Metal City - Hai Ina Ia Mai Ana Ka Puana

Pop Music - The Scourge Of The Earth (But still a source of genuine amusement) And kids entertainment. A two-pronged attack.

I hate pop music.

Sounds too easy, right? Sounds like the kind of thing you'd EXPECT a twentysomething with floppy hair and an old Holden to say? You'd be right, under normal circumstances. But not this time. This isn't some unfocused bile - a thrashing, wanton attack of vitriol aimed at anyone with a bare midriff and a microphone headset. While, of course, we should hate pop music for the soulless, cash-driven, fat-cigar-choming-guy-Porsche-buying swill that it is - that's not what I'm talking about. After all, weren't The Beatles pop music? The Rolling Stones? My sainted E.L.O - were they not maligned for being the very epitome of pop music, boldly flying in the face of both metal and punk as only a white guy with an afro and aviator goggles can?

Pop music, all. But that's not what we're talking about here - and I think you and I both understand that. No, what we're talking about here is that modern form of pop music - pop music as simulacra. These people are not musicians - and they have reached the point in the public consciousness where to even try to pretend that they have any credibility as artists of musicians is laughable. No, wherever their talents lay, music is not amongst them - and when I say 'them', you know who I mean. Kylie. Britney.

Kylie.

So, Kylie , not content with your album flopping, you've been trashed by a bunch of goons who earn their keep by pretending to be animals, and warbling inane songs at a bunch of whining, overindulged six year olds. My heart fucking bleeds for you.

I hope Kylie Minogue burns in hell. I can't even begin to tell you how deep my hatred of that she-beast is - and it started in 1988. Anyone remember 'The Locomotion'? I sure as fuck do. Even SAYING the name of the song causes it to erupt in my brain like an over-ripe adolescent zit, spraying its payload of foul musical pus across my consciousness, causing me to reel backwards in nauseated horror, waving my hands in front of my eyes and resting my weight against the nearest table, with my breath ragged, and my pupils swollen and dilated. When I was 10, and the bitch was still a part of the putrid Grundy's production "Neighbours", hitting the height of her fame as the spunk-receptacle of Jason "Who?" Donovan, who hadn't yet cottoned on to the joys of his eventual career - professional drug addict and talk-show-wrecker. I remember sitting in my classroom, at one of the graffiti-covered wooden desks that I was chained to for eight hours a day, and for reasons long since consigned to the dustbin of my mind, 'The Locomotion' began blaring over the chewing gum-coated loudspeaker that was bolted angrily to the ceiling of the classroom.

Even then, at age 10, when my primary concerns in life were my Commodore 64, mourning John Lennon, and watching 'Astroboy' ad nauseum, I was smart enough to know when something was truly sick. Truly wrong. And as the Original Moron bleated at me about how 'everybody's doin' a brand new dance, now' - I ground my teeth against one another until they began to crack, fissures savagely wrapping themselevs vertically around my dental enamel, and my nerve endings releasing a steady pulse of blood, which mixed with my saliva and trickled down my chin - providing an interesting visual counterpoint to the tears which were coursing down my cheeks.

Yes, Kylie sucked. 'Ho, ho!', we laughed - as my mother applied another coat of hairspray to her mullet, and pinned her giant gold hoop earrings on, trying to decide between the blue eyeshadow, or the red - 'What a load of shite! She'll be gone in a year. Hell - she'll be gone in six months! She certainly won't be around long enough to get decent seats at Expo '88! Loser!'

But we were horrendously wrong. And as the howling dog of the eightied painfully transformed into the bloated, rotting corpse of the nineties - she refused to fucking go away. Every year, another hilariously inept platter of shitty dance-pop. Every year, another pitiful attempt to 'update' her image, and to prove her 'credibility' as an 'artist' who is respected for her 'music' and not her 'arse'. Remember the video for 'Confide In Me'? Was that the biggest piece of shit you've ever seen? Yeah. Me too. Remember 'Impossible Princess'? Kylie can't fool me. She may be able to fool successive generations of adolescent girls, and the entire gay community, but she can't fool me - she wants to be a cross between Madonna and Joni Mitchell - while only succeeding in being as hideously irritating as the former, and as self-indulgent as the latter.

Which is why it gave me such incredible pleasure to take a brief reprieve from the hellish nightmare of my exegesis to read the facist piffle of news.com.au - and discovering this hilarious piece on Kylie's recent humiliation.

The wench was outsold by Hi-5. For those of you who haven't seen Hi-5's inexplicably successful programme, here it is in a nutshell: Five retarded twentysomethings, harvested from only the finest modelling agencies that Sydney can provide, spend a half an hour grinning like weasels on MDMA as they warble their way through a grab-bag of the most saccharine, bowel-loosening kiddies music imaginable. They all look kind of the same, and they offer the children of Australia an important lesson at an early age - look like a model, or die in your parent's basement. I hate Hi-5, and as each day passes, I find that my hatred of their eye-watering drivel takes on new and more exciting configurations - each more penetrating in extremity.

But, I digress. Kids entertainment just isn't what it used to be. I remember back when I was a spry young lad - with bright, blue eyes and a winning smile - my sandy hair swept back off my forehead, allowing the world to see my firmly-set eyebrows which crackled with authority and poise, signalling that I was a natural emblematic leader - kids entertainment was really violent. There was my beloved Astroboy - a show about a scientist who's son is killed in a car wreck, so he builds a robot version (creepy) - which spends every episode battling evil robots and crazy aliens with his buttock-mounted machine guns. If that isn't a positive image for young boys, then I don't know what is. Then there was the Transformers - a bunch of ultraviolent alien robots turn into overpowered cars, planes, and military weapons, in order to kill one another. Or, if that's not to your taste, what about the homoerotic fun of He-Man? A buffed, overmuscled young boy with hair stolen from Led Zeppelin's bass player receives a sword which allows him to turn into a buffed, overmuscled older boy - with no shirt - so that he can roam around picking fights with anthropomorphic evildoers. Anyone for 'You Can't Do That On Television' - a show which was basically centered around combinations of snot, vomit, slime, and the eating thereof. Perhaps you feel that Little Darling Junior doesn't have enough exposure to hard-core violence, but you can't quite make that leap of faith to hire him Robocop, or Rambo - never fear! With the release of the Rambo and Robocop television shows, Junior will be primed and ready for a lifetime of ID-required video hire, without intervention by those pesky bastards at Child Protective Services.

We are breeding a generation of WUSSES. Our kids are SOFTCOCKS. What in the fuck is going on when our kids WANT to watch Hi-5? When I was a kid - if my evening's viewing didn't have a body count in the triple figures, my mother would know what was in store for her when the silhouette of a 7 year old boy carrying a fence pailing with nails pounded through it loomed menacingly overhead. When I was a boy, if I didn't see someone's head explode in a mist of fine read blood as their body sank to their knees, I would cry, and my mother would have to hold me until I calmed down. The LAST thing I wanted to see was a bunch of fruity models dancing about like whippets on acid, singing about the fucking rain, and how great it is to 'be friends'.

Kylie got owned by Hi-5.

That's too funny.

Posted by David at February 23, 2004 12:27 AM | TrackBack