Once More, With Loss Of Feeling...

Okay, at the risk of looking for a horse to beat in a glue factory, let's review the facts one last time.

Kill lists, murder by unmanned android, sweeping civilian deaths under a semantic rug, harshest enforcement of the Espionage Act ever, indefinite detention: a handful of "radical" leftists get upset.

Guarantee that citizens needn't go broke or die for want of quality healthcare: half the country loses its goddamn mind.

America: the fuck is you thinking.

The Dead Hear No Eulogies

So Whitney Houston dies and suddenly everyone gives a shit about the foghorn-voiced cokehead who gifted us with the only vocal performance more oppressive than Celine Dion's Titanic theme. How sadly predictable; how pathetically mawkish. Why does everyone rush to recall their Edenic first impression of a once-formidable talent once that person has crashed, burned, and kicked the bucket? Is it the public's way of absolving their own guilt for having used the fallen celebrity as a feeble punchline for the final decade-plus of their life? Despite the fact that some of us had problems - both aesthetic and political - with the woman from the very start?

Please. I really like some of Michael Jackson's records and I still didn't give a shit when he died, for reasons I'll let Kat Williams elaborate upon. Oh, and dig the bonus swipe at the cadaver du jour.

Misplaced Indignation Again?

Am I obliged to comment on M.I.A.'s "finger malfunction" because my most popular post ever - by a factor of over four times its closest competitor - is my 2010 takedown of her pop-provocateur persona? Because, like, I've got shit to do besides rehash two-year-old quarrels of stage-managed mischief.

But fine, let's get into it, if only because it'll be easy. Turning first to the finger itself: really? Really! Have we backslid into such petty puritanism that flipping the bird is cause for a proper conniption fit, as opposed to the single most overused & hackneyed gesture of juvenile waggery that packs all the symbolic punch of overcooked rice noodles? She doesn't even do it well! Look at her hunched shoulders, look at how tightly drawn in her arms are: a meek & defensive posture, like a toddler who's committed to misbehave deliberately just to piss off the parents. Pathetic. This is how you give someone the finger:

Boom! Ain't no equivocatin' when you're telling someone to fuck off.

Now, with regard to M.I.A. as riotous pop shit-kicker, a lame, recycled flip of the middle finger is merely the latest in her continued reliance upon lame, recycled gestures. The chorus of her latest single is a monotone bleat of "Live fast, die young" and it doesn't get more threadbare & depleted than that hoary countercultural trope. Hopefully, M.I.A. has accepted (as most of us have) that she's utterly inept at articulating a political position so we needn't reexamine precisely why her identity-derived political aesthetic is bullshit. Of course, she still covets the currency of being branded a "political artist," but she can shoot every one of her music videos within safe distance of a "conflict region" from now on, and everyone will understand it's empty & opportunistic provocation, like Madonna fornicating with Black Jesus and burning crosses.

Which returns us to the stock defense of M.I.A.: the provocation itself was the point. As I explained before, I'd have no problem with such an excuse - heck, I might even become a fan - if M.I.A. was able to transgress the form or process of "being a pop star," but she isn't. (In fact, no one has been - not even Lady Gaga, I'd argue - since Kurt Cobain.) Because M.I.A.'s transgressions are limited to the realm of content, she is - at the risk of repeating myself - doomed to one of several failures:

1. The provocation fails to provoke. Congrats, you're boring.
2. The provocation succeeds, at the expense of banalising the provocative.
3. The provocation succeeds to the point of returning the threat to the provocateur, who stands by the ever-present escape hatch of "not meaning it."

And if anything is symptomatic of art's sickly & moribund state in the post-modern era, it's an absence of meaning.

Change The Channel

A dozen time-zones away from Washington, DC, I happened to wake up in time to catch both the State of the Union and the Republican response this morning over breakfast. Yeah, over breakfast, what kind of a ludicrous glutton for punishment am I. At least it was all pathetically predictable, with Mitch Daniels painting modern America as some litter-and-body-strewn hellscape that the Republicans will somehow miraculously cure through the alchemy of deregulation & cracking down on gayness, while Obama laid out his platform for re-election thusly:

1. I killed Bin Laden, yo!
2. Support the troops!
3. Jobs 'n' schools 'n' shit!
4. Iran, we will fuck you up.

By the end of it, I felt mildly drunk as I was physiologically incapable of determining what possessed me more, anger or boredom. Boredom won out in the end, as I realized I could've skipped both Obama and Daniels' speeches and simply watched the keystone speech from Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion on loop for two hours. In fact, I recommend you doing precisely that instead of watching the SOTU every year from now until the bloody erosion of the American empire is complete.


Of course, the fundamental difference between the SOTU and Investigation is that Gian Maria Volonté's police inspector, loathsome fascist that he is, has more integrity than any American politician in office today.

iCame, iSaw, iConquered

Come December, I'll be curious to see whose death ends up earning more year-in-review ink: that of Osama Bin Laden or Steve Jobs. For now, I just feel bad that Bert Jansch was robbed of his last moment in the spotlight.

The only thing I feel about Jobs' sudden passing is surprise at how quickly it followed his resignation as Apple's CEO. Perhaps this is another instance of how intimately entwined are sense of purpose and will to live. Jack Layton, for example, took the New Democratic Party of Canada from a marginal parliamentary presence to the official opposition in a single election and was dead within a couple of months. Even T.E. Lawrence - a man whose feats of endurance & military daring read like pulp fantasy - was scarcely two months into his retirement when he met an ignominious end in a minor traffic accident.

Beyond that pseudo-philosophical chinstroke... so what? Can't say I particularly care. But judged by the online tsunami of farcical grief, I am starkly in the minority. So maudlin & wracked is the tenor of the bereaved I'd have thought that all these people were personal friends of Steve Jobs, that he'd brought them chicken soup on a cold November night, that he'd awarded their kids college scholarships, that he'd given sight to their blinded-by-moonshine great aunt.

But no, they are not a one his friend. They aren't Steve Jobs' acquaintances, they're his customers, his consumers.

Lest we forget that Apple is a corporate behemoth whose liquidity exceeds that of even the world's largest national economy. Lest we forget that Apple is a technocratic Goliath which dodges corporate taxes and whose idea of "healthcare coverage" extends to suicide-prevention nets but barely any further. Unlike his oft-maligned doppleganger, Steve Jobs is not a philanthropist - he's a corporate padrino whose brilliance lies less in innovation than elaboration & refinement - making borrowed ideas better. Apple's very first personal computers (the Lisa and the Macintosh) were little more than liberal imitations of the Xerox Alto. Similarly, Jobs did not invent a GUI platform to (re-)distribute digitized music, but he did figure out how to monetize one.

The true genius of Jobs was his aestheticization of appliances. He transformed utilitarian machines into the fully syntactic symbols of a lifestyle; his public-relations alchemy made technological amenities into elite totems. Between his products & his customers, Jobs fostered not just a relation but a relationship - a transubstantiation presented literally in those anthropomorphic "I'm a Mac" TV ads.

At least the UK got to watch the guys from Peep Show make smug pricks of themselves.

Anyway, this explains why Jobs' death is a big deal beyond the business section. A man like Philo T. Farnsworth arguably had a more revolutionary effect on daily life, but Steve Jobs was a man with whom people felt they had a personal relationship, a friend who had enriched their lives & enabled them to unleash their expressive potential. It's no exaggeration to say Jobs' death has elicited a despair whose scale and substance are equivalent to - perhaps even greater than - the passing of the Pope. Within a mere hour of the news, floral tributes were piling up outside Apple stores the world over. Social media was more choked with endless inspirational quotes than a Deepak Chopra book. The grief was so sensational it would've been considered too stagy for a Broadway musical.

Against this backdrop, the latest essay on Adam Curtis' blog made for some serendipitous reading: in his endless trawl of audio-visual archives, Curtis has managed to trace the evolution of demonstrative emotion on TV. Within barely a generation between the '50s and '70s, spilling one's guts on air went from being anathema - "shameful agony" - to the necessary signifier of human authenticity. This sentimental overflow has become a carved-in-stone commandment not only of broadcast media, but of western social relations in general. However, Curtis warns that this hysterical style of emotional "authenticity" may actually be anything but:

There is a creeping sense of someone pretending to have the emotions that are expected of them. And in this way hiding their true feelings even further below the surface. Or maybe the truth is even more disturbing - that there are lots of things that people live through and experience that they just don't have emotions about.

As irrational psychic ephemera, emotions are difficult to understand and even harder to reproduce convincingly - particularly positive, sympathetic emotions. This is why tearful confessions & expectorating fist-fights became mainstays of daytime television far earlier than the joyful hug-orgies & triumphal backslapping of more recent shows like The Amazing Race or American Idol. So how did gushing exuberance become part of the public's expressive mode? Curtis points to the rise of "self-help" and collaborative craft shows like Trading Spaces and its British counterpart, Changing Rooms:

I think the man that really brought the hug into British television in a big way was the producer Peter Bazalgette. His genius was to spot that the idea of transforming yourself as a person could be intimately linked to transforming the things around you - starting with the rooms in your house.

I think the first real hugs of these kind began in the series Changing Rooms in the mid 90s.

The original revolutionary idea had been that by changing yourself emotionally as a person you would then change society. Bazalgette created an easier and quicker variation. By simply changing the physical things around you - you could then change your inner feelings and became a better and more expressive human being.

Wallpaper as redemption.

Steve Jobs understood this perfectly. By emphasizing his products' artful design, and by casting them as tools of creative composition, Jobs enabled his consumers to feel they were more fully-realized, expressive individuals thanks to him.

What I find disturbing is that, by surrounding themselves with beautiful expensive objects that encourage a melodramatic solipsism, people are encouraged to construct & occupy their own private fantasy wherein the crueler aspects of reality are not allowed. No one wants to feel bad. No one wants to struggle with criticism, dissent, violence, or acrimony. This relentlessly positive self-regard creates the illusion of a cozy but false consensus: by engaging only with the familiar & agreeable, we diminish our ability to cope with difference. Think different, but not so different that it unsettles you.

This is why there is no such thing as a "Dislike" button.

Phoning It In

The overwrought pageantry that passes for political punditry is so hackneyed & calculated, it's a wonder anyone pretends to be surprised anymore. Everyone so desperately admires & awaits a Howard Beale or Barry Champlain moment, forgetting (or ignoring) how expertly stage-managed & corralled by corporate interests those fictional "mavericks" were. Thus audience & broadcaster alike have managed to turn yet another non-event - Glenn Beck's exit from the Fox News network - into frothing political scopophilia.

Personally, I could give a fuck, not the least because I live outside America and have no TV or radio. More importantly, Beck himself is not special: his is a role to be filled by whatever appropriately attention-hungry ex-cokehead lunges hardest towards the microphone. But, as I explained last month in an e-mail to a friend, I'd had an appalling premonition about Beck's next step:

Beck can get the fuck off the air already. The only thing I'm worried about now is that, for his next act, he'll undergo some histrionic "crisis of faith" in the conservative movement and refashion himself into a pseudo-libertarian leftist and everyone will eat that shit right up. Don't think it can't happen! Ariana Huffington pulled off that stunt with startling efficacy (though I believe she's far more sincere than Beck has ever been).

But surely such a mawkish turn would be so transparent & tacky, no one would fall for it, right? I mean, come on. Yet, yet, yet, as I click across to Crooks & Liars this morning, what do I see atop the front page?

Beck on Republicans: 'I hate them'

Well, stomp on frogs 'n' shove a crowbar up mah nose! Who'da fucking thunk it. As good forgive-and-forget liberals, we should presently, if prudently, embrace the Fox News rodeo clown, not only for his dubious disillusionment with both mainstream political parties, but because Beck is (now) solidly against extraordinary rendition:

"Ghost planes - we're picking people up in the middle of the night. We're saying talk to us or we're going to drop you off over in Egypt. That's insane... We don't stand for anything."

Beck is unconvinced of the efficacy of state-sponsored kidnapping & torture (for which legal repercussions have just been forever swept off the table). Welcome to the club, buddy! Everyone against zapping civilians' scrotii with car batteries gets a gold star! If you disapprove of kidnapping, you get a cookie! How about this: as long as we're doling out special credit for shit you're supposed to do, can I get extra sprinkles on my sundae given that I've resisted the temptation to chainsaw off my neighbour's head & fuck his wife?

Breaking News!

After a mere decade of costly, murderous effort, the largest imperial military apparatus in history succeeds in killing diabetic cave-dweller!

Wow, I can already vividly feel how the world's changed for the better.

Yep. Everything's fine now!

Update: I had no idea that a bloodied corpse getting booted out of a blackhawk helicopter over international waters counts as a burial in accordance with Islamic law. You learn something new every day!

Honest Question

Crooks & Liars asks what I've been wondering myself: why is Helen Thomas (who held G.W. Bush's feet to the fire more than any other White House press corps suck-up) ignominiously shoved onto an ice flow because people confused anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, while bloody Ann Coulter & Glenn Beck are not only still on the air but are boosting books by Nazi sympathisers?

Mistaking Pop Stars For Political Theorists

I just listened to the third episode of the Hit It Or Quit It podcast, which is (in case you ain't heard) a fine cultural-commentary radio show to have on whilst doing your laundry on a sunny afternoon. I mean that as a sincere compliment; not everything need be immersive gesamtkunstwerk. Anyway, Nick Sylvester made an appearance to speak about the controversy surrounding M.I.A.'s "Born Free" video, the consensus about which seems to be that it's neither interesting nor illuminating.

At which point, the conversation should naturally end. But sweet merciful crap, it don't. God knows how many terabytes have been dedicated over the past two weeks to this very topic (of which I'm also, however minimally, guilty). This is due to the epidemic mistake of perceiving M.I.A. as a political artist. Of course, Ms. Arulpragasam has worked overtime to portray herself as such: Jessica Hopper opined on the podcast that the political sloppiness of "Born Free" is because it's more calculated image construction than commentary. But signifier-slinging and bumper-sticker sentiment do not a political artist make. The only thing discerning M.I.A. from Eddie Veddar, Michael Stipe, or my favourite punching-bag Bono is her demographic.

I've never had much time for Nick Sylvester. While his creative fiction is mildly more interesting than his criticism, his tastes don't hew far outside the post-pomo orthodoxy of deconstructionist pop. He occasionally hits it on the head, as when he called A Place To Bury Strangers "a songless one-trick turd" (though I then wonder what he makes of the sophomore effort by Serena Maneesh, for whom Sylvester once went purple with praise). But Sylvester's conservatism is laid bare when, in discussing "Born Free", he professes that "the avant garde need not be moral" and that M.I.A. is "acutely aware of structural violence."

If M.I.A. is the avant-garde, then our cultural limbo contest is into sudden-death overtime, wherein only expert practitioners of the dope-fiend lean can escape elimination. And to say someone as prone to meaninglessly broad gestures as M.I.A. is "acutely aware" is like citing Idiocracy as a definitive argument for eugenics.

Requisite Expression of Knee-Jerk Apoplexy

Staring at the above photo, I can only fantasize about placing a loaded Desert Eagle into her hand and watching her pull the trigger.

Thank you, M.I.A., for raping one of my all-time favourite songs, you politically disingenuous, sub-GaGa, bafflingly untalented, conceited, C.R.E.A.M. of the crap, signifier-flexing Socialite of the Spectacle. May the pomo cultural feedback loop be your noose.

Update (Monday April 26th): And already there's the compulsorily "shocking" snuff film to accompany the songs! I ain't linking to it, because M.I.A. isn't winning any click-throughs from me, but the video is at least crassly spectacular enough to distract from what an outrageous bit of mafioso appropriation the song is. It's directed by Romain Gavras, the French director who specializes in faux-documentary exploitation flicks with all the sociologial depth of a Dixie Cup. This time out, he's ripping off one "park" - Punishment Park - but alas, his brilliant twist-premise was scooped by another - South Park.

Let me tell you how it will be...

In honour of American tax day, here's a mix of tunes dedicated to the motley association of resentful, politically simplistic, tacitly racist, historically ignorant, isolationist, millenarian, militia-forming, science-doubting confederates known as the Tea Party. Choke on that credit you get from The Recovery Act, you rubes.

We Don't Go To Their Parties

1. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - "Skunk"
2. Alex Chilton - "All I Really Want Is Money"
3. The Stranglers - "Bitching"
4. Shellac - "This Is a Picture"
5. Brian Eno - "Driving Me Backwards"
6. Pissed Jeans - "Half Idiot"
7. Todd Tamanend Clark - "Mathematics Don't Mean a Thing"
8. Big Flame - "Let's Rewrite the American Constitution"
9. The Stabs - "The Patriot Song"
10. The Fall - "Who Makes the Nazis?"
11. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "City of Refuge"
12. Lungfish - "Jonah"
13. Nation of Ulysses - "Maniac Dragstrip"
14. David Bowie - "It's No Game (Part 2)"

The Infotainment Scan

It's old hat to complain that the 24-hour news cycle is a morass of irrelevant tripe because more coverage doesn't guarantee there's anything more worth covering... but this is ridiculous: a Guardian blog post bemoaning the lack of stand-up rock drummers, written by someone who's obviously never attempted playing the drums standing up. Hey, if you can maintain bipedal balance with all four limbs a-flailin', more power to you! But seriously, there's not much an upright stick(wo)man can do beyond the rudimentary boom-bap of Moe Tucker.

I'm not saying every band needs Terry Bozzio behind the kit, but unless there's room for a Burundi-class platoon of drum-beaters, it's nice to go beyond bang-on-a-can primitivism, isn't it?

Always want credit for some shit they supposed to do...

To paraphrase Mr. Rock, what do you want, a cookie? You low-expectation-having motherfuckers.

Is it spelled "poorism" or "pourism"?

Update in the Indie Bono-ism department: Swedish songbird Lykke Li has jumped on the bandwagon to Uganda. Evidently, what the world needs now is yet more fashionable white people going slumming on their fans' dime. At least one ugly angle has been wrenched out of this con job - donations towards the trip (organized by the noble folks at Invisible Children) are no longer going through a website in which Pitchfork editor Chris Kaskie is an investor. One less eschelon in this Ponzi scheme.

To reiterate: by all means, lend whatever support you can to Invisible Children, but do so directly instead of investing in this ridiculous indie rockstar Make-A-Wish field trip.

Indie Bono-ism

Yesterday, I was catching up on current affairs & cultural chatter over my morning coffee when I saw this:

Yeasayer has committed to join the Polyphonic Spree on a trip to Gulu, Uganda later this year, where the bands will learn about the effects of the Ugandan civil war and perform live in various locations.

Ah, Yeasayer - the band with the hardest-working publicist in indie-rock, proof that in the post-Pitchfork paradigm, a high profile guarantees neither consensus nor support. Why exactly is this quintet of bourgeois-bohemian Brooklynites traveling to eastern Africa? Here's the story: Invisible Children is a nonprofit group that rehabilitates ex-child soldiers from Uganda's civil war; they've teamed with French music blog La Blogotheque to bring occidental indie-rock bands to Uganda to see firsthand what horror Joseph Kony hath wrought and, y'know, play a few tunes. La Blogotheque will film the cross-cultural encounters for a DVD which will be sold to benefit Invisible Children.

Oh, but to pull this off, they need fans of the bands to donate $20,000 towards the endeavour. Kind-hearted consumers can donate their ducats via the Kickstarter website, a "funding platform" whose investors include Pitchfork publisher Chris Kaskie.

This whole thing stinks to high heaven.

For starters, neither Yeasayer nor the Polyphonic Spree is a band that sells hundreds of thousands of records, let alone millions. If Invisible Children wants the M.O.R.-indie audience's discretionary cash, why not recruit acts with a wider fan base? Are Vampire Weekend unable to rearrange their touring schedule? Do the Arcade Fire not give a fuck about the Ugandan civil war? I seriously doubt that.

Secondly, the loop of participants is far too closed for this to be anything other than graft. Bands routinely hyped by a prominent music website get a free trip to Africa, while the publisher of said website gets his pockets lined by donations by the bands' fans - who are expected then to pay again for an entertainment commodity wherein the globetrotting bards will learn valuable "life lessons" from poor, beleaguered brown people. And Pitchfork seems to think the magic words "full disclosure" mitigate the flagrancy of this conflict of interest.

Amidst all this backscratching, it's expected that some money will wend its way towards the nonprofit, but this is going around your ass to reach your elbow. Rather than raise twenty grand to fly a bunch of mediocre musicians to Gulu, couldn't that cash be spent on, I dunno, a school? A mobile clinic? A skills-training program?

After all, why assume concerned consumers will only donate to Invisible Children after watching a bunch of middle-class musos wander awkwardly around Africa, muttering platitudes about what great perspective it lends them (before jetting back to the warm bosom of the developed world)? Condescending juxtapositions of celebrity Caucasians cuddling third-world orphans aren't necessary to appeal to people's sense of charity. Not On Our Watch just donated over $1 million towards the Haiti relief effort, and no one had to watch some damned documentary of Brad Pitt or Matt Damon gawking at bloody rubble in Port-Au-Prince.

Though I'm not the first incensed by this debacle, no one is questioning the nobility or value of Invisible Children's mission; I'd encourage you at the very least to check out their website, if not donate directly to their cause. What's disgusting is not only how integrated into the machinery of capital so-called "indie" music has become ("as in Lady Gaga is Brokencyde is Pavement reunion"), but that the musicians see nothing wrong with this and expect their fans to empty their pockets accordingly. By turning featherweight "ethical" gestures into commodities - like hybrid cars or "Live in Uganda" DVDs - capitalism not only keeps everyone playing only by its rules, it tacitly absolves everyone's guilt about playing only by its rules. The expected/accepted display of rockstar ostentation has shifted from trashing hotel rooms in a narcotised rage, to flying half a world away to be photographed messianically embracing victims of some fresh disaster. As Jessica Hopper put it recently, "is 'I can't afford to go on my trip to Africa' any different than 'I can't afford this special cocaine I'd like more of'? Not really."

Sniping (3)

K-Punk's "new orthodoxy" translated into layspeak:

I don't give a fuck how wrong I may be, and I don't give a fuck how vague or amoebic my ambitions may be - I will be Napoleon for a day if only at my own desk!

K-Punk's slide towards self-righteous incoherence has already been noted by myself and others, but what's shocking at this point is that, in seeking "to impose a new orthodoxy in the way that the right did," K-Punk is actually pulling pages from Karl Rove's playbook. Banishing all discourse except sycophantic acquiescence; equating "nuancing" a position with abandoning it; accusing critics of giving comfort to the enemy (or at least of conforming to the enemy's prescriptive narrative); maligning the libidos of those unwilling to charge headlong & blindly into battle... at this rate, it'll won't be long before K-Punk blows Ads Without Products' cover and Dominic Fox accidentally shoots Owen Hatherly in the face.

What's beyond surprising, utterly perplexing in fact, is that anyone would want "to impose a new orthodoxy in the way that the right did." The ultimate result of neoliberal capitalism's utter domination of the past decade has been bloody fucking disaster - not just for the "little people", leftists, and Iraqis, but for the Masters of the Universe as well. The right's politics weren't so much politics as moronic bumper-stickers plastered on a vehicle fueled by psychopathic greed & an insatiable lust for power, which doesn't offer much of a long-term strategy once every house of congress, parliament, and boardroom has been occupied. Given how badly this chapter of our civlization is ending, why should we put our trust in the bulldozer militancy & smoggy philosophizing of a handful of Joy Division fans?

Much as K-Punk may wonder on the "libidindal impulses" of we who'd ask a theorist to bother defending their own ideas before lending them our full faith, I wonder about said impulses of a leftist who'd rather headbutt everyone into submission or sulk in the corner than articulate a position. The more he prattles on about the "punkish demystification" the militant dysphoria enables, the more he sounds like some prat at a rave in denial that the pill he popped was just Tylenol, and the more I wonder if he's just trying to punk us.

This Week in White People Saying Stupid Shit - now with bonus Kanye backlash!

Bill Maher on Obama's big healthcare speech, during the Friday night broadcast of his show Real Time:

It was a great speech. Y'know, when Black Elvis gets jiggy with his teleprompter... (4 second pause for a laugh that doesn't come) there's nobody better!

Elsewhere, Matt Welch of Reason Magazine found Obama's vow to push back against slanderers a "nearly Snoop Doggesque display." When Joan Walsh of Salon.com called him out for his "totally gratuitous racial imagery," Welch fell back on the ol' I Have Plenty of Black Friends excuse by professing his undying admiration for Mr. Dogg: "I'm from Long Beach..."

It's a pity Maher's too in love with the sonorous hum of his own voice, and Welch is a little proud of his "keeping it fresh" to heed the pointed observation that Maher's own buddy, Chris Rock, made about Colin Powell thirteen years ago - a point that, unfortunately, is too easily tailored to fit Obama.

What do you mean, "he speaks so well"? What, did he have a stroke the other day? He's a fuckin' educated man! ...What voice were you looking to come out of his mouth? What the fuck did you expect him to sound like? I'ma drop me a bomb tuh-day! I be pray-zo-den'! Get the fuck outta here...

Updated Sept. 15th: Sweet merciful crap, this is what I get for posting about white people saying stupid shit before the MTV Awards aired on Sunday night: a tsunami of Twittered racism in the wake of Kanye West's ill-advised, alcohol-enabled (but kinda hilarious) hijacking of the spotlight from jailbait android Taylor Swift. Harry Allen has done the unenviable task of rounding up a depressing array of posts from around the web that go so far as to advocate lynching.

Kanye's bumrush recalls another stage invasion during a highly-publicised awards ceremony: Ol' Dirty Bastard's considerably less topical commandeering of the 1998 Grammys. Perhaps everyone was more relaxed during those halcyon days of the Clinton era, or maybe racists were just more zipper-lipped & self-policing at the time, or quite likely Michael "SOY BOMB" Portnoy managed to steal ODB's thunder, but I recall much bemusement and no outrage (manufactured or otherwise) when Russell Jones swiped the mic to proclaim that, "Wu-Tang is for the children."

Also, that was at the Grammys, an event so devoid of tension or thunderbolts that even accidental spontaneity is met with that quietly insolent eye-roll perfected by the ruling classes and the French. The MTV Awards, on the other hand, are fueled by the screams of dumbfounded teenagers and so have to up the Faustian ante annually, concocting evermore ridiculous & grotesque spectacles to elicit shock & awe instead of yawns. But in its quest to appear freewheeling & hedonic, MTV's "events" are reduced to a dully predictable procession of micro-stage-managed cockteases - so much so that, prior to the genuine purge of badwill, many speculated that the Kayne/Swift collision was staged. Staged or not, the hysterical pitch of the proceedings doubtlessly encourages less measured & more vehement audience reactions, as per below:

There laid bare is the loathsome side of the democratization of communication. Social media as a solipsistic emetic does as much to encourage the laxative expression of people's most splenetic & debased thoughts as to enable reconnecting with old classmates. It's no mere coincidence that now the western world is awash in a rising tide of race-related violence and screeching harpies decrying the collapse of civilization as they knew it. This seedy undercurrent has always existed, as testified by the initial hoots of laughter audible at the onset of Michael Richards' infamous onstage shitfit. But it took the election of a non-white to the highest office in America to trigger the socially atavistic's Howard Beale moment. As Driftglass elaborates in this astute essay:

Because during the Bush years, people... never saw their love of their Dear Leader and their fealty to his Administration as something "political". They saw it as normal. As the Universe being at its proper, wingnut default setting: White, male, fundamentalist Christian, Conservative, flight-suit clad and killing scary brown people.

And once the Dear Leader's reign ended... the natural order of mindless obedience in exchange for a smug and blissful ignorance collapsed.

And worst of all, "their country" suddenly had a Scary Black Man living in their Dear Leader's pretty White House, probably having dirty, Muslim sex in the Dear Leader's sacred, Christian bed and putting his filthy, Kenyan hands all over "their county's" pure, white Constitution.

And thanks to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo chat groups, these reactionaries & racists can clasp hands across time & space and mobilise.

But as Newton's Third Law teaches, there can and must be a push back against this sickness. While the web can easily operate as a Stasi-esque Panopticon ordered upon intimidation & paranoia, it also offers nowhere for racists, thugs, fascists, and obstructionists to hide. There is no excuse to offer for allowing this aggression to stand uncontested. It is all of our responsibilities to live up to Obama's oath: We Will Call You Out On It.

Hold, Please

Well, I intended to have a lengthy diatribe posted this evening, but I live in the closest thing Japan has to compete with the projects, complete with undependable landlord, leaning towers of grease-stained dishes, thieving social retards masquerading as housemates, the incessant roar of the thoroughfare next door, and sex-tourist transients who defy the laws of physics to shit on the wall.

This also means the internet's down at the moment.

Who wants to bet S.F.A. happens before I begin fucking with their money?

Calling For the Head of John Anthony Gillis

Who is John Anthony Gillis exactly? Well, I'd say he's the one above with the studied pout and vacant stare, but that wouldn't really help, would it?

Anyone who's paid even vague attention to this webpage knows that I am not a fan of Jack White - not of the White Stripes, nor of the Raconteurs, nor of that hammy underwritten track where he & Alicia Keys stand around and shout a lot. Now, bitching about mainstream music is tilting at windmills: no matter how shitty, it ain't gonna change for some crank with an obscure vinyl collection, so sit back and let the harmattan of history sand the chrome off the latest novelty until it's as rusted & useless as all that went before. But Jack White is cannier than your average pop mouthpiece and displays both a stylistic percipience and business acuity to rival that of career(ist) icons Bowie and Reznor. The White Stripes may have reached both the platinum & gold sales thresholds but once in America, yet consider that since "Fell In Love With a Girl" first gatecrashed MTV in 2002, we've been subjected to saturation airplay of Avril Lavigne, Linkin Park, 50 Cent, Norah Jones, Usher, Maroon 5, Kelly Clarkson, the Killers, the Black Eyed Peas, the High School Musical soundtracks, Amy "My Last Name Is an Easy Punchline" Winehouse, and Katy Perry... and through it all, Jack White has remained more consistently credible and popular than any of those acts.

To give credit where it's due, Jack White is a hell of a businessman.

White knows pop begins with (and doesn't go much further than) its facade, and so painstakingly sculpts his acts to look how they sound: the peppermint insouciance of the bratty White Stripes (“the most powerful color combination of all time, from a Coca-Cola can to a Nazi banner”); the tweeds-'n'-jeans bar-band antiglam of the Raconteurs; and most recently, the sallow black leather rebel peacocking of the Dead Weather (as seen above and a million times before).

White has also learned a lesson from the Catholic Church and the Grateful Dead: what good is an image without accompanying merchandise? As far back as the Stripes' major-label debut, White's been keen to go beyond trad T-shirt-and-sticker stock by releasing limited-run collectibles bearing his trichromatic cordon. He may not have gotten his own Lego set, but he did get everything from USB sticks to sewing kits and a signature-edition Lomo camera set.

Perhaps heeding Lego's lost opportunity, the Coca-Cola company came a-knockin' in 2006 to commission an update of their epochal grouphug. The Nagi Noda video accompanying White's sub-Sesame Street singalong was an immaculately executed rip-off of Michel Gondry's fast-fatiguing repeat-o-rama trick (including, of course, the "Hardest Button To Button" video).

But while the fool multitude may be content with wacky-looking guitars and a head-nodding beat, tastemakers, critics, and hipsters are quick to call "foul" on a musician palling around with corporate sponsors. White set about defending his cred even before any worse-than-typical-knee-jerk blacklash kicked up, cranking his Analog-Man-In-A-Digital-World affectation to 11 by slagging off "kids today" and the internet in every interview. Also, when his Bond theme was debuted via another Coca-Cola commercial, he rushed out a press release disavowing any involvement in the marketing scheme, claiming to be "disappointed that you first heard the song in a co-promotion for Coke Zero, rather than in its entirety."

But who other than the densest, most irony-deficient dolt would accept this blatant cant? (Though such blatant about-faces often seem to work for scandalised evangelicals...) Clearly White's not shy about shilling for a megacorp of questionable scruples - he just wants total control over his product. After all, he 86'd that collaboration with Lego because, in his words, "You had your chance." True, White could avoid tangling with tie-ins and licensing altogether by forsaking merchandise a la Fugazi, but then Ian MacKaye ain't got a net worth $37 million, does he?

White's technophobia & analog asceticism also rings false. The band does in fact use digital trickery to enhance their sound, and White's label's much-vaunted subscription service is - surprise! - built upon the online platform. It's this false piousness and deliberate luddism regarding the internet that is most maddening. "Do I really need a MySpace page for this fucking music?" White recently asked, and obviously no, he doesn't - but only because the Stripes (and thus all his subsequent endeavors) were one of the last acts truly to benefit from the full support of the now-shuddering machinery of the music industry. Shit, if I had V2 funding music videos and paying for airplay, I wouldn't need a MySpace page either!

If there is any other contemporary icon I consider a kindred spirit of Jack White, it's Beyoncé Knowles - which isn't to say I'll sit through a Raconteurs video just for the hip-shaking. There are other musicians who parlayed their "pop outsider" status into a self-sustained cottage industry, with numerous side-projects and forays into other mediums: Frank Zappa, Ani DiFranco, Mike Patton, and fellow Americana afficionado Nick Cave have all done this. But whereas they all regard(ed) the industry at large with enormous contempt & suspicion, White seems unnaturally at ease navigating the corporate landscape - as graceful a glad-hander as Beyoncé. Additionally, both White and Beyoncé's extra-curricular excursions seem less like creative exploration than a rapacious quest for ubiquity, that we should all die with their frizzy hair and unblinking stares seared onto our retinas, the last incandescent image we should ever see as we slump lifeless in our Laz-E-Boys in front of MTV's analgesic strobe.

But, in the end, it's all about the music, right? So yes, let's make it about the fucking music: Jack White enjoys the obscene fortune of being the most widely-admired musical half-wit in history, with a three-chord vocabulary and as great a gift for nuance as Michael Bay. As refreshingly raw as White Blood Cells may have been after a half-decade of ProTool-lacquered pop & nu-metal, White's musical aesthetic is stuck solidly forty years in the past. He's contributed as much to music's progress as these shuck-'n'-jiving charlatans.

What baffles me is that I'm far from alone in acknowledging how starkly unoriginal White's work has been, yet I am desperately alone in not forgiving his shopworn adequation. Clippings from recent Dead Weather reviews include:

• ...having refashioned such dead-horse devices as slide-geetar riffs and Bonham-style boogies into something both exciting and exceedingly profitable. (7.5/10)
• ...a swampy and distinctive, if not wholly original, take on the age-old rock melting pot of dirt, sex, danger, God, and the Devil.
• But about half of Horehound is very much in the same spook-boogie mode that’s been done to death by thousands of Allmans/Winters/Hendrix/Zeppelin-worshipping bar bands. (B)

See that? These days, "dead-horse devices" reminiscent of records from almost 50 years ago can still somehow be "exciting", while "done to death" merits a solid B; that's some No Child Left Behind grade-curving shit. How, how, how can such under-achieving retro-conservatism still be so gleefully consumed? Where is the otherwise-inescapable post-post-post-ironic backlash? Is everyone too scared to admit that this pallid caveman, once a compelling herald from leftfield, is actually not the fuzzbox messiah we wished? Or is everyone just THAT FUCKING BORING?

Non-Sequitorial Postscript: Separated at birth?

Son of Non-Sequitorial Postscript: Ah, Buddyhead... it's good to have you back, lads!

Enjoy the Kneejerk

This is the funniest, deflating album review I've read in a long goddamn time. Someone at the Onion A/V Club give this cat a job!