entitled on Amazon.com as Fush Yu Mang [EXPLICIT LYRICS]. Fush yu mang is a slurred pronunciation of a Nuyorican spoken unwritten mandate, if you get my drift. If you don’t, you should read this blog more frequently.
  • The first line of their first hit (“Walkin’ on the Sun“) is It ain’t no joke I’d like to buy the world a toke. You know, a marijuana cigaret.

Family-friendly? Geez, man, this is rock and roll. Smash Mouth will only be family friendly in thirty years, when the inured children of this generation curse the next-generation corruptive musicians who have scientific methods of actually altering brain waves through sound to cause orgasm or uncontrolled sobbing, or both when Chris Carrabba, Jr., sings.

Looks like the public/private partnership titans in charge of Fair St. Louis hired the wrong six-figure consultants to tell them what’s cool.

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Sheer Hatefulness

Everybody sing!


Outside my window there’s a whole lot of trouble coming,
The cartoon killers and the rag cover clones.
Stack heels kickin’ rhythm of social circumcision.
Can’t close the closet on shoe box full of bones…..
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Kangaroo lady with her bourbon in a pouch
Can’t afford the rent on a bamboo couch
Collecting back her favors cause her well is running dry
I know her act is terminal, but she ain’t gonna die

Slim intoxicado drinking dime store hooch
Is always in a circle with his part-time pooch
Little creepy’s playing dollies in the New York rain
Thinking Bowie’s just a knife.
Ooh the pain.

I ain’t seen the sun since I don’t know when.
The freaks come out at nine.
It’s twenty to ten.
What’s this funk that you call junk?
To me it’s just monkey business.
Get back!

Blind man in the vox that will probably die,
The village kids laugh as they walk by.
A psycho on the edge of this human garbage dump
And the vultures in the sewers are telling him to jump.

Into the fire from the frying pan, tripping on his tongue,
For a cool place to stand.
Where’s this shade that you’ve got it made?
To me, it’s just monkey business.

Monkey business, slipping on the track.
Monkey business, jungle in black.
Ain’t your business if I got no monkey on my back.

Monkey business, slipping on the track.
Monkey business, jungle in black.
Ain’t your business if I got no monkey on my back.

The vaseline gypsies and silicone souls dressed to the socie-tees.
Your hypocrite heartbeat and cheap alibis can’t get you by that monkey.

M-m-m-m-monkey, monkey!

Monkey business, slipping on the track.
Monkey business, jungle in black.
Ain’t your business if I got no monkey on my back.

Monkey business, slipping on the track.
Monkey business, jungle in black.
Ain’t your business if I got no monkey on my back.

Monkey business, you can’t tell me
(Monkey business) if I’ve got the business.
(Ain’t your business) no monkey on my back, yeah! huh!

Monkey business, ness, business.
Don’t give me your business, baby, woah ay!

Dudes, when I was in college, one night I did sit-ups keeping in time to that song. I am pleased to announce I didn’t vomit nor did I cry for my mother when the next song on the cassette, “Slave to the Grind”, began.

(Michele deserves it for slandering one of the greatest forgetable hair hard rock bands of the late 1980s.)

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Lileks on REM

From his column in the Star-Tribune (registration required):

I never really loved R.E.M., because I felt as if I was supposed to love it. C’mon! The guys are brainy-looking, and sometimes their lyrics make Elvis
Costello’s opaque blocks of text look as clear as an Irving Berlin chorus — heck, man, you’re in COLLEGE! You HAVE to love R.E.M.! It’s this or Ratt! Fine. I liked them, but never loved them. Example: “End of the World As We Know It” — it’s Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” for vegan guys with goatees.

Ouch, that’s got to burn the kids with van Dykes up (which were much more popular, and often were confused with, goatees). It undoubtedly bothers them as they middle age that Billy Joel has a longer, more diverse musical career than Stipes and co and is ultimately more relevant.

Of course, even when I was young (and even considered a van Dyke briefly), I preferred Billy Joel. I mean, he sang about being young when he was young, and he sang about aging as he aged. REM? One trick ponies: disaffected youth, even as they grew old. Billy Joel covered that, too, in “Angry Young Man”.

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What Generation Gap?

In the September 2003 issue of Speakeasy, the magazine reports on its survey that sought to examine the differences among the generations in its readership and to determine if one or more generation gaps really exist. A handy table condensed some of the highlights:

Graduated from High School In: 1940s and 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s
When you crooned behind your closed bedroom door in high school, which singer did you most often imitate? Elvis Presley Joan Baez
The Motown Sound
Joni Mitchell
Carole King
Paul McCartney
Johnny Cash
Prince
Tori Amos
Madonna
Ani DiFanco

Ani DiFanco? It’s just a typo, I know, because a later cell of the table (most important album from high school) spells her name right (while getting the name of her album Little Plastic Castles wrong). But jeez, it sort of proves the generational gap, wot, that they couldn’t tell at a glance the misspelling?

Or perhaps I am the only one who straddles the generational gaps like a gymnastically-inclined squid.

To celebrate, I switched from the AM oldies station today and put on some Vag Rock. I’m I am not a pretty girl…. that is not what I do…. I ain’t no damsel in distess….. and I don’t need to be rescued….

Yeah!

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Deploy the DiFranconator!

I know that United States forces in Iraq have played American rock and roll as a form of psychological warfare against the islamofascists. When confronted with taunts of against their manhood and Metallica, many Iraqis charged out like rabid animals and were quickly shot down.

Imagine how much more madder and crazier they would have been if our guys played Ani DiFranco. If the decadence of American rock and roll offended them so, it could only be more effective to have a woman singing to them that she’s enthusiastically conflicted about sleeping with copious amounts of men and women.

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We Bear All Alanis

So, according to Drudge, Alanis Morissette has been protesting United States censorship, by which she means commercial enterprises that ask her to change words in her monobrow lyrics before broadcast. Let’s examine that more closely, shall we?

  • She’s a Canadian
  • who protested in Canada
  • about “censorship” in the United States
  • which is not actually censorship, but a negotiation between the producer (Morissette) and a purchaser (radio stations) that didn’t work out according to Alanis’s “artistic” sensibilities.
  • She protested this “censorship” by wearing a body suit (not by exposing her actual, slightly dumpy body).

How seriously does she expect anyone to take this protest? Just seriously enough to buy her new album, probably. That’s what the smart people who run her told her, anyway. If she understood or remembered.

For crying out loud, U.S. Censorship. I tell you what, honey, but I will take your point a little more seriously if I knew CBC was showing a little nudity between hockey games and shows about hockey. So if you want to see some bodies, agitate for liberation in your own damn country first. When CBC changes its ways, I’ll personally write my cable company to get it piped down here.

Other sources for the story:

Others weigh in:

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Things You Wished I Hadn’t Made You Think Of

Gollum singing Parliament’s “Tear The Roof Off The Sucker (Give Up The Funk)“:


Yessss, wes wantses the funk
Gives us the funk
Yesss, we needses the funk
Wes gotta haves that funk

Face it. In one fell swoop, I have infected your mind with the song and have possibly ruined the song for you forever.

No need to thank me, it’s part of the community service portion of my sentence for Missouri State Statute Section 574.010, Grand Lack of Funk in the Second Degree.

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Bumper

Java Developer

Design servlets to deploy every day.
If we hit the Web server, would it play?
XML with an exception,
XML it doesn’t know
How to SOAP the right connection.
You wrote that code.
You wrote that code.

Java Java Java Java Java developer
You wrote that code.
You wrote that code.
Testing would be easy if your app worked like a dream,
Type, click and save,
Type, click and save.

Didn’t check your method calls every day
And all of them used to work, or so you say.
But your app is like spaghetti,
It’s the knots that makes it strong.
Once it’s kludged, it’s kludged forever,
It breaks anon.
It breaks anon.

The Event OnClick doesn’t fire.
Get the gum and the baling wire.
The Event OnClick doesn’t fire.
Get the gum and the baling wire.

XML with an exception,
XML it doesn’t know
How to SOAP the right connection.
You wrote that code.
You wrote that code.


(Apologies to Culture Club.)

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More Creepy Love Song Lyrics

Over at Signifying Nothing, Chris Lawrence takes Clay Aikens to task for his song “Invisible”. Lawrence decries the lack of subjunctive voice in the following:

If I was invisible
Then I could just watch you in your room
If I was invincible
I’d make you mine tonight
If hearts were unbreakable
Then I could just tell you where I stand
I would be the smartest man
If I was invisible
(Wait… I already am)

Dudes, that’s the second scariest song in the universe next to “Iris“. Let’s just break this down:

  • If I was invisible
    Then I could just watch you in your room

    He’s a voyeur, peeping Tom, or valued x10 customer.
  • If I was invincible
    I’d make you mine tonight

    Okay, wait a minute. If he were invincible, then he would make you his tonight. You’ve got no choice, he’s invincible, just lie back and enjoy it. Fellows, that’s called rape, and that’s what the word means. Not patting a reluctant fanny. Getting made his by Mr. Invincible, yes.

  • If hearts were unbreakable
    Then I could just tell you where I stand

    Hearts were unbreakable? You mean if handcuffs were not so confining and the hoods of police cars such unyielding headrests, don’t you? If you mentioned where you stand, that would be yet one more restraining order in your collection, wot?

  • I would be the smartest man
    If I was invisible
    (Wait… I already am)

    The final assertion is the scariest. If he were invisible, he would be watching you in your room tonight. And he admits that he is! Draw the blinds, turn on some running water and a couple of radios, and stop down at the sporting goods store tomorrow for a nice shotgun for when he gets it in his head that he’s invincible.

And they say that video games make people violent. This song is a veritable roadmap to stalking. All the lyrics need is a reference to Google, and all the pieces would be in place.

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