It’s become trendy among political pundits to draw parallels between the Russian invasion of Georgia and Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland. They are eerily similar: a former superpower moves to reestablish influence by invading its neighbor in the name of protecting an ethnic minority. Further, each attack yielded only an international slap on the wrist. Some hypothesize that we’re on the brink of another cold war; others fear world war. Either way, the Russian incident is distracting from an incursion that even more strongly places the fabric of humanity at risk. I am speaking, of course, about Germany’s grab at the last limb of American world supremacy: tween mind control.
I’ve long held the belief that, someday, America will wake up and all of our celebrities will be Canadian. I can live with that. They speak the same language, grow up with the same pop culture, and have easier access to pot. I even have an above-average tolerance for Celine Dion and Nelly Furtado. What I can’t live with, however, is that 16-year-old Germans are better at whining about the suckery of middle school than American kids who actually went to middle school.
Like every self-respecting music listener, I hate emo. But I understand why it needs to exist. For all intents and purposes, emo is the contemporary disco. To create disco, music executives condensed decades of soul, R&B;, and funk into a commercial formula; to create emo, the execs did the same with grunge and indie rock. The same thing happened with punk and is about to happen with hip-hop. As we all know, this is why Kurt Cobain killed himself. What Cobain didn’t realize, though, is that out of every commercial music movement comes an army of kids who earned their musical chops covering its hits, only to realize that they suck. Without the backlash against hair metal, grunge never would have existed. So, sure, emo sucks, but it’s teaching a whole bunch of kids how to write lyrics, and eventually some of them will actually get good. You can’t have alternative music without a mainstream to trash on.
This process, however, has been a largely American one, with some noble assists from the British. The rest of Europe has its own cycle. They import whatever’s big in the English-speaking world, use the same formula to create even shittier domestic acts, and then somehow combine it with godawful techno. This is why the most intense street riots and darkest music will always belong to Europe. Not even a brutal dictatorship can provoke a rebellion like shitty European techno can.
I’m not kidding when I say that maintaining control of the pop music cycle is more important than containing Russia’s imperialist aspirations. The strongest weapon we have is our pop culture. Thanks to American marketing, nearly the entire world shares one culture. We’ve all eaten at McDonald’s. We’ve all seen Die Hard 3. We’ve all had “Umbrella” stuck in our heads since last summer. Don’t underestimate this power. People love to bemoan the death of European cultures at the hands of MTV, forgetting that our cultural exports played a major role in uniting Europe and winning the Cold War. What did the first President of the Czech Republic and leader of that country’s struggle against the Soviets ask for when he visited the White House? A private performance by Lou Reed. When kids in the US were getting busted in the 70s for smoking weed and dropping acid, kids in East Germany were getting busted for listening to Jimi Hendrix. Despite the Soviets’ best efforts, kids in the East Bloc didn’t want to be the next Lenin – they wanted to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band, just like every American kid.
Today, this dynamic is just as salient. If we ever went to war with a European country, we could get its entire army to surrender by offering them 50 Cent tickets. Does it suck that corporate America owns our youth? Sure. But it’s awesome that that they also control the youths of half the world. Fuck food – let’s drop Hannah Montana CDs on Afghanistan.
So, Tokio Hotel. Germany’s new emo boy band. They even play instruments. They’ve already taken over Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, and who knows how many other Western European countries. And now they’re being covered in Rolling Stone and have videos on MTV. Somehow, they’ve managed to perfect American angst while maintaining their German efficiency. Every one of their hits has been translated into French and English. They’re literally getting three hits for the price of one. We’re in trouble.
If the EU starts to export angst to the United States, our tweens will want to be European. Nothing could pose a greater risk to the balance of power. What will we do when, in a trade war with the EU, the Germans offer our troops Tokio Hotel tickets? When the music starts coming in, the street riots can’t be far behind. It’s all downhill from there.
Somewhere, in a jail cell far, far away, Lou Pearlman has a hard-on.
