Friday, June 03, 2005

Anyone catch the show Hit Me Baby One More Time last night? The show where they ask old bands to perform their hit song again. That's the kind of show I like to call a generation cutter--40% of the nation was probably saying, wow, they're performing again, and 60% was saying, wow, what the fuck is this crap? To some of us it was like watching a Woody Allen movie where most of the audience didn't get the jokes. But, it was interesting that the host was British, which led me to believe that it's only foreigners who still have Loverboy records in their jukeboxes. This leads to an interesting thought, because there does seem to be a preponderance of cover music, actually, a resurgence of all things "redone" i.e. music, movies, plays, TV shows, video games... I'm still watiing for a "cover" novel, but I guess copywright protection actually works in that area. I think the reason for this is not that we exactly enjoy the inherent high quality of the original work, but more so, the memories that we associated with that period when we initially lived through all that. For instance, when I was watching that show, I wasn't thinking, "Damn, Speech and Tiffany really held up well, or Flock of Seagulls used some great guitar riffs," I was thinking about the collection of Umbros I had, or the Zubaz pants I wanted, or the ice cream guy stopping near our house and me buying those red, white and blue pops, or me killing time at the mall for a dozen hours and then heading back home to watch the Bulls wreck shop. Blame it on a lack of quality stuff today, our disillusion with the times, or a failure to create good, lasting memories, whatever it is, we're losing our creativity fast and that could really suck in the long run.