“On the Upside, 2020 Has Methodically Unfolded as a Pretty Iconoclastic Year in American Culture”

Just earlier I was mowing the lawn and got to thinking how we’re really lacking (spared?) a true, unifying “hit single,” in Summer 2020. Now, the cheesy, throwaway hit of the summer is something time-honored, in America, a tradition seemingly as hard to phase as sunburns and sand in uncomfortable areas of the body. I personally am old enough to remember when it was Len’s “Steal My Sunshine”; when it was Eve 6’s “Inside-out”; when it was Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” (I’ll spare my readership Hootie & the Blowfish references though I was inching dangerously close to said territory there) [1].

Well, remember when it was Weezer’s cover of “Africa” by Toto? Or have you downed so much Fireball since then that you forgot it, in which case more power to you [2]?

To be honest I actually listened to some of the new Taylor Swift album, I think about one verse and one chorus (yes believe it or not it did tend to abide by the typical verse/chorus structure of pop music… don’t drop your drinks over that one or anything) and again found her to be a wannabe hip-hop bit**who’d started out as a country cu**, so nothing really changing there. And sure, genre is pretty dead… a rapper like Freddie Gibbs, hailing from Gary, Indiana (one of the worst towns in the country), tends to be just so confrontational and gutter to a superhuman extent, that with the obliteration of the erstwhile crutch we’d called “culture,” a lot of listeners, in their own time or in aggressive commercial kitchens or other workplaces, have gravitated to it for similar reasons to why Biggie and 2pac are more popular than the Beastie Boys and The Roots, today.

I don’t pay much attention to movies so really I can’t speak on what’s going on with them, although the apparent cancellation of Clerks III would seem to encompass a fairly foreboding picture of the future of said industry. Still, and in a similar vein to all the “horror” popular in our music to this day, that “Bob’s Hideout” page on Facebook certainly was advertising some pretty messed up stuff last fall in what must have been October, around Halloween. I actually caught chest pains just looking at the previews for one of them. Hey, I actually got through The Shining, for the record, to then go and fiend for some Percoset immediately afterward.

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[1] And yeah just this BLM kick might be a decent time to stop acting like Darius Rucker is the Unabomber, or something outlandish like that. Just a thought.

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[2] Somewhere out there there’s a dude who owns the Toto boxed set and has been laughing his a** off for two very long years. For one, I was lucky enough to catch Umphrey’s McGee rip through a spirited, naïve version of the ’80s hit at a Bloomington, Indiana show in about ’02 or ’03.