Journey

Journey blows. Onto the next order of business.

When I was at Marquette, and I do say this with pangs of nostalgia, my friends and I would go to a bar that, every Monday or Wednesday(or whatever, my memory is hazy these days) had karaoke night. This should have been fun. But every fucking karaoke night, the same people would sing the same songs. This is the rundown.

The Rodeo Song

-I can't find a definite credit for who did this song first. I can tell you that every online source I've found has this for the refrain:

"Ya piss me off, ya fuckin' jerk, get on my nerves"

Except that on karaoke night, it became "you fucking bitch". Classy and Catholic. You could
expect this from the guys who carried their huge fucking jugs of water to every class and wore
muscle shirts even in the winter. Which was nine months of the year.

Don't Stop Believin' by Journey

-At the time, I assumed everyone was in on the joke: this is '80s cheese 'n' schmaltz
at its absolute apex (nadir?). I mean, this is John Cougar mixed with a lobotomized Springsteen
with "Jump"-level synths and the kind of Reaganite popisms we might expect from the era. For
the record, there are no midnight trains that "go anywhere." They are very prim and prudish, however
inconvenient this makes for our songsmiths and glorious motivational story tellers of yesteryear.
And personally, I want to find those "streetlight people living just to find emotion." They got a dose
of what I need to have. Oh, and to finish the thought from the first sentence of this paragraph:
No, everyone was apparently not in on the joke. Irony is dead.

Total Eclipse of the Heart by Jim Steinman (performed by Bonnie Tyler)

-You'll never guess what fucking movie these very drunk frat guys have just seen. The thing
I can say in defense of the bars around my alma mater is that by the second time,
no one was laughing. I do wonder what song has replaced this in terms of asinine performance
piece at karaoke nights in college towns everywhere, but then I think everyone is too damn
drunk and unoriginal to take this anywhere else. By algebra, this takes me to "Wedding Crashers"
and how utterly embarrassed I was for my fellow man when people laughed at the sweet old
lady who called her own grandson a fag. How fucking outrageous, to have an out-of-it character
say something that is ostensibly reprehensible. I'd say American comedy died with this, but
Jamie Kennedy had already put a fuckin spear through its chest with Malibu's Most Wanted.

Like A Prayer by Madonna

-Honestly? I got nothing bad to say here. Gives me pangs in my chest that make me
somehow nostalgic for those nauseous Friday night end-of-the-year dances at SLUH
where the girls in their glorified tube tops (means they had an attaching skirt) sang
along to this. Plus the girls who sang this were too drunk to get all of the verses, so they
stored all their energy for the refrain, which meant there was a lull where I could actually
get my order across to the bartender.

Honestly, this is all I can remember for now. And I've had a few drinks.