Is there a deep gaping void in modern music scene that only they can repair? Is there a mass of people out there crying for new Blink material? Are there kids who never got a chance to see Blink-182 live who had cool older siblings who introduced them to these influential juggernauts of modern sound, and are clamoring for another chance to Take Off Their Pants And Jacket?
Anyway, even though they wrote angry songs to each other like so much bad emo breakup poetry, Blink-182 is coming back together. As impossible as it is to forget Angels and Airwaves, not to mention… that other group that other guy started… they’ve found their way to each other, and of course, they made the announcement under the hot lights of the Grammy awards on national television.
I imagine they almost felt like famous people again.
Maybe we need to establish some criteria before letting the likes of Sublime sully our local auditoriums, say, for example, someone has to miss you. In addition to the Limp Bizkit’s and Faith No More’s, I hear about two new one hit wonders reuniting every week, the kind of people whose greatest hits albums could be played in the space of a particularly lengthy dump – and while you could say that the economy sucks and they’re doing it for the money, is that all there is to it?
All right. Let’s talk about the feelgood story of the decade.
Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail are still living in Mumbai? And not just in the neighborhood – in the same run down huts (and worse in Ismail’s case) that they were in this time last year.
One one hand, I think it’s unreasonable to think that the producers have a responsibility to pluck them out of poverty and ship them to England, but the more I looked into it, the more I think those two kids got hosed : Rubina got about $700 for a year’s worth of work filming the movie, and Azharuddin got about $2400, but the studio made about 30 million dollars of profit off the picture.
Fox Searchlight, for their part, is thrilled with the treatment the kids got, because they set them up in school and gave them 3 times the average salary here, in one of the most impoverished spots in the developed world. This reeks of so much spin to me. D’ya know what “three times the average salary it takes to be homeless is one of the most impoverished spots in the developed world” gets you?
For those of you who guessed “homelessness in one of the most impoverished spots in the developed world”, congratulations – pick up your prize in the comment section at the bottom of the page.
Now, to make matters even worse for Azharuddin, his dad is diabetic, but he’s also an alcoholic. Trust fund? He don’t need no stinking trust fund. He says his kids need a father more than anything else and wants every last red cent of that money released to him now. Now, on one hand, it’s always nice to have a family that’s in good health, but let’s be honest with ourselves : kids who get paid for work like this through their parents rarely get a sniff of that money – it’s a safe bet that any money they see is going straight to booze.
We could spend a lot of time going into the larger social conditions that make this kind of life a reality for millions of kids who don’t have the benefit of a Hollywood movie to draw western eyeballs to their situation, but I want to concentrate on the mental condition of the kids, because I think they’re in a uniquely bad spot. It’s bad enough to live in crushing poverty, but to live in crushing poverty, get plucked out of it, take the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous tour through the heights of Hollywood decadence, and then get plucked down in the same pit of dust you started in seems especially cruel, like something the Gods in the Greek pantheon would have cooked up to punish an especially impudent mortal.
Most people aren’t too torn up about being poor and obscure : while we’ve heard and seen other people’s lives, we don’t have our own experiences to serve as a frame of reference. But how should people handle it when they get a little taste of life in the stratosphere and get sent back to their 9 to 5?
And does it matter if we missed them?
Tags: Blink-182, Faith No More, Limp Bizkit, Slumdog Millionaire, Sublime