Band camp

Maybe I'm just getting weak, but I was watching MTV2 today and very nearly teared up. Without any pretense at poesy, the horns in the Neptunes' "Hollaback Girl" quite literally thwart my meager attempts to lend some sort of imagery to them. If, as Shlovsky says, the making of literary language exists in the making unfamiliar of reality; in the destruction of the algebra of human thought wherein words are left unfinished and symbols in their place fill our discourse with half-ideas and shorthand, then "Hollaback Girl", in the sheer awfulness of its lyrical content (which extends, certainly, to the delivery, which, like swallowing bleach, has been known to induce tremors and vomiting but does, on the upshot, clean out one's system), defamiliarizes the unconscious musical legacy of a youth surrounded by half-baked appropriations of hip-hop and whatever the hell happened in the seventies that I don't understand. So, yes, my eyes blurred with tears today watching MTV2. Not that this is any comment on their respective merits, but I've never cried while listening to Future Days. Bananas, indeed.