Sludge = Trance "Oh eeeyah, bleat bleat bleat"

Does it take much talent to write "dance" music? No. Never did.

Years and years ago, Amanda Lear drily said with a world-weary smile, "What is the message? Get up and dance."

With few hybrid exceptions, from her own "Queen of Chinatown" to her pal Mick's "Miss You" and Davies' "Superman," few "dance" tunes bothered with any kind of lyric. It was just ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk, and a self-important "disc jockey" blending a ka-thunk with a ka-chink with a da-blob.

It got so ridiculous, even Ethel Merman and Cab Calloway issued singles. Then, oh joy, there were hybrid variations mixing in a bit of punk or...electronica.

All it means is that no matter what kind of asshole you are, an old school Nigga, or a pretentious nerd, there's a ka-thunk with dirty lyrics, stupid lyrics, druggy lyrics or just electronic noise and a catch-phrase.

Since the only way to hear this shit, other than being IN the disco, is on GooTube, the trite music has to...yes...be mated to trite visuals. If it's old School Nigga, it's just giant lips, gritty streets, brown "booty" in a thong, and people getting shot. If it's druggy or electronic shit, then you get sunsets, speeded-up footage of city traffic, and oh-so-arty surrealism (a fully dressed man standing in the ocean, a nude woman reading a book, etc. etc.) Oh, how about a fully clothed WOMAN standing in the ocean? How NEW!

Anybody actually make money or get famous off this shit? Hardly ever. The big deal is that hardly anyone LOSES money, or too much, because this crap is so easy to do. It's all programmed. Set up the beats, toss in the noises and "FX," and get some cunt or some dickhead to mewl or grunt, with a ton of sweetening to cover a thin voice or one that's out of tune. Maybe have the song title repeated enough that people will remember it the next morning.

Why bother putting this junk on GooTube? Is it for chimps who are receptionists in failing offices, and need something mindless to glance at once in a while as they file their papers and their nails?

THIS particularly odious example doesn't even have anything worth looking at. If this is the woman singing, she needs a major overhaul, because she's booooooo-ring.

Enough of that dull face. Cue the postcard view of some faceless cityscape. They all look alike now. They're all full of half-breeds taking drugs and jumping up and down for a few hours before hooking up and polluting the planet with more people.

Trance. Christ, is that an accurate term or what? That's right, go through life with an artificial heartbeat, a catch-phrase slogan repeated, and a lot of noises. It's not much different from being on a train after a long day and slipping into a nod. That's a trance, too. Or to quote an amusing phrase in a dopey dance tune from Agnetha Faltskog, "I got a mind but I put it on vacation." Right. Can't afford a lobotomy? Put THIS stuff on and go into a TRANCE.

All it takes is a machine that produces beats, a machine that recycles "samples" of other beats and noises, and paying some cunt a fiverrrrrr to mewl a few noises (in this case, it seems to be "oh eeeyah, bleat bleat bleat") and the song title.

Every generation has had this kind of shit, going back to the invention of elevator MUZAK. Aural wallpaper is another term for it. The people who do this are walnut-brains. At least Kraftwerk had the sense to make some kind of "art" out of what they knew was soulless pulses intended to bring animation to robots. Dance dance dance, suck suck suck, it's all the soundtrack to monotony. Trance is limbo, but without the joy of actually doing the limbo.