When I first started blogging here, it was a two birds, one stone kind of thing. One reason is that I hoped it would give people a reason to keep coming back to my website, and keep me in the minds of people who might potentially book me for a show. It’s more business-oriented than I usually am, but it’s easier than cold-calling. (Which I did as a job when in college, and which is no fun.)

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.)

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently won a court case against a young Midwestern mother – Jammie Thomas-Rasset – who downloaded music illegally. A Minnesota federal court ruled in favor of the behemoth corporation in the amount of almost two-million dollars.

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.)

Yeah yeah so he won like 8 gold medals at the Summer Olympics and we were supposed to love him and everything. People started throwing around phrases like “Greatest Olympian in History” and “Greatest Athlete of All Time” and it all kind of seemed to fit because he did something nobody had ever done before. EVAR!

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?

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London recently saw the world premiere of the musical adaptation of the novel (and subsequent film) Gone with the Wind. Seventy-nine shows later, it’s been canceled.

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…)

I have never paid attention to horse-racing ever in my life, but the events of this past weekend have got the wheels spinning a little in my head.

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.

Yeah. So. I’m just gonna say it.

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. (more…)

Many of you know Barry Bonds stays in the news because he holds the record for most career home runs in Major League Baseball, and a lot of folks assume he’s been juicing for years. Never mind that the MLB has known ballplayers have been using steroids for a long time and never did anything to discourage it or that it’s never been proven that Bonds ever used steroids – a lot of baseball fans, particularly white baseball fans, hold a distaste for Bonds so rancorous, you would think he was Dick Cheney, Jeff Skilling, or someone who did some truly evil shit – not a professional athlete. (Huh? What do you mean there’s more apathy than hatred for Cheney?)

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.

You may have heard that CNN’s Glenn Beck was on “Good Morning America” last week on the same day that Mitt Romney was to give a speech addressing – for the first time during this, his campaign to become the Republican nominee for President – his religion. Because he is a Mormon, and because he doesn’t have Chuck Norris’s endorsement, his hold on that number one spot is starting to slip. So I guess his staff felt like it was now or never to address the fact that he practices a religion that a lot of Americans kind of just assume is crazy.

(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.

“Seinfeld” was a funny show, but based on his recent television appearances, commercials, and this godawful new film, I have to assume that the show should have been named after Larry David instead. Either Jerry was never that funny, or having kids makes you infinitely more lame.

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.) (more…)

Let me admit upfront that I don’t really know shit about painting and painters. Gauguin is no exception. I was barely familiar with his work or his life, except I knew he had once been a white collar professional and moved to Tahiti later in life to concentrate on painting. He’s renowned, so I figured, you know, go on, do your thing. I had no interest in learning much more.

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. (more…)

image ganked from concreteloop.com – obviously

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? (more…)