Assorted Rants, Or How the Mighty are Fallen

1. The Beatles. And the Boomer nostalgia machine strikes again. Every couple years or so they dust off songs we've bought, listened to, and recorded for 40 years, repackage them, and lay them on the altar of Our Long Lost Pop Innocence. Spare me. The Beatles were a good pop band with an honest dedication to crafting well-made pop songs, ones that shimmer with life even forty years down the road. That's all they were. Nuthin' wrong with that, but let's stop regurging up the same old slosh when there are thousands of bands trying to create something new that won't get heard because we keep wanting the same old slosh, served hot. For pity's sake, Let it Be.


2. JFK. See the first sentence of above. My birthday was yesterday, and every day after my birthday I have to put up with Camelot/Conspiracy fetishistas doing their merry best to make us feel gloomy before Thanksgiving. The man is dead. His son is dead. His presidency wasn't a golden age. The Kennedys aren't coming back to rescue us from our social anomie. They were a rich and pretty family that bought political power and used it to make asses of themselves. Their memory is not tragic. Lyndon Johnson was tragic; a shady backroom dealer with control issues who had no idea how to prosecute a war; a good-hearted man who hated bigotry and racism, who only wanted to lend the poor a helping hand, but left office in hatred and disgrace when he hit the wall of human power. Richard Nixon was tragic; an even shadier dealer who had no idea how to manage an economy; a farsighted-strategist who set in motion the dynamic that would end the Cold War twenty years later, who could not be forgiven by the cool kids because he was so earnestly uncool, and thus went over the edge of paranoia and went home in even bigger disgrace. John Kennedy is just dead. Deal.


3. Michael Jackson. Bleaaahhhhhh. Just Bleaaaaaahhhhhh. Who's to blame for this? What happened to that guy? How did he evolve from being the Golden Boy of Pop, the James Brown of his Generation with Beatles-like fan adoration, to that pasty pedophiliac Skeletor thing? I feel nausea, and not just at his face: at the machine that is now crushing him with all the glee with which they once deified him, and at us, because we buy it. Let him be carted off to prison if he so merits, but then let's shut up about him. If we should feel anything, we should be ashamed of ourselves, for devoting so much of our energy on someone who didn't need it or deserve it. Look at that face of his, if you can, and say to yourself: That is the face of a star.