(Let this be) The Day the Music Died

OK people, I love you all, but . . . Well, to be honest, I may not love you ALL. I don't know all of you. I suppose I could learn to love most of you if I knew you and we tried real hard, maybe a little counseling or something, but wait, that's not the point. The point is, music on blogs. Oh people, we really have to stop with the gratuitous unrequested music. I understand the impulse, I really do. I will totally slap on my latest music crush and force defenseless house guests to listen. I have even (and I'm not proud of this) put my iPod headphones on a person and cranked up the sound while said person sits and squirms, with a visible question mark above his head. A question mark that says, not "I hate this" but "Do I hate this? Or do I like this? And more important, "How long do I have to sit here listening to this to maintain the appearance of politeness, when I really want to bolt for daylight?"

Heck, I was a teenager in (don't cringe) the 60's. The 1960's, that is. Back then, almost every other person I knew was in a band. Sometimes one of these friends would manage to scrape together enough money to go into a studio and record an album. And whether it was an OK album, or a pretty good album, or a totally crap album, you can be sure that every person with even the smallest connection to that album would show up at my house (or even your house, if you were alive then) with that album under his or her arm, and after making a little small talk, or whatever, that friend or friend of a friend would find a way to slap that album right onto your stereo, and then you were trapped for the next 30 or so minutes, trying to pretend that you were even vaguely interested in this friend or friend of a friend's music.

It was hard enough then, and we had drugs. Good drugs. So you can imagine how it is these days, when, instead of psychedelics, we might be under the influence of nothing better than blood pressure medication, or if we're lucky, anti-depressants or something, and we are flipping around the internet, checking on this and that, and finding a blog that looks really interesting and right on point, and we click on the right button, and sure enough, it is a tasty looking blog filled with everything we ever wanted to know about whatever it is, and then. Then the music starts.

Now, it could be pleasant music. It could be inoffensive music. It might even be music that, under different circumstances, we would be perfectly happy to give a listen to. But right here at this particular minute, Dr. Phil is giving what-for to a guy who has been cheating on his wife with two junior high school twin cheerleaders, or Tina Fey is speaking, and it doesn't really matter what Tina Fey is saying, and whether it's Tina Fey Herself or Tina Fey as Liz Lemon, when Tina Fey is speaking, it is totally worth listening to, and when you are listening to it, you don't want to hear somebody else's music on the dang computer.

If you are reading this, and you have music playing on your blog back home, it doesn't make you a Bad Person, well, not necessarily. You could be a Bad Person whether or not you have music playing on your blog. It really doesn't matter. All I'm saying is, you need to turn off the music.

Unless it's cowbell. I totally need more cowbell. But that's just me. If you are looking for other readers, you may want to turn off the cowbell, too. Just saying.