30.EP.27v: October 15, 2002.
"The War Party, part 21:
Real Men Don't Wear Hats-- SIDE B:
Pop Goes The World."
Jenny had a vision....
-- Men Without Hats, "In The Name Of Angels."
POP!!!
Pop Goes The World:
The cover has a gooney picture
of a baby. The title of the album, and band's name are printed in
blocky, colouful letters.
I'm not gonna go out on
a limb here and say that this is the lamest album cover in existence because,
frankly, I can think of worse-- but, arguably, it still might be in the
running. Even though the baby is kinda starry-eyed and cute.
Also, the two videos from
Pop
Goes The World are total fluffy cornball crap. They're performance
videos with featuring Ivan dancing and twitching and mugging to the camera,
and there's some girl playing bass, and some guy dressed like Elvis, and
of course, that stupid baby, in a baby carriage, playing keyboards.
And, before I forget, there's someone dressed up as a Bonhomme.
In case you don't know what
a Bonhomme is, Monsieur Bonhomme is a menacingly happy snowman who always
wears a toque and a sash. He's always smiling and is symbol of the
Quebec Winter Carnival, something that happens every winter, in Quebec,
up here in Canada. I guess. And, frankly, to be honest, I don't
know what in the name of God a Bonhomme has to do with anything in the
two videos from Pop Goes The World. However, he's also directly
referenced the lyrics of the song "Pop Goes The World"-- he's a member
of The Human Race, Jenny and Johnny's band. And also there's other
snowy-white imagery scattered throughout the album, too. Maybe it's
just a French-Canadian thing. But, I'm not French-Canadian, so I
don't really know for sure.
(Oh yeah, and lotsa Bonhommes
show up in the video for "Where Do The Boys Go?" So, maybe Ivan just
has a thing for Bonhommes.)
(And, by the way, the two
videos from Pop Goes The World are for the songs "Pop Goes The World"
and "Moonbeam.")
Anyway, both the videos
from the album look like fluff. The video for "Pop Goes The World"
is a performance thing that looks like it was cobbled together over a weekend,
and the video for "Moonbeam" isn't much better. Another bad performance
vid. (And the Bonhomme's in that video, too-- I think. It's
been a long time since I've seen it.) Although in the "Moonbeam"
video they're all supposed to be in space, wearing space suits, and the
guy who looks like Elvis sticks one of the other members' air hoses in
his pants. So, I guess that's kind of funny and so that maybe counts
for something.
THE CRUX
Fans of the album-- and there
are fans, quite a few, actually-- tend to relegate Pop Goes The World
to the world of glossy blissy pop. And, yes, there is definitely
a glossy blissy pop aspect to the album. Pop Goes The World
contains some of the most perfect, wonderful, utterly astonishing "pretty"
pop music to come out of the 1980s. And because of this it sounds
totally dated.
But also, because of the
high quality of the music, the Men-Without-Hats-ian super precision with
which every element is laid down in each song, Pop Goes The World
also transcends its decade of origin. Therefore, when you listen
to Pop Goes The World, you are at all times completely aware that
you're hearing a type of music that came out sometime in the mid-to-end
of the 1980s, and yet-- even if the electronics are a bit tacky by today's
standards, and ditto with the effects-- there is still something in this
music that remains at the same time fresh.
And I don't know if this
is intentional genius or not.
Also, the '80s electronic
tackiness of the instrumentation seems kind of naive, and, in a way, heightens
the absolute irreality and shiny surrealism of the album. And, on
top of ot all, it's also kind of fun and silly.
That is, when it's not being
sad.
Or oddly unsettling.
JENNY & JOHNNY
Pop Goes The World appears
to be a theme album that centers around a young girl named Jenny, and her
boyfriend Johnny. The album is subtitled "The Ballad of Jenny and
Johnny." Or at least the record sleeve is. My cd doesn't have
a subtitle.
Now, theme albums don't
always have to have a defined narrative. In fact, most of the time,
when artists try to give their albums a coherent story everything just
sorta falls apart. Some of the strongest "story" albums I've ever
heard have been done by Pink Floyd and The Residents. Especially
The Residents.
While almost every Residents
album has an overarching theme of a sort, when they decide to throw a story
into the mix they usually leave everyone else in the dust. This is
because they started their careers as filmmakers and seemingly because
of this possess a very strong sense of narrative continuity. Their
albums Mark Of The Mole, Eskimo, and God In Three Persons
are ambitious, and brilliant, and hang together like films or novels (or,
ahem, "operas").
On the Pink Floyd side the
results are more mixed: The Wall is fairly well done, although
does have a few problems with internal coherence in the last half, Dark
Side Of The Moon makes no sense at all (but I don't think it's supposed
to), Animals is okay, The Final Cut is, well, okay, but pretty
fragmented and a little too whiny. And the rest of the albums are
all just sort of a bunch of stuff and noodling. Roger Waters, on
his own, is a bit better but needs more focus. Maybe he should take
Ritalin. But, Pink Floyd and The Residents aren't Men Without Hats
so I'm going to stop talking about them now.
Anyway, Pop Goes The
World is a theme album, and it doesn't really have a story. However,
at the same time it does have a story. And that's sort of the nature
of its story.
A BRIEF DIGRESSION ON THEME ALBUMS
By the way:
I like theme albums.
I really like theme albums. This is because even a bad theme album
takes at least some thought-- usually more thought than the average musician
is capable of. This impresses me because people who make music are,
on the whole, from what I've seen, very dumb. They're really good
at whining about relationships and taking drugs, and that's about it.
On the whole.
Anyway, in a theme album,
each song is like a chapter of a longer work. This takes planning,
thought, and vision. It's easy to write a single song, but to put
a bunch of single songs together and then use these songs to convey a sense
of narrative progress-- the kind of thing that happens when you read a
novel or watch a movie-- that's just amazing.
However, most theme albums
become incoherent mush, ultimately. Most are failed experiments.
One of the reasons why the majority of theme albums become incoherent mush
is because it's very difficult to tell a story in rock-music form.
(Again, this is why I like theme albums-- because they are difficult.
Both to produce and consume.) You can tell a story in one song--
or zero in on an emotion-- but to successfully treat each individual song
like a chapter in a novel takes an almost superhuman effort. Or at
least it must, because so few theme albums actually seem to hold together.
Now, part of this could
be because on the whole, sad to say, musicians are lazy. Another
part could be, sad to say, a lack of vision. And a third part could
be the difficulty of producing discrete units that are meant to exist independently
on their own, while also functioning as parts of a larger structure.
The fragmented nature of theme albums also make it very difficult to convey
characterization, and also the fragmentation almost totally gets rid of
things like dialogue. You can't really have much dialogue in something
that's supposed to exist as a single. That sounds cheezy in a "rock"
format, and it's kind of confusing. And, most stories, in order to
be even remotely interesting, need character and dialogue. (This
is one of the reasons I like The Residents so much-- they can, on occasion,
impart a sense of character and character development in their albums--
and sometimes they even have dialogue. However, most Residents songs
cannot function as self-contained units-- they need to be contextualized
in an album. Therefore, The Residents sacrifice a huge amount of
accessibility in order to realize their vision. In this way, they
are far closer to the world of Opera than rock-- or whatever the hell it
is you want to call their music.)
And, of course, there's
Momus. All of Nick Currie's albums have ideas behind them.
They are all theme albums. But they don't really have stories, as
such. They're more like explorations of ideas, social criticism,
maybe even sometimes essays. Very accessible essays in pop music
form. Maybe. But Momus is in a class all by itself.
Anyway, Pop Goes The
World doesn't care about narrative, or character development, or even
dialogue (although all three of these things are sort of present throughout
the entire album)-- but this isn't due to lack of vision, or laziness on
Ivan's part. In Pop Goes The World the narrative stasis and
muddy action are central to what the album is about.
POP GOES THE WORLD: TRACK LISTING
1. Intro
2. Pop Goes The World
3. On Tuesday
4. Bright Side Of The Sun
5. O Sole Mio
6. Lose My Way
7. The Real World
8. Moonbeam
9. In The Name Of Angels
10. La Valse D'Eugénie [trans.-- "Jenny's Waltz"]
11. Jenny Wore Black
12. Intro / Walk On Water
13. The End (Of The World)
AND NOW, FINALLY, WHAT THIS ALBUM IS ABOUT
As I said above, Pop Goes
The World appears to be a theme album centering around a young girl
named Jenny, and her boyfriend Johnny.
The album starts with a
warning. A distorted female voice (or maybe Ivan's voice, altered)
asks: "Can you hear me out there?" Then "she" claims that "this is
the big one. This is the one we've all been waiting for." Kind
of an apocalyptic warning-- "the big one" is kind of an end-of-the-world
sort of metaphor. It also lets us know that this is-- or is intended
to be, anyway-- a Magnum Opus. Then we're treated to some obviously
tape-recorded and then sped-up strings, and then a girl with a fake British
accent says: "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Pop Goes The World
by Men Without Hats." (The girl is probably the same girl who we
heard warning us earlier-- and if she's not actually the same person, she's
definitely meant to be reminiscent of her.) And then the album launches
into its titular track, introducing Jenny and Johnny.
The song "Pop Goes The World"
seems like cheery, goofy anthem about a bad pop band, however the lyrics
are cryptic, apocalyptic, and kind of dada-esque. They're also sort
of cute. And kind of schizophrenic.
THIS IS BECAUSE....
Pop Goes The World seems
to be, underneath the gloss and pop, the story of a schizophrenic girl
(Jenny) who is obsessed with love, angels, and the end of the world.
It's told, mostly, from her point of view. But sometimes told from
the points of view of others who may or may not be figments of her imagination--
or at the very least somehow filtered through her imagination.
Jenny is a wide-eyed innocent.
She is also quite possibly
pregnant. Remember, there's a baby on the cover. And a baby
is very explicitly mentioned in the title song, and alluded to in others.
Also, Jenny is in a band.
But the band may be in her head. As might her potential pregnancy.
She is also a some form
of movie star. Unless that's all in her head, too. And her
time on the movie screen may be a reference to rock videos, or just about
anything else. Any type of movie. There are touches of cloaked
sleaze here and there. And, after all, she is pregnant-- maybe.
And, to top it all off she
keeps falling in love, seeing angels, losing her mind, and finding some
sort of abstract, infinite Truth she-- or someone-- refers to as "The Way."
Among other things.
And, as for Johnny, he may
not even be real. Or he might the father of Jenny's child.
Because sometimes it seems like he's had sex with Jenny.
But, at other times Jenny
seems totally virginal.
ANOTHER POSSIBILITY
There is another possibility,
also:
Jenny is a young girl who,
while not initially schizophrenic has ruined her mind with chemicals.
This interpretation has been running through my brain for a while and would
be consistent with the love/hate relationship Ivan and Men Without Hats
have with club culture. This would also be consistent with the way
some of the songs on the album allude to Lewis Carroll's drug imagery--
for example, the caterpillar scene from Alice In Wonderland sort
of makes an appearance in "The Real World."
But there's a slight problem
with this reading: Jenny's innocence.
There is no doubt that Jenny
is an innocent-- this is almost the only really explicit, certain thing
in the entire album-- and I have a problem accepting the notion that someone
who wrecks their mind with clubbing and chemicals is an innocent.
Maybe it's just me, but there you have it. They can be naive, but
that's not the same as being innocent. And they can be stupid-- and,
primarily they are stupid. But stupidity is clearly not the same
thing as innocence-- as anyone who's watched any news at all in the last
year should be able to attest to.
Therefore, I'm less inclined
to think of Jenny as a clubbing casualty than I am to think of her as schizophrenic.
She just seems far less innocent if she's been popping pills every weekend
until her brain dribbles out her ears. When that happens, a lot of
the charm of the album is lost. For me, anyway.
SLIPPAGE
However, it's actually hard
to really get a full grasp on Pop Goes The World because the album
exists in a state of extreme semiotic slippage. In normal words,
what that means is that you can never really nail it down: right when you
think you have it figured out, it shifts into something else. So,
every time I listen to Pop Goes The World, right when I think yeah
I've got it cased, all the metaphors and images in Ivan's song have finally
coalesced into a meaningful selfconsistant whole, something changes-- I
notice a double meaning I hadn't noticed before maybe, and then suddenly
the whole glorious mess means something different.
This is not, by the way,
the same as bad writing. Bad writing is something different.
And, in fact, this is the way language actually works. You can like
or hate the fact that meaning is in perpetual motion, that when you examine
a concept closely it turns into something else, you can complain and squawk,
but tough titty: no one thing means only one thing. And serious kudos
to Ivan Doroschuk for writing an entire album that is, on one level at
least, all about this phenomenon.
And so:
Pop Goes The World
is in perpetual flux:
Sometimes the album is narrated
by Jenny, sometimes possibly Johnny, and maybe sometimes Ivan. Jenny
becomes Lewis Carroll's Alice, she becomes a fertility goddess, she becomes
the cheshire cat, maybe she becomes Schrodinger's cat, maybe she's a young
girl, maybe a keyboardist, maybe an abstraction based on a perpetually
shifting idea. Maybe she's even God. Maybe she's Johnny.
Maybe Johnny's some sort of earth deity. Maybe Johnny's a loving
boyfriend, maybe he's a rapist. Maybe he's a drug pusher. Maybe
he's a drummer. Maybe he's Ivan. Maybe Ivan is the leader of
a band called Men Without Hats. Maybe Ivan, as Johnny, is in The
Human Race-- Jenny and Johnny's band-- which, of course, may or may not
be real. Maybe Ivan is Jenny's father, maybe her lover. Maybe
he's God-- but no, later on he tells us that he never did walk on water.
And the world ends, sort of, because at the same time it stays the same.
A complete list of all the
imagery and references scattered throughout this album would be unwieldy
and confusing. So I'm just going to list a few.
The four elements-- earth,
air, fire water-- are frequently referred to in different contexts.
Of course there's Lewis Carroll, and the whole Jenny-as-Alice thing.
There's birth / fertility imagery. And, with that, the idea of eternal
return, a sense of cyclical time-- and with that the idea that art always
cannibalizes itself. There are angels, of course. There's the
general idea of apocalypse-- which is more of a mythological thing than
a real event-- no matter what doomsayers might want to believe. Science
/ science fiction tropes pop up in minor ways (and not just in the idea
of the end of the world). There may be one veiled reference to William
S. Burroughs, but I'm not too sure about that. It goes on and on,
each image and reference bringing a new angle to Jenny's "story."
Perpetual flux.
To give you a bit of an
example of what I'm up against here, let's just look at something simple--
the title:
Pop Goes The World.
Packed in this simple phrase
we have allusions to:
The children's game Pop
Goes The Weasel, which underscores the whole youthful, whimsical playfulness
of the album.
A reference to the end of
the world-- the world goes POP-- winks out-- dies in some sort of cataclysm--
and this is totally consistent with the apocalyptic subtexts of the previous
three albums.
A sly sort of half-comment
on T. S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" which itself casts the end of the
world in the form of a children's song and ends:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
But, in Jenny's case, of course,
the world doesn't end with a whimper-- instead it goes out with a POP.
(And if you really want
to put "The Hollow Men" into the mix, you can. It fits well.
But that would make things just a little too complex right now, so let's
not.)
It's also a reference to
the complete and total entrenchment of pop music on the radio, and in stores,
and frankly, everywhere... so, very literally Pop goes the world.
The world is Pop culture-- in all its various forms.
And this in turn is a comment
of the way the media has consumed the real.
Plus:
Just look at that starstruck
baby on the album cover, and remember the references to the baby and Johnny
in the text of the song "Pop Goes The World" and then consider how these
things relate to the phrase "pop goes the world." This is another
apocalyptic image, yet this time more personal. It echoes, very literally,
Jenny's loss of virginity-- and innocence. The popping of her hymen,
and with it the popping of her "world," her youth.
(If these things have even
happened. If she has in fact lost her virginity, and isn't simply
imagining / wishing something along those lines. Which, if that's
the case, puts yet another spin on the idea of "pop goes the world.")
And, it's also quite possibly
a drug reference. If you want to look at the album as the story of
someone who's fried her brain in the club scene (and as much as I don't
like it, this is borne out through at least one type of reading of the
Alice
In Wonderland themes) it is literally a reference to popping pills,
popping drugs, pop goes Jenny's mind, and her / the world.
I could go on. There's
more in there-- I'm sure of it-- and it all fits, in some way. And
in some way each one of these readings is echoed and supported by the content
of the album.
EVERYBODY HAVE YOU HEARD?
And, the lyrics themselves contain
numerous puns and bits of scattered weirdness, too. I've only seen
the lyrics for the song "Pop Goes The World." They're on the sleeve
of the record, but not available on the cd release. And these lyrics
have some very strange features. One thing that springs to mind is
the line:
"Everybody tell me have you heard, pop goes the world?"
which when spoken sounds like one sentence, but when written down on the
record sleeve looks like:
"Everybody tell me have you heard? Pop goes the world!"
It's two sentences. And
on the surface, it's pretty simple. It's a question with a built-in
revelatory aspect.
"Everybody tell me have
you heard?"
Heard what?
"Pop goes the world!"
And of course the "Pop goes
the world" can mean all the things I've mentioned to above, and more.
It can also be seen as a reference to the song / album itself.
But, still, the written
separation of "Everybody tell me have you heard?" from "Pop goes the world!"
brings a little something else into the picture. It gives the reader
the option to consider both phrases as a units unto themselves, which results
in some interesting effects.
Just because the first half
("Everybody tell me have you heard?") points to the second ("Pop goes the
world!") doesn't mean it has to, now. In fact, there is the potential
that the transfer of meaning has been interrupted, here. That there
was a revelation of truth ("Everybody tell me have you heard?"), that has
been derailed, interrupted ("Pop goes the world!") by Jenny's schizophrenia,
drug use, or general madness, or any of the little tropes that follow in
the rest of the album. Therefore, the "end" of the "world" can occur
right at the "pop."
And, now, I'll just leave
it at that and let you ponder.
PLAY
Ultimately, Pop Goes The
World is about play. It is a playful album. The lyrics
are playful, the music is playful, the overall tone is one of fun.
This is all double-edged,
though, because the person who exemplifies this atmosphere of complete
and total play is Jenny, who schizophrenic or not, is mentally unstable.
JENNY'S MIND
She goes through stages, not
really evolutionary stages, but stages of fluctuation. Her world
is constantly shifting, and so she is also shifting. But, because
her world is always shifting, and because she is always shifting, she is
never growing. There is no narrative development in Pop Goes The
World, only a sense of a series of non-linear, intuitively connected
snapshots. And, maybe, information overload.
EVIDENCE OF JENNY'S SCHIZOPHRENIA (IN "O SOLE MIO" AND A FEW OTHER PLACES) AND SOME OTHER STUFF (BECAUSE IT ALL KEEPS SLIPPING OUT BETWEEN THE CRACKS IN MY FINGERS)
In "O Sole Mio," Jenny says,
among other things:
Mother mother can't you see
Something's wrong inside of me
Every time I try to say the words
They don't come out right
In the same song, as well as other
songs, Jenny is obsessed with Angels and God. Many schizophrenics
are obsessed with religious themes. They see angels, demons, they
think they can talk to God. And so on.
(Jenny also uses strange
phrases like "holy lovelife" which while not necessarily pointing towards
schizophrenia do seem symptomatic of Jenny's words not being able to "come
out right. The phrase "holy lovelife" also underscores her fascination
with angels, and the divine.)
In "O Sole Mio" she sees
angels, as well as other things she cannot communicate:
All the people in the square
Try to act like nothing's there
She also sees her reflection
in the ground in the song "The Real World." The lines where Jenny
sees her reflection also showcase the schizophrenic weirdness of Ivan's
lyrics (and Jenny's problems with language):
Hey hey it's a real world
Look at the ground, can you see your reflection there?
Everything is single
Here we come again
I have no idea what these lines
mean, but they do echo some of the major themes of the album: recurrent
and circular time, the unreality of reality, the idea of everything becoming
one ("everything is single"). And other stuff, too.
Later on, Jenny will "become"
the Cheshire cat, reveal "all" and will either fuse with or obliterate
the world.
Jenny also "becomes" a rainbow.
A cute young-girl image, sure. And this reinforces her identity as
an innocent. But a rainbow is also ephemeral, transient yet always
the same. A rainbow also changes depending on which angle you view
it. It's halfway between something that's real and an illusion.
Angels also make an appearance
in the song "The Real World." Jenny sees angels in the sky, a vision reminiscent
of Gustav Dore. The angels signal the coming of love, in a sort of
religious way. However, the slightly slower tempo of "The Real World,"
and that fact that it's played in a minor key suggests that both the angels,
and the scenario in general are also a little menacing:
They call it falling in love
They call it falling
Falling of course implies a
decent, a "down the rabbit hole" Carrollean theme, as well as other kinds
of mythic "falls" (see, for example the Biblical fall that permeates our
entire culture), as well as simply physically falling, having a seizure
or psychotic episode. And of course there's the idea of the "fall
from grace," again a spin on the Biblical fall-- a loss of innocence reinforcing
both Jenny's possible rape and pregnancy, as well as her possible connection
to club culture.
BUT, MORE EVIDENCE OF HER
SCHIZOPHRENIA:
We're talking about "O Sole
Mio," again, now-- here she imagines the world as being love with her,
but only she knows this. She is utterly famous, in her world.
But it is only in her world that she's famous. A delusion of grandeur.
With maybe a few religious overtones.
Also, Jenny can only remember
the present. She has a sense of perpetual temporal displacement.
She has no past and can't really think ahead into the future. Again,
this is-- while not explicitly schizophrenic as such-- a symptom of mental
dysfunction.
Also, there's Jenny's general
sense of disconnection from reality. A flattening of affect common
to many schizophrenics. She is "real, but almost not quite," and
also "frightened by the way we looked at her," and "here [and] almost on
time" (all these quotes are from "Jenny Wore Black").
There are also images and
various tropes implying great distance scattered through the whole of the
album. A feeling of trying to communicate from far, far away.
There is one section which sounds like a staticky radio broadcast intercepted
late at night, another track (the instrumental "La Valse D'Eugénie")
sounds like a scratchy vinyl recording of an old piano-- there's a temporal
distance here. On "Bright Side Of The Sun," a brief song which could
either be about falling in love, uniting with God, or suicide-- or all
three-- interstellar distances are invoked. The song is also a very
broad allusion to Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon, a theme album
about insanity and mental collapse in contemporary society.
And, in the song "Moonbeam"
things appear "blue-green" alluding to the Doppler shift effect that occurs
at extreme speeds. However, things go into Blue Shift when they are
approaching (they bend to red when flying away), so there is also an image
of unity, or at least some sort of proposed (or hoped-for) unity.
But, again, there is also distance. Blue Shift can only be seen at
great, interstellar distances.
These examples of distance
are all symptomatic of many things, among them-- possibly-- the "distant"
feelings schizophrenics feel in relation to the rest of society (and reality).
Or maybe just alienation in general. And also a little hope.
Jenny also has visions,
and "two holes for my eyes where the dreams peter through" ("Jenny Wore
Black"). And, mostly, her visions are happy visions: joyous, images
of rainbows and angels and people dancing, but in one vision the angels
warn her:
You can lose your head
You can lose your mind
You can lose your way
Keep your eyes and still be blind ("In The Name Of Angels")
And, she reminds us:
You'll never see clear with tears in your face.
Could never see clearly anyway. ("Jenny Wore Black")
And so, everything is opaque,
confused, hallucinatory, down here, in the middle of her "fall" into love
and apocalypse and eternal play. But she reminds us:
Look at the sky, hear the calling above again
"Again." An image of cyclical
time. She goes up there, and then comes back down. A cycle
of rising and falling, epiphany and confusion, "losing" her "way."
And it's mostly confusion because whenever the world becomes clear, it's
only for a minute, and then she comes back "down" into her hallucinatory,
decentred world of chaos and play.
For Jenny, truth is fleeting,
if there ever really even is any truth.
BUT, THAT SAID, WHY SHOULD ANYONE CARE? WHAT'S IT REALLY ALL ABOUT? DOES IT EVEN MATTER? WELL?
Yes it matters. This is
a dangerous album, even now. Jenny is a dangerous metaphor.
Jenny stands in for everybody.
You, me the whole goddamn postpostmodern world.
Like everybody now, she
is "real, but almost not quite."
(On the last track of the
album, "The End (Of The World)," Ivan invokes the wonderful glitter and
excess of postmodern society-- it's a playful song, a little annoyed maybe,
but not overtly angry.)
And if you don't believe
that we're "real, but almost not quite," turn on the tv and watch Bush
on CNN babbling about declaring war on Iraq, and then go for a walk down
to the local video arcade with your MP3 player glued to your ears feeding
your brain the perfect soundtrack of your choosing, making everything you
see into an extended establishing shot. Or better yet, take a drive
in your care with the music blaring out of speakers twice the size of your
head and feel the world mediated through the screen of your windshield.
Or even better yet, just stay home and stare at your Playstation all night,
or your tv, until you feel yourself losing your body.
Or, go on the Internet and
talk to texts, while you yourself become a text.
And feel nostalgic for time
periods you've never lived in, wars and causes you were always too young
(or too unborn) to understand. Put yourselves in their shoes.
Except they are just an extension of your own hopes and dreams.
And then go down to the
7-11 and bloat yourself on Vanilla Coke.
And then go buy a new wardrobe,
making yourself look as poor as possible.
And the next time you see
a car accident or a bum freeze to death outside a mall just see if you
don't think: "This is just like a movie."
And then, five minutes later
you're grooving away to whatever your current fetish is, always living
in permanently nostalgic present where the colours are brighter and more
real than whatever it was you only vaguely half remember... that thing
that happened a few minutes ago in front of the mall.... Oh well,
whatever. Just pass the E, pass the porn, pass the fanfiction and
the net browser, pass the cartoons and the disaster footage, the high and
low art, the VR terminal, the new bigdeal DJ mix, the nostalgia, the futurism,
the apocalypse and the bliss, and let me wallow in the false transcendence
the here and now brings.
Jenny shifts in and out
of focus just like you do, bub. Just like the whole world does.
Everything for her is entertainment and overload. Angels in the sky,
love in the air, a search for the real, and fragmented overblown self-reflection
everywhere.
And so Pop Goes The World
is the perfect metaphor for what it's like to be alive and overwhelmed
now, in this demented 21st century wonderland, where every last thing--
every last war, protest, accident, tragedy, movie, tv show, videogame,
party, job, killing, good thing and bad-- exists solely for us as entertainment
and entertainment only.
It always happens to someone
else.
Except when it happens to
us.
And then that's the best
theatre of all.
