From Time.com:

another research team that administered questionnaires about emotions four times a day for a week reported that Japanese people feel emotion — any emotion — less often than Americans. And the Japanese respondents tended to rate their emotional events as more neutral than Americans rated theirs.

Maybe the Japanese just get more easily fed up with questionnaires...

Slip N Slide: A short introduction

Warning: this might offend you. For a couple of reasons. There's some connection between the lyrics, which are brilliant in an amoral way, and the technique of the production, the way the bass is layered with the samples, which is just undeniable. If this were representative of hip hop in general, and if the music were taken just for its lyrics, it would be easy to argue that hip hop has no political meaning whatsoever. But the bass is deep, and Trick Daddy's voice is deep, as deep as Florida is South. His interjections placed over his own verses press down on the entire song...

It all began here, after Trick Daddy caught the attention of the infamous Luke, the man almost solely responsible for those little black and white stickers on CDs. Trick and Trina establish themselves as the king and queen of Miami here, and there's even a hairspray-wearing court jester running around. The production is strengthened by the bouncing echo of Trick's voice (ah-ah!)



I do think in this video Trina became the first woman to name her price on MTV ("twenty G's for the nut, what"...). She is much more believable than Lil' Kim or Nicki Minaj--even if she did get plastic surgery, which is unlikely, her style of presentation is more honest than either of theirs.


Trina - by Warner-Music

A classic pan-Southern collaboration:


Trick Daddy - In Da Wind by freship

With one of the coldest verses since the Geto Boys, Trick Daddy raps "fuck the judge and C.O.'s, fuck the family of the victim, witnesses, snitchin' ass ho's, cuz I'm a thug." Love that shot of the white kid getting pulled away from Trick Daddy by his mom as he waves at his hero. Trick Daddy taunts bougie black folks just as mercilessly: if I'm your worst nightmare, get ready for some sleepless nights, cuz I'm a thug.

He puts words in the mouth of his rival, whose girl he may or may not be interested in: "'Bitch, I been watchin you watchin him/ you must wanna fuck this nigga,'" and adds, "My name alone/ been known to break up happy homes." Rest In Peace Family Values.


TRICK DADDY - I'M A THUG by hushhush112

Probably the best song ever made for and about basketball. Again the vocal echo is used in the intro


Trick Daddy - Take It To Da House by freship

The significant overlap between babysitting and standup comedy

A friend of mine wrote a fascinating blog post about the overlap between computer repair specialists and therapists. More and more, he said, the person who fixes your computer is prepared to, basically, counsel you, because the trauma of losing access to your workstation is increasingly enormous.

I notice a similar kind of occupational drift with regard to standup comedy. Today the way comedians practice their art has everything to do with the way they deal with "hecklers." A drunk man, in 2003, kept yelling "yeee-haw!" from the back of The Fillmore at Dave Chappelle. Eventually Chappelle found a way to incorporate this guy into his act, asking the crowd, "who here likes to give head?" and, after a beat, "thought I was gonna hear you, yee-haw guy." This is the traditional formula: a heckler is hostile and disruptive, the comedian makes fun of him, the crowd returns its focus to the comedian.

But in the two clips above, something different might be going on. There are basically three hecklers in these videos. During Hannibal Burress' set, a man, who's probably tripping on something psychedelic or maybe just a nutcase, is publicly displaying his enthusiastic affection for a woman who seems to enjoy the attention too. During Galifianakis', it's a woman who gets on his stage and starts acting like an oblivious, rambunctious kindergartener. In both cases, the crowd members don't seem to want to attack the comedian directly, but just to get attention themselves, to be performers themselves. They are literally regressing, ignoring the standard procedures of adult events like standup comedy by acting like very young children. Maybe there's something to this idea that the generation of people born in the 80's are now big, adult-sized children, unprepared for life as adults.

White voodoo

Apparently the word 'voodoo' catches the eye of corporate executives looking for marketing research--or whatever it is these seemingly infinite urban 'consultancies' do. There are not one, but two such vague institutions within the city of London who have taken their name from the religion whose roots are in West Africa. They do things like "design, programming, e-commerce, search engine marketing and optimisation, usability, copywriting, fulfilment operations, store management and statistical analysis," as well as "rigorous analysis" and "candid explanation." Those last two quotes were from the trendier, hipper-looking firm, so hip that they don't have a picture of themselves on their website and it looks like it could be a site for an Urban Outfitters. They provide solutions, analysis, new ways of looking at things, and even ways to make a difference. I should be working for them, right?

APOCALYPSE comes from the Greek apokalyptein, which means the unconcealing, the bringing to light, the revealing. The Western canon, insofar as there ever was such a thing, has believed in the occlusion of the pre-apocalyptic present from itself. In this tightly-guarded monument to paranoia that is European Ideals, the present can only exist insofar as it is not apocalyptic, insofar as it hides its true nature, which is the apex of the highest beauty and the lowest degradation, all at once in the figure of the banal, the heart-disease-ridden bag lady at the bus stop, the shivering heroin addict on the corner, oversexed chattering people, men who love gambling, pub quizzes, immigrants and "natives." The incessant, libidinal invasion of the present by dark spectres, formless forms, by the chromatism of hiding, eruption and fugitivity. The Black death, the hiddenness of truth, the final uncovering of truth in the Holy Revelation and Resurrection. The light is only at the beginning and at the end, in the cratio ex nihilo and the apocalyptic revealing of the bifurcation of being into those who are saved and those who are damned, the civilized and the sinners.

How to think the apocalypse otherwise is our hope and our wager. What could the apocalypse be if not a revealing, or could it be a revealing that reveals what was already there? The collapse of everyday things into other forms, the life that lives on death? The apocalypse which is real for the grass dying outside, for the plants and animals dissembling in our intestines, just as much as for the new lives which emerge to multiply from the fresh corpses. There is no drama here, at least not in the sense of a final Reckoning or Revelation, aside, perhaps, from the plant's understanding that it will be returned to the multiplicity which already traversed it. To feed on sunlight, on the creator which will ultimately destroy our world with its overzealous, exuberant abundance.

The Angry-dad-ification of Marshall Mathers

Having been twelve and amidst a large cohort of urban white kids, I remember vividly Eminem's dramatic entrance onto the national scene in 1999. For the first time, it seemed, the familial, oedipal, self-harming psychoses of a white youth were placed alongside the gangstafied funk and soul revivals of a black producer-icon, Dr. Dre. It was as if Kurt Cobain had been reborn, in a black neighborhood, with a sense of humor. A perverse kind of musical cotton candy, it became the quintessential youth "headmusic," to borrow Kodwo Eshun's phrase. For the entirety of my 13-year-old life I could remember men in the neighborhood blasting hip hop from huge, lumbering American cars as they passed my house. Eminem seemed to be the first massive rap artist who was immune to this type of broadcasting. Yet every private-school boy, mostly white and asian, had a copy, bootleg or genuine, of the Slim Shady LP and its darker followup, the Marshall Mathers LP.

Hey, kids! Do you like violence?

Eminem's appeal seemed solely male, a sort of musical accompaniment to the first-person-shooter game, each track repeating, in explicit and gory detail, a series of assaults and overdoses (See, for instance, "Brain Damage"). It was their outlandishness, their absurdity, that made them OK to us, and this appetite for the fantastic may have been Eminem's way of refusing the compulsion to prove his "street cred"--the stories, like those of Slick Rick, were often so entertaining that nobody cared to ask if they were true or not. At the same time, though, there were stories about his relationship with Kim that made people hope they weren't true. One of the moments in Eminem that I loved the most was his hook on the track "Role Model":

I came to the club drunk with a fake ID
Don't you wanna grow up to be just like me!
I've been with 10 women who got HIV
Now don't you wanna grow up to be just like me!
I got genital warts and it burns when I pee
Don't you wanna grow up to be just like me!
I tie a rope around my penis and jump from a tree
You probably wanna grow up to be just like me!!!

His joy at the prospect of his own imaginary castration set him far apart from other hip hop artists, even Dre himself, for whom the mention of one's own penis could only be a metaphoric reference to size and power. Eminem's antics were all in the service of the overarching philosophical journey towards "just not giving a fuck".




I would not, then, have guessed that Eminem's career would proceed the way it has, although, looking back, I really can't imagine how else it could have gone. Nowadays, his tracks are inevitably put together by superstar producers and played almost as a kind of "urban easy listening," that is to say, everywhere that plays hip hop music--malls, convenience stores, salons. His new ("post-addiction-metamorphosis") tracks lack the utter Dionysian destructiveness of his early ones, but are no less angry or violent. Nowadays, he yells like a middle-aged alcoholic, his voice devoid of the mischief and humor of the bleached-blonde days. His tracks have always, since "My Name Is," been mainstream, but now they occupy a different mainstream, one which includes middle-aged people, black people, and women. That's not to say that black people never listened to Eminem at the beginning, but I remember the moment when D12 came out as a turning point, at which a black kid I knew told me he thought the early stuff wasn't very good, but this new stuff was better. At the beginning he really was Elvis to many people, the white guy stealing the art form and making a lot of money off of it. Now he's just another abusive dad, his anger completely uncontroversial, the pitched rage of his voice used to "balance out" the soulful harmonies of the female singer he accompanies. I don't mean to suggest that his anger was more controversial when he directed his vitriol toward Christina Aguilera, Fred Durst, Insane Clown Posse, and Mariah Carey. But in those days it fooled people for whom the entire world consisted of MTV into thinking that he really was rocking the boat. Nowadays he's another jealous, over-the-hill lover, yelling at Rihanna: "I'ma tie you to the bed and set this house on fire!!"