NO SINGING!

The realization suddenly dawned on me that the last two decades have been unendingly miserable.
No, this isn't gloom over my love-life (or current absence thereof), this is about popular culture.

And really, it should not have been so sudden a revelation, as the symptoms were evident for years.
I should have spotted it sooner. But I'm a bit dense.

Throughout the eighties and most of the nineties I did not watch television, nor listen to the radio. For many years, I didn't even own either of those contraptions.
Finally exchanged the horse and buggy for a boob-tube in 1995, and got cable.
Since then I really haven't switched on the teevee very often.

Without Forever Knight, Monty Python, and the X Files, there just isn't that much on.


EM I OLSEM TRUPELA!

Amusing story: For several weeks I had been thrilling myself and nauseating a statuesque blonde coworker with stuff about New Guinea, focusing on head-hunting, poison magic, tokpisin, and kuru (human spongiform encephalitis). She didn't believe half of what I said, but thought me a right freak anyway.
One day I brought two books in to the office - one specifically on kuru, one a lovely illustrated cookbook with New Guinean recipes. She absolutely refused to look at either publication, and hid from me the rest of the day.
That evening I turned on the television and saw my first ever episode of the X Files.
It was, appropriately, the Arkansas chicken ranch cannibal episode. Lovely.
The next day at work everyone was talking about it.
My coworker was convinced that I had done it, deliberately, using evil voodoo, to piss her off.

She disappeared soon after.

I had nothing to do with it.

Since then I have probably seen most of the X files.

But until a few years ago, that was pretty much the extent of my exposure to popular culture.


Then Karaoke became common.

Most people sing the songs they know and love.
Stuff I had never even heard, popular music from the eighties and nineties.

It's a cesspool.

Nothing says gangsta rap like a bunch of loud white suburbanites drunk on fruity vodka.


About a fortnight ago, my nightcap at a local bar was coloured by middle-class twenty-somethings hollering out the dulcet tones of Bad Daddy Gonad and Sistah Crack Ho......
Thumpa thumpa thump.
More in yo' face they could not get, but lordy, did they try!

There's something obscene about waspy-types pretending ghettotude.

Yo yo yo!

If Raoul Duke had been there, he would've shot the damn machine.


==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================