One of the things that I've always loved about the very idea of America's Next Top Model is that as a reality show about the modeling industry, it is essentially a fun-house mirror held up to another fun-house mirror. The resulting distortion of the way the world really works is absurd (and the fact that next cycle will be something meta as an "all-stars" edition means that we're adding yet another mirror to the chain -- a reality show surveying a reality show surveying the modeling industry -- and that promises to be so futile and ridiculous that I don't think I'll be able to restrain myself from writing about it in some capacity).
Anyway, that mirror/mirror/mirror effect is going on in this child's karaoke-style style performance of DC Talk's "Nu Thang," in which the Christian hip-hop-ish collective's divine wackness is filtered through the inherent wackness of a prepubescent child. This is way too special for me to just file away in the lefthand gutter of this blog under "My Hero" -- at last, someone on Earth has the capacity to make DC Talk look cool by comparison. A momentous occasion! (via Paul M., and America's Next Top Tumblr, Christian Nightmares)
Truth be told, I would not have done this video re-edit were it not for the hip-hop part. That is not to insult the magesty of chair-dancing the twist, the Shorty George, the truckin' and doing the hand jive with your feet; rather, it is to express my deep love for vague covers of 2 Unlimited's "Get Ready for This." Don't worry, this will all make (some) sense when you watch the video above.
Also, I think that it's very nice that they've developed a workout for people with disabilities and families with separation anxiety. However, I can't help but fear that in the wrong hands/chair, all this just amounts to exercise for lazy people.
As a result of HBO's Cinema Verite, I'm a little obsessed with An American Family -- or at least, the idea of it. The whole thing -- all 12 hours of the first modern reality show that aired on PBS in 1973 -- is too slow-moving to hold the interest of a modern attention span. That's a sort of retrospective irony for its subjects, the Loud family, who griped about their portrayals after being excessively edited*. If anything, they could have used some more.
Lance, the oldest son and arguable star of the show, does a little bit of that kind of complaining in the clip above, but mostly he's just his fantastic, flamboyant self. He's often credited as being the first out gay man on television, and it is impossible to underestimate his importance. A disciple of Warhol from an early age, he got to live out the artist-thinker's philosophy better than just about anyone of his time, experiencing 15 minutes as we'd come to know it. I watch him in action, being his big, floppy, gay self and I'm amazed at his courage. My views on gay representation have changed considerably over the years -- I used to think that we needed as many traditionally masculine gay guys in the spotlight to show society that we aren't all freaks...and then I thought about it, and came to the conclusion of: fuck that. Obviously, everyone should be who they are, but there's not a greater need for one type of gay over others. Why bend to expectations? At times, nothing is more confrontational than a faggot. In a way, exhibiting that without reservation requires so much courage, it's butch.
Lance carried the heavy burden that pioneers do. He went on to front a band called the Mumps that did the C.B.G.B/Max's Kansas City thing but faded out, partially as a result of him being unable to shake his association with An American Family. He then became a pop culture journalist. In a heartbreaking Family follow-up Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family, Lance's former editor at Details, David Keeps, discusses how Lance dealt with being just about the only openly gay guy in pop culture for so long: "He wore fame, and he wore being a role model, and he wore being a gay man, and he wore being a brave soul like it was a piece of chiffon, when in fact it was really a very heavy piece of armor for him. And it weighed a lot. And it was very, I think, difficult. He never really showed it, but I think it was difficult for him to be that person and to trudge through life. Because it had been so easy for him at the beginning. He was a full-blown entity. He was a force of nature to be reckoned with. By the age of 20, he had done his masterpiece. He'd created it by merely existing and letting someone capture it on film." I'd be willing to bet that no one read Lance better.
That movie, by the way, chronicles the days leading up to Lance's death in 2001, as he suffered from HIV and hepatitis C. He requested that the crew come to film him one last time. "I can't leave the planet without some form of closure form the series..." he explained. Though he had very pronounced moments of modesty (in a different documentary that followed up with the Louds 10 years after An American Family, he described himself as "just a normal guy that was made brief and to the point by editing"), he clearly was bit by the attention bug. He was a show-off, a public goofball that, regardless of what conflicts he tangled with inside, clearly thought highly of himself. These days, we'd call someone like Lance Loud a narcissist, but he came up at a time when no amount of self-love was enough for a gay man. He was a visionary, and 38 years after An American Family introduced him to the world, it's still catching up.
I always like to post something religious in advance of Easter (also, I like to post something religious in advance of everything), so I started to cut up this 50-minute Christian propaganda flick Rock: It's Your Decision. It's about a kid named Jeff and his struggle with negotiating the morals of rock and roll with his own Christianity. It has a little bit of a cult following, which is ironic on multiple levels. Perhaps you've already laughed at it. Anyway, Rock's porno-level line delivery and all-around melodrama are pretty amusing (watch some of that in the movie's trailer) until the film's last nine minutes, when it blossoms into an indictment of pop music as a whole in church. What you see above is Jeff's epiphany in its beautiful entirety.
You know, the movie almost convinced me of its moral soundness up to this point. Yes, it's awfully concerned and all up in everybody's business, but at least it verbalized the often-mystifying philosophy (and self-imposed squareness) of those who listen to only religious music (people who kept these guys in business). But by the time Jeff gets around to whining about the dangerous pull of a "really good, get-down beat," and the dangerousness of Captain & Tenille, it was over for me. (I even tolerated the casual gay jab!) (Just kidding. It was always over for me.) Leave Barry Manilow out of it, Jeff! He really is mild! There's a willful ignorance of diversity and how it is, at the very least, interesting from a cultural perspective. I'm coming from the opposite end of the spectrum ("Pass the sex! A second serving of Satan, please!") as Jeff, and I didn't catch the proselytizing bug from this movie. (Then again, this movie was short on beats to drive away my bad mood.) I'm one-man proof that we can all coexist and at least be amused by each other!
And laugh I did. "I think you better look at your albums. If three or four or even if only one song promotes sin, then that's what the author is promoting. And if we buy those albums, every album we buy encourages that artist to keep putting out that kind of music!" That is exactly the kind of logic that Strangers with Candy was made to lampoon. Beautiful. (For more on Jeff's speech, check out Agony Booth's lengthy review, which runs down the factual inaccuracies spewed regarding the secular, really not Satanic music Jeff condemns.)
All that is to say, Happy Easter, you devil-sympathizing heathens!
I wrote about Jessie J's earful of a first album, Who You Are, for the Voice this week, and in it, I talked about the arsenal of annoying sounds this woman makes (and words she says). It is a vast arsenal, let me tell you! In a way, this vocalizing represents Jessie's hustle: certainly, it's what makes her her. In another way, it's what makes the album a chore. Trade-off!
As repelled as I am by annoyance (being, you know, human), I'm also fascinated by it (give me a few years and I'll remember everything fucked up about Who You Are fondly). And so, I've collected the 30 most annoying sounds made by Jessie on her debut, and ranked them from least to most annoying (i.e. from "Ugh, get it out of my ears!" to "I no longer have ears because my brain just exploded out of mercy"). It was a highly scientific process. Just kidding! It was totally subjective. It's like that old saying: one coconut man's melisma is another's chew-toy squeak is another's "beating-buh-buh-buh-buh-beating-beatin'." See what gets to you the most!
(Note, this embedding style was the best I could find. I know it's still sucky, but believe me I've spent far too much time on the mechanics of this shit already. I honestly considered learning Flash for this. Anyway, you may need to play a clip to let it load and then play it again to hear it play smoothly. That's the kind of two-pronged endurance test that I love!)
KRS-One's rant above is a relic of a lost time, when making socially conscious hip-hop had just as much of a shot at being profitable as virtually unconscious music (unsurprisingly, it was taken on the set of a video for his Stop the Violence Movement project). I like plenty of music about absolutely nothing (much of it literally containing commands to work and shake your body), but I mourn the loss of variety. NO ONE would say this today, because it simply isn't true: you don't get paid as much if you say something as opposed to nothing.
And speaking of idealism, there's so much of it in this video, too, which comes from the set of a video of yet another KRS-One-related project, H.E.A.L (directed by Ted Demme!).:
Come for the naive hope, stay for Big Daddy Kane's pink sequined baseball cap.
Both of these come from a late '80s/early '90s VHS series called Slammin' Rap Video Magazine. There's a YouTube channel with many of the set's offerings (though it is frustratingly incomplete -- I uploaded both of the videos above myself, and M.I.A. is the interview they did with H.W.A. that I'm DYING to see). Nonetheless, it's worth checking out for a flashback to a more positive, less PR-controlled time when people wore their lack of media training on their sleeves (see YoYo's adorable babbling). L'Trimm's entry might be my fav, though, especially when they explain why their name is French.
How do you review something you love so much, there's no way for you to have an objective stance on it? You don't.
For weeks I've been wondering how to approach Katy B's debut album On a Mission, and now I realize that I can't with much substance or insight. Part of it is that the album is largely extension of the varied guest work she did prior to it, and so I stand by what I said about her in September. I love this girl and her music speaks to me on a level that few things do – listening to this album feels like a direct conversation. She is everything I ever hoped for in a pop star, mostly as suggested by my ranting against the shortcomings and misdeeds of other pop stars. She is understated, polite, humorous, adorable, genuinely interested in dance music and immensely talented. She is a gift.
My attempts to talk sense into myself have failed. I hear how she can disappear into her production (generally supplied by longtime collaborators Geeneus and/or Zinc) to the point of anti-divadom, and I think, "She respects dance music enough to let the track shine brighter than her." Generous! I hear a few lines where her voice almost sounds trifling, and then seconds later, she'll swirl it around a word, showing off its full body. Distinctive! I regard her as sexless, and then I listen to her sing about being so bored with guys and their cheesy lines. Justified! I listen to "Broken Record" and think, "This sounds like such generic pre-dance-revival trance a la iiO's 2001 hit 'Rapture,'" except no it doesn't once you listen to it 20 times. It sounds like flying (and a little like drum and bass in the chorus). Exhilarating! ("You're holding every breath I take," is also the best line I've heard in a pop song's chorus in I don't know how long.)
Katy's tone can be cool, but the music is often otherwise, often pounding and knocking around with enough soulful house/broken-beat zeal to subliminally call for a Shelter revival. (She's exhibiting among the most useful of Tyra Banks' ANTM Tyraisms and modeling the opposite of what she's wearing.) Granted, her producers' endless sound-fizzing, -smearing, -shimmering, -whooshing and -washing gives her genre exercises depth, but there is something possibly superficial about her dabbling. Maybe if I had more of an investment in dubstep, bassline house or UK funky, I'd be more offended by the pop appropriation. But I am not. I am only who I am, and Katy B is only who she is -- thank god!
If you are bad at something, take solace in the fact that you're still probably not as bad as Winston is at everything, specifically playing and attempting to bite things.
After DC Talk and the Westboro Baptist Church, here's something more general to round things out: the Christian Nightmares Tumblr. This collection of outrageousness for Christ is so up my alley, I love it like my only son. Just when I thought Ridiculous Pictures of Céline Dion had solved the Internet, along comes something to rival it. That is the power of religion.
(Also, just when you thought a teen couldn't be more awkward than Rebecca Black, along comes an evangelist like Sadie B, in the "Friday" parody "Sunday" above. Way to resurrect an Internet sensation whose time was drawing to a close. Very Christian of you guys!)
