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There are few things in life that I would consider to be truly evil; the Ku Klux Klan, Bill Gates and Cheetohs are prime examples. But, when I recently heard "The Barking Dogs" sing the Beatles, I knew that I was in the presence of true, undeniable evil.
I first heard the barking dogs when I was working in a Pizza Hut in San Diego. My manager would spare himself the trouble of forcibly evicting the local gang by putting five dollars into the jukebox and playing one song from the Barking Dogs Christmas CD fifteen times in a row. Some members of the gang would stay, presumably to show their defiance, but by the third or fourth repeat of dogs barking out "Jingle Bells" they needed to leave. These were people that sold crack to 10 year olds and performed drive by shootings, and they couldn't hack dogs barking Christmas carols. I think now that, on some level, they must have realized they were in the presence of an evil so horrible mere humans are incapable of even imagining its soulless horror, but at the time I figured they were just annoyed.
The Juke box we had was set up so that it would remember the selections even after a power failure, so we couldn't reset it and, if we turned it off, the day shift would show their displeasure by leaving wet pizza dough stuck to the ceiling. Twelve inch discs of fermented pizza dough falling on the customers in the middle of their meals is sort of bad for business, so we had to leave the Jukebox on. The manager conveniently avoided death by promptly leaving whenever he used the "Dog" contingency. Those of us left generally ended up the night cleaning dried globules of dough off the ceiling and rocking along to dogs barking "Silent Night". We were all annoyed, certainly, but I didn't really think in terms of good and evil then, it was only much later that I began to wonder.
The Barking Dogs phenomenon started off small, at first it was kind of cute. Dogs Barking Christmas carols, how novel. It got quite a bit of airplay in the beginning, not because of some inherent joy people felt when they heard the songs, but rather because it bugged the disc jockeys to have to play it so many times and that was kind of funny. This is how evil works, you see? Slowly. Evil creeps up on you, out of sight. It can be kind of cute at first, but then you lose interest and start ignoring it. Then it's free to work its way into the world, invading everything that's good and pure and making it foul and rotten. Or worse; mediocre.
Every Christmas you can hear the Dogs Barking Christmas carols on the radio. The disc jockeys don't really like to play those songs, but they always get requests for them. Few people really think about the sick, perverted minds that actually call up a radio station and request a Barking Dogs song and that's probably a good thing. People need to keep their sanity, their faith in the way things work, and if ignoring the evil in some freak's mind is the only way to do it, who can blame them?
Yesterday I heard the Barking Dogs sing the Beatles and I began to wonder just what the Hell was wrong with the world that it could allow something like that to occur. Are there no checks and balances on what is allowed to survive in our culture? What's next, will the Barking Dogs do Nine Inch Nails, or Nirvana? Is elevator Muzak not enough, must we also have the cruel mediocrity of dogs barking rock and roll?
Apparently so.
Evidently the purveyors of barking dogs "music" are no longer satisfied with driving the populace to the brink of insanity with the musical renderings of barking dogs. They've put sheep, cows and cats on the Beatles remake. At some point in the future, I suppose these heinous freaks will eventually run out of animals and they'll have to use humans. I can only wonder just what human sounds they will think of to use. Imagine a belching rendition of "Come All Ye Faithful", or "Joy to the World" in fart minor. I shudder to think of the possibilities.
I think the true evil here isn't the mediocrity that is dogs barking songs. It probably isn't the artistic loss whenever a really good song is played so poorly that the listener comes away feeling that that song will never, ever be as good as it once was. No, the true evil is in the fact that the barking dogs songs stick in your head when you hear them. They play over and over again in your mind, driving you just a little closer to insanity until, finally, you snap and open fire in a McDonalds somewhere with an Uzi.
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