Today I was the lucky recipient of two new CDs. One I ordered straight off the web, by a band called For Against. It’s some really good crap; pretty songs that sound like they’ve been moldering in someone’s basement since 1987. Since I will turn 34 this coming year, even the specter of 1987 brings up some seriously good memories. Man. I sure jerked off a lot that year. It was special. I look forward to jerking off to these songs; or perhaps just reminiscing about such profligate jerking off. Either way.
The second one I got was totally different, yet is still undeniably crap. It’s a CD (I have to consciously not type “album”) by some bunch of fucking lunatics named Lemon Jelly. I wish I could tell you more, but they won’t tell me more: the CD and its packaging is utterly bereft of any words at all. No lyrics. No track listings. Not even a goddamn list of band members. Just a bunch of drawings that look like something Chris Ware might have designed for a Stuckey’s ad. Anyway, it’s crap. It’s total studio wankery, a ton of self-consciously strange found audio bites melded to limp-dick guitar and synth arrangements in a weirdly autoclaved dance context. It totally blows. Naturally, I love it.
We all love crap. I clearly love a lot of crap music, and as if that weren’t damning enough, I also enjoy sports, which is basically crap writ large on the screen. Crap writing? Gimme! Hunter S. Thompson is a one-note johnny that I still enjoy, even after he stopped making sense, which was around 1972. Crap movies? I recently watched the indefatigably stupid Thirteen Ghosts, and I think I might have enjoyed myself. I mean, come on! That was QUALITY CRAP! It was so awful, I took a perverse glee in its existence.
I said a bit ago, with basically no substantiation, that we all love crap. I just kind of assumed that you agreed with me. I imagined that everyone thought, “Yeah, I know what you mean,” and then thought of personal examples of SchadenKrap. Because we all know those people who really, insistently hate crap. They’ll tell you so, over and over. You know these people. You try and make sure not to invite them to your parties. Hell, you try and make sure not to invite them to your funeral. They are the anti-fun.
Nobody doesn’t like crap. No matter what they say. And if someone denies it: they’re full of shit. And that’s a whole other discussion.