Seen and Herd

He's the one

Who likes all our pretty songs

And he likes to sing along

And he likes to shoot his gun

But he knows not what it means.

- Nirvana

I’m not a trendy asshole

I do what I want

I do what I feel like.

- Offspring

Whenever I'm asked why I like what I like, I usually respond with a blank stare, a shrug, or just a dry “what's it to you”. It’s like asking a person why he likes blue over orange when the latter is obviously the best color in the spectrum, and then wondering why the hell the other person picked the other. What kind of answer are you looking for when you ask questions like these, anyway? It’s one thing to be genuinely interested about another person’s preferences, and entirely another to ask questions that are seemingly harmless at first glance but are pointed accusations that always come across as how could you? Or to be blunt: How could you like it when it’s not the popular choice?

Like in music: someone asks me what I enjoy listening to and I mention something even my parents were partial to (by that I mean they liked when they were young) and suddenly the person looks as if he was speaking to a leper or someone with a bizarre sense of humor. Add +100 damage if said person is younger than you. And then comes the all too-familiar “Luma na yan, a.”  ("That's old.") And I’m always tempted to get back with something like coercing the guy to join MENSA for that phenomenal observation. Of course I can always lie and give something very generic like the ones I see every time I tune in to some music video channel to save myself from ridicule but why bother? Oh, I see. It was a tasteless joke about my age. Stupid me. And by the way, pu+@&^@ mo rin. I’d take an idiot’s heckling anytime over being known for liking crap disguised as something else just because it’s “new”.

It is amusing. This general assumption that anything not commonly spotted in the radars of contemporary pop culture are automatically regarded as a waste of time or, at the very least, ugly, boring, or nonexistent. Of course this is true to some degree. Popular is popular no matter how defiant one is regarding that definition. And some---most, actually---of what I like has been popular during their time as well. So who am I to say that today’s collective taste is bad? But then I’ve always held on to the adage that popularity isn’t always in direct proportion to quality. Or perhaps my headstrong revulsion toward latching on to trends because it makes me feel like an idiot---because that’s how I perceive people with no identity of their own to fall back to. It’s a bit tricky, as well. All a person has to say is that the Beatles were the largest pop musicians in the planet; so does that mean I’ll snob them had I been born a little earlier and lived through the height of their popularity just because they wrote corny love songs designed for teenaged girls? Probably.

But then The Beatles innovated—they reinvented their sound, subject matter and even their very image to grow from singing about puppy loves to singing about Eastern philosophies, mind-altering substances and even looking through the eyes of a 64 year-old. And I am more familiar with their later works like Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The White Album, Revolver, etc. I have been exposed to their music since kindergarten (due to my father’s bootleg cassette copies) but my interest toward the band came when I was in high school. About the same time when puberty demands listening to subversive music by bands with the least surplus of sappy love songs in their catalogues. They went from being top 40 poster boys to serious artists.

Ah yes. Artists and art. As much as it makes me cringe at sounding like a pretentious poseur I'd have to admit that it is the main factor I look for as a spectator. It is very hard to define or peg because most of the time, shock value or nauseating attempts at cuteness are often received with more enthusiasm than the real thing. This is unnerving to put in one's journal. Especially when everyone nowadays seems to have a delusion that automatically gives license to proclaim themselves as artists just because what they do requires a level of creativity even a trained chimpanzee won’t have a problem attending to. But I digress and that’s a separate topic, altogether.

The point is how can it be unfashionable to like something like A Clockwork Orange or Kraftwerk or Led Zeppelin during these times when they have already proven their value to the world? The Police’s Reggatta De Blanc was released in 1979 and I have yet to listen to the entire album. You can argue that it sounds dated, but so what? Truly good songs are timeless. If what’s being played now sounds good because it’s new, then why bother liking it? It would be passe in a year, or maybe within months, anyway. Give it a few more years and someone with an IQ of over 15 would inevitably mumble “Luma na yan, a.” You’d be better off not liking anything, if that’s how your twisted logic operates.

And I am aware this is sounding more and more like the intergenerational grousing that typical old people like grandparents usually do. That people were more sensible in their time than today’s society with corrupted values and reckless youth, and so on until the cows come home about everything that’s right about theirs and everything that’s not in the present. To a person, pretty much everything about his generation is the best compared to the rest. And I am guilty of that to some extent, except that I also appreciate most of what they said that was great about their generation. And my parent’s generation. And mine, of course. I try hard to see any redeeming qualities on today's contemporary landscape and the only thing that struck me as totally original these last few years was William Hung.

Even guitar-based bands not only sound alike, but also talk of the same lovelorn woes or how they’re gonna slit their wrists because, well, they just feel like doing it; because they are overtly emotional. As if Weird Al Yankovic does not have emotions due to his irreverent humor and approach at creating/parodying songs. Or maybe I’m just not looking. Even films that are being peddled nowadays are just bloated, but ultimately hollow versions of their original 80s incarnations: The A-Team, Predator, Aliens, even the upcoming Tron Legacy and The Transformers.

If consumerism was already bad enough in 1979 to warrant a stinging criticism via George
Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead, it sure as hell no different now. If anything, it only got progressively worse. Music, film, literature and other branches of the creative arts are reduced to products with a definite shelf life designed for today’s generation with an attention span relatively comparable to that of a jellyfish.

I guess this is the inverse of a previous topic I posted a few years ago (Indie-Indiehan). In that I touched on one of the most extreme form of snobbishness in the guise of liking something, anything, not popular or known to at least five people because of a weird form intellectual arrogance; and here I’m ranting about an extreme form of intellectual inadequacy that is abysmally annoying because most people seem to be suffering from it. Hard to believe that herd mentality, coupled with the dependence toward Google and Wikipedia to do the thinking reduced most people into mindless cows content on eating what the media shoves down their throats.

FURTHER/RECOMMENDED READING: The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein