Obsessed with Artificial Crap

Whoa! Look! It's 13 tons of floating cosmetic products!

People love fake shit. Think about these ones:

1) When they made Orange Drink, the corn-syrup cheap replacement for orange juice, they made the orange color more visually pronounced and visually appealing through additives and food coloring chemicals. The color of real orange juice just was not orange enough for us.

2) Perfume is made from the sweat, tissue, and puke of sperm whales (ambergris). Females think it's a good idea to attract males by covering the natural odors of their bodies with the vomit of whales. Most males are attracted to women's smells not the smells of whale puke...it's actually kind of an offensive odor to be honest. Plus, nowadays they don't even use ambergris...they make synthetic ambergris which smells exactly like whale puke but it fortunately spares the whale. You womens are buying fake whale puke!

3) Auto-tune...why does every singer want to sacrafice originality to sound like they are talking in front of rotating fan? Every singer wants to sound like Soundwave from Transformers. This is silly.

4) Generic synthetic leather couches. Ikea, Brault & Martineaux, and all the other chain bigbox stores import these generic fake leather couches from China and everyone buys them. Leather has a smell, a feel, and a look to it that is indistinguishable. The synthetic leather does not feel, smell or even look like leather...it looks, feels and smells like vinyl. Everyone who has one of these in their home, always without fail, will brag to you that they have a leather couch.

"If a horse won't eat it, I don't want to play on it" - "Big" Dick Allen on artificial grass.

Corn syrup drinks, perfume/cologne, auto-tune, and synthetic fabrics are the norm now. This is what the consumer wants, it wants artificial products. This is what the audience for musicians want, it wants artificial music. People want artificial fabrics. The sellers are just giving the buyers what they ask for. Why do we want these things? Because that's what everyone else wants so it must be what I want.

We want to be saturated in reasonable fac similes of reality....but isn't reality refreshing sometimes? Aren't those strange things that don't seem to fit...a breath of fresh air? Take that show American Idol, where everyone is trying to achieve that level of reasonable fac simile and fit into the mold of what is "good" and what the audience wants. Why when William Hung came around did people take notice of him? Sure, many were laughing at him, but I think the main quality that propelled him to stardom was Hung's realness. The mold was diecast...yet he broke the mold.

Who set up what was right to be begin with? True musicians search for the the Perfect Beat...but is there even a Perfect Beat? If one person's trash is another person's treasure...then how can anything be perfect?

A term in linguistics called "Prescriptivism" applies to this situation, where some ruling power/authority prescribes a correct manner of speech and writing. How can there be a perfect or even right way of talking/writing in a world with a hundred thousand different dialects and languages? All us english speakers were prescribed what was "right" by the Victorian English Monarchy. It's right to pronounce a word in a certain way...but terribly wrong to pronounce it in another way. For all french speakers, the Académie Française (established in 1635) is the authority which governs proper pronunciations and, of course, decides whether a belt is male or female (a belt is a chick by the way).

Is what is "right" totally arbitrary? Yes, and that's why when a William Hung comes to town everyone takes notice. Because deep down inside we all crave for arbitrary rules to be broken. 

Take the greatest language, Mathematics, for instance now. Scientists have smashed apart the rules over and over again. When Einstein and others first started saying that the rules of math won't work in all cases and that there are certain special cases where the current set of rules would not apply...they called them crazy. Apparently, the story of Alice in Wonderland was written as a tongue-in-cheek bashing of the new math rules coming out in the mid 19th century. Lewis Carroll apparently was a mathematician and devout Victorian Rule-Lover who was enraged by the new concepts being proposed and made fun of them in his book...

By now, scholars had started routinely using seemingly nonsensical concepts such as imaginary numbers - the square root of a negative number - which don't represent physical quantities in the same way that whole numbers or fractions do. No Victorian embraced these new concepts wholeheartedly, and all struggled to find a philosophical framework that would accommodate them. But they gave mathematicians a freedom to explore new ideas, and some were prepared to go along with these strange concepts as long as they were manipulated using a consistent framework of operations. To [Carroll], though, the new mathematics was absurd...

-Melanie Bayley (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427391.600-alices-adventures-in-algebra-wonderland-solved.html?full=true)

Having said that, let's go back to music now. Knowing that the rules for what is "good" are arbitrary and that different things will please different folks, and that everyone basically wants crap. I think originality has a big place in music. You wouldn't have Rock and Roll if someone didn't get tired of playing what everyone else was playing, you wouldn't have rap if someone didn't get tired of playing what everyone else is playing (etc etc.).

One wikipedia entry I find very interesting is the one on Bavarian composer and music theorist N.Seneda. Seneda seemed to understand that the only way to break the current rules and create something new (and hopefully good...but not necessarily) was through, what he called, the "Theory of Obscurity." He believed that you had to disregard everything you heard and know from the music world around you to truly create something original (though not necessarily enjoyable to the listener mind you). Rumors say he would lock himself away in the wilderness, or some secret room, or Patmosian-esque cave for years to compose his great symphonies without being influenced from outside sources.

"...a man or woman moreso than this being can be called an artist, can only produce pure art when the expectations and influences of the outside world are not taken into consideration." -N. Seneda

You gotta keep it real and original too....simply for the sake of breaking silly rules.

Um, I think you're "leather" chair looks kind of like plastic...no?

(spellcheck says I spelled "sacrafice" wrong...did you grammar red barons catch it?).

(Oh, and ponder this too...is that bum Tom Petty famous because he's on TV or is Tom Petty on TV because he's famous?)