Friends-Only Post No. 24: Kool Kat Let Me Play with Your Radio

BE KIND -- REWIND!

Hello and welcome to a new electronic mail! The topic this time around is the off-putting, somewhat bizarre project COOL CAT SAVES THE KIDS. An insight (?) I had rather late in the process was that the reason this movie felt so familiar was that it bore serious tonal similarities to some of the (ahem, worse) music of my youth.

Specifically, Cool Cat is essentially coming from a place of unstinting, wearying positivity -- conveying a difficult-to-argue-with message, or set of messages, in a manner that doesn't inspire so much as it just exhausts the listener. The manner just sort of ... yells at you, instead of firing up the youth with revolutionary fervor, as Bad Brains might have done by instilling the value of PMA (that Positive Mental Attitude, natch), or asking you to think through your society's values and decide, consciously, whether you wanted to buy into them or not, as Minor Threat did:

This is no set of rules,

I'm not telling you what to do.

All I'm saying is I'm bringing up three things,

That are like so important to the whole world,

I don't happen to find much importance in.

Because of these things,

Whether they are fucking or playing golf,

Because of that I feel...

I can't keep up,

I can't keep up,

I can't keep up!

Out of step with the world!

Because there are more ways to be positive than just these, in the wake of Bad Brains and Minor Threat and whoever came a crop of lesser talents who made up in stridency and humorlessness what they lacked in flexibility, insight, or charisma. And this was called "positive hardcore" and it, mostly, was awful, and I, mostly, listened mostly politely when my acquaintances talked to me about it, while wishing they'd actually put on a reggae record or something (but not ska, never ska).

And, because people are actually good, eventually there came some other people, people who wanted to mock the ever-living shit out of that crop of less-talented/more-annoying bands.

FOUR RULES

This brings us, inexorably, to Crucial Youth. Either a truly funny parody of the positive hardcore scene or the logical extension of it (or, more likely, both simultaneously while actually only trying to be the former [subcultures have complicated ontological consequences]), Crucial Youth came into my life at the exact right time, with a message I needed -- and, let's be frank: still need -- to hear, a message of straightening up and flying right -- right away from the boozes and other potent potables I so proclive towards -- of punctuality, of firm fitness and even better sexual health, delivered in a decidedly muppety voice over a Ramones cover band not playing that well:

BE STRAIGHT
DON'T BE LATE
BENCH YOUR WEIGHT
DON'T MASTURBATE

WAKE UP AND LIFT

Probably bears mentioning that I wouldn't even bring these guys up as a joke if I weren't absolutely 100% certain that their usage of "straight" meant "drug-free", not "heterosexual". However, I am in fact 100% certain that that's what "straight" means here.

POSITIVE DENTAL OUTLOOK

Do you extremely need to know more about Crucial Youth? I think you do. I think you need to hear this music, and I think you need to be like them, and like Cool Cat, and like IDEOTVPOD: united in the fervent belief that brushing isn't enough; you also have to floss. So follow the link and make your mind like your life like your mouth: clean.

THANKS

Please note that this episode and this email came out early because -- exactly because -- J. and I extremely on board with Crucial Youth's punctuality position! Cool Cat likes that!

--Collision for IDEOTVPOD