Fast Food Bands! Yay!

I've had a couple of brief conversations off-line (sad that I need to make that delineation) about my system for comparing bands to food. A couple questions I've received:

• Is it about luxury?
• Is it about the connotations of the taste or experience?
• Why do you base one comparison on something experiential, then go right ahead and compare another band based on public perception, then compare a third band to a food based the nature of the food's taste?
  

The answer to all of these questions is "Of course!".

There is no system and their never was. The system is hunch-based and can never be proven or disproven. But the null hypothesis is that I have blog and you probably don't, so if you want to disprove my hunches, go right ahead, but no one will ever know about it. It's a long null hypothesis.

We've established what bands are the chicken of the culinary world, so now let us foray into the world of quick-service restaurants. Fast Food.

Before we get into the bands, let's establish the utility and benefits of fast food (thanks Jeremy Bentham!). Before we identify the utility and benefits of fast food, let's define fast food. When I say fast food, I mean chains, normally with drive-thru's, but not always. So Sbarro lives to fight another day. And I don't mean the good chains. Like In-N-Out Burger, Whataburger, Taco Cabana, even Chipotle. These places are exceptional fast-food restaurants in that they are frequently devoid of shame and fatties. Except for Whataburger. Whataburger has a lot of fatties. They all use relatively fresh ingredients and are places at which I could see myself going out of my way, albeit not very far, to dine.

I'm talking about places to which you either are or feel, relegated . I use the word "relegated" in this blog fairly frequently because I think it's endemic of what's wrong with American dining. It's not an issue of health, but an issue of apathy. Diet Coke, American Cheese, fries with every meal, people who don't want to think, but just want to put crap in their body that can taste good but is just...boring.

Getting back to my point about utility, I think these boring chain restaurants (McDonald's, Taco Bell, and their ilk) serve a purpose. They are a good place to eat when you have no other options. If you are out of time, or need a place nearby, you can always go to McDonald's. It can even be a unique, interesting experience if one goes infrequently enough. And oh, the eye candy!

But they aren't anyone's favorite restaurants, except for little kids and older folks who have all but thrown in the towel in the game of life.

So why do people eat at them so often? I heard once (don't know if it's true) that McDonald's served 1 out of 3 breakfasts in the United States. Ugh. I guess I understand that when you are on your way to work, you aren't exploring new dining options. But for lunch? Or dinner? Why wouldn't your favorite restaurant be the one at which you dine most frequently? Cause you're lazy. Or you simply can't afford your favorite foods all the time. That's why. And I am too. Though I don't eat much fast food in the traditional sense, I get a lot of food delivered, even if it isn't my favorite. Which is a pretty awesome sign of laziness.

Let's see if I can tie this pontification into a cogent discussion of music in the same vein.

So let's see: Easy, ephemeral, ultimately unsatisfying. Instinctively, I would go with hip-hop. Hip-hop may have changed the world, but it was the collective effort of (largely) disposable artists. It was the culture as a whole the affected change, rather than the work or a small group of artists. While it could be said that McDonald's singlehandedly created its landscape in the same vein as the pioneers of hip-hop created theirs, both those happened a while ago. Let's get more current for the sake of discussion and salvaging my argument.

15 years ago, I was 13. And I was making 13 year-old money. As such, I had to perform triage every time I stepped into a record store. While I would splurge for the occasional album, for every one of those, I would purchase cassette singles to get the most bang for my $2.99. And if I hadn't burned those incriminating singles years ago, you would have found the absolute dregs of pop "music". Weird Al, Quad City DJ's, late-era Michael Jackson, Wreckx-n-Effect's "Rump Shaker" (which was actually the first popular song penned by Pharrell).

Hip-hop has been a genre geared toward the single, rather than the album, which makes for a breeding ground of one-hit wonders that disappear from the popular consciousness while they are still embedding themselves in it. The amount of rap represented in my singles collection was way higher than it was in my album collection. Cause I wanted something I could digest and move past fairly painlessly. Granted, I could have done the same thing with other pop genres, but the filler on rap albums has always lent the genre to being the most single-friendly.

Easy? It was played on the radio all the time. I didn't have to hurt myself gaining awareness of Positive K. He was just kinda there, not unlike fast food. Ephemeral? Uhhh, yeah. The guy from Quad City DJ's was vacuuming my carpets at the car wash last week. Ultimately unsatisfying? I guess so, cause I didn't tip the Quad City DJ's guy at the car wash.

Could this argument be made for several other genres of music? Yes, it could. I understand that trafficking in these generalizations is shaky ground. And I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that there are myriad hip-hop artists that transcend these generalization to make music that is quite special. But further to my point, rap has become so commoditized that a list of items goes into a rap single or album the same way the same list of items constitute 90% of all fast food menus. Guest rapper du jour? Yup. Big name producer? Yes. Diamond jewelry that deserves more attention than the lyrics? Check. Droning, mindless beat? Normally.

Popular? More than anything else that's out there.