Wednesday, April 27, 2011

PORFLE VS. MUSTANG SALLY


I hate any song with the words "Mustang Sally!" in it. It's always sung by some guy with a guitar who fancies himself a storytelling troubador whose job is to mesmerize a roomful of people at a party with his stupid "story song" while he makes goofy facial expressions and "acts out" the various characters in the song. This is especially true when he belts out the phrase "Mustaaaang SALLY!" I don't know why this is supposed to sound so cool and get everybody so excited about his dumbass song, but it is.




Who the hell is "Mustang Sally" anyway? Does she drive a Mustang? Does she look like a horse? And why should we have the slightest interest whatsoever in what goes on in her worthless life while she's scuzzing her way through some moronic "story song"? Just because some doofus songwriter somewhere put the words "Mustang!" and "Sally!" together one night while he was at home drinking alone and then concocted a stupid story for her to take part in, we're supposed to all gather round any idiot who wields a guitar and croaks it out after we're already too smashed to realize what an extravagantly horrifying waste of several precious minutes of our lives it's going to be.



But even worse than this is when the self-appointed entertainer in question, who is invariably some creepy bastard you wouldn't be caught dead associating with under normal circumstances but is now a "star" all of a sudden, has penned a song of his own which is just like the "Mustang Sally!" song but has different names that he's come up with himself, such as "Paraquat Patty" and "Munchies McDougall." And, god help us, chances are he will "talk-sing" the song like the charismatic, divinely gifted storyteller that he is while making eye contact with everyone as he holds them in his magical musical spell one at a time.



"Now Paraquat Patty..." he'll talk-sing while mugging like a brain-addled goon and strumming his cheap guitar, "and Frisco Fatty... ducked into an alley with Heroin Hattie." There's always an alley in these songs, by the way, mainly because "Mustang Sally!" rhymes with "alley" and not much the hell else, and the word has to be included even though it doesn't rhyme with "Patty" or "Fatty" because alleys are one of the cool places that the cool wasted lowlifes in story songs hang out in.



And what happens in that alley--oh my, is it ever entertaining and funny and hip and cool, not. But Mr. Superstar will perform this wretched artifact of his own Shrinky-Dink brain as though he were Woody Guthrie serenading some noble rail-riders around a bubbling cauldron of hobo stew instead of just a bunch of dizzy stoners strewn across somebody's livingroom furniture or vegetating in lawnchairs in the backyard surrounded by bongs and beer cans.



The really, really embarrassing part, though, is when, one by one, these fickle stoners begin to lose interest in the increasingly boring story song, which goes on forever because the derp who wrote it thought it was an epic that would hold listeners in rapt attention till the very last note, and they start getting visibly restless. The Entertainer will notice his fans glancing listlessly around the room, wishing he would shut up so they could go back to having fun, and start to talk-sing louder. "SO, COUGH-SYRUP KATIE..." he'll bark like a TV that's suddenly been turned up too loud, setting everyone's nerves on edge.



Even worse than this, his mugging facial expressions will get broader and more extreme, his eye contact more intense and intimidating, even when various people actually begin conversing amongst themselves about their day or what they saw on TV that afternoon or how freaking boring this clown's interminable song is.



And when enough people have bailed out on his stupid story song, which is only about halfway over by now and still has lots of drugs 'n' booze adventures about Paraquat Patty and Frisco Fatty to recount, he'll zero in on the last hardy listener who still feels a moral obligation to suffer through the rest of the song till the bitter end (it's usually some nice blonde girl who is smiling politely while secretly wishing she were dead), and jolly well make them suffer through it till the bitter end. Meanwhile, the happy hophead party has loudly resumed around them and Paraquat Patty and her friends can go straight to hell as far as they're concerned.



And so, whenever you're at a party full of drunks and stoners and some self-styled songster grabs an acoustic guitar and looks like he's about to utter the words "Mustaaaang SALLY!" or a reasonable facsimile thereof, you should all immediately attack him, tie him up, gag him, and fling him kicking and screaming into the nearest dumpster behind a supermarket or fastfood restaurant somewhere. Because if you don't, he and Mustang Sally are going to buzz-kill your poor, helpless party right back to the Stone Age.