Damn, I admire Henry Rollins. Not only does he have an uncanny knack of saying exactly what I'm thinking, and would say myself if I wasn't such a fuck up when it comes to expressing myself, but he does it with the sort of effortless style that can only be achieved by working long and hard at your craft. Love him or hate him, you have to admire someone with that sort of commitment.
Anyway, enough fanboying, about the song...
I think this is about the sheer wall of inane data that we are exposed to every day. Not just from the mass media but also from people in the street who pick up on it and regurgitate it. The manufactured water cooler talking points, the latest celebrity scandals, the next "Big Thing"(tm), all the banal trivia and bland invalid's pap that the media serves up to us, and we, like lazy, overfed lap dogs, feed our emaciated brains on. There's nothing inellectually challenging in it. It's presented to us pre-spun so we know instantly how we are supposed to feel about each and every issue, there's no decision making or critical analysis going on when we process it, we just absorb it into ourselves like saturated fat. We're so used to it now that it's almost Pavlonian.
To me, this song is saying that (at least sometimes) he'd prefer to experience oblivion than have to listen to another bozo repeat what he heard on TV that morning and try to pass it off as his considered opinion on the subject.
Considering the fact that hardly anyone I know seems to read anything with any meat in it any more, I'd have to admit to feeling the same way on more than one occasion. A significant percentage of the Earth's population has easy access to an amazingly rich and varied banquet of ideas and thought but rather than do what I would consider the obvious (i.e. dig in with both hands, right up to the elbows), they sit in the corner eating the intellectual equivalent of a big mac over and over again. That's sad, but sadder still is that they are happy that way, or at least they seem to be.
I'm optimistic that the rise of the Internet will, one day, break the Svengali-esque hold of the TV netwoks over the masses and once again expose people to a vast range of raw ideas. Sure, some of those ideas will be just as banal, others will be distasteful, some will be downright offensive, and others still will just be straight up batshit weird but I, for one, wouldn't have it any other way.
Damn, I admire Henry Rollins. Not only does he have an uncanny knack of saying exactly what I'm thinking, and would say myself if I wasn't such a fuck up when it comes to expressing myself, but he does it with the sort of effortless style that can only be achieved by working long and hard at your craft. Love him or hate him, you have to admire someone with that sort of commitment.
Anyway, enough fanboying, about the song...
I think this is about the sheer wall of inane data that we are exposed to every day. Not just from the mass media but also from people in the street who pick up on it and regurgitate it. The manufactured water cooler talking points, the latest celebrity scandals, the next "Big Thing"(tm), all the banal trivia and bland invalid's pap that the media serves up to us, and we, like lazy, overfed lap dogs, feed our emaciated brains on. There's nothing inellectually challenging in it. It's presented to us pre-spun so we know instantly how we are supposed to feel about each and every issue, there's no decision making or critical analysis going on when we process it, we just absorb it into ourselves like saturated fat. We're so used to it now that it's almost Pavlonian.
To me, this song is saying that (at least sometimes) he'd prefer to experience oblivion than have to listen to another bozo repeat what he heard on TV that morning and try to pass it off as his considered opinion on the subject.
Considering the fact that hardly anyone I know seems to read anything with any meat in it any more, I'd have to admit to feeling the same way on more than one occasion. A significant percentage of the Earth's population has easy access to an amazingly rich and varied banquet of ideas and thought but rather than do what I would consider the obvious (i.e. dig in with both hands, right up to the elbows), they sit in the corner eating the intellectual equivalent of a big mac over and over again. That's sad, but sadder still is that they are happy that way, or at least they seem to be.
I'm optimistic that the rise of the Internet will, one day, break the Svengali-esque hold of the TV netwoks over the masses and once again expose people to a vast range of raw ideas. Sure, some of those ideas will be just as banal, others will be distasteful, some will be downright offensive, and others still will just be straight up batshit weird but I, for one, wouldn't have it any other way.
TV