I just received an email from a correspondent who had to admit defeat with one of my reflexive pop-culture references.
I must concede that a couple of forty-somethings who record the cartoons on Adult Swim so we can watch them the next night before our bedtime may be fairly characterized as displaying some degree of arrested development.
I have a justification for that!
It's my experience that the pendulum swing away from witless fad orthodoxy is led, and often defined, by satire.
And the most culturally influential -- or culturally indicative -- satire is this kind of hip, edgy, youth-oriented mockery.
We just found out that cats have balls too.
Could there be a more perfect distillation of the reflexive, brain-damaged, knowledge-free regurgitation of a passively received dogma than Nathan Explosion's single sincere-and-oblivious sentence?
It's way better than some old fart like me railing about the anorexic celebutard who poses naked for PeTA, then wears a pair of shoes made from the hide of an endangered lizard, which is okay 'cuz lizards aren't cuddly and it was already dead.
Along with countless other pop-culture mavens, the writers of Metalocalypse are finding the stupid and smugly milking it for entertainment.
Smug on, boys and girls.
Because the laughter evokes a question in the minds of the laughers. And that's all the truth -- nuanced, messy, data-dependent truth -- needs to get into those minds and fertilize a thought.
oh man i am such a metalocalypse fan.
ReplyDeleteI'm can't quite tell if I'm ashamed or just oddly intrigued that a small portion of my playlist sounds like this. The growly part, not the cut-off-balls part. (That's the Miranda Lambert & Other Country Girlies section!)
ReplyDeleteI just don't think the mental image of a Reverse Gumball Machine O Testicles will subside for a while.
Reminded me of "While you were out" :D
Frighteningly, it reminded me of that day too.
ReplyDeleteAnd I had even joked that I was disappointed that we didn't have a great big glass jar of balls in the middle of the room, that we could watch fill up.
I felt no corresponding desire to fill a vat with uteri. I don't think that's sexist, more aesthetic and just generally reflective of my chronic lack of an editor.
Nobody threatens anyone with hysterectomy in the heat of a fight, ya know? No cultural baggage there.
On another note, not being a head-banger myself, I cannot make out the lyrics at all, and haven't had any luck finding them online, though many Dethclock lyrics are available.
One of my neighbors kept his GSD's testicles from that operation. His wife has obviously learned to live with them, but she still has the "yuck" expression on her face whenever she mentions them. Which isn't often.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't find the lyrics either. I'll probably end up wasting time trying to figure them out from scratch. Given the choice of Growl Karaoke or Call of the Wintermoon, I'll go with deciphering this one.
At least they're singing in English. The first time I listened to Dimmu Borgir, I tried to sing along until I figured out, these sounds, they are not anything like English or its derivatives...
I have been trying to watch this in pieces over several days, but something about my pro-punk, anti-death-metal musical sensibilities kept me from finishing it.
ReplyDeleteUntil now.
My.