Hard Rock Cartagena

I went to the Hard Rock Cartagena tonight to have dinner (purely as a social experiment, of course). It is located in the middle of the tourist area of the historical center, with lovely balconies overlooking one of the main squares.

They've done an amazing job of recreating the "American dining experience," which I can best define by the enormous size of beverages, the option to have any item on the menu served with bacon, and waitresses who all seem to have the personality and demeanor of high school cheerleaders.

At one point they all gathered around a table and sang "Happy Birthday" in English, which horrified me until I realized it was the exact equivalent of us going to a Mexican restaurant and having the waiters sing "Cumpleaños a tí" and thinking we're being multicultural and sophisticated.

I couldn't help but enjoy the irony of the fact that, while this song spreads around the world as an example of authentic American "culture," the two sisters who own the rights to it are just sitting back and collecting millions while living in luxury in California. Actually, now that I think about it that is a perfect example of American culture.

After a year of drinking South America-sized beverages, I was impressed with the girth of the glass that was placed before me. I assumed that my Coke-drinking prowess had remained intact (years of practice you know), but now after finishing such a quantity I feel like I'm hopped up on cocaine. Actually that Coke did taste a bit funny...

I was lucky enough to be there for the live music that they have every friday night. The band looked like it was teleported straight from Southern California, complete with cleverly counter-cultural t-shirts, emo-influenced alternative mohawks, and Weezer cover songs. What struck me was how commercial and exportable the SoCal "underground" has become. As I suppose always happens, the style of those trying to buck the system has been appropriated, replicated, and is now being mass-produced for export.

Thinking about all this while listening to an extremely accurate cover of "So Lonely" by The Police, I realized how truly lame so-called "youth culture" is. I mean, seriously: 99% of it consists of trying to be cool, which consists of a daily competition to see who can spend the most money meticulously following the greatest number of trends in the greatest number of categories, all in the name of personal expression of all things.

Even the people who are on the cutting edge, the ones we call "early adopters" and "influencers," are basically saying "wow, I am so skilled at following a trend only from the time it is popular enough to not be weird until the time it is so widespread that middle-schoolers start doing it that everyone should envy me and I should be exempt from any type of personal or professional growth so I can spend all my time further perfecting this extraordinary skill." Which is why it's ok to be unemployed or broke or utterly clueless as long as you're "cool."

The band played a few more covers, all of them quite well imitated. The thing I most enjoyed, however, was how even though all the members of the band took their roles very seriously, head banging and guitar riffing at all the right places, there was just enough of a smirk on their faces to reveal that they didn't take themselves too seriously. Always a good quality in a cover band.