fourfour

Beyoncé is a lunatic

Straight up: the recently released live concert DVD The Beyoncé Experience is the most entertaining filmed concert I've ever witnessed in my life. In fact, it may be the most entertaining concert I've ever seen, period. For two hours Beyoncé spazzes out on stage with not nearly the amount of self-awareness that would make it arguably reasonable. She is a maniac. I love B'Day so so much, but even given that love, I wasn't so sure that she was equipped to really ascend to the diva throne that she's been given. After watching her breathless display, my mind has changed entirely. She's not just a diva, she's the queen of my heart. I look forward to watching her become an even crazier old lady.

Oh, and you know what the best thing about this is? She mugs and seizes and dances with such force that it suggests a holistic ritual to rid oneself of crabs almost the entire time, and yet her voice takes no damage at all. She sounds just as good at the end of the show as she does at the start, and I don't think she lip synchs a single note. She is a superhero.

Here's a countdown I've assembled to salute Beyoncé's ridiculousness. Try not to swoon or swallow your tongue.

I couldn't be prouder if I had assisted in her creation

Jade takes up Page 5 of the January issue of Vibe:

I'm so happy for her that I'm willing to forgive the Sister Patterson hairline. Entirely! I don't know where Apple Bottoms fall on the cool scale, as my bottom is no apple and I am, you know, male, but I think that this has to be a positive thing for her. Yay, Happy Positive Jade Thing!

A few other ANTM-oriented things are after the jump. But first an update: What follows is a spoiler, according to many disgruntled people in the comments who, apparently, don't agree with the general truth that the Internet waits for no one. I consider reality show eliminations to be events, not plot points, per se, and I have no problem discussing them as they happen, without warning. I understand that TiVo has changed our viewing habits, but really, once something has happened, it's happened, and if you need to keep yourself pure, you should probably avoid places that could defile you. Like this blog.

I moved the additional items of this post to under the jump because I'm not a dick, and I don't want to spoil things for people. But if I already did earlier, you should be at least as mad at yourself for checking this blog as you are at me for revealing last night's eliminated contestant.

Not that this is a big deal or anything, but damn.

Out for Blood

The climate of Coen Brothers craziness, spurred by the fantastic No Country for Old Men (a film that I won't review because I have nothing to add to the rampant discourse, although I will say that I can't remember the last time a film's suspense had me so rapt), led me to revisit Blood Simple. I hadn't seen the Coens' first film since its 2000 theatrical rerelease, and I'd forgotten how awesome it is. Perhaps it's not as complicated or philosophical as their work has become, but there's something entrancing about Simple's relatively primitive sparseness. It's like Chicago-house drama.

Anyway, after I finished watching the DVD, I decided to check out the commentary by one Kenneth Loring of Forever Young films. As much as I love commentary tracks, I hate when they're done by outside sources, pondering and pontificating on someone else's work for hours. There's nothing like a lecture to zap all the fun out of criticism. So, I guess I was too lazy to press the "change disc" button on my remote or something because I forged ahead with the commentary track and, like, 30 seconds in I wondered to myself, "Who is this asshole?" It took me another minute or two -- when Loring tells of how the sequence featuring Frances McDormand and John Getz riding in a car was filmed upside down and in reverse -- to realize this asshole is a plant. A quick Google search told me that the Coens' actually wrote the commentary, which mocks their own film mercilessly, and this review suggests that one of the Coens might actually have voiced the track himself.

No matter who it is, it's awesome. It serves to underline the film's not-always-apparent sense of humor, but more admirably, it's a statement of humility from a pair of filmmakers whose work is again and again deemed "important." As such, it's maybe my favorite thing the Coens have ever done.

I've assembled a 10-minute clip reel of my favorite of Loring's musings. I'm sure it will come as a shock, but commentary humor is dryyyyy. Loring is basically Fred Willard's no-nothing Best in Show character rendered as a stuffy British cinephile. I guess I'm a dork for finding this so amusing, but really, that probably goes without saying by now.

Oh yeah, despite the alternate audio track, the video is still kind of spoilery, so beware.

A hole in my heart that goes all the way to China

I'll miss Lisa for many reasons, but here's the main one:

Any girl who's going to run around with a stain on her shirt is clearly an asset to this show. The reason for the stain was never explained, but I like to think it was drool. 

Thanksgiving feast

Swear to god, it's like living amongst raccoons. Except unlike Edie Beale, I don't find raccoons and cats one bit boring.

Happy Thanksgiving, for real. Last year, I wrote a cloying post about all the things I'm thankful for and you the reader/this blog was high on that list. The gratitude has only deepened.

Lions and Tyra and...shower scenes

So Ambreal didn't listen to her dad...

...but she did prove herself to be one hell of a good sport...

...who really knows how to make an exit...

...I might not want her up in my magazines, but you can be sure as Chigurh that I'd invite her to a cocktail party. Awesome that I started loving Ambreal 30 seconds before she disappeared from my life forever!

But enough about her. There are more pressing matters to attend to.

Hottest. Model. Ever.   

...and I'm out

I don't want to make a big deal about this (because it sooooooo isn't a big deal), but it looks like I will not be recapping Project Runway this season. There are two main reasons for this. The first is a matter of time: in order to cover this show in a way that would satisfy the expectations of others and me, I would need to devote virtually all my non-ANTM time to it. No thanks. I'm not interested in only writing about reality TV on this blog -- I do quite enough of that at work, and I care about far too many other media for such a specific focus. There was a Project Runway-ANTM overlap at the end of Season 3 and the beginning of Cycle 7 and it was fucking hell to cover both. No, no, no.

The second reason is that I don't think I'm that into ProjRun, anymore. Besides the forest woman and that hateable art-fag with the spine-tingling haircut, I found myself attracted to none of the (non-) personalities we met on Wednesday's Season 4 premiere. Clearly, ProjRun cast very talented and accomplished people this time around, but I wonder if by leaning so heavily toward that end, they've squandered the opportunity for compelling characters.

I'll find out -- I'm not giving up on the show entirely. I'll be watching along and if anything grabs me, I'll definitely post about it here. When ANTM ends in a month, I may pick up recapping Project Runway. It sounds like cheating, because really it is, but maybe by that point, the characters will have developed beyond their current blandness?

In any event, for all your Project Runway needs, please hit up Blogging Project Runway. They're really good people and are far more devoted to the show than I could ever be.

I feel like leaving the comments on this post open would read like I was asking people to beg me to reconsider (I wouldn't normally assume that people would even care that much, but this poll suggests otherwise). So I'm closing them just to show you how firmly resolute I am -- this is just the way it is, and it isn't up for discussion. If you do care enough to be bothered about this, I'd suggest erring on the side of assuming that I won't be covering the show at all. That way, I can only surprise you.

Latin hustle

You haven't lived until you've witnessed several thousand people in one room (in Jersey, no less!) singing along to Brenda K. Starr's "I Still Believe." I learned that this weekend, when I attended KTU's annual Freestyle Free-for-All at the Arena in the Trump Taj Mahal. I understand that the prospect laid out in the preceding sentence -- basically, seeing the formerly spandex-clad 15 years and god knows how many calories later in the cultural void that is Atlantic City -- sounds sad, but, in fact, it was a joyous occasion. So many who helped define the genre were there: Stevie B, TKA, the Cover Girls, Sweet Sensation, Lisette Melendez, Coro, Judy Torres, Sa-Fire, Debbie Deb, et. al. And even better, they stayed on stage only as long as their hits lasted: for many, this meant that after one song, they were out of there. It was like a mixtape, just live and with more flights of fancy. No one busted out new material with the exception of Judy Torres. But the fact that hers had the line, "Jesus loves you, but I don't," in its chorus made everything OK.

Hilarity abounded. I've never witnessed so many people relishing singing off-key in my life -- I'm tempted to reason that at this point, these singers just don't give a fuck, but the fact is that they never did. This, of course, is the beauty of freestyle -- emotion trumps craft every time. Is that a poorly sung note or is it a little meltdown? Hard to say, usually. This flair of telenovela-style drama, formerly just applied to objects of desire in freestyle's lyrics, has entered a meta sort of realm: the singers now apply their yearning to the genre itself. At times, the three-hour-plus show felt like propaganda, as we were constantly hit over the head with the fact that freestyle is not dead. Perhaps it is just a very spangly zombie. My favorite of such moments came from Judy Torres, of whom I entered barely familiar with (I don't think she ever had a lasting hit in South Jersey). She quickly won me over. She is a gay-pride-parade-float of a woman (at one point, she announced a dance move she was about to do: the "Puerto Rican Wonder Woman"). "This is your music," Judy told us between songs. "This is your legacy. You teach this to your children...and your children's children." Indeed. We learn to crawl, we learn to walk. We learn to talk, we learn "Bad of the Heart." I scoff, but really, that's kind of my childhood in a nutshell.

The stage was as bare as one you'd see at a high-school talent show. Helping out the warblers was a backing band. As though live instruments aren't antithetical to the synthetic heart of freestyle, it was particularly hilarious to see a drummer pounding away to Maurice's "This is Acid" (that Maurice Joshua, who has never laid down a freestyle track and is known as a house pioneer, was on the bill seemed appropriately half-assed). It's wonderful to watch musicians play in a non-musicians genre. Someone near us, at the beginning of the show when this band, dubbed the MGM Band, was announced, yelled out, "They're a wedding band in Brooklyn!" I believe it, oh yes I do.

And speaking of the crowd, the attendees weren't nearly as exciting as I'd hoped. Believe me, I would be sharing pictures right now if they were. It was mostly made up of people pushing 40 also seemed formerly spandex-clad, but now just have receding hairlines, paunches and vagina arms. Everybody was really into it, though. During Coro's set, some older guy leaped up on a chair a few down from where we were sitting and started pumping his fist. A security guard came over to ask him to get down, and he said, "But this is Coro! This is freestyle!" Surprisingly, that didn't help his cause.

But it was as it should have been, mostly: the true stars of the night were the veteran acts. Some performers (Lisette, Coro, Sa-fire) underwent outfit changes during their brief sets -- in every case, this involved taking off part of their outfit to reveal their bodies' success in the fight against time. Many of them dedicated their songs to the audience, which: duh. I didn't think that they were singing to the cushioning. My favorite of such shout-outs came from Betty Dee, the lead singer of Sweet Sensation, during the intro of "Take It While It's Hot": "This song is for all the hot people tonight. Are you hot? I don't know." That makes two of us!

Oh, and there were awards! Lifetime achievement ones, to be exact. The first went to Sa-fire (Coro and some behind-the-scenes guy would also get little trophies before the night was over). She had already performed and proved herself to be dominatrix-like in her heckling of the crowd (she seriously would get so pissed after she'd sing a line, hold out her mic to have the audience sing the next, and be faced with silence). "I really hope she cries!" I said to my boyfriend as soon as they announced her name. And, much to my pleasure, she did. Oh, and by "they," I mean various KTU personalities who hosted the night. Introducing Sa-fire, DJ Whaterhisnamewas said, "It's tough to dance without her." You know, he's on to something. That's why I'm usually so reserved at clubs and family functions: no Sa-fire to be found. Additionally, TKA were announced as "the Beatles of freestyle." I think a more apt title would have been "the champagne of wine coolers," but hey, I'm just a blogger.

Stevie B played last and received the reverent response he deserves. I can say without a shred of irony or derision that seeing him live was pure joy for me -- he's simply one of my favorite producer-songwriters of all time. Despite the rapturous response, Stevie threatened (albeit good-naturedly) to leave the stage after every track, just to make sure the audience really, really wanted to see him. This sort of behavior was the night's most striking motif: the constant rabble-rousing (variations of "Sing along!" and "Get out your seats!" over and over and over) by the performers bespoke a deep insecurity of artists whose medium has long gone out of fashion. A common refrain of Coro, TKA and Stevie was, "Are you still with me?" as though they'd grown accustomed to a waning fan base since freestyle's heyday, now almost 20 years ago. But for the throng of us almost filling out the 5,000-person capacity venue, it was clear that we weren't going anywhere, and we were doing it together.

I took lots and lots of video during the show and what follows is a highlights reel including the aforementioned crowd-hyping, Coro's shaking ass, Sa-Fire's acceptance speech and brief clips of almost all the acts performing. I have extended versions of most of these clips and footage from many more songs, so if you have a request to see more, let me know and I'll upload it. But really, I think the video below should be plenty.

But just in case it isn't plenty, here's a bonus:

Fat chance

I mean, seriously, putting the big girl in netting? I love how this outfit shows signs of stretching over Sarah's problem areas, giant O's, as if the outfit itself is bitchily saying, "Oh, woooooow!"

I'll get this out now and speak no more of it: I'm not mad at Tyra & Co., for eliminating Sarah, per se. The not-plus-enough argument actually seems plausible. But maybe that's because I've heard it so damn much: during this cycle's first episode, Tyra herself laid out what would come to be Sarah's curse (and twice!): "Looking at your body, I see a girl that could be a plus-size model, but is on the thinner side of that,: and, "I'm just a little concerned that she's a little small for plus." It was there all along, and Sarah didn't have to click her (undoubtedly slightly wide) shoes or anything. They really toyed with her, but because of the blatant foreshadowing, I should have seen this coming. Mostly, I'm mad at myself.

Youth revolt

If you haven't checked out Chris Brown's new album Exclusive, but were considering it, I'll save you the trouble: this song "You" is good...annnnnd, that's it.

I just don't get this kid. In a year of embarrassingly excruciating No. 1 singles, I believe Chris Brown may have turned out the worst with "Kiss Kiss." No, my memory isn't faulty: I still find Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry" to be disgusting in every way, but god, at least that song makes me feel something. "Kiss Kiss," like the rest of Exclusive is innocuous to the point of being outrageous. Indistinct synth lines and beats flurry around the endlessly moving Brown, and what comes of his tongue ("That laffy taffy! That kiss kiss!") is blander than snow. It's the kind of ugly "club record" that makes me want to go home. It's indistinct enough to taste like 2007's backwash.

Some nimble producers contribute to Brown's second album (Jazze Pha, Swizz Beats, the Underdogs, Stargate), but they're just rubber-stamping -- Exclusive feels like a dumping ground for the tracks that didn't go to other artists this year. I can't blame anyone for phoning it in with Brown. He's so pointless that anything he can do, someone else can do better. In the realm of young, black entertainers, Lloyd's a better singer, Omarion has better taste in material (and is quite possibly the better dancer), Marques Houston is cuter (and thus, his sexual ambiguity is more intriguing), Ne-Yo's a better songwriter, Bow Wow's got a more convincing swag. And don't even full-package me, because Usher wraps circles around Chris Brown with more panache in his crow's feet than Chris has in his twinkle toes.

It's funny to write passionately about music, particularly pop music, because it often all seems so arbitrary. I love Britney Spears' recent work and I hate that of the more technically talented Fergie's. Homo say what? I think it's all just a matter of perception, however it falls on whatever day. (An example of rationale: Brit's woven into our pop culture and she's going to be releasing albums no matter what so instead of wasting the time pointing out her inherent pointlessness, it's more constructive to praise her work for what it is; whereas, minor blips that were Kids Inc. and Wild Orchid aside, Fergie's mega-fame is a relatively recent phenomenon -- the trip back to the bridge she crawled from under doesn't seem so far at all.) And from where I'm sitting on this very day, my 30th year on this earth in clear view as is the fact that Chris Brown's fame is utterly needless. To me. The kids love him, and I don't and that's fine. After years of dreading aging and worrying about falling out of touch with youth culture, I've hit the ground and I can't even be bothered to look up at the superstars shooting into the stratosphere. High School Musical, Billy Ray Cyrus' daughter (whatever the fuck her name is), Chris Brown...they just aren't relevant to me, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm better off for it. I've gotten to the point where I can say, "I'm too old for this shit!" and not even worry about the kids missing the reference.

Of course, I'm never so self-righteous that I can't neurotically examine where I'm headed: If I ever start freaking out about being in the fast lane to geezerdom (not yet in a youth-recapturing convertible, but hey...like all things, it's only a matter of time), I can take refuge in the post-post-retirement Jay-Z's American Gangster. The album, my favorite hip-hop LP of the year and my favorite Jigga record ever, proves that there is life after, "I'm too old for this shit." It reportedly was written and recorded in a four-week frenzy of inspiration following Jay's early viewing of the not-half-as-good film of the same name. A portrait of Jay's history of slanging and banging, you could call it Reasonable Doubt '07 and get away with it (though it's better than the comparison to Jay's slightly overrated '96 debut implies). Gangster comes on the heels of Jay's failed Kingdom Come, a record that was full of I'm-rich-bitch sentiment and had little practical application for, I don't know, 98 percent of his audience. Because Come sucked, cynics could peg Gangster as a flailing bid for renewed street cred, a good old dose of yin because yang didn't work.

For once, I'm not so cynical. Over the course of its 15 tracks and virtually chronologically, Gangster calmly charts Jay's rise from the streets to moguldom. The truth is undoubtedly stretched and twisted along the way, but it's as neat of a musical biography as I've ever heard on wax. People will wonder, why now? Why should a 37-year-old be talking about shit that happened so long ago? Is it, as the movie has been accused of, to further glamorize a life of crime (although I can't imagine leaving American Gangster feeling that Frank Lucas is anything but a despicable fuck of a guy, as the supplier of an unfailingly life-destroying drug, as a man whose livelihood was based in the continuation of the fucking Vietnam War and as, ultimately, a snitch). But I don't think glamorization is the case here. Things are a little too grave for that: Gangster is more effective than Reasonable Doubt because of the added perspective that only comes with time. It's not that Jay's wise (morally, he's still scattered and conflicted: "Now when the rules is blurred / As they is and were / What am I to do but...pray"), but at least he's wizened enough not to care about hip-hop's de facto law of ageism. 

When people write their biographies early in their lives, the problem isn't that by jumping the gun, they're leaving out the chapters to come, it's that when you're sitting right up against what just happened, you don't necessarily have the time to process it. Hip-hop is so ridiculously moment-driven and trendy that it doesn't even keep people around long enough for them to develop perspective publicly. Very few people are in Jay's position -- still relevant after over 10 years in the game and still relevant as he approaches 40 -- and I love that he's taking advantage of it. He's a boss, through and through, ignoring hip-hop's ageism and, maybe even more impressively, pumping out the tracks he wants to. Diddy, who produced a lot here with Jay, has said that he approached Jay with a bunch of "blaxploitation tracks," which seems awfully quaint and turn-of-the-century. So the turn of the century happened less than 10 years ago -- that's too little time for the sound here to be retro (or, really, retro-retro). The heavy soul-sampling flared up to a Chipmunks-esque frenzy by '04 (thanks to Just Blaze and Kanye) and soon passed out. A lesser artist turning out Gangster might seem out of touch, but the thing is that as a business man, if there's one thing that Jay isn't, it's out of touch. He chose to revive this increasingly classic sound. He could have gone with Timbaland or Polow or someone who would have attempted to blast him into the future. Shit, he has enough money that he could have commissioned a spaceship and gone on a beat-quest through the galaxy. But he didn't. He's looking back and so are his tunes and he's not afraid to reference Al Green or Marvin Gaye. He doesn't even feel the need to interject, "no homo" or anything.

As much as it shakes things up, Gangster isn't an anti-hip-hop hip-hop album: even as Jay grapples with morality, he never betrays hip-hop's golden rule of self-celebration (it goes: I'll treat myself as I'd like to be treated by others). As heavy as it often is, there's plenty of fun to be had -- the horns on "Roc Boys" are jubilant enough to be gayish and Jay isn't afraid to get his 4/4 on as "Ignorant Shit" pumps a breath of life into the Isley Brothers' "Between the Sheets." I've never been convinced of Jay's supreme lyricism and I still am not: at the very least, he's a storyteller and not someone to pull quotes from. His analogies are too far on the obvious side of tangibility ("Like a mama you birthed me / Brooklyn, you nursed me") and at times, he just doesn't have enough ideas to fill 16 bars ("I ain't no ordinary nigga / Look around, this ain't what ordinary gets ya / Extraordinary figures / I'm an extraordinary nigga"). Jay often needs time to show his brilliance -- it can sprawl out over the course of a song. A cycle of 15 interconnected ones, then, seems like a perfect showcase.

Maturity, patience, taste and at least a dab of humility ("Truth be told, I had more fun when I was piss poor," he says in "Success" -- how's that for perspective?) are not generally associated with hip-hop and yet Jay-Z offers an album rich in those elements. See, what's so notable here isn't that he's an American gangster; it's that he's an artistic one. He's balking at so many codes and de facto rules and, in the process of creating such a compulsively listenable record, making his own game. It's something truly graceful to behold. Fuck the kids; this is hope for the future.