Friday 30th May 2003: Reasonably Prepared to ROCK!
Easy targets. I love ‘em. This week, I’m stooping lower than most, in delivering a reasoned critique of The Fast Food Rockers. Someone’s got to do it.
If you’ve been spared their, ah, work, so far, consider yourself among a lucky few in this country. Essentially, what they’ve done is they’ve rehashed the appalling kids’ song in which a number of fast food brand names are recited, loudly and often. Why exactly it exists is a mystery, but my theory is that it’s a sort of marketing barometer. When the billionaires owning and operating said brands can hear the song ringing in their ears, they know that not only have they succeeded in their aim in life, and can now retire to the Costa Verde, where they will construct three swimming pools and a mansion that possesses a gravitational field from the bodies of live Spaniards bought from Social Security at the going rate of £3,367 per body (there’s a price break at 10,000!), but also that they can now hold a procession through Marketing, blowing away salarymen with unfeasibly large weapons. Whilst it would be greatly satisfying to see the mass slaughter of those who call indoctrinating the world’s children a living, they’ll only be vapourised once they’re no longer useful.
Why won’t they be needed? Because the ghastly works of evil they’ve spent their lives thrusting down the throats of those too young and ignorant to know better will have become totally insidious. Parents will be weaning their children off the breast with the offer of some McDonalds’ fries. Churchmen, desperate to attract followers, will be eating a Grand Pan Vegetable Supreme® to represent the body of Christ, and drinking Fanta Red© to stand for His blood. Pre-school kids will be seated before the television, sitting impatiently through the coloured blobs danced before their eyes, waiting for the adverts to come on again.
Alright, I admit it’s going to be a while before that happens, but people like these aren’t helping things. And you know the worst thing? It’s actually the official song of the Brownies already. If you don’t know what they are, it’s akin to Girl Scouts, only aged 7-10, and they’re being fed this crap on a weekly basis. Whilst I can understand why the organisers adopted this monstrosity as an anthem of sorts, I can’t quite grasp the how. For an organisation that is supposedly founded on principals like loyalty to your Queen and Country, just how did it escape the organisers’ notice that their song of choice was an advert for Americano shit? More to the point, given a choice of the entire wealth of history, arts and culture this nation is endowed with, how did it get to the point that a song that is to the National Anthem as the forces of Capitalism and Free Market Economics are to the Queen their organisation allegedly supports was actually the best choice available?
At this point in writing this update, I decided to stop and have a look at their website in search of some points in their favour. Alas, I was to be disappointed, as I was immediately greeted by a splash boasting of their song being the most popular on The Box (surely, more an indictment of society than praise of their own quality), brief profiles that reveal such priceless nuggets of information as their likes and dislikes (Who’s-her-face likes to eat and shop! Whatsisname doesn’t like things that smell bad!), as well as a list of the jobs they should still be doing if there was any justice in this world (waitress, papergirl and shit shoveller, respectively), and finally, a link to the power behind the throne, simply credited as the ominous Management. I get the impression that the mail sent that way ends up at a huge call-centre in North Korea, where overworked, underpaid guys use Microsoft Word’s Search-and-Replace feature to write pop songs whilst pretending to manage all of their conveyer-belt full of novelty bands that appear, gain an inexplicable number of sales and popularity, then blessedly vanish, only to be replaced by more shite of the same sort.
Perhaps this is why Señor Bush is so keen to blow the living shit out of the entire country. After all, it can only be a matter of time before he’s unseated, and the CEO of All Foods Conglomerate takes his place. Given the quality of the current incumbent, I wonder if anybody will notice the change.