cruelty

This live video of Corey Feldman and his band performing at Riot Fest 2023 came up in my feed today. Without thinking much, I watched a bit of it, and now I regret doing so. Don’t watch it. But here it is in case you also want to regret something today.

The whole thing is a disaster, of course. Every detail, it’s all bad. I had to turn it off after skipping through the first few minutes because I was just feeling so awful about it.

It got me thinking about Feldman, and I remembered he was involved in a similar thing several years ago where he performed on a daytime talk show and it became an internet sensation. Everyone was sharing that performance online and laughing about how fucked he is, “is he for real or is this a joke, this is so insanely bad,” all that stuff. And of course, he has had many other far more serious, less funny, and just as public trials and humiliations. It all made me feel sad for him. He didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell, being raised as a child star in Hollywood. He was doomed from the moment his parents set him down this road.

But on top of feeling sad for Feldman, I started feeling angry that we all seem to feed on his missteps, on stars falling on hard times and making terrible choices. The video has so many views and so many comments, people are just lapping it up. I guess Britney Spears is another obvious example of someone people love to watch circle the drain.

I hate this quality in us. It’s a terrible trait to have, to feel good when someone else is doing badly. It would at least bother me less if we were more self-aware about this predilection, if we were like “yeah I’m a fucking sadist, I love seeing people suffer. I get off on being a mean-spirited person, it feels good to be awful.” Ok, that’s still horrible but at least you’re owning it. But for most of us we consider ourselves normal, fairly kind, whatever. We don’t consider watching Corey Feldman embarrass the shit out of himself over and over again a bad personal habit of ours, but I think that says a lot about who we are and what we derive pleasure from. I think it says that we aren’t as good as we like to think we are, and that we have a hidden sadistic bent that I find troublesome.

Maybe I don’t want to join another band.

I miss playing in a band regularly so every now and then, I check the musician classified ads. The disappointment never ceases to disappoint though. You wouldn’t believe how many weird losers are skulking about there, parading their lousy material that was poorly recorded in their single bedroom apartment and then uploaded to bandcamp or youtube for their five or six friends/family members to check out. It really is thoroughly depressing. The other day I came across an ‘alt-cabaret’ duo in Victoria looking for a few more members. The duo consists of an ugly middle-aged couple dressed like pseudo goths but their ad made them sound fairly established and professional so I checked out their bandcamp page and wow, it was horrid. It sounded like the old 4-track recordings I used to make with my first band when I was 16: lots of noise and poor performances, out-of-tune instruments, and horrendously weak vocals. The music and lyrics they had written were so bad that I can’t imagine someone sitting down, coming up with that stuff for the first time, and thinking “wow, I’ve got a song here.” If that were the fruit of my labour, I would be abjectly depressed. I would think, “I’m really in a slump here. That was terrible. I need to take a break from this or at the very least, start fresh with much, much higher standards.”

I think that’s the saddest part, that these losers don’t realize they’re losers. That in itself is the true mark of a loser, I think. If you don’t realize that your songs suck, your band sucks, your recordings suck, and your promo photos suck, and if you think anyone at all gives a shit about your band despite all those things, you must be so checked out and delusional that it’s not even funny.

After writing that, I was reminded of a similar band out of Victoria back in the early 2000’s. It was surprisingly similar in nature to this sad alt-cabaret duo: this older band was also a duo, also a couple, also totally out of touch, and also terrible. They were called The Perish. The main guy was about 30 and always wore a cheap alien mask during his interviews and tried to be clever and funny but he just came off like dumb white trash who was pretending to be an artist. You know, I think Bill interviewed the guy once at a Tim Horton’s or something, and the guy wore the mask the whole time. I’ll have to confirm that with him but can you imagine that? Man oh man. Even the thought is tough to stomach.

Anyway, The Perish were so bad and so laughable that they became the laughing stock of the local scene. They were living legends, and in the worst way possible. I felt awful for them because they were such easy targets that they invited the ridicule, and didn’t have the faculties to recognize why they were being mocked or how best to respond to it. They just dug their heals in and it got worse and worse, and eventually The Perish disappeared. Luckily for you, some remnants are still on youtube:

It’s shocking that bands like The Perish still exist now (although the alt cabaret band is nowhere near as legendarily bad). You would hope that modern day losers would learn from the mistakes of their forefathers but this seems to be a rock that people will trip over again and again, until the end of time, most likely. Sigh.

I should probably give up searching for a band that I would like to be a part of. This kind of disappointment and vicarious embarrassment is too hard to take on a consistent basis.

how’s tricks

I never look in my neighbour’s windows and watch to see if they are doing yoga in their underwear in the living room or dancing around the house while listening to disco, yet I always draw the blinds if I’m doing any of that kind of embarrassing stuff so they don’t catch a glimpse of me doing it, accidentally or otherwise.

Am I paranoid, or do my neighbours pay more attention to me than I do them?

OR IS IT BOTH

love the synthwave, hate everyone who comments on it

Boy, as much as I love listening to synthwave/chillwave/retrowave, I have to be careful not to read the comments for each video. There are a lot that make me cringe, like whoever wrote the comment is either baring their soul in the most embarrassing way possible, stoned out of their mind, or trying to write something that sounds touching and beautiful that will get a ton of likes. Like this:

One day it will be 10,000 years from now and no one will remember this. So keep it close, close for now. Right now it’s unforgettable.

Barf. Or this:

Strangely beautiful, like a dream I had once forgotten.

Or all of these:

Life is short but nights are long.

it’s pretty sad we’re only here for such a short time

Have you guys ever thought about how fast life passes by? One moment I’m in elementary school sitting in time out, now I’m graduated, 20 years old, everyone around my age who i used to see as “the big kids” are here but I’m now one of them… Its like it all ended so quickly and i never appreciated living in the moment. You live your life out, marry someone, have kids, make something of yourself, cause if you don’t, all of life will feel like school did. Gone in the blink of an eye.

But I like this sarcastic comment one person left that touches on exactly what I’m talking about:

Edgy deep comment about life,death and the universe.

I think the most embarrassing part of those comments for me is that I understand what they’re getting at, and I actually feel the same way — this music is heavily nostalgic in the most painful, beautiful way. I don’t mind admitting that or talking about it but I hate feeling like I have something in common with people who would publicly make such trite comments about it. I guess I have to come to terms with it: I’m just as typical and pathetic as every other synthwave-lovin’ jerk out there. Better soothe my frayed nerves with some more of the shit. I just have to remember not to scroll down to the comments this time.