Humour

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Violence of Viewpoints: college edition

[cant wait to start college wearing my free swag!

By Joe Keener, Overly Eager Person

ell, here I am! Ready to begin my first steps towards adulthood

by going to college. I wonder if my parents will be worried about me? After all, Douglas College is about 45 minutes away from home. When I told

| hate college and Im only going because my dad forced me to.

By Marc Scheisskopf, Person

Who'd Rather be Watching Japanese Cartoons

gh, I fucking hate this place. Not because it’s

them about this place, the two of them almost went into hysterics over their baby boy leaving the safety of home-school. But I’m not like them, because now that I’m going to college, I’m going to be the coolest, smartest, and handsomest man alive!

Thope that Douglas College has frat houses. When I got my campus tour, I didn’t see any dorms, but maybe they’re only visible to those who meet the proper requirements. Lucky for me, Douglas has already

necessarily bad, but it’s just so boring. There’s no adventure here, only cheap-ass decorations and booths. By the way, all these booths suck. There’s no anime club here. Even though there was an Asian lady in charge my little group of sheeple, which I was sorted into without a thought, she didn’t even speak Japanese!

Oh well, it doesn’t matter

given me all the swag I can carry! A bunch of the stuff says “Douglas Students’ Union” on it. I think that’s just a code name for the dorms, so people won't think that Douglas has a bad reputation. In any case, I'll be wandering around the halls wearing my Douglas sweatshirt, pants, and the beads I got when I checked in at orientation! That way, people are bound to think I’m cool!

In addition to wearing the Douglas clothing around

anyway. That lady’s a baka

for not being Nihongo like I

am! Humph. I got these stupid beads, which at first I thought were supposed to ward off demons or something, but it turns out that they were just plastic junk! Unsurprisingly, the sheeple bought into them like the baka they are. In fact, this whole orientation is baka. For a school that has a lot of Nihongo,

campus, I’ll also make sure

to impress my professors by writing down my homework in my free agenda and drinking coffee from my Douglas College mug. By showing up to classes in all this Douglas College wear, my teachers will think that I’m really excited about learning and will automatically give me extra credit in every course!

So long, mom and dad! Thanks to the kind people who helped me out at the orientation, your little man is going places!

they weren’t dressed all kawaii desu. Watashi aishiteru kawaii Nihongo girls. I even said that exact phrase during the introduction session and no, I will not provide a translation, you baka! You're too baka and un-kawaii to even grasp glorious Nihon-sama!! It doesn’t matter; I’m going to become a famous mangaka in Nihon someday!

So take that, you baka gaijin.

An exploration of extreme egos, quality of pop music

Overexposed review

By Joel MacKenzie, Staff Writer

irst, I have to apologize for Fe: lateness of my review.

The album, Overexposed, was released in June 2012, and at the time, I, like many other listeners, did not understand the nature of the band behind it, Maroon 5. I hastily wrote it off as a cheap, uninteresting pop album; but 12 chance listens to the single “Payphone,” played roughly every seven minutes somewhere on the FM dial, revealed to me the album’s very clever satirical nature.

Overexposed slyly criticizes

the pitfalls of pop music by using them excessively without definitively labelling them as such. The album gently invites the listener to laugh with the band at the ridiculousness of the

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repetition and lazy lyric-writing prevalent in today’s pop music, as well as the extreme egos of the genre’s front-persons. Songs blend in Overexposed. They

all feature loud, unrelenting vocals over repetitive chord progressions. Song structures are predictable, hilariously repeating the typical pop organization of introduction, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, etc. The instruments blur together in every song in

a barrage of muddled chords, thus highlighting pop’s lack of emphasis on them. The drum patterns never deter far from typical beats predominantly using the high hat and snare. Of course, the sarcasm evident in the predictability of this production is not immediately apparent without careful listening; they act as a gentle set- up to the punch line that is the lyrics.

The seemingly lazy, predictable lyrics provide the real comedy in Overexposed. Lines appear to have involved very little thought, incorporating clichés, hilariously awful rhymes, and lines making no attempt to rhyme at all. Filler vocals are prevalent throughout: roughly 75 per cent of “The Man Who Never Lied,” for instance, is repeated lines and different variations of “oh.” Lyrics consistently avoid creating mental images, only evoking vague references to love, changing, touching, etc. The use of emotional singing to cover the terribleness of these vague words is constantly laughed at, particularly in the masterwork “Sad,” where the words “sad” and “scared” are shouted throughout.

Finally, the album analyzes the extreme egos of pop’s front-persons. The unchanging,

smug, underachieving voice throughout proclaims “I don’t have to try very hard.” The lack of vocal silence on the album appears to be a testament to the singer’s engulfing ego: when the focus could easily be on the instruments, the voice dominates with “oh’s,” often apparently mocking the simple musical phrases.

Overexposed offers a hilarious satirical look into the cheapness of the pop genre, and gets a lot right. However, while the jokes appear obvious to experienced, professional music reviewers, they are perhaps not apparent enough to the lay- listener. With a slightly more blunt approach, Maroon 5 could reach the same calibre as other comedy acts like Flight of the Conchords or Garfunkel and Oates.