He came from space to save mankind with the power of rock n' roll

Foamcore. If you're an art major, you've probably encountered this mysterious and malignant substance at least once or twice in your day, and if you aren't, maybe you've at least heard its name whispered in a dark alley someplace, or from behind a cupped hand at a murder trial, or floating from the lips of the dark creature that hides under your bed at night.

Foamcore is basically two sheets of paper that sandwich a thin, flexible layer of foam. I don't really know what its true purpose is, or if it only exists to fulfill a number of smaller, less direct purposes, but either way, foamcore sucks. It's horrible. It's messy, it takes three cuts from your X-acto knife to get through it (and I've had way too many bad X-acto experiences to go using three cuts on something that should only logically require one), and it's ugly as crap 90% of the time, no matter how well you rubber cement it to whatever you were rubber cementing it to. It just gets in the way and really shouldn't be required.

But foamcore still somehow maintains a special place in my heart because of my theory behind it. My roommate and I, before we were even roommates, were wondering about the point of foamcore and who the idiot was that initially gave it the go-ahead when we realized that if ever there should be yet another musical offshoot from techno, it should be known as foamcore. It has all the earmarks of the next great genre name--it contains both a silly, nonsensical adjective and the word "core." It couldn't fail! So Jon set out to actually produce the first ever foamcore song while I sat around wondering how David Bowie could have failed to come to this conclusion before we did. He's a fine artist too, after all.

Eventually, after spending about twenty minutes staring blankly into the eyes of the photo I have at the top of this article, I realized that Bowie surely did create formcore. In fact, Wikipedia confirmed that foamcore already exists as a genre and is described as

"[...]a subgenre of House music that originated in foam dance parties and is differentiated by its conspicuously slow and heavy drum track in relation to the rest of the music.^{[citation needed]"}

And although I was saddened by the realization that we hadn't coined this musical term, I was lifted by the fact that Bowie did. I mean, sure, it doesn't expressly say right on the page that it was Bowie, but who else could it have been? Only someone as brilliantly insane as Ziggy Stardust himself could have come up with the mysterious and seemingly pointless substance known as foamcore, not to mention the plainly unnecessary musical genre. Who else descended from the heavens to save Earth with his guitar? Who else claimed to sleep in a coffin standing up, or that he found all his clothes in garbage cans? How many other "trisexuals" do you know? Who else could non-ironically dress as a Martian, a marionette, a pirate, and a goblin king, among others, while still maintaining an air of impeccable style? Of course Bowie invented foamcore, both the music and the actual stuff. Of course he did.

That's what I'm telling myself, anyway, in order to not commit suicide at the thought of spending all of today and probably close to $30 on foamcore supplies to make a scale model of a tradeshow exhibit for signage and exhibition class. Thy will be done, David Bowie. Thy will be done.