I Write Shit With Long Titles

Why I Want To Destroy The Checkout Stand Of Dominick's
Or
I Don’t Make You Read My News, Now Do I?

"She's got the biggest tits. He's got the longest dick.
And I get to read about it every week.
You hear that sucking sound? It's culture going down."
- The Falcon/"The Celebutard Chronicles"

I love punk music. I listen to it all the time: it’s my thing. I’ll put that out there, even though it comes with an automatic stigma, like any label. Upon revealing that, my angle is probably predictable. I’m going to push the usual DIY, underground, “fuck the man” ethics that pump through the heart of every punk.

So yes, that’s where I’m coming from. I’m dedicated to local, independent punk music and reading material. And that’s just fine for me and a bunch of other people in the thriving punk scene. Meanwhile, I have friends who are dedicated to fashion, gender studies, Nietzsche, exercising, even Middle Eastern anthropology. And that’s cool too.

And this is kind of the way of life in America. Everyone’s an individual. Pretty much everyone’s passionate about something, and so we surround ourselves with people who are passionate about similar things, forming behaviorally predictable groups. Just look at the neighborhoods of Chicago: people live with others like themselves and then branch out. Not everyone respects that, but it seems to me that's generally how it works, and I think it works well enough.

But then along comes the mainstream media, oozing through every filter and permeating our lives, ruining everything. It’s not that the mainstream media is ‘bad’ per se, it’s that it suffocates individual lifestyles; it’s that it forces itself upon everyone, creating arbitrary standards of things I’m supposed to know and care about.

I can deal with most of it, except for one tiny, little part: the total unearthly saturation of celebrity gossip. Celebrities and their overpriced Hollywood culture have infiltrated every aspect of mainstream media and culture. I can’t watch TV or buy a pack of gum or sit in the SAC pit without inadvertently watching, reading or hearing about Britney and her shaved head or Anna Nicole and her methadone.

And I don’t care about any of this. Britney Spears could decide she was dedicating her life to Jesus or nudism or garden gnomes and I wouldn’t care. And I have the freedom to not care, just like someone else has the freedom to care. But I absolutely deserve the freedom to not freaking hear it all the damn time.

See, I know from experience not everyone cares about what I do. Not everyone cares how incredibly cool Dan Andriano’s voice is. Nor does everyone think the latest update from the Lawrence Arms is the most exciting news of the day. And only a select few really want to debate whether or not Against Me!’s jump to a major will effect their music.

And I get that. And I get that a lot of people read that paragraph and went, “What? Who cares?” cause the things I really want to watch, read and hear about don’t dominate society. Yet, somehow, my head is swimming with someone else's niche crap like germs on CTA station handrails.

Where is the freedom to keep my head unclogged of information I find useless and silly? If everyone had to hear about Naked Raygun reuniting, or Dillinger Four’s ever-changing release date, I bet many of them would get pretty annoyed and curse us punks for assailing them with our niche crap.

So you see, I’m not trying to criticize the people who want to know what Paris Hilton did yesterday, I just want that group to deflate to a fair size. Keep celebrity news on the magazine rack and leave it out of everything else.

However, I must add, in a fine print kind of way, while I respect everyone’s right to delight in whatever they want for whatever reason, there really is no comparison between Lindsay/Britney/Brangelina celebrities and real musicians.

People who speak honestly and from the heart, contributing thoughts and ideas and quality works into the vast stream of human existence deserve way more attention and discussion than any celebrity yammered about on TV or gracing the cover of a gossip rag.

But that’s just my opinion.