Alan Thicke's Son Kinda Sucks and Other Fun Music Notes.

It happened like a month ago and people are still talking about Miley Cyrus twerking in latex underpants.

Woo-frickity-hoo, people. A young pop star danced in what had more coverage than your average bikini.

Not that I enjoyed her oddly tongue-laced molestation of a foam representation of being number 1, but I think we’re all not talking about the most important thing, here.

A dude dressed as Beetlejuice sang a song about rape on national television and no one cares. His dad is all “I’m so proud of my son!” Yes, let’s be proud of your kid, who sings (did he write this?) “I know you want it. You’re a good girl. Can’t let it get past me.” Alan Thicke, if Kirk Cameron had done this crap on Growing Pains, you would not have been so nice, now would you?

This song was also featured on last week’s Glee. The teacher sang it while surrounded by his musically-inclined class sang backup. Jane Lynch’s evil character Sue Sylvester calls him out on singing a song about rape with a bunch of underage high school students.

She may be a little bit evil, but she’s not wrong. Robin Thicke: a name like a second string almost superhero, songs like an asshole frat boy.

First, I’d like to point out the sheer elegance and sophistication of today’s pop hits. Lady Gaga has penned a ballad that will go down as a classic, her lines “I live for the applause, applause applause. I live for the applause-plause, Live for the applause-plause.” just touches my soul in a way Billy Joel just never quite has.

Bruno Mars recently posited to the world: “You and me baby making love like gorillas.”

And I am not saying that the hippies are right and the music from the last generation “meant something” and was so much better and more meaningful than today’s top artists. There is crap music represented in every decade.

I love the Beatles. They had everything from meaningful to ridiculous, and it never gets old. That doesn’t mean every song was a masterpiece. Let’s take an objective look at the opening to “I Am A Walrus”

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.

I'm crying.”

Yes, yes, tell me more. You do not sound like you’re SUPER HIGH AND STUFF or anything. And weirdly, I like that song a lot.

Don’t freak out. I love the Beatles, Springsteen, Billy Joel, Bon Jovi, the Temptations, and a lot of other music that is not of my generation. I still rock out to Lady Gaga with my 6 year old niece in the car, sing along with Katy Perry when it’s stuck in my head. I have a slightly nostalgic lean toward the Backstreet Boys and Avril Lavigne.

I am not condemning your music choices, my friend! I would never do that. I am pointing out that we like ridiculous music sometimes, and that is not an opinion, it is fact. Take a look at some of those lyrics and try to tell me it’s the Starry Night of music.

LOGICKED.

But we often do accept lyrics from our favorite artists that don’t make sense or kind of suck, and we do it because it’s catchy. I don’t like Selena Gomez’s “Come and Get It.” It is literally a song about loving someone and just hanging out, waiting for them to come and hang out with you. Chorus: “When you’re ready come and get it. na na na na.” Line from first full verse: “Can’t stop because I love it, hate the way I love you.”

That is not a healthy relationship right there. You should try counseling or something.

I know songs about real life normal love might not be as exciting, and like I said, it’s not like I don’t dance to these songs or sing along either. I just think we should take an objective view of the situation.

I guess a love ballad like this wouldn’t be as popular:

“Sitting in my sweatpants,

Watching Law & Order with you.

Chinese food and soda,

Typical Tuesday night.

Na na na na.

Saturday afternoon

Sitting around, eating a bagel.

Let’s run off together

To Target for more paper towels.”

But if you think it would be, feel free to make it famous, though I’d like writing credit and royalties. :)

We The Young People

My first thought as my bus from DC to NYC came into the city the other night was “Grilled Cheesus Crust, I can finally get off this bus!” My butt had been numb since Delaware.

Whenever I hear someone say something like “Jesus Christ, you scared me!” or something along those lines, I always have a moment where I think about a cartoon Jesus hiding around a dark corner and popping out and scaring someone before laughing hysterically, or a creepy Jesus in a trench coat flashing people in the park.

Religion is one of those things they say it’s not polite to talk about in an interview, on a date, or out in public. I don’t know when we all got so sensitive, maybe it’s just always been that way. When someone says something that you don’t agree with, religion-wise, it certainly isn’t a personal attack on you and all you stand for. And if it were me making the statement and it WAS a personal attack on you and all you stand for...you’d KNOW it.

Something many people get wrong is that the United States was not discovered and settled as a land of freedom of religion. The Puritans came here to escape religious persecution in England, where Catholicism was the reigning religion, and England at that time believed that there MUST be uniformity of religion for a given society to thrive. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and this it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, by force when necessary, in the interest of saving everyone’s souls. The Protestants actually agreed with that, they just thought Catholicism needed reform, and to become more like Protestantism.  

So the Puritans came to the New World, not so that anyone could believe in whatever they wanted, but so that they could specifically believe in Protestantism, away from persecution from the Catholic leaders.

I feel like my generation is the one with the power to change the world. We are large in number, we scream for tolerance and change, and Generations X and Y was the first generations to be raised during the rise and rapid evolution of technology. We were among the first to be able to access the entire world and a wealth of information.

Today’s teenagers and young adults are spoiled from the ridiculous amount of technology and information at our fingertips. Who needs to remember numbers or how to do simple math when we can just use our phones and calculators? Who needs to actually read the classics when you can just Wikipedia the detailed summary? And why do people find it odd that I love to read for pleasure and don’t really get into video games? But whether we are spoiled, entitled, or just misunderstood in a changing world, we can change everything.

There are more people in Generation X and Y than there are in the Baby Boomer generation. The Baby Boomers are the ones currently holding office, holding the high level CEO jobs in a lot of companies, and are a lot of the ones making policies that affect our lives.

Imagine what we can do. We can literally change the world. We already have!

More young people voted in 2008 and 2012 than ever before. We voted, and it just goes to show that your vote DOES matter. Your vote helped change the direction our country was going in. Generations X and Y (Y is sometimes referred to as the Millennial Generation or the ‘Me Generation’) have live tweeted catastrophes, such as in Egypt and Israel, they have demanded information, they have found vigilante justice on the internet.

We have built social networks that literally connect the world, we believe in starting something from nothing, and we know that with the right idea, anything is possible. Our generation created Google and eBay, we have Facebook and Twitter to unite people globally at the touch of a button, we made the Hubble telescope, and the biggest strides in space exploration.

Our generation are the ones who are fighting for LGBT rights, for equal constitutional rights of them to be married. We follow in the footsteps of every Civil Rights movement in our history, which proves over and over again that we the people know what we want, and what is right, and are willing to yell and fight and work for it.

Jeff Gordinier, author of X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything From Sucking, has a pretty awesome quote from when he was featured in Time magazine. Here is a short excerpt that includes it:

‘Shirking the media myth that Xers are slackers, Gordinier argues that Generation X has — to borrow a '60s term — changed the world. Citing Gen-X icons like Quentin Tarantino and Jon Stewart, along with Gen-X triumphs like Google, YouTube, and Amazon, among others, Gordinier argues that not only are Xers far from over, they might be the most unsung and influential generation of all time. "Gen-X stomping grounds of the past — the espresso bar, the record shop, the thrift store — have been resurrected in digital form. The new bohemia is less a place than it is a headspace. It's flexible enough to bypass all the old binaries. It encompasses mass and class, mainstream and marginal, yuppie and refusenik, gearhead and Luddite. It's everywhere and nowhere in particular," he writes.

In short, "GenXers are doing the quiet work of keeping America from sucking."’

(read the rest of the article here)

So, rejoice, young people. We are changing the world, we are the future, blahblahblah.

Seriously, we have the interconnectedness, the tolerance, and the ability to learn, grow, and change the entire world and how it works. We are not in the Hunger Games, we are not in The Giver or Divergent. We are not yet dystopian, but we are the future.