Pants On The Ground
My friend David Rubinson is incensed. Couldn’t everybody see that the Susan Boyle phenomenon was manipulated? That as a producer of "Britain’s Got Talent" Simon Cowell had to have already seen her act, and therefore he was feigning surprise, as he rubbed his hands together and plotted how he was going to turn this into dough?
If the qualifying age for "American Idol" ends at 28, how come General Larry Platt got an audition?
Come on, have you ever been on set? The main goal is to go home! You’re gonna waste time seeing someone who can’t possibly win?
Which is why reality TV is no longer seen as real. And will have an ever-diminishing lifespan as a result. Kind of like the music business. Sure, people buy the Top Forty dreck, but they don’t love it! And if they love something, they have no problem forking over their dough. Just look at Taylor Swift!
But all this is to tell you that when my inbox started lighting up with parodies of "Pants On The Ground", I had no idea what they were talking about. I had to resort to Google to get the story.
And I was up to speed just that fast.
And I applaud General Larry for protesting the backward slide in race advancement. Kind of like the backward slide in women’s rights. All those women burned their bras and refused to shave their legs so their progeny could dress like ho’s and trade on their looks. Huh? If I didn’t live through it, I wouldn’t believe it.
But the real reason I’m writing this screed is to get you to watch this clip, Jimmy Fallon’s Neil Young version of "Pants On The Ground".
Once again, I didn’t get hipped to it by watching Jimmy’s show, but by Howard Stern, who saw it and thought it was a new Neil Young song.
Sounds like it, wouldn’t you say?
And can we stop revering Neil and admit that he hasn’t done decent work in eons? Oh, he’s done reasonable work, but not exceptional work.
Then again, it’s hard to beat up on Neil Young when I saw Eric Clapton in an ad for a Fender myTouch. I bet he doesn’t even use this HTC piece of shit. Just like John Mayer shilled for BlackBerry and is constantly talking about using his iPhone.
And I still think Jimmy Fallon is great in the basement, but not on TV, but I do respect his song parodies, going all the way back to the MTV Movie Awards, so check out this clip and tell me it doesn’t sound just as good as Neil Young’s recent material.
P.S. The reason we look the other way and allow ourselves to be manipulated by Simon and "A.I." is because we have nothing to connect us anymore. Mass culture is dead. Yet we yearn for social fabric. Therefore, Brett Favre does a version of "Pants On The Ground", we can all laugh together. And you’ve got to laugh, because if you look at your bank account and try to have hope for the future, you just cry. Wall Street’s got the money, the Democrats are impotent and hope has been extinguished.
We’ve been beaten up, manipulated to the point where we’re tuned out. We’re lucky for a laugh. In a world where Sarah Palin resigns a government job to appear on Fox and is touted as leading a group that is ever-shrinking and we have a President who ran on Hope and delivered none of it.
