I'm So Cliche

Oh, MYNX, you thought you could slip your viral YouTube sensation quietly by me, didn't you?



Ack! I hear "La-la land!" And every other cliche in the book, but you could probably assume you would from the title alone.

It's too bad, because I usually like music that basically sounds like this, but let's get real here, MYNX. You guys met as models on the set of a music video, yet are complaining that people tell each other they "look amazing" or are following fashion trends? Plus my BS meter goes off when I read things like this in their LA Weekly blog interview (by friend of NWiLA and fellow LA native Lina Lecaro):

Ara: My friend went on a date with Angelyne. He's not into blonds, and wasn't up for it, but I begged him to do it. "Do it for me!" I said. Anyway, halfway through the date, he tracked me down, and handed her off to me. We danced together and it was amazing.



Mmm hmmm. Pics or it didn't happen, dude.

And, in what should be a shock to no one, guess what else they bring up in the interview?

[Lina:] Satire, social commentary or pure celebration of excess?

Holly: It's definitely equal parts. We love all the excess and glamour of the L.A. lifestyle, but we're not blind to the flip side of that. We celebrate that too.

That's right! My favorite cliche, LA's Dark Underbelly didn't make it into the video itself, but it didn't take long for MYNX to let it rear its head again. So I thank you very much for one thing besides your catchy indie-electro-dance tones, MYNX: I've been saving up appropriate underbelly-related jpg's in anticipation of such a reoccurrence, and haven't gotten to use one in a while. Enjoy!

I'm So 'Board With the USA

Here's a 2007 single by Collective Soul called "Hollywood" that, if your musical tastes are anything like mine, you had no idea existed until just now. It's really not the end of the world as far as Hollywood cliches either:

Oh summer
It never leaves your face
You’ve got the sunshine bright-eyed California cotton candy taste

Yeah Hollywood
You know I love you more than one man should
Yeah Hollywood
Well kiss me, kiss me good

Oh pretty pretty stars
They love to sparkle for you

You’ve got the hip locked laidback animated groove attitude

Yeah Hollywood
You know I love you more than one man should
Yeah Hollywood
Well kiss me, kiss me good
Yeah Hollywood
You know I love you more than one man should
Yeah Hollywood
Well kiss me, kiss me good
[guitars]
[return of poppy riff]
Yeah Hollywood
You know I love you more than one man should
Yeah Hollywood
Well kiss me, kiss me good
Yeah Hollywood
You know I love you more than one man should
Yeah Hollywood
Well kiss me, kiss me good
Well kiss me, kiss me good
Well kiss me, kiss me good
Well kiss me, kiss me gooood
Well kiss me, kiss me gooood
Well kiss me, kiss me good
Yeah Hollywood
Yeah Hollywood

Of course that's because there are so few actual lyrics other than "Yeah Hollywood" and "Kiss me good" that there isn't room for many stereotypes anyway. We've got stars, being laid back, sunshine... meh, whatever, we've seen worse. Here's the video:

Again, it's kind of bland and inoffensive, much like the song itself. But what struck me as noteworthy here is the visuals feature a strong return of the "billboard" cliche. Is that something people really say a lot about Los Angeles? That we're just so full of billboards? More so than, say, Times Square or Vegas or other billboard-y places?

Apparently it's not just a cliche, but it's true to the extent that we don't just even have regular billboards here, but there's even a black market for illegal billboards, of which there are currently a whopping 4,000 in the city. Plus hundreds of regular billboards are being converted to the moving digital Blade Runner-esque ones. There's even an anti-billboard activist group called the Coalition to End Billboard Blight.

So, okay, I'll accept it and "billboards" are now officially a Los Angeles cliche. It's my own fault I haven't picked up on it anyway, since I blithely cruise around concentrating on the road and ignoring pretty much all the billboards in town.

Well, almost all. I know, I know, these are quite possibly the absolute worst LA cliche of all, but if the Coalition to End Billboard Blight tries to put Angelyne out of business, they're gonna have some serious 'splaining to do.

The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Red Car, Baby

Los Angeles has long been justifiably mocked for its smog, and I'm not going to try to refute that. We have smog; it's horrible. Add a sprawling metropolis to a desert basin, and you're going to have smog.

We of course could do a lot better by using alternate modes of transportation such as public transit, but at this point we're too devoted to our pink Cadillac convertible cars that we drive to the beach with our blonde hair streaming behind us like a sexy sunkissed flag, right? Isn't that what people driving in Los Angeles do if they're not in pre-driveby shooting road rage mode? Pray to the blessedness of their tailfins while stuck in a sigAlert?

Erm, no. We do love our cars, but that love mainly comes from dependence. Any viewer of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? should remember that the basic plot of the story was a conspiracy involving the replacement of Los Angeles' well-conceived Pacific Electric Railway (a/k/a the "Red Car" trolleys) with a bus system. A bus system that used gas, and tires, and buses manufactured by various companies with an interest in taking over transportation for a sprawling metropolis. And public transportation in our city crumbled when somebody realized that public transportation wasn't a moneymaking opportunity even when you have a monopoly on it.

So we developed our car culture as a way of making lemonade out of lemons. If you don't believe a dead silent film star like me, just check out Tom Wolfe's essay about kids and designers in the middle of LA car culture in the '60s to see what a fantastic lemonade we made. But really, I think we'd all be happy here having the opportunity to use public transportation and alternate methods of transport rather than having to drive all of the goldurn time. We dream about it, and we're working on making the dream a reality. It is, of course, still hilarious to be stuck in traffic behind that ancient mummy Angelyne and her pink Corvette, but I don't think the humor would be lost if we could encounter that sight while whizzing past her on a bicycle.