"The Button, And Whether You Will Push It"
Ah, it's a pleasure—sort of—to see that old arguments never die, they just get more ridiculous. Except now instead of it being The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones (or even the Beatles vs Elvis; yes, I remember that one), it's now The Beatles vs The World!
Which might not be an altogether bad idea for an animated film of the kaiju eiga variety, but that's a topic for another time. And come to think of it, the obvious prequel, The Beatles vs KISS!, is far more engaging, anyway. (Henry, we need to get started on the comic-book adaptation right now. Or do you think we should skip that and go straight to The Beatles vs GWAR?)
Me, I don't know that I have a dog in this fight. While I like most of the Beatles' songs well enough and have a fair amount of personal respect for the late George Harrison, the most recent CDs I've bought were The Clash: The Singles and the extended CD reissue of The Who, Live at Leeds, which no doubt says something interesting about me, although I'm not sure what. As far as I'm concerned the definitive words on the subject were penned by David Bowie, by way of Mott the Hoople:
"And my brother's back at home
with his Beatles and his Stones
you know I never got it off
on that revolution stuff."
Given more time to think about it and an inclination to be serious (which I most definitely lack), I might go off on at rant about how the Sixties and The Beatles and All That Crap were really all about the discovery, by the vast multinational corporations that in time evolved to become CBS and Time-Warner, that there were vast mountains of money to be made by packaging badly written and hastily produced slabs of incoherent adolescent rebellion and marketing them to the easily bored children of the bourgeoisie—I mean, Wild in the Streets, anybody? Or how about Thunderclap Newman?
But never mind that. This is Ultimate Geek Fu, and the object here is to pose a thought-provoking but not at all serious question. To do so today, I need a prop. Ah, this one will do:
No, it's not HAL's eyeball. This, my friends, is a Magic Button. You can only press it once, but when you do, the song you are thinking of at the moment you press it will be instantly, utterly, and irretrievably erased from existence for all of eternity, leaving you as the only person who ever knew it once existed.
What song will you pick, and how fast will you hit the button?
Let the arguments begin.
ULTIMAGE GEEK FU runs every Wednesday. Have a question that's just bugging the heck out of you about Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Battlestar Gallactica, Farscape, Firefly, Fringe, Heroes, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Smallville, The X-Files, X-Men, The Man From Atlantis, or pretty much any other SF-flavored media property? Send it to slushpile@thefridaychallenge.com with the subject line, "Geek Fu," and we'll stuff it in the queue.
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