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Can’t buy me brains, but I can go into Danny Merk’s t-shirt shop — yes, the same Danny Merk who employed Snook’ums and Co. and gave them their first-season house — and see girls “actually start crying.”
“They actually worship them,” Merk told — who else? — MTV News. “It’s really weird. They’re like the Beatles.”
Yo, Merk: They’re not even like The Chipmunks.
You’re comparing one of the most talented, accomplished popular musical acts in history to a collection of mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging scrotum cheese who make Ringo look like Itzhak Perlman.
You might as well compare my mustard burps to Chanel, or cognac to anal leakage.
John Lennon was so astounded by his band’s mid-Sixties fame that he once said they seemed “bigger than Jesus.” He was talking overall popularity, though. The Beatles had been traveling the world — not trolling boardwalks — only to be besieged by tens of thousands of screaming lunatic fans at each and every stop.
If these flat-stomached, flat-lining slabs of meat with eyes are the “Beatles of Seaside Heights,” then I’m the Fresh Prince of Belmar.
I will give them this: The crew of “Jersey Shore” is so beyond contempt that they draw the contemptuous in droves. And for Seaside’s “Merkantiles,” t
John, Paul, George and Ringo slips off the tongue much easierhat means one thing: mo’ money.
The otherwise idle worshippers have to memorialize the experience — how else? — by buying t-shirts and “Jersey Shore”-related Merkandise at — where else? — his shop.
(An underlying irony here: It used to be a cool place.)
I can understand Snooki thinking the Pilgrims came over in the 1920s. Who could expect her to know, or care, about the history of a country that brought overnight notoriety to a box of rocks like her?
But for Merk to be that ignorant of popular culture less than 50 years past says more about those satellites who orbit these crotch stains — who love the sun and tanning beds despite what it’s done to whatever gray matter they started out with — than it does about the cast itself.
Does the history of popular music now start with Michael Jackson? Has rock and roll joined the Charleston in the dustbin, along with the Pistols and Foreigner and Ricky Nelson? Does the “MTV Generation” know the difference between Grace Kelly and Graceland?
I’ve always been knocked out by people who know the roots of jazz, who could name every act produced by Phil Spector, who could draw a straight line from Billie Holiday to Etta James to Neko Case. Now I have to be impressed if someone’s actually heard of Creedence? (“Uh, yeah. Creed, man. They’re awesome.”)
The good news, of course, is that pop culture, in this case, is simply mass culture — no threat to the high brows — same as the hippies, yippies, yuppies, punks, nerds and baby boomers. The mid brows among us, unfortunately, can’t help but get our Speedos in a knot. This stuff is so far beneath low brow, it’s actually bush.
In the end, Merk the Jerk can come off as dumb as the creatined cretins he’s exploiting — to most likely buy himself a Shore house as far from Sleazeside as he can get. Hell, he can think Fred and Ginger’s last names were Flintstone, for all I care.
Just as long as people like him don’t start having lots of kids.
The bottom of that gene pool’s obviously been scraped dry.
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