I'm not an old man!

Okay, I made a mistake, I watched some primetime TV.

They had this show where they brought back stars from the 80s, which is a cute idea. Except Vanilla Ice, who last I saw was talking about coming to grips with being a has-been, now apparently thinks someone gives a shit.

But wait, it gets worse! These 80s stars, the Motels, The Knack, etc., they weren't even allowed to do their own material.

I saw Steppenwolf at Worlds of Fun when I was fourteen or so, and they got boos for their new material and had to cave in and do 'Magic Carpet Ride' and 'Born to Be Wild' and all those the other stuff they've got to be sick of. But they didn't have to do Brittany Spears, or her equivalent at the time, whoever that would be.

It was like watching American Idol but with people who'd had hits being forced to perform other people's material for a laugh. I hate American Idol, in large part because they don't look for complete bands, and because the people sing other people's songs. With some exceptions, thats a formula for failure in the real world. Night club cover bands, they do other people's songs. Bands that want to make Billboard write their own fucking material. They rehearse with their own band.

If they are a real band, and have a sound of their own, they can cover someone's song and have it be recognized as their interpretation. Cake doing Gloria Gaynor and Willie Nelson songs. The Dead Kennedys doing Elvis and Sonny Curtis.

American Idol, and this 80s flash back show, and so on, they focus on the stuff of high school talent shows and it sucks.

Then I saw the most horrible thing of all. Apparently an American Idol immitation where the prize is to be the singer for INXS, a band that sucks to begin with. And apparently (I'm basing this on the preview) one of the attempts is by trying to be the singer for KISS doing their 'anthem' 'I wann Rock & Roll All Night...'

A song even KISS didn't put more than an hour's thought or rehearsal into.

The worst part of this 80s flashback was the hip-hop infusion. With Vanilla Ice it's at least comprehensible, because he apparently never learned that rap is not music. And the dancers are cute. Mini-dresses with garters halfway from skirt to knee, thrusting their pubes at the camera, it's sexy. And it'll give them something to tell their homeroom teachers about.

Cake (mentioned above) and The Urge and a few other bands have managed to do a rap type thing in a musical way, but for the most part hip-hop is what Chuck Palahniuk describes in 'Lullaby' as the 'arms race of sound.' Not about quality, about domination.

It makes me wonder, would these people buy a recording of, for instance, a bunch of rappers at a skeet shoot? 'Pull! Blam!' How about a 24-bit digital remastering of the Daytona 500?

It's not the newness of the music. I like some fairly recent pop/rock stuff. But rap is not music, and I'm not an old man for saying so. It wasn't music when I was in high school (when it was the latest thing). And no, that doesn't QUITE make me an old man either.