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Like you, as Rocks Off grows older we have to come to terms with the fact that many of our friends are having children. Usually we can just scroll quickly past the offspring-related Facebook updates or send those 12-MB emails containing brood photos into the Trash folder unread. No harm, no foul. But the holiday season presents additional challenges: Christmas cards featuring toddlers resplendent in their reindeer sweaters grimace out at us from every other envelope, TV commercials are chock-full of smiling rugrats opening fire trucks and Malibu Barbies in front of a $200 fake Douglas fir, and the last two weeks of the year are crowded with family gatherings where you'll probably end up getting your ass repeatedly handed to you in Super Mario Kart by your mocking nine-year-old cousin. We feel your pain, people. So as you're loading up the car with Jack Daniels and an extra carton of Camels, take a listen to a few songs that portray children not as precious angels, but as the sociopathic cretins they often are.
While the account of the methedrine-shooting, sexually active 15-year-old is a bit disquieting, what exactly is wrong with the twentysomething who pays his rent with unemployment? Quit trying to roll back welfare benefits, you fascists.
"A Way" was the song all the girls would ignore us to at the club, but every self-respecting adolescent boy with a bad haircut in 1985 empathized with the "blew my family clean away" sentiment. Even those of us with relatively pleasant home lives.
That's right, kids: before Danny Elfman wrote the theme song to
The Simpsonsand scored every third movie released in the U.S., he was in an honest-to-god rock band. This remains one of the greatest "bad seed" songs ever written.
We love that this won Video of the Year, continuing the MTV tradition of giving out awards to avoid responsibility for any negative impact it's had on the music industry - from rampant commercialism ("This Note's for You") to marketing sex and violence to the same kids whose loss of innocence Eddie Vedder is lamenting here. Stay classy, Music Television.
"Park Avenue leads to Skid Row?" If only we'd listened to these guys back in 1989, this entire global financial crisis could have been averted. Pity more people aren't willing to take financial advice from a guy named "Snake."
Rocks Off is afraid we have to sympathize with the schoolmaster, for while he may be working through his own...issues, he at least realizes the purpose of school isn't to educate children, but to keep the little hooligans off the street until they're old enough to enlist in the military.
Attention all 16-year-old girls: Uncle Ace feels your pain, and he "knows you're looking good these days." So go ahead and "ignore your Mom and Dad," if they kick you out, I'm sure he'll make up the couch for you.
Remember kids, your best source of advice about adolescence is a 30-year-old man who wears eyeliner and thinks he's the reincarnation of Freddie Mercury.
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