Let’s wish Benji Madden from Good Charlotte, a happy 33 and rant waywardly a little.
One, if not the better, of the identical Madden twins turns a swinging 33 today. Benji and the Good Charlotte have seen us through some of our most crucial years – Puberty, high school, bad music, Atomic kitten etc. Along with making some decent guitar material and dating Paris Hilton, he is also an avid collector of the living death dolls. For those who don’t know, those darling little ‘dolls’ come with tiny pitchforks, knives and cutesy blood stains on their dresses.
They also probably come alive in the night and go to parties too!
When you Google Benji, the confounded engine hits you with news about Paris Hilton’s bikini wax. Apparently, you can’t just date Paris – thou must surrendereth your search engine to her too! Googling further elicits some flashy spam-rich pages about celebrity scandals, Not Just Another Teen Movie ratings and something about a ‘MADE‘ clothing line, which he and Joel own together.
Moving on, there’s stuff about MTV (of course) and a boxing match! At this point you wonder, just what is the meaning of life? And if it’s not the blondes, is it Benji who’s having all the fun? Did ‘I just wanna live’ result in the creepy living dead doll obsession?
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While we’re on this tangent, an interesting tit bit caught my superman-like eye. It was one of the viral songs that Sony paid the radios during the infamous Payola scandal.What’s this damned scandal, you ask? Well, I like to call it the ‘Do you really love the song you think you love?’ scandal.
In the American music industry industry, ‘Payola’ in layman’s terms meant paying the radio to play your songs as a part of the normal day’s broadcast. Radio as you know, plays a crucial part in hyping and increasing a band’s or a song’s popularity. When a radio station plays something, it essentially means that that’s what the station thinks their listener should check out. This usually works out fine because we trust the radio for playing good music they think is worthy of our attention.
However, when the record companies PAY the radio to play their music, it just throws the whole practice out of the window. When a song like that is played over and over again, you give it your time and iPod space and eventually it goes viral. Even when it’s not that good in the first place. Hence it’s a shady mindgame-y ‘Do you really love the song you think you love?’ affair, against which strict action MUST be taken.
Now I know this must not be a very cheery end, what with the birthday and everything, but let’s all be a bunch of bummers and bring back the good ol’ birthday wishes with a public message! Just like Sesame Street, minus Katy Perry!
To make for the absence of cake, here’s Good Charlotte playing ‘Lifestyles of Rich and Famous‘. Yes, we noticed the irony. We hope you do too.
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