KULTUR-KAMPF

Weyland (the whale guy, not the STP singer) or Tom Morello.

Thomas Kinkade must die.

I hate almost all modern poetry, especially those influenced by the Beats. Just pick up one of the ten thousand Beat anthologies out there and try to read anything BESIDES Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. I like those three writers very much, as it happens, but they really don't have a lot in common - if they hadn't been friends, this would never have been considered any kind of 'movement'. And they opened the door for a lot of really bad pseudo-hip doggerel masquerading as poetry. So keep the main Beats, but destroy anyone who ever tried to write like them (excepting those who did something totally different with the influence, like Kesey). Also, Bukowski - misogynist drivel for hard-drinking poseurs.

I have not read any of kerouacs poetry, but I read on the road and thought he was a whinging middle class scenester-poser. I will have to reread it when I am in a better mood next time

The most consistently slept-on beat has got to be Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Search: Her.

whitney houston - you are the weakest link. goodbye.

This world sans The Barenaked Ladies = better place.

Blink 182. Uncle Kracker. Jackie Huggins. Tracey Emin. (I had to look all of these up on google because I can never remember their names.)

Bye bye Lucien Freud.

Michael Jackson. The George Lucas of music (i.e. accelerated the takeover of empty spectacular gestures that ate the industry), except Lucas was kind of cool and Jackson is Jackson.

Get rid of Shakespeare and the whole framework for Anglo emotional expression and expection is torn down as he taught us how to feel.

And Cilla Black/The Velvet Underground/Captain Beefheart/The Byrds/The Beatles/Mods/chat#game#family#lottery#variety shows

radiohead, it's time for you to leave now, I can live without hearing anyone can play guitar again.

Rousseau. Bye bye, hippies.

Gundam Wing, all its drawings and characters and worst of all THEME MUSIC. Although that doesn't count as art.

Alistair Campbell.

the cocksucker who wrote "the 7 habits of highly effective people"...fuckin tradeshow seminars...

Fyodor Dostoyevski. Erasing his oeuvre has the added bonus of also wiping out the collected works of Ayn Rand and Jean-Paul Sartre (and, as we all know, Sartre was nothing but Ayn Rand in a beret anyway).

Richard Wagner. Pluses -- would get rid of Mahler and Richard Strauss, and Hitler would have had to rely instead on "The Beer Barrel Polka" at his rallies (thereby making it much less likely that he would have come to power). Minus -- there goes Norwegian black metal (maybe that's not such a minus, though?)

Pearl Jam, Sublime, Oasis, and Korn. I estimate that somewhere between 80-90% of the crap on the airwaves would thereby be poofed out of existence, as more likely than not would be Clear Channel.

Douglas Sirk. Because that would have spared the world of cinema from Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and that's good enough for me.

Then there are the acts whose works should not be erased from this Earth, though the progeny of certain of their works most definitely should be. A brief list:

The Who: Get rid of "Tommy" and there goes rock opera (and Jesus Christ Superstar). (Fairness would seem to dictate that the Kinks also share the blame for that monstrosity, but I couldn't bear to eliminate "Arthur" and at least their rock operas were entertaining [in a sort of "let's get really drunk and dress up in silly costumes and not take this all-too-seriously" kinda way]).

Van Halen (David Lee Roth era): Bye bye, poodle rock and hair metal. But would high school in the 1980s have really been the same without them?

David Bowie, circa "Ziggy Stardust": The Birth of the Mullet. Who woulda thunk it at the time? Tho' it also lead to Mr. Bowie's doing an Al Pacino-as-Tony Montana-nose-over-a-mountain-of-coke impression which while fucking up David's health and mind it also lead to the better things to come from him later on that decade.

Philadelphia International: From whence disco came. But that cuts too wide a swath through musical history and besides, see exergis on cokefiend Bowie above.

Charles Dickens. Farewell icky sentimentality. Gawd bless us, ev'ry one.