In a time before this year, more than last year, there was talk of Green Sleeves and their dominance of the ice-cream truck jingle. In effect, the tune ringing incessantly and desperately throughout the streets of the poor was nothing if not a failed attempt at mass hypnosis. Yet there are no little kids who end up like the bugs caught in the windshields of trucks zooming with a full bladder against the midnight dawn. In any case, the siren of the frozen milk balls declare, "seedy type handling food coming through."
Matchbox Twenty are back with a new album, More Than You Think You Are, and the campaign running with it proclaims the bonus added extra of 'hidden tracks.' The distributors and the promoters are under the impression that trying to understand and appreciate the pop/rock genre is taxing enough. So taxing that whoring out a new music CD with buffers of void noises will only see admissions into mental asylums skyrocket. They have taken it upon themselves to expose the extended silences at the end or start of the CD and that they are intentional and not the workings of equine molestors or the fanatical wheelchair raiders.
Along these lines, the front page of today's Sydney Morning Herald has dubbed the Bali bombers with stylish codenames. Monikers that would not be unfamiliar in the world of comicbooks or fiction. The Confessor. The Mastermind. The Detonator. These broadsheet-media generated aliases are to make it easier for the readers to relate to. There is no point in trying to present the factual account of mass murders without a glorious rogues gallery, complete with sobriquets.
The Matchbox Twenty tactic is most likely to placate consumers who were dumbfounded by John Cage's 4'33" (Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds).
Written on Monday, 18 November 2002