Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Bark louder, little dog.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

No one could have predicted…

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

The willow is too close to the house.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

We still have time to mess this up!

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

The words do not have to be perfect.

You are here: Home / Music / Open Thread: An Old’s Thoughts on Pop Music

Open Thread: An Old’s Thoughts on Pop Music

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I’ve come to look forward to DJ Earworm’s annual United State of Pop mashups, because they always introduce me to a couple of enjoyable songs or artists I’d otherwise miss, being as I was never very musical and have long since aged out of the target demographic. This year’s keyhole-into-the-lizard-brain discoveries, for me, were Scream & Shout (but when did you-know-who morph into Young Phyllis Diller?) and Can’t Hold Us…

Trouble, trouble, trouble! — welcome to the new age!… despite its opening, “Living the Fantasy (2013)” seems more upbeat than the last couple. Maybe we’ve accepted that all media have become permanently unstuck in time, so we’re each going to be our own Kilgore Trout. This is our moment!…

Did I miss the vast purity-patrol outrage over Radioactive‘s racist “blue-eyed virgins vanquish learing Hispanic cockfighters” mini-movie? Or did the “tattered care bear vs. evil muppet” thingie distract their millenial brains?

One of these days Katy Perry and Robin Thicke are gonna collaborate in public, and those of us who survive will remember it as the Kitsch Singularity, or Snigger-ularity…

Somewhere in the upcoming three- to five-year window, the newest Manic Pixie Dream Americana Artiste will pick out “We clawed, we chained, our hearts, in vain, never asking why… ” on her mandolin, and every tax-attorney hipster in the audience will have trouble not touching himself in public…

Does Pharrell Williams’ mother know what her son is doing for money? Cause I think he was raised better than that!

Now you all can explain to me, in the comments, exactly how I am doing it wrong — or what I have missed, here or elsewhere.

Reader Interactions

45Comments

  1. 1.

    Punchy

    My cousin’s g-friend named her Boxer “Tyson”. I find this stupid. It will be expected to bite earlobes, catch and raise pigeons, and cost about $300 million to live a good lifestyle. Not to mention, I can only imagine how messed up his face is…

  18. 18.

    srv

    @Corner Stone: Well, so a Whiter Shade of Pale for Civil Libertarians, or?

    It would seem to me the Snowman crowd doesn’t have a protest song to rally around.

    I was out there with my “Hey, Hey, NSA! How many kids have you spied on today?” but that hasn’t caught on yet. Who is the Woody Guthrie of our time?

    We need a modern version of this:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwcKwGS7OSQ

  24. 24.

    srv

    @Jewish Steel: And where is Sarah, I thought she did Christmas in Rome – which means hanging with the Cardinals of course.

    What do we pay her for if not scoops on the basement Vatican raves?

  27. 27.

    Corner Stone

    @Jewish Steel: Did he, at least, have a nice set of cuff links to complement your Christmas tie?
    Otherwise, how gauche.

    Jesus Christ. I just had the feeling of being Davis X. Machina making smug and back slapping commentary on a thread at LGM.
    ***shudders***
    I repent my sins, O Lord! Please, pray forgive your wayward child!

  29. 29.

    max

    Now you all can explain to me, in the comments, exactly how I am doing it wrong

    I don’t think you are doing it wrong, I just don’t pay attention to ‘pop music’ (in the sense of Top 40/Bubblegum/Whatever) now. Of course, I never paid attention to pop music. There was a brief moment when AOR was popish (or pop was AOR?) in the 80’s that I remember, but what was listed as popular was always way different than what I was listening to. Or maybe I should say that I sometimes listened to bands that sold lots of record for time, although why that happened was a mystery. And then I listened to things that were never going to be popular.

    OK, try this: if it’s in People, it’s a form of xenoathropology as far as I’m concerned. Far less sensible & comprehensible than what’s going on the Central African Republic (for example). On the other hand, if the goths or the punks are listening to it, I’ll probably like it, unlike… everyone I know. (I sorta dug the Bulgarian music I was listening to a couple months ago – it had fewer preservatives and artificial ingredients than the noises emitted by the VMAs.)

    max
    [‘So. Your answer.’]

  31. 31.

    max

    @srv: The democrats of yesterday are the fascists of today

    So I take it then that the Democratic party is now taking the stance that the Bill of Rights is obsolete, that the United States should engage in preemptive war, torture is to be embraced, the war on terror will last forever, the United States is the ultimate power in a unipolar world and should thus seek perpetual war for perpetual peace, and also our jails are not full enough?

    Those were the Bush administration positions, last I checked.

    When did the Party embrace that constellation of positions, and why? And where is the platform statement saying that?

    max
    [‘Just wonderin’, because I’ve been hearing that echo all damn day, and I could have sworn the Democrats were down on that sort of thing.’]

  32. 32.

    Corner Stone

    @max:

    So I take it then that the Democratic party is now taking the stance that the Bill of Rights is obsolete, that the United States should engage in preemptive war, torture is to be embraced, the war on terror will last forever, the United States is the ultimate power in a unipolar world and should thus seek perpetual war for perpetual peace, and also our jails are not full enough?

    Hmmm….hmmmm…
    Is this mecha snark?

  33. 33.

    srv

    @Corner Stone: We are all Darrell now, dude.

    @max:

    Bill of Rights is obsolete

    Retro-active immunity. I’ll leave it to CS to cover the rest.

    engage in preemptive war

    That’s what John “Courtesy Bombs” Cole called it.

    the war on terror will last forever

    You imagine there’s a party plank on rolling that back? Wonder why John Cole doesn’t fly?

    our jails are not full enough?

    Democrats aren’t going to empty any jails because their enlightened, it’s going to be because we can’t afford it anymore. What democrat is “weak on crime” now?

  34. 34.

    Mike in NC

    Katy Perry and Robin Thicke would gladly agree to perform at the inauguration of President Rand Paul. Money talks and bullshit walks.

  35. 35.

    srv

    @Mike in NC: Where is all this Katy hate coming from? She told her parents to GFT’s

    Katy Perry turned down her parents’ request to attend President Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration because of their conservative politics.

  36. 36.

    Corner Stone

    @srv: The extra beauty of that is our special friend Martin arguing *again* for state death from above.
    Between making the compelling case that olds deserve “more but longer” with C-CPI, and deadly shit falling on people who aren’t Martin…not sure how he has time to inform himself on all of the other things he knows so much about.

  38. 38.

    PaulW

    We live in an age where there are no death-metal mashups every year. :(

    It’s either DJ Earworm or Pop Danthology making us listen to different versions of Miley Cyrus… and both of them mashing up too early because they missed Beyonce’s Stealth Album.

  39. 39.

    Hunter

    My basic approach has always been “Well, it’s all music.”

    As a reviewer (these days mostly for Sleeping Hedgehog.com — toot! toot! Check it out — I’m the Editor with a Capital E) and Epinions.com (as “rmthunter), I’ve covered everything from reconstructions of dinner music from the Periclean Age of Athens to stuff written about a year ago, all continents (except Antarctica — doesn’t seem to be any indigenous music from Antarctica), and a range of styles that make me dizzy sometimes. Fortunately, I like music, just as a Thing.

    As for pop specifically — been listening to Moby a lot lately. He does interesting things. Nickelback, the band everyone loves to hate. (You may not like what they do, but they do it very well.) Linkin Park, whose latest album, Recharged, is a set of remixes of the previous album, Living Things — they really should have left well enough alone.

    I don’t listen to the radio, which annoys me, or stream music very much, unless I happen across something that looks interesting. For the most part, I figure the music will find me.

  41. 41.

    GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)

    @srv:

    Democrats aren’t going to empty any jails because their enlightened, it’s going to be because we can’t afford it anymore. What democrat is “weak on crime” now?

    Really?

  42. 42.

    srv

    @GHayduke (formerly lojasmo):

    “Although incarceration has a role to play in our justice system, widespread incarceration at the federal, state and local levels is both ineffective and unsustainable,” Holder’s speech says. “It imposes a significant economic burden—totaling $80 billion in 2010 alone—and it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate.”

    This isn’t just a major shift for the Justice Department. It’s also another break from the past for a Democratic Party that’s slowly shedding the baggage of an earlier era. Mandatory minimum sentencing, after all, was a Democratic innovation, a direct response to President Ronald Reagan’s brutally effective 1984 reelection campaign, where he went beyond “soft-on-crime” labeling to accuse Democrats of a pro-criminal bias.

    Progressivism today is kicking the shit out of people and families for 25 years and then screaming victory by saying maybe you went a little too far.

    Oh, so heroic:

    Support for reform has been building for some time. One precedent to look at is the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the disparity in minimum sentences between powder cocaine and crack cocaine from 100-1 down to 18-1. That bill was supported by several influential House Republicans such as James Sensenbrenner (Wisc.), Paul Ryan (Wisc.), former Rep. Ron Paul (Texas), and even Todd Akin (formerly R-Mo.). That act proved that not only can drug reform be bipartisan, it can also attract strong conservative support.
    …
    The Justice Safety Valve Act, sponsored by Senators Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), and by Congressmen Robert Scott (D-Va.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), would go even further, eliminating mandatory sentences for some non-drug crimes. Either bill would be a positive step towards creating more-just sentencing laws by returning discretion to judges.

    When you stand with Ron and Rand and call yourself a hero, you might want to think twice about that.

  43. 43.

    Mino

    NSA has been reduced to claiming it never spied for corporate advantage. Every other brick has been kicked out.

  44. 44.

    Paul in KY

    Since it is the Festivus season:

    I dislike the fact that when you see a youtube link, you never know what the link is about until after you click on it & arrive there. I wish they had a title in the link.

    There, I feel better now…

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