Mongo Nation

Over-hyped and under-delivered

By Jeremy Azevedo

Look, I’m just as guilty as anyone when it comes to accepting responsibility for encouraging the whole 80s synth revival thing. I’ve been telling anyone who will listen to check out local LA keytar heroes like Totally Radd!!, Rocket, Bedtime For Toys, This Blush, etc. for months, years even.

I haven’t been able to get enough of the stuff. You can dance to it, it always sounds epic due to the whole nostalgia thing, and it beats the hell out of nu-metal, that’s for goddamn sure. But a line has to be drawn, a line that differentiates real musicians ironically employing old pop conventions in fun new ways from the shameless cash-ins that clearly don’t know the difference between synth pop and disco. I draw that line right here, with the Black Kids debut album “Partie Traumatic”.

Detective: Can you please point out the ones that sucked, miss?
Victim: Yes officer, yes I can… It was… (sobs)… it was all of them!
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The spawning pool of the nation’s hipster population!

By Jeremy Azevedo

Last week we examined some of the various characters that make up the landscape of art school, a magical place where people go for four to six years to escape reality and fritter away their parents’ money so that they can tell their fellow mortgage brokers that they “used to be a really talented artist” years later when their family cuts them off and they’re forced to get a real job.

Now you might ask yourself: “Gee whiz, is everyone that goes to art school an egocentric idiot with a funny haircut that exists in a fantasy world of their own making, oblivious to the fact that people don’t actually get paid to paint pictures of their nuts, and even if they did, they sure wouldn’t have learned how to do it in a school that charges double what a regular school would charge to learn something that’s actually useful?” The short answer is an emphatic “yes”, but since that was a very long question, the long answer lies withing the following profiles:

The Emotional Wreck

Way, way, waaaaay too much information. Every time.

The Emotional Wreck thinks that art school is like their therapy or something. Science is unable to explain why it is that The Emotional Wreck doesn’t just go see an actual therapist, which would not only be much cheaper, but also much more effective. The Emotional Wreck will always make the rest of the class uncomfortable with her film about being raped by her father, or her interior design project that reflects her uterus experiencing a third trimester miscarriage.

The Narcissist

I would have shooped my ears a little smaller, had it been me…

At least one person in every class in art school is a Narcissist. Every project by The Narcissist will be a self-portrait of some sort. The Narcissist is in art school to “take a swim in lake me” or some such bullshit. Not surprisingly, The Narcissist is also a chronic masturbator.

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