Jay-Z as rap hegemon vs. The Game as rising middle power

Tour de force post by Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy about the international relations politics of The Game's spectacular (in the sense of creating a spectacle) attacks on Jay-Z and analysis of Jay-Z faces now. Made my whole day.

I have to run but will have some thoughts on this later tonight.

'It shows you how crazy people can get'

Overheard conversations in the YMCA steam room:

1.

A: You remember Josh? He was crazy. Really crazy. He tried to kill himself you know, jumping off a bridge in Duluth. But he didn't kill himself -- he just went splash in the water! [Hard laughter.] Yeah, he ended up shooting himself though.

B: Really?

A: Yeah. He was crazy. It shows you how crazy people can get.


2.

B: I was in Chicago and I went to one of those gyms they have in the bottom of a skyscraper? Like a Gold's Gym, a chain, I don't remember the name of it. In the bottom of a skyscraper. I went in the steam room they had there. The room got steamed up, but it was cold. The steam never got hot. It was like a greenhouse or something. I was like, bring some plants in here.

A: Do you garden? Plant things?

B: No. Well I grow some marijuana out in the woods. On county land. For parties, you know.

A: Me too.

I overheard both of these just today. (Same two dudes, these exchanges separated by a few minutes.) And I was in there for like 10 minutes. I really need to get a waterproof pen and pad and just hang out in there and take notes...

Roland Martin does not stop talking

The news that CNN commentator Roland Martin is getting his own Sunday talk show is a good enough reason for me to tell my Roland Martin story:

You may or may not already know this, but I attended a wildly prestigious J-school, as befits my overall awesomeness and elite status. Part of what made it a fun place to pay tens of thousands of dollars to go was the fact that the school had a working news bureau in downtown Chicago, where student journalists covered actual news events and wrote stories that were published by actual news publications -- not the Trib or the Sun-Times, of course, but by a handful of other, smaller Chicago papers.

I remember the first day of classes in that downtown newsroom. Exciting! We weren't going to do any actual reporting that day, but it was a full, tightly scheduled orientation day with a lot of different parts to it -- tours, explanations of newsroom rules and so on. And one part of that orientation was a talk to the students by then-editor of the Chicago Defender, Roland S. Martin.

Martin is a charismatic guy, and he gave a good talk. Importance of journalism, holding public officials accountable, etc. The thing was: He was very comfortable talking about himself and his profession. He talked and talked. And he exceeded, by some margin, his allotted block of time. The professor whose job it was to shepherd us out of the room and into the next part of orientation -- a great teacher named Jon Ziomek -- was visibly nervous. At some point Martin was going to throw off the entire day's schedule. Ziomek stood up, walked to the front of the room, where he hovered to the side of Roland Martin like a handler about to usher him offstage.

No matter. Roland Martin had more wisdom to impart to us. Kept right on talking.

Finally, Ziomek broke in. "Well, our time here is --"

And Roland Martin said: "Oh, it's okay, I've got time."

For all I know, he realized a split-second after he said it that our professor wasn't actually worried about his time. But to me it was a hilarious moment, the hilarious obliviousness of someone who could listen to himself talk all day long.

I think that must say something about the sort of people who end up making their living as television political pundits.

However I should also say that I have nothing really against Roland Martin as a TV commentator. He is certainly not one of the worst talking heads, and arguably is even in the top half. Maybe his new show will be good!

Ways Michael Jackson is different than the Eagles: A meditation

Q. Does this mean that we will see a spontaneous outpouring of love and grief when Don Henley dies?

A. Hahahahahaha.

...

But why not? If it's true that the Eagles have the top-selling U.S. album of all time (more on that below), then why does it seem like they aren't even in Michael Jackson's league as musical/cultural figures? Why is it that Michael Jackson's music brought the world together, while the main redeeming quality of the Eagles is that they made for a good punchline in The Big Lebowski.

I can think of a few reasons:

a.) no compelling/grotesque personal story. As far as I can tell, Eagles are just rich dicks. Not very interesting!

b.) No real artistic reach. Like Michael Jackson, the Eagles occupy a hybridized musical niche -- in their case, country-rock. But while country music in recent decades has certainly incorporated more rock influences, there simply isn't a tradition of Eagles-influenced artists the way MJ spawned a billion baby MJs.

c.) We grew up with Michael Jackson. And in more than one way: People roughly my age have our childhood memories of the Thriller era, while people my parents' age actually remember MJ as a child star. That's a different relationship than the one anyone has with some boomer-centric country-rock act, or some released-after-the-fact greatest hits collection.

d.) Video. Via MTV, Michael Jackson reached millions and millions of kids who didn't buy his records. Like me! I was too young to be buying records, but I was well aware of Thriller and Bad.

e.) Last but certainly not least, there are lots of reasons to doubt that RIAA number. The primary one, though not the only one, is that RIAA measures U.S. sales only. Contra Greg Mitchell, if you take plausible high-end estimates it's possible that Thriller sold more than twice as many copies as that Eagles album.

In summary, let's always remember that Michael Jackson is awesome and the Eagles suck.

Major Lazer

Olbermann on Joe the Plumber's Wausau visit

Keith Olbermann tonight picked up another Wausau Daily Herald story written by me, the one about Joe the Plumber's visit here. Here's the Olbermann clip:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

R.I.P. King of Pop Pt. III

Apologies to those who are tired of this by now. To me, listening to all-MJ-all-the-time these past few days -- and knowing that everyone else is listening to the same songs -- has been a great experience. So I'm going to offer a few more tidbits:

• Via Eli Lake, this is a fantastic MJ mix. Includes a lot of Jackson 5 stuff and a really cool demo version of "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough." MUST LISTEN!
  
  
• My favorite music writer, Kelefa Sanneh, has a piece in the New Yorker with an interesting digression about Jackson's lifting a piece of Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa" for "Wanna Be Startin' Something." Then Sanneh's piece finishes this way:

  Thursday night in New York was hot—after weeks of rain, it was one of the first real summer nights of the year. Car windows were open all over the city, and just about every station on the radio dial had switched to an all-Michael Jackson format; for the first (and, for all we know, the last) time, it felt as if absolutely everyone was listening to the same songs. Later that night, at least one bar in Brooklyn continued the celebration into the early hours of Friday. If you lived above it, you may have found yourself awake at 3 A.M., listening to a song you knew by heart: that familiar thump, that familiar chant. As Jackson and Dibango and millions of listeners discovered, you can’t escape “Thriller.” But, then, why would you want to?

• Sanneh also did a good NPR segment summarizing Jackson in three songs:

  There's no way to sum him up. Here are three interesting tracks [...] but I would never, ever want to say they are the three greatest.

  The three? "Wanna Be Startin' Something," "Human Nature" and "Heartbreaker."
  
  
• And I do think most everything in this piece is properly characterized as "gossip," but what can I say? Gossip is interesting. Jackson was gay, anorexic, drug-addicted, "in hock to Sony," etc. etc. Who knows if any of it is true. But given all the unanswered questions in his death, a piece purporting to have sources inside the Jackson camp is, well, of interest.
  
  
• And if you are still hungry for more, Idolator has aggregated a lot of people's interesting quotations on MJ.

Meet Eddie

This great Times article distills Hollywood's fortune as contingent on the careers of people liek Eddie Murphy. I really liked this 'graph:

Arnold Robinson, Mr. Murphy’s publicist, said he would not trouble his client with an interview request from a newspaper. “Mr. Murphy does not do print interviews,” he said in an e-mail, adding, “For his age and body of work there are only one or two other actors that can compare to his career box office numbers.”

R.I.P. King of Pop Pt. II

I posted a bunch of videos to my other blog when I heard the news. But a few more can't hurt:
"I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5:


Rock with You:

Michael Jackson - Rock with you
by Discodandan

P.Y.T.:


Also thinking tonight about this old Jacob Weisberg piece in Slate from soon after Jackson's acquittal, which dared to make the case -- persuasively -- that MJ was not a pedophile.

And, worth revisiting Rhymefest's album of MJ tributes, including the pretty funny simulated interstitial conversations with Michael. Certainly the best thing Rhymefest has ever done. MOST RECOMMENDED: Track 9, with a sample of Jackson 5-era Michael singing "Ain't No Sunshine."

UPDATE [6/26 12:13am] ... In fact here's the original of that version of "Ain't No Sunshine":

Nate Silver on the public option

This is just a very strong case in favor of a public option for health care.

New Auto-Tune the News!

Maybe these will get old one day, but today is not that day. Highlight: Joe Biden's "God Bless America":

Thanks Andy Laub!

Views of raptors

Yesterday Laura and I had a really great visit to the Raptor Education Group, Inc. in Antigo, Wis. Not long ago I wrote a story about some of the nonprofit group's activities, and was offered a tour by Marge Gibson, who runs the place.

REGI rehabilitates injured birds found in the wild, everything from hummingbirds to bald eagles. Most of the birds are rehabbed and released, but sometimes that's not possible -- if the bird's injuries are permanent, or if they are imprinted to humans. In those cases, REGI usually keeps them as education birds.

Here are some of the birds we met yesterday:

This baby bard barred owl liked to play with Kleenex:

*

Peregrine falcon Ozzy was not happy to meet us.

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These bald eagles were recovered from the site of the Exxon Valdez oil spill:

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Marge Gibson with a Great Horned Owl named Bumpy:

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And a bald eagle imprinted to humans who we got to meet close-up:







More: I've posted these and some other pics to my long-dormant Flickr page.

R.I.P. To my Grandpa, Bob Mentzer, 1916-2009. Not a bad run.

Autotune the News #4

Kind of old by now, but who cares. Still good, and Frank McGee the Angry Gorilla is back:

I visit Carl Sandburg in a dream

Last week I found myself in Galesburg, Ill., where I decided to visit the birthplace of Carl Sandburg. I like the "Chicago Poems" and "The People, Yes," and I also like that one Sufjan Stevens song involving Carl Sandburg, so it was worth it. I haven't read Sandburg's Lincoln biographies but I like that he wrote them.

The birthplace is exactly what you would expect but I was glad I went there. Then, for reasons I do not fully understand I bought two 50-cent reproductions of his manuscript pages. I am not going to frame them; I guess I will put them in a folder or something.

One is the famous "Hog butcher to the world" poem. The other is just a quote from a Lincoln speech, which I like because I think it fits our Internet age:

If you cannot read the image, it says:

From Lincoln's message to
Congress Dec. 1, 1862
In times like the present
men should utter nothing
for which they would not
willingly be responsible
through time and eternity.

Barney Frank storms off

from a CNBC interview right before he walks into a hearing and grills my friend JW. Rep. Frank can be a very intimidating man, I can say from experience.

The rhythmic, sedative pull of the motorways

Not a perfect fit for me, but I did spend some time in the car today and I have been suffering from a sense of melancholia lately, so this beautiful passage from Andrew O'Hagan's essay on cars will do:

In American fiction, a great number of epiphanies – especially male epiphanies – occur while the protagonist is alone and driving his car. There are reasons for that. One may not have a direction but one has a means of getting there. One may not be in control of life but one can progress in a straight line. When your youth is over and definitions become fixed, even if they are wrong, it might turn out that the arrival of a car suddenly feels like the commuting of a sentence. It may seem to give you back your existential mojo. [...] If you read the novels of Joan Didion, you will see there can come a time in anybody’s life, women’s as much as men’s, when they climb into their car and feel that they are driving away from an entire kingdom of dependency. The motorways don’t offer a solution: they offer a welcome straitjacket. Your car will get all the credit for bringing you home to yourself, for showing you the only person you can truly depend on is not merely yourself, but yourself-in-your-car, a somatic unity. Those who spend most of their lives being alert to the demands of others – and that’s most employees, most husbands, wives, parents, most believers – will know the rhythmic, sedative pull of the motorways as the road performs its magic, pulling you back by degrees to some forgotten individualism that the joys and vexations of community always threatened to turn into an upholstered void.

Still going

The story of former Marathon County Republican Party spokesman Kevin Stevenson's dismissal after he criticized Rush Limbaugh, that is. Here is Olbermann on Tuesday's show responding to Limbaugh's response to the story:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And from last week, here is Stevenson's phone interview with Contessa Brewer on MSNBC:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I think that will probably be enough of that, now.