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Oh ma gawd, y'all!

Ah just peed myself and am unable to post an ANTM recap today. I have to spend my day air-drying. Sahrray!

(Just kidding. It was Halloween. Gimme a break.)

Recap tomorrow. In the meantime, if you need to be entertained, I highly suggest watching Keyshia Cole's mom Frankie on the BET Hip Hop Awards red carpet (embedded below the jump because I can't figure out how to take it off autoplay). She is a fearless interviewer who'll physically drag a celebrity over to her camera and ask questions no one else would (Anaconda, anyone?). This is the best use of a drug-addled past that I've ever witnessed. This is really a phenomenal moment.

Oh, Kanye!

I sincerely hope that no one's surprised about this shit.

The Grammys were watchable this year, and other surprising facts

God bless yuh.

Duller than gold

In a refreshing contrast to their endless stream of categories, most awards shows fall in one of two: the boring and the infuriating. With repeated lip service to (but no sign of effects of) the recession/burgeoning depression/reason to lay-off everyone and their mother, multiple trophies for John Adams (which I didn't see and hear is great, but still: zzzzzz) and Slumdog Millionaire (I'll get to my scorn, but for now: hello, frontrunner!) on top of a lifetime achievement for Steven Fucking Spielberg, the 66th annual Golden Globes fell squarely into the latter category. Seriously, everyone who was actually there was so bored that they wouldn't shut up while people tried to read their bland-ass throws. I can't believe I actually watched the whole thing. If I weren't planning on writing about it, I would have turned it off and pulled out all my body hair, strand-by-strand, including the hard-to-grasp nubs on my head, and I still would have been more entertained. Sometimes having a blog is just an excuse for organized masochism.

Like, really, when at one point early on, the picture faded in and out, as though even the camera's eyelid were getting heavy, I was like, "Really? You too?"

 

And yet, I still found much to mock. Of course.

Clearly, we've learned nothing

Worst VMAs ever! Every year I say it because every year it's true. But this year it was especially true -- if last year's chaotic VMAs was a train wreck, this year's was a model train set. Wholesome and going absolutely nowhere, the 2008 VMAs sucked and it's not exactly MTV's fault. The effort to streamline and present something dynamic was evident throughout, especially in many of the performances, whose film-set-integrating set-ups were inevitably more complex than the actual songs being performed.

No, the fault rests on us, or what's left of the music-buying public, who seem content with the blandification of our pop culture. So many things in the past one-and-a-half years have damaged pop music almost to the point of destruction. Jordin Sparks, she who is as personality-free as she is sexless (a fistful of rings will do nothing to help either), won American Idol; Leona Lewis brought a tide of nondescript sonic wallpaper to these shores, opening up the door for everyone to give adult contemporary anther try; squeaky clean teen fare like High School Musical and the Jonas Brothers (a three-man rendition of Greg Brady's Johnny Bravo persona, in my estimation) hit cultural juggernaut status; Katy Perry introduced Girls Gone Wild-style pseudo-sexuality to pop music and people were still titillated despite having seen thousands of infomercials (as a peddler of counterfeit edginess, Katy Perry is nothing but Diablo Cody with an actual stripper's body, instead of a former stripper's body). And on and on and on. It's times like these that you're happy to have someone as unpredictably trashy as Miley Cyrus commanding attention. Which is to say: we're fucked.

For no better and much, much worse, the VMAs captured pop music's dire state this year. After the jump, a few more brief lessons the VMAs taught us that we already knew anyway.

New jill swing back

Alicia Keys performs with SWV and En Vogue at the BET Awards:

A real pity that no one sounds good, save Alicia, who looks suspiciously like Beatuful from Flavor of Love 2. I suppose this means she has herpes. But whatever, don't act like it's AIDS and shit. On the more tragic end of the VH1 resemblance scale, SWV's Taj is giving me serious Sister Patterson vibes. And to think that Coko is the one who's known for having talons! At least En Vogue look good. I'm gonna guess it's all the grown sex these ladies are undoubtedly getting. This video inexplicably leaves out (I didn't upload it, see) the TLC segment of the performance, but that's for the best. It was the most depressing, as T-Boz had the range and disposition of a flat tire. Chilli kept her mouth shut and looked pretty. But then, of course she did: old habits die hard, I suppose.

This is just to remind you that everyone is getting so old. Have a happy Wednesday and stay out of the damn sun.

Update: Because no one knows how to have fun anymore, this video was, of course, removed from YouTube. You can watch it here, though, with the painful TLC performance intact and everything.

She just doesn't get it

"I still don't know if I'm straight or if I'm gay!" - Tila Tequila

No, really. She said that:

(Download)

So, wait, there was ever a question about her sexuality? I thought her whole thing was that she DID know all there was to know about it -- isn't that why we all know about it? You know, because she's constantly howling (in a voice that's increasingly Pee-Wee Hermanesque), "I'm a bisexual! I'm a BISEXXXXSHUUUUUAHLLLLLLLL!!!!"

Watching this clip has me thinking that she really is the stupidest person to have been given a public platform in some time. And yeah, I know she's being jokey above, but that compounds the tragedy: she can't even make fun of her herself correctly! And, god damn it, there's so much to make fun of that she if she devoted her life to self-mockery, there'd be no time to actually exist. She wins, we win.

"I still don't know if I'm straight or if I'm gay," is so telling because that's the exact sentiment that lies unconscious in so much college-age sexual experimentation. There's a difference between bisexual and bi-curious. By even suggesting that being bisexual is defined by uncertainty (that this should even be in her head at all when she's supposed to be SuperBi!), I think Tila Tequila outed herself as the latter. It's almost hilarious that the most audible queer mouthpiece in pop culture doesn't actually know what being queer entails.

Before she could hurdle the bar of inanity on Bravo's A-List Awards (from which the clip above was taken, thanks to Tracie, who had it saved on her DVR), Tila set it last week when she declared herself responsible for the California gay marriage decision. That's obviously a big bunch of bull balls (and a pig's vagina for good measure), but that's not to say that Tila has nothing to show us about ourselves as a society. If nothing else, her behavior and road to fame-whoring (perhaps it's more a strip than a road) show us that we've reached a point where it's profitable to commodify the sexual (and not just cultural) aspect of queer sexuality. It might be a drunken stumble ahead, but hey, at least it's ahead. I just wish that Tila had enough respect for gay culture to realize that it helps her way more than she helps it.

Night of the creeps

Chances are you saw this, but just in case you didn't or want to relive the exact moment when Kanye West became the most despicable man on earth, here it is:

(And just in case it gets deleted from DailyMotion -- I didn't even fuck with fascist YouTube -- you can download the file.)

I've also taken the liberty of transcribing the speech, just because his words become infinitely more asinine in print:

“It definitely feels good to be home, here at the Grammys. You know, we snuck in about four years ago, four or five years ago, and now we basically made this our new place of residence. And um. When working on a hip-hop album in a state, you know, where the music game they say, like, you know, you can’t sell records, so, a lot of people said hip-hop was dead, not just Nas, but you know a lotta people just said the art form wasn’t poppin’ like that anymore. You know, I wanted to, I wanted to cross the genres and show people, you know, how we could still express ourselves with something fresh and new and that’s what hip-hop has always been about. You know, comin’ out with new sounds and stuff, so. I always tell Common, like man you gotta time the albums out better, you know, you can’t drop ‘em the same year as me, man. You gotta, this is, this is my award. (Music comes on) Um, I wanna...and for Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse...come on, you gonna play music on me? For Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse, if I don’t get to get up here for Album of the Year, you deserve it just as much as me. I deserve it, too. And, just to say somethin’ about my mother, I appreciate all the support, I appreciate all the prayers, it would be in good taste to stop the music then. Um, I appreciate (the audience full of assholes cheers), I appreciate everything and I know you really proud of me right now and I know you wouldn’t want me to stop and you want me to be the No. 1 artist in the world. And Mama, all I’mma do is keep makin’ you proud. We run this.”

Look, I'm no fan of this guy. I think he is, at best, overrated and under-clever. If he stopped running his mouth this second, it'd be too soon. Still, when his mom died three months ago, I felt for him. Just on a human level, that sucks for someone who was as openly close to his mother as Kanye was. However, when he performed "Hey Mama" earlier in the Grammy Awards ceremony last night, I thought it was pretty cheap. He's mourned her publicly since she died and it seems that unless he's going to add something new to his discourse, that performance pushed his grief over into the territory of shtick. Still, it's nothing I'd bitch about too loudly. Kanye West thinks his mother's death is the most important recent current event, and given the circumstances, his egocentrism is, for once, understandable. His medium is, after all, pop music: big, repetitive gestures are a major avenue of self-expression.

But his acceptance speech just destroyed everything and confirmed to me that it is all shtick: he was probably going to say something about his mother again, but the way in which he did it -- to get them to stop playing music that he'd already bitched about -- seemed like he was just playing the dead-mother card. After bragging ineloquently for a minute straight about how wonderful he is (oooh, how genius: crossing genres! No one's ever done that before, except, you know, everyone who made any impact on hip-hop since its conception some 30 years ago!), after all that, he had the nerve to be shocked that people didn't care what he was talking about? Put it on an album, Kanye! (You know he will anyway.) And then for him to mention his mother and say, "it would be in good taste to stop the music"...what, I wonder, does Kanye West know about good taste? He just said that he deserved the Album of the Year award! He just said that Common shouldn't release an album in the same year as him! He was wearing a fucking Croakie for god's sake! Good taste had no place on that stage!

Mostly, it just seemed like a cheap way to invoke his mother's memory. I have no emotional connection to the woman, and I thought it was a disservice. Shame on him.

But at least all the gratuitous mommying gave the cameras an opportunity to point to Ne-Yo's mom, blog favorite Miss Lorainne:

Honestly, that kind of makes everything worth it.

After the jump, some more bitching. Duh.

Same shit, different blog

Usually, this space would be home to a recap of last night's Video Music Awards ceremony. This year, I wrote it up for the VH1 Blog. If you're so inclined, check it out over there.

(Also, something that I didn't include in the recap -- I don't think Justin Timberlake has changed out of that suit since the FutureSex/LoveSounds album-cover shoot. Is he fucking Pee-Wee Herman?)

I'd like to hate on the Academy

Hey everyone: look what God can do!

Now focus your attention on what he can't do: hair.