I’m fairly certain I hate black olives only out of principle.
For years, I have been preaching a black-olive-hate agenda. Every party where pizza was ordered, every casserole completed, I was there with a grimace and a smug remark.
“Black olives are bitter, they ruin the taste of the entire dish and I’m fairly certain they raped my mother,” I would say.
Just recently, though, I was consuming a “cowgirl” pizza from Papa Murphy’s, and I was feeling lazy and apathetic. I decided to leave those damned olives where they lie and consume the pizza regardless. Turns out, they don’t taste so bad. Actually, they made me want to cook in a tin can over an open flame in the middle of the Arizona desert night. I guess I was in flavor country.
And this is when I realized that black olives are an awful lot like Christian-metalcore outing The Devil Wears Prada.
For years now, I have been preaching a TDWP-hate agenda. Every party where someone insisted that “HTML Roolz Dude” was a clever song title, I was there with a grimace and a smug remark.
“No. No it’s not,” I would say. (How foolish was I!)
OK, well, I may still be right about that. (OK, I AM still right about that.) But I think I simply hated them out of principle.
They are a breakdown band. They Auto-Tune the fuck out of their vocals, and it annoys the shit out of me. Or at least it did, in principle.
I was simply too afraid to admit that sometimes I just want to listen to a breakdown band. I would make a “shitty beer” metaphor here, but I don’t drink. I guess it’s similar to searching “hot naked chicks” on Youtube every once and a while, just to see what turns up. You KNOW nothing good will show up. All you’re going to get is a bunch of videos that have been tagged with “hot,” “naked,” and/or “chicks,” but they certainly contain none of the aforementioned. The number one hit will probably be a video of some guy’s dog that can make a noise like a helicopter. You’ll laugh, he’ll laugh, the dog will make war-noises and the 13-year-old boy inside of you will die a little bit.
But sometimes you just have to do something stupid to later better realize when you’re doing something smart.
I read an interview in Alternative Press with Mike Hranica, main vocalist for TDWP, where he stated that, when he joined the band, he loved the name because he thought it was referring to the novel and the social commentary within. Turns out, no one in the band had even read the novel, or even seen the movie for that matter. One of the members just saw the book laying around his mother’s house and thought it sounded cool.
Hranica said he wished they could change the name now, but their label advised against it.
I respect him for that, and therefore, I guess, I respect the band a bit more. And after listening to more of the group, I think he’s a pretty good vocalist.
I mean, in all fairness, it’s similar to the black olive being thrown onto a pizza labeled “cowgirl.” It’s not really the poor olive’s fault that some Aristotle back at the Papa Murphy’s headquarters decided that naming a pizza after a sexual position was the idea of the day.
So sometimes you do things your past self would loathe, and sometimes you join a band with a name that doesn't mean anything. At least you can ironically mock yourself sometime in the future.
But at the end of the day, you took a chance. You held your nose and tried something new, which is something you simply have to do from time to time, even if you only end up hating it out of principle.
