Her first album was titled Metropolis, its follow-up – The Arch Android. She has killer rock n’ roll androgyne style and addictive musical-theater-trained pipes. Oh, she also does live painting and has her own label, too. Yet somehow, I hadn’t heard of Janelle Monae before this video for her single Many Moonspopped up on my screen last week.
As you can see, Metropolis is a concept album. Its fictional protagonist Cindi Mayweather finds herself in the year 2719 and on the run from android law, because she’s in love with a human. Monae’s next three albums will follow Mayweather’s adventures, some of them in space.
Yep, I’m in full swoon. Monae’s influences might be more than a little transparent, but I just don’t care – the combination is fresh and it’s pop. Great pop, at that. There’s space and robots and art and she’s adorable, but above all that, she gives answers like this in interviews:
I am driven by the need for change. I have had many nightmares about our future and if we do keep living the way we do, killing the way we do, hating ourselves the way we do, I do believe we are headed to the great road of nowhere. I know that I was put on this earth to lead, not to be perfect, but to lead and display a positive example and that is what I will die trying to do.
And I actually believe these aren’t just producer-polished words – Janelle is already working on starting a non-profit organization to help disadvantaged girls develop their artistic side. When, in light of a Grammy nomination, she was asked if she enjoyed being photographed and interviewed, she said, “Only when I have something to say. I’m not a red carpet gal. I wear a uniform for god’s sake! I have a hair machine I stick my head into. I have other duties to worry about.”
You hear that, pop culture? More of it, please. Also, I need a hair machine.
“Call me eccentric I haven’t a doubt
I’ll labeled a whole lot worse and far out
When I roll down a springtime grassy green hill
You think I won’t but I betcha I will
Cause I’m over 21 considerably
and I’ve earned the right to be no one but me.”
“Rad Anthem” by Rad Omen. Directed by Nicholaus Goossen.
Gack! What a disgustingly perfect, perfectly disgusting piece of work. Very “Dick in a (Happy Meal) Box”. One of those indelible wee slices of cultural tongue in stripper cheek that makes ya want to spit, laugh, cry, vomit, and masturbate all at the same time.
The four reigning icons of American fast food (Ronald, Jack, The Colonel and The King) get together for a boy’s night out and proceed to rampage up and down Sunset Strip like the douchiest of all popped collar, Entourage-aping broheims, gorging on drugs/booze/casual sex before retiring to Carney’s for late night refueling and condiment abuse. (The only thing missing is a cameo from the “yo quiero Taco Bell” chihuahua. Thankfully, comedian Nick Swardson‘s appearance as Wendy the stripper more than makes up for that omission.)
As Steven Gottlieb at Video Static puts it, “why wouldn’t fast food mascots live fast? After all, if they actually subsist on the shit they’re selling, it only stands to reason that they’d be just as tasteless with other aspects of their lives.” He goes on to state that the video “dry humps the line between parody and defamation” and I’d have to agree. It’s not as full-on chaotic neutral as “Smack My Bitch Up” or as viciously intelligent as “Windowlicker“. I’m giggling, but also left feeling the same vaguely irked “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG” sentiment that I get watching a mindless sausage-baster like “Country Girl“. Displays of entitled douchebaggery + vapid disco shitbeats + the unbidden, deeply personal olfactory memory of being accosted with the stench of other people’s McDonald’s = INSTINCTIVE WRATH.
So. Is this conscious social commentary, or just another music video that –more cleverly than most– panders to the lowest common denominator? Either way, it got a strong response from me (I sure didn’t intend to ramble on this long about it)! Kudos. Now I’m off to alleviate this emotional hangover by fixing myself a huge, healthy salad.
Remember those mind-blowing Heather Parisi clips we were all gaping at a few months ago? Well, it’s time for Heather to scooch her bedazzled Mickey Mouse-clad tush over on that giant Rubik’s Cube pedestal we built for her.
Make room on the throne, and in your hearts, for another star of numerous 80s Italian television variety shows, the inexplicable Miss Sara Carlson:
I’m just gonna give your guys a minute to process that clip. Deep cleansing breaths, people. Zalright? Zalright.
The commentary on Carlson over at Nobody Puts Baby in a Horner is sharper and better than anything I can come up with at this late hour, with the fabric of my reality in tatters:
I recognize that, in the era of YouTube clips, what probably made sense in a particular time to a particular group of people is reintroduced to the world in a contextual vacuum. Without meaning, these videos become a veritable playground for camp, a place where the indecipherable message is the first language of ironic detachment and surface aesthetics the currency of visual pleasure. As such, perhaps I’m inherently biased towards this Fellini meets Lady Gaga pinnacle of unadulterated, uninhibited batshit insanity.
Several more clips and further spot-on commentary from Benjamin after the jump.
All but her belly buried in the floor;
And the lewd trounce of a final muted beat!
We flee her spasm through a fleshless door…
Then you, the burlesque of our lust — and faith,
Lug us back lifeward — bone by infant bone.
— Hart Crane, “National Winter Garden,” (1930)
“Jo Boobs” Weldon is Headmistress of The New York School of Burlesque, whose home at The Slipper Room is just a few blocks from where Lydia Thompson’s “London Blondes” brought burlesque to America and a stone’s throw from where Minsky’s original National Winter Garden made burlesque part of the American vernacular. Minsky’s notoriously established Gypsy Rose Lee as an icon synonymous with striptease, and launched the careers of Abbott and Costello, Phil Silvers and Robert Alda before being closed in the name of public morality.
Houston Street Burlesque by Mabel Dwight (1928)
Is burlesque – a word which refers to turning things upside down – still able to subvert morals and mores? In a popular culture where the use of sexuality to sell consumer goods is banal, pornography of nearly every stripe is freely and instantly available, and sympathetic gay and lesbian characters are commonplace, is the self-conscious performance of gender merely campy fun or does it still have a liberating capacity? Can sex work, titillation, gender play and masturbation undermine heterosexual monogamy? Whose moralities and identities might they challenge?
Catherine MacKinnon argues that sexualized depictions of women in patriarchal societies reinforce misogyny to the point of constituting a form of violence. Do sexualized performances by women lead to their individual and collective debasement? Is stripping a phenomenon where women who appeal most to men are degraded whereas burlesque liberates women who stand outside the norms of beauty as prescribed by male desire? Considering stripping and prostitution, I ask whether everyone sells their bodies at every job? Further, when men pay a high premium to be with a woman or just to look at one, whose body is exploited? More specifically, does it make sense to import 20th century standards of judgment to a 21st century United States whose educational system produces more female post-graduates than male and whose career women earn 94.2% of the income of their male counterparts? Despite shifts in income and status, why do so few straight males study burlesque or work as strippers?
Jo Boobs and I met at the basement headquarters of her school on the coldest evening in recent years to explore questions of gender, activism, and whether she and her ilk are gender traitors or gender busters. She even stripped down to fighting gear for an intimate performance caught by our unblinking digital eyeball. (See above!) In June 2010, Jo will publish The Pocket Book of Burlesque (with a forward by Margaret Cho), a volume whose slender design can slip under the inspector’s prying gaze. The New York School of Burlesque is in sympathetic affiliation with Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque in Seattle and Michelle L’Amour’s Burlesque Finishing School in Chicago as well as programs in Washington, D.C and elsewhere. When will someone open a campus in Tehran?
COILHOUSE: How does burlesque differ from stripping? JO BOOBS: To understand the difference, look at it from the audience’s point of view. If someone goes to a strip joint, they usually go in whenever they want, they pick the performer they want, they negotiate how they interact with them, they interact one-on-one, and they leave. When they go to a burlesque show, the show starts at a [predetermined] time, they pay a cover (not the performers), they watch the show, there isn’t usually any one-on-one interaction, and they leave when the performance is over.
DJ Earworm’s 2008 edition of “United State of Pop” was one of the most disturbing, oddly pretty things I’d heard in ages. The pitch-perfect mashup maestro continues his yearly tradition of crafting silk purses from a score-and-five sow’s ears with his 2009 offering:
“United State of Pop 2009 (Blame It on the Pop)” by DJ Earworm. A Mashup of the Top 25 Hits of 2009, according to Billboard.
Oddly uplifting, ne? Ariana puts it well: “100% amalgamated poptimism from a keep-your-head-up year… a ribbon of shiny all rightness pulled off the box of meh that was 2009.”
While this edition doesn’t move me on quite the same level as “Viva La Pop” did (that mournful, menacing homogeny!) “Blame it on the Pop” is still a thought-provoking and highly danceable mashup.
Repeating for emphasis: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I can’t bring myself to sit all the way through most of these cruddy pop hits ONCE, let alone listen to them on repeat. But I find myself revisiting DJ Earworm’s yearly Billboard mashups over and over again. They are beautiful, and they frighten me.
Download “Blame it on the Pop” here. Full playlist after the jump.
I’ve been relatively free of the internet as of late, a state dictated by my having moved. Having finally reacquired a connection one can imagine the dismay I felt upon seeing the post directly beneath this one. Regardless of the article’s cathartic nature, a mere glimpse of that sour visage is enough to drive me to teeth-gnashing rage. Even now I hammer the keys with with unnecessary force.
In a bid to “get my mind right” and dispel any cloying vestiges of bratty whinging being passed off as philosophy I present this very special message from the Miami-Dade County Justice Department, circa 1988, who want you to know who the sex offenders are in your area. To that end, they created this spectacular video, and had these individuals spit some dope rhymes about their crimes. This may or may not be the work of comedian Scott Gairdner. Either way, fake or not, you should probably keep an eye on Sam. He’s a bit too enthusiastic.
Picture yourself as a young ballerina, fresh out of the academy. Your head held high, your posture perfect, you feet turned out just so. The years of training, all those countless hours of acerbic critique, nights spent awake with debilitating foot pain, cold instructor hands twisting your ankle into the correct position on the barre, all those things are falling away behind you like a house of cards. No more Swan Lakes and Nutcrackers. It’s the 70s, you’re Czech, sassy, and your future is bright. So you join the The Ballet Company of the Czechoslovak Television. You’re gonna be famous.
A few months later, thousands watch in awe as you strut your shiny stuff across their TV screens. In your go-go boots, fancy hat, and chic shoulder pads you’re almost unrecognizable, moving in unison with your colleagues, merging into one unified body of DANCE. Now they see you as you truly are.
Popularized by singer/actor Kishore Kumar, “Eena Meena Deeka” is a highly addictive, nonsensical tune written for the 1957 film Aasha. It is noteworthy for being one of Hindi cinema’s very first rock n’ roll numbers. If something about the lyrics reminds you of the childhood limerick “Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe”, it’s with good reason: the words of the song were inspired by kids playing outside composer C. Ramchandra’s music room. Via Wiki:
Ramchandra and his assistant John Gomes were inspired to create first line of the song, “Eena Meena Deeka, De Dai Damanika”. Gomes, a Goan, added the words “Maka naka” (Konkani for “I don’t want”), and they kept on adding more nonsense rhymes till they ended with “Rum pum po!”
I’d never heard this alternate, feminine version until the lovely Mme Darla Teagarden posted it on her Facebook. It’s just as faboo as the Kumar version:
