“Of course I’ll work for free” says no person ever

Shock and awe this morning, after literally no one in human history came to you today and agreed that they would work for utterly no pay whatsoever.

The man – 26-year-old Jake Henderson, whose name and age we made up because he is purely fictitious – made the startling announcement this morning, saying he’d do that thing you want him to spend several dozen hours this weekend doing for you without being fairly compensated.

“Of course I’ll do it for no money,” he said taking time out of his busy schedule being a nonentity to speak to reporters. “DJ-ing at your birthday this Friday, playing guitar at your club event on Saturday, or even coming up to your wedding to take photographs, edit them, and then email them all to you – I’ll do all of this, and you don’t even have to give me a dime.”

“I know it takes hours of my time to design a website entirely from scratch, and that this is a skill that has taken years of study, practice, and hundreds of dollars’ worth in software, tuition and time to master, but you don’t have to pay me,” he continued in a statement that does not exist because you’d be crazy to write it. “I’m pretty sure my landlord and the bank accept the exposure I’ll get from doing this as legal tender for paying rent or my various living expenses.”

And Jake is just one of thousands of people who are not alive, and never have been, who share this controversial opinion.

“Jake’s totally right,” said Eric Smith, who, even if you were to look through the annals of human history, delving into even the most ancient records of our species, you would not locate because he has never existed and never will. “It’s like I said to my boss the other day: of course I’ll come in this weekend and at 7am on Sunday and not claim overtime from you.”

And scientists now say research shows that this is merely the tip of the iceberg.

“You think people would say, ‘what the hell, what kind of idiot would ask me to come in this Saturday when I clearly asked for this weekend off three weeks ago?’ or, ‘no ways, I’m not doing that shit for free – at least respect me enough to pay for my transport to the venue halfway across goddamn town’,” said head researcher for the Institute of Shit No One Says, Thomas Everson. “But our research indicates that of course I don’t mind if you went to the fridge and drank the last of my milk without asking, and that it’s totally okay if you borrowed my car without my permission and then didn’t clean up the burger crumbs or even contribute towards petrol costs.”

This study also suggests that yeah man, go ahead, change the channel right in the middle of whatever I’m watching, I don’t mind.

“It might sound like we’re living in a crazy world,” said Everson, “but you know what, if we agree to split the bill equally at a restaurant, you don’t have to feel guilty about ordering the $17 spare rib special, or even throw in a tip for the waitress.”

Concert are the worst. Seriously.

Do you like concerts? Well, you're either a blithering idiot in dire need of being committed to an asylum or a masochist.

There is something inherently unpleasant about going to concerts that I’ve never quite understood. Whether you’re a braces-equipped red-faced screaming fourteen-year-old girl at a Justin Bieber “concert” or a sad black-shirted, jean-wearing old man dealing with his mid-life crisis by using out-of-fashion slang and going to see bands that were huge when the afore-mentioned “Beliebers” were mere protein in a nutsack, the one thing that we all have in common is how shitty the pilgrimage to see our favourite musicians in action truly is.

The journey

All concerts start, of course, with the journey. One of the problems with any sufficiently large or popular band is that it's pretty much a predetermined fact that you aren’t the only one who likes them, and no matter how advanced we fool ourselves into thinking our society is, there will always be four-hour traffic jams between our point of departure and the venue parking. Naturally, no matter how much parking the venue boasts, there will never actually be enough parking. Besides, even if you do manage to conjure up the Sainthood-worthy miracle of finding an available spot you’ll never be that fucking guy who found a Lucky Place Right By The Entrance. That doesn’t happen to people like you. Ever. And so, on top of your sanity-testing car trip or first-hand experience of what a sardine feels in a tin (read: bus trip), you’ll be forced to enjoy a ten-minute walk to the entrance.

The queue

“Well,” I hear you say, “at least the awful car trip is over. We’re at the venue – it’s all plain sailing from here, right?” Wrong. Thanks to detestable society-ruining arseholes who have nothing better to do with their lives than come eighteen hours early to the venue and set up camp in the queue like refugees escaping a dictatorial regime, you’ll have to wait. And of course, you’ll spend that waiting time standing, because who the fuck brings a chair to a concert?

Security

Having spent a considerable portion of your life sandwiched between drunk foreigners and that irritating group of girls who play the songs you’re about to hear out loud on their goddamn phones while screeching along to the lyrics, it’s now time to face the security door. Obviously, there’s a problem with your ticket. It doesn’t matter how many fucking holograms there are on it or whether you have the receipt, invariably it will become the long-lost twin of that single pocket of oranges you made the mistake of trying to buy at Pick ‘n Pay, as the booth attendant attempts again and again to scan the barcode. Having given the person your life story and repeated claims that the ticket is, in fact, legitimate, they reluctantly nod you on to the security checkpoint – or as I like to call it, the “destroy your human dignity and invade your personal space” checkpoint. If you’re a woman (I’m not), you’ll have your handbag disemboweled and upturned, the black-shirted angry huge guy in the SECURITY shirt rummaging through its contents like a druid trying to divine the future from the entrails of a chicken. If you’re a man (I am), you’ll no doubt get your nuts fondled by a security guard like he’s an enthusiastic child trying to guess the contents of a particularly large Christmas present the night before he can open it, jiggling and juggling it to and fro as he wonders “what could it be, what could it be? A gun? A knife? A penis? What could it be?!"

I can’t be totally ungrateful, however. Thanks to concerts, I now know that unopened bottled water poses a severe risk to massive crowds. Who knows what clear liquid explosive those AquaVie bottles could be holding? And cameras, god forbid, let’s not let those in. After all, we wouldn’t want you to take non-cameraphone photos that do the concert any justice, no!

Finally, you’re in – time for a drink!

Having had your basic human rights violated, you make it into the venue intact save your dignity and perhaps the overwhelming feeling of self-disgust at being publically violated. To assuage your great shame at having been felt up like a try-before-you-buy prostitute, you’ll want a drink. Well, I hope you’ve taken two jobs, because concert beer is expensive. Hell, even concert water is expensive. And I hope that second job pays cash, because there will never be a card machine. Okay, you have your beer? Down it. Have another. And another. And maybe one more. You’ll need it, trust me. Drink it all right there by the bar (it took fucking long enough to get your spot, you might as well use it to the fullest). There’s no point taking it with you to your spot in the crowd because either (A) it’ll take so long to get there that it’ll be finished by the time you arrive or (B) as you try to push your way through the unmoving crowd of sneering assholes who take your “Sorry, coming through” as a personal insult against their mother, entire family, culture and religion, you’ll spill it all anyway.

Found my spot!

Once you’ve given up on getting to the front and decide to settle for a lesser space roughly as far from the stage as your car is from the front entrance, it’s time for the concert to begin, right? Well, not quite. You see, if a concert is advertised to start at eight, it’ll start at 9.30. After all, the cynical millionaires who are profiting from your concert-going experience need time to sell crappy merchandise and overpriced alcohol, and what better way to do that than to make you wait another hour or so while the stagehands pretend to still be setting up sound and lights and all that stuff that was obviously prepared hours ago?

As you stand there, you’ll slowly become keenly aware of the kinds of people who share your taste in music. Take, for example, the man standing so close behind you that it makes you feel like you’re in your own Miley Cyrus music video. His uneven, too-loud breath will waft down your neck in a warm, fetid wave of air you can’t ignore. The smell of it, however, is what really gets you. It’s a stench that can only be described as “fascinatingly awful”, a kind of olfactory car crash you can’t tear your nose from. Imagine old, musky honey, mix it with the bile-raising smell of wet leaves that have been lying in a mouldy drain too long, and blend this with the unforgettable tang of the unwashed, sweaty skin between the thighs of a fat person wearing tight nylon pants. It’s like staring into the sun, but with your nose. The first few sniffs are of awe –‘Can I really be smelling that?’ you wonder, ‘Could a smell so horrific exist, and from what Nazi biological weapons laboratory did it escape?’ As you waver between vomiting and laughing and going insane, all the time sniffing more and more deeply in sheer incredulity (maybe I’m not smelling it right?) you’ll wonder what kind of determined, ceaseless commitment it took to get breath that bad. What kind of insane devotion did this man put into his obvious lack of dental hygiene to muster up what can arguably be called a valid reason to commit suicide in a public place? Pity you don’t have that bottled water. You could have blown yourself up.

It gets worse, though. There’s always some tall prick standing in front of you. It doesn’t matter how tall you yourself are (I’m over six foot, a fact that earns me worse death-stares than a war criminal on trial for genocide when it comes to being in a crowd), there is always that one fucking guy who is that much taller. And if you’re that guy, then the guy in front of you will put his girlfriend on his shoulders. Added to this delight, you’ll be rubbing shoulders left and right with two couples who are obviously addicted to the taste of each other tongues. I get it, people. This is a date. I just wasn’t aware I was invited to play such a personal role in it.

Finally, it begins

After the unknown tiny opening act ceases their warbling slew of unknown, inaudible lyrics, the real concert begins. And this would be a veritable pleasure if it weren’t for the rest of the fucking hellhole collective of Twitter-obsessed imbeciles we are dictionary-bound to call “society”. As you look over the sea of heads toward the act you’ve paid a generous portion of your monthly wage to come watch, you’ll slowly realise the extent to which social media has ruined this short, painful journey we call life. The concert will framed by a box of glowing iPhone screens as the masses simultaneously convert this cherished, special moment into low-resolution, crappy film complete with uncompressed sound, uncontrollable hand-shaking and ruinous digital zoom to be shared and never watched on Youtube. Basically, imagine bobbing for apples but instead of apples you’re trying to watch a screen, and instead of a tub of water you’re dunking your head into a tub of lard and Vaseline.

As Mr Tall’s head weaves left and right, intermittently blocking your restricted, smart-phone filled view of the stage, he starts to dance. Well, I say “dance”, but that’s generous. The problem is, he’s old. And he’s white. And he has a ponytail. To make matters worse, there’s a faint scent of weed in the air. As he jerks and spasms in time with every 13th beat in the music, and as the Breath Guy pokes you in the back and comments on how tall you are, could you move aside a bit please, you bite down on the urge to commit hideous crimes against humanity.

“It’s not fair,” you lament, and slowly you realise that there is no god, there never has been. It was all a lie made to make you think this chaotic, unjust world of darkness and cruelty had some kind of order and fairness to it. You slowly begin to understand that you used to think you knew what hate felt like – but only now do you grasp that that was a mere heart-warming fable of hatred. True spite, the festering worm of rage that chews down all the way into the core of your being, is something you are only now beginning to appreciate. This feeling grows and grows, and just when you think the burning wrath of a thousand supernovae exploding with incomparable loathing in your soul cannot get any worse, you spot the Golden Circle fans dancing and cheering and having a good time. All a mere arm’s distance from the musicians you’ve obsessed over for years and years, they cheer and sing, untroubled by the worries and qualms of those too poor (lol!) to afford a good spot. As one of these rich fucks gets pulled on stage (probably some fucking girl who had the ticket bought for her by her stacked boyfriend, and she’d never even heard of the band until today) you remember that one day you’ll die, we’ll all die, and all our accomplishments will die with us, forgotten and meaningless in the void that awaits all of mankind.

And it doesn’t even matter

But that’s the ironic thing about concerts. Like with any terrible metaphor that doesn't quite describe what I'm trying to say, it's always darkest before the dawn, and after (perhaps because of?) all the suffering, all the hardships and irritation, you actually enjoy yourself.

Who doesn’t have a concert moment like when Bruce Springsteen played an acoustic version of “Down to the River” and I stood with my arms around my family, remembering how that song and its profound lyrics defined a time filled with uncertainly and hardships, and you all cry and sing along in unison because that moment represented the beginning of a better tomorrow? Who doesn’t have a story like when I went alone to a Rodrigo y Gabriela concert after six years of obsessing over their every move, buying every album on the day they came out, even going so far as taking painstaking months of slow, ham-handed practice to learn how to play the guitar like them - and after all that waiting, you finally get to see your heroes in action? Concerts – be they your of favourite band or where you are dragged along to watch your knows-no-better daughter shriek as a hormone-overloaded teen scrapes the barrel of talent for the very dregs left in the primordial scum of originality and excellence – are moments in our lives where, for a short while, we are able to escape the mundane routine of our everyday lives. And as we look up to our heroes rocking the shit out of that guitar, we realise that it’s special moments like these which are worth all the difficulties that precede them.

Except maybe the nut fondling. Let’s skip that next time, please.

Girl realises her life isn’t Indie music video

Pictured: Not Jessica.

It was a bad day and depressing wake-up call today for 22-year-old Jessica Barleson, after the young, dress-wearing fan of Alt-J reportedly realised that her life is not actually an Indie Music Video, and that she is not in any way the carefree, tall, skinny blonde girl depicted in the underground media.

“It’s been an awful day,” she said. “You know, I used to think I was like a real-life Lana Del Rey, drinking and loving the nights and days away in a careless and reckless haze of summer days, gorgeous men, fast cars, memorable nights out, and early mornings on a beach watching sunrises with my Ray-Ban-wearing, cardigan-bedecked friends. But now I realise that it’s nothing of the sort.”

Barleson now says that, despite her best efforts to drive in cars without a seatbelt and with one hand out the window flapping and waving through the sultry autumn breeze, or even to stand up and hold her arms outspread in the warm rays of the sun as the warm late-October wind whips her hair artistically behind her while dark-haired musos croon meaningful lyrics at her and her counterculture companions, she has to face reality.

Also pictured: not Jessica again. 

“I can’t just dance on the beach to no music, or in a public place as if no one is watching,” she said, citing mounting student debt, pressure to get a job after graduating with a degree in Fine Arts, and growing expectations from her final year Master’s thesis supervisor. “I can’t lie in the middle of the road late at night, the soft, flashing lights bathing my soft skin in the ruby, amber and emerald of a carefree life on the fringe, or even sit around a fire sipping authentic Mexican tequila and wearing nothing but a bikini top and denim shorts. Hell, I’m almost 23. I have obligations to meet. Bills to pay. Life isn’t some Music Video. I’m not some imaginary character embodying the lyrics of a song.”

Pictured a third time: people who in no way,
shape or form, represent Jessica.

So what now for the depressed, dejected teen? Well, the answer, she says, is utterly clear to her.

“I just feel so utterly betrayed,” she said, wearing a black top, dark mascara and fishnet stockings, a new, sombre tattoo of a dagger-impaled black heart decorating the side of her bone-white back. “It s like life is meaningless and a total illusion; it’s a lie, designed to heat your desires only to dash your ambitions on the dark, jagged rocks of an uncaring, brusque world filled with misery and decay. I almost feel lost in a universe of darkness and chaos.”

“It’s almost,” she said, writing a depressing poem about the meaningless void that encompasses all existence, “as if I’m one of those girls in a Bullet for my Valentine music video.”

pics: wikimedia commons, Huffington Post, Pintrest

Singing talent will be a factor this year – Idols SA

Singing talent search television hit South African Idols has shocked the world this morning, after they announced that during the upcoming 14th season of their dream-destroying drama show, talent and musical ability would be actually considered as a factor by the judges.

“We know it’s a huge, bold new step that seems to totally go against what we as a show have stood for this past decade or so, but we think that judging our contestants on singing talent will be just the breath of fresh air this show needs,” said Idols show director Noah Melody. “We’re still going to stick to the other tried and tested, much-loved criteria for singers in our show – for example how ugly or irritating you are, and how dead your parents are or how many AIDS orphans you played guitar with at that charity – but we think this could really spice things up a bit.”

The show's researchers and interview desks have already started scouring the country for the 73 people you’ll actually see on TV standing and singing in front of the judges.

“We think it’s going to be a nice addition,” said junior show researcher Lexi Ploytation. “Just think of how great and controversial the show will be when the judges purposefully drop a better, talented singer and advance some talentless, tone-deaf douche so as to rile up the thousands of screen-bound sheep?”

Though Idols has, in the past, been criticised as a shallow, exploitative and nasty belittlement of human beings and their dreams, the show’s producers and judges have defended it.

“We’re here to help people. Well, person, to be exact. We take that guy or girl from an the entire country's population and turn them into a star,” he said, “we even help them to make that obligatory one-hit crash and burn album they make after winning and subsequently stepping into a life of obsolescence as the country moves onto the next fad star. So what if we utterly demolish the hopes of people we trick into auditioning?”

In spite of the controversy, media pundits have claimed that this year’s show is set to be the biggest yet.

“Hell,” said talent contest media analyst Misty Vhoats, “there might even be three winners this year!

SA Music Union seeks chefs, businessmen, for next week’s gig

Chefs, businessmen, doctors and experts of all professions can look forward to an exciting opportunity for fantastic exposure in their various fields this weekend, after the South African Musicians' Union published a press release announcing free slots in their upcoming gig in Johannesburg this weekend.

According to the press release, the gig organisers are looking for professionals from all walks of life to come and show off their skills to a gathered crowd of hundreds. Chefs, painters, accountants – no matter their field of expertise – will work in 40-minute slots at the venue. 

“It really is going to be a fantastic opportunity for various career leaders to make their names known in their spheres of work,” said event organiser Eim hun der Payd. “For example, if you’re a struggling doctor who wants to get his name out there, or a starting-up chef already working two jobs to support his passion for cooking – often for free – then this is a great chance to get some unequalled notoriety.” 

However, he added, due to budgeting constraints, Hun der Payd added that they would be unable to offer remuneration for services rendered. 

“Right now we’ve unfortunately spent all of our allocated budget on paying our designers, photographers and musicians for a change, but we don’t think that’s too big a deal,” he said. “I mean, this about your art, your passion, your calling. What is money? Can you really justify paying for art? Doesn’t that debase it?” 

He did, however, mention that they might “swing you a free beer” or “at least one that’s much cheaper than usual.” 

“We’re cool like that. We think you’ll have earned it,” he added with a smile. 

Since the announcement, thousands of amateur professionals across the country have greeted the news with delight and excitement. 

“I’m going to sign up immediately,” said 36-year-old Sushi chef Roald de Maki. “Even if it means doing everything for free.” 

Other professionals aired similar enthusiasm. 

“I’m only doing this accountancy work to support my passion for figures and numbers,” said 42-year-old charted accountant Kerry Balance. “Maybe afterwards I’ll get paid for my pen-pushing? I know that to become a real, accepted accountant, you have to put in a few free hours here and there.”

“I’m also signing up,” agreed corporate CEO Emma Basil. “I’ve worked tirelessly, day-in and day-out from the lowly position of daughter-of-the-CEO for over a year to get to where I am, and this showcase will be an opportunity to show off what I’ve learned. My father always told me that if I worked hard I would succeed, and that’s exactly what I tell my kids.” 

However, not all professionals have been pleased. 

“It’s a joke,” said expert engineer Brad de Zyyn. “Every weekend people call me up and are like,’Hey, Brad, don’t you want to quickly draw up some standards-compliant, fully accurate and to-scale blue prints for my second home that I want to build in Durban?’ I’m sick of these free gigs. I mean, I put a lot of time and effort into my drawings. It is too much to ask for a little bit of recompensation for that time, skill, and hard work?”

This is a complaint that has been echoed by struggling neurosurgeons, nuclear physicists and advanced encryptologists across the world.

Meanwhile, in related and equally shocking news, a poster designer, a photographer and at least four musicians were actually offered money for their services. 

“We’re just playing around with a new strategy,” explained Hun der Payd. “But right now we don’t seriously think that it’s something that will catch on and continue as time goes by. I mean, that would make them think their work is actually worth anything of value. Hahahah!”