Self Righteous Musings from a Sad Lonely Man

WEEKEND IN NEBRASKA

This past weekend, I took the Megabus out to Nebraska from Chicago to play a solo set at the Lincoln Calling music festival. I don’t have a car and I am terrified of driving, so whenever I go out to play a gig without my band, I’m often seen clutching my acoustic guitar on trains and buses throughout the country. A lot of people have the notion that carrying a musical instrument automatically turns you into a chick magnet. However, I can safely say that the most attention I’ve gotten from a woman while equipped with a guitar on a train was one time on the Red Line in downtown Chicago when the 5pm just-got-off-work crowd forced a middle-aged housewife’s gigantic ass to pin me to the window for twenty five minutes. Other than that, the combination of my ratty guitar case, frazzled unkempt beard and deadened, world-weary eyes doesn’t seem to illicit anything from women except for the occasional glance that seems to say “You would never be able to provide for my children.” Having an instrument handy will, however, most likely make you a prime target for being forced into horrifying conversations with crazy, elderly men who look at you, yell, “Guitars, huh?” and then go into a long tirade about the war. 

As I finally settled down in my seat after humoring a seventy year old man as he told me about how my guitar case reminded him of a one night stand he had in Korea, I read a few chapters of a book called Descent of Man by Charles Darwin. Darwin’s most recognized work is Origin of Species, where he introduced the theory of evolution by suggesting that all creatures’ traits developed over time from lesser creatures, instead of being independently created in full form by a higher power. Since he was a timid guy and this idea was controversial enough in the 1850’s, he didn’t even bother mentioning that humans most likely evolved from monkeys, fearing that this would cause a gigantic uproar from bourgeoise debutantes who would be outraged by the suggestion that their relatives were shit flinging apes. However, as the years went on, slavery was becoming more and more rampant in Europe. Scientists at the time were actually rationalizing slavery by saying that humans were most likely independently created as eight different species, with white Europeans being the most highly developed, and black “savages” one of the lowest forms.

Darwin was a staunch abolitionist, and wrote Descent of Man to prove that man as we know it is in fact just one species that evolved from monkeys, hoping that this humbling fact would make one race less prone to feel superior to the others. He spends most of the book discussing all of the similarities that human’s physical and behavioral patterns have in common with the rest of the animal kingdom’s. On the bus ride, I read a chapter about how in most species of animals, the males are much more eager to mate than females, and often need to compete with other males by using acts of aggression, flamboyant plumage and passionate song to entice the female into copulating with them instead with of the others. Often times, females are ambivalent to sex altogether, and have to be stubbornly coerced into the act by the male. No shit, Darwin.

After nine hours of driving through the flat corn fields of Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska, I arrived in Omaha and got a ride into Lincoln later that night. The music festival took place in a series of music venues located around downtown Lincoln. Duffy’s, the venue that I was hanging out at on Friday night, was on the main strip. This area looks like most college downtowns; sports bars and nightclubs mixed up with fast food chains, local restaurants and coffee shops. Around 8pm, the street was crowded with a sea of drunk college kids walking to and from different bars, and as the night grew on, they were getting drunker and rowdier. 

At around 10:30pm, I witnessed a fight break out outside. It was between two athletic gentlemen who were in their late teens. One of them yelled, “You are a pussy!” and the other one lunged at him and yelled back, “No, you are a pussy!” As a crowd of passersby accumulated to watch the spectacle, one of the girls who was with them intervened and held one of them back, yelling for them to stop fighting, but also giving a look that seemed to say that she loved the attention and would probably put out if one of them threw a punch. 

Darwin 1, Humanity 0.

I slept on an air mattress at the house of a photographer for a music website called Hear Nebraska, and then woke up and met up with the  organizer of the Lincoln Calling festival to kill time until the show that night. We had heard that there was a show going on in somebody’s basement around town, so we drove over there to check it out around two in the afternoon. When we got there, about twenty people were huddled in a dark, musty attic, drinking cheap beer and watching a puppet show. The puppets were decaying, plastic baby dolls that had been punctured with holes so that they could be rigged into marionettes, manipulated by detached pieces of rusty exercise equipment. It was a musical drama set in the 1950s about foul mouthed gangster babies who were competitive boxers. The music was provided by a group of ominous looking men who wore hockey masks and black wife beaters. 

After the show, the festival organizer and I headed over to Duffy’s, where I was going to be playing that night. I played first, around 9pm. At one point towards the end of my set, I noticed that the venue had become quite full, despite the roaring thunderstorm going on outside, and there were a lot of very attractive women watching me. I was becoming extremely self conscious about the ragged and unkempt state of my hair and beard, and announced that if four people bought CDs then I could afford to get a haircut the next day.

When my set ended, a woman in her fifties went up to me and told me that she worked at a hair salon down the street, and said that she would give me a free haircut if I wanted one. I asked her if she wouldn’t mind giving me a haircut right then so that I could be more confident talking to women at the bar. She agreed, so we walked over to the hair salon. She unlocked the doors, turned on the lights, gave me a haircut, and then we walked back to the bar. When I got back in, a beautiful Hispanic girl approached me and told me that she was moved by my performance and raved about how passionate and romantic my voice was. She bought me a few drinks and we talked for about forty minutes. We looked into each other’s eyes, and her tender and honest appreciation was extremely moving. I was quickly falling in love with her, and was making plans to quit my band, sell all of my personal belongings and move to Nebraska to beckon to her every call. I tried touching her hand and then she pulled it away and quickly started talking about something else. Then after a little while she said, “You know, my roommate really wants to sit on your face.” I told her that I thought we were having a romantic connection, and she explained to me that she was engaged to be married and was trying to set me up with her roommate. At that point, I realized that I was so infatuated with her that I didn’t notice that I had been painfully holding in a pee, so I excused myself and went to the restroom. When I came back out, she had left the bar. So had her roommate.

I was very sad that the Hispanic girl had left, and I sat at the bar by myself for a little while, wondering if I should have ignored my urinary needs and persuaded her to back out of her engagement so that we could start a life together. Moved by the buzz of alcohol, I walked around a couple of blocks in the rain to see if I could see her through the windows of any of the restaurants, but I eventually went back to Duffy’s without any luck. As the night progressed, I ended up talking to a tall blonde girl who I had met briefly outside the night before. At around two in the morning, I asked her if I could sleep on her couch for the night. She said that I could, so I grabbed my guitar and we headed for the door. As soon as we walked outside, a dirty homeless man in his late sixties with a greasy black mullet pointed at my guitar case and then started furiously playing air guitar while aggressively barking in my face like a dog. He then politely said “God bless” and stumbled away.

We got to her house, and I set my guitar and backpack down on a couch in her living room. She asked me if I would go outside and tell her if I saw her doing anything through the window in her living room and her bedroom. I walked back outside in the rain, and saw a silhouette of her dancing through the curtains of her living room window. Then she moved into her bedroom, but I couldn’t see anything through that window. I went back inside and told her that. She was relieved, and said that she just wanted to make sure that people outside wouldn’t be able to see her “fooling around” in her bedroom. I found this to be a very forward statement. She gave me a sexual look and we sat on her bed. I got up to use the bathroom. When I got back, she had fallen asleep. I asked her if she wanted to fool around, and she said that she was tired and just wanted to sleep. A word of the wise to the gentlemen readers out there. If you are with a woman, under no circumstance should you ever go to the bathroom. It just gives her the opportunity to realize that she could be doing much better things with her time, such as sleeping.

Darwin 2, Humanity 0.

I woke up around eight in the morning, walked around town with my guitar for a bit, and then got a ride back to Omaha to wait for the bus back to Chicago. As I was standing at the bus stop, a man in his fifties wearing a grey sweater slowly gravitated towards me, and eventually said, “Guitars, huh?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Ya know,” he went on. “I was at a store the other day. Nothin’ but guitars and musical instruments. Can you believe that?”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yep. Never seen anything like that. A store, that had nothin’ but music. Good stuff! What, uh, what kind of guitar you got there?”

“Oh, I think this is a Gibson,” I said.

“Yep,” he said. “I think I saw a Gibson at that music store. That’s what they called it, a ‘music store.’ Store full of music. Yep, definitely had one of those Gibsons.”

“Oh,” I said. Then the bus arrived. The man wasn’t waiting for the bus, he was just looking for conversation. I said goodbye, boarded the vehicle, and headed back to Chicago. I was sad to leave behind everyone that I had met in Nebraska, but people all seem the same and sort of blend into eachother after a while if you don’t get too attached to them, don’t they?

Last night I got a call from my mother telling me that my ninety three year old great aunt Sarah, known throughout our extended family as “Crazy Old Aunt Sarah,” is in the hospital on a morphine drip and is going to die in the next day or two. For the past two months she has gone through some serious health issues, going blind in one eye and clotting blood in her kidney. However, in the last few nights, she has said her goodbyes to her relatives, made her peace, welcomed the presence of death, and is now in a peaceful slumber until the inevitable.

One of the reasons that she has been known as “Crazy Aunt Sarah” is because of her notorious tendency to speak her mind, oblivious of basic modern American manners and how uncomfortable it might make people feel. When I was thirteen, she once told me, “Fuck it, I’m going to die soon anyways, so I’m just going to say whatever I want.” Mind you, that was eleven years ago and she was perfectly healthy; but that kind of made it all the better. It really resonated with me. She had said it because she knew that she was getting old, but we’re not all going to die of old age. There are literally millions of ways for us to die on any given day, so fuck it. Much to my parent’s dismay, this had a pretty big impact on me.

The first time I went on tour with my band, I took them to visit Aunt Sarah at her beach house in New London, Connecticut, in between our shows in Providence and New York City. We walked onto her patio where she was sitting by a table. You could tell that at one point she had been a very large woman, but a lot of the fat had been whittled away from age and illness, and her arms kind of looked like fleshy wings. We all greeted her, clasping her shaky hands. They introduced themselves. Joe, August, Sarah, Andy.

“Have a seat, have a seat!” she encouraged us in her hoarse, raspy voice, delighted by the company. As we all settled in, plopping ourselves down on our chairs, she looked at each of us very intently and finally said, “Alright, so who’s sleeping with who?”

The initial shock of a question so forward and extreme being thrown in at such an early stage of the conversation took my bandmates aback a little bit. However, after knowing her for a good twenty four years, I had become somewhat of a seasoned professional, and continued our discussion unphased. “We don’t fuck each other, Aunt Sarah,” I explained. “It’s bad for business.”

We had some pleasant small talk for a little bit, talking about our house in Chicago, which instruments we each play, things like that. As Andy was reminiscing about how our show went in Providence the previous night, Aunt Sarah cut him off and said in a forceful elderly Jewish tone, “You know, when I was eighteen, I wanted to be a comedian. Then, I got an opportunity, but I got scared. So, I became a hairdresser instead. Now I’m ninety three years old and I’m going to die alone and unfulfilled.”

This was her version of small talk.

Aunt Sarah kind of lived vicariously through her sister, my grandmother, Rebecca, who created the gargantuan and loud Jewish dynasty that I come from. Sarah didn’t have any kids and her husband died about fifteen years ago, but Rebecca spawned four children, got three son-in-laws and one daughter-in-laws out of the deal and then eventually, seven grandchildren. When she passed away three years ago, Sarah appointed herself as honorary grandmother of the family, and became obsessed with seeing to it that the grandchildren (my generation) would start reproducing.

At the first family gathering that I went to after I became a touring musician, Aunt Sarah hobbled her way over to the kitchen where I was having a conversation with my mother. She interrupted whatever it was that we were talking about and said, “Gabe, I understand that you’ve been traveling around the country.”

“That’s true,” I said proudly. “Sometimes I’m in ten or eleven different states a month.”

“Good good good,” she said in a very businesslike manner. “Now Gabe, make sure that you’re not using protection while you’re out on the road. You’ve got to start sowing your seeds.” She then hobbled away, leaving my mother and I in the most awkward situation we had been in since I, oblivious to the general plot, got us tickets to see Oedipus Rex when she visited me in Chicago three years ago.

The last time I saw Aunt Sarah (well, the last time I will have ever seen her) was at her ninety third birthday party back in May at her house in New London. Her backyard was filled with relatives, friends, and general acquaintances who had heard that there was going to be free food. I was over by the drinks table talking to an Israeli girl named Noa who had been “adopted” by my mother because she secretly always wanted a girl and a spawn who actually practiced Judaism. I had just introduced myself to Noa when good old Aunt Sarah came hobbling over.

“Are you two together?” she said, looking Noa over.

“No, we just met,” I said, taking a huge swig of wine to prepare myself for what was inevitably going to come out of her mouth next.

“Come on now!” Aunt Sarah said in dismay. “I’m dying soon! One of you needs to get married before I die!” She then changed her tone and became very serious. “Listen, I have a lot of money. I’ll give you fifty thousand dollars if you two get married. You can get divorced after I die. I won’t know. I’ll be dead.”

Noa was getting increasingly more and more uncomfortable. I was considering it.

Then Aunt Sarah nudged her, gestured toward me and said, “You’d let him fuck you, right?” There was a horrified silence. Then she said, “Think about it,” and hobbled away.

Ever since I started developing my own personality and began being more and more vocal about uncomfortable, awkward things at inappropriate/inopportune moments, it became clear to my extended family that I was becoming the Aunt Sarah of my generation. Aunt Sarah and I began being banished in the corner at family gatherings so that we could make jokes about blowjobs and racism while everyone else discussed art history and taxes.

Now, as you are reading this, Sarah is in a hospital bed hooked up to a machine, and is most likely going to die in the next forty eight hours. The last thing that she said before she went into her final coma was that she was ready to die. For those of us who choose not to believe in an afterlife and view death as not much more than a “big nothing,” the most comforting notion we have is that as our lives progress, the prospect of an ending becomes more and more of a natural and welcoming feeling. You don’t necessarily have to have fulfilled all of your dreams and aspirations to have the feeling that you lived a complete life followed by your own rule of thumb.

I’ve lived my life by a similar rule of thumb, constantly having the urge to bring up sweat inducing topics that most people choose to ignore in their own brains, let alone in casual conversation. In Chicago, it has earned me the reputation of being a crazy person, an asshole, an insensitive prick. It makes it harder to meet women, and in general, it makes it a little harder for some people to take me seriously as someone who is more than a quirky novelty. I am convinced that if in the next seventy years I don’t die in a plane crash, cancer, car collision, asthma attack, violent allergic reaction, get cancer, or perish in a freak balloon accident, I will be the shriveled up Jewish hunchback in the corner of the family gathering, affectionately referred to as “Crazy Old Uncle Gabe.”

So, here is to a woman who always spoke her mind, regardless of the consequences and how it made her perceived by others. I plan to fully carry on her legacy.

Next blog entry will be about blowjobs and pussy farts. 

Alright, gang, so the word is out. Mumford & Son’s new album Babel is the mammoth release of the year, by far. In its first week alone (it came out last Tuesday) it has sold over 600,000 units in the States. According to Billboard, that’s almost twice as many copies as Justin Bieber sold with his record, “Believe,” this year. It’s the largest selling “rock” album in five years (that includes Creed, Nickleback, Daughtry, and a myriad of other Eddie Vedder soundalikes who sing like they have powdered donuts in their mouths, and whose singles sound like they were penned by vacant suits filled with dollar bills and copious amounts of cocaine). And while this new record is exploding, their debut “Sign No More” has been resting snugly on the Billboard charts for the past two years, selling well over 2.5 million copies.

Now, Mumford & Sons have never been critical darlings. Hipster tastemakers Pitchfork gave “Sigh No More” a scathing 2.1 rating, lamenting that they have tapped into the “indie” warehouse of Fleet Foxes harmonies and Avett Brothers rootsy earnestness and turned it into Top 40 mainstream schlock. As their quick rise to fame escalated, a lot of people were calling them out on how formulaic and predictable their songs were, lambasting them for being one trick ponies. Most recently, a website surfaced that shows how most of their singles can be summed up by an animated .gif of a Disney character furiously playing a lute. It reminds me of when someone figured out that Chad Kroeger was using the same formula for all of the Nickelback singles, and layered “How You Remind Me” and “Someday” on top of each other to prove that the verses, choruses, breakdowns, etc., all happen at the same time.

But, come on. Fuck the critics. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, AC/DC…these bands were bashed by major reviewers when they released records that we now look at as classics, and the test of time has shown that these were undisputedly some of the greatest rock bands that ever were. We can’t rely on critics to be right all of the time. And when it comes down to it, it’s all about what resonates with the people. If it makes them feel something passionately, then what does it matter what critics have to say about it?

With that being said, I’ve really come to love modern pop radio. Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson…come on. These are monster songs that, as we briefly discussed in my last entry, are expertly crafted to fire you up and fester in your brain forever. It’s not high art, but why the fuck does everything have to be high art all the time? Isn’t creating something that everybody likes (even if not everyone admits it) an art in itself?

So when some of the new songs off “Babel” began surfacing on Youtube, I decided to give them another shot. As a dude who has publicly lambasted Mumford & Sons before, as a dude who reads Pitchfork on an embarrassingly daily basis, who knew about Grizzly Bear before they were cool, who goes to see obscure synth bands in 100 capacity venues with his arms folded, eying that one nineteen year old girl who’s wearing a vintage Smurfs t-shirt and a spirit scarf and thinking that maybe if she looks my way and I pretend that I know the words to the song then she might go home with me because she knows that her and I are both floating in an exclusive, tiny bubble of alt…and more importantly, as a bitter dude who is in an unsuccessful band that happens to include a banjo; well, the odds weren’t really in Mumford & Sons’ favor.

I put on the titular track, “Babel,” first. To be honest, my expectation was that I was going to yell “Fucking Mumford & Sons, these guys suck!” but deep down inside, there would be a tiny part of me fighting the embittered hipster majority of my psyche, yelling “No! This is catchy, and it’s pumping you up! And goddamnit, it makes you remember that girl who broke your heart! You’re starting to cry, you pussy!” But as the song went on, I didn’t feel like they sucked, and I didn’t feel like it was catchy, and it didn’t really evoke any sort of emotion. It just made me feel kind of blank. To me, there were no guilty pleasure choruses or emotionally manipulative lyrics that make me drunkenly sing along to “Call Me Maybe” and pop songs of that ilk. But you know, it also wasn’t terrible. It sounded like music. The dude has an engaging voice, and the lyrics aren’t any more cringeworthy than the indie bands who underground tastemakers have told us to like.

The thing is, they’re humble dudes. They’re not the Chad Kroegers and Katy Perrys sitting in laboratories, fine tuning gigantic hooks that will fill arenas and dominate the radio. They earnestly like folk music, they like Bob Dylan, and they like wearing vests. In an interview with Rolling Stone last year, Marcus Mumford actually said how shocked he was at how popular they were becoming, since he saw themselves as a middle of the road folk outfit.

If you look at the music video for “I Will Wait,” you can see tens of thousands of people going nuts as the Mumfords play their three chord rootsy ballad wearing old timey outfits, as the guy with the beard twirls his upright bass and the main Mumford starts pounding his bass drum. It looks as if people are witnessing a museum piece, an exposition of simpler times, when folks played acoustic instruments on porches and told stories. It’s like when Buffalo Bill came down to New York City in the late 1800’s and got millions of people to buy tickets to escape from the hustle and bustle of their city life and witness an exposition of a romantic, heroic Western lifestyle that they could only really imagine.

When a band or an artist like Mumford & Sons becomes so extraordinarily popular and sells such a large amount of records while being so unlike anything else that charts that high, it’s safe to assume that the public has been hungry for something radically different than what’s been offered to them. The prime example is Nirvana and Pearl Jam exploding onto the mainstream just as teenagers were getting tired of the pomp and overindulgence of hair metal. So, it makes perfect sense. Technology is rapidly evolving, and people are getting overwhelmed by the increasingly electronic direction that popular music is taking. Going back to where it all began, just a couple of dudes wearing vests, playing acoustic instruments and yelling about lions….it’s a breath of fresh air. 

Now all that criticism about them being one trick ponies….it’s pretty accurate. When you listen to enough of their songs, you know exactly when Marky Mumford’s gonna start pounding on that bass drum as the banjo comes pummeling in, and when they’re going to pull it back to make room for some earnest introspective lyrics, and when they’re going to come BACK in with pounding bass drum and banjo. My problem is, I don’t think that they have the songs to match the gimmick, and the formula/image in itself takes the place of the hooks that draw people into them. I don’t appreciate them on an artistic level, and I can’t even get myself to enjoy them as a guilty pleasure.

Although, it kind of makes you wonder if the next Nickelback music video will feature Chad Kroeger with a bottle of whiskey, sitting on a barrel of hay and singing about redemption. If it happens, I’ll bet it will be a hell of a lot catchier than “I Will Wait.” 

Okay. So Kevin James is a portly, happy go lucky high school teacher. He finds out that the evil soulless school principal is cutting all funding for extracurricular activities, including the high school band. The only way that Kevin James can raise the money and save the drama club is by for some reason becoming a mixed martial artist and winning the heart of Salma Hayek in the process. The film is called “HERE COMES THE BOOM,” and what it really means is that the secret maniacal executives behind the curtain of American popular culture have completely lost all respect for us, and are at this point simply mocking us.

Here’s another example. I was watching an episode of The Voice the other day. Now, the basic formula for the audition portion of the show is that the contestant has faced some sort of emotional tragedy and the only way that they can overcome it is by singing. Last year it seemed as if twelve contestants all had parents with stage eleven pancreatic cancer. Tragic stuff, but it pulls at your heartstrings, makes you emotionally invested in the character (or I guess you could say, “person,”) and more importantly, makes you more likely to keep watching more episodes.

So there was this one girl who came to the audition this season, and this is the basic gist of what she said in the interview before she went up to sing:

“<weeping> My family and I were robbed at gunpoint when I was nine years old. Nobody was killed or hurt, nothing was stolen, and the robbers were caught and sent to prison. Now the only thing that gets me through life….is my music. <more stifled sobbing>”

Now, it’s shoddy craftsmanship like that that makes me throw my hands up in the air and think that the people aren’t even trying anymore. You know what people I’m talking about. The secret society of 40 year old cocaine addled businessmen who are behind the curtain, pitching every Kevin James movie plot, writing every Nickleback single, coming up with every new Taco Bell/Dorito hybrid, and genetically engineering slimey pulsing beauty queen reality show larvae in the eerie laboratorial area of their dark, sequestered layer located deep beneath the bottom of the earth.

It’s fine that these people exist. In fact, it’s actually quite comforting at times. When I’m eating a McDouble, I’m filled with a feeling of warmth and appreciation for the item that I’m consuming, which was created in a laboratory, by not chefs, but SCIENTISTS, scientists who have data and know statistically what human beings would probably want to consume, and were actually able to synthetically create it, using SCIENCE. I know that it’s completely negating whatever menial exercise I put in during the day, and furthermore is most certainly planting the seeds for diabetes, eight different types of cancer, and, to round things out, let’s say, infertility. (I’m no doctor, but come on guys, probably.) But at the end of a long day, it’s easy to acquire and it makes me feel good.

We’re just animals after all, aren’t we? Data of behavioral actions of dogs, for instance, can be written down and analyzed to tell you how to train your dog. We’re no different. That’s why there’s books on dating, how to raise your baby, how to nail a job interview. That’s why if I’m at a bar lamenting about my bad luck with women, Steve the Drinking Pal says, “Dude, when has texting girls drunk off your ass at two in the morning rambling about Fraggle Rock and your penis ever worked for anyone? I’ll tell you what works every time….” I of course won’t actually tell you, the reader, what works every time. Then I would have to kill you.

So, it’s no secret that we’re all under microscopes and our every moves, our every desire and impulse are being tracked and turned into data to figure out patterns of our behavior, sometimes to benefit psychology, education, medicine, and sometimes to benefit the market. In fact, there’s a whole science called “behavioral economics” that looks at our social instincts and how it affects what we buy and why we buy it. When you think about it, it really is a fair trade. There’s a team of very intelligent people that figure out what we as a people are probably going to enjoy with the most minimal amount of effort possible, and we in turn give them all of our money.

And that, I think, is something that is important to understand. The person who writes the song “How You Remind Me,” or the guy who thought up KFC’s Double Down, or whoever wrote the screenplay for “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” on the surface, may seem like the biggest idiot jagoff on the planet, who somehow, through some incomprehensible act of God, got their huge flaming pile of feces to be dished out onto the mainstream to rack up millions and millions of dollars. But I guarantee you, these people are not idiots. In fact, they’re some of the smartest people in the country. Do you think Chad Kroeger doesn’t know what he’s doing? He studies songs on the Top 100 Billboard chart like Jane Goodall studying a fucking chimpanzee, and he creates song formulas that are guaranteed to sell huge amounts of records. Shit, he probably wrote “Rock Star” in a dark sequestered ominous underground layer, perhaps right next door to the laboratory where the Doritos Locos taco was conceived.

In closing, this isn’t a piece to lambast mainstream popular culture. Sure, I go to art museums, I read heady literature, I listen to arty chill drone wave core indie rock and all that shit. But I also like fast food. I like bad reality television. I like Katy Perry singles. They’re easy outlets for me to relax and decompress, especially after a long day. But there’s part of me that has this sinking feeling that the people behind the curtains have figured out these formulas, and now they’re just experimenting to see how much they can dumb things down, which inevitably means less effort on their part and more money coming in from the public. Listen to all of the Nickleback singles written after “How You Remind Me.” Look at all of the bizarre snack food/taco hybrids created at Taco Bell since the popularity of the Doritos Locos. Watch the trailers for all of the Kevin James vehicles since the smash success of “Hitch.”

Is the evolution of popular culture, what we choose to consume, what music we listen to, what movies we see, evidence that Mike Judge might have been right on the money with “Idiocracy,” where five hundred years later, entertainment has devolved into a series of mindless grunts and farts? And who is really to blame, the maniacal coke-addled men behind the curtain, or us, the consumers, for encouraging them?