Sausage Mahoney.

Sob Story

Cue the world's smallest violin, etc.  Since I do not live in a cave, I have some idea of where power and influence reside in our society.  So I understand why articles like this appear above the fold on the front page of our Paper of Record.  The editorial staff recognizes the need to pander to the same cohort that reads the Escapes section each Friday and salivates over purple prose describing hot-stone massages at exclusive resorts in Scottsdale and private dirigible rides over Richard Branson's private Carribean island.  But I doubt any actual human being has much sympathy.

Really, it would be too cruel to increase marginal tax rates now, when John McAfee is down to his last $4 million.

Barn Door Open, Horse Long Gone

Somehow I doubt this would have persuaded the kids even if it weren't largely a strawman argument.  

I'm not sure who Nasir is talking about here, specifically.  Hip-hop actually does a pretty good job steering clear of minstrelsy.  Admittedly, one always has to be careful with this stuff.  History is a bitch; no matter how hard you try, no amount of self-awareness and winking can erase the power of centuries-old racist tropes.  Still, I most definitely admire Nas's commitment to curmudgeonliness, and it's both startling and refreshing to hear this sort of old-school racial dialogue today, with zero tolerance for purported irony and repurposing and reclaiming and all the other buzzwords we know so well.  The old-school approach is good by me, even if it sometimes overshoots the mark.  I am beyond tired of the insistence of willful and ignorant persons alike that race is no longer a subject fit for consideration in modern life, that it's become irrelevant to the daily experience of humans, like alchemy or the Seattle Pilots.  Truly, it's hard to see how anyone could make this argument without being willful about it.  Maybe they want to put their troubled consciences to bed; possibly they are sick of watching what they say and looking for the chance to try out some killer new material.  We have a substantial segment of Americans convinced that the guy we just elected President with a substantial majority of votes was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, because—well, he just seems different.  They're not sure why, they can't put their finger on it, but the fellow just doesn't seem like one of us.  It is an obvious fact that millions of our citizens actively and conciously believe in white supremacy.  Their numbers are shrinking, percentage-wise, as the country gets browner, but they're not going to go down without a fight.  They are getting louder and louder.  We desperately need to talk about race.

Also, if you're really feeling mean, you might point out that this beat is better than some of the lesser efforts on Hip Hop Is Dead and Untitled.

Unacceptable

Charles "88 Keys" Njapa is a mid-level hip-hop producer and occasional emcee.  He's pretty obscure, but not because he lacks talent.  He's been making records for over a decade, since he donated "Thieves in the Night" to the Black Star record.  Since then, he's worked with Macy Gray and Musiq, among others.  More recently, maybe you dug his beat on Tanya Morgan's "Threemcees," from last year's The Bridge.  I did, anyway, even if it was hardly a standout on that excellent effort.  I'm just speculating, but I'd bet the guy is a hip-hop lifer struggling to get by in what is certainly a very and increasingly competitive marketplace.  So I would like to celebrate the fact that 88 finally has a record of his own out—The Death of Adam, released late last year.

But I can't, no way, because it is fucking terrible.  I'm not quarreling with the execution; the beats are interesting enough and the emceeing is non-embarrassing.  The lead single, "Stay Up! (Viagra)," features an unusually sprightly, non-synthesized Kanye West; maybe you've heard it.  88 is clearly influenced by Kanye, maybe a little too much.  But all that stuff is okay.  What is not okay, and what to the contrary merits a giant middle finger of derision, is the record's concept.  I mean, good on 88 for making a concept record, and a coherent one to boot.  But did he have to be such a colossal asshole about it?  If you wanted to make the case that men, in their hearts, despise women profoundly, The Death of Adam would make a pretty decent Exhibit A.

The Death of Adam is the ignorant story of the fall from grace of a random douchebag with whom we (the target audience comprised exclusively of young dudes) are supposed to identify.  Adam is a complete zero; he has no personality or distinguishing charateristics.  The only thing that defines him is that he's preyed upon, victimized, and destroyed by this grotesquely evil woman.  In case you don't get where he's coming from with the storyline, the woman's name is "Pussy."  First Adam wants to fuck Pussy, but she withholds, saying she just wants to be friends.  (We all know how infuriating that is; am I right, guys?)  When she finally submits, he's so nervous he has erection problems.  Somehow that's her fault too; she's too demanding, not sensitive enough to his sense of entitlement.  He gets through it, but no sooner has he shot his wad than she demands he fuck her again, which is clearly unreasonable because (am I right, guys?) he needs a reasonable amount of time to replenish himself.  She doesn't care, because she's just out for her own selfish pleasure.  Also she's crazy.  And evil.  She verbally abuses him and forces him to fuck her again and again.  Adam only has three condoms, but she assures him she's on birth control so it's okay to go bareback.  In the morning, when he tries to sneak away, she freaks out and accuses him of rape.  He leaves anyway, but shortly thereafter figures out she gave him the clap.  It's really painful!  And she shoulda told him!  How terrible is that?  (Am I right, guys?)  After he gets it treated, stopping only briefly to cusses her out as the trifling ho she is, she comes back a month or so later and tells him—get this!—she's pregnant.  See, she was lying about the birth control too!  Now he really loses it, but what can he do?  She's got his hooks in him for good now!  She gets his wages garnisheed and he is taken to the fucking cleaners.  The end.

See, "death" is just a metaphor here.  Adam doesn't actually die, but he loses his pride and freedom to a woman and a baby, against his will, and that's certainly the equivalent of death, if not much worse: Sundays at Bed, Bath & Beyond, pushing around a stroller, looking for a pepper mill or some shit, no money at all to spend on weed.  Seriously, who wouldn't want to self-disembowel in such a circumstance?  And what man would possibly voluntarily enter into that situation?  DON'T DO IT IT'S A TRAP.  That's basically the dumbass, retrograde message we're dealing with here.  Worst of all, because the songs don't really convey the plot, 88 cheats and ties the tracks together with voiceover from a female narrator, which lady is properly aghast at the horrible connivances of vile-ass Pussy and her systematic depredation of poor Adam's soul and 401(k).  This is a transparent device to mask the record's misogyny, but it's basically like treating a grand mal seizure with topical cream.  Sure, the storyline traffics in every pitiful cliche imaginable about the awful shit women willfully pull to deprive men of their metaphorical and actual testicles, but it's A WOMAN TELLING THE STORY, so it's cool.

It's no coincidence that the protagonist is named "Adam"—you remember the guy from Genesis and the Garden of Eden and the apple and all that.  88 is trying a "humorous" take on Man's eternal struggle to escape the grasp of female genitalia.  I know that most artists have a limited number of stories to tell, but how boring and simple-minded and un-self-critical do you have to be to tell this particular story?  You're better off keeping your mouth shut.

Fish in a Barrel

This is from the folks at that LOLcat site, but I adopt it as my final comment on the music of this past year (hell, every year, really).

Bullshit Moose

It will come as no surprise to my eight regular readers that I am no fan of this asshole.  Over the past week, in response to Russia's excursion into South Ossetia, John McCain has taken the opportunity to try on the big cowboy hat, and his mouth is working overtime to write checks his ass palpably can't cash, all but pledging to put American lives on the line to defend Georgia against Russian aggression.  But what you see is what you get.  McCain is reflexively bellicose; he was just as aggressive as our current President in pursuing recreational war after September 11.  I don't think we can credit McCain's improved standing in the polls solely to this flurry of tough talk.  Barack Obama, though admirably genteel, has basically driven his campaign through a hedge by the side of the road into the tomater patch, from where he's watching the national political conversation pass by and disappear down the road.  But there's no question McCain feels better and more confident, and plays better to the electorate, when he can repeatedly mention his reluctance to discuss the fact he was once a prisoner of war, and on that basis pretend he has some core competence in military strategy.  Why wouldn't he, since no one's allowed to call him on it?  Last month, Wes Clark, who is an actual military strategist with actual recent experience leading American troops in a combat zone, was excommunicated from Face the Nation for suggesting that being shot down over Vietnam and imprisoned by the Viet Cong did not, of itself, qualify McCain for the presidency.

So I'm a little confused by Bob Herbert's column today, which takes issue with McCain's stump-speech applause line that he is a "Teddy Roosevelt Republican."  Herbert seems to think this is false because McCain's campaign is largely run by prominent lobbyists and the candidate himself believes our greatest domestic priority is offshore oil drilling, whereas Roosevelt fought Standard Oil and saved pelicans off the Florida coast.  As often happens with Herbert, the column is full of good intentions but ends up tangential to the real issue.  In the sense most relevant to both our current political discourse and the modern Republican Party that is about to crown him their Presidential nominee, McCain is absolutely a Roosevelt Republican.  Just like TR was, McCain is a macho, bullying loudmouth who believes America is an empire and there is glory in subjugating other nations through force.  Whatever problems he may have with other traditionally Republican constituencies—and, let's not kid ourselves, he will not have many come November 4—he is beloved by the GOP national-security apparatus for exactly that reason.

Like most of you, the first thing I learned about Teddy Roosevelt was that he spoke softly but carried a big stick—either that or the thing about the teddy bear.  Embedded though it is in our common narrative, there is little or no truth to this claim.  Roosevelt spoke as loudly as humanly possible at all times about whatever subject interested him, whether or not he knew anything about it.  Mostly it all came back to an exploration of the wonders of himself.  But it is no longer 1904.  Back then, however intemperate its President, however juvenile his self-concept, the United States had a pretty big stick, and Europe, Asia, the Middle East were oceans away.  Our great-grandparents could avoid the other great powers of the day and concentrate on imposing their will throughout Latin America, against countries that had real trouble fighting back.  Not so much anymore.  All good post-structuralists know that power is at its most fragile when it must be exercised; the past eight years have shown definitively to the entire world that the United States cannot remake even a single, mid-sized foreign nation in its image through military force.  Today our big stick is broken into pieces across Iraq and Afghanistan.  John McCain is so busy picturing himself sitting in the big chair, he can't tell the difference.

Pundit, Heal Thyself

Few things annoy me more than punditry.  I spout off plenty on this page, but I encourage no one to view me as an authority on anything.  I'm mostly just speaking for myself.  Cable news is different.  There, the viewer is treated to an endless cavalcade of underqualified loudmouths who are presented as having special insight into what the American people really think, want, need.  There's no reason to think any of them actually know anything.  Pundits may have better access than you or I do to inside gossip from political flacks, for whatever that's worth, but they mostly spend their time talking to one another.  They're not out there shooting the shit with these hypothetical Real Americans they're always mouthing off about.

There are incredibly dedicated people who devote substantial waking hours to detailed examinations of the fraudulence and moral bankruptcy of this pundit-driven discourse—its circularity, its unrelenting focus on trivialities, its belief that political gamesmanship is way more important than substantive policy.  It'll drive you crazy if you let it, for sure.

But the thing that irritates me the most, because it's so completely pervasive and corrosive to any attempt to engage rationally with problems, is our celebrity media's pathological focus on "authenticity."  You know the drill; Americans supposedly prefer to be led by meat-and-potatoes, salt-of-the-earth types.  They value consistency and principle over waffling and worry.  Who cares if you're a little stupid, a little crooked, a completely delusional godbag?  Needless to say, this is the identical bullshit that directly provided us with the unqualified failure that is the current Bush Administration.  George W. Bush was thought preferable to Al Gore because Gore was a namby-pamby, lying smarty-pants, whereas Bush was the "kind of guy you'd have a beer with."  Never mind that Bush, being a dry drunk desperately clinging to God-fearing sobriety in an attempt to make sense of his tenuous place in a world he doesn't understand, would have refused the beer.  Before their ranks were culled earlier this year, you heard similarly breathless stupidity from pundits about Mitt Romney (and his shoulders "you could land a 747 on"), Crazy Rudy Giuliani (and his solemn promise to "kill all brown people"), and the current favorite son, John McCain.  I don't know if you know this, but apparently McCain is a Navy combat veteran.

Democrats are the other side of this coin.  If you think back to 2004, you undoubtedly remember John Kerry windsurfing off the shores of Nantucket.  Or the time he ordered a Pat's cheesesteak with Swiss cheese instead of Cheez Whiz.  (Working-class people fear Swiss cheese!)  Or when he ordered green tea at a diner instead of coffee.  Pundits hopped up and down insisting that all these completely trivial, unimportant personal preferences were deeply suggestive of his character and should influence the way Americans voted.  Even worse, each incident indicated he was an effete, pointy-headed swell with no conception of the lives of workin' folks.  Or, worse yet, a woman.  Gore got the same treatment (and much worse) four years earlier—our purportedly liberal media made up a story about Naomi Wolf forcing him to wear earth tones, and in response the demented Maureen Dowd wrote that Gore was "so feminized that he's practically lactating."  Way back in 1988, Michael Dukakis was lampooned for suggesting that Iowa farmers diversify by growing Belgian endive instead of manly crops like corn and soybeans.  This year's target is Barack Obama, and just today Dowd took a shot at him for discussing the high price of arugula with those same Iowa farmers (who evidently eat nothing but iceberg lettuce, maybe with an occasional foray into romaine).  Never mind that Iowa's simple farmers grow a substantial amount of arugula, or that Obama was talking to actual arugula growers when he made the comment.

So anyway—Americans demand authenticity, Republicans are super-butch and accordingly keep it real, and Democrats secretly all have vaginas and cannot connect with the common man.  That's about the size of it.  And the trope is inescapable.  Earlier this week, The Politico's normally clue-free Roger Simon ascended to a new plateau of knee-jerk cretinism with his column about Hillary Clinton pounding a shot of Crown Royal in an Indiana bar. Simon apparently believes Hillary's social drinking trumped anything she actually, you know, had to say:

But Clinton’s statement [about Obama] was not as important as her downing that shot of whiskey.

Presidential campaigning is about image making, and there is no better image than being a man (or woman) of the people.

Who is actually less elitist or more in touch with average Americans makes little difference.

I am not sure that Hillary Clinton of Wellesley College and Yale Law School feels the pain of ordinary people any more keenly than Barack Obama of Columbia University and Harvard Law School.

They are both lawyers who are married to lawyers. They are both millionaires. They both live in very nice houses. Wolves have not gathered at their doors in a long time.

But while Americans place the office of the presidency on a pedestal and demand (though they do not always receive) higher standards from our presidents, we also demand that they be like us.

This is a hanging curveball, I know.  If that wasn't bad enough (and it surely was), Simon concludes by asserting, without any stated basis, that "Deep down, the public knows that virtually all the people who run for president are wealthy and live an elite lifestyle, no matter how they grew up. What is important is their image."

Seldom has the cancer that has rotted our national press from the inside been so comprehensively displayed.  Simon declares with unexamined certainty what "Americans" think.  But he has no fucking idea what "Americans" think.  Even if this nation of tens of millions of individuals, each with his or her own nuanced experiences and thought processes, could be reduced to a simple yes-or-no, it's not like Simon has actually deigned to talk to any of these people.  If he did, he talked to ten or 15 of them, which statistically speaking is about as useful as talking to nobody.  (See Brooks, David for myriad examples of this sort of here's-what-Red-America-thinks sophistry.)  Simon imagines that a benchmark ordinary American actually exists because he lacks the imagination or persistence to speak to actual individual Americans and digest what they have to say, or even to read a poll.  As a result, he purports to give voice to the concerns of the rank-and-file, but really succeeds only in smothering their varied voices with his monologue, condescending to them immensely in the process.  I most certainly do not believe that Americans only care about candidates' images, and not what they have to say (or would do once in office).  It is a terribly pernicious thing that leading political journalists believe it.

So why do pundits have this bizarre conception of how Americans think—in Simon's words, that "we also demand that [our leaders] be like us"?  You wonder what he's thinking when he says this.  My first response would be, "No shit, Roger.  Our leaders are like you.  They were educated at good schools, they have plenty of money, they live in Washington, DC and are obsessed with DC society minutiae, they attend cocktail parties with Tim Russert and Maureen Orth."  Personally, I don't want a leader who's like me.  I'm ill-tempered, easily bored, and unfit for public office.  I would spend too much time watching football and trying out my new Flying V.  I want a leader who's better and smarter and more patient than I am.  These days, I mostly just want a leader who's not overtly evil.

Here's what I think.  Pundits fundamentally need to believe that Americans want our leaders be regular folks because it is the only way they can possibly believe themselves to be regular folks.  They do not want to admit they are part of an elite, even in the face of irrefutable evidence.  Exhibit A is Chris Matthews's insistence in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine that he is not "part of the winner's circle in American life."  The guy makes $5 million a year to talk on national television and has a vacation home on Nantucket.

The easiest way for celebrity pundits to square this circle—to reconcile their wealth, their narrow obsessions and insular culture, with their desire to be jus' folks—is to reimagine their own world.  If people want to elect a regular guy as President, that must mean the President is, at heart, a regular guy, or at least someone who understands regular guys.  To a celebrity pundit, feeling insecure about her own elitism, that notion has to be incredibly soothing.  If the President, the most powerful person in the word and the master of the DC social universe, is a regular guy, they must be regular folks as well.  I mean, they sure understand where the President is coming from, and the President understands where the people are coming from (he must! they elected him).  By the transitive property of equality, they must understand ordinary folks too.  So they feel they have license to stupidly pontificate about the hopes, dreams, etc. of "Americans" they've never spoken to and never will, and insist that the whole country shares their lame, lazy, shallow value system.

It never occurs to them that, when they talk about what "Americans" want, they're really talking about what they want.  They're not talking about America or to America; they're talking to and about themselves.  The egotism and laziness is mind-boggling.  I suppose the logical thing to do is ignore it, but it really does cause all of us serious problems.  I mean, this is not a game of Risk.  There are actual people on that battlefield.

Three Hots and a Cot

Few facts speak more eloquently about the priorities of our current political culture than today's news that one in 100 American adults currently goes to sleep behind bars.  Does that sound like a positive development to you?  Naturally, there is a certain segment of the political spectrum that makes no secret of its preference for providing social services in this way, but, really, we're all complicit.  Instead of dedicating our social-spending dollars to fixing our educational system, providing affordable housing, and treating drug addiction as a public-health crisis rather than a criminal problem, we've used that cash to build more and more prisons.  To further grease the skids, we've expanded the definition of criminal activity and legislated away the ability to show mercy to someone convicted of a crime—and particularly crimes that disproportionately tend to be committed by poor folks.  From the standpoint of protecting the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small minority of Americans, this is a pretty neat package; it maximizes the chances that the poor will stay poor, and provides a built-in mechanism for disenfranchising them and salting them away out of sight when they slip up.

Most people don't think of the ongoing prison explosion as the result of diverting social spending, or, maybe more accurately, the realization of a very different, authoritarian vision of the modern welfare state.  But that's what it is.  That's how we take care of poor people in today's United States.  We lock them up, let them do whatever they do behind the prison walls, and forget about them.

Douché

I should probably just let this go, I know.  Yesterday, noted Jimmy Kimmel hanger-on and Road Rules enthusiast Bill Simmons reached a career low.  Surprisingly, it did not come in the form of his 457th 30,000-word assertion that the 1985-86 Celtics represented the peak of Western civilization and if only Lenny Bias hadn't dug the booger sugar so much and Walton could've stayed healthy they would've gone 94-0 the next year and stomped the Lakers' balls in the Finals.  Or his 4,000,000th dewy-eyed recreation of Dave Roberts's steal in Game Four of the '04 ALCS.  Or his deeply-held beliefs about the supernatural potency of Tom Brady's tumescent dong.  It's way, way worse.  This is an honest-to-God verbatim exchange from his quarterly circle-jerk ESPN.com mailbag column, where his readers kiss his ass in hopes he will republish their lame-ass jokes:

Q: If they were going to construct the Mount Rushmore of the rap industry, who would the four members be? Keep in mind that it is the four most influential people to the history of the industry, not necessarily the four best rappers.
--Adam, Hillsville, Va.

SG: You'd have to call it Mount Rapmore and, by the way, it's not a bad idea for a tourist attraction in Compton or Watts. Anyway, Tupac had the most raw talent, the biggest creative impact and the most fascinating legacy. He has to be there. Dr. Dre played a crucial role during rap's formative years, helped launch the West Coast sound, found Snoop and the Dogg Pound, pushed rap into the mainstream with "The Chronic" and showed everyone else how to sell out. He has to be there. Jay-Z made the most money, bagged Beyonce and turned himself into a financial and cultural icon. He has to be there.

As for the fourth spot, Eminem reached the single highest peak of any rapper; Biggie Smalls was the greatest freestyler ever and had the single most distinctive sound; and Public Enemy had a bigger influence than both of them, only you couldn't just stick Chuck D. on there because it would belittle the contributions of everyone else in the group. So I keep coming back to this point: Biggie's major red flag was that he died too young, but if he had made one more memorable album, you'd pencil him in without an argument. Can you penalize him for dying young? I say no. Besides, you can't have a Mount Rapmore with Tupac and not Biggie when those guys are so intertwined historically. So Biggie would be my fourth pick for now, but it's up for grabs. We're an Eminem comeback album away from him knocking Biggie off and grabbing the fourth spot.

Now, let's be clear—I have no problem with people who don't know anything about hip-hop.  I have no problem with people who hate hip-hop, except to the extent it bespeaks cracker discomfort with the racial Other.  Personally, I love rap music, and these days to me it is much more creative and resonant than the abstract, flaccid nonsense that folks are peddling as indie rock.  But I make no claim that appreciating any particular genre of music makes you a better person, or means you're free from prejudice, or has any moral significance whatsoever.  That's the sort of logic that caused well-meaning liberals in the late 80s to fall all over themselves pretending to listen to Youssou N'Dour and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

But what does annoy me is fronting.  By which, in this case, I mean presuming to speak authoritatively on subjects about which you are largely if not totally ignorant.  Now, this is par for the course with Simmons, who is unable to distinguish between topics about which he's genuinely knowledgeable (like basketball and reality TV) and things to which he's devoted thousands of hours of his life, apparently without learning very much (like football and music).  Like a lot of white guys, he claims the power to definitively address every subject that comes up.  ("Brain surgery?  Sure, I'm just a sportswriter on the Internet, but that surgeon really crapped the bed on that right frontal craniotomy.  What was he doing, trepanning?  He was never going to fix that patient's trigeminal neuralgia like that!  Particle physics?  Sure, I'm just a sportswriter on the Internet, but—")  Obviously, Bill is not the only person who does this—I mean, how many thousands of blogs currently exist?  You could for sure accuse me of doing the same.

Of course it's a little different when tens of thousands of people actually read the words you write.  That would cause me to be especially careful I knew what I was talking about.  And, in this particular circumstance, there's also the problem of an upper-middle-class white guy assuming, without thinking too much about it, that he can legitimately define the pantheon of the most vital cultural and political African American art form of the past generation.  You know, Simmons is not just starting a casual conversation about the form and what he digs about it; he's telling us all whose work gets to be in the hip-hop time capsule.  That's some chutzpah.  Maybe if he had either established, or showed any sign of possessing, credibility as a hardcore hip-hop head (who happens to be a white guy), that'd be one thing, but all evidence suggests he's basically a dilettante who's bought several million-selling rap records over the past 15 years.

What leads me to that conclusion?  Well, let's go to the videotape.  Right out of the gate, "Mount Rapmore"?  That's what we're obliged to call it?  That's a deal-breaker right there, and we haven't even gotten into the substance.  And it'd make a great "tourist attraction in Compton or Watts"?  We know Bill is from Boston (and thus hates the Yankees specifically and maybe all of New York by extension) and now lives in L.A., but surely he knows hip-hop first drew breath in the south Bronx, right?  Maybe not, I guess; he might not be aware that hip-hop had been around for more than a decade prior to the release of N.W.A. and the Posse.  Or maybe he just prefers that smooth G-Funk sound to Pete Rock.  And what's up with the reference to Watts?  I challenge Bill, without resorting to Wikipedia, to name a single MC from Watts.

(Also, I don't want to go unnecessarily heavy on the historiography here, but I have to use my American Studies degree for something.  Mount Rushmore is located on sacred land belonging to the Lakota Sioux, which land was expropriated by force in the 1870s by the U.S government. The mountain was renamed after a New York lawyer who subsequently climbed it.  Having stolen the land and killed thousands of Lakota, the government then blew the face off the mountain with dynamite and chiseled out a monument celebrating four white-guy presidents, two of whom were slaveholders, a third of whom was a flaming racist, colonialist asshole.  I guess at least the Lakota could be grateful they didn't put Andrew Jackson up there too.  Now, don't get distracted—I'm not arguing Washington and Jefferson were awful people; evidence mostly suggests they were relatively progressive men who were nevertheless products of their times.  I'm saying the literal and symbolic results of seizing the mountain and building the monument are hard to mistake.  Particularly if you view hip-hop, at least in part, as an anti-racist, anti-colonialist, oppositional art form dedicated to telling stories that otherwise get suppressed from the dominant American narrative, Mount Rushmore is a really piss-poor template for a Rap Hall of Fame.)

When we get around to Simmons's choices and justifications, we are instantly afloat on a sea of lame.  For starters, this is supposed to be a historical project, but he's mainly picked artists whose first releases date from the 1990s.  Dre has been around forever, but I'm going to hazard a guess Bill wasn't listening to the World Class Wrecking Cru in the mid-80s and first got on the bus in 1988 with Straight Outta Compton.  Tupac first popped up in 1991, doing a few bars on Digital Underground's posse cut "Same Song," and released his debut LP later that year.  Biggie rapped on the "Real Love" remix in '93, and dropped Ready to Die the next year.  Jay-Z's debut landed in 1996, and Eminem's Slim Shady LP didn't arrive until 1999.  Even if we assume Bill was a fan of Shady's earlier EP releases, that only takes us back to '97 or so.  So he omits from his calculation roughly the first (and necessarily most formative) half of the history of the genre.  If the folks who began carving Mount Rushmore in 1927 had used this logic, we'd have a monument featuring James K. Polk, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, and William Howard Taft.

Then there are overgeneral, imprecise, pointless statements like "Tupac had the most raw talent, the biggest creative impact and the most fascinating legacy."  What does it mean to say that a particular MC had "the most raw talent"?  Was he the best lyricist?  If so, in what sense?  Was he the funniest, most elegantly braggadocious, most pointed, most thoughtful, most socially aware?  Did he have superlative flow?  The most compelling personality?  The broadest range?  The statement is incoherent.  What does it mean to say Tupac had "the biggest creative impact"?  Does it mean he was the most often imitated?  If so, by whom?  Or is Bill just talking about the mysterious fact that the gentleman has been dead for over ten years but is still releasing records?  If so, I agree—that's a business model that will stand the test of time.

It gets stupider from there.  "Dr. Dre played a crucial role during rap's formative years"?  Seriously?  I'm not trying to put down Dre, who is a massively skilled and resoundingly influential producer.  But by the time he got going, others had spent many years preparing the canvas.  I will agree he played a crucial role in hip-hop during my formative years as a hip-hop fan, but that's not the same thing.  "Eminem reached the single highest peak of any rapper"?  WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?  I guess, if we wanted to be charitable, we could assume Bill is referring to record sales here rather than, you know, actual rapping.  But even so, does anyone listen to Eminem anymore?  Will anyone remember him in ten years?  He's already well on his way to joining his fellow mooks Limp Bizkit in history's dustbin.  Finally, "Biggie Smalls was the greatest freestyler ever"?  This I don't understand; is he talking about swimming?  I'm not sure what Bill thinks he means by "freestyler" here.  I doubt he spent a lot of time at Brooklyn house parties watching Chris Wallace rock the mic.  I certainly can't dispute his claim that Biggie had outstanding vocal ID, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Please, thinking people of America, let this be a lesson to you—informed opinions are wonderful things, and we should all strive to acquire and express them.  But it's a process.  Words have meanings, you know.  Facts have contexts.  You shouldn't just show up and shoot your mouth off.  As emcees have been pointing out since the dawn of time, there's no future in fronting.

Peace Out

To the asshat who tagged my garage door.  Buddy, your style is pathetic.

Stupid Question

So I read in the New York Times this morning that Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) is very troubled that the NFL destroyed evidence that may have proved the New England Patriots cheated by surreptitiously videotaping their opponents during games.  I'm sure we all agree that's a serious matter, since professional football implicates core American values and is so vital to our daily way of life.  Specter is doggedly pursuing an investigation.  So that must mean Specter also will investigate the confirmed fact that the CIA, with approval from the Gonzalez Justice Department, destroyed videotapes of operatives torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.  Right?