High School Musicals - then and now

Not that we're a bunch of old men standing on a porch yelling at kids to get off our goddamn lawn, but for crissake the kids today are frankly a bunch of pussies. Case in point, High School Musical 2; this corporate concoction of acne-less saccharin talent is a phenomenon of disturbing proportions. Tweens are losing their shit over this swill. If you haven't wasted minutes of your life watching this thing check out the below clip (and please follow with an insulin chaser).

Fine. Wholesome clean entertainment for a generation of youngsters who love their church, are team players and consider their parents to be their best friends. Pardon me while I heave. They're also a generation that has more of a sense of entitlement than a kid of an OPEC member and couldn't be less concerned with the world around them unless it has a hip hop riff and blatant consumerism associated with it. Many a publication and comedian ask "where are the pissed-off youth of the 60's and 70's?", I'll tell you where: watching crap like High School Musical and Hannah Montana in between text messages, soccer practices and virginity commitment signing ceremonies.

29 years ago another high school musical hit the pop culture collective: Grease. It was a brillaint little musical with some fairly well-known names produced by a cadre of coke-snorting, high-living reprobates who knew how to make entertainment not based on demographics and merchandising. A testament to it's longevity is the fact that the damn thing still lives with us till this day in the form of knock-offs and shitty reality shows. If High School Musical enjoys that kind of success, I'll be hooking up to a morphine drip in 2036 and checking out.

Now that you've seen the High School Musical clip, check out the below clip from Grease; specifically the Greased Lightning number. Saccharin it is not; listen closely and you will hear some of the filthiest lines you would've thought you'd only hear in a Prince song.

Thanks to corporate-driven political correctness and mega-church judeo-christian jingoism the days of a family musicals containing lines like those in a Grease tune are long gone. It's an interesting experience to look back and see things a little rougher around the edges and nastier.

Then again, I could just be smacked on cheap Shiraz and making less sense then the guy in the center-divider asking for spare change.