Hey, ho, let's go! ...um...shopping!!!!!

The question comes up: would you buy your groceries from these men? It seems the good folks at our local Safeway seem to think so. See, about an hour ago, I walked into the Safeway on Mill Plain and 136th here in town. I had my eleven-year-old daughter in tow, and had left the rest of my nuclear family in their Sunday best in our 1999 Honda Odyssey minivan. Emily and I were on a mission to buy bread, hamburger buns and mayonnaise. We'd made it halfway down the condiment aisle when I hear something rather familiar pumping over the Muzak system (though, thank God, not a Muzaked-out version - the Ramones, the founders of punk rock, done as Muzak would be in the category of a crime against humanity). I stopped, mid-browse (I was deciding between the $2.50 a jar Nalley's Real Mayonnaise and the Best Foods variety, which tastes infinitely better but was a buck more a jar. I went with the Best Foods - what can I say?), and heard the following:

Hey, ho, let's go! Hey, ho, PRICE CHECK ON GREEN BEANS, let's go!

My Safeway was playing the friggin' Ramones !!! Now, the notion that someone managed inadvertently to turn a line of a thirty-year-old punk anthem into a pretty funny insult is entirely beside the point. I didn't think grocery checkers could refer to their runners as "ho's" without incurring a lawsuit, but I guess times are changing.

Changing, indeed. I can recall going to the Market Basket or Lucky's with my mother, and hearing Guy Lombardo or Dinah Shore on the in-store music systems. The closest thing to hip the stores would play circa 1977 was the Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville" as bastardized by the Golden Gate Strings (which, I'm ashamed to admit, I actually own a copy of). They surely weren't playing any tracks off Rocket to Russia. If this keeps up, by the time I'm ready to retire, the grocery stores should be playing System of a Down and Fallout Boy.

Fast forward thirty (!) years. Blitzkrieg Bop (complete with the line "shoot 'em in the back now," which is either about killing someone or Joey Ramone's heroin addiction - I don't know which, or which one is better, for that matter) is playing, unexpurgated, in my local Safeway. Now, don't get me wrong - I love the Ramones, always have.

I just don't like to mix my punk rock with my bag salad.

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On a connected note, when I told Katrina this, she informed me that just last week she was shopping in the same Safeway when an early tune by this somber lass started playing (it was "Lucky Star", for anyone who wants to know):

Mothers, hide your sons. The Material Girl is going grocery shopping, along with her good friends Joey, Dee Dee, Marky and Johnny.