Thoughts on pop culture

 

Cause it’s a bitter sweet symphony this life…
Trying to make ends meet, you’re a slave to the money then you die.
I’ll take you down the only road I’ve ever been down…
You know the one that takes you to the places where all the veins meet – Richard Ashcroft (The Verve)

Random thoughts.  You know the ones that come to you after you’ve drank a bottle of wine or smoked the last joint in the box while listening the latest fancies of YouTube music.  The thoughts that come to mind after reading a writer that can actually articulate a sentence and a thought unlike today’s “popular” culture bullshit that the over simplified, ego centric youth are forced to read by their teachers who only care about making that next student loan payment on time.  Well, it’s really not their fault, more a victim of a culture that values excess rather than quality.  I mean, how many different ways can you package a show where plastic girls argue, fight, and put out more often than the busiest of porn stars, to some over the hill rock star.  Music is another thing the poor bastards (often literally) have to put on there iPods in order to be anywhere above the ‘never going to get laid’ teenage social class system.  How’d we go from Clapton to Spears?

And now to the main point of my rumblings on a rain soak evening where it seems I’ve lost everything including that god damn baseball game to a bunch of one-armed cultural rejects.  Restaurants!  I live in a despot of a hometown that seams only to support the ‘chain’ establishment meme.  Every local treasure seems to have fallen victim to the jolly coke addicted teenager dressed up as Chucky Cheese.  Microbreweries which seem to have become an overnight obsession in this state, cease to exist here.  I find myself on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road where the cannibalistic chains are swallowing up any sense of individuality and originality that we had.  What is good and what’s comfortable are almost never the same thing.

Were obsessed as a culture with the inevitable ‘American Dream’ tag line.  This pop culture dilemma has squeezed me in.  I love it; it’s the greatest this generation (whatever the fuck their called) has given us.  The fact that you can be a 35 year old hooker, living on the corner of 52^nd and Broadway, paying her pimp while he snorts cocaine off her ass while the next night she goes out and belts out ‘Sex on Fire’ in front of Simon Cowell and gets paid five million dollars.  This is a secret, often embrassing back of the closet joy of mine to see.  Even though the American Dream isn’t really true anymore, or possibly ever was, it makes me at least feel good, that someone who never thought they’d have a chance to afford that vacation to the Caribbean now can.  I just hope they stay the fuck out of St. Barths. 

So I think this alcoholic induced tyrant has covered the basics of todays most fucked of a culture.  Popular music probably shouldn’t have been produced if the musician can’t go out on a stage and actually sing their own songs.  Books probably shouldn’t have been written if it has anything, god forbid to do with a vampire.  Movies, well those seem to be doing just fine, probably because their easy and comfortable.  Food probably shouldn’t be consumed if the fish gets flown in from the Philippines or the cow from Mexico.  Local is always and I mean always better.  The American Dream presence has never been stronger on TV but has been truly pissed away in reality as corporations have become the free loaders and the poor and middle class are stuck to pull the cash from their yet to sprout money tree.  But who knows, maybe they will win the X Factor this season.