8 Songs That Are What It’s Really All About, Man

1. “Reason to Believe” by Bruce Springsteen.

There are some popular songs that point their listeners toward the answers to life’s big questions. Reason to Believe attempts to answer the really big one: what does it all mean? This song is the final track on Springsteen’s ultra-bleak Nebraska and on first listen this song doesn’t seem to be a shift in the tone of the rest of the record. Here is Bruce alone with guitar and harmonica, alternating between a fragile whisper and a primal scream. He’s singing about life, love, and death, and the meaning behind it all. What answer does he find? Basically, that nobody is going to answer the question for you. Somehow people always seem to find their own answers and carry on. This solution puts all the power of choice in the hands of the listener. No matter what awfulness fate deals you, it’s up to you to find some reason to believe things will get better.

2. “Dead” by They Might Be Giants

The Johns have a reputation in the mainstream for producing smart songs for kids and quirky songs for adults. The song Dead sounds like it could be belted out by a few hundred youngsters at afternoon assembly, but the content of the lyrics betray the sing-along ease of the melody. There’s nothing quite like that first time you realize that every living thing is just a mass of stuff that was at some point other living things, and pretty soon you’ll be ex-living, too, just in time to feed someone else. The revelation that all I am is a bag of delicious meat makes lines like “I didn’t apologize for when I was eight and I made my younger brother be my personal slave” seem all the more petty. In a way, the message of the song is liberating. If we’re just shambling sacks of food that have yet to expire, then all the little things we worry about day to day seem even smaller. Remember, when you die, you’re just returning groceries.

3. “Time” by Pink Floyd

It’s distressing that a concept album which essentially illustrates a complete descent into madness has so many lucid things to say about the quality of our lives. Time takes advantage of the listener’s awareness of his own impending death. You can relax, you can work really hard, you can stress out and count the minutes, but none of it will stop the clock from ticking closer to the end of your time here. It really is enough to make a person crazy, and set within the context of the rest of this album it makes you wonder how someone who’s already paranoid and living on the edge of his own mind must struggle with the inexorable march of time. Even more crushing is the final thought that the only way to stave off panic is to essentially close your eyes, pray for a pardon, and hope you won’t notice the end sneaking up on you. It’s a tough choice between insanity and ignorance, and Pink Floyd demands a decision.

4. “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen

No songwriter can convert verse-chorus-verse into bleak-triumphant-bleak with the mastery of Leonard Cohen. Cohen’s second coming brought his trademark gravelly monster voice, and it has never been so appropriate. Anthem sounds like you’re sitting in a mountain’s lap and it’s giving you inspirational advice. The concept is nothing new: life is going to get hard and you’ve got to persevere. But it’s sung and orchestrated here with such audacity that it just has to be true. The exultant voices behind Leonard in the chorus inject some well-timed beauty into what would otherwise be an ugly dirge. Even the long outro serves its purpose of giving you enough time to ruminate on the lesson old Uncle Leonard has taught you. If this guy who sees so much wrong with the world still thinks we can make it through okay, then who am I to doubt him?

5. “Rainbow Connection” by Kermit the Frog

No, seriously. I know this song is sung by a frog. Get over it. The fact is that Jim Henson seems saccharine to our generation now because he wrote the purest form of anything magical that we’ve ever encountered. Other songwriters hint at the presence of magic, spirit, love, providence, and divinity. Jim Henson, and by proxy Kermit, comes right out and tells you that these things are real. Furthermore, he’s not angry if you don’t want to wonder what’s on the other side of the rainbow. Most people don’t ask these questions out loud. But Kermit sings about that part of everyone that wonders “What’s so amazing that keeps us star-gazing?” And he lets us know that it’s fine to keep on wondering. Yeah, it’s a little corny, but if you can’t swallow your pride and take a meaningful lesson from Kermit the Frog, then you might just be beyond hope.

6. “All You Need Is Love” by The Beatles

For real. Love is all you need.

7. “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M.

If you’re looking for a song to sum up the elemental sameness of human existence, it is this one. This particular song is derided by cynics as being far too sad and whiny to be of any value. I should know; I had a lot of derision for this song back when it was a big hit. But it is more inspirational than it initially lets on. Basically the song asks “You really think you’re sadder than any other person has ever been? You think your life is the toughest life imaginable? Seriously?” And, verily, the song has a good point. It’s not asking you to deny your own sadness and it certainly doesn’t want you to stop whining about it. It’s just a little reminder that you’re just one sad mope in a world of sadder mopes, so it’s not really that bad after all.

Am I the only one who felt bad for any paraplegics stuck in their car when everyone else gets out and walks at the end of the video?

8. “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” by Talking Heads

Some might argue that I threw this on the end of the list simply to appease my hipster too-cool-for-Springsteen friends. I actually like this song because it’s performed in such a personal voice that it can’t really be about anyone but the singer finding his way through life, finding his soulmate, and finding a home, and ultimately finding that all these things would have found him somehow whether he wanted to get there or not. Of course, these are universal phenomena that everyone can appreciate. There are just places, times, and people in your life that feel like home. If you feel at home with your smoking jacket-wearing, poofy-haired, corporate-logo-t-shirt-purchasing hipster crowd, then there’s no better place for you to be.

Find love, and find your way home, you hipster doofus.

What’s In Coca Cola?

I, Phil Wells, drink Coca Cola instead of Pepsi. Granted, I don’t drink too much soda as it is, but when it comes down to it Coke is my cola of choice. So I was at lunch one day, polishing off a big pile of leftover Rice a Roni, and as I sipped my can of Coke I became curious. What is this delicious substance made of? The label says it’s only got six ingredients, yet I sat there mesmerized. After much research and many hours in the lab, I am able to present to you, my loyal salad eaters, an ingredient-by-ingredient analysis of Coca Cola.

Water

Fish have sex in water. So does Aquaman. The Coca Cola people say they’re able to filter out all of the love juices through distillation, evaporation, reverse osmosis, and the like. But imagine the effectiveness of these methods measured against the rare infinitesimal amount of times that these procedures simply do not work. Surely, one or two tiny little spermies has survived and persevered long enough to make it to the bottling plant. The next time you take a sip from America’s favorite cola, imagine the odds that Namor the Submariner just had sex with your mouth by proxy.

Makes you feel powerful, doesn’t it? You’re one step away from being the Queen of Atlantis.

That water you just ingested has almost certainly been to more places than you have. Before you drank that can of soda, the water they used to make it was part of some babbling stream coursing its way through a majestic mountainside that you’ll never see because you fill your vacation time with boring leisure activities that thousands of other people have already tried. The source of the stream may have been a huge freshwater lake teeming with delicious catfish that you’ll never eat because your corporate whore father never took you on his fishing outings with his buddies. Before it joined the lake, that water was part of a cloud that traveled halfway across the atmosphere of the planet, overlooking dazzlingly bright cities where humanity has erected the most beautiful structures that you’ll never see because you can’t trust your drunk cousin to watch your cats for a week.

And what now? You’ve got this world-weary water in your system. You’ve interrupted this magnificent substance’s fantastic voyage so it can know the tedium of facilitating your metabolic processes or the vile squalor of breaking down your food into poop. This water, the same water that has been on Earth since there has been water on Earth, is now doomed to sustain a being who has to read the same recipe twenty times and still can’t make peanut butter cookies from memory. If the water is lucky it’ll be quickly and effortlessly peed out of you. If the water had a mind and was given its druthers, it would surely be bled out of a fatal wound. Knowing you, though, it will most likely be squeezed out of a pimple.

I wouldn’t worry too much. The water will find its way out eventually. Even if it’s stuck in you until you finally die, it’ll be drained out of you and squirted into the ground where it’ll rejoin the silent spring. It won’t complain that you held it up. Its soul won’t carry any of the good deeds or awful things you did when it was a part of you. It’ll just evaporate, fall, flow, get drunk by some other ape, and stoically start all over again.

In this way, water is better than you. And since water is the primary ingredient in Coca Cola, Coke is also better than you. So stop complaining that it’s $0.60 a can in the vending machine at work.

High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)

It should be stated, first of all, that corn syrup is only called “corn syrup” in the US and Canada. Most other countries call it “glucose syrup” but there are a few interesting idiomatic translations for this phrase from other languages to English:

Japan: Bunion Preserves

Greece: Callous Honey

Turkish: Cob Oil

Mandarin: Glaze Which Was Squoze From The Flower of Flakes

Forgotten Realms: -4 Penalty to Saving Throw versus Type-II Diabetes

North Bergensian: “The Ol’ Monkey Squirts”

The dispute between Communist Cuba and the US caused the American government to shun foreign cane sugar imports and seek a domestic alternative to sweeten their beverages. The answer came on April 26th, 1974, when an American adventurer named Radcliffe Rex Baxter discovered high fructose corn syrup at the bottom of a well in Lawton, OK.

Archer Daniels Midland, corn syrup tycoon, is a real American hero. With exemplary farsightedness, he was able to see that a world paying 3 measly cents for every pound of Cuban sugar it could get its hand on was not a world that America wanted to be a part of. He went to work right away making his fortune in the corn and corn syrup industry. And did he use this fortune for personal gain? Did he squander it on licorice whips and loose women? Fuck no! The man was a philanthropist. He set up a special interest group (or a “lobby” if you’re a yellow journalist) that identified legislators and leaders who represented the best interests of our fine nation’s humble corn industry (corn growers, corn huskers, corn blowers, corn holers, corn bowlers, men made of corn, etc.) and rewarded their steadfastness with piles and piles of sticky cash. Thanks to his effort, vile sugar (which still costs 3 cents a pound pretty much everywhere but America) now costs American importers roughly 22 cents a pound due to brave subsidies imposed by our Congress. And even though HFCS has been defamed by so-called doctors who say it “artificially stimulates the human appetite when it is eaten causing obesity and adult-onset diabetes”, Archer Daniels Midland can proudly say that his baby, his high fructose corn syrup, feeds hard-working American farmers to the tune of 14% of domestic corn’s annual $19 billion earnings. That’ll buy lots and lots of Coca Cola! Yay agriculture!

The process for turning corn into corn syrup is truly a marvel of modern science, as well as the gem of American culinary innovation. Corn is picked by itinerant laborers and stripped of its tarty green pajamas before it is packed on the back of a mule or large goat or whatever will bring it to the factory. Once it’s there each cob is ripped from its many kernels in a tearful goodbye ceremony. The shucked cobs are dried to make pipes or are used as toys for third world children in poverty who can’t afford dolls. The kernels are soaked in an acidic combination of lots of water, a little sulphur, and a trace amount of fart gas if any of the mill workers are feeling sassy when that batch is being steeped. This slurry is then filtered through old shirts, pulverized by angry inmates, centrifuged in vats bigger than theme parks, and separated into two piles: one solid pile containing husks and little seeds for feeding cattle and the elderly, and another viscous pile of goo that will be scraped off the floor and altered with enzymes until it tastes like Juicy Fruit or Pepsi or whatever.

High fructose corn syrup is sweeter than regular sugar because of (surprise, surprise) its high fructose content. Regular sugar, the tedious white crap you spoon into your coffee every morning so you can stagger through another unrewarding day in your dreary cube, has about a fifty-fifty ratio of fructose to glucose. But when factory workers introduce all sorts of neat enzymes to great big pools of man-made corn oil, the sugars in it break down into tinier and tinier little pieces until they can separate the glucose out of there by running some ions through the stuff. That makes the fructose ratio in the remaining syrup as high as 55 or even 90 percent! In scientific terms, that’s sweeter than Angelina Jolie’s poon buried in maraschino cherries.

HFCS can be made using genetically modified corn, which we all know is the leading cause of Godzilla occurrences and zombie plagues. The biased conservative media would have you believe that genetically modified corn would greatly alleviate famine in impoverished parts of the world, but you cannot believe their lies. It has not been proven that genetically modified corn does not cause conjunctivitis, arthritis, gingivitis, appendicitis, bursitis, colitis, encephalitis, hepatitis, laryngitis, meningitis, tonsillitis, or cancer of the balls.

Enjoy high fructose corn syrup at your own risk.

Caramel Color and Phosphoric Acid

Phosphoric acid is used to break down the bonds in sugar before it is cooked, creating Coca Cola’s signature poopy hue. The relationship between these two ingredients, listed adjacently on the list of elements in Coca Cola, cannot be overstated. With phosphoric acid, caramel color would have to be extracted from the pigment in baby’s irises. Don’t worry; it’s usually pigment from the eyes of blind babies who aren’t going to miss it anyway. Usually.

Caramel color is a colloid, meaning it’s really clear liquid with billions and gajillions of tiny little brown blobs floating around in it. In 1961, Swiss chemist Hans Lichtenbliecht tried to remove the solid matter from the fluid in caramel color to create a thicker, darker soft drink which would have been named “Zej.” The end product was a dismal failure, but as a result of the experiment the United States was able to invent the cruise missile before the dirty Communists could. And that’s how Ronald Reagan got an airport named after him.

Phosphoric acid is used in all sorts of cola products, but its most popular use is for rust removal. Its common medium for this application is a gel called Naval jelly. We all remember the day the Republican Party was caused quite a bit of chagrin when Vice President Dan Quayle introduced Naval jelly to his own navel in an attempt to send the product “to its home.” Two prosthetic belly buttons and a reality show later, Dan Quayle became the first American Vice President to successfully defeat lint infection.

Some people might tell you that phosphoric acid causes osteoporosis in the ladies’ bones. Your body will always try to keep an even ratio of phosphorous and calcium in your blood. The theory goes that if you drink gallon upon gallon of phosphoric acid, your body will respond by sucking the calcium out of your own bones to maintain order. This is a frightening prospect if you’re a woman and a coward. The fact is that osteoporosis is God’s way of telling old women that it’s time to stop storing heavy cans of fruit cocktail on the higher shelves. Anyway, if your bones aren’t dense enough to support your body’s weight, I know of no better way to calm your nerves than indulging in an ice-cold Coca Cola. So drink up, ladies!

Natural Flavors

Depending on what batch of Coca Cola your can happened to be filled from, the
“natural flavors” in you beverage may contain any of the following:

Mint, koala pelts, stag’s blood, honeysuckle pollen, roach legs, eye of newt, cobra venom, condensed rage, parsley, sage, rosemary, lime, peat smoke, sailor spit, heavy whipping cream, that stuff that collects under your fingernails until you scoop it out with a matchbook cover, ham, ham snouts, ham feet, ham balls, the monkey from that Jay and Silent Bob movie, Smurf hats, ectoplasm, lemon zest, communion wafers, very small rocks, holly, any of the noble gases except neon, Renu contact lens solution with MoistureLoc, or ginger.

Caffeine

Caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant, having the effect of warding off drowsiness and restoring alertness. To paraphrase the late Rick James, caffeine is a hell of a drug. Any college student in the world will tell you that beverages containing caffeine are a safe, fun way to renew your focus amply to get you through a long night and flunk an exam in the morning anyway because the ethnic dork at the front of the class ruined the damn curve again.

Unfortunately, caffeine can also result in restlessness, a loss of fine motor control, headaches, and dizziness. Since this list describes an admittedly minor shotgun blast to the face and being married to Courtney love, we can comfortably assume that Kurt Cobain must’ve felt like he was overdosing on caffeine in the ephemeral moments before fragments of his skull hit the cabinet behind him and he died.

It is important to note that caffeine cannot replace sleep and should only be used occasionally to restore alertness. Some things that can be used to replace sleep include alcohol, oral sex, and waiting restlessly all night in a burned-out hovel for your killers to find you and finish the job. Caffeine, of course, enhances all of these items.

So there you have it!

My curiosity is sated, and there is something truly rewarding about knowing exactly what I’m putting in my mouth. Those were my grandmother’s last words, coincidentally enough. Fortunately for you, the audience, these are this article’s last words.

Dear Paris,

I know it’s been weeks since I’ve written, but I’ve been so busy recently. Don’t worry, we’re all still out here supporting you and praying for your quick recovery.

So, how’s rehab? Is the methadone helping? The doctors tell me that your violent shaking is stopping for several minutes a day now. That’s so awesome! We’re all so happy for you! You’ll beat this speedball addiction. Just take it one day at a time.

So much has been going on since I last sent a letter. I know they don’t let you watch TV, but there’s some stuff you have to know. Let’s see, Stavros is dating Mary-Kate again. Leo is dating that whore Zeta Graff. Nicky is dating Edward Furlong.

Oh, poor Nicky. Representatives from the Kaballah Center came by to repossess your red bracelet the other day. When I tried to explain that you’re in rehab and the bracelet went with you, they broke Nicky’s thumbs. She can barely lift a Red Bull. It’s sad, really.

Oh my God! You probably haven’t heard what happened to Nicole Ritchie yet. I hope you’re sitting down next to some Kleenex as your read these words. There’s no nice way to say this, so I’ll just say it. Nicole drowned in an accident involving bobbing for novelty dildos from a bucket of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I wasn’t there, but the story is in all the papers. The Enquirer got a picture from Frankie Muniz’s cell phone camera.

Oh, that reminds me. Your cell phone contact list got hacked again. Now everyone at the Enquirer knows that all the friends you have left are Bobby “The Brain” Heenan and Jonathan Taylor Thomas. And, of course, you have me. They may have also found a picture of David Blaine finger-violating your chihuahua, Tinkerbell.

I’m afraid your current condition is not boding well for the Paris Hilton brand. Your debut album “Paris is Burning” failed to make a splash on the Billboard charts. Number one on the week it came out was “Brownish Haze”, which is a compilation of Snoop Dogg farting into various tape recorders. Oh, Snoop says hi, but he told me to spell it “h-i-g-h.” He’s so crazy.

And Eminem says hi too, kinda. He put a few lines about you in his latest single:

Paris Hilton turned herself in with a needle in her arm

Now they got her on methadone all morning drooling in her Lucky Charms

She probably waking up to an orderly’s dick every day before she even hear the alarm

Dumb trick

I’m Eminem!

He sang it at Ashlee’s concert. Ashlee’s still in the hospital, by the way. She tried staging a benefit to raise awareness and sympathy for your recovery from addiction, but the “background” CD skipped during the second song and she was trampled by a stampede of rabidly angry preteen girls.

We’ve all been pulling real hard for you. We auctioned off the casts from your horseback riding accident on the set of Simple Life. I think we raised enough to pay the paralegal fees for your crippling slander lawsuit. I hope it’s enough. Your “estate” is sort of falling apart since your family disowned your sister and you. Sales of “That’s Hot” tee shirts never quite caught on like we hoped they would. America’s too busy being swept away by a new catch phrase from Paula Abdul: “I wish my butt cheeks had a skin bridge connecting them.” I’m so sick of hearing people say that!

Oh, and Carl’s Jr. found a new spokesmodel to soap herself up while washing a car and take a big bite out of one of their burgers. It’s Starr Jones. She told the press she doesn’t care if you drown in a puddle of your own sick.

I wish I had better news to bring you now in your time of need, but life is hard outside of rehab, too. I bought a Nutty Buddy the other day and half the top didn’t even have walnut chunks on it. Just chocolate and ice cream! I cried for ten whole minutes.

I’m sure by now you’ve lost the ability to see straight and may have even vomited bile all over this letter, so I’m going to get going. You hang in there! Only four more months strapped to the bed and then they’ll let you walk through the courtyard once a day!

I have always loved you.

Sincerely,

The Guy Who Played Chunk in Goonies