"Pop Will Eat Itself"? It already has. Eaten itself, had dessert, a brandy, coffee, and shat itself out. Case in point: Letterman's on in another room; I can hear it in the distance - it's those Wang Chung geezers, playing "Dance Hall Days". Typical Letterman crap musical guest. I head over to the TV to see this atrocity - but it turns out to be Counting Crows, playing a song from its new piece of product. Typical Letterman crap musical guest. It wasn't "Dance Hall Days", but it sounded pretty damn close. If you're going to steal something, why not steal something good instead? Why not tap into some primal, low-level code from the rock'n'roll kernel, rather than rip off the VB apps that are Wang Chung?

And don't get me started on the recycled-disco aspects of electronica. 93.18% of disco sucked in its first incarnation - there were many case-by-case exceptions, of course. It amazes me that recycled (or hi-techified) suck can somehow be kewl now; maybe it's because tanzmusikkultur of the 80s/90s has been freed from all those unsightly black, Latino, and homosexual people. It worked that way for rock in the 60s - the unsightly were reduced to distant icons (random example: Muddy Waters; random modern analogue: Martha Wash in the late 80s), and cannabis and acid (and, in the background, behind the curtain, The Man, selling you the music and its accompanying mythology) helped bond the new, lily-white rawk community. Less than a decade later, the corn-fed muzak of the likes of REO Speedwagon was what "rock and roll" was all about to many in this new mass audience.

Good golly...

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