2001-09-18 - 9:29 p.m.
OK, this is stupid.
Dear Clear Channel: "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is not a war anthem. Neither is "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Neither, for chrissake, is "American Pie." Just when exactly did the War on Terrorism morph into the War on Music, anyway?
I have this mental image right now of a conference room full of balding white guys in suits, poring over the playlists of all Clear Channel stations (not a very difficult task, considering there are only about half a dozen station formats with about 20 songs on each playlist to start with) and doing word-association games to decide which songs should go. "Walk Like an Egyptian"? Egypt is in the Middle East so that one�s out. "Peace Train"? Isn�t Cat Stevens a Muslim now? Besides, he was obviously some kind of hippie peacenik when he wrote that, and a train is a mode of transportation just like an airplane. Away with it! "Imagine"? John Lennon--another commie-pinko-pacifist. Enough said.
I do support the banning of "In the Year 2525," however, since that�s the worst, most pretentious-yet-insipid pop song ever written. I�ve hated that song ever since I was five, when I first heard it over my mom�s car radio while we were heading to the emergency room to fix my two broken femurs. Is Man still alive? Can Woman survive? My bloody-murder-screaming self didn�t really give a shit at the time.
And then there are the songs that have, amazingly, escaped this blacklist. What about "Killing an Arab"? "Party at Ground Zero"? If my warped little mind can come up with those two right off the bat, I�m sure Howard Stern and his producers have drawn up a whole list of them on a roll of toilet paper and are putting them into heavy rotation even now. And yet Clear Channel wants to ban Alanis Morrisette�s "Ironic." Isn�t it ironic?
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No, it�s not, apparently. According to today�s L.A. Times, irony is dead.
"The more long-lasting impact is the effect on the ultra-hip, ironic, wise-guy culture that took root in the early �80s, influenced by �Saturday Night Live� and people like David Letterman, Andy Kaufman--an entire generation of people. ... Irony as a mode of communications was appropriate for peacetime, but that now gets called into question."
Not by me, it doesn�t. I�m not ready to declare irony a war casualty just yet. God knows I�ve been uncharacteristically humorless this past week--I don�t personally know anyone who died on Tuesday, but a couple of friends were at the WTC just hours or even minutes before the attack, and other friends of mine did lose people they knew and cared about. When history--normally defined as "bad shit happening to other people over there someplace"--gets that close, or closer, we�re all too busy trying desperately to wrap our brains around it to laugh at anything.
But eventually one has to. The Russians know this better than anyone. A dozen or more centuries� worth of famines, tyrants, civil wars, more famines, more civil wars, and invasions by, well, everybody--not to mention the most godawful weather on earth--has given them a sense of humor so black you could paint a Goth chyk�s bedroom with it and even she would think it�s depressing. I�ve been told several times, by people who should know, that I�d make a great Russian.
So no, irony�s not dead, just MIA. I plan to tie a yellow ribbon around my tongue till it comes back.
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There's been some good stuff going on in my life, too--namely, a new development in the looking-for-a-swank-new-place-to-live department--but I'm afraid of jinxing it so that's all I'm going to say right now. Further information as events warrant.
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Finally, a little game of "Name That Reference." Where does the title of today's entry come from? Whoever signs my guestbook first with the correct answer gets a cookie.
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