Why I'm great

Both Voltaire and Kris Kristofferson decried the "best of all possible worlds," claiming that it could never exist. They're pessimists, and I never believed the president woke up, rubbed his feet together and thought about how he could destroy some people's lives. The best of all possible worlds does exist, and it lies somewhere between blissful ignorance and inspired critical thought. \nWe're in a day and age when art forms are all called post-something by the same people who claimed the last days of decadence were upon us in the '60s. Like the fire and brimstone Baptist waiting for the end of the world, the last days never came for those people and they're still trying to justify the reasons why. They are similar to Jehovah's Witnesses, who are bound to toil away their days preparing for the great non-event. We should never underestimate the ability of the masses to organize, but the power in the rhetoric of these camps inevitably comes from whether or not they practice what they preach, or with how much sincerity they believe it.\nWhat was so great about The Beach Boys is that their music was true. Even if four-fifths of the group had never surfed before and if Brian Wilson was scared of the beach like everything else, they sang "Little Deuce Coup" or "California Girls" as if they really believed in California as utopia, just like they eventually believed Charles Manson to be deity or at least master playboy, that the dastardly Maharishi would lead them transcendentally or that cocaine would be a final solution.\nPost-modern music, as transcendental and witty as it can be from time to time, smacks of unoriginality. It is a form based on recycled forms, not as juxtaposition, but to usurp pop culture as the origin of contempo-emotion. As geography, such intertextuality is a necessity; though, when compositions are created on it, it's proof of a mind in traction.\nThus, great rock music most often comes out of an incompetence, whether it is musical or intellectual. Critics scourged Beck's last record because he dropped irony for saccharine frankness. It was his best record because the pastiche style of his former work lacked a voice, which ultimately is the more interesting element. Even if they find the new Beck dull and cliché, he is honest, and the music is pretty too.\nSarcasm is never as endearing as incorruption and ardor. The evocation of lost innocence is such an effective subject matter that the best book and rock album of the 20th century (Catcher in the Rye and Pet Sounds respectively) are revered for their veracious portrayals of the great evil winning over. \nAt this point, I do not intend to sound like a defendant of high art, but want to recognize those things mistakenly artful, like the paracinema of Ed Wood. A musical example of this would be the Innocence & Despair album put out by BarNone in 2001. It was a recording of '60s pop songs from artists like David Bowie, Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney and the Eagles as done by Canadian grade-schoolers from the Langley Schools. Especially in The Beach Boys' songs, the kids' album shines through as the most dramatic testament to Wilson's songs and the virtue of childhood.\nLester Bangs, a notorious thumper for all things "stoopid" and innocent, once wrote, "the whole concept of Good Taste is concocted to keep people from having a good time, from reveling in a crassness that passeth all understanding."\nSome may call "Plan 9 from Outer Space" or Innocence & Despair novel. I question what their notion of pop must be. Pop culture is supposed to be immediate, and the amount of truth in the performances will determine the elasticity of its influence. \nEven more interesting to be found in paracinema and so-called "novel" musics is the lack of self-consciousness displayed in the work. Ed Wood's movies suggest that he really didn't know how to make a film, just as Captain Beefheart's saxophone suggests his ignorance of reeds. To view and listen to this type of work is to hear the performers feel their way through a tunnel, to find something in nothing. The practice is half the fun, and when it executes, the effect is ecstasy. Such "artists" simply do not have the skills to tell a lie.\nAnd so, while the PoMo battles are being fought in jazz clubs and college campuses, it comes down to DIY vs. this dirty capitalist system of hierarchies. Sometimes staying in school too long hurts you. I think I'm going to grad school.