Grade 12 is Licking My Neck. Make it Stop!

So I’m making lasagna, which involves many pots & pans and me being in the kitchen for a long time. As I often do, I turn on the radio to the top 40 station for some mindless noise while I cook. All the other CD-type music in the kitchen is fraught with emotion and will make me listen and then cry or howl and that’s just not what I’m after.

Anyway, anyway, anyway. It just happens to be 2 pm, which is when the American Top 40 Countdown starts! Sweet! (aside: it is one hour and one half later and I still have not heard anything I like. this is not because I am 31. It is because, as Saint Aardvark put it, “the top 40 countdown is ASS!” Nor is this new.) Number 37 on the countdown: “More than Words.”

Yes, THAT “More than Words.” By Extreme. Ugliest band ever, next to Mr. Big. Oh actually, that’s not a claim I’m prepared to stand by. Now that I’ve typed the words Extreme and Mr Big I am brought to mind of Poison and Great White and this is what is commonly called a slippery slope upon whose peak I refuse to tread.

Yes, I owned That Extreme album but only because ONLY BECAUSE there was a boy in my class who had long hair and I loved him and the boys in Extreme had long hair and I thought if I listened to more long haired music I would develop some method of communicating with long haired boys. He also liked Queensryche. I didn’t buy a Queensryche album. I came very close to buying a Queensryche album and then I heard “Silent Lucidity” and I snapped out of it and realized that there are many ways to sound like Pink Floyd and Queensryche had mastered all of them. I was throwing myself at a wanker and a stoned one at that.

Our boy, number 37, has re-recorded “More than Words,” with extra R&B and he’s doing scales with his voice and he’s got a machine that goes “whiz!’ and “brrrrrummm” like he is trying to travel back in time & really feel what Nuno and the boys were feeling back in 1990. I’m just wondering – why? Is it because when your main competition on the charts is “My Humps” you don’t feel motivated to even try to write something good? Or did someone have fond memories from his prom of singing softly into his girlfriend’s ear: “Saying I love you/is not the words/I want to hear from you” and think: “Classic! Let’s expose the kids of the ’00s to the greatest poetry of the ’90s!”?

Number 37’s name is Frankie J (Caution: appalling use of Flash) and he is just so darn happy to be here.

In other Top 40 news, the Backstreet Boys sound kind of like Bryan Adams. And that “Listen to your Heart” remix has been re-remixed into an acoustic piano version.

Don’t you people have anything else to do?

Also if someone could please wake me up when Billie Joe Armstrong is done whining, that would be great.

The lasagna is poisoned with my bitter tears. But popsicles are great!