Keeping it Real!

I rant, therefore I am.
Or, to put it another way, I’m keeping it real – by railing against the forces of unreality.
Apologies to the poor clerks at Borders. I understand that you just work there.
I wasn’t there this past weekend to make a fuss: I was there buying a book – the subject of which is irrelevant. As I went from aisle to aisle though, I couldn’t help but listen to the music they were playing.
They were promoting a new CD that is both a tribute to John Lennon, and a fundraiser for the efforts to bring peace to Darfur.
Being a child of Lennon’s era, I recognized the songs immediately, and was appalled.
If anyone knew how to keep it real, it was John Lennon. Lennon, in a real sense, sacrificed his life in order to have a life: living the life of a family man in the midst of one of the world’s most populous, and dangerous cities. Lennon, in his own words, had gotten off the merry-go-round of fame: “I just had to let it go”, he sings on “Watching the Wheels”, a song recorded just days before he was murdered on the streets of New York by a deranged fan.
So Lennon is not here to defend himself as his life is put back on the merry-go-round: not here to defend himself as – over and over again, he is made one of the lesser ingredients in another guilt-free, low-cost, tee-shirt and wrist-band is all that we ask of you cause.
Sure the cause is good, just, worthy, but that does not mean that Lennon is represented well by this ‘tribute’. In fact I believe that Lennon’s music – standing on its own, is far more effective at moving people to action, than when it is reconstituted and sprinkled on the latest brand of breakfast cereal.
The final straw (one of a hundred annual final straws), for me, was the contribution to this CD from the collaboration of Christina Aguilera and the faux-goth band Bigelf: the two recorded a version of Lennon’s nearly psychotic, primal scream session, sung to his parents and simply entitled “Mother”.
There is no song in recorded history more ‘real’ or as raw as Lennon’s recording of “Mother”: it is a wrenching, riveting – and completely personal cry of an abandoned child and in my opinion, the Aguilera-Elf rendition has all the depth of a Hanna Montana pre-teen angst ballad.
All this was bubbling in my brain as I walked around Borders, and when the cashier offered me her obligatory check-out remarks, I just couldn’t let it go.
“They play a lot of bad music” was her instinctive, CYA response.
She didn’t care, one way or the other. And you don’t care, either – at least about my opinion of John Lennon’s music.
But it wasn’t really the music I was complaining about, it was the unreality I had been involuntarily subjected to: it was, it is, the layers of plastic that we are all forced to dig through in order to get to the object of our desire. It is the distance we are all forced to travel to uncover – often not what we are looking for, but whether what we are being sold is what we thought we were looking for.
I think that we all want, crave – indeed need, something real.
Whether it is the food that we eat, or the music that we listen to, or the affection that we crave from other people, we need the real thing.
Too often, instead, we are offered substitutes, imitations, associations, approximations.
And I guess what I want to say is that it is not only alright, it is necessary for our sanity, that every so often we simply spit out the crap we are sold, spit it out onto the floor, in front of everyone.

· Walk out of the bad movie. If both of your butt cheeks die before you can figure out who’s who, it ain’t worth it.
· Spit the food back on to your plate. If in the middle of a mouthful, you realize you don’t remember what you ordered, give your stomach a break.
· Scream at the gas pump. The worse thing about self-service gas stations is the lack of someone there to blame.
· Call your Congressman. Find their name, their number, and ask the lackey who answers their phone if you can scream at them in person.
· Return the CD you bought. Instead of not listening to it ever again, get your money back and give it to an organization that buys food for refugees.
· Burn your Walkathon Tee Shirts: unless you promise to make a new donation every time you wear them.
· Tell your doctor he’s an ass. If they can’t treat you with respect, let them at least remember your name.
· Stop putting up with mediocrity. (that’s a career)
· Stop eating mush. (hype has no flavor)
· Stop paying for hype. (mush is mush)
· Stop swallowing your pride. (unless you’re a mush manufacturer)
· Speak up. Spit it out. Spill the beans.
· Don’t accept the half-assed, the half-hearted or the half-cooked.
· Take a deep breath.
There now: doesn’t that feel better already?