lowquality.net

You tell every­one it’s a great way to meet peo­ple, a great way to find cool indie bands, and a maybe you think it’s a much-needed extra hand in the Get­ting Laid Dept. It’s aol for the socially elite. It’s the open source SUV of the blog world: totally unec­ces­sary but how did we live with­out it?

For a sec­ond, though, let’s be hon­est. You have a myspace account so that you can spy on your for­mer class­mates and see what kind of dumb shit they write about in their blogs. You do it because some­where, deep deep deeeeep down inside of you there is a jerk off 17 year old kid who wants to see how fucked up all of those peo­ple are, but thank­fully the jerk off 26 year old you really are has a sense of irony that doesn’t let him get too judg­men­tal because, it ain’t like every­thing is going so well for him either.

But you check these peo­ple out and you see them strug­gle, you see them writhe and clum­sily assert them­selves in para­graphs of vague self-expression, some­times not-so-cleverly stick­ing it to cor­po­rate Amer­ica (and then putting Fiona Apple in their “cur­rently lis­ten­ing” win­dow for an extra shot of irony), often tram­pling the Eng­lish lan­guage with cyber-kitschy mis­spellings and always being care­ful to avoid being too obvi­ous about who they may be slag­ging as to avoid retal­i­a­tion and hold any respon­si­bil­ity for their words.

For a sec­ond your not-quite-grown up self con­sid­ers respond­ing: swing­ing in from stage left onto the set of the worst school play you have ever seen, and then begin trash­ing the set, slap­ping the direc­tor, and knock­ing over the card­board cutout sup­port­ing cast. But these days, for some rea­son it’s just more fun to watch. So go ahead. Have a good time. You deserve it.

Myspace is all things to all people.

For me, it is a non­stop train wreck buf­fet serv­ing up dam­aged goods with room for all the extra bag­gage you can handle.