Mind Your Own God Damn Business

It’s that time again: I need to gush about a bunch of bands that I like right now that I will undoubtedly be deeply ashamed about listening to in three months, but by then, it will be too late. The Internet will have documentation of my love of Hoobastank forever.

Lady Gaga

This isn't actually Lady GaGa. Based on her other wardrobe decisions, you wouldn't know that if I hadn't told you. That's kind of awesome.

Have you ever spent an evening hanging out where you have a good time, you’re feeling confident, and then you come home, look in the mirror and realize that for the duration of the evening, you had a bunch of snot hanging out of your nose, or your fly was unzipped and your balls were hanging out, or a mural of a horse’s penis was drawn on your forehead? And you feel this hot wave of embarrassment and shame roll over you, and then you spend then next three hours remembering the group of girls that kept looking at you and giggling that you thought were into you, but were actually probably just trying to guess your age by how low your balls were hanging? And then you kind of wonder why the fuck your friends didn’t give you a heads up on that?

That’s kind of how I feel about The Fame Monster being out for four months now and no one telling me to get a copy of it. This album is nothing but solid gold hits. A more savvy business person would’ve rationed these hot, nasty dance jams out at a slower pace, putting one or two them on an album full of filler every year or so. Apparently, Lady Gaga (Who I will refer to as Stingray Bearslayer for the rest of this post, because the name Lady GaGa is way too stupid to keep saying) is confident that she can keep producing club music that gets my nipples hard at a fast enough rate that she doesn’t have to make any filler to go with it.

No matter what the reason, I could’ve been listening to The Fame Monster for quite some time now if only my “friends” had brought to my attention that it was awesome. I’ll remember this, fuckers. If we’re hanging out sometime and you’re on fire, you might find out about it, but it won’t be from me.

Die Antwoord

I don't know why I think this is awesome, but I do.

I recently friended Robert Hamburger, the author of Real Ultimate Power on facebook, because the rest of my sorry-ass friends refuse to completely dedicate their profiles to ninjas, which is to say they waste my time (apparently I will be dedicating this post to badmouthing my friends. Good call, Johnny.) One of his random fans linked the video for “Enter The Ninja” by Die Antwoord. After watching a crazy white guy who looks like he’s older than I am, a dude with projeria (That condition where you age abnormally fast) and a hot little pixie chick with crazy bangs jump around and sing and rap, I had to find out more. As near as I can tell, they’re a few art school students who made a fake band that are roughly the equivalent of South African Insane Clown Posse. Given how I feel about Insane Clown Posse, the genre of music they play and the fact that the band appears to be a few hipsters that decided to make themselves into Cape Town Ali Gs, you would think that I wouldn’t like this band.

Which doesn’t really explain why I can’t stop listening to them.

Ever since hearing this, I’ve been yelling “You can hear me coming from the distance!” in my best 103-pound-South-African-girl voice. I like most of the rest of the album too, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because it’s something different. Maybe it’s because even though it’s a joke, it seems pretty good.

Actually, as I think about it more, I think some of it has to do with the fact that it’s a joke. I can’t quite explain why, but once I realized that they probably weren’t serious (About the time that the guy says “Fuck – this is, like, the greatest song I’ve ever heard!” in the middle of the Enter the Ninja video and referred to the Internet as the “Interwebs” a few seconds later), I found myself suddenly more into them. That shouldn’t make a difference to me, but apparently it does. I think that it’s because if something seems bad on an album from a band who’s trying to be ironic, I assume that it was intentionally that way, which changes it from an embarrassing gaff to the punchline of  a joke.

The fact that this has an effect on how I enjoy music is kind of depressing for me for two reasons.

One, it means that there’s a large component to how much I enjoy a band that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual music that they play, which makes me feel like a shallow douche bag.

More terrifying, though is the dangerous precedent that this sets. I did a little test and watched this video:

I have to be honest – I don’t hate this nearly as much as I want to. I mean, it’s bad, but I don’t entirely dislike it. It’s just a LITTLE bit too stupid for me to get into.

But what if I found out that they were joking? What if I were to find out that the wicked clowns were a couple of dudes with finance degrees who thought it would be interesting to see how much money they could make by dressing up and writing goofy, ham-fisted lyrics about murdering people and reciting them over really shitty beats? Would I be into them? I want to say no, but I think I might.

The implications are horrifying: If I ever get an inkling that Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J are even slightly less sincere than I currently think they are, I may start liking Insane Clown Posse, a band that Chuck Klosterman says “mostly appeal to preteens who are even too dumb for Limp Bizkit.”

Q: What do you call it when your self image hinges on these two men being completely serious? A: An unenviable position.

The more I think about this, the scarier I find it – They wear clown makeup, spray their fans with Faygo soda and are constantly yelling about “The Dark Carnival” – suddenly, it seems way MORE likely that they’re joking than that they’re not.

And if I would love ICP if they weren’t serious, what else would I enjoy? How many bands do I think that I don’t like because of their music that I would suddenly fall in love with if I thought they were doing performance art? Am I going to be gushing about Fergie and Nickleback two weeks from now because I’ve decided that they’re hipsters who are only pretending to suck?

I can’t think about this anymore. I need something to listen to that doesn’t make me feel like this.

I have just the thing:

God Damn it.