Pretentiousness

I am a man of few passions. No, honest; I can hear you snickering. But I am. Yet what I love I adore and what I hate I despise. And I despise pretentiousness, the idea that things are more meaningful than they in fact are, and those of us who don't 'get it' and simply obtuse.

I hope obtuse isn't a pretentiuos word.

Anyway, I find that art and music are two worlds where pretention runs amok. When bananas taped to a wall are considered art, it's pretentious. When people pay millions of dollars for that, they're stupidly pretentious. As a political conservative, I have routinely been called out (falsely) for not caring about the poor. Sure seems like a lot of the poor could have been cared for with the six million bucks wasted on a banana duct taped to a wall. And when something which is only a big green dot can be hung on the wall at the Detroit Institute of Arts, something even I could paint, it's not art. It's pretentious.

With regard to music, nobody, and I mean nobody with a brain defends the Beatles' Revolution 9. It's nothing but noise. My apologies, a 'sound collage', whatever the hell that means. No, no, no. That's just John and Yoko, with a little help from George (Paul and Ringo wouldn't touch the thing) being pretentious. Revolution 9 is the only Beatles track which I've never listened to all the way through, and I've withstood You Know My Name (Look Up the Number). A group of twelve year olds with a tape recorder could have done it. A supergroup like The Beatles? Either of those tracks could only have seen the light of day because they were the Beatles. If they'd have taken those sounds to George Martin for their first audition we'd have never heard of the lads from Liverpool again. He'd have laughed them out of the studio.

There you are: pretention. I'm done being crabby. For now.