Here's what I want to know: do record companies really have separate divisions
dedicated solely to producing Stupid Gym Music? My gym plays songs I've never
heard anywhere else. (Thank goodness!) Presumably, the idea is to play upbeat
tunes to energize gym rats (and us smaller gym mice) and distract them from the
pain of the workout. However, that plan fails completely because of the bone-
numbingly stupid lyrics of those songs. Someone ought to suggest to the record
companies that they use a randomizing program to generate their lyrics; the
results would have to be an improvement.
You can't escape the music,
either, even on the locker room, which lends credence to the hypothesis that the
lyrics are carefully chosen to hide subliminal messages the gym broadcasts.
Unfortunately, those are probably less likely to be "You are getting stronger and
more toned," and more likely "Sign up for personalized sessions with a trainer at
our new low, low prices."
This morning while I was getting dressed
after my workout, they were playing one of these musical excrescences whose lyrics
were something like, "A real woman knows a real man when she sees one/ And a real
man, he just can't deny a woman's worth". My first thought was, 'Well,
there's some circular reasoning." After listing to an additional verse with
the line, "A real woman knows a real man always comes first," my second thought
was, 'Well, yes, they often do, but it's not really anything to brag about!'
Though I suppose they might have meant that a "real man" would expect a woman to
treat him as more important than anyone else, a distinctly less palatable concept.
I don't mind my original idea so much; after all, someone's got to be first,
unless you have the sort of split-second timing general only found in cheap
romance novels and magazine columns purporting to consist of true stories of
readers' amatory exploits. On the other hand, the credo that a real man is one
who is possessed of a sort of domestic megalomania, never happy unless he is the
sole focus of his woman's attention, is downright appalling.
It makes
me hope that song really is only played in gyms, and not, say, on radio stations
catering to a junior-high demograph.
I'd also like to know why it is
that none of my shoelaces can stay tied for more than five minutes, even when I
double-knot them, but thatŐs a whole 'nother rant.