Happy Birthday to me.
I can think of nobody in the history of the world who has achieved so little in 22 years.
So young! You still have a whole lifetime of futzing around and getting nothing done to look forward to.
June 2010
May 2010
Why do I gain more followers when I don't post anything than when I do?
I'd be down with saying that there's no use comparing Run DMC and Weezy; rap changed sufficiently between Raising Hell and now to have the kind of effect you were talking about. But Young MC, though of his time, was basically operating in a hip-hop landscape that bears sufficient comparison today that it's pretty easy to say that he, a goofy party rapper with a couple of hit singles, just isn't on the level of one of the best in the game today. A claim otherwise seems analogous to an argument that the 1910 Fruitgum Company is better than the Clash*. You hear something like that and you think, OK, clearly we aren't operating in the same world.
See, I can easily imagine the sort of person who’d say, with total sincerity, that the 1910 Fruitgum Company is better than the Clash. And given their priorities and proclivities, I don’t think I could call them wrong — out of step with the mass of rock-music opinion, sure, but all perspectives are valuable. Maybe especially those that highlight music which would otherwise be swept aside by the world-conquering ubermensch.
And I’m less sure than you are that the hip-hop landscape of 1989 bears much resemblance to the hip-hop landscape of 2010, if only because in 1989 it hadn’t been the most popular music in the world for two decades. If you played anything on the chart today for a hip-hop kid in 1989, would he — B.o.B. excepted — hear much that sounded familiar, or even understandable? There’s a reason older heads like TNC ignore hip-hop today; the game has changed so profoundly they no longer recognize it.
But again, I’m no expert, just a guy who only started getting into mainstream hip-hop in 2008. Which is maybe why its difference from the stuff I knew in the 90s stands out more to me.
Re: quote from the Piscataway Chief--Isn't it true, though, that over 90% of Latin American citizens are mestizo, meaning they have some Indian blood in them? Here in the US you can claim Indian citizenship if you are 1/8 Indian. I'm pretty sure the vast, vast majority of Mexican immigrants would meet that standard. And I would think that's what the Chief was referring to. I don't think that's a racist thing for him to say. What do you think?
Of course I don’t think he was saying anything racist. I wasn’t “correcting” him so much as waging a lonely war against the word “Hispanic” being used to mean “people from Spanish-speaking countries” rather than “people with Spanish or Portuguese ancestry.” Some Latinos I know reject the word Hispanic because of its colonial implications, and insist that it only refers to people from the Iberian peninsula. Others, of course, reject the word Latino, and prefer to be referred to as Chicano, or by nationality, or by indigenous ethnicity. As is their right.
On the subject of mestizo identity, I’m no expert and will likely trample on any number of sensibilities if I try to say much beyond what I think I know. Which is that throughout much of Latin America indigenous ancestry has neither the cultural cachet nor the official status that it does in the US, and is often more like being black under Jim Crow. It is more often something to be ashamed of, something to escape, and something to deny, than something to which to claim rights which aren’t recognized by the US government anyway.
“I’m guessing Bob Lefsetz is about sixty years old. And for that reason above all others, his worldview is obsolete and irrelevant. He suffers from the delusion that all Americans his age suffer from: that the way he’s always known it to be is the way it should be and the way it could continue to be, in perpetuity, if people could just be brought around to his way of thinking. But in fact, the music industry as people Bob Lefsetz’s age knew it is such a massive historical anomaly that to see it as anything else is farcical.”
—Superb music-industry-rant rant from Phil Freeman.
Play
“While the power of the Europeans has continued, I see the other part of the Ghost Dance prophecy coming true today. So-called ‘Hispanics,’ with faces that sure look like Indians to me, are returning to repopulate North America. We cannot always speak to each other because we have learned the languages of different colonial powers. But these Indians have as much right to come and go on our land as the geese when they migrate north and south. No one would dare to ask them for their passports and visas as they cross man made borders. Instead of seeing ‘Hispanics’ as outsiders who do not belong here, we need to start seeing them as ancestors of the original inhabitants of these lands. They are the living fulfillment of the Ghost Dance prophecy.”
—
Chief Billy Redwing Tayac, Piscataway Nation, First Nations United (via zuky) (via nezua)
love. love. love.
(via guerrillamamamedicine)
(via novazembla)
Two points:
People without European ancestry are not Hispanic. The conflation of Native Americans with Hispanics because they speak Spanish (not all of them do) is a product of white racism, insisting that everyone below an imaginary border (or color line) is the same.
The U.S. government, as represented by the most recent Census, does not officially recognize Native Americans who are not part of a U.S. or Canadian tribe as having any existence. Millions of people descended from the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan peoples, as well as thousands of other civilizations, cultures, races, and tribes that existed long before “Latin America,” have to call themselves either Hispanic or Other, of which one is a lie and the other dehumanizing.
The U.N. has declared that indigenous peoples have the right of free movement across their ancestral lands regardless of national borders. The U.S. (a signatory to that declaration), by regarding all non-U.S. Native Americans as not indigenous, is able to ignore those rights and effectively criminalize poverty and oppression. (And don’t give me any “that’s not the U.S., only Arizona” shit. There are just as many people in your state who think it’s a good idea.)
Okay, that was three points.
Everyone needs to calm down about Hayley's tits.
Paramore isn’t even relevant anymore. It’s the same as Celine Dion showing her tits, effectively. No one cares, they are not even spectacular boobies in the first place.
Counterpoint: Paramore’s three albums have all been great, the most recent one was the best of the three and one of the best albums of last year, and they are TOTALLY musically relevant, at least where the genre they inhabit is concerned.
As for Hayley’s boobs, there’s definitely some weird sexist double standard slut-shaming going on in all of this, and that shit bugs the hell out of me.
And she’s on the number two song in the country right now. Not relevant please.
Sometimes my friend and I like to play “Marry/Boff/Kill” with cheeses.
Brie is a Marry, Blue Stilton is a BOFF, and weak-ass mild cheddar (as opposed to sharper stuff) is a kill. KILL LIKE A FIRE.
God, all I want to do now is eat cheese and smear cheese all over my body.
Ugh why do they even make cheddar in varieties milder than Sharp.
Hey, why don’t I throw something really dumb out there that I probably don’t actually believe and hope there’s some sense in it: Democracy’s all very well for politics, but maybe pop music is better populated by Randian ubermenschen.
I was going to play out the metaphor and talk in terms of tribes and different varieties of ubermenschen (the way that for example the Jewish-American Superman is subtly different from the Aryan vision), and bring up the question of don’t people who feel oppressed or alienated by one tribe deserve their own heroes? (And yes, that would have been a pretty obscene argument in strictly comparative terms: oh those poor middle-class white indie kids! Won’t anyone think of them!)
But agrammar beat me to it, talking much more sense than I would have anyway.
I don’t carry any particular brief for or against Robyn — I don’t mind what she does, but it’s never excited me the way (for example) Ke$ha and Britney and Annie, each in their own very different way, has done. But I do think that believing the people who find value in her is a more appropriate attitude than believing they need to be brought to heel by the regime.
California Gurls (feat. Snoop Dogg)
Katy Perry
Katy Perry ft. Snoop Dogg, “California Gurls”
Because I just heard it today for the first time and it’s the first or maybe second time I’ve actually liked Katy Perry. (If this is the second, then the first is “If We Ever Meet Again.”) And it also gave me a way of thinking about her which sets her apart from the pop pack, which is always a useful tool.
Katy Perry’s “thing” is Retro — so much is obvious from her videos, her Betty Page and Liza Minelli costumes, and her oddly winking glammed-up photoshoots. But it’s also true in her music: the glam-rock schaffel of “I Kissed A Girl” and the 90s hi-NRG of “Hot N’ Cold” both recall eras whose time has passed, and it’s to her and her producers’ credit that she was able to make them vibrant enough to catch a zeitgeist to the degree that she’s a credible pop star.
So “California Gurls” evokes 70s disco-funk (those guitar flecks make me think Chic, though I stand to be schooled here) and of course the Beach Boys (without being so gauche as to recall them sonically), and it’s yet another bunch of retro signifiers being thrown around without much care for how they land. Which is either terrible, raiding the past for contentless kicks, or a total joy, the telescoping of history into one undifferentiated bliss, depending on your perspective.
And I think of all the California gurls I know IRL and on the Internet dancing to this song and it makes me kind of happy.
!
I used to be really wary of the exclamation point too — like smilies or all-caps, they seemed the first sign that one was dealing with a functional illiterate online. (And now I occasionally use all three. Time doth make hypocrites of us all.)
I think that changed when I started reading people like Tom Ewing, an obviously smart, engaged, and tolerant writer who used exclamation points in a way that I hadn’t really seen before — not to indicate excitement or emphasis (though those came through as well), but to create an atmosphere of cheerfulness and open-dialogue bonhomie that was immensely attractive. (I don’t have any idea, or really much care, whether that was intentional on Tom’s part — it was my perception of it that mattered to me.)
My natural inclination is always towards self-serious, even pompous prose. (I misquoted fucking Shakespeare up there, and didn’t think twice about it!) Largely this is a function of what I read as a teenager and impressionable young adult — lots of Victorians and early twentieth-century Brits — and even more it’s a function of a slight Aspergerian tendency that makes it hard for me to care whether other people can hack their way through the weeds of my dependent clauses. My default setting, when I don’t think about how I’m writing, is turgidity.
So the infusion of playfulness, posturing, and intentional dumbness into my prose from exposure to the playful, posturing, and intentionally dumb Internet massive, is, I think, all to the good. I don’t believe in following strict rules for good prose — Standard English isn’t a matter of competence, it’s a matter of register — and anything that breaks up the monotony helps.
