Weird Al Vs. Billy Joel.

For some reason I was thinking about the amazing song by Weird Al Yankovic: Dare 2b stupid.I actually know the reason. His name came up in a conversation and I mentioned that my friend's band WE MARCH (www.myspace.com/wemarch ) does a crazy cover of the aforementioned masterpiece. (they manage somehow to make it sound like Motorhead's eponymous song, if you can believe that). This lead me to start thinking about all the cultural references and cliches used to make up the lyrics in this song. It's mostly cliches but I think it's cultural references bear more significance on my personal being than a similar song: "We Didn't Start The Fire" by Billy Joel. I remember most of the lyrics to D2bs but I'll be damned if I didn't have to google WDSTF. The only lyric I could think of was "Space monkey mafia.." Which would be a sweet band name if it wasn't a Billy Joel reference. Upon goggling, I discovered that there were pages that specifically used the song as an educational tool! (http://www.teacheroz.com/fire.htm)Why is this?!
I think the main reason is that most teachers are lazy, but also because they're Subaru Forester driving Liberals who grew up with the song and trust that Billy would not lead them astray with his comprehensive run-down of the 20Th century. I call bullshit! I think it unfair to squeeze a bunch of historical and cultural references into a 5 min. song. This smacks of revisionist history and as everybody knows, revisionist history is the stuff of American educators, Nazis and apparently Billy Joel. It's true! If you need proof, the title of the album on which WDSTF appears is "Storm Front", also the name of a white supremacy group.(http://www.stormfront.org/)
That link gets four hits on google before you see even one hit for the BJ album. That should be enough for anyone to surmise that D2bs is a superior song. If not let's compare both songs on a strictly sonic/visual basis:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKu2QaytmrM I know it was excruciating the first time you watched this 20 years ago but bear with me. Besides the bloated, sterile rock production and inflated video budget for this song it just sounds AWFUL and has not one iota of the kind of timeless quality Dare 2 b stupid has: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nll8-kSlq6c

See what i mean? I'm sure Mr. Yankovic had no idea the kind of significance this song would have when he wrote it, I mean, it's obviously a stab at DEVO and their sound, (lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh was once quoted as saying he found himself to be angry and jealous of the sound Al got in the song, wishing he could have captured it himself and being pissed off about
The Prince of Parody making fun of his band, which if you think about it is a compliment: you haven't arrived until Weird Al makes fun of you) but when you compare the two videos you see that the real differences lie in the intentions. It seems to me, your humble narrator, that Mr. Joel's intentions were somewhat toward the educational while Weird was just having fun. Billy encourages you to enjoy history, while Al dares u 2 b stupid. Joel fails while Yankovic succeeds in achieving the opposite. Joel references a multitude of bygone stars of the big screen while Al is the only one to use an actual big name star in his video (the unforgettable Craig T. Nelson of POLTERGEIST and COACH fame). Even though it seems like Al is being whimsical and funny
I'd say he's really lambasting the junk culture of America, while Billy seems to be championing it.

Evidence of this can be found in "The Transformers Movie" in the scene where Al voices a "Junkion" transformer, lending credence to my statement:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKqboQV_lfg
see there? further evidence, proof positive! that Dare 2b stupid is more culturally significant than We Didn't Start The Fire. I'm sure the Nazis and teachers of Amerikkka would say otherwise but I have a question for them: Did Billy Joel have a song in the fucking Transformers movie? Did Mr. Joel ever make Mark Mothersbaugh jealous with his sound? I thought not, Rommel.

Calzones & Bonghits.

In my last post I mentioned that in order to free ourselves of disappointment we must first embrace Disappointment. This starts with everyday things such as eating and getting rad with the warlock or warlock 2 the raddening. Such mundane things as these are quite easy to fuck up and can make for a supremely Disappointing experience, or a Chicken Crunch Wrap Supreme(also terribly Disappointing).A typical evening can be spent renting horrible movies (what's the most Disappointing aspect of actually getting up, putting on shoes and leaving the goddamn house to do this? The fact that it's not net flicks and you're leaving the house?, not quite but getting there...is it the fact that you wont own these shit burgers after you've been through the agony of watching them? no, it's the fact that you'll have to get up, put on shoes, and leave the goddamn house again to return them, and you'll probably end up renting more shitty horror movies, thus completing the cycle, thus thus creating more Disappointment to embrace) and ordering out for the fast food world's most Disappointing consumable: Calzones. Yes I've said it, there's nothing more sad and lonely than the "pizza you don't have to share" (except maybe the poor slob who delivers it...the guy that stands in the fucking doorway and lets out all the heat, says nothing, expects YOU to provide the conversation when all you want is for him to get his ass out, hell you just tipped the guy two dollars! and now he wants to waste your precious heat and talk to you about his mutant progeny and the thing that actually accepted his abnormal seed: a mockery of human form and evolution). Now I know you're asking yourself: "how can you fuck up a pocket of flaky dough filled with delicious cheese, sauce and toppings?" A: there are several ways but the most important one lies in the act of ordering, paying for and eating the calzones. It makes no difference whether it's the Best Damn Calzone In The Land (or : BDCITL) or not, the Disappointment factor comes from the fact that you and your loser friends are sitting around watching Big Trouble in little China for 118Th time, eating shitty over-priced strombolis and doing bong hits of the worst schwag weed ever scored from some chubby diabetic gamer nerd whose actual REAL job it is to sell you over priced shitty weed. Fuck.

Yeah, smoking the herb isn't supposed to produce the kinds of Disappointing effects I've mentioned above and, unlike the easy-to-fuck-up-calzone, it's not really that easy to fuck up a tasty bong load, but lo and behold, some people are just full of surprises, aren't they?
Seriously, if you want a real taste of Disappointment, find yourself a weed man who accepts obscure nerdy card games in exchange for an eighth(or so) of commercial bud that smells like hay. Once you've heard the Bells of Dis (the clinking of a bong slide against the living room ashtray), finished the last crumb of Disappointment Dough (TM), and learned without really wanting to that John Carpenter was the deep voiced singer of the
"Big Trouble in little China" theme song, you can go to bed with the knowledge that another level of Disappointment has been attained.

BASIC TENETS OF DISAPPOINTMENT.

Disappointment as philosophy is a hard concept to describe. At it's root it's mainly about becoming free of the crushing let downs that our expectations provide. It's about liberating one's self from disappointment by embracing Disappointment. Make sense? Didn't think so.Here's what you have to do: Have a shitty childhood. It doesn't have to be specific just make sure it sucks. Being poor is a good one but that doesn't always guarantee shitty results because even though you have nothing and are starved half the time, you could have really loving parents and all that and become one of those American success stories where "pulling yourself up by the bootstraps" and "coming from nothing" are the magical catalysts responsible for your success, so if you're going to be poor, make sure it's the whole enchilada that includes merciless beatings, humiliation, parents engaging in drug use, prostitution, and even murder. On the other side of the coin if you must come from a well-to-do back round make sure there's enough neglect in your life to distort your development to the point of no return, being an asocial weirdo is paramount to understanding Disappointment (*note* all sorts of factors play a part in the development of an asocial weirdo, not just neglect by busy rich parents). These are the more extreme examples I can give of course (Not to say there's none more extreme but they are just a guiding example after all), for most Disappointanarians are average, like myself for example: I may have grown up in less than abject poverty, and had pretty cool folks to raise me but the looming Disappointment was always there. Socially I couldn't have been luckier. I was chubby, grubby and in love with comic books and role-playing games (not to mention Nintendo). Yes, I was that spazz who sat around in class and drew up character sheets, toted around a faux velvet bag of multi-sided dice and listened to "kill 'em all" on headphones at recess. All dues-paid card-carrying Disappointanarians have had similar experiences such as: bad luck with the opposite sex (or preferred sex if you like), alienation from peers, unpopularity, bland food, shitty haircuts, horrible soul-slurping jobs, mechanical failure, erectile dysfunction, small breasts, narrow still-born child bearing hips, greasy hair and that disorder that makes you stink worse than normal. The looming cloud of Disappointment knows no color, creed, gender or soda preference, it doesn't care. Some decide that this force, if you will, is responsible for their own pathetic lives while others use it to explain why other people are dumb, hard to get along with, foul smelling, limp dicked, narrow hipped corporate dick-jobbers with shitty haircuts. But no matter which sect you may fall into the remaining fact is this: Disappointment is for everyone.