Welcome back to the "Millennial Music" December Pledge Drive, loyal PBS hologram viewers! You just heard an oldie from Ricky Martin called "Livin' La Vida Loca." As we used to "holler" back in the day, that "joint" was "da bomb"! (I should clarify that "bomb" in this context is fin-de-siècle slang for "of high quality" and does not constitute a terrorist threat or subject me to arrest without due process under the 2017 Palin-Jindal Patriot Act.)
"Upside, inside out, she's livin' la vida loca..." Wow, do those timeless words take me back to when Spanish was something you had to learn and wasn't instantaneously translated and subtitled on your FacialDisplay! I think I first downloaded that classic from Napster while volunteering in college for the Steve Forbes 2000 campaign-wild times. But you know what they say: If you can remember the late '90s, you probably weren't there.
It's vital to preserve precious memories like these of the Digital Age of music, 1999-2009, so please telepath in with your donations. Donors pledging 100 Universal Credits will receive a mug for that morning cup of StarDunc, 200 UC will land you a tote bag sewn by American Apparel officially licensed sweatshop workers, and 600 UC scores you one of these babies: [picture of an MP3 player appears.]
That's right-a personal MP3 player! Can you believe it? And no cobwebs! Plus, it comes pre-loaded with 200 of your favorite oldies MP3s. I bet a lot of our younger viewers have never experienced the pleasure of "double-clicking" a new song for the first time or hearing the satisfying wheel-tick of an iPod. Man, how fun was it to "Net-surf" on iTunes for a band's latest "album," render U.S. currency (before it became valueless), wait for a song to download with bated breath-sometimes for a whole minute on those DSL connections, then transfer it to your player under a playlist titled something like "Workout Mix" or "Singer-Songwriters Not Yet Considered Enemies of the State"! And then go outside to listen to it, back when the ozone layer permitted out-of-domicile exposure beyond fourteen consecutive minutes? (Note that the MP3 player has been refitted, and runs only on highly enriched uranium, not regular uranium.)
You're probably watching from your Class I-IV Trump Domicile, thinking, "Hey, Clone-Boy, I get all the oldies music I need from 'Holovideo Block' on CSPAN3." But, as a government-sponsored institution under the dominion of laws enacted by Madam President-for-Life Jenna Bush, will CSPAN3 also include music from the North Korean Invasion-as Public Broadcasting Service does, thanks to the inspirational leadership of our new co-owners, the recently thawed Walt Disney and He Who Possesses the Secret to Everlasting Life, Rupert Murdoch? Meaning, not the North Korean traditional music we came to know and, eventually, to love, but the powerful non-resistance music the Koreans' fourteen-year occupation inspired. Toe-tapping anthems like "K-Jong 4-Eva" and "Rice, Rice, Baby (Three Meals a Day, Yo)."
Joining me now is a very special guest from the millennial music scene who helped define the songs that we, as a nation soon to be colonized by our glorious fatherland of China, listened to, from the non-event that was Y2K to the Great Oil Drought of '15 and the subsequent Era of Suburban Riots. Welcome, Chief of Dome-External Environmental Protection Agency Kanye West. Before we discuss Taylor Swift, Jr.'s rude interruption of your speech before all three members of the United Nations, how goes the battle against global cooling?
Teddy Wayne's debut novel, "Kapitoil," will be published by Harper Perennial this April.
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