Well, 2007’s death list was kind of a wash — my only right guess was Jean Baudrillard. Here’s hoping for more accurate death-calling in the new year. And, responding to Charles’ criticism of my last list, I’ve made sure to include some female candidates.
Candidates (in order of likeliehood)
1. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) – saw him the other day on CSpan looking very old, tired, and shaky. Reminded me I had to do this list.
2. Claude Levi-Strauss – Going on 100 – so old! Also need a token theorist.
3. Betty Ford (former first lady/drunk) – Yeah, she old too.
6. J.D. Salinger (author) – You know, so we can read all that shit he’s been working on. Just kidding: if it’s anything like Catcher in the Rye and Franny & Zoey I’ll read it when I’m a life-stage or two too mature for it to resonate.
7. Young Jeezy (rapper) – He’s young (30) but he’s prone to shootouts and car-wrecks. Plus no list is complete without a token rapper on it (ask every music mag).
8. Hamid Karzai (President of Afghanistan) – It was either him or Nouri al-Maliki.
9. Charleton Heston (actor) – Has Alzheimer’s; also old.
10. Farrah Fawcett (famous nipple possessor) – Has butt cancer, refusing standard chemo in favor of experimental German treatment. The miraculous information you learn when you google “celebrities with cancer.”
(Risk and Monopoly are both registered trademarks of Parker Brothers, Inc.) “RISKOPOLY” and its rules are the property of Daniel M. Haley
Copyright 1975, 1996 All rights reserved.
Riskopoly is a combination of the games Risk and Monopoly. Though played as a board game, Riskopoly is actually a game of negotiation, cunning, economics, and politics. As model of the “real world” Riskopoly goes far beyond its venerated parent games. The formal rules of Riskopoly are actually just a framework. The real rules are those that govern global warfare and international business. The game is best when played creatively — and always remember EXTORTION IS LEGAL!
A scruffy man shambles on to the bus, picking at the inch-long dreads curling from his scalp. He sits down across from me, removes his shoe, and begins rubbing his foot inside a decaying gym sock.
“That’s all there is to it,” he muttered to himself as I exited the train.
The chills don’t hit me until I start up “Waiting For Godot” for my 8 AM class. A coincidence too trite to be believed; yet the thought hits me instantly: how did he know?
This afternoon:
I instantly recognize the sweet vomit smell: the young woman sitting next to me has Dmitri Gin on her breath at 2:30 in the afternoon. At the mercy of the rancid odor, like pickled body odor with a hint of pine, her mints are useless.
Trust is a relationship of reliance. A trusted party is presumed to seek to fulfill policies, ethical codes, law and their previous promises.
Trust does not need to involve belief in the good character, vices, or morals of the other party. Persons engaged in a criminal activity usually trust each other to some extent.
This section does not cite any references or sources.
A critical element in studies of trust behavior is power. One who is in a position of dependence cannot be said to trust another in a moral sense, but can be defined as trusting another in the most strict behavioral sense. Trusting another party when one is compelled to do so is sometimes called reliance, to indicate that the belief in benevolence and competence may be absent, while the behaviors are present. Others refer only to coercion.
Every brand is a promise. How will yours be kept?
Marketers need to uncover the subconscious emotional motivators that are not apparent with more superficial market research methods. They simply must sample emotions, not people. It’s critical to look at undercurrents in emotions and how these affect consumer behaviors and decisions. Marketing success depends on knowing the nature of consumers’ emotional reactions instead of sampling their surface opinions.
Trust is an abstract concept whose definition can differ based on the individual. However, when it comes to brand trust in international markets, it can mean only one thing. International companies need to ensure that foreign consumers have trust for their brand if they want to have successful relationships with their customers.
Every brand makes promises. Following through on the promise builds a brands image, just as failing to deliver can forever bury a brand.
You don’t actually give a shit about Britney Spears’ health. Admit it.
“Now, now,” you say. “Her descent into drug abuse and mental breakdown is a fascinating case study in the tribulations of fame. But it’s tragic, and we shouldn’t forget the human being underneath. And her children.”
Fuck you. You are a liar. You don’t give a shit about this latest celebrity burnout. Why would you? You don’t know her, she’s fucking rich, she can’t sing and she probably can’t even read. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, per se, and not that she hasn’t made some good songs. But you don’t actually care at all. You know you should care because that is a human being, so we are continually told. Yes, this sack of flesh in a wig and stupid sunglasses who has done nothing but stupid human tricks since childhood has to be human. And so we’re supposed to care.
But you don’t give a shit. You don’t care about her kids either; they’re destined for spoiled-rich-celebrity-idiocy and they always were. Fuck her kids. Fuck Britney. But most of all, fuck you.
While quitting things too early may not strike you as unfashionable lateness, I assure you it’s merely the dialectic negation required for true UL-osity. And so as OiNK goes, before I’d really milked it for its goods, so goes Stylus, the music website I helped kick off and quit right around the time it was getting good. But I was there from the beginning, man. Back when it was the Oligarchist Home Journal and I was writing cheeky reviews of Pootie Tang in my underwear. See, while I was learning the hard facts of college life, like how to smoke weed in the dorm bathroom and juggle girls, with the occasional crappy take on some pointless record or another, Todd was learning HTML and hiring and firing, staying up late at night making something beautiful and valuable and maddening but always interesting.
I was there when we recruited writers (mostly shit) from the old Pitchfork messageboard.
I was there when Pitchfork turned around and snatched the best writer away to make their editor.
I was there when they kicked off Pop Playground, when in some weird fevered burst of creativity rarely to be matched I wrote 3,000 words on the first N.E.R.D. album, when I convinced Todd to add comments to the pages like on Bogdan Raczynski’s site (oh yeah I’ll take credit for that), when one of my reviews got published in an actual paper magazine (gee, only like FOUR YEARS ago), when I garbled out a stoned screed about Britney Spears’ In The Zone that somehow now qualifies as a credible citation on Wikipedia, when I tried to start a fashion column when I knew absolutely nothing about fashion, when I started accruing actual promos and for whatever reason couldn’t bear to review them (apologies to Lil Jon, the Greensleeves label, J.G. Thirwell, and most of all to Genghis Tron who sent me a beautiful 10-inch record for nothing — I bought your latest album out of the guilt I still feel).
Transsexuals! They’re the hottest thing since… well, since homosexuality was considered no longer very threatening, perhaps. Corporate entertainment has devoted plenty of time to this increasingly visible segment of the population. A couple nights ago, two TV documentaries were running concurrently on the fat-mom channels (you know, Discovery Health, TLC, etc.); I opted for the one focusing on a couple middle-aged female-to-male trannies who looked straight out of Tom of Finland‘s work. A couple weeks ago, Oprah had on a teenage FTM with a mother so supportive, in another situation her daughter/son would probably have been a Disney Channel star (no mention of the father, interestingly). Documentary films aren’t to be left out; I can think of several new releases at the video store I used to work at off the top of my head (one had the horrible name of “Gendernauts,” although I didn’t ever see it, so maybe it’s actually good — for some reason I doubt it). And they aren’t just a media phenomenon either; they’re throwing their hat into the identity politics ring, demanding to be included in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, even though it’ll inevitably torpedo the bill. Bully for them, I say.
What’s interesting to me is the fascination regarding the transsexuals and the peculiar disavowal that takes place in the media. The TV doc went through all the typical motions, wherein 5 minutes of actual content is stretched to 22, with repeated assertions of the “normality” of transsexuality. They eat, go to work, shave, and have sex, just like normal people. As one of the advocates on the show pointed out, “They’re the people you see every day. They’re lawyers, doctors, university professors…” — I laughed at the last one, as gender diversity certainly is a (often quite pedestrian) growth industry in academia. Yes, this normality is always maintained — notice how the advocate points to professional occupations as proof of their worth. Transsexual advocates typically maintain, in move similar to the gay rights movement, that they were born with their condition — they’ve simply been wired incorrectly, placed in the wrong body. Nothing more to see here. They’re as normal as you or I, QED. Pretty soon they’ll be minor sitcom characters (oh wait, Wikipedia informs me they already are).
This is the part that bothers me. I have no problem with transsexuals, and strongly believe that they should have all the rights and protections that American citizens enjoy, something I shouldn’t even have to say. What gets my goat in the pure disingenuousness at the way the transgendered are presented in the media, as if the whole point is to show you how normal they are. Obviously the wave of tranny media has to do with the fascination, the titillation, the erotic/exotic appeal of this strange other, an effect heightened by showing how “normal” they can appear. But even more insidious is the emphasis on proving how trannies are just regular folk — clearly they aren’t, or there wouldn’t be such a market for shemale porn. Nor should they pretend to be.
This is probably personal bias (I’ve never found regular people very interesting, instead gravitating to weirdos, the socially awkward and maladjusted), but I think has an important political implication as well. The continued pressure in our corporate-media-driven culture is to continually make ourselves over as normal, to fit into certain lifestyle patterns deemed acceptable, to regulate our behavior to assure the smoothest possible social cohesion. The polemical insistence on tranny normality is just a way to incorporate a segment of the population genuinely threatening to the established social hierarchy. Transgendered people throw a lot of cultural assumptions out the window that SHOULD BE thrown out; turning them into happy family-unit-ready regular folks who want to be white collar professionals lets those assumptions in through the back door.
This is what happened to the gays. At one point, homosexuality was threatening, bizarre, and fascinating (it still is to many people, but not the way it once was). Gays were queer — they didn’t add up, they called assumptions into question, they had freaky sex that you couldn’t comprehend and they rubbed your face in it. Now mediated gayness is mostly a matter of physical comportment and lifestyle marketing — gays (at least the well manicured, white collar “regular folks” ones) are a highly coveted group among marketers. Any hint of the weirdness, the queerness, the aspects that threatened official dogma of before are swept under the rug or banished to John Waters movies (Waters has had a long affection for the genuine queers of the working class). While it’s certainly not easy to be gay, it’s really hard to do so without succumbing to the stereotype-turned-demographic vomited forth incessantly by the Logo-Bravo-MTV-Oprah axis. This is why I have a gay friend who says he’s homophobic: he’s not self-hating (in that way at least), but he hates the silly mincing caricature he’s supposed to be. I had an argument with a lesbian colleague in grad school who maintained that gay characters on TV was some sort of progress; I tried to explain that this just puts the powers to define homosexuality in the hands of corporations. “Sometimes it’s powerful to see someone like you on TV, it’s a source of strength,” this short, fat, farm-living, child-raising, no-money-having woman told me. “What makes you think they’re like you?” I responded. They weren’t like her at all — there are no characters like her on TV, because all the lesbians on TV are either fratboy wet dreams or terrorizing bull dykes, and they’ve all got money.
There needs to be a concerted effort to reclaim queerness as a viable political position, and fuck this assimilationist crap. Who wants to assimilate to this fucked, diseased, insane culture anyway? [Full disclosure: I’m a straight white male, and I know I’ve had all the breaks.] The first place to start: drop the biological essentialism. I want to see trannies (and gays for that matter) stand up and say, I chose to be this way. I wasn’t born as a man in a woman’s body; Judy Butler reminds us that you can’t be born a man or a woman at all, it’s something that comes later when we’re taught what those words mean. So say you made a choice. Say you woke up one day and thought you’d do it for a lark. Say you did it for the freaky sex you would have because of it. Yeah, people will be “horrified” by it, but then they’ll go home and whack off over it (plenty of people already do), be bothered by it, maybe even have some of their cherished ideals threatened by it. I think that’s a bigger accomplishment than turning into a bunch of Crate&Barrel commercials. And if GLAAD won’t stand up for you, at least I will. And shit, I’ve got a fucking blog.
It’s a truism of course that, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message”: the type of distribution system for particular media not only affects the content of the media, but actually determines it in some sense. There’s an echo of a “vulgar Marxist” political economy in this aphorism (content is determined by who’s paying), although McLuhan himself was happier quoting Finnegan’s Wake and consulting for businesses than brandishing the ol’ hammer-n-sickle.
Anyway, I have no interest in dredging up the corpse of a Woody Allen cameo. My interest lies in music, which seems to undergo a revolution in distribution methods every three years or so. And hip hop proves to be the avant-garde of capitalist realist pop yet again. It was first on the ringtone bandwagon, and the spacious high-and-low-frequency productions characteristic of snap music was nothing less than the perfect ringtone. D4L’s “Laffy Taffy” is probably the quintessential ringtone track; with its poor quality Casio production and mostly incompetent rapping, it’s suited much better for a 15-second loop than a 3:30 pop song (although it went to #1 regardless). According to Wikipedia, The Source hailed it as the worst hip hop beat of all time.
Ringtones are passe now (you heard it here first); after the novelty wore off, people realized that hearing the same 15 second snippet of whatever was hot two weeks ago wears thin rather quickly. The new hot distribution method for music is YouTube.
That’s right, just as MTV and MTV2 had all but done away with music videos, the form rears its oft-ugly-but-done-up head yet again. Funny, really; I’ve read plenty of music video scholarship from the 1980s, and most of its bandwagony predictions for new forms of postmodern Ur-art were hilariously off-base. Lauding “experimental” videos like Madonna’s “Material Girl” rings rather hollowly when you realize that music videos only got worse and less imaginative as the 1990s wore on, i.e. when making videos became an integral facet of music promotion instead of a weird niche for film students. Videos, despite predictions from TV scholars talking out of their asses, never became the predominant mode of music distribution — people still bought records after all, in ever-increasing (until 2001) number, even though Madonna records suck compared to her videos. When you have the recording, you can control the song that’s on; you can’t control what MTV shows (although TRL, MTV’s last hurrah, inserted an element of pseudo-control via voting).
YouTube offers instant (and free and legal) access to practically any recording through its catalog of videos, making it one of the best places to listen to music when you’re online — better than the Java-choked ad-catastrophe of MySpace. And it’s not only label-commissioned promotional music videos, either — anybody can upload their own videos using their new favorite song as a soundtrack.
What exactly is this doing to music? We’ve had rumblings, but no one to my knowledge has hit the nail on the head. They cheered when OKGo went from corporate-indie never-weres to YouTube stars on the back of some choreographed dancing. Kelefa Sanneh noted that despite everyone still getting their panties in a bunch over those evil rappers, “[h]ip-hop radio is full of cheerful dance tracks.” Not just dance tracks, but literally tracks about how to do specific dance moves. It’s like dozens of little Electric Slides all over your FM dial. Sanneh’s article implies that increased policing and censorship of hip hop has lead it to abandon controversial lyrical content in favor of tricking out the beats, and I think that’s partially the case. But the real story is the medium: because people listen to new music through YouTube, and are encouraged to participate in its distribution (if not in its production — important to note, all you fandom apologist Henry Jenkins followers) through their own videos, the natural — indeed, ancient — form of particpation in music is through dance. And the music is meeting the medium.
Think about this: if you’re an aspiring hip hop star, you want as many people as possible to watch your video on YouTube, and then go out and make their own video tributes to your song. The easiest way to do that is to promote a new dance (usually with some sort of regional roots), sit back, and watch as teenagers across the country record and upload their best attempts. And this is way, way bigger than the Hustle — because it doesn’t have to rely on Soul Train or Saturday Night Fever to spread the moves, a new dance can come out every week. Hell, every day.
Here’s a sampling of dance-rap tracks to make it big on the charts in the past year or so:
Dem Franchize Boys – Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It
Fat Joe – Lean Back
Huey – Pop Lock and Drop It
Crime Mob – Rock Yo Hips
DJ Unk – Walk It Out
DJ Unk – 2 Step
Ciara – 1-2 Step
Lil Jon – Snap Ya Fingers
Young Dro – Shoulder Lean
Young Leek – Shake and Jiggle It
Cupid – Cupid Shuffle
I considered listing Gwen Stefani’s “Wind It Up” too, since that’s a dance move (also prominent on Daddy Yankee’s “Impacto”) but it sucks a little too hard.
Search any of those songs on YouTube and you’ll get not only the official video (itself little more than a demonstration of dance moves), but dozens of fans doing their best 2-step on crappy webcams and cell phone cameras. My favorite manifestation of this trend so far is Chicago-native (holla!) Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat Superman.” The video acknowledges not only the YouTube distribution method, but also the crucial demographic of young children.
If you didn’t catch how to do the dance, here’s an instructional video. Soula Boy seems to really understand how to tap the YouTube market.
Now competing dances have sprung up on YouTube, DC Comics copyrights be damned. Here’s the Spiderman, which is my personal favorite:
And the Robocop of course:
The Aquaman:
And the Batman:
The peculiar democracy of dirt-cheap keyboards is in full effect — anyone with a Casio can make their own version and get in on the fun. And Soulja Boy can count on plenty of homegrown promotion for his upcoming album. Not bad for a 17-year-old.
Oh, and one little side note: YouTube dance got at least one guy a record deal: Bamabounce AKA Dj Taj, a young Baltimore club fan from Alabama, got the attention of hipster booty DJs Tittsworth and Ayres with the Wu Tang Slide, a mashup of “The Percolator,” “Moments In Love,” and that Bmore shuffle. He’s now released several records on their T&A label. Do how you do it, slow it up, do the Matrix:
All you ghetto dance producers take note: if you want to break into the mainstream, this is probably the best way to do it.
Posted by Gavin Mueller 
UNFASHIONABLY LATE 