Consumerism: Ben Folds Style

Musically, I have been going to the well a bit lately.  Ben Folds wrote a bunch of EPs after Rockin The Suburbs came out and released those instead of making a full disc.  Eventually a bunch of those tracks got reworked into Songs for Silverman.  One of them that didn’t make the full disc is a tune called All You Can Eat.  I’ve listened to it a million times, but just not recently.  It happened to come on while I was shuffling all my tunes and I thought, “I should post this song because it is so true about America.”  A quick search of YouTube and I found a video from Australia that uses the song as the background.

Ben married an Aussie and has lived there with his kids for a long time, so he’s probably been awakened much as I was when I went to Canada.  ”Awakened,” you say?  Yes – awakened to our “me” society.  Me want big cars.  Me wants to have 300 choices of cereal in the grocery store.  Me want my MTV.  Me want 30 colors of the same shirt in every different size even if it was made by workers who aren’t fairly paid, but I have to look good and I don’t want to pay the real cost of the garment, so please make it quick and dirty and I don’t care if its made with all kinds of toxic dyes and was probably made in a factory that is polluting like crazy and then ship the friggin thing all the way from China and then put in on the store shelves so I can get in my Tahoe (Hybrid, of course, because “I’m green” and I changed a light bulb b/c Oprah said to) that I leave idling until its the ideal temperature so my lazy fat ass can be comfortable while I go through the McDonald’s drive-thru to pickup some cheap-ass plastic toys (made with the finest Chinese lead) in a Happy Meal for my screaming kids who are drinking their 20oz Mountain Dews in plastic bottles which I will never recycle and then I’ll wonder why my 5yr old weighs 100lbs and then finally I can get to the store to find the garment I want in the big pile of shit and look in the mirror and feel good about myself because I look fantastic, damnit!…but I digress.

Two summers ago, we took a family vacation to Toronto.  I’ve always had this odd fascination with all things related to the Great White North.  I’m not sure if it has to do with my love of hockey or the fact that I watched Strange Brew starring Bob & Doug McKenzie like a million times as a kid or the fact that my brother listened to Rush on a constant loop. Anyway, we spent several days in Toronto.  It’s a beautiful city with a lot of similarities to Chicago.  I could live there in a second (except that I’d be poor because the US dollar is so weak right now).  I felt like it had everything that I could get here, but the people were thinner and there were more Prius’s and people were more socially conscious.  So after spending several days in Toronto we headed around the lake to Niagra Falls.  We could easily tell that we were nearing the States when the people got larger and the cars got larger.  We could count on one-hand the times we saw a Suburban or another truck of that size in Canada until the Falls.   When I listened to All You Can Eat today, it made me reminice of our trip there and the feelings we had.

I should make a note here that I really am not Anti-American, although it may sound like it from this post.  The more you read about large “green” movements that are accepted by the culture and governments – it’s almost always in a different country.  I’m just hoping that more people become aware and start to make changes for the good of the world and not just their own immediate carcass.

So anyway – without further ado, watch and listen to Ben Folds – All You Can Eat – and oh yeah – there are some f-bombs…

Bonus vid from Triple-J Radio