Y'Know What I Hate? The Internet

Two thousand years of progress and the pinnacle of mankind’s achievement online is a website with photos of Paris Hilton looking like she was beaten by a former boyfriend. I am not an intellectual by any stretch of the imagination, but what is stunning to me is the amount of garbage there is floating around on the Internet.

On any given day you are bombarded with ads for penis enlargement, hit with spyware, and receive messages from some person in Africa claiming to be a prince that wants to share his fortune with you. I recently saw an advertisement from a company telling me to click on the banner to remove advertisements on my computer. My response and yours should always the same to this bombardment of substandard waste. Run Lavasoft's Ad-Aware when finished surfing the net, try your best to shield your eyes from the ads, tell the guy from Liberia his check is in the mail, and if necessary ask the good people at the “Rhino Penis Company” how much they want.

The sites I go to, when I am done with that cavalcade of gallstone-inducing madness that is my email account, are the news sites. I get my news, maybe a few cheap laughs, and then I sign off. Not as exciting as, say, putting a stick of dynamite down my throat and trying to put out the fuse before it blows, but this kills time and keeps me sharp. I never know when someone is going to regurgitate what he or she saw on the news and misinterpret it to make a point in an argument. You should never believe everything you read, and you should not form an opinion on something without all the facts. Just because The Age makes things up does not mean you should either.


Every website out there looks exactly the same. Almost all of the sites that I have had a chance to check out were either a cheap knock off of a popular site, or the site amounted to another Norman Rockwell who took their PHP mastery or some such nonsense, gave it a sleek "look at me I'm a nerd" design, and piled on everything they thought they could that would get people to go to their site.

Now you have blogs popping up everywhere like a foot rash. I loathe blogs because most of the time it is some unqualified, blithering, teenager yapping endlessly about what they think about Julia Gillard or waxing philosophical on such intellectual matters as whether to scratch their behind with the left or right hand. And then of course you have the blogs that just focus on celebrities and offer snarky comments that a 3-year-old chimp named Ooka could top. And yes, I am all too aware that I sit comfortably in this category.

The media needs to stop their love affair with blogs and “citizen journalists.” There is too much danger in this flash journalism style that people will be harmed.

It seems to me we have been on a downward spiral in terms of what we expect for entertainment and the Internet reflects our low standards. So I say go to your usual sites, stay informed so you don’t turn into a blithering blogger, and for the love of everything holy run some kind of spyware protection when you are done.

Y'Know What I Hate? Pink Floyd

To me listening to Pink Floyd is like being forced to ingest Thorazine capsules in a dark depressing room with a TV set put on its' side showing a test pattern and then being suddenly told in a deep condescending voice that your parents have just been killed in a car crash. Then someone else tells you that everything is still OK though, in the ever-existing-time-space-cosmos or some such pseudo-intellectual wankery..
 

I’ve asked people to explain to me why it is that Pink Floyd is so great, and I always get a response along the lines of “If you have to ask, you’ll never understand” or some such arrogant arts student type response.

In other words, they don’t fucking know either.

I can tell you why Motorhead and Iron Maiden are the greatest bands of the early heavy music era, or why the Ramones and the Stooges did more to change the face of punk rock than any of that 77 UK shit or why Hip Hop wouldn’t be where it is today without Public Enemy and Wu-Tang Clan. But when I want to know what Pink Floyd gave me, I get looked at like I’ve just raped someone’s bed ridden King Charles Cavalier puppy.

Any of the things that get all too often attributed to the Pink Floyd name I can see elsewhere beforehand in bands like the Beach Boys and the Beatles and at the same time with the Doors.

Also in an interview ‘The Edge’ from U2 stated that he bought his first delay pedal after hearing the opening guitar chords to “Dogs” from the Animals record.. That alone is an offence worthy of some serious hard time.

 

Look, everybody will tell you they appreciate the genius of Pink Floyd. You probably went through a "Big Pink Floyd Phase" at some point in your life. Yeah this "phase" is known as your first year studying Graphic Design at University when you ate mushrooms once a week.

If you don’t take hallucinogens you should not be listening to Pink Floyd. Simple.

Their music serves no purpose other than to serve as the soundtrack to your group tripping experience in a dark room. If you're on psychadelic drugs you obviously aren't going to want listen to say, heavy metal or anything particularly rocking. After all you are mentally unstable and might react by taking off all your clothes and running down the street screaming bloody murder after think your girlfriend was a werewolf mid coitus. You also don't want to listen to anything laid back with complex lyrics like say some Bob Dylan, because words don't actually make any sense to you in your current state. So you go with Pink Floyd as completely neutral background music that will not upset the balance of your night of mind expansion.

 

Have you ever listened to Pink Floyd in a completely sober mind state? Like say cruising around in your car on a Friday afternoon jamming out to the classic rock station? Their music truly is shit. I hate when I'm listening to a solid block of classic rock, and I hear that "CHA-CHING!" cash register noise. Then “You fucking cock juggling thunder cunts! I was just in a solid groove after some Creedence and Skynyrd and then you have to put Pink Floyd's "Money"  on”. I hate that fucking song along with pretty much every Pink Floyd single that comes on the radio. Yeah, the idea of rebelling against the establishment and protesting your educational experience was kind of unique in the early 1950’s, but by the time “The Wall” had come out, Elvis Presley had well and truly knocked down those walls with his unstoppable pelvis, and even if it was something interesting to hear again, I definitely do not need to randomly hear a bunch of creepy British kids singing a hook about it on repeat.

 

"Wish You Were Here" is one of the weirdest sounding love songs ever written. Pretty much the only tolerable Pink Floyd single is "Comfortably Numb." This song however, is infinitely better when sang by Van Morrison rather than by the members of Pink Floyd, so they lose points for that.

Of course people will argue that Pink Floyd is not a band that should not be judged by their individual singles. "You gotta get like the whole album experience maaaaan."

 

Yeah well I've listened to both Pink Floyd masterpieces "The Wall" and "Dark Side of the Moon" all the way through and they are both complete excrement.

First of all there are very few rock albums that I am willing to listen to all the way through, and generally they all serve some sort of purpose that involves fun. You can leave the album on for an entire party, or a BBQ, or a road trip, or a drunk drive home.

If you are listening to a Pink Floyd album, you are only enjoying yourself if you are tripping in a dark room watching a light show. You can't throw on Dark Side of the Moon at an Australia Day party and enjoy yourself. Pink Floyd's songs are all extended dark, gloomy jams that continuously "build" without ever reaching much of a climax. Roger Waters whispers song lyrics in a creepy voice that sounds like the demonised version of Michael Jackson from those court tapes is lurking in your closet. Pink Floyd is basically the soundtrack to you looking up at the sky and realizing the apocalypse is coming as the dark clouds gather and lightning flashes. So.. just what you need to get the party going..

 

Syd Barrett – The Genius. The God.

Man, what the fuck? Are you for real? What did he even do for the band?

The dude did one and a half records with the band and his work was hardly iconic.

It reminds me of things you'd hear on a Weird Al Yankovich record.. Sure, Syd was a strong influence but, saying that the band wouldn’t sound how they did without him is like saying Dio formulated the sound for Black Sabbath or Sammy Hagar for Van Halen.

In the end he couldn’t handle the drugs and turned out to be a psychopath that shaved his eyebrows off and hid in a cabin for almost 40 years until he cashed out.

Every time an artist dies young (which for all intents and purposes, Syd Barrett died in 1970) there's always the people "It's so sad, he had so much more to give."

 How do you know? Maybe he was out of shit. How do you know?

He's done. He got all the money, he did all the drugs, he fucked all your holes. And that's the celebrity dream, and when you're done with that you go.. "Oh, that's why they call it a dream. — It's bullshit, I'm still empty." How do you know what any artist had left? How do you know if Jimi Hendrix hadn't had died he wouldn't have wound up doing  duets with Meatloaf at the AFL Grand Final right now?

Anyways, Pink Floyd were one of the first bands to… I don't know… lock themselves in a studio with a year's supply of LSD and experiment with weird production effects (Oh shit, Brian Wilson did that first? Fuck!). So they will always be considered "revolutionary" in some manner.

After all, if you are the first band to do anything weird you are always looked at as an "innovator" even if your fresh, revolutionary sound is worse than a Jamie Kennedy punchline. Let’s just admit however, that nobody is ever in the mood to randomly rock out to a Pink Floyd song. Nobody has the patience to sit and listen to an entire boring and gloomy Pink Floyd concept album. If you do actually "enjoy" Pink Floyd for extended periods of time, it's time for you to stop spending your Tuesday night dropping acid in your mothers basement while staring at a lava lamp and get a fucking job already and stop sitting there talking at me about Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, Yes or Phish because my violent opinion won’t be all I give you next time.

 

01/02/13

 

<Also, I'm aware that people aren't stupid and will pick up on the "Maybe he was out of shit" being a reappropriated Doug Stanhope bit>