Irritated by people more talented than myself.

There, I admitted it. Lots of people are more talented/ intelligent/ socially adaptable/ essentially better than I can ever hope to be. And some of them irritate the gadobeepers out of me (“Gadobeepers”-- yup, I just invented that, don’t ask me what it means, I don’t know either.); but that’s just because they’re wasting it.


I walk around inside a mall targeting the A & B markets on my way to the bus terminal -- clearly, that mall is not for me-- and some wise guy in charge of the PA system decides to play a CD of acoustic renditions of otherwise perfectly not-disgusting songs if A) the songs weren’t being sung by girls with fake American accents and B) the songs themselves actually sound better than the original versions. But A) they are, and B) they don’t.
This is annoying enough on its own, until you realize that if they could muster that much courage to make themselves look (and sound) foolish, then they could’ve expended that same courage to do something original, and help make the music industry better.

If you’re like me, and you’ve wanted to learn to play at least one musical instrument decently all your life and still haven’t, you’d be irritated too.

They say that to be an expert at something you’d have to devote at least 10,000 hours practicing it, whatever ‘it’ is. Ten thousand hours. Ten thousand. Now, I’m no mathematician, but since that’s the number for reaching ‘expert’ level, then to achieve ‘mediocre’ you’d at least have to attain half of that. So, 5,000 hours of, say, guitar practice, and you take all you’ve learned using all that time and proceed to make a ridiculous boy-girl duet of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story”? Seriously?


I understand that you’re just trying to be known, and that the easiest way to break into the biz around here is to be all pretty or hunky or pretty hunky and sing already really popular songs (probably counting on that song’s popularity to pull you along). But making sure that the songs you pick are either really unsuitable for acoustic guitar renditions, or that you make really bad versions? Or, I don’t know, just ignore intellectual property rights altogether and sing it the exact same way with the exact same “adlibs “ thrown in for good measure? How ridiculous can you get?


Oh please don’t let them take that last question seriously and actually try.