Black Friday in a Bleak Economy

A Brief Analysis of American Consumption Habits in a Post-Recession Market

“Black Friday” is the most American thing anyone has ever dreamt up. The Super Bowl is the only thing I can think of that comes even close to matching it, and even then, that’s just a weaker version of the same concept. More so than any mainstream U.S. tradition, “Black Friday” vaunts our one true religion, consumerism, as the omnipresent, hyper-important aspect of our daily life that it actually is. There’s no charades or pretense here - it’s all about Americans, the marketplace, and people more than willing to do extreme things in the name of material accumulation. It’s so devoid of pretext that even the most hardcore socialist-anarchists have to appreciate it, if nothing else, for the absolute shamelessness of it all.

Despite being on Planet USA for a good quarter century, it wasn’t until this year that I decided to partake of the “Black Friday” worship service, and dear lord, was it ever the experience. I live in a pretty small hamlet outside Atlanta, so I was shocked. . .shocked, I say…to see so many of the townsfolk lined up outside the local big box mart at midnight. This, I assure you, was no measly queue, it went on for a good quarter of a mile, at least. And that’s before you got through the automatic sliding doors, and saw the indoor line, which snaked around the perimeter of the building, creating an almost perfect people chain around the entire store.

Needless to say, I really can’t tell if this demonstrates the ongoing economic downturn or refutes it wholeheartedly. When you see twenty people wheeling out flat screen TVs, one after the other, it sort of gives you the idea that maybe, just maybe, people aren’t as hard pressed for moolah as the media is leading you on to believe. Then again, when you see two raggedy looking people threatening to punch other senseless over a pair of discounted socks, it kind of leads you to believe that perhaps the plight of the everyman is just a tad WORSE than what the news is telling us.

Admittedly, I just don’t get it, but I’ve never really claimed to have my thumb on the pulse of middle America, either. Apparently, there are scores of people out there that believe that it’s well beyond reasonable to wait in line for three hours, in sub-freezing temperatures no less, to score a ten dollar gift card so they can save even more money on those House Season 3 DVDS and Monster High dolls, but I reckon I just ain’t one of them.

My initial “Black Friday” experience didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t know, but it did emphasize a lot of the stuff I’ve suspected for most of my life regarding the unofficial holiday and American spending habits. First and foremost, it petty much proved that U.S. citizens have no idea what “wealth creation” really is, as a lot of people I observed appeared to be spending a ton of cash on stuff they never would’ve purchased otherwise with the false assumption that they are actually saving money on the investment. American economic thought is contradictory to everything we know about standard arithmetic, as most folks in the States somehow think that only spending half of the full price of something is wiser than not buying anything at all - as in, they honestly think spending $50 on what would’ve been a $100 purchase is financially smarter than not buying that $100 item at any point in time. The fact that they’ll never see that other $50 again in their lifetime, I suppose, is simply something that doesn’t enter their cortexes while jamming pair after pair of tube socks into their shopping cart. 

The secondary thing I noticed was that, for all intents and purposes, the thing is something of a reversion to our hunting-gathering roots. I think that most of the people that attend such events really aren’t there because they truly want something, they’re there simply because they enjoy the thrills and perils of the chase. For all the non-Americans reading this, let me assure you that shoppers in the U.S. take this shit very seriously - they plan out their shopping schemes weeks in advance, they often work in large teams to maximize their purchasing efficiency, and there’s an entire niche of subculture consumers that work out NASA-quality algorithms so that they can stretch their coupon purchasing power to positively absurd extremes. Americans may not be the best at saving money, but I assure you there isn’t another kind of peoples out there that’s better at finding ways to spend it.

Lastly - and this was the one I was the most disappointed with - was the violence factor. Granted, at many locales and venues on “Black Friday,” you’re pretty much one broken cash register away from a full scale riot taking place, but at least on my initial observation, things were surprisingly staid. Perhaps the lack of a Tickle Me Elmo­-like sensation this year kept patron-on-patron mayhem to a minimum, but there’s the additional likelihood that I just picked the wrong big box mart to observe - the rumor has it that at a certain union-hating store across town, some dudes ended up getting maced and truncheon-ed for simply cutting in line.

Ultimately, my “Black Friday” expedition validated that, at this point, there’s no way around it - America is an insanely materialistic culture. If you’re looking at factors as to why Americans seem so docile, complacent and unwilling to provoke intra-national change, that’s pretty much your answer, right there: consumerism has got us whipped something bad. It doesn’t matter how crappy the economy gets, how many wars we’re involved in, how great the wealth inequity gap is or how many of our civil rights are being pooped on, as long as we have the ability, option and freedom to spend money on largely worthless crap we don’t need, we’re more than willing to accept any of the other conditionals as a necessary trade-off. As long as there are Sonic the Hedgehog games, Mountain Dew variations and UFC action figures available to us, we’ll forego rattling the boat too much. At the end of the day, we’re not really fond of protesting and challenging big business or questioning our leaders or trying to promote intra-cultural change, based primarily on our want of goods and services. Forget justice and virtue and morality and all of that jazz - most of us avoid illegal activity because that means we won’t be able to go to Starbucks or pick up Blu-Ray special edition DVDS if we do them.

And in the name of material gain? Buddy, we’re willing to resort to some downright primitive behavior if it means saving a buck or two…

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Five Reasons Why The Beatles Suck

Exposing Irrefutable Proof that the “Fab Four” were the Most Overrated Musicians of All-Time

It was the '60s. Nobody knew everything they liked sucked.

Is it possible to discriminate against people and simultaneously enforce a status quo opinion via pop cultural tastes?

It sounds really stupid and unlikely, but I think I’ve uncovered a key example of such homogenized group ideal enforcement in modern music with something I like to call “The Exclusionary Beatles Principle.”

“The Exclusionary Beatles Principle” is this: no matter who you are or where you live, you MUST admit that the Beatles were either among the greatest musicians of all time OR they were the absolute most important ever. You must also admit that they were indelibly influential artists, extremely important social philosophizing poets and without question men of incredible ethics and values.

The social code I’ve observed in the western world is this: if you break away from “The Exclusionary Beatles Principle,” you are WRONG. The Beatles, for whatever reason, are a band that you MUST not only like, but give an incredible amount of reverence to. While it’s OK to crap on Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson (up until 2009, anyway) and Justin Bieber, not only is Beatles criticism frowned upon, it’s seen as a perversion of cultural thinking. If you don’t have a great deal of respect for the group, then you are considered guilty of non-group thought, which in turn, allows those within the same thought-group to fallaciously discredit and disbar you in just about every other domain, as well.

Well, old Jimbo here has never been one to refuse to barbecue a sacred cow, and I’m just going to come out and say it:

The Beatles sucked. I mean, hard.

Blasphemy, you say? Unfounded conjecture, you protest? Not so fast, amigo, because I’ve outline five SCIENTIFICALLY AND HISTORICALLY INDISPUTABLE reasons as to why not only are The Beatles EXTREMELY OVERRATED, but a downright crappy band of musicians AND human beings.

You say you want a revolution, man? Well, here’s a paradigm shift for you:

FIVE IRREFUTABLE REASONS WHY THE BEATLES SUCKED

"..imagine no possessions..."

  

REASON NUMBER ONE: THEY WERE MEDIA CREATIONS

When people refer to Brian Epstein as the “fifth Beatle,” they’re WAY more accurate than they probably think. Not only did Epstein serve as the band’s original manager, he’s pretty much the Svengali that transformed the four mop-headed racket-makers from Nazi-dive playing scoundrels into the N*Sync of their day.

As part of Epstein’s “marketing strategy” for the band, he advised the group to make a few changes to their act - namely, everything. Not only did he force the kids to change their appearance (that’s where the suits and haircuts came in), he also advised/threatened them to play more “radio-friendly” tunes, which resulted in all of those Lou Pearlman-esque bubblegum songs making their way across the pond.

“Beatlemania,” in reality, was a heavily produced marketing ploy by Epstein and the bigwigs at Vee-Jay Records, who were willing to dump tons of payola to score themselves a Motown like sensation for the label, so that they could use The Beatles as a bargaining chip for a highly lucrative Capitol Records deal in the States.

In short, the term “Fab Four” actually is pretty fitting regarding the group - although if we wanted to steer closer to reality, that “fab” connotes not “fabulous,” but “fabricated.”

REASON NUMBER TWO: THEY WERE RIP-OFFS

Quick question: what exactly did The Beatles do differently as musicians?

The short answer? Absolutely nothing.

The Beatles early recordings might as well be admitted plagiarizations of countless American artists, from Carl Perkins to the Supremes to Roy Orbison to especially Buddy Holly. . .in fact, the name of the group is a direct nod to the name of Holly’s band, The Crickets. And that’s not even counting the groups’ countrymen, including the Dave Clark Five, whom the Beatles “borrowed” tons of inspiration from for their post-“Rubber Soul” albums. 

As far as their much revered later work goes, just remember this: The Beatles didn’t exactly pioneer the art, or crunching guitar overlap, Bengali interludes or orchestrated feedback in popular music, either.

Think “Helter Skelter” was the first heavy metal song ever recorded? Too bad Arthur Brown, Budgie and Blue Cheer were already established acts by the time the song was released, and completely ignore the fact that the first Jimi Hendrix album came out a full year before the “The White Album.”

The Beatles were FAR from being the first pop act to interject sitars into their sound, either. (Ravi Shankar, your table is waiting.)

Think “Revolution 9” was the first instance of a musical group getting all “industrial” on our asses? Well, it would be, if not for the fact that tons of bands like Cromagnon, The Monks, The Fugs and The Godz had already begun exploring fuzz and distortion years earlier.

Even The New York Times called the group out on their lifting of other bands’ sounds, which prompted John Lennon to write a nasty reply in 1971 in which he said that the Beatles’ music wasn’t a rip-off, but a love-in.

And in case you were wondering, the Beatles were successfully sued for those love-ins on THREE separate occasions, as Chuck Berry, Joe Garlandand the Chiffons all filed – and won –suits against the band for ripping off their music.

REASON NUMBER THREE: THEIR ALBUMS WERE RIDICULOUSLY OVERPRODUCED

Odds are, you hear Beatles songs a lot. You hear them on the oldies station and you hear them on a perpetual loop at Starbucks. You’ve probably heard their number one singles a million billion times, but answer me this - just how many times have you heard a live recording of The Beatles performing?

Outside of the Ed Sullivan tapings, most people have never HEARD a live Beatles song, and that’s for a good reason: The Beatles were a TERRIBLE live act, that’s why.

...and you thought the Beach Boys were 
the only group famous for 
hanging out with psychopaths?

Earlier, I said that the Beatles didn’t pioneer anything new in music. Well, the closest they got to being innovators for pop music was the fact that they were the first band that necessitated overproduction in their recordings. Listening to “The White Album” or “Sgt. Pepper’s” is basically the equivalent of listening to the work of a hundred people, because there’s so much post work and audio tweaking on the tracks that there’s hardly anything organic about the compositions at all.

Here’s just a few criticisms about The Beatles overproduced albums that I’ve stumbled across on the Web:

“John Lennon and Paul McCartney are not writing together, haven't been for two years, and you can see the whole thing falling apart in Let It Be …there are only two songs which get anywhere and we have heard these so much they have lost their lustre…the rest of the album is hackneyed, originally supposed to signify the Beatles attempt to get back to rock and roll, to where they once performed live. This album is a sad attempt to recreate the days when they played before actual people and not George Martin and millions of dollars of sound equipment. There is a photograph of the group buried in their equipment, performing before cameras. The result was nothing live at all but a group of very famous people, heroes of our time simulating live performance…. Let It Be is a disparate album, going all sorts of different places at once, never unified… it reflects not the many sides of the Beatles in the act of creation, but the dissonance that precedes the fall.

- Jonathan Eisen, 1970, on ”Let it Be”

“Flawed, botched, and overproduced by Phil Spector…”

-       William Ruhlmann, 1995, on “Let it Be”

 

“Let It Be is a grim reminder that there is nothing so depressing as the sound of breaking up. A salvage effort by Spector renders the LP's few worthy tunes unlistenable with lush strings and choirs.”

- Christopher Scapelliti, 1996, on “Let it Be”

Heck, even the people that like The Beatles admit that they went overboard with the post-production. Just listen to this fanboy talk about the faults and foibles of “Sgt. Pepper”: 

“There is something wrong with Sgt Pepper, and it is by far the most overrated album in the Beatles catalog, and possibly the most overrated album of all time. Here are the arguments…the stereo effects are way too exaggerated, with vocals or other sounds panned all the way to the left or right, indicating a wild overuse of the Beatles newfound opportunity to mix a record in multitrack stereo. Albums since then, even Beatles albums subsequently produced, do not make use of such gimmicky stereo panning unless the effect is designed to be extreme. In the case of some of the tunes on Sgt Pepper, the extreme panning serves as a distraction instead of an enhancement.”

…and that tells you just about everything you need to know, don’t it?

REASON NUMBER FOUR: THEY WEREN’T GREAT MUSICIANS BY ANY STRECH

Pic courtesy of some awesome guy named 
Steven Howard.

Say what you will about John Lennon’s lyrics (which he, by the way, thought were pretty pointless himself), the reality is unavoidable: none of the Beatles were remarkably talented at what they did. Yeah, Lennon and McCartney could play the piano, but if you made a list of the top one hundred pianists of the 20^th century, you would have to be an absolute mongoloid to include them on the countdown. If you can name ANY bassists or drummers out there that cite McCartney or Ringo as direct influences on them, please let me know, because I haven’t heard such praise in all of my 25 years on the planet.

George Harrison was probably the most talented of the Beatles, but let’s face the facts: would anybody feel comfortable in naming him one of the greatest guitar players of all time? Was anything he did on par with the work of Hendrix, or Van Halen, or Stevie Ray Vaughn, or even a Scott Ian? In all reality, that dude  from Limp Bizkit was more impressive as a guitarist than he was.

The Beatles may have been adequate singers and writers of mildly above average poetry, but that’s about it as far as their musical dexterity goes.

REASON NUMBER FIVE: THEY WERE ALL HYPOCRITES

For whatever reason, people seem to equate John Lennon and the music of the Beatles as symbolic of the peace and human rights movement of the 1960s.

The only problem? John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison were all a bunch of duplicitous, insincere a-holes.

McCartney and Harrison both went on and on about the ills of consumption and commercialization, but what do you know? Both guys spent the rest of their lives living in luxurious mansions, collecting gargantuan royalty checks that they spent on such humanitarian efforts as themselves. Ever one to note the value of the musical art form, McCartney celebrated the medium by doing what any connoisseur of art would - he bought up thelicensing rights to more songs than anybody on the planet, so that he couldmake a profit every time other people’s work was used for commercial purposes.

Julian and Cynthia Lennon, seen 
here paying respects to 
the man that gave peace 
a chance/ ruined their lives.

And then, there’s John Lennon, the “martyr” that just wanted us “to give peace a chance.” Here’s a quote about Mr. Lennon that you’ve probably never heard amidst all of that vaunting and praise he is perennially showered with:

"I have to say that, from my point of view, I felt he was a hypocrite…[he]could talk about peace and love out loud to the world but he could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him…how can you talk about peace and love and have a family in bits and pieces - no communication, adultery, divorce? You can't do it, not if you're being true and honest with yourself."

At first, that sounds like your run of the mill case of the sour grapes, until you realize this: the above words were written by John Lennon’s own son. 

And that, in a nutshell, summarizes the innate hypocrisy behind those oh-so virtuous Beatles. You claim to promote all of these ideals that wins you a legion of fans, and what do you know? You do the exact opposite as soon as you’re off stage or out of the plain view of a camera.

I mean, what could possibly be more hypocritical than a guy that sang “imagine no possessions” dying with about $150 million in his bank account?

So what have we learned here today? Well, a lot, hopefully, key among them the fact that opinion is opinion and anybody that wants to enforce such as a cultural dictate is a grade-A despotic bung hole.

I’ve brought up the “Great Man” myth several times before, but it deserves another mention here. Throughout history, certain people are showered with praise for their “achievements,” even if they a.) really didn’t do what everyone claims they did or b.) they were absolute pricks in real-life that did horrible, horrible things that, for some reason, gets filtered out of the mainstream pool of cultural knowledge, despite tons of records existing on the matter.

A lot of the accolades thrown towards the Beatles are undeserved, the same way just about EVERYONE and EVERYTHING that has been or ever will be popular has. The important thing here is that you go beyond the fan boy and girl-ism of your cohorts and decide FOR YOURSELF what’s individually great or meaningful. . .

. . .because the moment you give up that inquisitive mindset, and especially if you just buy into the herd mentality without a smidge of skepticism, you’re pretty much setting yourself up for a lifetime of aimless following.

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A Rant Against The Radical Health Food Agenda

Is the "Health-Conscious" Movement An Infringement Of Our Civil Liberties? 

Meet the end of Democracy. 

 

One of the movements that has really irritated me over the last decade or so has been this supposed “organic food revolution.” The whole-food, health-conscious mentality has been battered into our skulls for so long now that I feel like I’m committing a felony every time I eat a handful of non-vegan, non-hydrogenated potato chips. And you know what? I’m sick of having these leafy-green, health-obsessed food fascists tell me what I can do with my body.

For me, the final straw came a couple of weeks back, when I tried to locate a vending machine at school so I could procure my normal breakfast of two brown sugar and cinnamon toaster pastries and a stick of wintergreen chewing gum. Much to my horror, however, the vending machine that has practically kept me upright over the last few years had been replaced by a new, high-tech vending machine that only offers “healthy alternatives” to snacking.

As an upwardly mobile young person, I just do not have the time to sit down and eat three meals in one day. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have the time to ingest two normal sized meals if I tried. Thus, to obtain the precious 2,000 daily calories I need for mere continuation, I have to seize as much caloric content as I can at whichever junctures such opportunities present themselves.

These “health-conscious” vending machines present two gargantuan problems for on-the-go types like me. For starters, a lot of these supposedly health-savvy foodstuffs just don’t have the caloric firepower I need to get through a day of even moderate activity. Despite all of the demonizing starches, sugars and fats have gone through since the 1970s, the simple, suspiciously understated reality is that we need things like oils and salt to simply exist as human beings. Because there are so many bipedal walruses running around campus, I suppose the administration had no option but to opt for such machines, but to the detriment of guys like me. Since all of these “cane sodas” and “organic, non-greasy” potato chips have fewer calories than the comestibles I’m used to putting down, that means to procure the same amount of energy I once did, I would have to purchase twice (and sometimes, three times) as much food as I used to. 

Pictured: National Socialism in action.

And this provides a natural segue into why I think natural foods are the biggest sham this side of Milli Vanila’s vocals. Not only are these foods of lesser caloric content, they are also of far higher monetary cost. The most expensive item in the old vending machines was about a dollar, and the costliest item in these “health-conscious” machines are about three times as much. Also note that the most inexpensive item in the “health-conscious” vending machine is just a few cents shy of being the same price as the most expensive item in the old, supposedly “junk-filled” vending machines. Now, I know I am being really kooky here, but do you think that maybe, just maybe, the push for all of these health-savvy foods isn’t to make us healthier, but to get us to spend more money on lesser amounts of the same kind of food we’ve been eating for years?

Yeah, I know. . .that’s the talk of madmen, I suppose. The question we arrive to now is whether or not all of that “healthy” vending produce is really any healthier for you than the mass-marketed junk food we were eating a couple of months back. And after doing some expert analysis, it turns out there really isn’t much of a difference to be found between “organic foods” and the processed goop we’ve been chowing down on forthe totality of our lives.

So at the end of the day, not only are those “all natural” fruit cups nowhere near as affordable and filling as those spongy chocolate snack cakes you used to enjoy, those stupid “health-conscious” foods may have even more sugars and starches in them than the factory-made goo you can scoop up at the Family Dollar for about one fourth of the price. 

 In the negative-utopia future, THIS is the extent of what   "Freedom of Choice  " entails.

I understand why the Michelle Obamas of this world are so adamantly opposed to the fast food-high caloric content Complex, but doesn’t the right to free expression also entail the right to consumption, too? To me, the vendetta against vending machine produce and junk food is eerily similar to the war waged against obscenity in print and electronic media - according to some experts that may or may not really be experts on anything, certain products MUST be verboten because they threaten the general welfare of the public. The same way all of those guacamole-heads up on Capitol Hill wanted violent video games “banned” back in the early 90s, we’re seeing a gaggle of special-interest folks serve up the exact same song and dance about what we’re eating. Since some people have the “apparent” physical inability to stop cramming Oreos down their throat holes, these lobbyists want to make it so that nobody can have access to trans-fats, or foodstuffs soaked in delicious, delicious hydrogenated oils. This “whole-food” nonsense is really an imposition on the rights of every freedom-loving person in the United States: just because other people are fat means that you can’t have certain, chemical-laden foods either.

Imagine, if you will, that exact argument, only involving a more polemic matter like abortion, or gun-control, or the right to healthcare access. There would be discourse out the yin-yang in this country, but when our rights to dine are under assault, nobody raises a whisper.

I reckon I know a violation of my civil liberties when I see them, and this push towards all-healthy food is a clear-cut example of our freedoms being imperiled by radicals, fundamentalists and out-right yahoos.

When it comes to junk food, colas and other forms of high calorie foods, I reckon I’m going to stay adamantly pro-choice, no matter how controversial the stance. After all, it is my body, and my right as a citizen, isn’t it? 

 

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