Because fads own

By the time you hit your senior year of high school, you’ve seen just about every fashion trend you care to. You think it’s over. You think maybe this year people have realized that looking completely shallow isn’t terribly appealing. You think your eyes have been insulted more times than humanly possible. And you’re dead… Fucking… Wrong.

The worst part about “fashion trends” in high school is that the lot of them are based off of, or at least originated with, music. And I figure, “meh, shitty music deserves a shitty look”. But no, trend whores just can’t leave the good stuff alone can they?

Enter Pink Floyd. And I swear if any of you reading this have never heard a Pink Floyd song but sport any of their apparel, I hope you die a slow, painful death at the teeth of a very angry and diseased rodent. That’s right, thanks to the fine folks at Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, and the rest of the grand ol’ mega-corporations currently taking over the country, t-shirts sporting the Dark Side Of The Moon album cover are now widely available to young tykes 12-15 years of age. Oh, but we should be happy relatively good albums and great bands are being tacked onto t-shirts en masse for the pathetically impressionable youth of America to be wearing, shouldn’t we?

FUCK NO. Sure, somebody with an Ashlee Simpson shirt on is probably completely worthless (or deaf; or, most likely, both), but worse than that is somebody who doesn’t even HAVE the musical taste that their apparel would lead you to believe they do. For example, my first day back at school I saw no less than four kids parading around in the same exact Pink Floyd “Dark Side Of The Moon” shirt (our student population is less than 200, so yes, it’s actually noticeable), and I would bet any number of important appendages that I possess that not a single one of them has listened to that album all the way through.

For crying out loud Pink Floyd is prog rock, a genre that does nothing if not defy trends. And what happens to them after their musical career ends? They turn into a trend. Irony is such a blast…

Hell, while we’re at it, let’s take a look at two of the other fascinatingly moronic things people are calling “a look” these days:

Emo kids – Cutting yourself because “pain r0x0rz!!1″, wearing heaps of eyeliner, having some of the most obnoxious and ridiculous hairstyles known to modern man (and that includes 80′s punk), appearing to be anorexic, and generally walking around looking like somebody just stomped your pet bunny to death is one way of spending your adolescence. Another is simply living up to your own hype and getting rid of yourself, thereby saving the rest of us the trouble of looking at you and putting a lot of really shitty bands out of business in the process. A win-win situation!

HIM fanatics – HIM is a generic and lyrically stupid Goth-rock band from a country that has produced DOZENS of far, far more talented ones. So why do so many people like them? Because some assclown with a camera and zilch in the way of common sense got popular (imagine that) and along the way decided “hey, their logo is purdy, so the music can’t be that bad!” That’s another thing: Stop kidding yourself if you think a heartagram is somehow a clever design; 12 year olds with MS Paint can scribble out more meaningful crap in 5 minutes. On the other hand, I guess I could say their devoted following is a fine example of how sheep-like many teens are these days. But then I’d be insulting sheep…

Why do people abandon logic and reason in the face of vanity? Hell if I know. Probably the same reason they watch American Idol: Repeated blows to the head when they were small children.