Insidious Trends

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ip8Si7bORk

This is the last of the songs I'm going to show you from my 1983 album Alcohol and Other Drugs, and in a couple of ways it takes us back full circle to where we were over a month ago with my entry about Novelty. As I said back then:

...life is a unique process which creates "pockets of negative entropy". What is the opposite of life? It's the formless, shapeless state of maximum entropy. As living beings, we crave those surprising moments of synchronicity, the novelty of uncovering new connections, the promise of a new day... and people who lose that in their lives are moving towards death more quickly.

When I wrote Insidious Trends back in 1982 I was thinking about the love/hate relationship we have with the constant inundation of media: we complain about information overload (a topic of another song I showed you last year, Gimme the News) but we also constantly crave the novelty of new input. While this song might seem to be a protest against a hype machine which if anything is exponentially more revved up now than it was when I wrote this song almost thirty years ago, the concluding line of the song admits that I still love the rush of seeing and learning new things, having new experiences, being part of the accelerating rush towards whatever it is we're headed towards. The Singularity? This word seems to moving towards mainstream consciousness more and more within the last few months.

When I was compiling the list of 26 songs which I planned to use in my Imagining the Tenth Dimension project, most of those songs were written in 2002, with a few exceptions like this one. Those of you who have been the longest term fans of this project will already have seen a previous version of the above video. Using footage found from archive.org, Talking Dog's Ryan Hill created the original version of the video a couple of years ago, and now I've taken that video and re-performed the song, overlaying my performance over Ryan's montage of classic footage from the last sixty or more years.

INSIDIOUS TRENDS
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Step right up and try a few
These ones sure look good on you
Take one home and try it for a week
They’re the very latest fashion now
You can do without ‘em but I don’t know how
And of course they carry our money back guarantee

Yes there’s always somethin new
Tryin to get a hold on you
Yes there’s always somethin new
Tryin to sink its teeth in you

You can see it on your TV set
You can hear it on the radio
You can play it on your stereo
And you probably will (you know that you will)
And in every magazine and paper
They’ll play you the same old song
It’s big and new and made for you
And it’s the best thing to come along

Yes there’s always something new...

They will break down your resistance
Like they were breakin down a door
They’ll just hit you again and again and again
Till you can’t take no more (you’ll give in for sure)
It’s a million dollar gamble for a billion dollar prize
Who can keep you the latest on the longest artificial high?

(Instrumental with collage of commercial clips/hype)

Hey!

Yes there’s always something new
Tryin to get a hold on you
Yes there’s always some big deal
Sayin nothing else is real
Yes there’s always something new
Tryin to get a hold on you
Yes there’s always something new
Tryin to get a hold on you
(Step right and try a few, these ones sure look good on you
Take one home and try it for
They’re the very latest fashion now, you can do without em but I don’t know how
And of course they carry our money back guarantee)
Money back
Money back guarantee, money back
Money back guarantee, money back
Money back, money back

Oh, insidious trends are creepin through my life
Insidious trends are creepin through my life
Insidious trends are creepin through my life
Insidious trends are keeping me alive

Other songs we've look at from this album:
We All are Chemicals
Gimme a Beer!
Just a Shy Guy
Trying to Escape
Courage

Once again, I'd like to thank those of you who have thought enough of these songs to want to go over to the Tenth Dimension Digital Items store and purchase a copy of the 11 songs on this album. Enjoy the journey!

Next - Turtles and Timelike Entanglement