fourfour

Happy Thanksgiving!

Eat like a pig! Or, better yet...

...eat like my cats!

For your ease (or whatever), the previous Thanksgiving Feast videos are embedded below...

Smile with your bloody eyeball!

 

Tyra done picked a pretty 'un this time!

The American music whores

I've always known that the American Music Awards is the most masturbatory major awards show our fine country has to offer, but now I have the gif to prove it:

 

Uh...mer...ic...uh...'s...Next...To...P...Mah...Duhl...Is...

Duh!

Syrup, Topanga and an absence of jazz: The Carter

"Every filmmaker should be so lucky to be granted a character as unique as Lil Wayne to explore," reads a slate that appears early in Adam Bhala Lough's brilliant documentary The Carter. Every viewer should be so lucky to be granted the same. The Carter is endlessly fascinating as a portrait of a chronically inebriated workaholic -- the main thing I took away from it is that it's amazing that Wayne gets any work done, let alone at the staggering rate that he does. The weirdest thing about the documentary is how likable and seemingly humble its subject is. Save one instance where he arbitrarily tells a journalist, "I don't like you" after being asked about New Orleans and jazz and how they influenced his work, he doesn't seem to have too much of an ego as rappers go (when asked, he tells Lough that he's only starting to see himself as a legend, and he downplays Tha Carter III selling a million copies in a week to an almost delusionally modest extent). If he's charmed you with his music, chances are he'll only charm you more via this movie (which he oddly went on to withdraw his support of - more delusional modesty?).

Anyway, he's awesome. Take it from these white kids:

I don't want to give too much away, because I think everyone should see it, but another thing that keeps Wayne appearing to be so humble is his ability to say the most bizarre shit like it's nothing. I guess that's part of the genius of his lyrics: they manage to feel simultaneously off-the-cuff and out-of-this-world. Wayne would be the first to admit that he's an alien, and where the truth stops and the performance starts is left deliciously ambiguous. He's such a consumable personality because he offers so much to figure out. He is a puzzle of a man, especially because so much of what he's offering is delivered via mush-mouth. It's to the extent that he's often subtitled in the film, and so I've rounded up my Top 10 subtitled quotes from the movie and posted them below. This guy is a purple gem:

Up and Up!

I remember seeing a Current Affair segment back in the late '80s about parents who bought a VHS of Cinderella for their kids, thinking it was family fare, but instead thanks to a packaging error, turned out to be an adults-only flick. The most disturbing part of this story was that once the parents realized that they had popped in a porno for their kids and promptly turned it off, the kids cried, saying they liked their movie and wanted it back on.

Ugh. That is so fucked up, and I'd hate for it to happen again. Scarily: it could. Last week, Disney/Pixar released to the home-viewing market Up, their CGI-animated colorfest that just happens to share a name with a 1976 fuckfest by Russ Meyer (the latter adds an exclamation mark just to convey how excited it is to exist). It would seem that an animated film about a man who saves his life from the shadows of the twilight years by attaching thousands of balloons to his house, sailing to a far-off land and saving a rare bird species from exploitation has little in common with a who-killed-Hitler murder mystery that's a thinly veiled excuse to showcase people having (softcore but graphic) simulated sex while Kitten Natividad narrates it all as the one-woman Greek chorus. However, there are more similarities than you might think. So come, let's explore the two via a compare-and-contrast session. If nothing else, this is so you don't get the two films mixed up. I never want you to have to deal with a little one who walks up and informs you, "I'd like to strap you on sometime." 

(I thought about making this safe for work, but it'd be pretty fucking impossible since I'm talking about a Meyer indie. Sorry, it's strictly fake-dickly and NSFW up in here...)

The ptosis with the leastest

Alternate punny post title:

 

"Imp interrupted." Or "Impterrupted", even. Or, hey, how 'bout, "The evil, dead"? God, a double elimination yields an embarrassment of riches. Or an embarrassment of bitches, even. Hey, there goes another one. I'm like Lionel Richie: I can't slow down.

Don't mess with a snap diva!

Here's another one for the Internet Needs This file: a performance piece/how-to on the art of snapping with attitude from the 1990 documentary...thing, Tongues Untied. The movie is kind of a melting pot of performances like the one above, monologues, spoken word recitations and interviews (with minimal affectation, for a change), all attempting to sum up what it was like to be black and gay in America at the time it was made. It's definitely something. The above clip stands out as a highlight to the point that I can't believe it wasn't on YouTube before I uploaded it. There is a younger generation of sassy gay (and gay-friendly) men that is missing out on this important lesson. If a choreographed performance piece doesn't teach them, what will?

(Also check out the video in My hero section for another very brief clip from the film. I thought that one needed to stand on its own. If you don't feel like rolling your eyeballs up...you are reading the wrong post! But also, I'm putting it after the jump for your ease...)

Endorsements

I had one of those beautiful moments a few weeks ago where it seemed like every new piece of music I listened to I loved. And I listened and listened and meant to write and then didn't, and now the shit is old news in Internet time and it's getting ready to be replaced by a new batch in my rotation. It's sad whenever the kind of permanent transience that defines my listening habits is spelled out like that, but hey, it's how I live. And love.

Anyway, I've got something to say! (About some albums and singles and shit.) Before they're totally irrelevant (i.e. two weeks old)...

I would be so frustrated right now if I were Amerie. With the help of producer Wiz the Buchanan, she created "Why R U," a calculus problem of a pop song that starts at the same time in two different directions (the explosive agitation we expect from her, and a new old-school hip-hop soul angle courtesy of a sample from Ultramagnetic MCs' "Ego Tripping" and so much more), and meets in a place that apparently only makes sense in her head, if the song's poor performance on any chart is an indication. This song, like the rest of In Love & War, save two tracks (the drab "The Flowers" and the "We Belong Together" rewrite "Dear John"), is fucking brilliant. At this point, the retreads of "1 Thing" that she's so fond of doing (the first five tracks fall under this umbrella) feel more like the cultivation of a style (frenetic retroism) than a desperate clinging to the past. (In retrospect, the fact that "1 Thing" was so huge was a happy accident -- in the scheme of R&B this decade, it was a sonic fluke.) The more straightforward R&B cuts that round out the album are arguably even better. "Pretty Brown" borrows heavily from Mint Condition's 90's classic "Breakin' My Heart (Pretty Brown Eyes)" (as full-band R&B, this was a "1 Thing"-like commercial fluke, come to think of it), but it only uses a few weird bits of its source, so that it seems more like a re-edit than a remake. "Different People" is the kind of grimy heartache that inhabited Mary J. Blige's My Life. Don't even get me started on "Swag Back," which braids Southern 808 flourishes with keyboards Whitesnake would covet and a main beat that shuffles like Siouxsie & the Banshees' "Kiss Them for Me." Mind-blowing.

Not that any of it matters from a commercial perspective. This will be ignored by radio and the few people left who buy CD. It's frustrating because Amerie displays her work ethic with every yelp, grunt and lift-off into the inevitably effervescent chorus. She is a powerhouse by trade. On her last album, she informed us, "I do it 'cause I love it." Let's hope that love never dies, because really, it's all she's got.

On Winston

This is just a little note to say that PEOPLEPets recently interviewed me about Winston. I never get to talk about him, so you can imagine how new this experience was for me. But for real, it was fun, and I got to explain why this cat is wish fulfillment to someone who grew up in the creature-heavy '80s. You can read the interview here. [Sorry I had the wrong link up for days and days and days. It should work now. I'm stupid guys, get with the program!]

Also, above and below is pictorial evidence of some claims I make in the interview regarding Winston's ugliness (as if you don't already know) and Rudy's cuddliness. I pretty much only post video of them now, so here's a good excuse to just throw in some random shots. Weird overload starts here.

We aren't all Precious

(I'm putting this under the jump because I get spoilery just a few sentences in.)

Sundai'll come out tomorrow

Sundai promised she'd tell her tale of orphanhood if she made it to the Top 4. Given this show's reliance on catharsis and oversharing, you would think that alone would have cruised her through. But no: orphan, interrupted. I can't tell if that means the show is maturing or that like everyone else, it just doesn't give a fuck anymore.

Two videos that I didn't make but love as if they were my own

My friend Gabe made a supercut of people in movies saying the title of the movie and it is as least twice as genius as my description makes it sound:

Gabe's been talking about this for a while (supercuts, like Mariah Carey's vision of love, take time), so it's pretty momentous that this is finally seeing the light of day. I also must pat myself on the back for contributing to it. I won't outright spoil the clip I suggested, but click here if you're curious.

Also, I missed this when it was posted a few months ago, but here's a video mashup of Ponyo (which I love like a half-human-half-fish loves ham) and the Lonely Island's "I'm on a Boat" (which I love like a vegetarian loves ham, which is to say: ugh). But whatever, this is extremely clever (if very literal) and it's all worth it to see Ponyo exclaim, "Aw shit!" She's such a card, that Ponyo. What will she have someone think up for her next?

[via ONTD]

If he's black, he must rap

R. Kelly. Bobby Brown. Ray J. Estelle. Sisqo. Russell Simmons. Shaggy. Damon Dash. M.I.A. Santigold. Kelis. T-Pain. Akon. All of these people have two things in common: 1) At one point, they were referred to by the New York Post as "rappers," and 2) None of them are. You see how some of these might confuse people: how the sing-songy styles of M.I.A. and Akon could be mistaken as rapping for the uninitiated and hard-of-hearing, old white people who write the Post. T-Pain is a "rappa ternt sanga," so that explains that. Bobby Brown has rapped (I mean, has a couplet finer than "Too hot to handle, too cold to hold / They called the Ghostbusters in they're in control" since been spat?), Kelis, R. Kelly and Santigold have kind of, as well, I guess. Russell and Damon have worked around rap, so I guess they're rappers by association?

The fact of the matter is that even if the case can be made that a few of these people could possibly write "rapper" on their resume, a more accurate title could be applied to any of them. (Someone like Kid Rock apparently is one of the few of the multi-hyphenate elite. Guess why!) I do not know for sure why they are called "rappers," but I can make a few guesses. The Post still fetishizes rappers as the bad boys of the entertainment industry. The vast majority of its hip-hop coverage -- I'd say just from the informal survey that I took to find the above examples of faulty labeling, 80 percent of it involves the rappers involved in some sort of crime. As silly as it is, the word "rapper," still has sensationalistic value at the Post that "R&B star" or "dancehall artist" or "mogul," just doesn't. (Shit, they called Barbie a rapper, even though she was actually, Rappin' and Rockin'.)  Also, these people who have no idea what they're talking about regarding pop culture, may hear about a (usually male) black recording artist and just assume that he is a rapper. I'm not saying that these people are racist (although, if they work for the Post, I'm not saying they're not racist, either), but I am saying they're lazy, ignorant and prone to stereotyping. That's all!

The reason that I bring this up is that in Tuesday's paper there was an item labeling Ne-Yo a rapper, which is the most egregious error of this sort yet. I think I've rapped more than Ne-Yo has. He's a fucking crooner, you know? A singing, songwriting crooner. (I discovered through my research that this isn't even the first time the Post has done that.) Seriously, Post, who's next? Stevie Wonder? Miles Davis? Lenny Kravitz is part-black, so he must be part-rapper, too, right? And look, I understand factual errors. I make them often. I understand meaning one thing and typing another. But I don't understand working at a national media outlet and just assuming in the place of fact-checking. That's nonsense.

It's not just the Post that does this, of course. Come, let's laugh at the mistakes of what we can presume are stupid white people:

Human differential

I love that Brittany was called out for looking too catalog. I wonder what catalog this could be for? The Curried Feather Company, specializing in all things red: from skin to dots?