Broken Record

This is an updated version of a piece previously published in 2003 in the pop-culture magazine Ape Culture .  This is going to be a long haul. Just like life. Anything worth having is worth working for, I say. As far as religion is concerned, I was raised with the very simple yet highly effective mantra for being good: don’t be a selfish asshole. And literally that was it. It was easy to follow because it was both easy to remember and not open to vague interpretations. No weekly sermon was required. No bizarre rituals. Hypocrisy was easy to spot within its parameters. It’s worked so well, I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket. (I've since gotten a speeding ticket.) In fact, it’s possible I go overboard from time to time. For example, before Thanksgiving of 2003 while I was transporting my new pet fish home from his office fishbowl in downtown Los Angeles, I turned down the volume on my car radio in sudden dismay that ‘maybe Basho doesn’t like Abba as much as I do.’  (B...

  Well, I wouldn't be a proper gray-haired Gen-X music blogger if I didn't post my list of favorite MTV videos.  Kids who were raised on YouTube can't possibly understand the impact a plethora of music videos had on young minds in the 1980s, particularly young teen-girl minds. Spellbound is a good word. The arrival of MTV kept us riveted to our TVs for the entirety of our high school years.  We would stay up all night watching MTV on the weekends. The cable channel played in the background while we did our homework and at our parties. We watched it when we couldn't sleep at night. We played our favorites over and over, taped down from VHS machines. As a courtesy, we pretended to like what our friends liked and they pretended to like what we liked.  It was such a supermarket-surprise in the beginning. And the channel had something for everyone back then, before videos were eventually segregated into overly-curated and boorishly-hosted hour-long "shows" by the 1...

  I was reading an old essay this morning about the Beach Boys written by Jules Siegel  and in it Siegel was talking about the "put-down" in certain pop-music reviews (and this was like 1967 or something) and how common it was to see put-downs in pop-music reviews because journalists felt it somehow demonstrated their objectivity as a writer, to put-down the artist.  As in, "I'm not a fan."  It was also "hip to be insincere" at that time and nobody wanted to be caught being sincere. After decades of it I guess Siegel quotes a writer who asked, "who needs all this goddamn intense sincerity all the time?"  There were reasons for the insincerity craze, but it sort of dismissed The Beach Boys who seemed too square and awfully sincere when compared to the Beatles. The same writer tells Siegel, "this year it is hip to be sincere."  Because who needs all that oppressive insincerity all the time? But, it turns out, this is just as bad as th...

Another thing happened during my car drive out to Cleveland a few weeks ago. I re-listened to Sting's Dream of the Blue Turtles album. When "Moon Over Bourbon Street" came up, I remembered all those 1980s songs inspired by Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles  novels (from 1976). I went online looking for a list of them, the Anne-Rice songs specifically and also songs about vampires in general.   I have to say I don't find vampires particularly interesting, scary or sexy. I think this is because the first few vampires I was made aware of were in comedy moves like Love at First Bite and Transylvania 6-5000.   And because of the other sweet, kooky vampires on Sesame Street (The Count who loved math) and on cereal boxes (Count Chocula who could helpfully turn plain milk into chocolate milk). The vampire in all his or her incarnations seemed a bit too much. It's no unrelated reason that "energy vampire" has come to mean any annoying person who drains your e...