NIGHT FIGHT: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Edition

First, the required watching for this post. Presented for your approval, the video for reigning pop queen Lady Gaga's first single, Just Dance:

And here, the lead single and video from Pop Skanksation© Ke$ha:

So, I don't know if you guys know this Lady Gaga broad but she's pretty really popular- when they write the pop culture books in the future, they're gonna be all "Britney who? Christina what?" I think she's neat and all, but all this obsessive wanking over the "Smartness" of her music and her videos needs to stop. She's a great performer, an able songwriter (With some shitty, lazy producers) and she's got a sweet voice. She's a smart BUSINESSWOMAN I'd say, even.

But man, some of her music sucks and is stupid and I hate it. I dare anybody who takes up Gaga's "Self-aware" pop flag to listen to "Just Dance" and try to tell me there's something deep there. There's nothing wrong with writing a dumb pop song. I love AC/DC, for god's, sake. The guys who did the soundtrack to Maximum Overdrive. It's this irritating veneer of depth that is really fucking irritating, though, lemme tell you. But then people spit on Ke$ha like she is the worst thing in the world. And you know what? That's wrong and you're dumb. Seriously, if you did this right then you listened to both songs. Did you maybe notice that they're... the same? That there's no mystical analysis of Fame and Celebrity in there that redefines modern music? They're dumb party songs?

You know what? Do yourself a favor and listen to "Tik Tok," but then sing the chorus to "Just Dance" over it.

"OMG" you're saying, ripping the crayon sunglasses off your face, "Ke$ha is jackin' shit from The GaGa!"

Slow your roll, champion. There's a simple explanation: They're both dumb party songs. We've covered how incredibly derivative Gaga is, I've done it myself at least twice. So she ain't exactly innocent herself. Somebody's gonna come along and be the bigger and weirder Gaga in twenty years just like Gaga's the bigger weirder Madonna and I'm going to be yelling this same thing over some future brain interface or something.

I'm tired. This is taxing. I'm going to bed. But let me put it to you this way: The biggest difference between Gaga and Ke$ha is that one of them has a team of schizophrenics sewing dresses to make her look fashion forward, and the other one has the most irritating voice in the world and loves partying. As usual, I just want everyone to admit one thing: What you like is just as retarded as what I like.

Hey! Turns out I go to school

So in reality, I'm a college student who writes things sometimes. Here's a 2000 word treatise on how we're being treated like idiots.

EDIT: You know what, here. Here's a playlist to listen to while you read this.

Beat on Repeat:

Why we're still partying like it's 1959

In 1957, Miles Davis released an album called "The Birth of the Cool," a compilation of tracks from 1949 and 1950. And brother, when it comes to prescient album titles "The Birth of the Cool" cannot be beat. The title ostensibly refers to the "Cool Jazz" style of the record, but I could care less about Jazz. The fifties are where Cool was born. Cool, the essential teenage life-fluid that every single advertising agency in the world has been trying to bottle and sell back to the young. The difference between owning a leather blazer (ugh) and a leather jacket (rad). The 50's were when all the swirling influences from history coagulated and the first miners of its ideals like Brando, Dean, and the early Rock 'n Rollers came together to make up the trends that cool people are still following today. With the help of smash hit movies, the standards were set. But once the floodgates of teenagers with disposable income were open, they were hard to close and studios played have played to the same exploitative styles for decades since, with varying degrees of success.

Understand first where the idea of cool comes from. This, Miles Davis and his contemporaries definitely had a hand in. The idea of "Cool" is actually far older than the 1950's. African tribes at least as far back as the 1500's have revered the characteristic that they called "Itutu," which closely resembles the basis of coolness, namely an almost otherworldly detachment from reality. While western cultures valued sang-froid, or a "coolness of blood," the african concept embraces a more creative nonchalance¹, as opposed to aristocratic demeanor and composure. And that's where Miles Davis and the rest of Jazz crew come in. Black bebop musicians jump-started the bohemian beatnik revolution of the fifties and, like Rock 'n Roll, it filtered down through until white postwar suburban teens. Clearly, the longstanding ideal of making people like you by not caring if they like you has its roots further back than anybody who used the phrase "Daddy-o."