GLEE + fun. = Joy + Happiness

Be Calm - fun. (mp3)
Happy - Ned's Atomic Dustbin (mp3)

If we could bottle up Irony and Sarcasm and bury it underground like nuclear waste in Nevada, I'm not sure I would enjoy the above-ground world that remained. I'm an irony-lovin', sarcasm-utterin' bastard, and you won't hear much of an apology from me. The world is a better place with toxic amounts of irony and sarcasm in the ionosphere.

That said, there's plenty of room left in our culture and in our lives for a kind of balls-out cheesy sincerity that's long been lampooned and mocked. In fact, it's sarcastic bastards like myself who are more often than not the same people who can't turn the channel when we see The Brady Bunch and who sit down to watch High School Musical to be with our children yet find ourselves embarrassingly drawn to the corny beauty of it all.

The more a soul enjoys the sarcastic and ironic, the more it longs equally for the other side, the unabashedly passionate, although we call these "guilty pleasures" and only savor their cheesiness unironically when alone with our teddy bears and boxes of wine. Mr. Miyagi was right -- isn't he always? -- that the key to life is finding balance. It's a yin and yang thing.

My sarcastic yin never suffers a shortage, but my sincere yang sometimes falls short. Thankfully, I've found two recent music-related items to build up the size of my yang (and no, this isn't a SPAM email about Viagra).

Let's start with GLEE.

The new FOX hour-long mostly-comedy, which debuted its pilot in May but has been building buzz ever since, is the brainchild of Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy, and if you have ever enjoyed or suffered through a season of Nip/Tuck, you can know this much about Mr. Murphy's gifts: he can create ludicrous scenarios and nestle them comfortably in Irony-Free Zones. He can create mock-worthy two-dimensional characters while still convincing you to like them. Who knows whether this show will survive, and that's no fair judge of whether it's awesome or important anyway (see: Freaks + Geeks, My So-Called Life, Serenity, Arrested Development).

The pilot for GLEE (still available on Hulu, I think) is just the icing on the cake of a culture yearning for sincerity. It followed a show, American Idol, that bathes in its own cheesiness like a pig in shit. In some ways, American Idol makes me think Bollywood has invaded Los Angeles, with all of this artifice carefully crafted to communicate "geunine" emotion.

In fact, the worst part about all reality shows -- and I mean ALL of them -- is that they're real without being genuine. The shows use our assumption of "reality" and very carefully manipulate it.

But GLEE, by being totally fake and cartoonish, manages to create a very real place with very powerful emotions. It's kind of an "out of the mouth of babes" thing.



If you can watch that entire pilot, get to the closing scene, and not feel this surge of emotion welling up in you -- some variant of joy, preferably with a dash of hope and optimism -- then you're probably not a very sarcastic and ironic person, and you probably don't need a show like this to balance out your qi/chi. And for that I salute you. (But in a totally sarcastic way, because I'll secretly be wondering how screwed up you have to be not to like this show.)

And then there's fun. And that's "fun." as in "fun, period!"

fun. is the brainchild of Nate Ruess, co-founder of the now-defunct The Format, a band I only discovered in the fall of 2008 after they were already practically dead. I basically fell in love with the band's rotting corpse, like we were in some Edgar Allen Poe story. Some would call The Format's music whiny, shrieky, neurotic and melodramatic. I would call it all of that plus one other little word: F*#KING AWESOME. (Yeah, that's two words. F&#king sue me.)

However, Nate's new band trades in a little of the whining for something a little more balls-out Broadway. Queen meets the bastard child of Ben Folds and Rivers Cuomo, maybe?

fun.'s album, Aim + Ignite, is so melodramatic and bombastic that it's like eating a York Peppermint Patty. The album is like taking the Lipton Plunge into a swimming pool full of Rockettes and stuffed teddy bears. I bought fun.'s A+I the day it came out, and the other three albums I've purchased in the last two weeks are being sorely neglected because I just can't stop listening to this.

Neither GLEE nor fun. is without their flaws. But really great melodrama is never flawless, otherwise it wouldn't be great melodrama! But both tug on my sappy heartstrings better than Journey or Grease 2 ever could.