i don't even know what to say about music anymore

(Not a diss)

I am the baby: a comprehensive list of my childhood television counterparts

As I predicted on this blog, after a two-and-a-half hour bus ride yesterday with no bathroom breaks (it is impossible to stand still long enough on that tumultuous drive to squat over that nasty ass toilet sloshing with blue disinfectant at its depths and actually pee into it), I HAVE A U.T.I. Shit. 'Hahaha,' I said before. Who's laughing now? Not me--it hurts too much.

So, in bed snuggling up with my quilt with the air conditioner turned off even though it's 87 degrees out because I have to stave off the chills, I stumbled across this clip of the 1990s television series, Dinosaurs. Marveling at what a masterpiece the show was, I realized how much its star, Baby Sinclair, influenced my personality as a child, which got me thinking about all the other fundamental building blocks of my identity contained in adolescent television programming.

1. Baby Sinclair



The stills from this episode are golden. Baby Sinclair is me as a baby, and yet simultaneously, is my grandmother at her present age incarnate. In the video below, the "GET OUTTA HEYAH" completely captures my grandma's snappy Italian attitude. For further reference, as they both age, my grandmother and Joe Pesci grow more and more alike and will soon converge into one wrinkly, permed, yippy Italian persona.
Sinclair loved to pester people, as I still do. He could have said "daddy" but he repeatedly screamed "not the mamma," to subjugate Earl Sinclair.

Also of note is Sinclair's chemical dependence on sugar, a struggle still relevant to my daily life which I try to make cute. Kind of like this next one's obsession with cookies...

2. Angelica Pickles

Angelica was an only child, which means she was the youngest and oldest at the same time. As the youngest, I never had only-child syndrome, but you could say I also fulfilled that simultaneous youngest-oldest thing because everyone was always telling me I was precocious and beyond my years but I hardly think that demonstrates the responsibility eldest kids inherit. Either way, I could always relate to Angelica's unique role in her family/the notion that it should be protected by preventing any 'additions to the family.' In other words, "I'm the baby" has to be enforced. I liked being the youngest, didn't want a little brother or sister, and wouldn't take any crap about it. Above all, Angelica hated babies, and so did I. When I was little I used to think that my 'real parents' were a king and queen and I was a princess, and Angelica thought this too in one episode. (Then the TV Repairman who operates under a 'home appliance king' gimmick comes and she thinks it's her real daddy coming to retrieve his daughter; it's not all it's cracked up to be and she realizes that she has to come home). I wouldn't say that I made up this fantasy because I saw Angelica do it, but probably from watching so many Disney movies, which likely influenced Angelica, or the writers of Rugrats, as well. I understood early on that Angelica had incredible depth as a character despite all of her textbook flaws that would make her a two-dimensional villain in a normal adolescent cartoon context. But Rugrats was extraordinary enough to captivate me well into prepubescence. Also, like Baby Sinclair, Angelica had an uncanny penchant for cookies, which was hilarious, and I learned a lot of my food humor from watching her maniacally gobble down sweets. She also seemed to have professionalized being a child. My dad is a lawyer and I loved Liar Liar growing up, so the episode where she sues her parents was such a fantasy for me. I always had my stuffed animals and beanie babies sue each other before a jury of toys lined up on an American Girl writing desk bench. I could go on forever about Angelica's power over my personality.


3. The Muppet Babies
When I was three I went to get my IQ test. I had been spending most of my time in my grandparents' rec room watching Muppet Babies on Nickelodeon and they made references to and parodies of Raiders of the Lost Arc, it seemed like, all the time. But when the psychologist showed me an ink blot that looked like a pyramid, I could not remember the word 'pyramid' and told him, "You know, it's one of those ancient temples where they have tombs and mummies." After the test I heard him repeating the phrase "ancient temples" to my mother and I was sure that I had gotten that question terribly wrong, but then they said that I was a genius or something and got to start school early. Thanks, Muppet Babies. You narrated most of my imagined adventures, seconded only to Power Rangers. (I GET TO BE THE PINK RANGER OR ELSE--Okay fine. In the dining room, you're the pink ranger and I'm the yellow ranger. But in the kitchen, I'm the pink ranger and you're the yellow ranger. Fine.).


4. Mr. Anthony DeMartino

Mr. DeMartino taught me that being angry can be funny, particularly when accompanied ridiculous and exaggerated facial expressions. He was constantly frustrated with the intellectual inferiority and lack of enthusiasm of his class, and even when relieved or impressed with Daria's participation and ease with the material, he still seemed pissed at her.

p.s. this was completed long after healing from my bladder infection, but completed quite poorly.

news roundup

Listening to the Smiths and reading the NYT.

Nigerian Death Toll Rises to 700
The violent Boko Haram Islamic sect attacked police stations and government buildings last week, killing 700 people in Maiduguri. More than 50 Muslim leaders repeatedly warned the Nigerian authorities before the attacks and urged them to take preemtive action, but nothing was done.

"On July 26, militants from the sect attacked a police station in Bauchi State, inciting a wave of militant violence that spread to three other northern states.The Nigerian authorities retaliated five days later by storming the group’s sprawling Maiduguri headquarters, killing at least 100 people in the attack, half of them inside the sect’s mosque."

Malaysia Cracks Down on Protests
In reversion of Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak's vow to quell government repression, police broke up protesters in Kuala Lumpur yesterday, launching tear gas shells on parts of the crowd. 600 of the 20,000 demonstrators were arrested. Despite the PM's apparently progressive actions in the his four months in office, due to incidents like this, the ethics of the governing party and police force are still in question.

"Opposition parties, which organized the rally, were calling for the repeal of a law that allows the government to jail its critics indefinitely without charge. The opposition is also pressing the government to expand an inquiry into the recent death under mysterious circumstances of a political aide after a late-night interrogation by anti-corruption officials. ...
... 'We can provide them stadiums where they can shout themselves hoarse till dawn, but don’t cause disturbance in the streets,' Mr. Najib said Sunday, according to the Malaysian news media."

Homeless in Poland, Men Dream of Odyssey
Oh my god, this is so endearing. "Two dozen homeless men are building a ship to sail themselves around the world and prove that they have some value to society," with Homer's Odysseus as their role model. Literary references abound.

" ...their story strikes deeper chords because, for all the modern tools in the building and corporate sponsors providing the raw materials, their endeavor echoes mythic themes of escape, adventure and redemption that can seem out of reach in a world of biometric identity cards and debt-collection agencies.
...But their odds of success grew slightly longer when the unique and seemingly inexhaustible Boguslaw Paleczny — a Roman Catholic priest and a touring musician who appointed himself as the foreman of the project — died of a heart attack in June at the age of 50. The men say that his death has stiffened their resolve and that their tale will end up more Capra than Quixote with these forgotten members of Polish society circumnavigating the globe."

What bothers me about Pitchfork...

People criticize Pitchfork Media for being overly pretentious, to the point where I've heard their rating system parodied as 'a scale of one to ten based on similarity to Radiohead.' People believe that the site searches for a certain ideal rather than judging for quality in the many different genres of music. Others rely on the site for their source of music news, cool videos from old favorites, new releases and bands to watch. And it really does have the whole music world on surveillance, from main stream hip hop to practically inactive art rock groups. Even though they only post 5 album reviews a day when more than 5 have been released, it seems like its gears never stop churning out content.

Like the public I have a love hate relationship with Pitchfork. I love that they organize the new releases for me so I can see what's coming out, but like I said it's never a complete list, and I usually find something unnerving within the first 2 sentences of a review which stops me from even considering the rest. So overall I view them with expected irritation. Take this for example:

"You wouldn't need to pay attention to the lyrics on Lacrosse's sophomore album to understand that every track is about love. Not just any love, mind you-- a big, big love; the sort of gigantic feeling that..."

[Album Review: Lacrosse: Bandages for the Heart]

GIGANTIC? A BIG, BIG LOVE? Are you going to follow through with the Pixies reference, or not? Control/Command+F "Pixies" on that page and you will find that NO, he does not. Shouldn't I be happy or excited to have caught a pixies reference somewhere? Shouldn't my soul feel touched by this shared interest between myself and some other pixel of humanity? Probably, but instead, I am upset and confused because I've never heard this band before and now all I want to know is, do they play or sound like the Pixies?

(Besides, a shared love of the Pixies is not that special. It's more of a social prerequisite.)

However, the rest of the review does provide a good sonic image of the band's new songs, and that lead was setting up one big, figurative leap to describe the music:

"The music is enormous and often overwhelming, with every hook and gesture blown out to absurd extremes of joy, desire, and anxiety, emulating the heightened emotional reality of romantic comedies and teen soaps. Every moment of the album sounds incredibly exaggerated, but at their best, Lacrosse replicate the intense drama of ordinary love with uncanny accuracy."

Writing about music is one of my favorite things. A creative writing teacher once told my class that playing with the senses is one of the most fundamental components of good writing. When people take acid they hallucinate because their perceptive signals all cross. The signals from their eyes are going where signals from their ears should go, and signals from their taste buds go where sight should go and so on. (Check out Hooked: Illegal Drugs and How They Got That Way on the History Channel or youtube for a more comprehensive explanation). And that is exactly what you are supposed to do in figurative language; don't compare something visual to something else that's visual. Switch everything around. Compare a guitar riff to the sight of a tree falling, compare the taste of pie to the touch of a mountain breeze or the sound of a train crash. (These are not the best specific suggestions, but you get the point; match up sound and sight and taste and touch and so on). Music is made of sounds that are not necessarily words, so when you write about it, unless you spell out the lyrics or come up with onomatopoeia for the instruments, you have to turn to the other senses in your description. Since we are land-creatures in a world under the sun and rely heavily on sight rather than echolocation, people fall into an excess of visual descriptions in efforts to make their writing cinematic. But it's okay to do this when you write about music, because you're not necessarily writing about anything you can see (unless it's a live review). So you can say that something is huge rather than just loud, and a music review automatically becomes one of the most delicious and refreshing pieces of aesthetic criticism you could possibly read.

Pitchfork writers often do this well, but sometimes they are too hasty to really commit to some beautiful verbal reproduction of the album and say stupid things. It really depends on who is writing the review; sometimes you can tell that the particular individual is simply not predisposed to liking the artist's work, which calls the objectivity of the reviews into question. In the Céline Dion 33 1/3 book, Carl Wilson insists that taste relies on familiarity. Since reviews are inescapably subjective, you would want a metal head reviewing metal albums and a seasoned pop diva writing about the pop releases. Though it would be refreshing or interesting to see that one indie pop band changed a diehard punk and hardcore listener's opinion on the aforementioned sugary genre, you want to hear about a new band or album from someone who understands it and is best equipped to describe it to you. While it would seem that everyone at Pitchfork is well-informed of each piece of music's relevance in the music world, and are able to draw immediate, inspiring comparisons between artists, they commit this foul in featuring artists that it would seem no one on staff could possibly be qualified to assess.

Nothing causes me to question who they think they are better than when Pitchfork reviews mainstream pop and hip hop acts, as when they reviewed Beyoncé's latest album. 'Reviewing Beyoncé?? Oh, no, Pitchfork. This is not your place,' I thought, upon seeing the thumbnail and rating. 'Seriously, Pitchfork, who do you think you are???' But when I read the review... I realized, they were right. Beyoncé's mediocre score was more than fair and they gave her all due props to justify their evaluation in terms of the singer's own high standards. Still, can't Beyoncé figure it out for herself if she's not on top of her game?

In 2008, Gossip singer Beth Ditto toasted music journalism at Webster Hall in New York, with a plastic cup of amber liquid and a giant 'fuck you.' She basically convinced me that music journalism is sick and wrong. To paraphrase, she said that people spend their whole lives being beaten up by bullies in school and when you get out of school you think you're escaping the popular kids who ostracize you. Musicians pour their hearts and souls into their art to express themselves, and the people at major music publications like Spin, Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork spend all of their time finding new and mean ways to make fun of them and tear them down. She then called them 'the New Jocks of High School,' (and later led the crowd in protest chants, which was honestly one of the most amazing things I have ever seen or been a part of). I think Brooklyn Vegan were the only ones, though copious photographers were there to represent other outputs, to cover this and include the rant.

This reminds me of the Strokes song where Julian Casablancas pokes fun at the pop culture pundits trying to keep up with and make sense of new music:

"Oh dear, is it really all true?
Did they offend us and they want it to sound new?
Top ten ideas for count down shows--
Whose culture is this and does anybody know?
I wait and tell myself, "life ain't chess"
But no one comes here and yes, you're all alone"

The Strokes, "What Ever Happened?" Room On Fire [RCA, 10/28/2003].

(These lyrics might be inaccurate, as I copied and pasted them off the Internet since I don't have the CD insert lying around from 2003).
Music journalists judge other people's self-expression while simultaneously flexing their artistic muscles in their own trade, writing. It seems unfair to use someone else's art, possibly containing large percentages of his or her soul, to further your own. Even within visual arts, music and literature people constantly borrow from and inspire one another, but this is different. This is less like cheating on a test or copying techniques from someone else's painting and more like talking shit about people to make yourself feel better or getting people to like you over mutual hatred.

In this view, though, music is something that is to be experienced and enjoyed, but not graded or evaluated. Is it wrong to have an opinion about what constitutes as good or bad music? I DJ and write for a culture blog, and in both métiers, if there is something I don't like, I don't feature it. Maybe Pitchfork operates under the same principle, owing to the fact that the number of reviews they post is more disproportionate to the number of actual new releases than the rising cost of education is to the rate of aggregate inflation. (Fact-check that one). But then how do you explain their rating system? Sometimes an album will receive a low number (a 5 or lower is bad), without a particularly scathing or negative review. I think people get most upset with this site when the critics tear apart an artist they've loved for years.

The right to critique is under attack in all fields of journalism in the face of the rights to privacy and expression, particularly in recent years where the indulgence of the populace has turned celebrities into an industry. We attack the media for disrespecting individuals' privacy, whether a field of cameras sprouts up outside the scene of a car accident or Paris Hilton's doorstep, and furthermore for confounding stupid shit with actual news. (RE: Hilton versus car crash). Yet music and music journalism have been each other's lifelong accessories and neither would survive without the other. (Or is it 'neither can live while the other survives, eh?)

My frustrations with Pitchfork boil down to one suggested course of action. Someone should critique their critiques. It would be equally ridiculous as journalists and music fans critiquing music, and equally necessary. There needs to be someone to check the validity and fairness of these reviews, and grade them for style and content. A sister site, the accessory to the everlasting accessory to music. Any other amateur writer or music listener or I would be just as qualified to criticize them as they are to criticize music. I do not have time to run such a site, but this is my humble suggestion.

Jimmy Brooks, the Vagina Whistler

"SHE CALL ME THE REFEREE/CAUSE I BE SO OFFICIAL

MY SHIRT AIN'T GOT NO STRIPES

BUT I CAN MAKE THAT PUSSY WHISTLE."

-Drake, "Best I Ever Had"

So, this song is about sex and the video has none but it is full of totally unnecessary, giant bouncing boobies. I also don't understand what they're going to "do big." As I said, the song is about sex--not just how good the object of his affection is at it, but how adept Drake is himself at the yet-unpublicized art of vagina whistling. So what are they going to do "big?"

One thing, though, Aubrey Graham (aka Drake). If you want to break from your image of your role as good-guy paraplegic Jimmy Brooks on Degrassi, DON'T FILM YOUR VIDEO IN A HIGH SCHOOL. The D on his Varsity sweater CLEARLY stands for DEGRASSI. When Drake shows off his acting chops in the sequences of dialogue in the video where he plays the girls' basketball coach, it reeks of Jimmy teaching basketball and spewing words of wisdom on the Canadian teen drama. Whatever I hope they had fun making this completely ridiculous and wasted opportunity of a video.

"Take the D" is also unnecessary because it is said surrounded by zero comedic climate... it just sounds like the kind of blatant innuendo that introduces a porno. Why would you lower yourself from Degrassi moral fiber to that in your transition to rap superstar? And are you fucking the whole team?

It did come through though, how they all think they're the best and he lip-services them to make them all play better basketball, demonstrating that "Alotta girls think my songs about them--but this one's for you baby" disclaimer at the beginning.

Still the new summer party jam. The new "Whatever You Like" if you will.

Ice Cream

You know it's bad when you're google imaging ice cream flavors to find the creamiest... shit.

The Wawa Mystery

Why is a brand that only exists in 5 Mid-Atlantic States...

advertising on Hulu, a nationwide internet television outlet?

Does Hulu know where I live? Wawa is 'the epitome of convenience' but it is creepy that the advertisements can be so specially catered to my location. Or else, Wawa is just doing really well and they want to expand to more of the country. I would like to add though, that the bigger Wawa gets, the lower the quality of its lunch meat drops. Truth.