Sugar Cubes and Lemons

So this, right:

For the sake of the populace, this song should carry a warning for your pancreas.  Like a truckload of cane sugar dumped right down your gullet and into your Diabetes Startup Centre, it is cloyingly sweet.  Even - dare I say it and risk the wrath of the females who adore these sorts of songs - evil.  Like aspartame.

I guess that makes me a not-girly-girl.  I just simply can't help it.  This sort of song to me is fluffery and frou frou and it has always madeth my toes to curl under.

I honestly didn't think this song could get any worse, ever.  That's until I saw a Family Guy episode a few nights ago.  Ever since then, Chris and that horrid pervert man singing it duet have been crowding my head in true earworm fashion and disturbing my peace.  I didn't think that song could ever get any worse.  But then it did.

I cannot insert the Family Guy video directly into this post because it makes me feel ill.  I have a love/hate relationship with that show.  When I'm feeling cold and fragile, it feels even more evil than Both for Each Other (Friends & Lovers).  And that's saying a lot, right?

And yet, on other days, when the beauty of life surrounds me and my body's current health level has climbed me a couple of flights up the stairwell, Family Guy can be damn funny.  Sure, it's acerbic and sorta (dare I say it?) male in its humour.  It regularly goes way overboard, far past the horizon of the bounds of convention.  But that's what it's there for, right?  That's the fun of it.  I get that.  Even though my getting is sometimes in small doses, and some days I could throw a brick through the TV when it feels nasty.  (But then really, everything feels nasty on those days and where I really need to be is in bed, or in the bathroom with a hose full of coffee enema up my bum.  But I guess you really didn't want to know that, right?)

Humour and music are both personal and come in lots of shapes and sizes, and have enough flavours to suit everyone's taste.  For some, what they do not like feels evil.  But most of the time it's not.  It's just not your bag.

But for me, if I have to choose, I would have to take Family Guy acidity over Both For Each Other AOR saccharine schmaltz.   The former is maybe not as officially sanctioned as the latter.  You're never going to be subjected to Family Guy-type humour at a public event as much as you will be harassed by Both For Each Other ear-torment.  Because it's romantic, right?

I don't see anything romantic about it at all.  If I had a choice, I would rather watch the entire history of Family Guy one episode after the other than listen to that song even once.

And even though that Family Guy clip seems so wrong in one way, it's one of the strange convolutions of life that this song in its wrongness feels more right to me than the original song in its horrid, sickening awful schmaltzyness.  Designed to appeal straight to the wallet of meringued-up brides, schmaltz is the unthinking woman's romance.  Straight from the bowels of the third ring of hell, there's very little about it that is romantic, as far as I'm concerned.

Speak to me reams of poetry, and I'll swoon.  I do have a romantic side.  But I do not wish to mistake schmaltz for romance.  In my heart, they are two rather different beats.

Sugar cube pic by Uwe Hermann under CC 2.5 licence (attribution and share-alike)