Grease

What is it with Grease?

No, really, what is it? Because I'm dying to know. To my (obviously unenlightened, because why else would I think this way) mind, the musical is terrible, the movie is awful, and the television show that both these abominations have spawned is atrocious. And yet people seem to disagree with me. Not all people; as a matter of fact, there are a lot of people I know who are dead-set against Grease in all its forms. But there have to be enough people who want to watch it to make these things possible, otherwise I would never have had to sit through it myself.

Let's look at the facts, and by facts I mean slander. Grease is a show (and when I say show, I mean play, because the television show is just about the play) which seems to glorify a certain lifestyle I personally find distasteful. It tells its audience to become a slut because nobody likes you. Change if people think you aren't cool enough. Give in to peer pressure. Great lessons.

If that's not bad enough, it's a musical set during a period of time when music was painfully bad, and the play doesn't even use any actual music, but rather pastiches clunky proto-rock together like a Frankenstein monster. Elvis was, take him or leave him (I'm pretty much in the second category myself, but I respect taste) a fairly important influence on music, but the music of Grease reminds one not of Elvis (or the numerous black artists of the time who get no credit) but of terrible commercial rock created by record labels. It's not even good musical music; it's like the current trend in musicals where a popular artist's songs are linked together by a vague story as an excuse to hear the popular artist's songs, but in this case the songs are terrible knock-offs which don't advance the plot much at all.

And who likes this musical? Is it nostalgia? No, it's children too young to remember that Grease is sanitized pap who are... well, they aren't nostalgic because they weren't there at the time. I can't fathom why they would like the music, or feel a connection with the time period, save that it's about High School. And they are just at the age where they become impressionable to the message of Grease (which is, in case you forgot, become a slut because no one likes you) without being old enough to know better.

So this terrible musical made John Travolta famous (or more famous, and in either case, that's cause enough for weeping), spawned a Fifties nostalgia kick which sees perfectly ordinary teenagers being heavily into music their parents find old-fashioned, and has now given us a reality TV show which is more annoying than American Idol for the simple reason, leaving aside the content, that its host is more annoying than Ryan Seacrest. People keep supporting it. There must be some reason. I just want to know why? What am I missing? Why?