Freebird!

Like most people my age, I get most of my American historical perspective from VH1. I could watch the History Channel I suppose, but really, what else can I learn from watching bombs fall in Dresden for the 800th time? Yes, I understand, WWII was so very, very dramatic, but it all comes off as trying too hard. They shot the whole thing in played out "evocative" grainy black and white, which is just plain cheating, if you ask me. If you don't believe me, try watching The Man Who Wasn't There in color and see if it isn't just Billy Bob Thornton hamming it up under bad lighting.

No, color TV has to work a lot harder to keep a person's interest. That's why all the sex and gratuitous violence: no effete pseudo-artisitic aesthetic to fall back on in the harsh, chemical color saturation of video tape.

And that's why Behind the Music and I Love the [Your Decade Here] type series work: sex, drugs, rock and roll and somebody always, ALWAYS dies. Sure, they cheat by talking about old people with failing livers, too broke to afford a $900-a-day cocaine habit and dress it up as recovery and redemption, but along the way, that same person banged the lead singer and eight groupies all at once AND SOMEBODY DIED! That's not just history, that's good television.

Sometimes the lessons of history can be sobering, though. Sometimes they sneak a little life lesson in there that beats you over the head with insight and perspective, I'm sure totally by accident. I think they were talking to former Jefferson Airplane founding member Paul Kantner one time, trying to get him to say something else about Grace Slick's breasts, and how he tried to straight-up murder Marty Balin with a ball-peen hammer back stage at Altamont and he mentioned, kind of in passing, about how when he was coming up, there were all these American bands trying so hard to sound like the Beatles, they would say "joost" instead of "just" while singing.

It's a small thing to notice, but I'm sure that was the first time it really occurred to me: musicians are all douchebags.

I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean you kind of have to be a douchebag in order to be a musician in the first place, right? You know what I mean. I mean in the same way you have to be a little bit of a sociopath to want to be President of the United States.

Follow the logic: all musicians, when they start, sound hopelessly (almost comically) like their idols. We call them "influences." These are the people who inspired them to play music in the first place. People whose work so touched their souls, they scratched out the spark that lit the flame of inspiration that fires the engine of their musical creativity. They would sit home and listen to the radio, bask in the unrelenting awe of listening to their Great Unknowing Mentors do everything to such perfection and their tought is: Yeah, I could do that.

Holy crap. Douchus maximus, right? And the ones who make it to anywhere after that audacious and totally asshole move do so by spending the next decade of their lives sitting in coffee bars, scribbling "moon... June... spoon..." over three chord progressions in spiral notebooks so obsessively that they sometimes maybe forget to wash. And everyone who knew the theater chick with the pit hair in college knows B.O. = art.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy music and I'm glad they're out there trying, but it's sometimes possible to be too evocative, too earnest. One or two steps in the wrong direction and you end up being King Douchebag and his Bitchy Punkass Princess Stepsisters.

Yes, we get great things out of these people, say once every 10 years or so, but in the mean time, how many more songs do we need about these two:



You know who I mean. It's Yao and May. It's what all these forlorn douchey songs are about. Oh baby, I love Yaaaaaoo... And why don't you love Maaaay...

It's freakin' "joost" all over again, but who are these people trying to sound like? Isn't it easier and more comprehenisble and INFINITELY less douchey to just say "You" and "Me," even when singing? Yes, I'm talking to you the Fray. Cheap Trick could do it in regular American, but you're too bourgie for all that, aren't you? America got over the Fray right around the same time we all found out what a bitch Katherine Heigl was. It's time for you to stop.

If you keep this kind of emotive doucheyness up, America will turn its back on you and in 20 years, we'll be watching Behind the Music about someone other than you. Probably Jefferson Airplane again. Man, that Grace Slick would fuck anything, wouldn't she?