As I've been saying for a while now (recapping be damned), I'm over America's Next Top Model. In confirmation, I thought last night's Cycle 18 premiere was fucking dreadful. I wrote about it for work, and a tweet I sent out with a link to that piece turned into an extremely unpleasant interaction:
I know people like that person from her past appearances on reality TV (I'm not much familiar with much beyond her name and occupation), but I think on ANTM, she is on some sub-Twiggy level shit. So dull. Here's the commentary on her that appeared in my review:
The biggest alteration arrives late in the premiere, when it is announced that fashion PR and reality TV vet Kelly Cutrone has replaced André Leon Talley on the judges’ panel. While Talley brought cloaks, his own vocabulary (“Dreckitude!”) and a sense of absurd performance (“I feel like I’m in a cinematic moment of something wonderful!”), Cutrone’s sole flash of color comes when she pronounces “aristocracy” as “UH-ris-to-crasy.” She is virtually lifeless, delivering flat line after flat line in a chat forum that demands animation (“It’s an unfortunate picture,” “The clothes are wearing her, she’s not wearing the clothes”). At one point, she describes her PR work by saying, “It’s my job to make them think they want things they don’t need.” If she’s trying to convince us that she’s what Top Model needs, she’s doing a terrible job.
I almost admire Rihanna's audacity. She is a willful woman in a world still fearful of them. She knew exactly the kind of backlash that collaborating again with Chris Brown would inspire and she did it anyway, taunting the world via Twitter last week in advance of last night's release of the remix of Talk That Talk's "Birthday Cake." (One tweet repurposed the lyrics of "Hard" from her superior, post-abuse album Rated R: "They can say whatever, Ima do whatever... No pain is forever <-----YUP! YOU KNOW THIS.") Rihanna has been unfairly accused of having no on-record personality, but the statement (and all of the psychological implications) made in one remix is bolder than that which your average contemporary pop star makes over the course of a single album.
"My selfish decision for love could result into some young girl getting killed. I could not be easy with that part. I couldn't be held responsible for telling them, 'Go back.' Even if Chris never hit me again, who's to say that their boyfriend won't? Who's to say that they won't kill these girls? And these are young girls...I just didn't realize how much of an impact I had on these girls' lives until that happened. It was a wake-up call. It was a wake-up call for me big time, especially when I took myself out to the situation and I'll say that to any young girl who's going through domestic violence: Don't react off of love. Eff love. Come out of the situation and look at it third person and for what it really is. And then make your decision, because love is so blind."
So is she regressing or making a cynical bid for attention (the second best currency in a rapidly crumbing industry)? Is she back in love, blinded all over again, the product of the effect on which she wisely opined two and a half years ago? None of this was any of our business, by the way, until she made it that way with such a public act of reapproval. As irresponsible as it would be for her to privately hook back up with Brown, there'd be little left to do but sigh over her not understanding the extent of the career she's chosen, that her words from 2009 were indeed true and that when you are a celebrity, at least part of your life is no longer your own. That's the trade-off for mass adulation and wealth. You don't have to be an explicit role model, but like it or not, you are an example.
The convenient thing about this "Birthday Cake" remix (and the infinitely duller "Turn Up the Music" remix, his song on which she now appears, in a one-two punch of releases) is that we need not examine a set of messy, complicated personal lives to critique the Rihanna/Chris Brown reunion: This time it's musical. It once was, too: Brown guested on a terrible remix of Rihanna's "Umbrella" before the pair confirmed their relationship. That one's long forgotten, as it deserves to be (it was dropped from playlists after the abuse reports, but it always seemed like a doomed, shrimpy attempt at eclipsing something that was iconic on first play).
The "Birthday Cake" remix will not evaporate so quickly. Like its Coldstone namesake, it will stick to the ass of pop culture. That's too bad because it is a terrible, terrible song. Brown, who's an embarrassment to the soul tradition, adds nothing as usual. His limited range and whiny tone help expose the song's ultimate bankruptcy -- what ran on Talk That Talk at a brisk minute and a half has been stretched to over three and a half minutes and you feel every extra second. Brown merely reiterates what Rihanna says verbatim. (Her in the first verse: "It's not even my birthday, but he wanna lick the icing off / I know you want it in the worst way, can't wait to blow my candles out"; Him in the second: "It's not even her birthday, but I wanna lick the icing off / Give it to her in the worst way, can't wait to blow the candles out.") His third person pronouns in reference to her help us look at this situation for what it really is: Chemistry-free. (When he does refer to her in the second person, it's to say, "Girl, I want to fuck you right now / Been a long time I been missing your body." So yeah, that's no better.)
An irritating clack of a song that finds its hook in a monotone, "Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake!," the "Birthday Cake" remix is a miserable experience. It's a shame because the original was something special: Not a song or an interlude, but a statement. It's a statement in which a woman sings, "I'mma make you my bitch," and it sounds plausible, not just wishful or compensatory to someone who already expressed what he thought of her humanity all over her face. The original features a hard cut right after Rihanna sings the words, "I wanna fuck you right now." She's so serious, so in control of her sexuality that she can't even be bothered to end her own song. It's real a shame that she somewhere lost belief in the power of leaving things unfinished.
Two things that are in this video: a guitar and the words "hip-hop" repeated ad nauseam.
Two things that are not in this song: a guitar and hip-hop.
Chris Cuevas makes Rick Astley sound like a member of X-Clan. This whole charade is so spectacular that I can't believe this video hasn't been viewed more (< 1,000 views at the time of posting) or mocked sufficiently. I mean, I kind of can because as self-parody it's awfully efficient, like a perpetual motion machine of shit. BUT STILL. WATCH IT AND MARVEL.
By the way, Cuevas was a Debbie Gibson protege. He makes her look like Sister Souljah. He makes me understand the concept of the hate that hate produced far too well. (Because really, this is straight up hateful -- even if it doesn't know it.)
Any negative treatment of a person of color is worth examining for racism. Ignore history if you like, but without perpetuating itself, the status quo would not exist. Regarding it warily, and giving minorities the benefit of the doubt represents the bare minimum of human decency.
And so, it's reasonable to momentarily wonder if Chris Brown's lingering reputation as a not-so-nice guy has anything to do with the fact that he's also a black guy. If his Rihanna-bashing were an isolated incident in an otherwise spotless track record then, it might be easier to make that case. But what I said about Brown a year and a half ago holds true: he's a hard person to like. This is based entirely on his behavior -- at this point, the only color the guy could be to improve his public profile is invisible. His charmlessness spans his earliest public address of the assault, in which he seemed more focused on how it might impact his career than in expressing accountability, to a recent one when he referred to it as a "mishap" (like the kind explained away with a chain that says, "Oops!"?). In between, there's been whining about a judge's orders to stay away from Rihanna and the possibility of him becoming, gulp, a "mixtape artist." There was an incident in which he mocked Raz B's alleged sexual abuse on Twitter by calling him a "dick in da booty ass lil boy," and then, when his fans took exception, he offered, "I'm not homophobic! He's just disrespectful!!!" Bigotry, after all, is about entitlement.
People have pointed out that the public seems to be picking favorites in our pool of celebrity women-beaters -- Charlie Sheen is the go-to guy for illustrating the perceived racial underpinnings in anti-Brown sentiment. In Anna Holmes' great New York Times op-ed, "The Disposable Woman" (which I otherwise agree with), she wrote, "The privilege afforded wealthy white men like Charlie Sheen may not be a particularly new point, but it’s an important one nonetheless. Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears are endlessly derided for their extracurricular meltdowns and lack of professionalism on set; the R&B star Chris Brown was made a veritable pariah after beating up his equally, if not more, famous girlfriend, the singer Rihanna. Their careers have all suffered, and understandably so." Perhaps a Times reader himself, Brown echoed the sentiment today, when after his window-smashing tantrum at Good Morning America, he tweeted: "I'm so over people bringing this past shit up!!! Yet we praise Charlie sheen and other celebs for there bullshit." If you read this as a plea for fairness, Brown's words sound like those of a child who can't wrap his head around the fact that not everyone wants to celebrate his feces like his mommy does.
The thing is that very few are praising Charlie Sheen for his "bullshit" (which I assume refers to his extensive history of abuse). As Holmes point out, what people have actually done is overlook it. A big reason for that is that Sheen has made it easy to overlook. His performance art is fascinating in itself. Sheen's media-mastery is savant-like and his way with words is diabolical. Chris Brown, a professional writer if you believe his albums' credits, would be lucky in his entire career to stumble once on something as absurdly clever as the shit that just rolls off Sheen's tongue (unlike Sheen, I get the feeling that Brown's boogers and brain are the same age). And that is to say nothing of the fact that the women who Sheen has been accused of brutalizing are not nearly as publicly beloved as Rihanna. Everyone deserves to live a life free of abuse equally, but the fact of the matter is that if you hurt a superstar, you can expect super-sized backlash.
Not that super-sized backlash is what Brown has received. Yes, his sales took a slight, momentary hit. Yes, he has his detractors, but he also has a legion of loyal fans who unleash questionable grammar and vague Biblical references the minute anyone intimates Brown's feces are less than praiseworthy. In the past year, he's had three Top 20 hits on the Billboard 100, and three Top 5 hits on Billboard's R&B chart (including the No. 1 "Deuces"). It would not be surprising if he sold out a tour the size of Sheen's upcoming one (after all, Sheen isn't filling stadiums but theaters). Given the consistent mediocrity of Brown's output and thinness of his voice, the guy is doing fine. His job provides him with an obscene amount of money and the ability to do what he says he loves on a national stage. His work in his other medium of choice, the outburst, regularly gets national coverage, too. If attention is the bottom line or at least close to it, being praised for his bullshit is exactly what Brown is experiencing. If that isn't winning, I don't know what is.
I already posted this on Twitter, but it deserves a heads-up here since this is my life we're talking about: Friday was my last day working for VH1. It's very surreal of me to leave a place that for a while, I never thought I would (I was coming up on my fifth year). While my goodbye post conveyed the bittersweetness of my departure, as I get further away (even as far as a weekend), there is more and more relief. When I start my new job at TVGuide.com next week, I will no longer be locked into one network's programming lining and creating (what amounts to) advertorial content (as much as I put into making it not read as such) for it. I have some pop-cultural blind spots that have come as a result of focusing on one network (so often, the last thing I wanted to do upon after spending my day watching TV was to watch more TV) and I look forward to fixing my vision.
Every job has its frustrations and while I'm happy to leave a lot of them behind and never so much as consider them again, there's a story I've been sitting on for a while that I'd like to share. It is a tale involving someone who had no idea how to do my job telling me how to do my job, of the rare clash I had with on-air talent (one of maybe two in the hundreds of delightful weirdos I encountered and wrote about), of an insanely late-night email exchange gone extreme, all drizzled in the essence of homophobia. I hadn't thought about it for a while, but when I was going through my inbox before leaving VH1, I reread this epic thread and was mostly pleased with my writing. For that reason chiefly, but also based on the belief that if you see something even remotely anti-gay, say something, I am sharing this exchange.
I'm not here to make friends, but I'm also not trying to throw anyone under the bus (see what I didthere?), and for that reason I have redacted the particulars that would make this person immediately identifiable. This is not meant to humiliate anyone, but to give a little slice of my former professional life and the complications that can arise when your job is to write about the output of the company you're working for.
I've gotten some good emails in my day, and last week I received one of the all-time best: Sean O'Rourke, a research coordinator for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno reached out to me for permission to show my Taylor Swift Is Surprised video during an upcoming sit-down interview with the pop star. "Duh! Squee! Duuuuuh!" I said (not really, but I did go, "HA!" in a quiet gym locker room when I initially read it off my Blackberry). Sean assured me I and/or my blog would get credit. Duh squared, that wasn't even a concern. How silly I become when I'm excited! In my response, I stressed how important it was for my friend Kate Spencer (who came up with the idea for the video in the first place) to be credited, too. Kate and me/fourfour and The Fab Life/both attributions -- however they wanted to do it, I asked that they somehow mention us both. Sean warned me that he couldn't promise any specific mention from Jay, but at the very least, our names would appear in the show's credits -- at least our names would be down somewhere. Great! Since Jay Leno tends toward the diabolical, I wasn't going to get my hopes up that he'd actually say my name on air. I didn't even know if they'd end up showing it at all. Sean and I went back and forth a few times about getting him the highest-resolution video possible (a tall order, as my video was a compressed compilation of already compressed source material, since so much of it came from YouTube).
Fast forward to last night:
Taylor's on his couch and he talks to her about winning awards (this is where the clip above begins). After (unconvincingly, I think) explaining that she refrains from being presumptuous while sitting in the audience of awards shows, Jay tells her, "We put together a little montage of you being surprised." What follows are four clips that appeared in my supercut, clearly cut from HD sources (they're 16x9 and look infinitely clearer than what I used) but put together in the same order that they are in my video (clips that originally appeared between the first and the second of the reel shown on The Tonight Show were removed, but the second through fourth appear in the exact succession with almost the same rhythm as my original video). And that's it. Taylor (after letting out a wonderfully appropriate, surprised, "Oh!" right before Jay rolled the clip) explained herself without a shred of irony or a seeming understanding of how silly all the instances of gaping mouth come off: "It's so exciting! I never thought I was gonna be at awards shows and nominated, and then you win them. It's just like, 'What?!' It's always fun!" The interview continued, so did the show. At its end, there were no credits in sight.
What surprised me the most wasn't so much that Kate and I weren't mentioned, but that the video wasn't credited as having originated on the Internet. This is not an obscure work -- it's racked up over 200,000 views in a week! I thought at the very least, he'd give and indication of this thing's preexistence so that his viewers could hunt it down if they were so inclined. That was, apparently, expecting too much.
This post is to reclaim due credit -- that is one very tangible function of this blog that I appreciate very much. As with my NPR/cell-phone supercut feud, I am grateful that I don't have to stand by and watch when someone's going to be so rude as to swipe something I worked on just because it was made for the Internet. Newsflash to the mainstream media: just like you have actual human beings making you work, so does the Internet! A little respect for the people providing your content would be nice! I understand that ownership is a dubious concept these days, and that I'm claiming ownership of a series of clips that I never owned in the first place, but an idea is an idea. They're so hard to come by and so, so valuable.
But really, the way all this went down is almost as good as if we'd been credited: a chance for righteous indignation is a gift, and I did get to see Taylor Swift's reaction to my video of her reactions, which is deliciously meta and very satisfying in its own right. Her seeming inability to see the humor in her behavior makes me feel like Kate's and my point is even more resounding. She is naive and lacking in self-awareness, it turns out without surprise. What is Jay's excuse?
Update: I heard from Sean, who chalks the matter up to the chain of communcation and says that this isn't the first time that a non-Jay Leno creation has been credited as such. Go figure. Credits throw TK, perhaps.
Update 2: Justice is served!
Or whatever! Frankly, it was served immediately via the overwhelming support everywhere I turned yesterday. I wasn't even that mad! I feel like people got mad for me. That was nice. I highly recommend getting ripped off (provided that you have a blog where you can tattle about the misdeed). Yesterday was amazing (the Times Arts Beat piece was a highlight), so much so that I passed out before I could catch the credits (thanks to Dave Itzkoff and Matt Cherette for catching this for me). Lots of fun, everyone. Let's do it again soon. (Or not!)
Below is a possible explanation (based on inisder knowledge!) for the air of bullshit that arrives with the new "documentary" Catfish. Also, I spoil the entire film. Ha.
"It'll make you feel strong and confident, just like Mary!" testified a fan in an interstitial package that ran during Mary J. Blige's appearance on HSN this weekend. Mary was there to hawk her My Life perfume, which was made out to be a magical elixir that would make you as perfectly imperfect, positive and real as the woman whose name was on the bottle. Since it is simply impossible to sell something on television without hyperbole, some amount of dishonesty and spin was to be expected. Adding to the nonsense potential and overall difficulty of the exercise was the fact that Mary appeared on HSN no fewer than four times this weekend, sitting on the couch for stretches as long as 90 minutes. Instead of an entire line of product to promote, she had only a fragrance to fill the space with, and so she did what any good megastar would: she talked about herself for much of the time.
Mostly, she made it so that talking about the perfume and talking about herself (and, by extension, her followers) were one and the same. My Life is named after Mary's second album, the one that established her as a misery/empathy queen (What's the 411? was heartfelt and easy to sing along to, but she didn't write a lot of it and it now plays like a collection of fantastic singles as opposed to a cohesive statement). Very early on, Mary established herself as a people's champ -- someone who'd been through everything and who was going through more, sometimes right in front of us (like her abusive relationship with K-Ci Hailey). At some point between then and now, it seemed that commiseration became Mary's brand -- even after she absolved herself of drama, she felt the need to remind her "troubled sisters" in "Good Woman Down" from 2005's The Breakthrough, "I still have troubles, too / You're not alone." More than anything, it sounded like a plea.
Confessing as an angle versus actual confessing is one thing -- music can be therapeutic no matter where it's coming from. If nothing else Mary was just doing what she does -- singing the blues. To then use that same rhetoric to sell perfume, however, verges on despicable. Even though pop music is product, too, the case can always be made for more art and expression; the same cannot be said for perfume. Mary J. Blige's entire shtick is based on trust and healing and for her to attempt to use that to sell something that is 100 percent pure product is so slimy ("My whole thing is to do good. My intentions are to do good. And that's basically why I did the fragrance," she explains virtually incoherently in the video above). Mary talked about putting her heart and soul into the creation of this fragrance, which was either a foolhardy waste of time or a bald-faced lie. Now that she has her audience hooked, she apparently thinks they will buy anything. That kind of egotism runs rampant in pop stars, but usually manifests itself in the form of shitty, samey albums. Branching out in this way and with this rationale (during one moment that my DVR ate, she referred to the perfume as a "blessing" to her fans!) feels infinitely worse.
Obviously, Mary J. Blige is not the first celebrity to attach her name to a perfume or any other useless thing that isn't even tangentially related to her craft. But this endeavor was sold via the cruelest of spins. It would be different if Mary's hook wasn't touching people on a personal level (however foolhardy and ego-fueled that is to begin with). For her to use this bond (or illusion of one) as grounds to make an easy buck reminds me of something Sarah Palin might do: pander to an audience by claiming to be one of them, while obviously not being so and profiting off people's gullibility. It's gross and it calls to question the veracity of an entire empire -- and that's a big problem when said empire is based on what's supposed to be honest emotion. (The donation of a dollar to Mary's FAWN Foundation for every $46 bottle sold was on one hand nice and on the other a joke of a pittance that only served as lip service for Mary's empathic persona.)
The video above isn't cut up to yield a laugh a second; rather it's to support my point. There are funny parts, I think ("It does not feel good to not feel good. It feels horrible."; "If I was a fragrance bottle on the counter, I would want to look like this."), but mostly it's just sad. This is the nail in the coffin of Mary's trustworthiness. As an R&B and pop singer, in a way, Mary's job from the jump was to sell her soul; watching her do it so literally is disturbing.
I watched the consciously notorious Srpski Film (A Serbian Film) and have a few things to say about it. I'm putting these things after the jump since they are spoilery, but mostly because they are reflections on the most depraved piece of fiction I've ever experienced. If the "unique magic of rigor mortis" is already too graphic for you, move on, by god, move on!
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