Comic #4268: pop-music

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Here is the transcription of the comic:

Panel 1 Character 1: I have an idea for a song in which I portray my cultural interest group as put-upon and misunderstood by society.

Panel 2 Character 1: It features a young man and woman who feel shunned by the broader community. This feeling drives them into each other’s arms.

Panel 3 Character 2: Ironically, they engage in an entirely conventional act of courtship, sexual relations, and ultimately long-term monogamy.

Panel 4 Character 1: That sounds pretty typical for pop music. Character 2: Yeah, but in my version, they become aware of their own hypocrisy.

Panel 5 Character 1: Realizing their love affair is so banal that it undoes all the little defiances that made their initial coupling romantic, they fall into a deep state of ennui.

Panel 6 Character 2: They discover that the path of cultural rejection is simply one more means of uncovering our basic biological conformity.

Panel 7 Character 1: One of them chooses to make peace with existence as an unexceptional and short-lived mammal, while the other falls into a self-deluding form of spiritual asceticism, whose demands he is incapable of living out.

Panel 8 Character 2: Their orthogonal strivings for meaning pull apart the knot of human connection that was the one happy thing in either person’s life.

Panel 9 Character 1: I’m not sure it has mainstream potential. Character 2: It’s called “Shake that ass, Girrrl!”

Panel 10 Character 1: Okay, that’s better.

Panel 11 Character 2: By the end, the shaking is an uncontrolled psychosomatic response to a needlessly wasted lifetime.

Panel 12 Character 1: Now see, you’re losing me again.

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