The Billiken's Bluff

I am a cynical person. I have found that...



generally people say things without understanding the words they are speaking. Conversations are composed of boilerplate. People stand for causes and choose sides without reason(ing). And so on with other generalities like that.

[But but but but wait it gets worse!!]

But I am also a forgiving person. It takes only a word in a song, a turn of phrase in a sentence, a picture, or a facial expression and I can look past all that I dislike.



Like Queen's Bohemenian Rhapsody is an awful comical parody of a song. Maybe it wasn't always that way, maybe in the 70s people swayed to it and sang along giving themselves goosebumps and thinking that this was as good as it gets, MAN.



But everytime I hear it on 104.3 FM, the faux-operatic flourishes in the song make me think of Wayne's World, SNL, and some Victorian scene playing out like this:



But the line:

"Mama, just killed a man, Put a gun against his head, Pulled my trigger, now hes dead,"

is good, the lines preceding and following are not. I don't know what to make of this line though. I don't think of Queen as the criminal gangster-type. But it gives a certain beauty to violence. It confirms for me a common wisdom that it's not what you say, it's how you say it. If you say anything poetically, eloquently enough you can probably get away with it.

Popular music is typically devoid of substance or worse. That sounds like some pretentious sentiment I might agree with or even say. In fact I started writing this post and did type that line originally, with a straight face. So, in other words, it's not like freebasing, it, well, is



I feel compelled to immediately react to anything popular with suspicion, this is what I have been tasked with. If it's on MTV, fuck that shit, it's garbage then. If it's popular, it's not authentic. If it's mass produced and endorsed in commercial across multiple mediums then it is not artistic and not worth considering, not worth writing (blogging) about. This is the mentality of the cynic, the educated, and for the most part… me.

So here is my review of Fallout Boy's Dance Dance. I drive in the car a lot. Listen to a lot of radio. This song is regularly played on Z100. I want to dismiss it for all the reasons in the last paragraph. And in reality most of it is terrible along the lines of Good Charlotte and extra strong hair gel.

But there is this one line:

Dance, Dance
We're falling apart to half time

But God answered, “For the sake of just ten good people, I will not destroy the city.”



And I am a lot more lenient, just give me something, anything that sounds interesting, in rhythm, something curious, unexpected or capable of causing some sort of chill up my spine, gut reaction when played at high volumes driving fast and

I can be persuaded not to rain fire and apocalypse.



And that's it. The remainder of the hook goes...

Dance, Dance
And these are the lives you'd love to lead
Dance, this is the way they'd love
If they knew how misery loved me

Which as per the usual, is bad. Clichéd. Misery loves company, that sort of heard it before line.




But, dance, dance we're falling apart. Makes me think of not focusing on the reality in front of me.

And of the line from Lord of War when the two African prostitutes who were paid to service Nicholas Cage tell him, “What if I have AIDS? Don't you worry. You worry too much. Why do you worry about something that can kill you in ten years? When there are so many things that can kill you today.”



It makes me think of being blissfully ignorant. Of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. It reminds me of forgetting or trying to make someone forget what we’re fighting about.

Of Kundera's Life is Elsewhere. Of distracting yourself forever and forever.




Of hearing about Afghani youths in Kabul who rebel by wearing black jeans and bright pink or yellow shirts, pointy shoes and spiked hair and who drink in the afternoon and go to dance clubs and want to wear gold chains. It reminds me of being more concerned with girls and parties and drinking 40s, and the excitement of it all than the actual events on the day of 9.11.01.



It's actually probably not like any of these things, but it feels that way sometimes for about 2 seconds which is why I can stand it.