Are "Trends" Emetic?

To say that we had a wickedy-wickedy rock pig weekend would be putting it mildly. We cannot go too much into the details of the Sunday, since it involved, almost exclusively, day job people. Let's just say it involved a banqueting hall in the Flatlands (had you heard of this section before? It's sort of between Brighton Beach and Carnarsie), and an actual wedding feast involving too many courses, an additional feast during the cocktail hour, and a flaming mobile desert service. Phew. And the Saturday involved half of the readers of this site, so we need not recap it here.

So what are we going to natter about here? Good question. Shelving? Karl Rove? [Actually, you should go and watch the press conference video if you have a moment. It has one of those hugely cool "the American people demand answers!" moments, where the rather important gentlemen of the press lose their sh*t].

No, we think we will blather along inconsequentially about what it means to be a teenager in Scandinavia. In tribute to the current incarceration of top administration mouthpiece Judy Miller, we wil base our musings on a single source, the aforepimped Lords Of Chaos about the rise of the satanic metal underground in Norway.

Now what always struck us as rather cool was how dismissive the metallers were of the people that stayed current in music. It seemed, and we're prepared to be corrected, that this wasn't the Ace Of Base crew of teenyboppers that was getting them upset so much as the hipsters. They called them "Trends", which struck us as one of the cute slightly off expressions that sometimes crop up in Scandinavians' excellent English. The category, we will own, is possibly a bit more expansive than mere hipster, and may even expand so far as intriguing psych-rock heroes Motorpsycho

Now, you can probably guess where we're going now, but it's not really going to degenerate into a fully-fledged rant against people with cute T-shirts from flyover state grocery stores and compelling haircuts. But we've always been impressed by the fact that the only abuse hurled at hipsters broadly comes from people that might, in the right light, be accussed of being hipsters themselves. Even the Times seems to be rather fond of them. And then along comes the most unlovely subgenre in musical history to decide that, no, it really does not like them one bit.

A willful misunderstanding of thin source material? Quite possibly, but then we're in Bush America right now, and can't think of anything nice to say today.