It seems a shade misanthropic but my version of He** is pretty much hearing the music that people play in the sports bar on a Saturday night. I’ll be having a decent time, anyway — I was chilling in there this past Saturday evening, dead tired from a crazy dinner shift, and the Washington – Oregon St. game was pretty good that was on TV. Eventually I’ll see my Deadhead friend who has an English degree like me and I’ll futilely try to get him to get the graphic novel.
In the meantime, though, there’s a lot of ridiculous music playing, from hapless attempts at being funny or amusing (there’s this God-awful song that goes “The lap dance is so much better when the stripper’s crying” being sung by some dude who sounds like that’s his only chance of ever making physical contact with a woman), to, perhaps even worse, unloading on us the goopy, ham-handedly emotional stuff people listen to in their spare time, which works in those settings. This is, of course, to confuse the herd mentality, which is closer to that of an animal, with the solitary, which more easily cottons on to sophistication. This Northwest dude was guilty of said malady with “Cowboy Dan” (that’s a great song but about 15,000 times too depressing to play in a bar, as anybody with a brain should know, I would think).
Anyway, at this bar I was just at this other night, this dude hated Creed. The ironic thing was that every time I started nodding my head, singing along or whistling, to “With Arms Wide open”; “My Sacrifice” or “My Own Prison”; this guy would get all offended and start singing it in this really obnoxious voice. (This other dude did that when he got really offended at me for knowing the words to “Runaway Train”; the most overplayed song of the ’90s.) So you might say Creed was like his little brother — he’d insult them and call them “cheesy” but at the same time he couldn’t bring himself to allow anyone else to lay any claim on them. His stolid choice was “Changes” by Black Sabbath, a selection that is obviously so bizarre that it’s surreal, for many reasons. One malady is that it’s so uncomfortably slow and depressing and another of course would be that it doesn’t in any way represent a stylistic cross-section of the given band, if your goal is to truly be pretentious like a Chuck-Lidell-fearing sports bar denizen in the sky. Another malady with always playing “Changes”; you might think, would be that if you constantly lunge back to this same track, it becomes increasingly hard for the onlooker to believe that you actually are going through any changes in life. But I digress.
..
<script async src=“https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-5127494401132808”
crossorigin=“anonymous”></script>
..
<!– Google Tag Manager –>
<script>(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({‘gtm.start’:
new Date().getTime(),event:’gtm.js’});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!=‘dataLayer’?’&l=‘+l:’’;j.async=true;j.src=
‘https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=‘+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,’script’,’dataLayer’,’GTM-5KV22KW’);</script>
<!– End Google Tag Manager –>
<!– Google Tag Manager (noscript) –>
<noscript><iframe src=“https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-5KV22KW”
height=“0” width=“0” style=“display:none;visibility:hidden”></iframe></noscript>
<!– End Google Tag Manager (noscript) –>