I was looking over Stuff White People Like the other day. For the three people who haven’t already seen it, it’s a funny critique of white [liberal, rich, self-centered] people, if a bit heavy on the low-hanging fruit side of white person self-loathing (and wait a second, who doesn’t like Netflix?). Anyway, a few days later I was reading Bill “the Sports Guy” Simmons’s most recent column and saw him threaten to move to Canada.
So why not just go the extra step and put together a SWPL/Simmons mashup site? Take every Simmons column and cross reference every time he mentions something that White People Like (e.g., “Bust a Move”, Holy Cross, indie music, and of course Steve Nash). Of course, his columns would end up more links than plain text. It might be easier to just start posting his full columns at SWPL.
[This post was spurred by this io9 piece about Kanye West and Daft Punk.]
There’s so much wrong about Kanye West’s performance at the Grammys last week. The awkward missing swears. The misogyny. The fact that Kanye essentially appropriates an incredibly awesome sample (Daft Punk‘s “Harder Better Faster Stronger,” off of their amazing album, “Discovery”) wholecloth and loops it to a hit single. The sheer arrogance/attitude Kanye can’t help but exude with his every public utterance.
And yet, it is unquestionably awesome.
First of all, I will always love Kanye for his willingness to take popular hip-hop in a new, eclectic direction. He’s not the first rapper to do it (Mos Def, Wu Tang, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest are just the few that immediately came to mind), but with apologies to those and other interesting rappers, he is the biggest star to do it. I imagine this must be what it was like to watch Michael Jackson’s creative explosion with Thriller–the songs’ subject matter, the music videos, the sheer ambition of his efforts. Really cool. In Kanye’s case, often cooler in theory than in execution, but when he gets it right it’s electrifying.
At any rate, with his diverse background and education and his incredible flair for marketing, Kanye is like a musical Kobe Bryant (before the rape fiasco)–a chameleon with something for everyone to like, and enough charisma to amplify his sizable talent. As I suggested above, my favorite thing about Kanye is that he takes influences that have rarely been applied to hip-hop, and by the time he’s done with them they seem inevitable. His preppy persona, then his Miami Vice pastel kick, then his retro-futuristic Tron thing… anyone who follows this stuff at all knows what I’m talking about. He’s either setting these trends or quite ably anticipating them. Either way, he’s a bellwether for the Next Big Thing. Plus, he allowed/commissioned this, for which I will forever admire him.
Second of all, as the io9 post I linked to notes, Daft Punk is really great in a lot of ways. They make really fun, really interesting pop music, too, and are willing to go to great lengths to create an artistic presence. They haven’t made a public appearance as human beings in years, and their music is in some ways extraordinarily sterile. But there’s a kernel of soul in it, all the same–like the pulsating brain controlling Krang’s mechanized body.
Anyway, everything I love and hate about the Kanye/Daft Punk collaboration is on display in the video, which you can see right here:
I just read this article in Wired Magazine, and it is a great piece of journalism. It’s about “griefers,” who are basically internet dorks who spend all their time trying to piss off other internet dorks. Also known as “trolls,” these guys (and they’re just about all dudes) can be found in every forum thread, multiplayer game, and major blog’s comments, doing their best to ruin everyone else’s fun.
Hey, they’re remaking The Matrix with the guy from Van Wilder! I mean, basically. It does look pretty cool, though.
I am back in Boston. I have a couple of weeks before classes start up again, so I think I might find a project to occupy my time until football season starts. I am thinking about upgrading essentially every component of my desktop pc–this 1.67ghz AMD processor and piddling 1gb of RAM just aren’t cutting the mustard anymore. I think it’s offending my awesome flatscreen monitor to be associated with such a pile of garbage. I am going to stop writing sentences that begin with “I”.*
* Except this next one. I am contemplating making a permanent shift to placing all non-quoted punctuation outside of quotation marks from now on. It makes a lot more sense, but I don’t want people to think that I’m some kind of dorky anglophile. Well, you know what? Screw it. It’s just the internet. From now on, periods and commas will go outside of punctuation marks!
My last post about ESPN Motion (linked by internet sports colossus Deadspin.com, I might self-promotionally add) addressed a problem that riddles the world wide web (and the real world, too, but let’s keep this simple): letting advertising dictate how content is presented. ESPN knows that video is difficult to ignore, and is a great way to serve up ads–for its own programming and for its sponsors. So it plasters a loud, garish, processing-heavy video window on its front page, forcing its users to a) put up with it; b) figure out and implement a fairly complicated workaround to block it; or c) go elsewhere for their sports news. I think this is pretty stupid. Here’s another example from the website I use the most: The Washington Post.
My name's Jake, and I live in Washington, DC. I write about lots of stuff and you might be interested in some of it. You can reach me at calamityjake at gmail dot com.
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