Skip to main content
I have this problem where I can't stop listening to the new Mean Jeans album, and it has lately become this problem where I can't stop writing about the new Mean Jeans album. Mean Jeans on Mars is just that good. It might be the best pop-punk album since Dookie. If a better album comes out this year I will be shocked and then I will probably die from shock.
I can't imagine I'll stop cranking Mean Jeans on Mars any time soon―I'm four months and hundreds of listens deep at this point―but my mental health (and possibly my job here at LocalCut) is riding on finding other music to write about.
And so this column marks that fork in the road at which I part from Mean Jeans as a literary subject, at least until the next Mean Jeans record comes out.
I want to leave an enlightened readership in the wake of my public adoration, though. To that end, I've compiled a brief guide to the vernacular that makes Mean Jeans' willful silliness so beautiful and stunningly perfect. Like Ramones and Wu-Tang before them, Mean Jeans have evolved a symbolic universe of their own, a ranging constellation of signifiers that map a new way of seeing and being.
To fully appreciate the staggering accomplishment that is Mean Jeans on Mars, one must begin with language, which is where human culture as we know it first burbled up out of the abyssal brains of our ancestors, and which is where Mean Jeans excel as poets of the heart, mind and soul.
With that, I give you the Mean Jeans Dictionary. Get out your lyric sheet and blast off to Mars with me.
2: Numerary substitute for "to" and "too", because there is 2 much partying 2 do 2 spell everything out.
Cheerios: This breakfast staple is the yin-yang of Mean Jeans' cosmology. A firm, just-outta-the-box Cheerio stands in for a flotation device one might while away an afternoon upon as one's paramour floats nearby in a similarly crisp, happy-making "Cheerio". A soggy Cheerio symbolizes a once-great thing that no longer satisfies, a porous love destined for the drain.
Crummy: A milder version of shitty (see below).
Jager: Jagermeister; Mean Jeans' favorite beverage; fuel for partying; can also, in extreme cases, fill a Martian lake so that one might "skitch across" said lake in style; most often consumed after being dropped into a glass of beer, which concoction is called a Jagerbomb.
Keanu Reeves: The earthbound manifestation of the mystico-heroic ideal to which all party dudes can and probably should aspire. To "become Keanu Reeves" is to attain an exalted state of dispassionate cool while transforming one's obstacles into stepladders from which one might sight a transcendentally awesome (Jager-filled) party to end all parties.
Macaroni: The only thing besides Jager that Mean Jeans allows into its collective tummy, macaroni doubles as a metaphor for love, because macaroni is the perfect food and love is the perfect feeling.
Mars: The planetary version of Keanu-ness, in a sense, but also a sort of prison for those who have "gone Keanu," as if the price one pays for attaining a State of Perfect Keanu Reeves is permanent exile on a planet where one will not blind others with the light of ultimate raditude.
Moonwalk: To stumble home after consuming too (or 2, rather) many Jagerbombs and/or after breaking up with a lover. Moonwalking is, like the trickster Cheerio, a double-edged metaphor and a pliable state that bends from bliss to misery and back again.
Shitty: The essential condition of the world and its inhabitants. It is from "shittiness" that one attempts to escape into the vaunted states connoted by Keanu Reeves, Macaroni, positive Moonwalking and Cheerio-tubing.
Slime: An appropriately amorphous concept in the world of Mean Jeans, slime can be interpreted as an image-projection of what passes for "mindfulness" in Jeans land, a physical idea(l) in and through which one can begin to understand the state of serene awareness to which mystics aspire.
Tuff: "Tuffness" is the attitude one must approach the essential shittiness of life with. To "hang tuff" is to look crumminess straight in the eye and do another Jagerbomb before Moonwalking home.
SEE THEM: Mean Jeans plays East End TONIGHT, May 10, with Freedom Club and DJ Danny. 9pm. Cover. 21+.
WWeek 2015