Thoughts on the Best-Worst Tattoo Ever

I was getting lunch today when a girl sat down at a table in front of mine with her back facing me.

That's when I saw, on her upper-right shoulder, a tattoo of the cover of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.



That thing ^. Except without the black around it. And, instead of having a beam of white light entering in to a prism and crapping out rainbows, she just had a thin rainbow going in with a bigger rainbow coming out...kinda missing the whole point of a prism.

But anyway, I immediately had a gut reaction to just hate it so much. What a terrible form of self-expression. And after sending my friend Justin about five or six raving texts while he was in class, I figured out what bothered me so deeply about it.

So, before getting to the tattoo itself, I realized that I think self-expression is like holding up a mirror. The things you decorate yourself with are designed to appeal to people with the same sensibilities and then they see a part of themselves in you. The goal is to identify yourself with a specific group or entity that people can see and relate to and then they feel like they can relate to you and you can relate to them. Friendship!

Like today I'm wearing a Hometsarrunner hoodie because I like Homestar Runner and I want people to know it. Or my friend Justin wears a jacket from the video game Mass Effect. And snot-nosed little teenage kids buy stuff from Hollister with its logo plastered all over it to show they shop there and that makes them good at clothes...or something.

We all do it. And the trick is to appeal to a specific group while excluding others. You don't want to be alone but at the same time you want to feel special. You can only see into the mirror and see yourself if you're on the right wavelength...or some other analogy that makes sense. I don't know how light works.  But it's a balance. If you're wearing a band t-shirt, you don't want to have a shirt that just has the name of the band you and your friend made up in the eighth grade and produced one single of you two making fart sounds into the mike. That's not--no one can see themselves in that. That's just a weird murky puddle that doesn't make sense. Although, the name Sprink Weasel, definitely has a universal appeal. At the same time, you don't want a t-shirt that just says "Music Band" on it. That doesn't say anything about you. That could mean anything. Who cares if you like music bands? Do you also like food eats?

We're obsessed with who is doing it wrong and who is doing it right and who is so good at doing it wrong that they're right again and who is so right that they're wrong and with irony and sarcasm in play it can pretty much loop forever in a convoluted tangle.

And so, what angered me about this tattoo was that I saw it as a terrible attempt to appeal to people. I like Pink Floyd and Dark Side of the Moon, but they're old.  Our generation can't really relate to them. We weren't there when that music came out. It doesn't mean the same thing to us. But not only that, because it's such an iconic logo and enough time has now passed, what used to be edgy and experimental is now completely bland and mainstream. Dark Side of the Moon has reached the point where it just kind of blandly stands in for the idea of psychedelic stuff, without the social consciousness or rebellion that accompanied it when it first came out.

And because of that, what I immediately think about when I see that logo is how the only place you see Pink Floyd anymore is the t-shirt section of Wal-Mart. It's lost all cultural relevance for me and solely represents Wal-Mart's decades late attempt to capitalize on a thing that has become commercialized to the point of meaninglessness.

(sorry if this sounds  pretentious but this tattoo really bothered me and I had to figure out why. It ends hopefully though so please bare with me. Or not. this is for me. not you.)

So, to me, what the Dark Side of the Moon album cover represents isn't a love of experimental music, it just represents Wal-Mart. It just stands in for like "Rock n' Roll" or "Chuck Norris Joke". It's tired. We all understand it. It's had its time and its place. Let it rest. Stop bringing it up, please. That's what I've come to associate it with. I used to own a Dark Side of the Moon hoodie and when I remember realizing the logo was everywhere immediately feeling I represented a store more than a band,  And it's one thing to buy a t-shirt of it, but it's a completely new level to PERMANENTLY SCAR IT ON TO YOUR FLESH!  

I thought, "why not just get WAL-MART tattoo'd on your shoulder?" What's the difference? But then I realized, that would be funny. That would have an ironic awareness. To earnestly advertise Dark Side of the Moon is more like being Wal-Mart. It's doing as Wal-Mart does. Getting back to the idea of mirrors, the only thing I think your reflecting is "I love commercialism!"

from Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected

So, I'm left to wonder: why? Why would you take a permanent and intimate form of self-expression and identify yourself with a faceless, soulless behemoth that is practically synonymous with "cultural wasteland". To identify with that tattoo is to give up all sense of individualism.

"I'm just gonna eat myself into a coma with trans fat enriched bacon-cakes while watching 36 consecutive hours of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and whatever freak TLC is following around this season."

But, there's no way anyone could be that wrong, right? No person could be that lost. No person could lack that much uniqueness to just give in to whatever people trying to take their money will give them. Therefore, because I am an optimist, that girl had to be mocking the very process I was applying to her.

She's subverting the entire ridiculous notion of using commercial, mass-produced possessions as a form self-expression by taking on-- by diving head first into the pure black heart of non-expression.

Her tattoo is a thing that is so meaningless and failing to appeal to anyone conscious enough to think about what our clothes or adornments say about us that it breaks that way of thinking.

By knowingly adopting something so commercial that it couldn't possibly reflect on anyone, she's giving up any form of self-expression. It's the ultimate, "I don't care anymore! I'm not trying to impress you or make you associate me with something that isn't me!"

We don't get a mirror. We don't see ourselves in her through this tattoo because we can't. We can't really see anyone in something their wearing, no matter how much we want to read in to it to feel like we're not alone. She shows us something that forces us to reject that idea of mirrors and look away from it with shuddering horror. She's only her.

We're left with clear glass.

We become aware, through this symbol, that she isn't trying to reflect back on us and then we are forced to see her as a person. As a human being. And that's the most universal thing of all.

 It's so inclusive that we can't help but reject something that everyone and anyone can take part in-- because we love to exclude. We end up excluding ourselves from the one thing we can all share just to make a more narrow connection based on something we bought or consumed.

And the only way to break that is let the light in, and watch rainbows fly out of our butts.