I'm gonna howl now

Well, Liz Taylor is dead and on television I just found some asshole pre-teens advertising something called “Kidz Bop” to my 2 year old (no small feat considering that this ad is on an educational channel which specifically promises to never have advertising…I guess Kidz Bop is such a good product that they fudge the rules for it).

Liz Taylor was extremely beautiful for a long time. She was Cleopatra. She got married, got divorced, got married again, she was kind of like the horseshoe crab version of Madonna, in that she was a different breed of ‘take no bullshit’ kind of woman than the staunchly anti-fun, anti-male types that people tend to think of when they think of anything surrounding the idea of women’s rights (though that’s completely stupid. It’s about the same as thinking that everyone in the army is a moron or everyone that’s Mexican in the US hopped a fence or swam to get here…but that’s a whole other deal).

Liz Taylor kind of took ‘slut’ and turned it into ‘go fuck yourself,’ which is pretty cool. She was classy and hot and then she got old and crazy (you’ve all seen her howl at the moon when, near the end of her life, that reporter asks her if she’s gonna marry again, right? It’s worth a google if you haven’t. Wow) and she hung out with Michael Jackson and I dunno, man. She was an original and her actual life was a work of experimental art. It’s sad that she’s dead. What’s left? Kidz Bop.

Now, Kidz Bop, for those of you who don’t know, is a CD of hit songs as sung by kids. So, it’s the tunes of dipshits like Jason Derulo, BOB, that one douche with the real soft voice…Mark Posner, shit like that. Some of these people are little more than kids themselves and the whole thing seems to wildly vacillate between completely irrelevant and vaguely offensive. I mean, I really don’t have a problem with kids listening to whatever songs they want. I had a rogue copy of 2 Live Crew’s “Hey, we want some pussy” that I listened to on headphones when I was a wee lad, and aside from being a jobless waste of space with a penchant for foul language, I turned out okay. It’s just more that I don’t want to hear kids singing about lighting up clubs or fucking on the dancefloor, not because it’s salacious, but because it’s fucking stupid. These kids don’t even know what they’re singing. Nope. Actually, they really, truly don’t. Let me give you an example.

The song 50 Things by the Dead Milkmen was a big part of the soundtrack of my middleschool years, when I was approximately the age of the kids in the Kidz Bop ads, and it featured the line “no, I haven’t got any pills. No, I haven’t got any hash” and I thought that it referred to vitamins and corned beef hash. I thought the song was literally about getting your day started right, with a hearty breakfast and some vitamin C.

Now, it’s completely possible that this could be because I was stupid, but it’s more likely simply because I was a kid. Even though I did shit like write graffiti and look at playboys and ride skateboards and follow skateboarding and punk rock culture through magazines I sent away for, and even though I hung out with the dude that ran the bong shop that was located inside the skateboard shop, and I heard people talking about drugs and stuff, I just NEVER even considered that the song would be referring to ACTUAL pills and hash. Here’s the weird part: I didn’t realize what this song was really about until I was in my late 20s, and to this day, I still vaguely associate that song with breakfast.

My point is, kids don’t pick up on direct references, so they definitely don’t pick up on Usher’s euphemisms for getting head. I dunno, maybe they do. Maybe the kids are just that much more sophisticated than they were. I guess that’s entirely possible.

I mean, what happened to that simple time when a young girl from Arkansas could grow up and marry 8 times and hang out with a manchild with an ape for a best friend? What happened to that golden, bygone era of sweetness?
RIP Liz Taylor.