Weekend Listomania (Special Terribly Trendy Trendiness Edition)

Well, it's Friday and you know what that means. Yes, my Oriental gal pal/morphine drip administrator Fah Lo Suee and I will be heading off to lovely Brentwood, California and the home of Andrew Breitbart [R-Unbelievably Despicable Shithead]. Specifically, to a high-tech video editing suite in his basement, where we'll be assisting Andrew and a crack team from Fox News as they doctor outtakes from D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation.

That being the case, and since things will be otherwise quiet around here til until then, here's a hopefully amusing little project for us all:

Post-Elvis Pop/Rock Music Trend You Either Fervently Wish Hadn't Caught On or Are Glad That Actually Didn't!!!

Totally self-explanatory, I think, and no arbitrary rules of any kind, you're welcome very much. And if we've done this before, mea culpa, but basically I just wanted an excuse to follow up the Mary Schneider clue.

And my totally top of my head Top Five is

5. Manufactured Boy Bands



Seriously -- with the exception of this song, which I think is a gorgeous piece of modern day doo-wop, I can say pretty safely that if the Backstreet Boys, N'Sync, New Edition, New Kids on the Block and any of the rest of their ilk had never existed, the world would be, on balance, if not a better place than certainly no worse than it is now.

Oh, and of course they're not actually bands. Thank you.

4. Sensitive Soft-Rock Singer/Songwriters



You know, I really like James Taylor, and I still listen to the Sweet Baby James album for pleasure, but jeebus -- does he have a lot to answer for.

3. Electronica



This was the most over-hyped trend of 1996 -- declared The Next Big Thing here even before the records showed up -- and if memory serves it actually never materialized as a result. Although I'm told today's kids really dig some up-to-date form of it.

2. Hassidic Hip-Hop



Anybody else think this bespeaks some really serious identity issues? Can you imagine an entire school of this guy? Yuck.

And the Numero Uno too-trendy-for-words pop/rock trend that ever was or was not is...

1. Yodelling!!!



Turns out the world really wasn't ready for a prog-rock version of Slim Whitman.

Alrighty then -- what would your choices be?

[Shameless Blogwhore: My parallel Cinema Listomania -- theme: (inspired by Roger Corman's Galaxy of Terror) best and worst big screen performances by actors originally associated with TV -- is now up over at Box Office. As always, if you could see your way to going over there and saying something pithy, I'd be deeply in your debt. Thanks!]