It’s a new year, and that means it’s time for us pretentious indie kids with funny glasses, bad facial hair and slightly odd-looking girlfriends to tell everyone exactly what we thought about “the arts” this past year. Thousands of boys and three girls spent December frantically catching up on all those obscure Canadian folk artists, British rappers and Iranian films about goat-herders that no one in their right mind pays attention to, and then forming fanatic opinions about them. Opinions they must share with the world. The result is the crowding of print publications and web bandwith with the multitude of top-ten lists that are the sticky, nasty excretion of this undeniably masturbatory process.
We at the Voice really like masturbatory processes and we are taking action. Every year we list our favorite movies and albums of the past twelve months, conveniently placing this as a cover story in actual newsprint. Go on, lick it. It’s real newsprint. We print 8,400 copies.
We always wonder – how many students on campus have any interest whatsoever in what we’re covering? Go take a look at the lists. How many of those musicians do you recognize? Brian Wilson hopefully, but reading the blurb you’ll hear all about his “genius.” Genius? Not a word to be used lightly, especially with a man who’s so brain damaged from eating nothing but acid for a decade that he can’t even form a complete sentence.
As for the rest: Devendra Banhart? Sounds like a Mexican transvestite. Arcade Fire? A.C. Newman? The Walkmen? What? Who are these people? Franz Ferdinand are familiar, but they’re a flash in the pan at best, albeit an attractive, flash in the pan.
Take a look at the movies. Film is an undeniably more democratic medium, and throwing in a few action movies and a cartoon certainly levels the playing field, but still, only a kid wearing a black turtleneck and fluorescent shoes could actually enjoy a wanna-be-art-house movie like Napoleon Dynamite. And The Life Aquatic? Wes Anderson is the hipster’s hipster; any kid with a subscription to MAGNET and the latest Interpol album blaring from their oversize headphones is required by law to like his movies, despite their sappy, dead-horse flagellation.
So we want to hear from you. Let us know what you think. What do you want more of? More art house? More Usher? More gray, slushy snow? We are a student newspaper, written by students and read by a handful of students and the proud, if confused, parents of the staff writers. It’s a new year and we’d like to know what you want. Email us, write us letters, come in and talk to us, push us around on the playground after school, sleep with our slightly odd-looking girlfriends; just let your opinion be known.
