You may have noticed, as I have, that pop culture has come to a screeching halt. Sure we have new music and art being produced, but frankly, it's not really all that new. Everything's retro these days. How is "retro" new!? It seems we're caught in the void between modernism and the 1960s futurist view of the year 2000. My angle? Post-modernism bites.

Frankly I see the idea of post-ironic humour as beneath me. Why would anyone in their early 20s and beyond actually choose to wear clothes emblazoned with Spongebob Squarepants? Why the sudden shift towards holding up Melissa Joan Hart as a martyr for days of Nickelodeon gone by?

Now, its actually cool to be interested in what were once pop references on Roseanne, such as retro video games. It's cool to like Bon Jovi again (except for anything they've made within the last 10 years, since Bon Jovi epitomise my theory that since about 1997, popular culture has become stale and meaningless. I mean have you heard anything off their latest album? Jesus kiddy-fiddling God!). Hell, it's cool to like Warrant! When I wear my Whitesnake t-shirt, I just naturally assume now that people think I've heard "Here I Go Again," remembered it from my childhood, and went on a post-moronic-humour consumerist bender, and I am being ironic.

I blame Kurt Cobain, as usual. Indirectly, of course. Here's Matt Groening to beef my argument up:

"This reminds me of an exchange between two teenagers at a Lollapalooza-style rock festival on an episode of the Simpsons --

1 Teenager: "Yeah, these guys are really awesome."

2 Teenager: "Dude, are you being ironic?"

1 Teenager: "I don't even know anymore."

More or less. Memorial reconstruction."*

Anyway, with the internet, we have the potential to create new and exciting forms of entertainment and whatever. However, this potential has been squandered in the same way television has in recent years – it's all about the fast route to your 15 minutes of fame. Andy Warhol was tragically right. With television we have Big Brother and Jade Goody. With YouTube, we have videoblogging and Nornna. With MySpace, we have… well… Hyphy Ghetto Mami. So maybe I shouldn't complain, since my entire existance revolves around this blog, but I genuinely wish we had a more interesting popular culture instead of bland indie bollocks on the radio and Banksy. When Gordon Brown and Joanna Lumley on Classic FM are making attempts at audience-grabbing by namedropping the Arctic Monkeys every five minutes, don't you think there's something going wrong? Particularly when the Arctic Monkeys seem to have already faded to obscurity (15 minutes over; gateway to fame locked.). This is the honest to God truth – the most memorable new song I've heard in the last year or so has been that song by that band whose name I can't remember… Possibly Manic Street Preachers? They sang it with Charlotte Church, and it was crap, but I remembered it.

Anyway, I was on YouTube earlier, and I actually found a whole bunch of videos revolving around filming yourself playing Sega Megadrive and Nintendo games. Is this not just a total waste? Why would anyone watch this crap? Sure, I used to enjoy the old Sega games, and was watching someone play Streets Of Rage on Youtube, great. But seeing that it wasn't finished within three minutes, and that there was an actual half hour of Streets Of Rage footage to come, I went back to watching pop videos from 1985.

Seriously. People actually play games for hour long sessions, film it, and post it on YouTube. What the hell!? Where is the need? And there will surely be parodies of people playing games posted as well… Oh God, the post-ironic vortex never ends. And there was me thinking Geek Chic was its limit!

I guess Streets Of Rage does have some merits… I do still find it funny when Blaze screams as she dies.

*This is an excerpt from bloggingtherenaissance.blogspot.com. I actually feel dirty about posting from this website since it actually goes against what I was whinging about in the blog. I mean read what some freaky chickdude wrote:

"At 3/20/2007 02:27:00 PM, Anonymous wrote…

I'm an undergrad taking that teen comedy course and have a final paper due in a couple hours that question the rise in popularity for these teen picks. I still have no clue why these films were so popular in the 1980s, died out and came back with Clueless and Meangirls a decade later. It was a great class, but we didn't discuss its historical connection in the quarter, and now have to conjure it all up for the final. (sigh)*"

I guess, like most of my blogs, I will finish by reiterating this sentiment: Most people who use the internet are fucking dicks.