White People Film Boobs Like This, Black People Film Boobs Like That

I might need to unpack this at some point, with y'know, like words. But for now I'm just going to watch these two videos until Christmas.

For Caucasian peeps:



For my nizzas:



I feel like the heteronormative guys of all race, color and creeds are going to be able to hold hands in appreciation of these two model examples of modern art. But I think the thing we need to wrap our immerse our heads in is the fact that on a Matrix binary code level, THIS IS THE SAME VIDEO.

TAN-Pack: Death of Auto-Tune

Jay-Z's Death of Auto-Tune video dropped this week. I might comment on it, maybe not. Sort of like Drake's "Best I ever Had" video, it's a little disappointing. The potential conceptual upside outweighs the physical execution (like how about something more macabre than italian gangsta, with Jay snuffing famous auto-tune artists in a gruesome grisly way?). But so it goes with making videos and songs, whatever, it's not "bad" by any means. And there is a lot of wine-drinking, and it will be so hilarious if rappers start talking about pinot noirs by way of Mr. Carter's trend-cue...



AnyJay, these "TAN-Packs" might be how I brand and package thematically-related content once the new site is up and all dat. So just starting a janky ghetto beta version here. Ghetto Pass, Negro Bowl, and other stuff like that could be called TAN-Packs. (Hmmm, actually that might be sound too much like a certain brand of female menstrual flow inhibitors, soooo, we'll see if that sticks ...)

If I had to tweet this, it's simply: the shit TAN's written about DOA recently.

Previously:
Jay-Z/Superstar hunger
Reading the Rhymes: Death of Auto-Tune
Negropedia Brown: The Case of the Undead Auto-Tune

Um, Maybe We Should Just Hand Hip Hop Over to the Ladies?

What does that mean exactly? I don't know. Maybe it's sexist. Maybe it's just a headline. But this female emcee (her name is "Invincible") I just got put on to prompts some thoughts on the subject of hip hop's proprietary gender issues:



First off, I'm sure I'm under-informed, but this is the first caucasian female i've seen with a *hardcore* hyper-lyrical flow. I haven't parsed the lyrics to give it a real grade, but it's the first time I've even felt compelled to. Now we know here on TAN, "a white chick is just light-skin". And we know they've quietly-but-surely been part of a renaissance for the beat-boxing arts. But flow? Like a Black Thought, or a Kweli, or a Jean Grae? Holla.

Now I'm sure she's pissed about the "white girl rapping" angle, because any interview/article/blog is going to want to discuss it, and she will be dealing with that forever (the youtube blurb indicates there's plenty of backstory in this regard already); but in terms of the whole Asher Roth a-solid-white-rapper-is-better-than-a-solid-black-rapper hip hop affirmative action plan, this girl kills that for white guys because if your average white rapper is just a better marketing proposition than your average black emcee, there's little question a white female is better than both of those options (all else being equal).

But that's all sort of tongue-in-cheek blog talk. Hip hop heads are over the white-black culture issues, they abide by the microphone. And the real bullshit is still entrenched in gender. Hip hop needs some mf'ing women in positions of power. That means behind the scenes, of course. But also artists that command respect amongst their peers (I can already visualize the eyebrows raising, the blunts falling to the ground, as this girl spits hot fire).

Once hip hop got embraced by pop culture, it wasn't about racism holding the culture back; it was the f'ing sexism. Because even the "conscious" artists were kinda-sorta misogynists. And homophobic. And generally insensitive/intolerant in a way that was laughably ridiculous considering the immediate history.... of course that's a different, much bigger story. And I'm not putting it all on her -- she's just what I've been exposed to -- but this girl makes you think about that, if only because it took this long for caucasian females to access the artform in this participatory way.

Now all she has to do is resist the Maxim (King RIP?) photo spread, and get a big co-sign on a mixtape without sleeping with the dude (sorry ladies, but see what i mean? i can't resist!)and voila, a star is born. or at least another solid underground hip hop artist with a capacity for emotional intelligence.

xox,

TAN

Michael Jackson RIP: "I Want You Back"

"The End of Pop", looking at the story and legacy of Michael Jackson one song and video clip at a time.

1.1

It seems appropriate to start at the beginning; the first single from The Jackson 5 on Motown, "I Want You Back". A song about the most human of emotions: regret. And not regret for a loss that seems preordained by god, but human error. This isn't a hurricane that tore through town. It's not an accidental car crash. It's not having to leave abruptly for an unexpected job opportunity or to serve in the Army. It's the concession of a proactive conscious mistake: I was an ass, I fucked up, I'm sorry, I want you back.



regret is a funny emotion, it appeals to what presumably distinguishes us from chimps. we have ambition. we dream. we aspire. we try to understand love.

this was the sentiment mined by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the most emotionally resonant movies of me and MJ's lifetime. "The world forgetting, by the world forgot." Or Nietzsche's, "Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders."

Knowing how things turned out, now, we can wonder what Michael might have given to forget. But what would he/we have lost if he forgot? in the case of love, and specifically, relationships, there's something that feels so inevitable about remorse. we regret doing. we regret not doing. what can ya do? would you rather be a chimp? (well, maybe, if it's Bubbles)

When MJ passed, I'm sure so many of us wanted to reach out to friends and family. To try and avoid that inescapable regret. To share the love and connection that Michael was obviously, desperately searching for at some point, until the wall he built around himself was too strong, too impenetrable, too high to get over (*yeah, yeah*).

Michael's story speaks to me in a profound way: he's the ultimate symbol of human-imperfection -- specifically our inevitable "wanting the moment back", he had so many regrets -- yet it was all mulch for this robust, blooming brilliance. We vaporized his essence as product, consumed it, and kept it moving once the buzz faded. His narrative leans toward tragedy because everyone's feeling regret now. There were many conscious mistakes made along the way. but still, the high was incredible. so maybe it was worth it.

Wiki fun notes:
song samples: kriss kross, Jay-Z

(next up: 1.2: the empty precociousness of "ABC")

Kinsleydamus on Michael

Before I trot out a bunch of MJ posts, I wanted to point at what I found to be the most striking article I've read in the past week. That being Michael Kinsley's "The Prisoner of Commerce" on The New Republic.

The commerce/capitalist angle tells so much about MJ:

This points up a second way Michael Jackson's sacrifice for art is different from, say, van Gogh's. Jackson's art is also big-time commerce. Corporations supervised his development, and even bigger corporations are making millions off of him: CBS (which features Jackson on the cover of its 1983 Annual Report), Pepsico (which has $50 million riding on a Jackson ad campaign). Time Inc. (which sells magazines by putting him repeatedly on its covers), and others. It's happened in front of millions of paying customers.

So many people, so many corporate entities with a huge investment in one human being. So clearly not a way to live.

Kinsley also adds good points on the freakish elements of Jackson's personality being lapped up and/or exploited as part-and-parcel with his art. He takes a Time magazine cover to task for glorifying quotes like Steven Spielberg (after E.T.) saying, "He's like a fawn in a burning forest ... I wish we could all spend some time in his world." Yes, a fawn in a burning forest does sound like a rather pleasant afternoon now that you mention it, Steven.

Many of these "we're all complicit" takeaways are embedded in the tributes and articles being trotted out now, but the trump card here is Kinsley wrote this in 1984, when Jackson was 25. It's positioned as one of these counterintuitive articles that now represent the instinctive path for journalists. In hindsight the Spielberg quote, or Jane Fonda's "His intelligence is instinctual and emotional, like a child's." are ludicrous. Obvious warning signs. Back then they were part of the MJ publicity-puffery machine. Part of his aloof cool.

Kinsley is a big-time alpha-journalist with plenty of credentials on his resume. But as someone who leans apolitical, this is the sort of piece that gets me on his bandwagon. I want to call it incredibly prescient, but at 25 MJ had already been a "prisoner of commerce" for 15-20 years. So I guess it just underscores our collective lack of reflection, our willingness to be swept away.

But take MJ's capitalist incarceration, and throw in the child abuse and racism and you have the three pillars of his dysfunction. The imperfect storm that resulted in something that was more natural phenomenon than relatable human.

The Prisoner of Commerce [TNR]

Friend or Foe, Bird? State Your Business

Lindsay at Videogum, a name/editor/sensibility to keep track of if you keep track of such things, posts 6 misunderstood cute-animal videos. I haven't been on the cute-animal beat for a second, so it was a good catch up for me.

This one I pulled, and totally see how it can be confusing. I would challenge anyone to get a definitive read on the parrot. I didn't know birds could emote smarmy, but the first half of the video, as he cozies up with his friend/victim, i am quite certain he has ulterior motives. Manipulative kitty-molester or somesuch. But by the end the cuteness rings true, and you think, oh, maybe it's just the claws that predispose you to suggesting otherwise.



I'd like a follow-up clip though, to get more sample-size on this relationship.

Eddie, Woody, & Michael: Do We Even Care About Genius Anymore?

On Gawk (I'll have some more MJ unpacking later/soon. Still processing ...):

Eddie Murphy, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson: All indisputable geniuses in the 80s. Hit-or-miss in the 90s. And, at least before the outpouring of adulation for Jackson today, you probably wouldn't want to trade reputations with any of them.

Everyone should have a go-to quote to come off like a learned smarty-pants. Mine is from Nietzsche who said, "the only proof of strength is excess of strength". I love it because in our current link-don't-tell culture it speaks to how proof of brilliance needs to be hyperlinkably obvious. For Woody, Eddie, and Michael this was never an issue. No one ever calls into question their obvious excess of talent. But yet, reading the news and reviews from the past week or so, and it seems being a genius doesn't seem to hold the same water it used to. At the least, critics and journalists appear to be challenging the statute of limitations on genius privileges like never before:

Eddie Murphy: This post was seeded by Brooks Barnes in the NY Times (who also was involved with NYT coverage of MJ) wondering how/why Eddie Murphy still had so much Hollywood clout, despite being the butt of more jokes than he makes these days. In the sidebar they list his top 5 box office grosses, totaling up to $780 million. If you throw in Coming to America and a couple of his middling performers like, say, Boomerang and Harlem Nights, you're approaching a billion dollars in box office bank before you even get to ten movies. Murphy is the #2 man all time at the box office, right behind Tom Hanks and ahead of names like Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise. So, what's the question again? Asking Hollywood why they keep going to Eddie Murphy is like asking why the Yankees keep putting ARod in the cleanup spot (despite inconsistent production).....

Eddie, Woody, Michael: Do We Care About Genius Anymore? [Gawker]

Toronto Has Yet To Receive Their Copy of Photoshop

No, seriously. Can someone put up a Craigslist Canada listing: This is Toronto, We Are In Need of Someone, Anyone Really, With Some Photoshop Skills. Thank You.

What am I talking about?

This is the original photo for Toronto's summer "Fun Guide".


Fairly non-descript, right? Now following is their current cover, after they decided to prioritize showing "the diversity of Toronto and its residents."


Now doesn't that just make your day? You might briefly be tempted to think this is some racist "pasting a black guy in at the last second" and then you realize, that's exactly what it is... And it's hilarious! How in this day and age of the iphone etc. is the country of Canada still, literally, like scissors and Elmer's, cutting-and-pasting images for a major activity guide?? Canada can't get an intern? This is Canada's biggest city being represented here! Is Toronto's Parks, Forestry & Recreation a one-man blogger operation? Is this thing handwritten on the inside? Look at it again. It's ridiculous. What is the black guy looking at? And maybe I've been staring too long, but doesn't his smile look kinda half-hearted? Like even he's wondering how he stumbled into this random circle of euphoric strangers (but moms over there is kinda cute). This is the most obvious example of slacking/waiting until the last possible moment I've seen from a country's economic capital evar!!!!

In a way, I guess, they kind of have the catalog game on lockdown. What better way to have fun with the whole "show diversity" game than this? And the Canadian spokesman who addressed the matter was very straightforward. Here's some quotes:

"He superimposed the African-Canadian person onto the family cluster in the original photo ...

We want everyone to feel involved and welcome to participate in everything. That's the only goal. Nothing wrong with that.

The policy doesn't say PhotoShop, the policy says 'show diversity'"

Ahh, yes. Love it. Dude's like, what? We old school. Respect our melting pot. If you got complaints, take this crayon and construction paper and drop it in the straw basket outside.

But yeah, back to reality ... if you're a graphic designer, holla at canada.

Coming Soon: My Date With Megan (Fox)

So this has been one of the cute-buzzy-celeb stories of the week. A young cherubic teenage everyman consumed by passion and desire for the Angelina Jolie3000 lovely Megan Fox attempted to make his affections known with a flower. Awww. Unfortunately, the only thing now in bloom is his awakening to how this cold nihilistic world works when you're cherubic and the object of your desire is out of your league. Ms. Fox couldn't even manage to Transformer2 her face into a CGI-affected smile.



Yeah, that's right. Boo-hoo, Mr. I came-with-the-wonder-years-schtick-a-decade-or-two-late. Go start a blog and stand in line with the rest of us, kid.

But wait! Apparently Megan Jolohanbiel has feelings. On camera!



Hmm. Maybe the kid's gonna get to licky-boom-boom-down after all. I hear she's waiting for him while hiding on the back of this great big fantastically-fluffy polar bear:


(Seriously, what is that? A duvet? A cloud?) So, anyfox, media and companies have spied the potential hollywood narrative, and the chase is on. People are offering rewards to locate the would-be cupid, who is probably stewing and plotting his revenge as we speak/ogle.

Sounds like we might have a sequel to "My date with Drew" coming...

For Every Press Conference, A Pop Song

People are doing some amazing things with auto-tune, and video and audio editing. Here's another one. Pretty awesome:



I wonder if this is incredible only for this specific iteration/execution, and because it's new and novel. Or if every press conference ever conceived can now be repurposed into something beautiful (and danceable, too!).

(Thanks: LT)

Might 'Love' Get Twitter Over the Hump?

Not romantic love, silly! I mean Kevin Love, the young power forward of the Minnesota Timberwolves who recently completed his rookie season. DUH.

"But why have you tricked us like this, TAN?" thought the internet chorus.

"Well I'll tell you," thought TAN as he wrote those very words on the keyboard ...

Sure celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah are huge celebrities, but that's just it, they're *celebrities*. I'd argue that celebritydom gets us to listen or pay attention or click, but at the same time it makes us minimize the weight/value of A-B-C-listers.

So, like, a PH.D will be more respected than a celebrity PH.D. (I know, there's vagaries to that, i.e. good and bad celebrity, but roll with me here, I think this is how we will undermine the celebrity infrastructure...) In the case of Oprah, in particular, it might constitute a thesis statement in need of further research to suggest her celebritydom has outflanked her ranking/merit as media mogul. The argument is at some point she (and every other celeb) tips over the line and is no longer applying her time to her media moguldom because she's managing everything involved with being Oprah day-to-day. The Celebrity Industry Complex.

Which is to say celebrities, if not now, sometime in the near future, will all occupy the same mind space. And this will be fair: part of the streamlining brain-efficiency program, we know to be a celebrity you must take some portion of your finite time and energy and devote it to something other than mastery of your craft/art/talent etc.

To make money these days, and in the past, you had to have some talent (play a guitar, rap, shoot a ball etc), but to be a *star* you also needed skills with schmoozing and the rest. Schmoozing and networking are the tools//talents of celebrities. Some people hate that. Some people revel in it. But that's all beside the point. What matters is there's a finite amount of time to devote your energies. And before, everything was wrapped into one ball. And now, everything is partitioned off. So it's easier to be a writer these days, but it's more difficult to be a *superstar celebrity writer*.

If we abide by the 10,000 hour rule, then to split your energies might get you more money and fame, but it will make you less of a master. Less of a genius at whatever you do. Some say I'm a good self-promoter, but that invariably makes me less of a writer. Presumably we don't know The Grand Masters of our various arts because they're in a hole obsessed to the point of socio-dysfunction. Genius!

So in the future, celebrities will be celebrities: People in the public eye, that we know to varying degrees, for some reason or another. Oprah, Ashton, Pam Anderson, David Letterman, same shit, different toilet. Or somesuch. (Unless you know them personally, of course).

Now back to Kevin Love. He's no celebrity. Just a basketball player. But last week he got the NBA media circles buzzing because he tweeted news of his coach/GM/boss leaving the team before the Timberwolves made any official announcement and before any reporters knew.

The big reveal is simply that he's going unpunished, and even better, he's being encouraged to do more tweeting. And now the door opens for every team to have their first player-tweeter-journo-blogger. Who's hurt, who's traded, who's leaving, who's got a bad attitude, who's re-signing, all from an insider perspective that couldn't be duplicated by even the most observant sports reporter. Players being allowed to use the new tools of the media trade feels like a game-changer.

In sum: a sports league embracing Twitter to the point of players being allowed to break news before the team's PR department -- something that in the past would normally cause a fine or suspension or other reprimand -- is bigger than Oprah or Ashton getting a jillion followers. Sports as one of our cultural institutions is bigger than Ashton. Bigger than Oprah (i think). If our NBA broadcasts will soon be informed by players telling us all sorts of insider-y stuff, feels like more of a fundamental philosophical embrace of the new medium and what it means. Athletes already have blogs, so what happens when the players are doing both the playing and reporting?

Regardless, it seems fitting that Love has led the way.

image:via

Three Uses of the Blog: Viral Video as Metaphor for the Human Condition

The title of this blog is haughtier than the post is actually going to be. I mainly want to point to the series of posts in NY Mag's Reading Room on Bill Wasik's And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture.

The background summary is: Bill Wasik, basically, has some hands-on experience with viral culture; he engineered the "Flash Mobs" meme of a few years ago, where via email and text messaging throngs of people would convene at a notably random location and sing kumbaya enjoy the experience of being herded without a cattle prod. It's the seed that led to stuff like T-Mobile's karaoke session earlier this year.

There are other viruses on Mr. Wasik's resume. He's also a senior editor at Harper's Magazine, so he can write. And thus, a book is born.

NY Mag's panel of folk (Virginia Heffernan, Anil Dash, David Rees, Charlie Todd, Sam Anderson) don't issue a wholehearted recommendation for the book, but I'm probably going to cop it sometime soon anyways. It seems the biggest problem is Wasik comes off as a pretentious d-bag. Which seems to fall in line with his Flash Mobs narrative (he engineered the gatherings, and then later positioned/revealed himself as Mad Social Scientist manipulating people/rats to his bidding). But I don't have a problem with that as long as *good ideas* are present.

In any case, I haven't read any of these "I Will Explain the Internet and Internet Culture to You for $21.99" books since The Long Tail -- that's not intended as a slight; it's mostly because I've embedded myself deeply enough in the culture that I didn't feel the need for an instruction manual -- but given the evolution of the landscape even in just the last 2-3 years, it's a good time to catch up. If only to see how the new trends, memes etc are being packaged.

There were a couple really interesting takeaways from the discussion though. The first is Virginia Heffernan's suggestion that "viral" is a misnomer when we talk about the culture of people passing along videos. Mainly because as the internet has developed, it's not so much about person-to-person sharing, and more sending e-mailed traffic signals directing everyone to Youtube or whatever huge content hub is hosting the *virus*. As she says, "the word 'viral' is used to pretend that culture is so idiosyncratic and personal now, where it may actually be more fascinatingly uniform than ever."

No one came up with a better term, but everyone seemed to agree with the semantics of "viral" being no longer appropriate. Specifically, I think everyone is turned off by the corporate exploitation element, i.e. every company issues a "viral video" that hasn't even been seen with their new product line.

This all made me flashback to The Matrix, when Agent Smith uses "virus" as a metaphor for humans:

"The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure."

It also made me think of David Mamet's three-essay collection, Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama, where in the context of a discussion on dramatic structure he explains how drama is a metaphor for the human condition. Drama is life. Or at least, what we live for.

I left a comment on NY Mag's post. Here's a snippet with another takeaway:

the other... was about "purity". How everyone, it seems, hates being manipulated. This is a theme through a few of the posts: Don't overthink it. Don't oversell it. Don't overschtick it (a personal TAN *cough* gripe that resonates). I guess we want internet hippiedom or something? Just be chill and watch pure-viral videos and people doing what they want to do but not too hard..."

This speaks to everyone being turned off by Wasik's pretensiousness. It also speaks to the nebulous don't-try-to-make-this-into-a-formula-because-you-can't nature of viral videos. Everyone thinks they have a viral video in them, and that's because they do. If you ignore the pernicious angle of Agent Smith's quote (don't worry Obama and Al Gore will fix all of that), then in the context of these quotes and book discussion, the striking conclusion is that the "viral video" is you. *cue Tony Robbins* Or, at least, it's your pure essence repurposed into a funny clip.

You can also think of the sharing element as someone identifying some crystallized portion of themselves in a clip, and sharing it. Like you would a list of favorite movies or whathaveyou.

Now this is where I don't want the post to ramble out of control; just go check the book discussion. But i think in this era of information age paralysis, what is in us, the intangible transient *thing*, is what creates the kinetic energy (kinergy?) of viral phenomena. This is true with athletes, and art, and blogs, and twitter, and just about anything that people gravitate towards. Now, sure, corporations and market research groups, and smarty-pretentious editors will thinkthinkthink it through until they come up with some Cool Ranch facsimile, and that facsimile might even create some ripples (I'm an absolute sucker for the same ol cereal being put in a newly redesigned box).

But I think Mr. Dash nailed it when he talked about pop music being what it is because people just like a good beat to dance to, as opposed to indie-rock (or indie-music) being about overwrought thinking over an instrumental. Good memes, good people, good viruses, are self-evident. It resonates not only with our rational side, but also our emotional intelligence.

Another brilliant pull is from David Rees who identified "moms" as the ideal spreaders of real viral ideas. Most "moms" don't know the current tech-pop-culture-hipster fad-trend, but they will absolutely share anything that is need-to-know or cool in an obvious self-evidently good way.

Which I guess means all the tech/culture commentary circles back and boils down to life's one simple truism: Moms rule the universe. Hallelujah!


Vulture Reading Room, Diagnosis: The Spread of Viral Culture [NY Mag]

image via Mike Arauz, moms

In Search of Negropedia Brown...

Well, last couple weekends I tried out the "Negropedia Brown" concept on Gawker.

On paper, the idea is this: there remain "ethnocultural mysteries", which is to say the issues of racial inequality still exist in this country (c.f. Barack's race speech). Particularly in certain institutions, media, for example.

And I've always been a big fan of the "Encyclopedia Brown" boy-detective mysteries. So wouldn't it be sorta cool to use that conceit to explore these "ethnocultural mysteries". It's a more creative and fun way to dig in on a touchy subject, perhaps wag your finger at The System. Harkening back to childhood storytelling can soften what often comes across as harsh sentiments.

So far I've done three cases:

Case of Will Leitch and the Burning Q-Tip
Case of Jay-Z and the Undead Auto-Tune
Case of Vanity Fair and the World White Web

Unfortunately, the execution hasn't lived up to the dream in my head. Primarily, as I see it, because the answers to Encyclopedia Brown mysteries were simple, succinct, and definitive. I haven't managed to recreate the same effect of suspenseful storytelling leading to a clear satisfying conclusion.

I'm posting this cause I'm going back to the lab with Negropedia Brown. I believe strongly in creative transparency and crowdsourcing, and want to get more of "The Process" on TAN; especially if I'm outsourcing the product anyway. So this a post/space for any thoughts, suggestions, and for referring people to the samples.

There are certainly other variables at play: Is referencing Encyclopedia Brown already making for a very niche group (do kids today or even young adults remember/revisit those stories; they seem classic to me, but maybe not)? Does the complicated nature of race totally short-circuit any attempt to have satisfying answers? i.e. when we solve the mystery of race at-large then you can broach this. How does "turn to the back of the book" storytelling work on blogs/the internet? And how much does timeliness and news relevancy play a part-- the first and third cases above were not timely at all. All this before even getting to the nuts-and-bolts of the actual writing.

I still think the seeds are there for something very very cool. It might play better as video or sketch where a character can better translate the mood/tone. Maybe it works better as a cartoon, a la Boondocks. Maybe it's just one of those ideas that doesn't get all the way *there*.

If you have thoughts on any of the above, feel free to share. You won't hurt my feelings. And if you have the notion that gets it right, you're totally in on any byline, $, etc. I just think there's upside, style and substance potential. And so many ideas get shelved and forgotten I wanted to give this one some special attention.

xo,
TAN/Negropedia Brown



Illustrations by the illustrious Brandon.

Negropedia Brown: The Case of the World White Web

Negropedia Brown was pedaling furiously on his bike. He needed to return to his bodega office in fast order. His last case resulted in picketing, "Hell no, the negro must go!" the surly crowd chanted.

It was only hours after Negropedia had declared Slate's Jody Rosen to be in need of hip hop autotuning. And the crowd disappeared as quickly as they had arrived once the case files fell off the front page of the blog where he stashed his evidence, but the dank smell of defeat lingered.

Perhaps humbled by the angry mob, Negropedia was still undaunted. He knew he was the best -- in fact, only! -- Ethnocultural Blog Detective in town. More important: He knew the stately town of Mediaville needed someone to solve these mysteries of ethnocultural dissonance.

See, Negropedia felt strongly that people's perspective and choices were inevitably informed by their ethnic/cultural background. And often in Mediaville, despite no obvious ill intent, there were weird mysteries of slights, misinterpretations, and lack of sympathy resulting from what Negropedia's father called "culture gaps".

Negropedia found it odd how the folks in Mediaville loved to talk about how technology was changing the town, but never about how the face of the population was changing as well. It seemed to him that as long as America was a melting pot, someone would need to watch over mixing the ingredients to make sure things didn't get salty....

(click image above or link below to continue the story ...)

Negropedia Brown: The Case of Vanity Fair and the World White Web [Gawker]

Will All the Girls Reading, Yes, You Three, Please Scrunch Together On One Side of the Subway Seat

This should probably be put up one one of my more nimble broadcast mediums, like twitter or tumblr, but I don't have one of those yet.

In any event, I see this socio-spatial phenomenon happen every so often on the NYC transit system, and I always get a chuckle out of it. When I took this picture there was basically no one else on the train. Why doesn't someone move???


There's probably more to break down there; certainly something eerie the way they're all lined up with bags in their laps and books in their hand. Maybe this could be the female version of the Captain Morgan commercials where the guys do the elbow on the knee pose?

I don't know, but I can't attend to the matter fully because I just got a package from amazon and now that it's opened I'm wondering if I should be thinking about that more:

One could see that as "get-busy" tools. One could see it as a cry for help. One could see it as, oh, 750-800 cups of coffee without the brown tooth-polish and less another 100-200 pounds of soft-dookie irrigation (too soon?).

Think I'm going to opt for the latter. no book deadline can stand up to the power of tan on no-doz, bwahahaha.

Will 'Keeping It Real" Ever Go Right?

One of my favorite sketches from the popular and missed-more-every-second Chappelle's Show was called "When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong". The sketch basically satirized the whole sensibility of "Uncle Tom" and "Keeping It Real" and "Politics of Authenticity/Identity" that can lead to denying your come-up in the world, i.e when success = sellout. And ... well let me not explain when we can watch it; it's only a couple minutes and well worth it:

[quick aside: in my first days at college i was a little notorious for breaking out animated-recitations-of-hip-hop-refrains as non-sequitur answers to normal class conversation, aka rapping in class. so for example, in my freshman seminar, i don't remember if this was the exact line, but imagine something to the effect of:

Teacher: "So, Patrice, what do you think about the summer reading? Could you relate to the protagonist's struggle in Manchild in the Promised Land?"

TAN: "I'LL THROW IT DOWN YOUR THROAT LIKE BARKLEY. YOU SEE THE CAR KEYS??? YOU'LL NEVER GET THESE!!" and then just look at the teacher like nothing out of the ordinary happened. it was pretty much the mid-90s college version of "when keeping it real goes wrong."]

So as with most good comedy, there's some other darker stuff lurking underneath. In this case, Chappelle's bit felt timely and zeitgeisty because everyone was ready to laugh at black folk "keeping it real". Through the 80s and 90s much of hip hop's public facade was a circus act: in one ring you have riots at every single live performance; in the second you have murder from east-west coast beef (is there any art form, let alone music, where hometown pride gets this serious?); in our third ring you have the epidemic of silly screwface posturing and posing/clowning and whatnot. All this convoluted affectation stemming in large part from an ethos of "keeping it real".

So yeah, that bubble was prime for popping. And Dave was rza-rza-rza-razor sharp with the execution. And, boom; all of a sudden, "keeping it real" was a joke. And it still is. One example would be the recent epidemic of spoof rap songs and videos that frame Wall Street in a hip hop context. The joke in these videos often comes from *uptight-finance-dudes* meeting the keep-it-real street sensibility.

Of course that premise kicks black people in the nuts/vijay a little, mainly because it conflates the art of hip hop with the corporate schtick used to sell hip hop as signifier of "keep it real" authenticity. That's why the best of those clips are simply well written songs/sketches, and the ones that fall flat do so because they're borderline racist (if not outright).

But the best of Chappelle's sketches were awesome because they used a Black lens to satirize what were in fact American issues. Which is to say the "keeping it real" bubble is not a black thing, it's an American thing (or maybe a "capitalist" thing). And I guess what I find funny/interesting is that while the black version is a joke now, the american or capitalist "keep it real" bubble still exists; instead of popping it might just be deflating at a much slower rate.

In American or capitalist terms, "keeping it real" is a function of business. It's selling a product. It means having conviction about your business model. When companies hire ad people to keep their message on point, they are essentially hiring "keep it real" consultants.

The magazine industry now seems to be going through its own keep-it-realness correction. All the photoshop of horrors episodes are sort of like what The Smoking Gun has done to hip hop artificiality. Magazines started with a well-intended spirit of keeping it real, but then money eventually led to keeping it real meaning doing what you needed to attract more fans and eyeballs.

Same with hip hop. When rap started "keeping it real" meant having skills, talent, persistence, etc. It wasn't a joke ripe for parody. It meant being about something, and staying on message. Having integrity within your artistic-business persona. In the early days of rap, the "business model" was simply having a couple hot verses in your pocket ready to go: That was your product, rocking a party was your advertising, and if you didn't keep it real you would not survive in the market.

It's an old school principle. Way older than hip hop. And the joke amounts to laughing at the immersive nature of people who give a fuck. Who care about their thoughts, actions, words being representative of who they are. Nick Sylvester sniffed this out as the engine of Hipster Runoff's post-irony. Hipsters, as a sketch, might be "when keeping it real goes wrong" for white people.

If you think about the spot above, Chappelle colors the universally felt impulse of rebellion and independent spirit with a black brush. But he doesn't have to shout "Wu Tang!" to make the joke work (though it is kind of perfect). You could have a white guy in the same position, say, at a Starbucks corporate HQ, and maybe this guy grew up on Green Tea, or Yoo-Hoo. So when the *CORPORATE* character pushes his buttons (as all *corporate* types do), he might stand up and scream: "Who you f'ing talking too?!!? I DRINK GREEN TEA. F this Starbucks bullshit. YOO-HOO, BITCHES!"

This is on my brain because I think all this "keep it real" authenticity stuff is a big part of Jay's "DOA" song. Both the song itself and the feedback/criticism. It's a big part, as I see it, of how we evaluate talent and superior art. Jay clearly wants to pen a clear-cut fatality for auto-tune. But he's conflicted because he has friends and peers using the tool. And he's very familiar with catering to pop-music impulses himself. And other reasons. This is real. But it's not "keeping it real".

His song, I think, is a good snapshot of this conflict. It's a song intended to be hard, alpha, but he holds back from really cutting the throat. Some might call it lazy, but it's probably more just the consequence of being intelligent. Being aware of the bigger picture. Being real about it all. This is the difference between DOA and Takeover, where he goes after Nas in a very personal fashion. The difference from a line like "but my bills are through the roof, can't do numbers like The Roots"-- a line brilliant in its particular detail, not the broader oft-heard distinction between so-called commercial and conscious artists.

In the Negropedia Brown mystery I wrote about Jody Rosen's review and DOA, the piece suffered a bit because I was conflicted in the same way. I couldn't keep it real. Rather, I tried to be real. I meandered and went to lengths to try and explain my opinion. But my piece, like DOA, from the artist perspective are not premised on thoughtfulness. They succeed only if style is as important as substance. I know Jody's no hip hop idiot; but if I have the bullets I should shoot first, ask questions later. If I kept it real, it'd be a sharper edgier edit that cuts right to the chase. If Jay mixed in some actual auto-tune and maybe spoofed a couple t-pain lines, it'd probably be a song that sparked more across-the-board appreciation.

But to do that there's an element of grandstanding, of the schtick you see in the chappelle sketch. In my case, you keep it real and start too much beef with "bosses" and you might end up a window wiper. In Jay's case, he's already conquered the industry; there's no more gained from "keeping it real" only being real.

So there's a lot more to explore here. This notion of what we value: true to life versimilitude, or a synthetic Pixar-perfect pristine reality seems to be the heart of the question. We look for artists/writers/creatives to keep it real. We look for irrefutable genius. But we also know none of that is "real". And it's also easier to "keep it real" when you're young. And, so, well, ... I guess we'll save some fodder for another post.

For now the point is time and again as Americans, as capitalists, we put our money behind "keeping it real" over reality. Even though we see "keeping it real" go wrong again and again. And even though we all can laugh at Chappelle's sketch, outside of the realm of hip hop it doesn't seem we get the joke. We're not perfect. We don't strictly occupy supply or demand. We're not paragons of "Street" or "feminine virtue" or "snark" or "people who wear pleated khaki pants". We're complicated. But complicated doesn't sell (typically). Real doesn't sell. "Real" does. So as a writer/artist/real person I just wonder -- as I finally segue back to the headline -- when will keeping it real ever go right? Or something like that.

image: via

Still #1: Not Vibe Magazine

Nice clip here with KRS talking about auto-tune and Vibe Magazine's authority in hip hop (in relation to their naming of Eminem the #1 rapper). He handles these potentially sticky questions in a hectic environment with ease, making sure not to conflate the artists with the artist-publicity machine. Then he drops a *freestyle* while waiting for the elevator. And he does all this while not being distracted by Super Mario's little nephew, or his mustache, harassing him with a microphone. Damn, he's dreamy ...



You know what you need to learn? Old school artists don't always burn.

like fine wine for the 0-9. Peace to Scott La Rock, you suckaaaaazzzzz

via BC

Negropedia Brown: The Case of the Undead Auto-tune

Mr. and Mrs. Brown had one child. They called him TAN, but everyone else called him Negropedia. One day he opened a Blog Detective Agency to solve Media-Mysteries resulting from Ethnocultural-dissonance.

This episode, Jay-Z and the Case of the Undead Autotune. Can you solve the mystery before Negropedia???



The Case of the Undead Autotune [Gawker]