Earlier today, with no forewarning, I was blindsided by a 1978 TV clip of Donnie and Marie. As in Osmond. As in Devil, get behind me!/Jayzus take me now!
They were performing, as a corn-fed TV-variety-show number, “Reelin’ in the Years,” the disarming 1973 hit by Steely Dan.
The great Steely Dan. That now defunct, subversively extraordinary, jazz-noodling juggernaut. The brazenly eccentric, ferociously intelligent dudes with the dildo name.
A group (OK, a duo, mostly, for most of their combined career) dusted all up in musical whampus and yowza, with twisty lyrical twists and sleaze-flecked left turns down wet, dark urban alleyways stinking of brilliance, just boy, fucking howdy.
A band that Joanie Caucus, circa the rigorously delightful Doonesbury TV special, which predated the Osmond offense by a mere year, might aptly have described as “a monolith” (though she actually used that term in reference to iconic feminist-activist-Simone de Beauvoir, but hey, lets not quibble over details).
A group who, in the persons of maestros Becker and Fagen, and in their incomparable body of recorded work, inspires in me a devotion I would have to characterize, at risk of devaluing it still, as worship.
So there I was, having managed my whole life not to stumble upon this … this Osmond thing. And then, in one of my must vulnerable of moments, along comes the goddamn Internet, as ever never leaving well enough alone. And lo, in the wee hours of last night, after my having been jolted awake by a surge in pain from recent back surgery, well … that heartless series of tubes, of voluminous cat antics, LOTR memes featuring poor Boromir, and hints of foul Zuckerberg spunk, slides this musical “interpretation” into my click-here path, forcing my view. Because I couldn’t not watch it, could I? That would have been breaking the law.
I’m pretty sure that’s how it works, anyway. In any case, I watched it. And I can’t. I just … I really just can’t.
Let me conclude by saying that this late into my scorched-self life, such an unexpected and voraciously unwanted piece of cultural terrorism has likely set back my functional development by more years than I have remaining upon this Earth. There is no law against producing such affronts, of course, no protection we can amass in anticipation of the blinding damage that may lurk just to the other side of the next Youtube compilation of ASMR masticating by pretty, wholesome girls with wide and soulful eyes.
We are caught in this staggering wind of cruel happenstance, to be weathered into nothingness before any visible calm returns. And when they look later for some hint of us as evidence, there will be perhaps some faint afterburn, a dissipating scent, a smudge. Incomprehensible echoes of whatever it is that whatever used to be.
Not to seem unoptimistic or anything …
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