It’s Hip to be Square

Somewhere along the road to revolution, we as a society collectively put our maps back in the glove compartment and started saying “I think it was past this I.H.O.P.*” I knew we should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque. Anyway, I was watching television the other day when a certain advertisement caught my attention. The commercial started off as any other, telling the viewer how original they were, and how they liked to stick out from the crowd, when the announcer proclaimed that “your drink: not coffee, you break the rules, you drink tea!” Have we really sunk so low that we must make martyrs of our hot beverages? I mean, what is there even remotely revolutionary about tea? Absolutely nothing, but we like to think that our lives are not cycles of banality, and hey, maybe Che Gueverra got his motor running with a pot of Red Rose every morning before fighting fascism in Latin America. Our obsession with non-conformity has lead to a society of people who are still mindless, but now dress and act as if they want to be heard.

One of the best examples of this stick-it-to-the-man posturing is in the music industry, where major labels entice the youth demographic with fresh, original acts with bad attitudes! Incredible. Has anyone ever stopped to think that if a band really cared about being “underground”, they wouldn’t be signed to DGC or Columbia, who export (and exploit) hundreds of millions of albums a year? A current case of this is Pearl Jam, who have a new album coming out soon. After their platinum-selling debut “Ten”, frontman Eddie Vedder said that he did not want to make any more music videos, because it was too commercial, and he was opposed to doing such a thing. He was not opposed, however, to doing a live radio special on internationally broadcasted radio to support their third album, and he obviously didn’t mind having television commercials promoting the group’s last two records, including the recent blitz for “Yield”. I guess Eddie’s philosophy is one of “we don’t want to be commercial, but we don’t mind making commercials!”

Overall, I think the problem is that people want to be different without changing. If you can set yourself apart from the crowd, then that’s great, but if you are trying to set yourself apart from within the crowd, then what is the point? It’s like if everyone wore red, but you decide to “rebel”, and wear a red hat as well. You’re still wearing all red, you just added a semi-personal touch, which anyone could repeat. Being different for the sake of being different is exactly like being the same as everyone else, but now the rest of us have to wonder why you’re wearing a lampshade on your head. I was talking to a friend of mine about this when he helped me make a stunning revelation. He noted that being non-conformist is so hip now, that to be different, one must actually conform to society. At that exact moment, we drove by a bus stop, where yet another kid was wearing army fatigues. It’s actually happened! The most conformist organization in the world is the army, and now it’s cool! As a sidenote, the proper way to address these slack-jawed, full metal jackasses is by screaming “Nice jammies / pajamas, Guile!” I prefer the term “jammies” because it implies their juvenility, but follow your heart when you mock others, it’s the only way to go.

I have been alerted by fellow writers that all my recent diatribes have ended with me proclaiming the suckiness of everyone else in the western world, and I’ll try to steer clear of that, but I have to do one just for fun; Take your HMV superstore-shopping, Starbucks-guzzling, “I think a homeless man saw me when I was at Speaker’s Corner” paranoia, and your basket of goodies for grandma and go back to the cottage before the Big Bad Wolf kicks you out of the Square One food court, because “South Park” comes on soon, and if you miss Cartman saying “Bitch”, you’ll never hear the end of it on Monday. Not that I have anything against “South Park” itself, but it’s hard to pretend you’re watching raw, cutting-edge television when you see a thirty-five year-old yuppie walking his two kids through Erin Mills Town Center with a Cartman T-shirt on. So much for not dumping on western culture. Maybe next issue I’ll get really angry about Eastern aphrodisiacs or monsoons and leave North America alone for once. After all, we stole this land fair and square.

*International House of Pancakes