Everybody poops. That inescapable fact, says Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is the fundamental quandary of human existence: that the consequence of every act of sustenance (eating) is the shame of defecation. (Not ashamed? Then he fucking dares you to stop crapping with the door closed.) To live is to shit.
Ke$ha's a garish neon pillar of vapid excess.
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Ke$ha, with Beardo, 6:30 p.m. Saturday, February 19, Fillmore Auditorium, 1510 Clarkson Street, $36, 303-830-8497.
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The original meaning of the German word kitsch, he goes on to observe, is that which denies the existence of shit. Consider Leave It to Beaver, from the golden age of American kitsch, which presented a prosperous world in which everyone lives in fundamental agreement, conflicts are minor and values are never challenged. There can be no room for pooping in the universe of Leave It to Beaver.
These days, of course, the world "kitsch" has come to mean something closer to "nostalgia" — and Leave It to Beaver is also a good example of that — but nostalgia, too, tends to cast things in a rosy light. And often, as André 3000 once put it, "Your roses really smell like poo-poo."
In a bizarre confluence of events that somehow failed to create a wrinkle in time returning the world to the summer of 1986, Ke$ha and Metallica announced almost simultaneously this week that they were both considering doing cock-rock records. Well, actually, Kirk Hammett didn't explicitly say "cock rock," but considering the old "make-an-album-that-sounds-like-the-first-albums" trick on Death Magnetic (the most METAL album name of all time), it's safe to say that's what it will be: cock rock.
Of course, it's fashionable to look back on our shitty past through the lens of irony — like, how hilarious is cock rock, amiright? True, with the distance of time, it's pretty hilarious.
But this will not be an ironic look back.
One, Metallica making an ironic cock-rock record would be like Tom Jones being ironically creepy: it can't be ironic if it's the genuine article. And in this case, it's just kind of sad that the genuine article is still around. Any record Metallica could possibly make will suck. If they try to make something not cock metal, it will suck because Metallica is a cock-metal band. If they make something cock metal, it will suck because it will be their 87th cock-metal record. Leave us be, Metallica. We know Ride the Lightning was awesome. Quit ruining our memories.
As for Ke$ha, I invite you to Google-image her and know that Ke$ha is the cock rock of today, a garish neon pillar of the same vapid excess and plastic rebellion that was the hallmark of the original cock-rock movement. A cock-rock record from Ke$ha will be no more ironic than the sincerest hipster new-wave record — and playing new wave is the one time hipsters are not being ironic.
When a microphone feeds back, it's because it is picking up its own amplified noise, re-amplifying it exponentially until it creates a sound unbearable to the ear. The resurgence of cock rock is similar: We're just feeding our own shitty noise back into the microphone, in the process making it louder and that much more horrible. And that is why we have now reached the nadir of our culture.
Because we're not just pretending our shit doesn't exist; we're pretending it's delicious.
