…modern fiction is “more punk rock than music will ever be again.”

A city-sponsored report claims the Seattle “music industry” generates $650 million annually and 8,700 jobs.

Granted, this includes music teachers, office workers at piped-in-music companies (Muzak was headquartered here for a few years), symphony members, etc. But still, there’s real careers out in what many people still think of as a marginal starving-artist activity. It’s just that “rock star” isn’t the most stable of those careers.

There’s an analogy there for word people such as I, somewhere, I’m sure.

Someone at Slashdot, in a comment that seems to have scrolled off the site, wrote:

“In a country where it’s okay to fry mentally ill people to death, let any eejit carry a gun, consume a huge proportion of the world’s resources and invade a country for dubious reasons, exposing a bit of human flesh is greeted with the sort of outrage that you’d think would be reserved for the end of the world.”

Of course, that’s the whole point. The right-wing sleaze machine loves violence (physical, verbal, emotional, etc.) and loathes sex (especially pleasurable, loving, or otherwise “girly” sex).

And the youth-marketing industry, which devised the Super Bowl halftime and most of the Super Bowl commercials, loves everything hard and “edgy” and hates anything soft and subtle. Faced with record-low TV viewership levels among the corporately-prized young male demographic, marketers are trying to outdo one another in vulgarity and desperation. It’s not that their audiences want this; it’s what they, the marketers, want their would-be audiences to want.

So, in the commercials, we got “jokes” about the following: A farting horse, little children saying a bleeped-out cussword, a wheelchair crash, a dog biting a man’s testicles, a talking monkey hitting on a woman, an old man beating an old woman, a football referee refusing to talk to a nagging wife, a man getting an unexpected bikini wax, and the very idea that a skinny man could love a heavy woman. All of these were just fine-‘n’-dandy with CBS and the NFL. (As were the two erectile-dysfunction-drug commercials, one of which included explicit language.)

In a further attempt to attract young nonviewers, CBS turned the halftime festivities over to sister company MTV. It staged a predictably rude and trite affair with mercifully short performances by has-beens Kid Rock, P. Diddy, Justin Timberlake, and Janet Jackson. Aside from Jackson’s reprise of the oldie “Rhythm Nation,” all the lyrics were about rude dudes boasting of their sexual-conquistadory prowess. Again, all that was OK’d in advance by all concerned.

Then, in the last dance move of the show, Timberlake (a mediocre dancer-singer known primarily for his write-ups in the gossip pages as the first boy to spear Britney) ripped open Jackson’s tear-away blouse and, officially “accidentally,” slipped her bra off as well.

This is far from the first “costume accident” on broadcast TV. (Remember Lucy Lawless’s rendition of the U.S. national anthem at a hockey game back in ’99?)

And CBS has been willing to show seminude women in recent years–as C.S.I. corpses, or as Chicago Hope hospital patients. And the network runs the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, but that’s all edgy and teasy, the way the Super Bowl was supposed to be.

But, like that other youth-marketing vehicle Maxim, rude-‘n’-crude’s OK, but pure physical beauty’s taboo beyond taboo.

Jeff Laurie at Sex News Daily claims the Jackson flash was newsworthy because “like most breasts, it’s scarce, and seeing it is getting a sneak peak at the forbidden fruit.” Uncovered breasts, of course, are far less scarce than they used to be. They’re in fashion magazines, in Oscar-winning movies, on Emmy-winning cable shows, and all over the Internet. But they’re not in “edgy” youth marketing, which is all about forever teasing and never pleasing.

And they’re not in the right-wing bombast culture, forever stuck in the sixth-grade notion that boys who like to blow stuff up are Real Men, but that boys who like girls are faggots.

So now we have, as a blatantly cynical election-year stunt, the Bush FCC promising a swift and thorough investigation into the incident; all while the Bushies keep stalling about 9/11, the Cheney energy plan, and the lack of real causes for invading Iraq.

What does it all prove? That in a supposedly sexed-up pop culture, one of the purest, simplest forms of sexual expression still threatens certain powerful interests–precisely because it threatens the premises of their power.

Sub Pop and PopLlama are officially not part of the evil RIAA.

HERE ARE the two most important parts of the big football telecast:

• Janet Jackson’s attempt to prove, once and for all, she and Michael are different people.
• The anti-tobacco ad that wasn’t by a tobacco company, TheTruth.com’s “Shards O’ Glass.”

The game itself was a surprisingly tight, action-packed affair, ending with a last-second field goal. And it was won by the northern team (the New England Patriots), barely beating the southern team (the Carolina Panthers). Perhaps it’s an omen that someone from, say, Vermont or Massachusetts might whoop a certain adopted Texan later this year.

WHEN mix CDs are outlawed, only outlaws will thump 160 bpm.

Seattle Weekly’s had two strong cover stories in a row.

This week’s piece by Tim Appelo wondering why Ken Kesey ceased to be a great writer expressed (and, thankfully, didn’t try to fully answer) all the questions I had when Kesey died and all the obits ran paragraph after paragraph about his drugging and drinking and only a couple of sentences about his writing.

Appelo’s piece followed Philip Dawdy’s long, haunting pontification about last summer’s suicide by beloved KUOW personality Cynthia Doyon. We’re just a couple of months away from what will probably be a string of media hype pieces marking ten years since Kurt Cobain’s death. We seem not to have learned a damned thing since then about taking care of ourselves or one another.

“Clinic,” the weekly live-music showcase at Re-bar, is still going on, despite the decline and fall of its co-sponsor Tablet.

Tuesday night’s edition went like they all did. Three bands played (pictured below: the unabashed loudness that is The Octabites). An improv troupe of “naughty nurses” told a few jokes and mingled among the crowd, passing out promotional tchotchkes for Tablet and Toys in Babeland.

After three years and change, the last fortnightly Tablet tabloid is out. Officially, the soft ad market did it in, along with its also-ran status in the local “alt” media universe and its confusing every-other-week schedule. But I’d add that the paper’s concept was contradictory from the get-go.

It never paid its writers a cent; expecting them to work just for the privilege of getting their statements made.

But, aside from a few political conspiracy-corner columns (which never challenged the orthodox-“radical” views of the paper’s target audience), its content was almost uniformly perky and light. The rag acted as if it was daring and rebellious by printing only positive reviews and by running lotsa puff pieces for advertisers.

In the end, Tablet had become a thin publicity sheet, not a true “alternative” at all. Its instigators plan to resurface later this spring in a monthly “magazine” format (no, I don’t know what that means) selling ads to both Seattle and Portland youth-culture businesses. I wish them success, and hope they’ll use the opportunity to reformulate their approach.

NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS over the next ten months, the tattoos shown at the bottom of the PunX for Dean page will look quite dated by ought-five.

I’m in a depressed mood today. I’m old enough to remember Watergate, the sixties assassinations, and the other horrors of X-treme politics past. With all the unreconstructed Nixonians running loose in the Bush wannabe-dictatorship (not to mention the guys whose apparent ideal of good governance is Pinochet-era Chile), we may see even dirtier tricks this time around. And they could even blame “terrorists” for the nastiest tricks.

It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

WE’VE NOT HERETOFORE discussed the Lord of the Rings movies, except to bemoan that their merchandising rights are controlled (and have been humongously exploited) by John Fogerty’s least-favorite record mogul Saul Zaentz. But the current New Yorker has a fond but not fawning essay comparing the films, not unfavorably, both to Tolkien’s original books and to Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle operas. Along the way, the essay gives particular praise to the one member of the films’ creative team with the closest New York connection, composer (and original Saturday Night Live bandleader) Howard Shore.

The SeaTimes sez Krist Novoselic might run for lieutenant governor. The article briefly noted how another ex-musician, big band leader Vic Myers, served five terms as Lt. Gov., which in this state is a largely ceremonial post. At least if Novoselic does run, he’ll have something to talk with the media about next spring other than the ten-year anniversary of Cobain’s passing, a topic which he’s said he doesn’t like discussing.

THURSDAY I SAW Jean Chretien’s farewell speech as Canada’s prime minister. It made me want to move there even more.

Here was a guy fluent in two languages (that’s two more than our federal leader), pointing with pride to everything that’s happenned in his country during his leadership–balanced budgets, decent health care, staying the heck out of Iraq, same-sex marriages, even the careers of Shania Twain and Alanis Morrisette.

Then came the clincher: Chretien’s barbs at the opposition coalition, whatever it’s called this week:

“Canadians should beware of those on the right who put profit ahead of community . . . beware of those on the right who put the narrow bottom line ahead of everything else.”Canadians should beware of those on the right who would reduce taxes at the expense of necessary public services . . . beware of those on the right who do not care about reducing social and environmental deficits. Canadians should beware of those on the right who would weaken the national government because they do not believe in the role of government.”

You think we could ever get a guy that on-the-bean?

AN ACQUAINTANCE NAMED RUSSELL held a “Loud Jacket Party” last Saturday night. The loudest jacket I currently own is a double-breasted navy blue number with silver pinstripes, but nobody seemed to mind.

My favorite new local band, Lushy (more about them on a future date, I promise) played two sets of ultracool jazz-pop. Delicately tasty cocktails were served up by trained professionals. Party guests read aloud from Russian history books when they couldn’t think of anything witty to say, which wasn’t often.

The center and right faces in this pic belong to the extraordinary party goddess DJ Superjew and cool-and-strange-music connisseur Otis F. Odder.

MTV’s SN magazine, a tiresome rote exercise in the branding of bland corporate entertainment as somehow daring and edgy. I used to defend MTV and its spinoff projects from the unholier-than-thou culture critics. I can’t anymore. It’s not that SN (or MTV itself) is a dangerous influence on our children; just the opposite. It’s an irrelevant nothing, as loud and as trite as the global-superstar acts it showcases. And it’s a mouthpiece for the major record labels, an institution whose sleazeball tactics against its own fan base are giving it a public black eye from which it may never recover.

I’m now adding this paragraph later that same day. Upon further pondering, SN is superficially not all that different from some of the more superficial alt-music magazines of recent vintage (you know, the ones filled with one-page, big-picture, few-words puff pieces about rising young alterna-celebrities). You can interpret that as meaning either that the independent music press has sunk to MTV attention-span levels, or that MTV’s nakedly stealing indie-music shticks for the umpteen-hundredth time to prop up its illusion of street credibility, or something in between the two.

…to get together and “Take Back Our Country,” little pink houses and all. Only he doesn’t exactly say how this is to be accomplished…