Baffled by musicals. Breaking from dialog into narrative song. Barely supporting a bizarre and oversimplified plot line. Opera cooked up in a garage meth lab by sentimental scientists already stoned on the fumes. All glitter and cliché and spinning off in a million directions. Your parent’s record collection. Such unlikely scenarios as “the song fight”. Characters make their most important pronouncements through song. When feeling sorrow, rage and love the first inclination is to sing one’s emotions and intentions. Where is the orchestra coming from? Where is the rock band that follows me around? We are looking into the mind of a schizophrenic. A window is opened to the inner workings of an acid casualty. While we leap levels of logic is there a test audience of white haired old ladies watching from a distance or hovering over their own crystal balls? Are these the same ladies who love professional wrestling? From this world springs karaoke. The demon seed radiates laser rays from the old ladies' crystal balls blinding not only the gatekeepers but also now the youth of the western world. Clay Aiken receives a zillion teen votes – the new Barry Manilow who can’t write the songs. He is born for an absurdist world where people sing 30 second versions of already famous tunes with all the original emotion removed and replaced with a primary coloured veneer of melancholy or, alternately, “rockin’ energy. Rockers wear sunglasses and leather jackets. That is what all rockers must do on children’s television. This defines the rocker as it did when Billy Joel made videos. Clay Aiken, built for a previous generation of musical theatre patrons, is foist upon the flushed faces and keyboard calloused fingers of the innocents. This is talent. This is a song fighter. The song fight is now a real fight. This is a plywood painting of cowboys outside the western town tourist trap. The faces are cut out and anybody can put their face in and be considered a real cowboy. Mom can take a picture to prove it. This is all it takes to be up there with the cowboys who actually get on a Brahma bull and ride it to the bitter broken ribs and steel rods in femurs end. We are inside the shoebox diorama we gave constructed for grade 3 social studies class. Music has jumped the shark. Potsie Weber’s version of “Hound Dog” is now certifiably as soulful as Big Mama Thornton’s original. Jesus Christ Superstar is now the better version of “the greatest story ever told”. “Dreamgirls” is the best movie ever made. It is a much cleaner and tighter version of modern Afro-American history. Who needs the comprehensive one? Sung to the tune of …Alfred E. Newman or Sir Isaac Newton…take your pick. They are both as valid. Cartoon anvils turn real people into accordions as the laws of gravity are subverted. Faux art mutates life. High on weed and watching cartoons to the grave we make the choice, “entertainment or death”. Brains are rewired to accept life inside the new Matrix. The same story is always a new story. Pantomime school, pantomime marriage and the pantomime baby carriage. Pantomime life and death struggle. Pantomime enlightenment. Talent is only in the realm of gymnastics. Gymnastics in singing, in painting and …even sports. Creativity is not rewarded in any of these. Variation from the matrix is frowned upon. We are doubly entertained by the cruelty applied to those who dare to sing without the backdrop or the plotline. We create a penal system of reality shows that humiliate and torture those who can’t fit into the “cruel shoes” (read Steve Martin) but die trying. It’s a variation on shadenfreuden that the German’s need to invent a word for. The camera follows the best story…the best television. The bets stories are the same stories of struggle, loss and victory over others that are popular in musicals and the opera’s that preceded them. The Little Mermaid can really sing underwater. She will be rescued by the prince and transformed. Mermaids don’t smell like fish. Television doesn’t have smell, touch or taste. Now the world will be denied those senses. If Beyonce were to fart a “crack” would develop in the Matrix. It’s not the sound of her fart or the scrunched up look on her face that will do it. A 13-year-old girl will smell the fart and her conceptual world will unravel. A 17-year-old boy will taste a tomato grown in a home garden under real sunlight and ripened on the vine. He will eat all the tomatoes when he discovers that tomatoes can have a taste. He will never again eat the watery orbs of pulp he finds in the grocery store. The crack in the Matrix opens a little wider. Leonardo DiCaprio becomes famous for smelling of stale cigarettes.