I don't spend a lot of time reading the news these days. I already know it's usually bad. I know there is good news out there, but the media long ago decided to only report the worst of it because they discovered people pay more attention to bad news, therefore they can get higher ratings and sell more advertisements.
There was a shooting, there was a murder, a nice old man can't pay his zillion dollar healthcare bill, a school closed, a politician did something horrible but rather than apologizing he blamed the other political party (and probably kicked a dog too), there was another battle in another war, another fifty species went extinct, the world is on fire, the sky is falling.
That kind of thing.
I have no need to know about any of that. Of course I feel compassion for the victims of bad things, but me feeling compassion isn't going to help any of them. The only thing reading or watching these news stories is going to do is make me feel bad and/or make me angry. I'd rather start my day with a smile, not a murderous rage, thank you very much. I figure if anything is actually really important, I'll hear about it somewhere else. A friend or family member will tell me, generally. So until I hear it from them, I'd just rather ignore the news.
Call it a news-fast if you want. Some people do. To me a fast is something that you are only doing temporarily and will stop doing at some point. I have no plan to go back to watching/reading the news anytime soon, so for me it's less a news-fast than simply a practice. Or... well, the opposite of a practice, because I'm not really doing anything. I guess I'm avoiding doing something in a way, which is doing something, but it's really no effort to not pick up the newspaper or open Apple news. Hmm..
Well, whatever it is, I'm doing it. Or not doing it. Whatever.
I did happen to catch a bit of news the other day, though. A friend sent it to me for comment. I'm sure most of you have seen it by now. It's the 50th anniversary of Dark Side of the Moon, which is in many people's opinion the best Pink Floyd album. Mine too. In honor of the event, the band changed their logo. To this:
My first reaction was, "Looks nice". If anything it's a little too clean, a little too digital looking instead of some analog job. But I like how they didn't just stamp a 50 on the original art and instead went for something a little different while still keeping it close enough to obviously be a play off the original. At any rate, this isn't the cover of the 50th anniversary edition, just a logo they adopted for the event.
But then I read the rest of what my buddy sent. Evidently there is some outrage from people accusing the band of becoming Woke. The funny thing is, a lot of the people yelling about this are also claiming that they were around in 1974 and bought the original album. I kind of doubt that. Bit if so, evidently they no longer have it and have somehow managed to avoid remembering what the iconic album cover looked like. Because it had a rainbow too.
I don't think many people were being Woke in 1974.
Music fans quickly flocked to Twitter and proceeded to mock the controversy and taunt those who were offended by the rainbow.
The entire thing reminded me of a more personal event.
I've been an Apple user for a long time. They may be the cool company now with the products everyone wants, but not so long ago they were the outcasts. But I digress. About 20 years ago or so, Apple changed their logo, from a bitten apple with a rainbow to the current solid bitten apple.
From this
to this
The rainbow pattern used to be a LSD thing, I think. Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out, right? The hippie colors. We can picture Timothy Leary walking around in a rainbow suit as he tried to get everyone high. Steve Jobs was very much a part of that culture and in fact credited a lot of his success to LSD, so it only makes sense that he used a rainbow for his company's logo. A lot of people were. Anyway, I suspect them moving to a solid logo was simply an attempt to move the company beyond this druggie, rebellious image.
I grew up with that original logo, so it has a special place in my heart. A few years after they changed it, I ordered some stickers with the original rainbow logo and I put them over the new logo on my Powerbook and iPod (that will tell you how long ago this was).
On a trip back home to the States I was working in a cafe and a guy came up to be and accused me of using the Apple logo to make a pro-gay statement. This took me by surprise and I was kind of flabbergasted. I remember telling him that it was the old Apple logo. He didn't believe me, but he went away so nothing more came of it. So yeah, I guess I was accused of being Woke, before that was a thing.
I never got any other negative reaction to using that rainbow logo. I've thought more than once about ordering some more stickers to do the same on my current laptop, but I haven't yet. Am I cheap, lazy, or is part of me worried about another bad reaction like that? I'd say the second if you asked me, but I wouldn't be surprised if part of me is worried about the last.
Meanings change, and that meaning of the rainbow morphed from a symbol of the drug induced counter-culture to a symbol of gay pride. That's fine. I mean, some things just change and that's neither good nor bad, it just is. Slang gives words new meanings constantly and it's not exactly uncommon for these new meanings to entirely replace the old ones. So too with symbols.
But this outrage over the change to this particular symbol seems more manufactured than organic. And we know who excels at manufacturing outrage.
That's another reason I avoid the news these days. Because it's not the news. As I mentioned above, the modern news has always had the agenda of shocking us to make us watch more. This really kicked into high gear after O.J. when they switched to a 24 hour news format. But even with that, as bad as it was, it was still objectively news.
But somewhere along the way from there to here that changed. You turn on the news now and it is opinion masquerading as news. Usually this opinion is aimed at telling us to hate everyone and everything in the other tribe, to disbelieve everything they say, and sometimes even to commit violence against them.
That's where this irrational anger towards Pink Floyd's new logo comes from and this really rubs me the wrong way.
Personally I don't care what your politics are. You can be socialist, MAGA Republican, Democrat, moderate, anarchist, whatever. We might disagree on ideas, but we can respect each other and have conversation together. I may not like some of the Woke stuff the more extreme radicals on the left are going for, but I'm not going to verbally attack anyone over it. The world is already full of enough bad stuff, why add to it by hating each other?
Yeah yeah, I'm not going to get all hippie on you. Peace and love, man. Be groovy. I just don't like all the anger that's going around these days. This outrage over Pink Floyd's new logo is just a symptom of the problem.
Anyway. After reading that story about the 50th anniversary cover, I kind of wish I hadn't. I want to just enjoy the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest music albums of the prior century without wasting time thinking of a controversy over them still using a rainbow.
They have a pretty cool set planned, by the way. I won't be buying it, but looks great. I'm sure the remixed tracks will eventually find their way to digital and streaming so whenever that happens I'll enjoy the new mixes as well.
To anyone who haven't heard the album before, do yourself a favor and listen:
Even better, find a place to listen that doesn't have the pauses between the tracks.
❦
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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. |
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