10-28-09
BET Hip Hop Award Cipher: Mos, Thought, Em
Mos kills it. Eminem and Black Thought might have the punchlines, but Mos strangles this to life. Primo on the turns.
BTW, ten years ago, this would have been crazy, but now that these dudes are all like 35+ years old, it’s that much better. There’s a lot more weight to their verses than I bet there woulda been had this been off a Rawkus compilation in ‘99.
Enjoy!
10-27-09
Top 10 Favorite Boston Celtics Players
I like pro sports, and the NBA in particular. I am not blind to the way it replicates exploitative systems from larger society – but in the same way we can appreciate a clever political campaign, a day of unexpected beautiful weather, or a well-crafted children’s picture book – so too do I appreciate watching NBA basketball. It is theater for the oppressed. (No Freire)
In honor of the new NBA season getting underway tonight (!!!), I’m putting up a list of my favorite Celtics players during my lifetime. There’s basically two loose guidelines: 1) I have to like them for what they did for the Celtics – no Gary Payton, no Dominique Wilkins, no Chauncey Billups and the like, and 2) I have to have watched them play, thus no Russell, no Jojo White (my mom’s favorite), no Bob Cousy, etc.
Let’s get it started…
10. Tom Heinsohn
Allow me to start off this list by breaking my own rule. Of course I never saw Tommy play: he retired in 1965, and coached until 1978 – the year I was born. So I’ve known him in my lifetime primarily as a broadcaster. And the great thing about him is that over the years, he’s gotten more and more crotchety and biased. Almost every time a Celtics player get called for a foul, Tommy gets livid and screams about how the refs are terrible. But my favorite is when they look at a replay and see the Celtic in question was undeniably guilty of committing the foul, he’ll usually mutter a retraction under his breath – then talk about how the other team has been doing the same thing all game and never got called for it.
9. Dee Brown
A Celtic won the slam dunk contest! Throughout the 80s, the Celtics were known throughout the land as the blue-collar, not very athletic NBA team. So when Dee won the slam dunk contest when I was in middle school – woooooooo! It wasn’t just the dunking ability, but it was mostly the flair. The blindfold dunk and the little act of pumping up his sneakers before every attempt! I waited in line for 2 hours at the Cambridgeside Galleria to get his autograph on a mini Celtics basketball. Uh. I lost it. Still though, he had a nice career in the NBA, so I’ll have a special place in my memory for him.
8. Kevin Garnett
He’s only been here two years, and he’s in the top 10 Celtics players of my lifetime? ANYTHING’S POSSIBLE!!!
10-23-09
I Love Yous Are for White People
I recently devoured Lac Su’s memoir I Love Yous Are for White People. And I kinda reviewed it at BPRLive.
I explain in my “review” – I’m not very qualified to review books, but whatever – a little why the title appealed to me so much, but to go a little deeper with it…
When I was younger, I think I put a lot of weight into that magical phrase. Why? I think because you’re expected to, here in America. But I never really felt it, I think I only thought I felt it.
In one way, I really love almost nobody. I can count on two hands the number of people who have ever lived I truly love or loved. That would be the members of my immediate family, some members of extended family, and my wife. I certainly care for and wish the best for many other people, but I can’t say with confidence that I love or ever loved those others.
In another way, I feel like I love almost everybody in the world – even, nah, especially the people I’ve never met. I have a sincere hope that all people in the world experience endless joy in healthy ways, and are able to avoid feeling sadness and anger and hate as much as possible. That’s a simplistic way to say my ideal world has no war and no exploitation or people, resources, and surroundings. My ideal world is the world where everyone has enough of what they need.
But I honestly recoil when people tell me they love me. Not because I’m mad at the emotion of love – but because saying the words “I love you” is shorthand. It’s played out. It’s both teams played hard. It has no meaning in real life. Relationships don’t get built on explicitly spoken pledges, no, it’s the opposite.
Anyway, this was the topic of a pretty well put-together blog post over at Stuff White People Do a while back. At the time, I left the following comment:
i am annoyed by the need for people to hear that they are loved from people close to them. this also – for whatever reason – sounds like a white thing to me.
the only person who i don’t mind hearing it from is my mother. i don’t even care to hear it from my wife, as i shouldn’t need her verbal confirmation for what’s already obvious. and then i actively dislike hearing it from other family members or friends – it makes me feel less close to person who says it.
in any language, we’ve loaded too much power into certain words, and “love” may be the worst of them. people say things like “i love to eat cheese!” or “i love star trek!” that it no longer means what we pretend it means – yet we still pretend it means love.
the actual concept of “love” is far too complex and large to be encapsulated or represented by any word or combination of words. so for me, using the phrase “i love you” is like showing a cell phone photo of the grand canyon or niagara falls to you…
i don’t, however, make judgment against people who freely use the phrase with each other – that means they’re into expressing themselves the same way. but i resent the phrase being thrust into my life by people who i don’t want to hear it from. it sounds cheap to me.
I feel I might have come across more harsh than I meant to there, but the gist is correct. I’m not big into the use of the word “love” because words can’t mean more than what they mean, and loving someone in real life is different from simply telling them so.
By the way, this is the point of poetry, where we try to get words to mean more than they mean.
Anyway, read the review at BPRLive, read the book, and holla back.
10-19-09
Top 10 Favorite Lines from Prince Songs
Dude, Prince again?
Yes again. Last week, I blogged about some of my favorite lyrics from Killers songs – and it made me feel guilty that I didn’t do it for Prince first.
It’s a lot harder with prince though, because the Killers have 3 albums and a collection of B-sides. Prince has at least, I dunno, 25 albums. In addition, Prince sometimes writes amazing lyrics and sometimes seems to not spend any time thinking about lyrics at all (My name is Prince! And I am funky!) – and even in songs with blah lyrics, the music can still make it amazing. So after much some thought, here are my top 10 favorite lines from Prince songs as of today.
Tomorrow, it could change. (As usual, scroll to the bottom for the imeem playlist.)
10. “Her favorite number was 20 every single day.” from Starfish & Coffee
This is a dark horse entry. There’s nothing remarkable about this line, except its context. In this song about Cynthia Rose, a little girl who has an active imagination, this detail about her personality grounds her in real life even though the song dwells almost exclusively in fantasy. More than anything, I just think it’s cute for a kid to have a favorite number of 20.
9. “I just want your extra time and your kiss.” from Kiss
The funk guitar on this jam makes it. But this refrain takes it over the top. The pause before the last word makes a simple kiss like the hottest thing in the world. Like the guitar says everything the lyrics don’t. Fire.
8. “I would die for you, darling, if you want me to.” from I Would Die 4 U
As with many Prince jams, this might be about God or love. It really doesn’t matter. It’s such an emotionally raw line to base a pop song around. There’s an extended version of this song that I caught wind of once – maybe it was released in Europe or something? – that takes the realness to another place with the entire band chanting “I would die for you” for several minutes before the song starts.
He balances the ultimate sacrifice – death – with the least weighty motivation – want, not need, desire, or even ask.
10-15-09
Top 10 Favorite Lines from Killers Songs
I like lists. I’ve said it before. And I started putting lists of my favorite stuff to give me subjects to blog about, but I did a piss-poor job of following up with that. So I thought I would try to put together a list once again once again.
A while back, wifey and I (BTW, can you call someone wifey after you’re actually married?) 
went to see The Killers in concert. It’s the first rock show I’ve ever been to, and after – I dunno – 15 years of going to almost nothing but hip hop shows and one Prince concert, I didn’t know what to expect.
First of all, I was surprised that the crowd did not look significantly different from the crowd at a Celtics game, except even fewer people of color. But I expected a bunch of tight-jeaned dudes with like dyed bangs; it was all dudes in cargo shorts who look like they probably throw their fists in the air and scream woooooooo! about twice a week. And then a bunch of uncomfortable middle-schooler/well-meaning parent duos.
Regardless, the buzz leaving the Garden was that the show was amazing. But to me it was just kinda alright. It felt far too overproduced for my tastes, it felt like I just watched “The Killers: Live in Concert” on TV, except the TV was 600 feet away, I had to periodically move from behind the person in front of me to see it, and it costed way too much goddamn money.
But I think rock shows must generally be like that. They just aren’t up there in terms of energy like hip hop shows are. And the truth is that my favorite thing about that band is their song-writing. They don’t do much vocally or instrumentally that I was really itching to see done live. In that sense, the Killers are a studio band through and through, but in a really good way.
All this to say that there’s a reason I’m not just doing a list of my favorite 10 Killers songs. (Another day perhaps.) What I’m doing below is a list of my ten favorite lines from Killers songs – because more than any radio rock band I can think of, their lyrics are complex and they matter. BTW, if you read the whole thing, you can find an imeem playlist at the bottom of this post.
So without further ado…
10. “Are we human or are we dancer?” from Human
What an awesome concept. I’m more than a little surprised that so many people – fans, bloggers, and journalists – didn’t understand it. Maybe we need to re-emphasize art in schools, because if a mildly abstract pop song lyric causes so much consternation, then something is wrong with the way we think about creativity in our society.
9. “I know that I can make it, as long as somebody takes me home – every now and then.” from Sam’s Town
This is one of many times that Brandon Flowers extends the line past the line cleverly. It sounds like the line will end “home,” which gives it a meaning on its own, that he needs help for some of the most basic tasks in life. But then by adding “every now and then” – it changes from having a designated driver to having someone he can get intimate with from time to time. From a call for friendship to a call for just wanting to be wanted at all.
10-08-09
Rest in Power, Ben Ali of Ben’s Chili Bowl
Ben Ali, who opened my favorite restaurant in the world – Ben’s Chili Bowl – passed away last night. When I lived a few blocks away, I used to this joint up late night at least every other week. Toward the end of my time in DC, I started heading up to grab lunch from Ben’s too.
It wasn’t just that the food was so magnificent, but that the vibe there was so welcoming. It was always packed, but somehow there was always a table free. It had the best jukebox in DC, and if you needed to tell someone how to get there, you could just say “Walk down U Street until you see bright lights and a line of people out the door.”
The man was a giant and will be missed. What was so great too was that nobody got treated special there – except Bill Cosby. Even this guy had to wait in line:
10-02-09
Why I Love This: Jay-Z’s “99 Problems”
For new readers (all 2 of you) and old readers (hi mom!), some background: I used to write about things I disliked in this space, and called it a series entitled “Sorry, You Suck” – but I’m switching the style. In my very last haterific edition of that series, I proclaimed ultimate suckage for myself and am now implementing a whole new M.O. here.
From now on, I’m gonna try talk about stuff I love. Solid.
Back in the day. Ice-T released a song called “99 Problems,” in which he talks about being a pimp and how 
various women in his employ – many referred to as “b-tch” – are not causing him problems. So the Jay-Z song of the same name uses a clever turn of phrase that is really not that clever after all, using each verse to refer to someone or something as a “b-tch,” but none of those times refers to a woman, instead it’s the music industry, a female police dog, and punk dudes. And while this does not represent a perfect upending of misogyny in our culture, it does indicate something.
On a meta level, it’s as though Jay is challenging the listener to hear the word “b-tch” and not assume its most sexist meaning; maybe it works, and maybe it doesn’t exactly work. Regardless, it can be seen as a response to the popular claim (made mostly by people who have never actually listened to hip hop) that rap music is all about b-tch this and b-tch that. Jay-Z was very aware of his standing as one of the few rappers mainstream America had heard of, so it was as though he wanted this song to be derided by cultural critics who would proclaim his sexism, only to be able to turn around and say I wasn’t talking about women; if you think that, maybe you’re the one with misogyny issues.
Clumsy as it may be, it’s an authentic attempt to stand up for hip hop culture by someone who was probably its best spokesman because he could speak the language of corporations and men in suits. (Check out his recent appearances on Letterman and Oprah if you don’t believe me.)
In addition, this track was produced by the one and only Rick Rubin, a producer who has worked with plenty of hip hop legends like LL Cool J, Run-DMC, and the Beastie Boys, but also with the most highly-regarded white folks in the industry like Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, Mick Jagger, and the Beastie Boys. In the documentary/concert film “Fade to Black,” we learned Jay recorded the whole joint in Rick Rubin’s West Coast mansion all surrounded by like bear statues and palm trees and Mike D of the Beastie Boys.
