My life sort of changed in late December of 1992, when someone gave me Dr. Dre’s now-classic album The Chronic. Listening to that juicy, bouncy, drawly hybrid of P-Funk and the usual gangsta rap themes (hating police, shooting enemies, acquiring/dumping hoes) pre-dated my first experience with weed, as it should have. It made the whole concept—yes, The Chronic was a concept album, a rolling tour through late-afternoon Compton with a gat strapped to your waist and your homies riding in the back—even better, since I had no idea what “the chronic” was (a mixed drink of some sort, I believed) nor why it was so popular among West Coast gangstas. And of course this pre-dated the internet as we know it, assuring my ignorance remained until months later, when a certain roommate produced a bag of sticky herb and pronounced “This is the chronic.”
No, it was not “the chronic.” It was schwag, at best. But I didn’t care. I listened to “Nuthin’ but a G Thang” and felt far cooler than my actual incarnation (a freshman at Buffalo State College who owned several Sting solo albums).
It wasn’t just the terrific videos, or the terrific songs, or my first exposure to a female rapper who actually sounded hard (Lady of Rage on “Lyrical Gangbang” owned Queen Latifah, Money Love, and any other female MC I could think of). It was the relaxed vibe, the posturing, the nearly every track being the perfect party/driving/working out music, and all of Dre’s The Chronicaccomplished what most early rap attempted: to elevate the embarrassing to the coveted. By “embarrassing” I mean the realities of Compton are the result of failed economic policies, institutionalized racism, and just plain old villainy; the hood was a place one wanted to escape, yet The Chronic made it oddly appealing. Suddenly, the idea of a bench on my front lawn, a pitbull snapping at the end of a chain, a dorm fridge full of 40’s, a barbecue, and custom hydraulics on my grandfather’s car seemed cool. More than that, it seemed authentic.[i] Certainly more authentic than anything I was experiencing, with my Dream of the Blue Turtles album and my J. Crew khakis and my 1977 Pontiac Parisienne. [ii][read more…]
I come to praise Patrick Swayze, not bury him. He was our B-level action star with romantic credibility, and we forgave him for Dirty Dancing and Ghost because he gave us Roadhouse and Red Dawn. The martial arts crossover was inevitable–execs don’t see any difference between ballet and kung fu — and the expressionless acting worked for each Swayzean archetype: the greaser bad boy, the misunderstood rebel with a heart of gold, the mourning husband, the stoic bouncer, and the post-apocalyptic warrior.
Did I say post-apocalyptic? Indeed. Swayze tried it all. He was the Michael Caine of genre cinema. 30-somethings fetishize Red Dawn but they should be dropping references to 1987′s Steel Dawn: [read more…]
Jack Daniels, gaffer's tape, assless chaps, a pack of smokes, and...a banana?
Death has the unexpected benefit of restoring relevance. Michael Jackson is dead so we forget about the bleached, siliconized, plastic surgery testing ground that was once his face, and we chose to set aside his suspicious activity with children, and we toss the Liz Taylor obsession, the crotch-grabbing, and his increasingly stilted moonwalk into a pit of gossip waste matter. Along with the Elephant Man’s bones and a chimp named Bubbles. The King is dead. Long live the King.
Let us also note that Keith Richards has outlived yet another rock star.
Among my friends it’s known as the boxer story—the day I ripped a wide hole in the crotch of an old pair of boxers, pulled it over my head, and wore it to the mall with a girlfriend I was desperate to dump. Of course I lacked the courage to break up with her, and of course it seemed easier at the time to wear old boxers as a shirt in a public place, with my arms through the leg holes and the waistband clinging to the top of my stomach. It seemed easier than telling the truth; truth being I no longer cared about anything she had to say, and no amount of sex made her company tolerable.
This was back when I believed compatibility could be discovered like a trail overgrown with vines and brush, and if only we both kept hacking away, one day the path would reveal itself. We had almost nothing in common. She liked music from the 4 A.D. label and I was strictly a Sub Pop guy. She was into tall blonde men and I was 5’8” dark-haired Jew (technically I still am all those things but my dark hair is turning gray). I considered Beringer’s White Zinfandel the best wine I’d ever tasted and she liked anything that got her drunk, as long as it worked quickly and didn’t burn on the way down. But we stuck it out anyway, joined by decent times in bed and a secret affinity for George Michael. George Michael! A chaser to anything grunge, and at one time the heir apparent to Hall and Oates. In 1994, everyone secretly liked George Michael. Trust me on this. Even guys wearing Ride the Lightning t-shirts would turn up Freedom ’90 if alone in their cars.
The certainty of death and taxes accepts a new recruit this week: the certainty of a college freshman breaking up with her long-distance boyfriend.
I should have seen it coming. So goes the refrain of the dumped, in this case my 21 year-old self living in a basement apartment in Buffalo, NY. We met at summer camp—of course—and she was 18 and loping through her final summer before leaving town for the ivy-shrouded confines of Cornell.
What was I doing that fall? Working at a boxing gym and finishing college part-time at University of Buffalo. I played it light and breezy that summer, knowing I had enough older guy-clout to act cooler than I normally would. She was nervous about school and I assured her everything would be fine. Better than fine. I assured her it would be awesome because she was going to Cornell. My entire family had gone to Cornell but I’d been turned down back in the day. Cornell still held the allure of unrequited love, a final shred of high school longing.
She wasn’t so bad either. There was no love between us (though she may have said I love you and I may have whispered it back, knowing I wasn’t telling the truth even if it felt true). Love was unnecessary. Summer flings don’t need love. They need to remain light, breezy, and inequitable, so they can end horribly—which they must—and so they can become nostalgic even before the end. [read more…]
Speaking of fantastic terrible movies, I watched Stuart Gordon’s From Beyondlast night. It was much better than its source material—a Lovecraft short titled, oddly enough, From Beyond—and it got me thinking about that Anglophilic old mollycoddle. Lovecraft, I mean. Not Stuart Gordon (who is neither Anglophilic nor a mollycoddle, as far as I can tell).
What is it about H.P. Lovecraft that endures? It can’t be his writing—precious and overwrought, creaky and humorless, the equivalent of faux Medieval antiques. It’s not the man himself, a caricature of the underappreciated artist muddling his fiction with talk of inferior races and his repetitive themes of indescribable horrors lurking about in crypts and mountain caves. Why does he linger then, on the edges of pop culture, much like his howling Other Gods linger on the edges of our world? Why hasn’t he faded into amusing irrelevance? Why do I criticize the man’s work and still count him as one of my earliest influences?
There’s no grand unifying theme for this week’s column. Sometimes—and only sometimes—reductionism is inappropriate when referencing pop cultural artifacts, because evidence of a particular epoch need not be found within the subtext of obsolete trends and memes. Sometimes—and only sometimes—we can look at a pop cultural artifact as its own phenomenon. It remains both timeless and past its expiration date. The best of these become irrelevant the moment they enter public consciousness. With immediate irrelevancy, the pop cultural artifact stops aging. It’s born as an ant trapped in amber, preserved for future generations to marvel at its differences and similarities with contemporary cousins.
We’ve become so cynical that even the most mediocre manifestation of the Hollywood marketing juggernaut—the video game adaptation of a Hollywood blockbuster—is now regarded with a shrug. Blame it on decades of desensitization to low quality and quick-buck schemes, but even the most reliable pop culture critics (I’m referring to that spicy blend of hipster, gamer, and techie) reserve their outrage for Uwe Boll instead of pointing their Doritos-stained fingers at lousy games. Why? Because they are exhausted. Too many targets tire even the most Spartan of sniping critics. Their trigger fingers are blistered and their cartridges are spent. Movies make for bad games but this doesn’t stop game adaptations, and since movies don’t show any sign of improving—Beverly Hills Chihuahua, anyone?—the snipers have packed up their rifles and trudged home. Taking potshots at Billy Mays along the way.
gave us Roadhouse and Red Dawn. The martial arts crossover was inevitable–execs don’t see any difference between ballet and kung fu — and the expressionless acting worked for each Swayzean archetype: the greaser bad boy, the misunderstood rebel with a heart of gold, the mourning husband, the stoic bouncer, and the post-apocalyptic warrior.
