So the Smash Mouth lead singer passed away. This is this group I had zero strong opinion on except that I got stuck in a “am I defending something I just find objectively unobjectionable?” question when I started seeing them used as a short hand for … Something cultural, I don’t know what. It was this blasting from a niche online influencer, like a big crochet online hub, who gnabbed some attention by posting that all Trump supporters and voters can go to Hell and I don’t want to hear anything from them ever and they can all be left to their Smash Mouth concerts. To which I scratched my head — why bring Smash Mouth into this? What did they ever do? Later, a back handed praise from The Huffington Post came when Smash Mouth made the lowest of low hanging fruit stage comments on mocking a “straight pride parade” with a response comment along the lines of “who woulda thought Smash Mouth would be socially conscious” — were they ever explicitly not? Am I staring at some Holden Coulfields finding “phoneys” everywhere and when diverging out of their fixed idea on musical and entertainment tastes? What is this? Is this slammed in the same manner something’s are as “angry white boy music” as instead ” happy white boy music”?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are cultural signifiers tossed out with a fixed understanding that I need to make a reach to understand what it signifiers even as it is stated as a given. It could be a sign of me getting old and out of touch except for the problem that I used to be young and out of touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other day I am caught flat footed with another pop cultural assumption of an adjective. Stephen King annoyed his wife by constant play of the song “Mambo Number Five” (The late 90s lyrical -filled reprise of an old song). Big Variety headline. The article casually refers to the song as “infamous”, leading me to ask “to whom — when — where?”. It has been years — decades — since it was ubiquitous (the one reason it could have been “infamous”) and today if you wish to hear it you have to specifically seek it out. I suppose the casual womanizing and listing of women’s name is an irksome message, and it would not be gauche to play constantly at your significant other in any monogamous relationship. But I don’t think the same adjective is being dropped in as an automatic qualifier for (name of a 50s rock song is escaping me, but it is barely coded and amounts to same thing and ends up dropped in commercials). Is this adjective drop a low level “cancel” attempt to firm up cultural consensus? What is this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So the Smash Mouth lead singer passed away. This is this group I had zero strong opinion on except that I got stuck in a “am I defending something I just find objectively unobjectionable?” question when I started seeing them used as a short hand for … Something cultural, I don’t know what. It was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56457"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56465,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56457\/revisions\/56465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}