Consumption Junction: The Cultural Significance of Britney’s Ass

I caught this post on Tech Crunch and in light of the hilarity of the 2007 VMA’s recently I thought it’d be appropriate to expound my opinion on a couple of things (btw, my opinion is awesome). I’ll first address the Arousal Industry’s latest blundervestment: making ringtones available on CD and selling them as ‘Ringle’s.’ If you haven’t followed the rapidly declining sales of the dinosaur-wearing-gucci-industry into the rabbit hole of failure you’ll know that these gentle giants and habitual employment curtailers are scrambling for the next best thing to supplement their bottom line. For that they have thought long and hard while on the toilet, squeezing out a seared ahi and quail egg champagne shit as the collective stone was passed from urethra, chinking on the porcelain, inspiring the latest money maker – The Ringle.

 

To the uninitiated or layperson, basically the ‘Ringle’ will, “contain three songs: one popular track, a remix, an older track from the same artist and a ringtone.” The distro method will be a “CD with a slip-sleeve cover.” If you’re smashing your balls with a meat tenderizer right now (or if you are a female, feel free to smash your nipple or equivalent in a desk drawer) in light of that news, well, you’ve been paying attention to the comings and goings of the music industry. If not, don’t despair. This can still be considered one of those ‘what the fuck’ moments. The first of those will be a single from recently re-celebritized Britney Spears, her song; “Gimme More” is already testing really well in the major markets. Sony and Universal are going to pump titles into the stream this fall and they’ll be available at your favorite wallet raping store. The propensity for continued revenue loss in the face of continued bad decision making isn’t as appalling as the fact they’re going to sell singles by CD. CD??? Or is Britney’s gunt more appealing packaged as a pitch corrected ringtone. I dunno.

 

Okay.

So now that your brain has come to a nice simmer and your eyes are bleeding a bit, drool slowly congealing somewhere on your shirt or blouse, hands limply at your sides, legs prostrate beneath you, a jolt of pop narcotic will bring you back. A shot to the jugular with a syringe full of excitement – a glass pipe filled with potent crystallized entertainment – a tincture of attention drawing, edge of your seat mayhem filled with blinking lights, celebrity and pageantry. For the kingdom of your brain we present the 2007 VMA’s. A nightmare ride into The Palms casino/hotel in Las Vegas for an amalgam of hyper stylized vampiric pop-lust orgy of coordinated chaos – presented by Chevrolet. That’s right. America’s car company. The company that brought you the Tahoe, and the tagline “An American Revolution.” AND John-fucking-Mellancamp leaning his jackboot on the fender of a truck while a montage of ‘life style images’ flood the screen. Look! Some sepia toned portraiture of African Americans that look doggedly low income smiling bravely for the high paid photographer, middle-American white folks ‘eating’ hot dogs, and team sports! Yes. Chevy has now taken it upon themselves to sell us cars by insinuating that this whole “save the world thing” is a punch line for some smog breathing fat cats with pockets full of cash.

 

Those genius marketers at MTV and Chevy teamed up for what they’re marketspeak calling a, “…Superserve Key 12-34 demographic with creative integration and multiplatform innovation campaign.” Essentially, they’ll use the power of their marketing muscle and advertising budget to sponsor something that MTV knows is well worth every penny for hooking new consumers. So they show a series of seemingly Eco-friendly spots. The spots are kinduh irreverent, edgy; MTV’s demo will totally jibe with this posish. (WOW 30MPG on highway! I can hear dolphins singing as baby seals swim in crystal clear water and unicorns shit rainbows).

 

This is part of MTV and Chevy’s “Break the Addiction” campaign, which sadly promotes the benefits of Flex Fuel or E85 and touts their continued development Hydrogen Fuel Cell technology. Want to know about E85? Click here.

 

MTV has always been the bane of my entertainment consumption. They’ve had some good shows and of course they used to play those dinosaurs of the entertainment dietary pyramid, THE MUSIC VIDEO but if the fact they’ve been dictating youth cultures taste in music doesn’t make you vomit your righteous indignation instantly, these commercials will. One example in particular is a scene of a young woman with dyed hair, fairy-winged, and glossy eyed. Hers is a character meant to exemplify some green friendly tree hugging marijuana addict blowing a tune into some plastic bottles strung together while a voice mockingly says something like “You can still save the environment without having to drive an ugly car you little sheep.”

 

And this brings me to Britney Spears ass. It has always been a shining example of slutty suburban chicks everywhere. Her ass is insignificant. Her music represents an industry’s reliance on tone corrected voices. It is robotic. She is ubiquitous. You could interchange her with Rhianna and only by ear you’d never know the difference. The reason she and Rhianna lip synced their shitty songs was because in the fantasy world MTV has made for viewers and the public, they’ve instituted a zero tolerance policy on imperfection. This is smoke and mirrors. It’s no wonder Viacom’s ad agency shares similar tactics as the US government’s agency that handles all of their “Be Army Strong” campaigns, or Chevy’s highly insidious and clever “Break the Addiction” campaign.

 

Britney Spears showed us all that you can sound like a robot, dance like a star in a giant production but if you gain just five pounds you can lose all credibility. She also showed the world our addiction to perfection through her socially imposed imperfections. Break the addiction of what? Oil? Bad performances and MTV? Soon we’ll see teen stars, weighing 90 lbs., chain smoking Marlboro Reds, eating a leaf of ice burg lettuce a day, while a Ringle from Mastodon plays “Holiday in Cambodia” on my sweet new iPhone. Chevy and British Petroleum will be champions of the Green movement and George Bush will go down in history as one of the most thoughtful presidents in history.

 

This isn’t science fiction.

 

This isn’t the future.

 

This is the perpetual “What the Fuck?”

Social Insurgent pt. 1

I’m in a crowded room drenched in red, drowning in glare
Where every whispered assumption and every silent condemnation
Is testament to the bomb strapped to my chest.
One might say, “he commands the attention of a room.”
As the nitroglycerin is kissed by cellular trigger.
Ring, ring, ring.

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In appreciation

Thanks to the one-man on the bar stool,
You’ve given me a fresh supply of not being able to.
Its not bad or great,
Just a laundry list of what the fuck?
And whose to blame?
I can always hit mutate,
Replicate like bacteria and facilitate those situations
Where it feels like gravity is another investor in my demise.
Unwilling to let the overhead float above the margins.
We’re drinking the error
And I’m oh-so-consolable
By the amount of hope that has been shoved up my ass

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From the Sons to the Sun – monkeys running things down here…

Bleak:
Some mountain top village, a villain peering from a tower down at the ant sized humans below. The all seeing eye burns, a magnifying glass in the hand of a giant, snuffing out lives for entertainment.

“Deadliest attack by insurgents since the fall of Fallujah.” Those lines leak into the system, cross the wires, disseminate their data into the farthest regions to be cast aside and remembered in the late hours, before complete system shut down. Flash of body parts, smell of diesel and burnt asphalt in desert sun. Oil skimmed off the top of the Euphrates, that artery of the Fertile Crescent, pumping more than blood from an ambushed convoy into those verdant hills and outlying fields.

Count the stars. Kiss the solar system. 98 million miles and one new planet discovered, or moon.

and those ceramic heat tiles on the shuttle; “it’s a clunker, piece of shit car,” in orbit, sent up by baboons and rhesus monkeys in starch white short sleeved button up and collared dress shirts, coffee stains, no more smoking in the control room.
It signifies our lack of importance.
It signifies our obsession with god.
To shoot the distance, close the gap to heaven and escape our earthly vessel to feel complete. And then it becomes clear for just a second through the haze – a cylinder of sun – that nucleus of us – shines down into a swath of land, half burned by incendiaries, the other half covered in elephant grass that sways in the low breeze.
It’s the Oreo effect.
It is this wishful thinking that will do us in.

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cabron in the studio…attempting to document sound

ah. punk rock. in all its facile glory. waiting and watching the dials turn. too much listening, not enough feeling or maybe too much feeling. whats the diff? and who fucking cares anyway. studio is so antiseptic. too clean. too nothing. not like the hot sweaty practice room, where your balls stick to your thighs and your face gets wet and smells like breath, cigarettes and beer. do that part again! oi! do that part again cabron! make that shit pop. this is all that matters in the time we take to eat sleep shit and fuck. just thirty minutes to feel like something is actually taking place instead of that endless wait. man that distortion is warm, feedback is so underrated i don’t know how U2 lives without it.

i don’t ever want to grow up.

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American Skeleton

A hillside spitting like a punctured artery
beneath the bridges of commerce
where the forgotten forge lonely bonds
with the crude beauty of the elements.
Sprayed in defiant patterns,
dancing in a symphony
of despair
The assassin sleeps without anxiety
Each bone has a function
And all the dead men sing
“DISTRACTION”
…we’ll cut your throat if you say too much
…we’ll cut your tongue out
Drink the silence
we are histories whores…

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