The other reason was that I have a lot of thoughts that I need space to process, and sometimes those thoughts are processed in the form of poems, and sometimes I just throw blog posts up.

So early on, I started writing this feature called Sorry, You Suck, because I’m a hater. I wanted to use this Internets forum to tell the world how bad certain folks and things annoyed me. But what I was really doing was telling the world how much of a sucka I am.

Because when it comes down to it, I’m no better than any of the folks I’ve been hating on. I just got wrapped in being petty, when the truth is I’ve made more mistakes in my life than I can remember. And if I could remember all of them, they’d be too numerous to count. So who am I to believe I hold moral authority over anyone?

It’s fun to be petty and it’s easy to hate on shit. It’s a lot more difficult, emotionally-draining, and time-consuming to engage with ideas and arguments in any kind of meaningful and authentic way. What’s weird is that I know this, man: I have been trying to live my life as nuance for a long time. I have long aimed to be non-judgmental, and only interact with people in the way that makes sense based on how they interact with me. The problem is I don’t know Glenn Beck or anything about horse racing. What I do know I tend to not feel too good about, but do I know enough to say anything really?

Or to put it another way: would I appreciate it if someone caught 15 minutes of one of my shows and pronounced all over the Internets that I sucked?

I guess what I’m saying is I’ve been acting like the exact people I’ve been criticizing. I’ve been too closed-minded – too much just going for a laugh or a clever comment so folks will go “OH SNAP!” like Biz Markie when he saw that guy tongue-kissing his girl.

So, I’m no longer proclaiming that people and things suck. From now on, I’m gonna share things I love. So all those that I have dubbed as sucky, I hereby withdraw my proclamation.

(Except Miss Saigon. Fcuk you.)

Damn. 2MIL? She must have been bootlegging that 2PAC/Biggie/Elvis joint they recorded in heaven!

Craziest thing about it though…she downloaded 24 songs. That’s not even 2 albums worth!

Give me a break RIAA. The thing is, you ufckers put yourselves in this position in the first place. When I was in high school, I knew the release dates of upcoming albums, which I would buy on cassette! I could listen to an album all the way through, from beginning of Side A to the end of Side A, and the same for Side B. Midnight Marauders. Buhloone Mindstate. The Soundtrack to the Motion Picture “Purple Rain.” Yeah I know.

Then in college, I caught up to the rest of the world and got a CD player. So the purchasing of music changed. Instead of wanting something I could definitely listen to all the way through, I was willing to settle for a CD with 5 or 6 good tracks. Getting a CD that was hot from beginning to end became more rare, but it still happened. OK Computer. Black Star. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Okay.

It’s no wonder that it was around this time that Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys and all those types of groups started to blow. There was no longer a need to make a full album of good music – and certainly no reason for the music industry to build careers. When I was 15, I would think to myself Yeah I liked his last album, so I’ll get the new one. But in college, it was about the couple songs you heard on the radio or saw on TV. But the music industry did not change their style of distribution, they still insisted that people should buy CDs – when most albums did not have an album’s worth of good music.

So after college, file sharing was the new way to get at music. And more than ever, it was about one track at a time. Still the RIAA insisted that albums were important, even though nobody bought any. Artists who had a reputation could still make albums, but I’m having a hard time remembering a single iconic album from the past 10 years that is considered a classic strictly because of its music. (Donuts doesn’t count; neither does The Black Album.)

Because of the immediacy of the way music is produced then distributed, careers are not built to last. They used to sell you a lifetime of Bruce Springsteen albums, now they sell you ONE Soulja Boy album and then try to find the next Soulja Boy.

The music industry treats its product like its disposable, but then expects us to treat it like its precious? If no artist or record label can put out a listenable product, why should I bother spending my money? What a scam RIAA!

Maybe if labels would take some time to develop actual talented artists who can create good music, then folks wouldn’t mind mind spending a little money for music. But as of now, I’m gonna keep stealing. (But seriously, please don’t sue me.)

But what was aggravating about it to me was how he competed in 8 events and won them all and got the accolades from the press, but I didn’t hear the press saying that swimming is the only sport you can win that many medals. USA Men’s Basketball played 8 games as well, and won every single one of them, yet in the end, players received ONE gold medal apiece.

And so even though it was kind of exciting that he was so dominant in a sport I’d never cared about before, my initial Phelps fandom disappeared about 5 seconds into the first interview I saw him do on TV. The words he “says” seem to fall out of his mouth like chewed food, making him annoying to both hear and see. But worse than that was how he presented himself, like the adulation was long overdue. He had a huge chip on his shoulder, which probably stemmed from the fact that he’s been a douche his whole life and nobody has ever wanted to be his friend.

Am I making an unfair assumption? I doubt it. How many times have you done something you wouldn’t want the world to know about? And don’t people always have cameras around? But isn’t it fairly rare that you or your friends have truly damaging pictures plastered all over the Internets? For someone who has as much to lose as Phelps to have one of his “friends” straight sell him out like that, he must be an insufferable prick.

While I don’t get down with smoking, it’s not so much the smoking that bothers me. It’s the attitude that he can do whatever he wants because people love him. But the thing is, nobody loves you anymore Michael. Your body is shaped weird, you house loose marbles under your tongue, and most of all, you act like a dbag. Who wears their hat backwards? Were those the 2008 Olympics or was that 1988?

We all know elite athletes often have stank attitudes, but most of them don’t flaunt it so bad. Those who do at least usually make it entertaining. (Chad Johnson comes to mind.) And many athletes – in particular Olympic athletes – turn their celebrity into something positive for the world.

DBag Phelps has done exactly nothing good for humanity. So someone remind me why we care about him at all?

I’ll admit if he was a more likable guy in interviews, I would probably have no strong feelings about this newly released photo. But I’ve been sick of him since about medal number 3; this is just an excuse to snap on him.

Combine the new picture with the 2004 DUI on his record, and we have the makings of a real great role model don’t we?

Various reviews online pan it, saying it aims to condense too much into a play. As many of you probably know, the story focuses on a love story between some rich bratty Southern Belle, and a suave pro-slavery capitalist. The backdrop is the Civil War, and tied up in the setting of everything is the historical understanding of race and slavery, war, economic development and exploitation, and…well, isn’t that a lot already? We all know it’s risky business to set a love story against such ominous historical events, unless you can convey the gravity the situation and its effect on the people who lived it.

So the musical tried to do that by having actors playing slaves singing a happy jaunty song entitled “Negroes for Sale.” And that is astounding. That someone thought it would be acceptable to portray slaves as jazz-handsing their way into a lifetime of brutal torture and rape is beyond me.

Or it was at first, but then I realized that there’s a long history of playing up pain and suffering for ticket sales. It’s more than a little appalling to think an interpersonal love story could be so compelling as to turn slavery – slavery! – into just another fact of the day. A musical certainly could convey the dire conditions of an historical era and harsh realities of life in that time, but it appears that “Gone with the Wind” didn’t, so good riddance.

But it has to make you really wonder about the continued popularity of “Miss Saigon,” doesn’t it? More than 2 million Vietnamese killed, another 50,000+ American soldiers killed – not to mention the millions of casualties in other parts of Southeast Asia, the mentally ill and amputee veterans, the birth defect-causing chemical weapons, the exploitation of the Vietnamese people by American and European economic and military forces, which continue to this day? The perpetual state of poverty in Vietnam and in fact across much of Southeast Asia is directly and indirectly traceable back to one event more than any other, and that is the American War in Vietnam.

So you would think it didn’t make any sense to set a love story against this horrid horrid backdrop. (Plot refresher: American GI returns to Vietnam years later to find he fathered a son with a Vietnamese prostitute his friend bought him who for some fucking reason nobody knows fell in love with him and waited loyally for him – and killed her own evil Vietnamese boyfriend – only to find he had married his American girlfriend, then she conveniently kills herself so her son can have a better life in America. Everybody’s happy! Or you know, everybody white the audience can identify with.) For the “Gone with the Wind” musical to make slaves sing and dance, they made a conscious decision to ignore context of the original plotline – inexcusable to say the least. For “Miss Saigon,” partially based on the opera “Madam Butterfly,” they didn’t even make a conscious decision to ignore parts of the story. For them, there was no story to ignore; the story was simply and solely the “romance” between Thuy and Whateverhisname. Miss Saigon’s source material is not a 1,000 page novel, but essentially the Vietnam War itself. So that means anything that was written for the musical is written only to advance the story. The war is nothing more than backdrop, is perhaps the least important part of the story. It’s disgusting. No other way to say it.

When atrocities are reduced to plot devices, then it’s no longer outside the realm of imagination to create a world in which American soldiers and Vietnamese prostitutes are simultaneously having equal giving and taking relationships, and the only negative to arise from them is broken hearts and fatherless children, you know, “the living reminder of all the good we failed to do.” A world where the flashy colorful opening number features the line “Let me buy you a girl!” A world where all the Americans are good or at least redeemable, and all the Asians are conveniently dead, evil, or mute.

War? What’s that?

This all seems pretty goddamn common sense to me. But you wouldn’t believe the kind of support this stupid play receives, that for whatever reason didn’t materialize for “Gone with the Wind.” Back in 2004, we – meaning Boston Progress Arts Collective – put on an artistic response show entitled “Missed Sigh Gone” (thanks to Bao Phi for the title), which wow, just elicited the most cuckoo suckaducks out the woodwork. I mean, we got threats! And naysayers were using every mode of attack they could think of – even trying to convince us that our satirical design for the publicity materials was copyright infringement!

Anyway man, it’s plainly obvious to me, but it’s disturbing that I know more people in this country probably disagree than agree with me on this.

So Eight Belles, one of the horses running in the Kentucky Derby, broke two ankles during the race and was euthanized on the racetrack. My reaction was to immediately question why this horse couldn’t simply have been allowed to live and see her ankles heal and simply hang out in a field the rest of her life. What I found online is that horses generally can’t heal from broken legs and ankles, and not euthanizing a horse after such an injury would actually amount to torture as the healing process for a horse is very painful and oftentimes fatal.

So naturally, my second question was – seriously? If these injuries, which you hear about often enough for the general public to know racehorses are euthanized, are relatively common, why do we have horse racing at all? Isn’t that somewhat needless?

And again the Internets provided the answer. Horses run in the wild as well, and they in fact race each other naturally, so doing so on a track is pretty much giving them a place to do it, and also allows people to get some enjoyment and cash out of it. OK, that makes sense I suppose. There seems to be some acknowledgment that breeding racehorses does result in animals that are a bit more likely to break a bone, and while that doesn’t exactly seem ethical, I’m really not an expert on the matter, and it’s hard for me to judge what’s really acceptable without being very well acquainted with the sport.

Now if you know me, then you probably know where I’m going next. What is the major difference between supporting horse racing, a sport in which animals are bred to be more likely to die than they would be in the wild, and dogfighting, a sport in which animals are bred to be more likely to die than they would be in the wild? How are clips of dogfights shown on CNN with a warning, but the Kentucky Derby is nationally televised to an adulating audience? Why are dogfight losers considered “brutally” killed, and Eight Belles was “euthanized?” How does Michael Vick get 23 months in prison, but the owner of Eight Belles gets a letter from PETA?

And as usual, I’m not advocating for the filly’s owner to be tried as a criminal and locked up, I’m just saying, there’s somethign a little uneven here, and if you just think about what types of folks tend to be into horse racing, and what types of folks tend to be into dogfighting, and I’m just saying, the different way they get treated has more than a little bit to do with the race and relative wealth of the audience.

I don’t like Harvard.

Growing up in this area, I had no special feeling either way for Harvard. As far as I was concerned it only existed on TV, or as a school that my parents hoped I would attend and would never in a million years have accepted me. I didn’t know anybody who went to Harvard, so I had no interactions with anybody from that school. As far as I was concerned, Harvard Square might as well have been the Kremlin. I knew it existed, but I had no reason or desire to go there. In fact, my college hatred was reserved for BC and BU students, who would crowd onto the green line drunk every Friday night and sing “Bye Bye Miss American Pie” or some other such nonsense like the climactic scene in a really boring movie.

In my adult life, I have met many people who went to school there, and you know, there’s definitely a lot of good folks. The good folks far outnumber the bad folks, so you know, don’t take this the wrong way. The bad catches are few and far between, but those bad folks are the worst folks I’ve ever met. They’re snobby and self-centered; they think their choice college education gives them the authority to pass judgment on others; they feel entitled to be a part of any and all conversations; they believe that what they learned in classes is more valuable than what anyone could have learned in life (or classes elsewhere); they see the world as having two possible views in everything: their point of view and the wrong point of view. In fact, you remember that ponytail in Good Will Hunting? Pretty much exactly like that dude, but in real life so way more worse.

Again. Not all. Just a few, but those few are so aggravating that they feel like a lot more than a few.

So I caught the link to this article off the Hyphen blog, and yeah, it ain’t really surprising. Basically, a Harvard student concluded that Asian folks at Harvard act “white” because it makes them more popular and intentionally have fewer Asian friends. (You know, this is not just Harvard, but everywhere – Asians buy into the idea that Asian people are simply less complex than white people, thus having all Asian friends would mean you are a less complex person. Other POC buy into this too, but it seems more prevalent among Asian communities.)

But we’ve all met Asian folks who say stuff like, “I don’t really hang out with Asians” like it’s something to be proud of. These folks have the opinion that – to borrow from Orwell – all races are equal, but some races are less equal.

Anyway, that’s all societal and it would take years to get to the heart of those issues, so I’ll let it lie. E-mail me if you wanna get into that.

What’s really more infuriating about Harvard recently is the way it has treated the Boston neighborhood of Allston, which is directly across the river from Harvard. When they released their plans to expand the Harvard campus more seriously into Allston last January, it was clear they’d never approached community leaders in the neighborhood for real input, and a year later still have not. They act as though Allston is a big parking lot, and not a vital part of the urban landscape. Harvard says it will create 14,000 jobs by building in Allston…in 50 years. So that’ll be great for the Brazilian, Korean, and Russian immigrant communities there…or not, since they will all have been priced out of the neighborhood 45 years prior.

It’s as though Harvard administration believes that having any association with their esteemed institution is an honor. Like residents of Allston – one of the few mixed commercial/residential neighborhoods that is home to recent immigrants and multi-generational Boston families both – should be honored to share a street with Harvard.

Anyway, on an up note, Larry Summers was run out of Cambridge and replaced by Drew Gilpin Faust as president of the university like about a year ago. And I guess – from what I be reading in the paper – she isn’t all about trying to get blood on her fangs, and may be taking it slower as far as Allston is concerned. Of course, I’ll take that with a grain of salt though because the school has continually proven to be a bad neighbor for a long time.

So Marc Ecko – who made his fortune selling urban fashion, with best-selling brands like ecko unlimited, G-Unit, and Avirex all a part of his empire – won Barry Bonds’s record-breaking homerun ball in auction with a bid of over $750,000. Populist that he is (I say that sarcastically), Ecko created a website where people could vote what to do with the ball, and the result was never really in doubt. The vote was as rigged as the presidential election was in 2004, and – surprise surprise – America voted to give the ball to the baseball Hall of Fame with a big fat asterisk stamped on it, to serve as reminder that while Bonds may have broken the career mark for homeruns, he cheated to do it by using steroids. You know, because guilty until proven innocent and all that.

Now of course a lot of older white folks – who had never heard of Marc Ecko, but whose kids have – are shitting their pants out of excitement that Barry Bonds will forever be remembered as a cheater in the HOF. I wonder if this will have an affect on the sales of clothes from ecko unlimited? I wonder if this stunt has anything in common with the fact that virtually all of the models on the ecko website are white for the first time like ever? Nah, probably coincidence.

But see, we shouldn’t really be surprised, I mean, Marc Ecko has sucked for a long time. You all may have seen a viral video that was going around the Internets a couple years ago of Marky Marc graffiti tagging the president’s plane Air Force One. Of course, it was fake and not at all tied to the impending release of the graffiti-based video game “Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.” (Remember folks, sarcastic.) He tried to play it like he was representing this pent-up frustration with the government that a lot of regular folks feel, but when questioned about the stunt, his true corporatist colors shined on through saying that not just anybody could pull off such a stunt, because “you have to be rich.”

Before all of this business – and I mean that in every sense of the word – took place, Marc Ecko was just doing his thing: exploiting clothing trends in Black urban communities, repackaging them and selling them back to those same communities he stole them from and selling them to kids in suburban mega-malls who assumed he was the trendsetter, not the trend thief.

It’s like he just gets worse and worse and worse. Maybe someone should set up a website to vote on whether we should continue to spend our money on his clothes or if we should start stamping asterisks all over them.

(By the way, I find it weird that Romney never converted to Protestantism – not because I think Mormonism is worse or anything, but simply because Mitt Romney will usually do anything to get elected. He tends not to be very strong in his beliefs, and I would assume that his faith is no different. And I know: I live in the state in which he was once elected governor, and almost everything he said then is the opposite of what he says now. Anyway, I can write “Sorry Mitt Romney, You Suck” another time…)

For some reason, ABC thought it might be a good idea to bring the aforementioned Beck on to talk about it. I’m not sure why they thought that was a good idea, because although Glenn Beck is a Mormon, he is also a windbag. Any insight he might have had because he shares a religion with Romney would be negated by the fact that he never never never knows what the hell he is talking about.

Perhaps hindsight is 20/20, and I’m simply saying this stuff because I already know how ridiculous he looked on the show. But it’s not just that; what has caught a lot of people’s attention is that when it was his turn to comment, the first point he made was, “why are we going to a candidate and asking about religion? Who cares?”

Uh…is that, like, a trick question?

Don’t you care, Glenn Beck? Or am I wrong? I thought you were the same guy who invited The Honorable Keith Ellison on your program on CNN after he became the first Muslim to win election to the U.S. House of Representatives, and said, “what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’”

Indeed, who cares about religion?

This genius went on to say: “I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.”

You know what I think a lot of Americans feel? That Glenn Beck is an asshole.

But aside from “Bee Movie” being unfunny, which a lot of kids flicks are, it was actually kind of offensive…which a lot of kids flicks also are.

It started out innocuously enough, a little racial joke here and there, not much to get excited over. They certainly weren’t funny, but were only mildly offensive – which is pretty much par for the country club course nowadays. They were just there, kind of like a reminder, “oh yeah, I guess that’s what some white people think is funny…” Except nobody was laughing at anything, like not us, not the white folks, not even any of the kids were laughing at the jokes. It’s like, my 3 year-old nephew would have giggled more if we’d gone to see “American Gangster” like I originally wanted.

For example, the Jerry Seinfeld bee character – I don’t even remember the lead character’s name, how often does that happen? – is talking to his parents about what he’ll do instead of work after graduating college. The final and most outrageous option is “get a gold tooth, start calling everyone Dog” as he pounds his chest and makes a peace sign with his fingers. Come on now, really?

Another one that struck me as pretty uninspired was when they were watching the news, and all the reporters had names like “Buzz Bumble” or whatever bee-related name they came up with, and the final reporter to be mentioned was “Jeanette Chung.” Haw haw. It’s not that I don’t understand the joke, I just don’t see how a professional comedy writer could have thought that was laugh-worthy.

Also, Chris Rock’s mosquito character – Mooseblood – was weirdly like a drug addict. Take that for what it’s worth.

But those somewhat questionable, altogether unfunny jokes didn’t ruin the movie – which was really three plots rolled into one. What really had me kind of upset was the moral of the story. All kids movies have life lessons at the end right? They are often overly simplistic, but you know, it’s for kids, so what do you expect? But the moral to this one was unnecessarily convoluted and turned out to be pretty messed up. (SPOILER AHEAD.)

The story is this: bees – led by Jerry Seinfeld – sue the entire human race for taking their honey without permission and in doing so enslaving bees in labor camps and turning profit on stolen goods. After bees win the court case, preventing humans from taking any more of their honey, they end up with so much honey, they don’t know what to do with it – an embarrassment of riches so breathtaking that bee society breaks down, which leads to the cessation of pollination of flowers and plants, which leads to the decline of crops worldwide, which will eventually lead to the death of animals and humans and no pretty colors for kids who play in the park. The Jerry Seinfeld bee is so moved by the plight of humans that he devises a way get the bees back into the business of honey-creation – giving permission once again for humans to take their goods – thus saving the world.

The not so subtle message is that cheap labor is cheap because it’s cheap and don’t think about it beyond that point. The underclass – bees – finally find a way to assert themselves and demand equal treatment and in so doing throw the world off balance. Turns out that humans should never have allowed the bees their rights in the first place. In fact, if anything, the bees should have been happy to be making honey for human consumption and profit because otherwise they serve no purpose in the world. The moral is not so much based on morality I think…

If, for example the United States should want to use the world’s most technologically advanced military to take control of oil from various impoverished states around the world in order to support their own economic world dominance, why then, we should all be at peace with that decision because it makes the world run smoother.

Or if multi-million and -billion dollar corporations are hitting teenagers in Asia and the Pacific Islands with 12 hour works days in return for no schooling, pittance for wages, and an elevated lifetime risk for cancer and respiratory diseases, well, they know what’s good for the world’s population.

Or if the artificially-inflated prices and corporate-created emotional significance of diamonds has resulted in the creation of war zones across Africa and illegal pipelines for money and weapons and the death of countless diamond miners in a field that has no base safety regulations for its practitioners, we should all be glad that Cecil Rhodes had the foresight to kill off the poor for a benefit the world’s rich didn’t know it needed.

Or that Black musicians should be happy enough making music and not worry that they don’t own the rights to their songs, because they wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway.

I could give you a million examples of situations all over the world in which the disenfranchised and underrepresented and oppressed are exploited for the benefit of the blissfully willful ignorant. But you’re smart enough to have followed along up until this point, so I probably don’t need to s-p-e-l-l every single detail out right?

“Bee Movie” sucks. Don’t support it.

But I recently came across an article about dude, and it opened my eyes a little bit. The author of the article admitted a few things about Gauguin, including that he was not embraced by other French folks, not considered a great artist in his day, was considered a hedonist by the local (French colonizer) Polynesian government, and disliked by most locals. Yet by the end of the article, the writer had us trying to sympathize with him because of his restless soul, which led him to travel to the South Pacific, searching for his version of paradise (where he could use his relative wealth to exploit local communities and spread STDs. Asshole.)

So I did a little bit of research about him. Turns out it’s as bad as I imagined. First of all, how are people gonna give him props for his influence on the “Primitivism” movement in art? From what I can gather – word to Wikipedia – Primitivism was a reaction to the Enlightenment in art and music, which reflected the values that Europeans at the time considered “primitive.” (Man Europeans of the 18th and 19th centuries, you guys are fucks.) Brought on because of widespread European invasions of other parts of the world, Primitivism was influenced by the white man’s interpretation of the arts of Africa, South America, the Pacific Islands, the Middle East, and Asia. I guess cats were thinking European art was all about imitation, and in their search for authenticity, they stole imagery from the art of other parts of the world. You know, because that’s way more authentic.

Gauguin – having lost his job as a stockbroker – bounced on his wife and five kids and moved to what was called French Polynesia at the time. He bounced around there, talking about his own greatness and alienating everyone with whom he crossed paths. He was treated as good as dead in his native country (which is racist in a different way) and abhorred by the local folks where he was at. He died broke and diseased, and I guess it serves him right. If you take a look at his works, there’s a strong strain of Orientalism in pretty much all of his later work.

After his death, he started to get major love for the aforementioned Primitivism, as well as for championing woodcutting as an artform. You know who else was into woodcutting? The people of Polynesia! So weird that he was able to teach that to the local folks and retroactively make it an historically significant part of their culture. Just like Justin Timberlake popularized beatboxing, and Elvis Presley invented Rock and Roll, and “The Departed” is like the most original movie idea EVAR!

It’s not like I ever knew a damn thing about Paul Gauguin in the first place, but after learning what I could online, turns out his is a stone best left unturned. Fuck a Gauguin. You can tell him I said it too.

I don’t want to be labeled a Lonnie-hater, because at his best, he’s one of my favorite emcees EVAR. More importantly, his artistic growth has been very apparent, something most solo rappers can’t claim. (After finding a certain level of success, a lot of emcees keep trying to replicate it instead of continuing to grow artistically.) It’s a straight line from Can I Borrow a Dollar? straight through to Be. I don’t mean to say the quality or listenability necessarily grew with each new album, but that you could see him adding new musical explorations and questions (huh, that’s what it’s all about) with each new release.

But that trend stopped with Finding Forever, which is straight wack. The first single, “The People,” was actually pretty bangin, until he called Kanye West “the new Primo,” and all the sudden, that song became kinda unlistenable. When I heard the album for the first time, I actually skipped over most tracks before they were finished, something I never do the first time I listen to an album. They were just so bland.

So what the hell do I know? Nothing really, but doesn’t something feel kind of awry in that picture up there? Word is it’s from his upcoming video for “I Want You.” Here in absolutely no logical order are the reasons the picture above represents everything wrong with Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr right now.

1. Alicia Keyes
Yeah I understand she’s dope, beautiful, talented, a great songwriter. (Please don’t talk to me about her poetry though.) She’s from New York City, she went to the high school that “Fame!” was based on, she pulls off wearing the most ill-conceived outfits by looking impossibly good, she is a big Prince fan. So what is my problem? Basically, she co-starred with Common in a terrible movie – Smokin’ Aces – which from what I can tell was produced and directed by a computer. How derivative can a movie be? It’s like the screenwriters just took 7 different run-of-the-mill crime short films and tried to figure out a way to make them one movie. Seeing Common and Alicia Keyes acting together again is no thrill. It’s not so much Alicia herself, but the memory of terrible filmmaking that haunts me.

2. Kanye West
I thought Will.I.Am produced this song? Why is Kanye in the video? My wife thinks Kanye intentionally encouraged Common to make a wack album so his own would look better when he dropped it. (“Yeah yeah yeah Rashid, just flip through this US Weekly to come up with metaphors. Trust me, I’m Kanye West!”) There may be something to that, because how could Common have gone from the musical scape of Electric Circus and Be to an album full of corny love raps? I know, in general when Kanye has a hand in something, it often turns out pretty pleasurable on the ear for the effort, but once he starts putting his voice on the hook, it gets worse, and when he kicks a guest verse, it’s time to pull the cord. I can only wish I could listen to Be with all of Kanye’s voice edited out. He’s like the rap Jar Jar Binks. (And why does Kanye’s voice shake so hard on the hook on “Southside,” was he jogging? And after Common’s hilarious clever and funny punchlines like the James Baldwin line or the “back of a motorcycle,” why does Kanye follow up with shit like “ArmorAll flow cuz it never get rusty” and the Grey Poupon line? That’s a perfect example of another otherwise fun song ruined by Mr. West.)

3. Serena Williams (that’s her on the far right)
Serena dated Brett Ratner. That’s just, I mean, come on.

4. His wardrobe
I’m not narrow-minded son. I don’t have any reason to believe a rapper shouldn’t wear a suit. I think cats should dress sharp if they want. Wearing a suit is fine by me, in fact, I encourage it if it looks fresh. (What’s up with his tiny lapels though?) But the real issue to me is that this video is obviously such a production. It’s got famous guests, bright lights, slick sets, basically giving the “people” what they want, except the “people” are casting agents and advertising executives. If this isn’t a demo reel for future movie roles, then it ain’t nothing. He even said it in one of those wack love songs on the new album, “I got my SAG card, baby, I’m an actor.” What, too good for rapping?

As good as Common has been in the past, it looks like he’s halfway over the shark right now. I know a lot of people have trouble admitting this to themselves, but it’s hard to think of another explanation.