I used Bing to search for “Hippies Doing Yoga,” and this picture was the funniest result.
Yoga is Rubbish:
Especially its music
I'm not exactly going out on a limb and taking a controversial opinion with this one. It was simply one of those “things that needed to be said” every now and then to reinforce what is already common knowledge. Water is wet. The sky is blue (it actually is, as of 45 seconds ago when the clouds parted). Things like that.
However, just because you know that water is wet and the sky is blue, doesn't necessarily mean that you know why these things are so. Well, it's because the one true Christian God made is so. Now, shut up and repent for your transgressions.
So, then,
in that same vein, why is Yoga so awful? On the surface, it seems
rather nice: it's very calm and serene LOOKING. The moves, while some
are quite difficult, give you a chance to stretch out, fix bad backs,
and generally be more limber and flexible. As an added bonus, many
attractive young women participate in yoga, and wear specially
designed “yoga pants” to highlight their ass
be more good at yoga.
Comely lasses and a promise of freedom from my crippling back pain?! How could anyone leave a class like that more angry than when they left?
Well, I'll tell you how. Because that's the kind of guy that I am.
You see, the first and most apparent problem with yoga, is that it's pointless. Now before you get all huffy and compose and angry “tweet” directed towards me, hear me out.
I
used Bing to search for “Hippies Doing Yoga,” and this
picture was the funniest result.
See, the great thing with most forms of sport and exercise is that there's a teleological element to them. An end point, where you either win or lose! An attainable goal to be set out in the short term. Score the most goals in a game of basketball. Get more runs than your opponent in baseball. Beat up the other guy in a boxing match. There's an end point to all of them, but there isn't one in Yoga. It just sorta meanders about for however long as you so choose to do it, not really having any reason to exist at all. Yoga would be benefit immensely from a fixed, objective “scoring” system, whereby you falsifiably prove that you've beaten your opponent at Yoga. Until then, it's doomed to suck, and be something only silly hippy types would do.
Then of course, there's the problem with the music. Now, I'm not one to make a fuss about other people's choices in music.
No, scratch that. That's exactly what I do. Other people have terrible tastes in music, and nowhere is that more apparent than in a Yoga class.
There's a lot that can be said with respects to someone else's tastes in music. I don't much like classic rock; I think it's annoying and overplayed, and its proponents hype it up way too much like it's God's gift to music. Which it isn't. But we can respectfully disagree, and I can compromise and say, “You know, classic rock isn't all THAT bad, there are even a few songs I like. But if I hear you practicing the guitar solo to Hotel California in the apartment next to me one more time, you're going to die in a mysterious grease fire.”
But then there's this shitty sub-genre of ear pain, sometimes lovingly referred to as “World Music,” seen here in an early form from a Delta Airlines Commercial:
“World Music” is sometimes called “New Age Music,” but is also more accurately known as “shitty hippy music,” “shitty IMAX bullshit music,” or “Yanni and Enya bullshit hippy garbage music not fit for the trailer to an IMAX film.” It's designed to sound vaguely “worldly,” in the sense that you feel you're in touch with the greater human race; that you're part of a joined whole, and not just an individual on the planet. Of course, you have to be a complete sissy, and like scented candles, in order to believe that. But I don't. So I'm ok!
The reality is that there's nothing worldly about this diarrhea of sound. It's made in very well furnished studios in Europe and California. The lyrics are actually nonsensical jibberish that mean nothing, backed up by synthesized strings and choir sounds. By getting a few drum beats out, your bigoted white ears are telling you “Ooh! That's Africa! I hear Africa there!!” Then a pan flute and a weird sounding choir comes out; the pan flute stands in for Asians AND pan-American indigenous peoples, as a sort of “not white, yet not black” signifier, and because the choir doesn't make sense, your brain is telling you it comes from a part of the world that you don't. And if that makes you feel good for no apparent reason, then you suck. And now you KNOW that you suck, and can feel ashamed, like you should.
Everytime an Enya song plays, your ears are transmitting a signal to your brain telling you that this music is awful. And yet you keep listening, force feeding your aural gag reflexes, trying to convince yourself at a conscious level that this is not shit. And while I have absolutely no medical background and a piss poor understanding of my own physiology, I'm pretty sure lying to your brain in such a wholesale fashion is how ulcers are formed. There's not enough fair trade soy milk inside your yurt at the vegan love-in festival to make that burning knot go down, until you listen to something that doesn't suck so much ass. Like this, for instance:
These musicians can play like this for hours on end, and yet without hint of irony, or sarcasm, I can honestly say I'd prefer to listen to a concert of this in its entirety than a single, 11 minute long Enya song. And anyone who disagrees with me is a liar.