RANTS

Any and all stories contained within this website are a work of fiction.
All of the names, characters and identities are the product of the author's imagination.
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. 

Copyright ©2005 by Jizzy Pearl

BUT CAN THEY SING?

I've pondered this question long and hard and I guess the most succinct answer I could give you is…FUCK NO. They can't sing; they never could. In fact they were specifically chosen because they couldn't sing. Strange, huh? A singing show for singers that can't sing. That's like a swim meet for quadriplegics. Now why would anyone, much less people who don't need the money, subject themselves to humiliation, embarrassment and scrutiny? Why indeed…

But Can They Sing is just the next step in the downward spiral of so-called “reality based “ television, a sort of reverse American Idol where the only criteria is that you must suck , pushed up on stage with no experience or training to endure our collective pie-throwing, cat calls and jeers for…what? Attention? A fucking record deal? What? And why?

There is no pretense here, these contestants are terrible, zero pitch, no rhythm, some can't even remember the words. The venerable Larry Holmes, former heavyweight champion of the world was reduced to a bumbling stuttering Parkinsonian farce, a guy that makes Muhammad Ali look like an erudite George Bernard Shaw, a James Brown in Neanderthal skin mired in his own feces. Hardy har har. Side splitting larfs. It was like watching the Son of Godzilla do Starsearch blowing smoke rings and rubbing his tum-tum with glee.

Morgan Fairchild was next, once TV beauty queen, the camera dare not get too close or we might leap back in revulsion at her Nefertiti-like papyrus skin stretched over her cheekbones like a trampoline. She sings “These Boots are made for Walkin'” but she can hardly walk in her impossibly tight Jordache jeans she must have had in her closet since Pee Wee's Big Adventure. That Idiot Gotti Spawn was next, the bastard child of another horrible TV show “Growing up Gotti , the talented no-talent arrogance of a spoiled brat who unlike the rest of them actually thinks he can sing. This kid presses the flesh and the girls go nuts and it makes me yearn for a pardon for Sammy “the Bull” Gravano and a high-powered rifle so he can Kennedy this fucker and put us all out of our misery.

Bai Ling. I loved her in the Crow but how long ago was that? This woman is ageless and unfortunately pitchless as she croons “Like a Virgin” with all the finesse of a goose with it's leg caught in a trap. Not even her beauty can make up for her off-key Cantonese warbling as she does a mock striptease on the dirty killing floor. And the audience goes wild…

The shameless hawking of such programs does venerable VH-1 little justice, itself a mere shadow of its former glory, when people used to care about music just a little bit. Now we're forced to watch 47 year old Peter Brady do romantic joust with his young hot paramour, herself a refugee from another reality show. Maybe it's because the real world is so surreal that any chance we get to turn our heads from it is a welcome relief. Watching out President bark “We don't torture” like a petulant child who just got caught pulling the wings off a fly, watching our government become a Kabuki Theatre of lies and liars and the 24 hour news channels parroting the lies until we accept them as truth. Somehow it's OK to hold people for 4 years incommunicado with no trial and torture them, we're OK with that. We're OK with the Cassandra-like proclaimers of Bird Flu pandemics (Which is this year's SARS—remember SARS? SARS was 2003's Black Plague) Was that before or after we were told to stock up on rolls of duct tape and plastic wrap our windows because a chemical attack was imminent? I guess the truth is we all watch these mindless shows because we're too fucking lazy to read a book, after a long tiring day at work or strangling the kids in a tub we're so tuckered out that all we can manage to do is plop ourselves down on the sofa and get our bullshit intravenously fed to us like drooling Terry Shiavos. Reality shows are tailor-made, they cost no money to produce and they don't have to pay real writers. Shot out like White Castle burgers a dozen at a time, tasteless and nutrition-free, making 15 minute celebrities of such goofballs as Clay Aiken and Young Gotti, as timeless as an old Band-Aid on a weeping scab—it's kinda no wonder that our kids are growing up stupid, where Playstation skills take the place of a working vocabulary, where hormones in the meat are accelerating puberty to the point where 12 year old girls are spouting pussy hair and tits. Where grapefruit-sized brain tumors are silently growing from cell phones, computer screens, HD TV's, walkie-talkies, bad food, bad sex, cancery sugary cereal and teenage lust, where Brad and Jennifer's relationship takes precedence over our own relationships because we've somehow opted to care more about some distant celebrity's life than our own…because compared to their lives our lives are retarded and boring. A place where Lindsay Lohan's weight is more important than War or poverty or the 3,000 illegal aliens dancing across our border like gadflies every fucking day…all of this and more lashed together and dangling precipitously on the head of a giant pin, like Madness, like a china plate full of squirming mice fueled and oiled by their own Filth, Lovely lovely dreams broken and scattered like ten pins, Mother and Son in a Death Embrace, strangled by the cords of their own Playstation modules.