Stadium Arcane-ium

After a six month hiatus, I mustered the gumption to play the now-Grammy lauded Stadium Arcadium by the immortal Red Hot Chili Peppers. My hope was to uncover a great rock and roll effort that I must have surely not given much of a chance when playing it back in May.

Nope. I discovered that 50 percent of the album is crap spread across a half-baked packaging concept and on two CDs. No wonder Sir Elton John regards the Grammys with about as much squalor as he would a Girls Gone Wild DVD: there's just no substance there.

While spacing out at work, I decided to be playlist geek and find within Stadium Arcadium the album they should have made. Surprisingly, there's gold in there, you just have to look. The record I think they should have made is called We Believe and arranged thusly:

Snow (Hey Oh)

Desecration Smile

Hey

We Believe

Slow Cheetah

Dani California

Strip My Mind

Make You Feel Better

If

Especially In Michigan

Hard To Concentrate

She Looks To Me

Torture Me

Animal Bar

Arrange these tracks in your mp3 player and let it roll. I'm confident you'll hear a gem that they somehow convoluted with 14 other poorly executed, tired tracks.

If you don't agree with me, come back with your own 14-track combo, name it, but stick with recent RHCP tradition and have a title track.

The Grammys would tell you that's terribly uncool.

Go ahead, you can laugh all you want...

...but I've got my philosophy. So postulates the venerable Ben Folds. Unless you're living in a cavern atop the Afghanistan peaks, chances are you're an active consumer of popular culture. I find it unfortunate that the widespread literature out there about popular culture, especially that of music, is pompous, condescending and belitting.

Every time I pick up music, pop culture or entertainment magazine, the pretentious borderline-nonsensical tone of any written piece is enough to make me gag. Does making me feel incurably lame sell subscriptions? Are they that arrogant as to try to tear down their readership as terribly uncool and never build them up? Do they intentionally inflate the tone and voice of the publication at the behest of some bizarre agenda to make everyone a freaking music snob? Or am I the only one who acutally reads the writ of periodic literature?

Probably a combination all of that. Nevertheless, a great many of us place an importance on popular culture that carries serious religious undertones. I am no exception. Whether or not this is killing society or all of us is an interesting discussion albeit a depressing one.

Readers, it's about enjoying the immense pop culture cornucopia literally at our fingertips. I don’t love the company of miserable music snobs. And, really, who does? Not even they enjoy the spat of their rhetoric, though they will tell you they do. How can you enjoy inflaming your own callousness under the pretense of "I know what’s cool and you don’t."

So I add this to the ever-crowding blogosphere of this revolutionary inner sanctum known as cyberspace: A commentary for the rest of us who shouldn’t settle for the hostile, arrogant and self-perpetuating garbage in the literature of mainstream popular culture. Stick it to the snobs.

But that’s terribly uncool.