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There are things Man was not meant to know.
And then there are things Man just wishes fervently and desperately to never have known. For instance, what was playing when the clock-radio alarm switched on this morning was just such a thing.
You've heard of bad, right? This was worse than bad. Next to this, bad was good. Bad was great. Bad was WONDERFUL. Oh, please, Mr. Radio Dee-Jay Man, please play me something bad to get this aural atrocity out of my head. You know Ren and Stimpy and the Log Song? "It's Log! It's Log! It's better than good, it's wood!" Well, this was the ANTI-LOG, OK?
I mean, this ... thing ... actually managed to make me agree with record companies, in certain limited ways. You know how so many songs have been released in cut-down versions on singles, or even on albums (that's CDs to you youngsters) because the record company thought that at five or six minutes, the song was too long to get airplay and wouldn't sell? Right there, bay-bee. I'm with you all the way. As three or four minute songs go, this one ran at least an hour too long. We're talking about a single song that is, in and of itself, conclusive proof that it's possible to have absolutely no musical talent whatsoever, to be the positive epitome of talentlessness, the antithesis - nay, the nemesis - of musical ability, and still land a major label record contract. I don't know who it was. I don't care. As a matter of fact, I don't want to know. I'm not even going to tell you what radio station the alarm was set to, or exactly what time it turned on, because if you know those things, you might be able to figure out a short-list of things it could possibly have been, and if you get that far, YOU MIGHT TELL ME. And I don't ever want to know. I don't ever want to have the possibility that a chance mention of a word in the title of the song, years from now, might recall the association from the dank, dark, festering dungeons of forbidden memories to which I am valiantly attempting to consign every shred of the recollection of this experience.
We're not just talking someone who can't carry a tune here, or someone who brutally murders innocent notes like that woman who committed graphic perverted sexual violence (no children under 17 allowed) upon Wind Beneath My Wings (no, don't remind me of her name either, please; amateurishly lesser offender though she may be, it's still a memory I can do without). We're talking about someone with a breathtaking absence of talent unequalled even by, say, J.Lo's inability to act. We're talking about someone with about as much talent for music as, for example, Rosanne Barr has at the Olympic pole-vault, or Newt Gingrich as a bikini model, or Joan Claybrook as a Moto-GP racer, or Rosie O'Donnell as .... well, anything, really. (But I digress.) This, uh, "performance" was the auditory equivalent of that amihotornot.com photo of the bodacious stacked-to-here babe with Michael Jackson's head photoshopped on. Allowing anyone this untalented to record a song was not just wrong, not merely a crime against art, reason, humanity, and ancient forgotten Chthonian deities from nameless outer dimensions, it was baby-eating wrong. Have you ever heard some song by someone who should, for the sake of civilization, spend the rest of their life welded in a small metal box with a closed-loop air supply, eating and eliminating through tubes, then heard this person described as "a talented up-and-coming artist" and wondered uncomprehendingly, "Talented compared to WHAT?" Well, this was that "what."
And yet, and yet (and this is the true horror), there was a certain kind of frenetic compulsiveness about it. The term "earworm" doesn't begin to cover it. This, dear readers, was a viral sound. Had Howard Peters Lovecraft ever heard it, the creatures whose mad piping cries of "Tekeli-li!" echo forever through haunted passages in nameless cities of twisted, non-Euclidean architecture not meant for human eyes would not have been piping anything as innocuous as "Tekeli-li!" No, dear readers, they would have been toting expensive Sanyo ghetto blasters pumping out this song. If Microsoft could learn the secret of this sound, ... Oh, wait. Perhaps they already did.
This was not just the kind of song that makes you fumble for the "Snooze" button. Not merely the ordinary, everyday, pedestrian kind of awful that makes you grab the pillow and wrap it around your head until the next song comes on. This was another dimension in awful. It surpassed the mere awfulness of that dream where your head is clamped in a hole in the middle of the table, with the top of your skull sawn off, and the combined Republican and Democratic National Committees are standing around you with little silver spoons, delicately sampling morsels of your quivering, helpless brain while they sip their aperitifs and force you to listen to their election platforms. It was worse even than that dream where you wake up and roll over to realize that the person next to you in the bed is Carrot Top, and you wake up screaming from that only to realize that the person next to you in the bed is still Carrot Top. It was not the kind of horror of watching the twin towers crumble one after the other on Manhattan Island; no, there was a human majesty to that, a dignity amidst the outrage and the calamity, a knowledge that even as terrible and unthinkable as the sight was that you were seeing, still somewhere in there people had performed, and with their last breaths were continuing to perform, heroic acts at the cost of their own lives.
No, this was far worse than any of these. It was the kind of auditory experience that makes people shoot themselves in the head in desperation when they realize that they're not awake enough and coordinated enough to find the "Off" button on the clock-radio. It was the kind of song that makes you wish that you saw with your ears and heard with your eyeballs, so that you could scoop your eyeballs from their raw, bleeding sockets with a broken plastic spork in order to obtain blessed, nay, sanctified relief. It was the kind of song the mere memory of which can induce people to perform improvised prefrontal lobotomies on their entire families, with a 2" spade bit mounted in an electric drill, as an act of compassion and mercy. The very recollection of this song is sufficient to make you leap up and endlessly scream "HASTUR HASTUR HASTUR HASTUR HASTUR HASTUR!!!!!" in the faint, defiant hope that some hideous Outer God will spring from unfathomable nameless voids and devour your head, thereby inadvertently causing your consciousness of the experience to cease. (If Hastur knew why you had summoned him, he would smile evilly, slowly shake his head, and simply say, "No.")
Which is not to say that it was unmarketable. No, that's exactly the problem. It was marketable in the worst, worst, WORST way. It was marketable in the way that should be a statutory capital offence with no right of appeal. It was marketable in the way that makes Madison Avenue advertisers giggle with insane syphilitic glee as they caper and gibber in their dank, fœtid subterranean lairs, in the unholy knowledge that they don't even need to do any actual work to earn their stained dollar on this contract, because this defiled, unspeakable thing will sell itself. It was marketable in the way that makes hardened hip-hop-devotee gangstas weep openly at their weakness in front of their homies and the world, as their subverted minds betray them and force them to hand over their credit cards in a shaking, trembling, raddled hand to the record store clerk to pay for the purchase they could no longer muster the willpower not to make. It has the quality of a train-wreck in your ear: even though you desperately want to stop, as you plug your ears you FEEL its eldritch, otherwordly power clawing at your brain and demanding in obscene, sibilant whispers that you listen to it. This is the kind of song that explains HOW people with such an utter absence of talent can get major-label record contracts, because you just know that even as the record company executives crawled semi-conscious from under the table, ears bleeding, Armani silk underwear freshly soiled, drool spilling from their lips, fingers raw and nails splintered from where they'd mindlessly tried to tunnel their way through the carpeted concrete floor to escape the sound of the demo tape, they knew in the deepest, darkest, dankest bowels of their minds -- you know, the part where record company executives live -- that they wanted that sound. Specifically, they wanted it on their label, on their display racks in the record store, forcing hardened drug addicts to carjack an extra grandmother today in order to put money in their record company's pocket. Executives who balk at releasing recordings with sexually explicit lyrics line up and fight each other in slavering frenzies for the opportunity to sell anything with that kind of viral, subliminal compulsiveness, something with that ability to creep into the back of your brain as you try desperately not to listen and to compel you to listen to it, and remember. That is how things as unspeakably horrific, as threatening to life and sanity, as what I woke up to this morning end up on the airwaves.
And this, noble reader, is the true reason why major-label record-company executives must die.
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(with all due acknowledgements to Steven Brust. And I had a lot of fun saying it, too.)
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She doesn't even play in this league.
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(You've got a b0rken close-bold HTML tag there somewhere)
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At no point does the <b> seem to be </b>'ed, so the whole last paragraph (and closing sentence, with which I heartily agree) appears to me as bolded in both MSIE6.0 and Mozilla/5.0 rv1.1
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Ah, found it! It's not the </b>, it's the unclosed </big right in front of it.
Interestingly, Mozilla 1.6 Does The Right Thing. (Have I mentioned how amazingly good I've found recent Mozillas' implementation of the DWIM instruction to be?)
Anyway, fixed.
BwaH!