scat is also another word for poo. that's an interesting coincidence.

I’m currently sitting in a ‘euro’ café where I’ve been for the past several hours. I’m not ENTIRELY sure what I’ve been doing but I’ve applied for some jobs and I’ve written some stuff and I’ve researched steampunk a little, which has to be one of the more confusing subcultures I’ve ever encountered. It’s confusing because it’s some serious dork bullshit and it resembles that movie Wild Wild West with all the old timey-modern era mashup weirdness, but the actual things that the steampunk designers make look pretty awesome. It’s kind of Jeunet/Gilliam-esque, and I like those dudes. I don’t know. I’m not gonna explain/ figure out my complex feelings regarding Steampunk beyond I think it’s dorky to dress up in costumes every day, but those dorks seem to make some cool stuff. The real issue at hand is that this café is playing jazz and it’s bumming me out on an almost cosmic level.

I used to like jazz. When I was a kid, I thought that the saxophone was, hands down, the coolest instrument on the earth. In fairness to me, I was extremely young and it was the early 80s and saxophones were enjoying real moment in the spotlight. These days, pretty much the only way to look cool with a saxophone is to be a really skinny black guy leaning against something in a poorly lit subway station, playing some really soft, dark sounding shit. I’d hate to discourage anyone from making music, so I’m gonna stop short of saying anything like ‘the sax is the dorkiest instrument on the earth’ but well, let’s just say that you’re gonna have to really reinvent that thing to impress me too much.

Now jazz is, in theory, unbelievably cool. Born in America, a loose confederation of black guys who were super fucked up on heroin cruised around to illegal clubs to play illegal music that they just made up on the spot while playing together (often for the first time) based on a few conventions of style. That’s fucking AWESOME. Except for one thing: the actual music. Now, I was in a jazz band in highschool just like everyone else and at the time, I kind of was able to fool myself into thinking that jazz was pretty cool, but that didn’t last/stick/hold any water because there was no point ever when I was sitting around putting on jazz albums. Jazz radio stations stink, jazz djs are the WORST and any perversion of jazz, like vocal jazz, smooth jazz, modern jazz, deconstructed jazz, scat, that shit is just completely unacceptable.

I don’t think it’s out of line to say that scat vocals make up the most offensive music I’ve ever heard. It combines the cocksure retardation of speaking in tongues with the shittiness of jazz. There is NOTHING worse than listening to a bunch of wide assed white ladies with Han Solo haircuts barbershopping senseless bullshit over a bunch of electric pianos and saxophones. It’s infuriating. Well, actually no. Speaking in tongues is actually much worse, but that’s because speaking in tongues is just jazz for non musical, humorless white religious nuts and that’s shitty on a level that can’t really even be easily measured.

The theory behind speaking in tongues is that an angel, or the holy spirit, depending on who’s making the shit up, is taking possession of your body and speaking to you in the pure language of gods love. The way you speak in tongues is to stand there, wait for the spirit/angel to take you over and then loudly start just jib-jabbin nonsense phonemes until you’re plumb tuckered out. This is, obviously, one of the stupidest things you can possibly imagine trying to convince anyone of, but wide eyed mongoloids seem to absolutely lap that shit up for some reason. I mean, if those kooks can talk themselves into babbling like assholes in public, why can’t they just talk themselves into being allowed to have a little fun the rest of the time? At least the people playing jazz were high on drugs. There’s NOTHING cool about speaking in tongues except for that since you’re already a complete religious weirdo that’s afraid of sex if you do it, then you’re at least not getting laid any LESS by doing it, which is an impressive outcome of babbling like an idiot in front of your whole community.

Speaking of babbling like an idiot in front of everyone, thanks to all y’all who came out to the Double Door on Friday. What a great time. Thanks for the beers and cheers. I had an awesome birthday! You guys are all right.
Okay, I gotta get out of this fucking place with its fucking jazz. I can’t stand no more. It’s making me furious. Ta.