Just Have Your Party on PC

Inspired by Blondie’s 1980 song and music video “Rapture.” Also inspired by a troupe member’s visit to a Celtic online radio station. The radio station has an interface that shows the song, the album and the artist. When this troupe member liked a particular song, he clicked on a little shopping cart icon and he was taken to an Amazon.com page where he could buy the album. If the album was in stock, it would take him to the album on an amazon.com page. If Amazon did not have the album in stock, it would instead take him some random product like septic tank treatment packets, silicone milk collectors or supplements, almost as if it were stating that they don’t have the album in stock and would like to offer an “alternative.” This sketch is poking fun at just a small sample of the totally irrelevant links that showed up on Amazon’s search page when he pressed the little shopping cart. It appears that Amazon, like Madam Zon, isn’t clearly isn’t paying attention to the customer or his needs. However, in this skit, it appears that the customer is just as much to blame in this transaction. While Mr. Harry Debbie is trying to get Madam Zon to make eye contact with him, Mr. Harry is “blind” in another sense of the word; that is, he is just blindly accepting all Madam Zon’s search query results without internally processing what he’s actually hearing. Madam Zon and Mr. Debbie are much like the dancers in the first verse who are “barely breathing, almost comatose” and “hypnotized.”

Madam Zon: “Well, we also have my hubby Adam Zon’s latest autobiography: ‘Women Are from Venus, Men are from Mars who Eat Cars, Bars and Guitars?’” - Reference to the rap break in “Rapture.” We here at CoBaD think the CEOs of online companies (like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Netflix, etc.) are kind of like the men from Mars depicted in the rap; they “come down” to Earth, and, with their insatiable appetite, “consume” everything in sight (via acquisitions, or if that doesn’t work; flood the market with cheap Chinese made knockoff that drive their competitors out of business, then turn around and buy those bankrupt competitors). The only way these warlike “Men from Mars” can be “tamed” is if you “turn off your TV” by refusing to buy their products (“Cause the man from Mars won't eat up bars where the TV's on”). Ultimately, though, these CEOs come across like the alien in the music video; they look sharp and attract attention, but just like the alien in the video who doesn’t have the common sense to realize that she’s literally running into a wall, CEOs don’t have the common sense to realize that they’ve figuratively run into their own little wall called public relations. That is to say, CEOs are too blind and stupid to realize that they are not showing their human side; they are not providing a personable experience to their existing customers when they suggest they buy things they don’t want, and their hostile takeovers and acquisitions (and even their treatment, or lack thereof, of their very own employees) aren’t endearing themselves to potential new customers.

Frank Moraes (2013) claimed that Blondie’s hit song was essentially about environmental destruction and over-blown consumerism. He claimed that human interaction had devolved so much that even in a dancing club, while people are dancing close, they are not interacting (“Barely breathing, almost comatose”) and aren’t even facing each other when they dance (“Back to back, sacroiliac”), and even when they do face each other, they don’t even look at one another (“Face to face, sightless solitude”). As Mr. Moraes summarized, “Without human connection, what is left: the things we buy.”

More than 40 years after its release, we here at CoBaD also think “Rapture” could be considered a scathing indictment of the online world as well; specifically, the obsession companies and customers have with doing things virtually. When we buy things online (like groceries or books), we miss out on the personal relationships we would otherwise build with human cashiers and clerks: real people who know who we are, ask how we are doing, and can cater to our individual needs. And without that human interaction, all we have are the things we buy (in this case, groceries and books).
References:
Moraes, F. (02 July 2013). Frankly Curious. Meaning of Blondie’s “Rapture” https://franklycurious.com/wp/2013/07/02/meaning-of-blondies-rapture/
Wikipedia. Rapture (Blondie song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture_(Blondie_song)
Youtube.com. BlondieMusicOfficial. Blondie - Rapture (Official Music Video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHCdS7O248g
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Convulsions of Birth and Death (CoBaD) is a comedy sketch troupe founded in September, 2022 that posts skits on social media covering varied topics such as music, history, art, science, sports, literature and events encountered in everyday life. The title was inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” (1849), an essay written as a protest against the U.S. government taking his “gift” (i.e., his taxes), and wasting it in ways in which he did not approve (e.g., war and slavery). CoBaD writes sketches in the spirit of Thoreau, but instead of strictly casting its nets outwards towards governments and figures of authority, it projects its protest inwards by taking a humorous, lightheaded look at humanity and specifically those who take the greatest gift of all, life, and senselessly and stupidly waste it on greed, narcissism, self-centeredness, petty-mindedness, arrogance, opportunism, power-grabbing, quid pro quo, the status quo, ulterior motives, and the most despicable waste of all, social media.