"I don't practice santaria..."

[quarrel]

"I ain't got no crystal ball.
 If I had a million dollars, well, I'd,
 I'd spend it all."

I was sitting in the hair salon when the cheery opening strains of this Top 40 Sublime song started wafting from the ceiling speakers. This song, in my opinion, has got to be one of the most disturbing songs I've ever had the mispleasure of hearing.

Yes, Marilyn Manson acts all freaky and sings songs about doing bad things to God and stuff, and Ozzy Ozbourne allegedly bites the heads off live bats (or did, back when he was under 70), and any number of rappers glamorize running from police and/or pre-emptively returning fire. The Offspring even have a cathartic song about road rage which I actually kind of like. So why am I upset by this chipper little ditty?

Well I'll tell ya. It starts with the words. If you listen carefully to the whole thing, the central message of the song is this:

"Tell that guy you're going out with, now that you've broken up with me, that I've got a gun now, and if I see him, I'll kill him."

Great. We've got a lovelorn individual threatening not the life of the woman who's dared to break up with him, but, instead, anyone she has the audacity to be friendly with. If that's not the mark of a sadistic, disturbed, immature individual, I don't know what is.

But it's not just the words. The whole song is deceptively light and melodic. In fact, it's in regular rotation on soft-rock stations. The singer delivers his lines with harmony and aplomb, in a casual voice that subliminally (heh) drills the message deep into the listener's hindbrain that his is a perfectly natural sentiment. It's normal to think this way.

Like I said: really, really creepy.

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[silvermink.livejournal.com]

Yesterday morning at breakfast we were talking about how Steely Dan is named after a type of dildo. Yes, this is what passes for breakfast conversation in my circle of friends.