If you stick around me long enough, you'll hopefully realize that a lot of the things I write are exaggerated for comedic effect. I deal in hyperbole. If it's funny, I'll probably turn it up to 11.

I also do a lot of fake pride. I'm a deeply insecure and self-loathing person, so to keep from constantly self-deprecating, I sometimes switch it up and go over the top with elaborate self-aggrandizement. This is also hyperbole. It's a comedic device. I can assure you that I'm pretty much always going to think worse of myself than you possibly could, so please temper your expectations.

I will riff on a joke or funny thing endlessly. I will riff it to death, then learn necromantic arts, eldritch and terrible, so I can resurrect it and keep riffing on it until I kill it again. I will assume whatever character is necessary to make the joke keep working, even if that means making myself out to be a horrible person. I am a horrible person, both in that I'm horrible at being a person and also horrible as a person, but generally not in a funny way. So if I claim to have seventeen kids or that I email reporters my detailed plans of war (purely hypothetically, of course, as I can't imagine any situation wherein that would be funny), it's probably a bit that I'm doing. I've probably been doing it for so long that everyone has forgotten how it started and everyone but me wishes it would end. Such is the way of things.

I have the sort of ADHD which makes me overuse parentheses and subordinate clauses, so if I'm going to do it, I try to be funny about it. Like in that last paragraph up there, I was using that parenthetical phrase to make a sarcastic joke about fashy dipshits (and here I'm using this one to point out that I can be serious and joking at the same time because, in the fine tradition of comedy, if I don't laugh, I'll cry). I'm also anus-clenchingly meta. And I employ appalling language to achieve this.

Basically, you shouldn't read anything I write because it's up its own ass. There's that self-deprecation again. I'm fucking good at it too. I'm so good at being up my own ass that sometimes I even fool myself.

There's a reason why I never made it on Facebook. I don't want most of the people I know to read anything I write. Only when I'm blissfully anonymous can I let my guard down and lie to you all for shits and giggles. Sorry.

Early white rock and roll was mostly singing the words "rock" and/or "roll" repeatedly while stealing licks from Black musicians. I mean, I get that young people up to that point had gotten bored with ragtime and Beethoven (which my autocorrect doesn't know how to spell because techbros are culturally illiterate philistines) but surely after the seventeenth or eighteenth song called "Rock Roll Rockin' Roll Rock and Rollin' the Rock" they must have felt a little like maybe Ode to Joy wasn't so bad after all. I know there's a limit to the number of times I can hear the word "rock" without going quietly insane and writing the names of all the horrible singers who've forced me to listen to their endless repetitions of "rock" on various rocks with which I can bash in their heads.

I digress.

I am aware that a lot of early rap music was mostly saying the word "rap" over a background of other people's music, if Rapper's Delight is to be believed. At least early rap evolved into the evocative music it is today, with the capacity to speak across generations, to people of all races and creeds, the message of racial justice and fucking the police. Whereas rock and roll evolved into The Eagles. I trust I've made my point.

It's interesting, I can't think of another popular art form which spent its early years expressing itself entirely through the use of its own name. It's like if Michelangelo had painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the pope had come in and said, "Mike, what the fuck is this? I hired you to paint angels and God and stuff and you've painted a giant picture of an easel and palette." Or maybe Martha Graham could have originated the style of dance where the dancers all spell out "Martha Graham" using their bodies.

"Boy, I sure am playing rock and roll music!" seems to be a lyrical theme of rarely-matched fervor among musicians of the 1950s and 60s. The only comparable thematic material is, "I am a teenager," as written by 40-year-old songwriters to be sung by 23-year-old crooners about hypothetical 16-year-old girls. Maybe we were better off with, "Boy, I sure am playing rock and roll music!"

Also, the genre of "rock and roll" didn't really settle down for the first decade or so of its existence. Everything was rock and roll. I'm surprised they didn't try to pass Beethoven off as rock and roll, based on the breadth of the genre at a certain point. Any genre that can encompass Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis, and the Beach Boys shouldn't sneer at a little Bach cantata up in this bitch. And lest you think that Ella Fitzgerald wasn't rock and roll, I caution you that during the 1950s white adults thought that anything which wasn't liturgical music sung by monks was rock and roll, the devil's music. Anything which had a tinge of melanin was anathema. Jazz was rock and roll. Rhythm and blues was and were rock and roll. Pop was rock and roll.

But now we have a fairly stable system where every single song, possibly every single note of every single song, has its own genre. Thus, by exploding convention, we've arrived back where we began. Rock and/or roll is all. Rock rock rock rock.