Look at me live la vida loca.
Ricky Martin won a total of four awards on the Video Music Awards (VMA, for short) tonight, and two of those were the international awards that no one really takes note of. To be honest, that's a lot fewer than I expected. (I have very low expectations for my peers.) I must have that damn song memorized by now. Is that because it's my favorite song? Hardly. Because I'm part of some Ricky Martin music-video-reinactment group? Nope. It's because no matter where you go, someone is livin' la vida loca viceriously through their radio for the brief minutes that the song is on. I don't understand it. The song came out of nowhere, and suddenly it's infested everyday life like some sort of cockroach. The employees at Madison, Wisconsin's Best Buy are subjected to it so many times a day that I'm surpised they haven't, to quote the song itself, put "bullets in their brains" yet. I asked one cashier how often she'd heard it, and with a weary smile said, "Too many. But I think he isn't going to be around much longer.". That was a month ago. To my (and likely her) serious unrest and concern, Ricky Martin is still around and pumping out the Latin music that all the hipsters and in-style chickadees are swooning over.
Not that I have a big problem with Ricky Martin or anything. His music could be a lot worse, and he really is a beautiful man, but I don't know how much more I can take! Granted, I think he deserved the "Best Dance Video" award; a dozen chicks shaking their boobs and butts and about ten half naked in the rain can't be a bad thing, after all. And I guess Best Pop Video, well, he was the lesser of many evils in that situation, if I remember correctly.
He does have some idea of what he's doing, though. After all, a guy who spends a VMA performance surrounded by women dressed in nothing but sparkly nylon has to have some clue what he's doing, right?!
There are some things coming out of all of this that cause me concern, however.
1: Ricky Martin paves the way for Latin music. Good thing. However, he also paves the way for wannabe, lame, lethargic, psuedo-Latin music. Bad thing. No matter where you are, someone is bound to pick up on it just because they think it sounds like Ricky Martin and, therefore, must be good.
2: Some of Ricky Martin's music, naturally, is in Spanish. Do you know how pathetic it is to hear some silly, little, white girl try and sing along with that? Do you know how much more pathetic it is when they think that just because of that, they can speak Spanish?
3: Do you know how many times I've heard that song today alone, or pieces of it elsewhere?
I'm not going to turn this into a total Ricky-bashing session, or I'll get all sorts of email from very angry girls and/or people calling me racist (I'm not). Instead, I'm going to move on to something else before I forget what I was going to write about it. Bonjour, poppets.