Irony in the Musical Literacy of Today’s Youth
Now, I know the only reason my blog gets any traffic at all is for that controversial rant that I’m quite sure sends tremors through the hearts of scene kids everywhere. But, you know, I do actually have the power to write other things. Like the little essay I’m about to subject you to.
Several months ago in my science class, we were given the basic equivalent of a free period. We got to run around the room, talk to people, listen to music, generally be spaztic and unfocused teenagers. At the front of the room, our science teacher Grahme is taking requests on what music he should put on from his itunes. I request Led Zeppelin, but somehow David Bowie gets put on. Not that I mind, David Bowie is by no means bad. Then. All of a sudden. Like an anti-music-cultured tsunami, up wanders a kid I hate with a fiery passion (whose name will remained unmentioned) and he changes it to “Ice Ice Baby.”
What were those emotions you felt? Shock, horror? Complete and utter disbelief? Cringing because you thought Vanilla Ice was dead? All perfectly acceptable responses!
Please tell me, loyal minions and readers, that you see the irony in this. Changing from a Bowie song, to a song Vanilla Ice jacked from Bowie. And do you know what happened when I called them on it? Blank stares across the board. The sheer idiocy of my classmates is really often amazing.
You know what I’m starting to think? I’m beginning to think that it’s a ploy by rap label reps to get rock fans into their music. I know it’s happened to me before. You’re flipping through someone’s music, you hear something good like Crazy Train by Ozzy, and then it dawns on you suddenly that it’s Trick Daddy’s “Let’s Go.” Then, as a side-effect to this madness, you end up falling in love with a rap song that you’d otherwise shove away in disgust all because it reminds you of a good rock song.
Now, I’m not putting down rap or hip-hop. I listen to a lot more of it than people expect, actually. What I am saying is that rap artists need to use their own music, because when they don’t you have today’s youth actually thinking that P.Diddy came up with “Every Breath You Take,” and that Eminem wrote “Dream On.”
OH MY GOD.
This is a repost from a MySpace bulletin I just wrote, but I figure it’s appropriate because all I do is rant here anyway. Enjoy!
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May Day, May Day!
Somewhere on the top of the list of things not to be in an equal rights rally surrounded by a hoard of Latinos there is me: The white girl wearing a tiara. I learned this the hard way when a man behind me started to mock me, in Spanish to the man standing next to him. “She wants to be a princess!” He said. Sheepishly, I took the tiara off. Though that probably goes without saying. But, anyhizzle…
Motivation.
In the grand scheme of things, and things that piss me off, the past few days have been very mild. Therefor I think I will have to recycle something the I wrote a few weeks ago; rewriting it into a shining jem of a piece. Or, at the very least, something that people will not read and then mock for being a terrible piece of shite.
So this piece of revised writing is about my lack of motivation. It is really amazing how unmotivated I am sometimes. Like in this blog. I’ve gone days without writing! Apparently, I’ve decided that I have better things to do than write. Which is probably why everything I try to write end up dying within it’s second chapter. You’d think that I would’ve given up by now. Hung up the old keyboard and called it a day. Most people would’ve by now. Why am I such an exception? Honestly, I have no idea.
I have an obnoxious persistence in writing that my mother really wishes I’d show elsewhere, like cleaning my room. Actually, I have obnoxious persistence in a lot of things that my mother would much apply to keeping a clean living area. “You can memorize the lyrics to every Nine Inch Nails song ever written,” she grumbles, “but you can’t keep your room clean.
You should all check out Nine Inch Nails, by the way, if you haven’t. They’re fantastic. But I’ve digressed.
None of this making fun is to say that I don’t love my mother. Because I do. I love my mom more than anything in the freaking world, because she’s a really amazing woman. But what I am trying to say is that I am a terribly unmotivated individual. I am a straight A student(save for one B+ in Spanish) and yet I have to make up 1003.2 excuses for why I don’t have my homework, or why I couldn’t be assed to come to school on a particular day.
I mean, really. Sometimes I amaze myself. My room is never clean, my clothes are never folded, everything is out of order. It’s a damn miracle I can put my shoes on the right feet.
And now, to close this lovely tidbit of writing in the most appropriate way possible… I have some really overdue homework that I need to get a move on.
Holy Mother of Pumpkins!
I have a fan! A real fan! Please, someone beat me over the head with one of these exclamation points because clearly I am dreaming!
No, really though. They’re added to the blogroll. Made me smile, fairly badass. Not doin’ half bad for a first-timer.
Scene Kids.
Someone had to have seen this coming. Though, I guess that if you don’t know me maybe not. I am biased, I will admit. I hate scene kids with a passion. Not Kandy Kids, and trust me there is a difference, just scene kids. Why do I hate scene kids? I’ll tell you. That’s what this rant is going to be about, and it’s going to make me feel hundreds of times better about life and everythingness.
Maybe I should start off with what a scene kids is. To the untrained eye, a scene kid and a kandy kid are the same thing. YES, it is true that they look similar, but it’s the personality that makes all the difference. Kandy Kids are very goofy, friendly, and are all about having a good time. Scene Kids are pretentious, shallow, rude to anyone outside their circle of friends and are all about having a good time if it means concerts, poorly angled photographs they can post on their myspace.
Good, now that I got that over with. Let’s start with my actual argument.
Thesis: Scene kids are the most useless sub-culture to date.
Point one: Clothes. Where does a scene kid shop? Everywhere! Often found in Forever 21 for trendy layered tee’s (with funky patterns) and tight jeans, Hot Topic for band shirts, Claire’s for an excess of clunky plastic jewelry, and the Disney and Sanrio store because bringing back things you haven’t worn since 2nd grade is totally in. The aim of the scene kid look is a bizarre hybrid of bohemian carelessness, faux-retro revival, and a hardcore edge. The only problem is that these styles already exist. The hardcore kids have their style, the Kandy Kids own all the retro plastic accesories, and bohemian carelessness is best left to people who know their way around a thrift store and can actually pull the look off with some sort of class.
Point two: Music. One of the main reasons I cannot stand scene kids is their ability to fuck up a perfectly good band for me. Any good scene kid knows the following things. A: you cannot be scene unless you listen to at least five local bands. B: you cannot be scene unless you own more than two pieces of band crap from said bands. C: you cannot be scene unless you listen to at least two bands from every conceivable genre just so you can say that you indeed listen to every conceivable genre therefor making you seem a lot more well rounded than you actually are. D: you are not a scene kid unless you like every band you listen to more than anyone else in the entire world could possibly like that band. In fact, chances are you own that band, have been listening to it since before you were born, and are probably the only person who should ever be listening to them anyway. Except your friends, who are just as cool as you and obviously get to listen to them too. E: you have Norma Jean on your iPod.
Point three: Attitude. Scene kids know they’re attractive. Now, this doesn’t mean that they’re attractive, this only means that they know that they’re attractive. Clearly you’re just jealous that you aren’t them if you say otherwise. End point.
Point four: Hair. The mark of a true scene kid, the hair. Often created from a bizarre mixture of plastic extensions, bleach, and several tones of hair dye, these blasphemous creations are all the rage. If it has lots of angles, covers one eye, or looks like it belongs on a punk barbie, chances are you’re in!
Point five: Wealth. Now, I know that chances are that this isn’t true for every kid, but it is true for every scene kid I know personally. That totals to more than five, so don’t mess with me about this. Anyway, they’re all rich. Like… really, really rich. Which always leaves me with this sick idea that the scene kids are in fact a socially acceptable, rich kid rebellion. Got over 100,000 in the bank? Sick of having to do chores and drive the 2006 Mustang your parents bought you? Be a scene kid!
And that’s all I’ve got for today, folks. Scene kids, and why they need to be eradicated from existence.
Classmates.
Classmates. Bad classmates, rather. What is a bad classmate? A bad classmates shouldn’t be considered a classmate at all. They do not do their homework, they give the teacher attitude, and they mutter angrily like they’ve been done some great injustice by being told to have a notebook and not whip out their cellphone during class. It makes me want to hit people in the head. Multiple times. With a baseball bat.
I don’t even understand how a person can get so rude! I mean, really, let me take you back for a moment. Way back too my wee years of preschool. Kindergarten, at most, but no later. It was the one and only thing I have ever done that is even remotely comparable to what these “bad classmates” do everyday.
My preschool boyfriend (remember those?) and I were out playing in the yard. Playing by the swings, using knotted up cloths to whack at people’s feet. We were laughing, having all kinds of fun. Because, really if you thinking about it, it doesn’t take much to amuse a 4-year-old. Anyways, there we were wacking at people’s feet when… let’s call him A, the preschool boyfriend, he fell into “my area” of the swing set. I beat him up with my knotted up cloth. I was so impacted by my teacher yelling at me for that one incident that I have never been violent since. That was one time. What happened to these kids? Weren’t they yelled at as children? I don’t understand! How do you have so little respect for humanity that even yelling doesn’t work? Yelling scares the shit out of me, but… maybe that’s just me.
Another extra special quality of the bad student is the inability to stop talking. And then they get offended when a teacher calls them out, denying that they were talking even when their voice is reaching a 6.0 on the Richter Scale!
I really could go on for pages and pages about how I want to stuff the Bad Classmate(tm) into a wood chipper and then feed them to a great white. But I wont! Now I’m going to talk about immaturity in general. Because, really, immaturity is the driving force behind the Bad Classmate(tm).
I don’t understand immaturity. I mean, I could recite the dictionary definition from memory but I still don’t get it. It makes no sense when I see it in action, in everyday life. Why can’t people just not act like idiots? Another rhetorical! I’m good at those. I have friends, you know, who are well over my age and some of the things they say and do make me want to shove them in garbage cans.
You know… I’m not actually a violent person. I could never hurt someone. But that doesn’t mean I can’t think about it, a lot, in times like these.
Introduction.
I decided, fourteen days before my sixteenth birthday, that I was going to write a book. And so I took out a notebook and I wrote. And I wrote. And I wrote a lot. But I didn’t write enough for a book, in fact I probably didn’t even write enough to publish my own newspaper full of things that people don’t care about enough to read.
And so. The moral of this story is that I am going to keep a blog of my observations of stuff. And things. And just so I don’t have to strain myself too much — because don’t kid yourself, writing is something that puts a lot of strain on the old brain bone — all of my first posts are going to be re-workings of the things that I wrote down in my book that isn’t really a book or a magazine. Except for this, which is my introduction.
I hope that it isn’t too painfully obvious that I’m trying to be funny, because really I am trying to amuse you. Any good writer knows that in order to keep an audiences attention, you need suspense. My suspense is in whether or not my next sentence is going to be funny. That one wasn’t. Neither was that one. But I think you get the point.
My name is Antigone and I am not a real teenager. Pleased to meet you.
