The Shitty Music Guy

Superbrocean12 years ago

In an organization of between 45 and 200 high-functioning alcoholics, you’re bound to find a plethora of tastes. You’ve got the guys who wear button-downs tucked into brightly-colored pants, and drink nothing but Maker’s Mark, all the while smoking Cohibas. You’ve also got the guys who wear Chubbies and sorority t-shirts with the sleeves removed, and spend most of their time pounding Miller Lite on the porch. They typically eschew Cohibas in favor of Marlboro Reds or Grizzly Wintergreen. You’ve got the guys who go for the better-than-sex amalgamation of butter and cheese that is Pokey Stix when they’re drunk, and the guys who would, for whatever reason, rather go for the dry mouthfuck that is Jimmy John’s.

The point is, even though many of us would only pursue diversity if it were an old wooden ship from the Civil War era and we had a chance to sink the damn thing, fraternities attract a multitude of characters. Thus it’s very interesting that we tend to exhibit homogeneity in our musical tastes. The TFM Ultimate Blackout Playlist is a perfect example. I would expect any of those songs to be played at any chapter house in the nation, and with good reason. Either they’re about us or the things we do (Friends in Low Places, Sorority Girl, If I Could Do It Again), ingrained into our collective conscience because of the men who came before (anything from the ’80s), or they’re simply infinitely catchy and fun to sing while drunk (Wagon Wheel). This is a great strength of Greek Life. It’s why our pregames are better than most GDI ragers. It’s why our bars, even the small and dingy ones, reveal GDI clubs to be the disease-ridden drug dens they are, filled with sad, lonely people who can’t appreciate their own culture and thus must try to appropriate a new one. Those people are a surplus population, and given their drug use and general lack of hygiene –or intelligence — they will likely never benefit society. I’m not advocating walking into a club, Kenny-Powers-style, and shooting off Roman candles, but I’m not advocating the club either.

Unfortunately, the purity of our music is threatened from the inside. Each chapter has one or two of this: The Shitty Music Guy. The Shitty Music Guy wears the same clothes, drinks the same beer, eats the same grease-laden food, and copulates with the same girls we do. He may even live in the same house. But, like Irishmen and anarchists, he threatens the essential character of our beloved institutions. He does this by seizing control of the iPod at events, and subjugating the whole crowd to his shitty music.

The Shitty Music guy comes in two flavors. The first is the rap guy. We can all appreciate some rap now and again, even if 2Pac’s lyrics about the need for change falls on the completely deaf ears of a bunch of well-off college kids. The rap guy, however, ONLY listens to rap. He probably wore diamond studs and flatbills in high school. His room is covered with posters of Lil Wayne. He has at least three pairs of Air Jordans, and at least three different types of marijuana-smoking devices. Rap guys and marijuana go hand-in-hand. After all, every rapper from Pac to Wiz Khalifa (whom they probably worship) has smoked weed. In fact, these guys would probably rather smoke weed than drink. When the rap guy is high, he’s fine. People who smoke marijuana aren’t a threat to anybody. Honestly, in a stoned state, he couldn’t care less what music is playing and is more concerned with whether the Domino’s guy will take a nugget as a tip. When he does drink, however, he’s a menace. Whether it’s at a full-blown rager, a pregame, or a just a gathering of a few underclassmen who don’t have fake IDs, the rap guy will seize control of the music, and fill the halls of the fraternity house with the cacaphonic chords of a song which was most likely written on a prison toilet seat by a man who could look like a murderer, but instead wears skinny jeans and gets stupid tattoos. The rap guy will defend his ability to play this music to the death. Luckily, he’s more into the shitty “rap” of characters such as Wiz Khalifa than he his into the gangsta rap of artists like Three 6 Mafia. Instead of grabbing the .357 titanium Smith-N-Wess when kicked off the iPod and putting a Hydroshock through your head, he’ll likely just smoke a bowl and wander off in search of McNuggets (The members of Three 6 Mafia are, by the way, some of the biggest proponents of the Second Amendment).

The second flavor of The Shitty Music Guy is the electronic guy. I won’t dignify the genre by subdividing it into techno, house, EDM, and dubstep. It’s all the same stupid synthesis of electrical currents and robots fucking, occasionally arranged in a slightly different manner. Now, most fraternity men can accept that there’s a time for electronic music. That time generally involves lasers, smoke, florescent alcohol (tonic water glows under UV light, and in an unrelated note, I think I spilled a few G&Ts on my bed), skimpy outfits, and “dancing” which might be better classified as “fucking.” Electronic music can, at times, encourage a female party companion to perform a maneuver with her posterior which will subject your penis to the same g-forces as an F-22 pilot. At some point in the electronic guy’s development, he experienced this and decided it was the greatest fucking thing on planet Earth. He decided to fly an F-22 everywhere, ignoring the fact that there are times that call for a B-52, an A-10 Warthog, or an Apache helicopter. He calls electronic music “rage music,” and plays it on road trips, on the boat at the lake, when day drinking on the porch, and on the way to the grocery store. This is ignoring the fact that true rage music is defined by use, not design. For those of you unfamiliar with postmodernism (guys who haven’t taken English classes and the entire state of Mississippi), this means that rage music isn’t rage music because it’s designed to be raged to; it’s rage music because we rage to it. I doubt Eddie Money or The Outfield could have predicted the levels of alcohol consumption that would accompany their music. We drink to “Take Me Home Tonight” and “Your Love” because it’s good fucking music. We’re supposed to “rage” to electronic music because “producers” want us to, not because it’s good music. These “producers” are nothing but skinny kids who had no friends in high school, so they wore ridiculous outfits and made robot sex tapes on their MacBooks to gain attention. We already had attention in high school, and we retain it now. We don’t need to hear robots fucking for us to be able to rage.

The cure for the electronic guy is, ironically enough, the same thing that gave him his throbbing computer-noise hard-on: sex. Eventually, he’ll be on a beach, a bar, or a debutante ball, and decide that the people he’s with need to RAGE. So he’ll put on some Cuban-Swedish house remix, expecting the panties to drop with the bass. Of course, the classy ladies will have nothing of it, and he’ll find that electronic music cannot comfort him while he is masturbating at the end of the night.