On Downton and Happy Endings

IF YOU'VE still not seen the series finale of Downton Abbey, I'll ruin it by saying everything turns out splendid. I counted at least seven actual or hinted-at couplings. A new business is formed. A wildly 'advantageous' marriage is made. Everyone stays alive.

By any standards this is an audaciously cheerful outcome, but it is particularly so for a show that often wallowed determinedly in gloom. Through six seasons we suffered world war, unjust imprisonment, shocking deaths, familial feuding.

The final season cleverly foreboded all the things that could go horribly wrong. The earl of Grantham bursts an ulcer, splattering blood on the dinner china; Barrow slits his wrists in the bathtub; Henry is terribly near a fatal race car crash—but all survive. 

In the final episode Anna makes everyone nervous, bopping about with maidly efficiency when she's eight and a half months pregnant and feeling unwell. Her water breaks and she says, This doesn't seem right, giving us all flashbacks to Sybil. But the final moments of the series find her abed, glowing, holding the bairn alongside proud Bates. The couple who voiced reasonable doubts about whether lasting good could ever come to their lives get to be ridiculously happy.


HAPPY ENDINGS are often considered cheap. Tragedy is more artistically respectable. But as any Jane Austen fan knows, a well-woven happy ending is heftily satisfying and a great narrative feat. Such brightness creates an especially lovely contrast among the English, whose dourness the Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the final episode, explains by saying, I blame the weather.

It may well be easier to strike characters with tragedy to buy easy narrative gravitas, rather than go to the effort of creating a plausible happy ending. But the thing is, sometimes life does actually go absurdly well. Rarely, perhaps, but it happens. Why not end there?

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Dark Tunes from The Weeknd and Lana Del Rey

"Terrence Loves You"

 

Lana Del Rey sounds wet-eyed in her new single, singing, I lost myself/When I lost you. It's a far cry from the usual kiss-off playlists, whose standard message is embodied in Beyonce's classic "Irreplaceable": I could have another you in a minute. The snarling kiss-off is meant to be empowering, but that equates power with bitchy invulnerability and blame-dumping, with a little man-hating thrown in for spice.

Lana does not do bitchy invulnerability. "Terrence Loves You" is equal parts sadness and acceptance (Youuuuuuuuu aaaaaaaaaare/What you are) and no parts righteous indignation. 

Undoubtedly her critics will deride the notion of losing oneself in a relationship's end as disgustingly weak and self-misogynizing. But we do find ourselves through love. And when love ends we must find new selves, yet again. I still got jazz, she sings, a hint of triumph.

Lana lets her heart break. That's real power.

"The Hills"

The Weeknd sings about love and tenderness, but he's not really about all that. His voice vibrates most in sinful subject matter; like some evil fungi he thrives in dark places. He really digs into those swamps and excavates, using an unlikely combination of erudition, falsetto and meanness.

He plays a self-aware asshole on "The Hills," which is far more resonant than his other radio hit, "Earned It," on which he plays nice. The "Hills" beat is as bombastic as any Dirty South banger and drops into the hook like it's falling off a cliff: I only call you when it's half past five/The only time that I'll be by your side. Dude is badly using half-past-five chick and he knows it. The drugs are "feelin like it's decaf" and the hazy lyrics might be regretful, unrepentant or just amoral. But they do cop to bad behavior, which is pretty original among the heaps of lyrics in which women are badly used and it's too unremarkable to merit thought.

The only love in this song flutters in at the end with a female voice singing sweet nothings in Amharic. The Weeknd seems to be winning World's Most Famous Habeshah, and he is catching up to Drake in the category of Depressive Realness with Infectious Beats.

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The Good Old Thug Love Duet

REMEMBER the video for "I'm Real"? JLo in hoops, bun, pink velour jumpsuit, smiling over how real she is. Ja Rule in a white do-rag, growling Ja Rule-isms. It epitomizes a classic rap sub-genre: the thug love duet.

Turn-of-the-millennium thug love duets have a bubblegum quality that predates the darkly complex sex-love relations of the Drake era. Think of Cam'Ron's bouncy "Hey Ma" or Jay and Bey's "'03 Bonnie & Clyde," from before she was Ms. Carter.

IT'S A WORLD where men rap hard and ladies sing nice. The guys are wild and profane, but the women are endlessly sweet, holding them down with smiling hooks. Down to ride to the very end. Thug love duets are about badboys and the good girls who love them; only the earnest heart of the good girl can melt a thug. All I need in this life of sin.

Undisputed princess of the genre is almond-eyed Ashanti. She mighta been singing "Foolish" over these fools later, but she made an ideal thug lover, her innocent smile the perfect foil for rapper grimaces.

The ladies aren't just relegated to hook duty these days; they rap hard as the dudes when they feel like. Thug love bangers may be naughtily retrograde, but they are so delicious. It's that polarity of masculine and feminine, hard contrasted against soft, plus a notion of love that's wonderfully simple: opposites attract.

Listen to my Thug Love Duets playlist

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Dawn of the Booty Supremacists

ONCE UPON a time, women longed to have flat butts. 'Big tits, tiny ass' is how my mother described the body ideal of her youth. How times have changed. I have a forty-two inch posterior and no complaints.

Well, one complaint. Now that we the callipygian have risen to power, I don't want us lording it over the assless. In the pop culture vanguard, the lording has already begun.

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Lana Del Rey and the Forbidden Feminine

LANA DEL REY evokes a world of red lips, intoxicants, deceptively innocent dresses, punky badboys and slick-haired sugar daddies who take you on fast drives down the coast at night. Her songs sound so lushly beautiful that you almost wish to be in them--until you remember how miserable that would be, since they are made of gilded angst, as dark-skied as pop can be. Lana has a Mad Men-esque knack for slathering glamor on turmoil until it's gorgeous. Her new album Ultraviolence is darker even than previous releases and edges into a hazily adulterous, abusive space. Even when she's cooing Ooh baby ooh baby/I'm in love it sounds like a scary place to be.

Her fascinations with quicksand sexuality, meekness and a badgirl variety of transactional romance are irksome and anti-feminist to some. "If we as a society accept the disempowered form of femininity that Del Rey embodies, young women are truly in trouble," read a recent denunciation in Ms.

I think such irking is important. Feminist thought tends to wish away some common, deep-rooted habits of the female mind, like yearning for male attention, fearing aloneness, being enticed by wealth, and that ancient craving for the protection of muscles. (He holds me in his big arms/Drunk and I am seeing stars/This is all I think of, Lana disempoweredly sang on "Video Games.") Even if we choose to sensibly repress such brain habits, lifting the rules to see what may lie beneath serves a real-keeping purpose.

Lana keeps it thusly real. Her sisterly defenders point to every woman's (feminist!) right to be screwed up, and I do not disagree. Lana's music contains disturbing scenarios, which should be heard as earnest art, dark subject matter handled with nuance and skill, rather than judged as bad role modeling. But her words are rarely as shocking as He hit me and it felt like a kiss; she is mostly criticized for the submissive fragility and phallocentric romanticism of her lyrics. The singer Lorde said of Del Rey, "It's so unhealthy for young girls to be listening to, you know: 'I’m nothing without you.' This sort of shirt-tugging, desperate, don’t leave me stuff."

But surely many a woman has had not-proud moments of "don't leave me" shirt-tugging, if only in her own head. Weakness, fear, neediness--and the use of seduction to paper them over--are authentic parts of female experience, and it is valuable to hear a voice that admits to loving foolishly. Lana, singing Need you, baby, like I breathe you, baby, takes us to vulnerable corners of the female psyche that feel forbidden. Her unfeminist vices let us question the unflappable power pose of contemporary womanhood.

WITH HER bombshell image and helpless romanticism, Lana sings sex and love in unusual ways. She doesn't care about uprightness, suitability. She sings desire, desperation, unseemly devotion. She sings the kind of sex that makes you feel unpowerful in a good way (In the land of gods and monsters I was an angel/Looking to get fucked hard) and the kind that makes you feel powerful in a wrong way (Fucked my way up to the top/This is my show.)

She has sufficiently intact romantic sensibilities to remake the deliciously treacly Disney classic "Once Upon A Dream," darkening it almost beyond recognition but still honoring the love dream of the original. The punky badboys and sugar daddies are her antagonists, but also her romantic heroes. This is an artist captivated by love, in all its soaring and crashing. The Lana of her songs is exquisitely, sometimes tragically, vulnerable in love, but savvy enough to know that vulnerability carries its own form of honest power.

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The Network Marriage Plot

We nowadays are too anti-romantic to quite embrace them--even the excellent book called The Marriage Plot does not (spoiler!) end with true love gratified--but marriage plots do, mercifully, live on, in the form of the classic, slow-build network sitcom romance. Our Darcys and Lizzys are Ross and Rachel, Jim and Pam, Will and Emma--subjects of will-they-won't-they teasery spread languidly over episodes and seasons.

To my utmost delight, Fox has fashioned a Tuesday night with back-to-back sitcoms of the best kind, starring lead ladies with Lizzy wits. New Girl's Jess is zany and adorable, as only Zooey Deschanel can be. She means well all the time and risks harming others only by annoying them with excessive cheer. Mindy of The Mindy Project is also zany and adorable, but with a twist of caustic Kaling lime. Jess is willing to impersonate Elvis at a funeral to help her roommate (who is also her Darcy); Mindy freely admits that she expects to go to hell because she loves gossip and doesn't "really care about the environment."

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The Format Pleasure of Harlem Shake Videos

Amid the internet-wide arguing about whether Harlem Shake videos have redeeming cultural value or demonstrate the "real" Harlem Shake (answer to the latter being a clear negative), I think the point is lost. 

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Beyoncé and the Impersonal Pronoun

No one can self-objectify quite like Beyoncé. (And when I use her name, please hear the Stephen Colbert pronunciation, fully engaging that accent aigu on the terminal "e": Bay-on-SAY.)

Let's begin, shall we, by attempting to unpack the nut graf of "Single Ladies":

Don't be mad when you see that he want it
If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it
Wuh-ho-ho, &tc

Begin at the beginning. What is "it"? In its latter use, we might might expect the referent to be "finger." As, That poor girl. He should have put a ring on her finger. But this theory crumbles the moment we consider the pronoun's other roles, standing for the thing wanted (by another), and conditionally liked (by the narrator's former flame).
Is the finger metonymous, then, for the body? In such case, the full meaning becomes, If you liked this body, you should have put a ring on this finger, which stands for this body. The logic holds, but the implications are troubling. Is appreciation of a woman's physical assets adequate basis for marriage? Surely not. And yet, how much more dismaying if we suppose the word "it" in fact stands for the woman in her entirety--body, soul, mind, spirit.

For, what woman thinks of herself as "it"? Aha! you say, glimpsing the path down which I appear to intend to lead you, Perhaps a man could think of a woman as "it"!
The "it" in question.

And indeed, "Single Ladies" was created not by some jilted woman, but by R&B mastermind The Dream. (Perhaps tellingly, he co-wrote Mariah's "Touch My Body" as well). Like most Beyoncé lyrics, these were written by a stable of male songwriters, Beyoncé credited among them.

Men writing objectification tracks for women leads to strange distortions. For example, in Beyoncé's "Check On It," written, per usual, by a stable, the word "it," used as described above, appears 49 times. Here is the construction I find most bizarre:

You can look at it
Long as you don't grab it
If you don't go braggin
I'ma let you have it

Does any woman think of her body as a removed Other like that? Wares to consciously ply? Here the direct referent appears to be the badonkadonk, metonymous again for the body whole.

While the lyrics evoke the body as a removed Other, they simultaneously conflate the body with the total woman. In one instance in the earwormish "Check On It," the word "me" is substituted for "it" (i.e. having said "check on it" eighteen thousand times, she throws in a "check on me"). Confirmation then, if any were needed, that Beyoncé herself--one supposes, body and soul--is "it".

When a man writes a song and a woman sings it, there is a certain synergistic fucked-up-edness. He can slip in offensive notions (woman="it") without voicing them himself. She voices these notions without giving the implied ownership thereof much thought. (See the related "ho cosigner" phenomenon.)

Beyoncé always strikes me as a childlike star, a sexpot never quite in possession of her sexuality. Hence she vixens it up throughout the "Single Ladies" video, but gigglingly disowns the whole bit at the end.

Feminist carping to the contrary, there is one way I don't mind: at least her work promotes the stubby-legged, long-waisted, back-stacked body type in which I share a stake. And hell yeah I can do the "Single Ladies" dance.

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Ode to the Bitchy British Songbirds

Now I know you feel betrayed But it's been weeks since I got laid
This doesn't mean
I don't think you're a fool
-"Never Gonna Happen"

He left no time to regret
Kept his dick wet
With his same old safe bet
-"Back to Black"

Wrap it up cause I ain't
Carrying your embryo
-"Wait a Minute (Just a Touch)"

If you can imbue caustic, obscene lyrics like those above with easy charm, you must be a Bitchy British Songbird. These ladies can don fabulous earrings, deball a man, and write a fetching song about it on any given afternoon. They can also do the vulnerable vocal equivalent of languishing on the couch with an ice cream pint. That's range.

No matter how much of a laughingstock she becomes, I keep loving Amy Winehouse. When someone is willing to rip open her soul for my listening pleasure, I forgive just about anything. Hence I still want to set Amy up in a little hutch in the backyard with some fresh straw and clean water and care for her until she gets better. Sure it's irrational. But if you were off listening to Mary Wells and the Shangri-Las when the other little girls were on Tiffany and Debbie Gibson, hearing that Motowny girl group sound coming from a sassy, contemporary London Jewgirl is too much to resist. In interviews about her hypothetical next album, Winehouse has said it will be like Back to Black, "but with more ska." Which makes me want to cry, because I would like to hear that so very, very much, and its future existence is dubious.

Not that I mind listening to Back to Black even yet more. The title track manages to chop and screw chipper Motown into the darkest of lamentations on love lost: We only said goodbye with words/I died a hundred times. (Of course she's talking about that fuckup Blake guy, but never you mind.) And "Wake Up Alone" is a slow jam straight out of the secret Kellerman's staff party in Dirty Dancing. She really croons on that one:

If I was my heart
I'd rather be restless
Second I stop the sleep catches up
And I'm--breathless
This ache in my chest
As my day is done now
The dark covers me
And I cannot run now

The sensational Estelle also harkens back to all my favorite old soul. But if Amy is widely known as cracked-out "Rehab" chick, the general listening public knows Estelle as just the popstar of "American Boy." Only marginally less of an underestimation. Her Shine album reminds me so much of Aretha's Sparkle that I have to wonder if the one-shimmery-word title thing is coincidental. The splendiferous "More Than Friends" samples the Queen of Soul version of "Bridge Over Troubled Waters," so it had me at hello. Then it overclosed with tender lyrics and Estelle's sultrily earthy rapping:

Don't play me like a extra
I got speaking roles
I am not that ho
I am so much more

And the "American Boy" thing is no joke. Seems every big man on the American music campus wants to musically date Estelle. Her "(feat...)" stable includes John Legend, Kanye West, Wyclef and Sean Paul. And the latter sounds especially excited to introduce the two of them (Sean-a-Paul and ESTELLE!) at the beginning of the "Come Over" remix.
Lily Allen's offerings remind me not of my old Motown tapes, but of driving out to Orange County for ska shows in high school. Her first hit "Smile" does, anyway. And come to think of it, I wish her new album, It's Not Me, It's You sounded more like "Smile" and less like microwave popcorn with fake butter. (You can say something mean like that to her, because she can dish it out, hence she can take it.) She may be lightweight, but she is just the perfect confection. A vanilla meringue, spiked with vodka.
Brits are always better at using the language, and Londoners seem to specialize in rich, cussy slang. Why say "lots of diamonds" when you can say "fuckloads" like Lily? (Amy also enjoys nouns that employ the "fuck-" stem, as in, What kind of fuckery is this?) The BBS's use those dirty mouths to dress down men, which is a healthy tonic if you listen to fuckloads of misogynistic rap, as I do. There's nothing quite like Estelle's final blow at the end of "No Substitute Love": You need to grow a couple boy/You ain't bout nothin boy.

It's Not Me, It's You goes ahead and takes it there by having a song entitled "Fuck You." It's about a bigoted individual to whose racism and homophobia Lily Allen is saying "fuck you very much"--but you know that theme was an afterthought. The girl wanted to have a song called "Fuck You." And then she was like, well it would be too obvious if it was another of my deballing tracks, so I'll go in this unexpected political direction. She never tires of using her cherubic voice to say something demonic, and I haven't tired of it yet either. If and when I do tire, I'll write her a saccharine-toned grenade of self-esteem demolition. Because she can dish it out.

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"Mad Men" and Asshole By Proxy Syndrome

Award-season hype may lead to a swarming of "Mad Men" dvds in mailboxes. Please be aware that prolonged and/or enthusiastic viewing of this program is associated with Asshole By Proxy Syndrome. Symptoms include painful guilt over neglected household chores, fear of committing adultery not commensurate with actual propensity to cheat, spontaneous desire to apologize to women in general and, in advanced cases, paranoid delusions of growing a curly pig tail and soft, felty pig ears. Researchers believe that watching the sexist behavior of the program's archetypal fifties males can cause enlightened, twenty-first century men to believe they themselves are the assholes.

If you must watch, preventive measures are recommended. Plan "Mad Men" viewing dates in advance and offer to both make dinner and do dishes on that night. Also note that women may take advantage of your ABPS by assuming a victim stance and initiating post-show arguments. Should this occur, politely remind your mate that you are not the asshole by scurrying off to the kitchen to wax the linoleum.

This has been a message from the Sanjay Gupta.

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HOT IN '09: Five Trends to Hope to Watch

#5
"African African Americans"

Immigrants from the Motherland! Debra Dickerson cumbersomely calls them "African African Americans" (or "not black" for short) but I call them just the Rx for America's endlessly smoldering racial problems! When Akon sang, We takin over, that was literal. Blurring racial lines, confusing our stereotypes, staking their claim to hip hop, keeping those parking garages humming (advanced stereotype alert), bumping Asian-Americans for the model minority title, growing their numbers by the day and, now--in their ultimate triumph--ruling our nation, "African African Americans" are poised to have the Best Year Ever. Which city boasts most of them? See below.


#4
Economics

Keynes is back and multiplyinger than ever. While a boon to the nation, this is rather a shame for me personally, having sent my econ degree to the shredder for the sake of my "dreams" of *writing*. Fortunately, the president-elect has more love for the Evans building at Cal than I could ever muster, tapping ShawtyLo Tyson, Xtina Romer and Elfconomists cliquemember Robert Reich as advisers. Expect bearded ones Ben Bernanke, Dean Baker and Paul Krugman to play the swashbuckling heroes as we ford the recession rapids.





#3

The Female Gaze

2008's "Sexiest Man Alive" had to earn it like women do: by submitting to relentless, humiliating objectification. The movie Australia was one big advertisement for Hugh Jackman's ass, culminating in an oiled-chest camera pan for the ages. Here's hoping it's a trend. The way Robin Thicke tweezes eyebrows and Game cultivates biceps and Andy Samberg bares flesh (the lovable/fuckable way, not Chris Farley gross-for-laughs style) it may well be. Americans don't really have the will to neuter popular culture, even if we complain it's oversexed. The alternative remedy is to flip the script and let women in on the ogling. Men may end up deciding that being an object can kind of suck and we'll all reach some happy compromise. At any rate, the terribly unfair slob husband:hot wife nineties sitcom construct is dead and Seth Rogen must hit the gym before he's assed out.

#2
Gayness

The recent rise in gay activism and acceptance is sure to bring more folks bounding out of the closet in 2009. LiLo and Wanda Sykes? Missy, Anderson: it's time! This is a gay-in-the-sense-of-joyous shift for all, as it increases the homosexual dating pools and excises closeted gays from the straight dating pool. Healthy housekeeping for both populations. A nationwide upsurge in happy relationships is sure to result.

#1
DC: The Place to Be
Don't just think of the Obamas. Think of the small army of smart-but-cool young people moving in to staff the guvment. New York is so inhumane; LA: so superficial. In 2009, DC is The Capital. And if we can't be in DC, we'll try to be DC. Picture celebs at red carpets with fake Secret Service escorts and politics bars playing nonstop CSPAN. We're all going to be calling our transit systems the Metro and clamoring for taxation without representation. Cherry blossoms are the it flower this spring, so order your bareroot saplings now. And get ready for more of the Backyard Band rapper who played Slim Charles on The Wire, because in aught-nine we're hearing nothing but go-go.

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hol.o.gram

It is customary for me to make fun of will.i.am. And so it will be today. But his instantly-churned Obama celebration song, "It's a New Day" and the accompanying video are irresistible. The song was released Wednesday the 5th, because of course everything in the modern age must happen mega-instantaneously to be worth anything. And just to up the ante on techno-neato-rifics, i.am appeared on CNN on election night in: hologram form. (Him and Anderson Cooper trying to act all breezy like they just felt hologram would be the most sensible way to do the interview was hilarious. Just the two of them together was God's gift to Cleb.)




So, watch the video. Download the song. Feel warm. When i.am says it'll be "You/ And me/Together," I'm not gonna go all brat on him like, no, I'm not coming.

But: a catty aside. Obviously will.i. is not expressing pure feelings from the 5th ("Woke up this morning/feeling all right") since the song was produced way before. So that's a blemish on his artistic integrity, although surely--snicker--the first. And then there's this curious lyric: "I've been fighting for tomorrow/All my life." Was he fighting for tomorrow when he made all those ho anthems for Fergie? Just saying. I don't like how he plays this pimpy-trashy/political-hopey split and gets away with it.

Okay now I'm nice again. It really has felt like a new day. I'm glad there's a smiling video with Kyra Sedgwick and Aisha Tyler cameos to keep reminding me.

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Why I Keep Up

I KNOW it's counterintuitive: Keeping Up With the Kardashians is good for my self-esteem.

The Kardashians bump is remarkably reliable. I watch the show, wondering how anyone could be so flagrantly incestuous, wondering what draws me to such trash, wondering when it will end already, and walk away thinking half an hour is squandered.

Not so! After a certain incubation period, generally between one and three hours, I feel better about myself. This is partly due to what I call the Girls Next Door Effect, the comforting realization that people living ostensibly glamorous lives are bigger losers than oneself.

But the other part has to do with a circuitous logic that seeps into my subconscious during the one- to three-hour incubation period. To wit: this is a show on television, actually a quite popular one, and there are various hazy reasons one could proffer for the show's existence--the family is vaguely famous, hot, rich, glamorous--but these are merely derivative. The kernel is the Kard.ass.ian badonkadonk. And, of course, specifically, that of Kim. This has to be the grandest celebration of the tuchus the world has yet seen.









Thank you, Kim's butt.
(Kim's butt: "You're welcome, Kleb Kardassian.")
Once this realization seeps in, I can expect to see myself in the mirror differently for up to a week. Why, I'm no chubalub, I'm Kim without the tatas and the nose job! Serious booty is always served with a side of cellulite, as Khloe helpfully explained to the camera in the calendar-for-Reggie ep.

It wasn't always this way. When I was wee, my mother warned that I stood to inherit the dread Miller butt. (Which only became farcical when I grew up to pack far more back than any Miller.) Mum came of age under the reign of Big Tits, Tiny Ass and has never had a Mixalot awakening.


THE RECENT Kardashians highlights special "Junk in the Trunk" really encapsulated the concept. The featured highlight? A how-is-this-on-tv shot of Kim trying to stuff her big back cheeks into little jeans, a muffin top of nekkid butt meat attesting to her failure. I have since been informed that this is a common porn trope.

Imagine my shock. Because, how many times have I faced just such a vision (albeit, with skivvies) in a dressing room mirror and fled the store drowning in a pool of shame?

Never again.

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*!POP!* Culture Report

David Montero said he feared pop culture was on the decline. I scoffed. I told him there was lots of great new hip hop--although Brian, responsible for bringing said hip hop into our home, Eeyored it and agreed with Montero and Nas that hip hop is dead.

What about Game's "Olde English," the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful song ever? (No, ever. It's not up for debate.) And that Timbaland beat for "The Way I Are" is so awesome that yesterday I played it on my pretend iPod in my head for 35 minutes on the elliptical. (I ain't got no Visa/I ain't got no Red American Express. I burned like a whole muffin's worth of calories!) Even the unbearable ego of Kanye West has managed to turn out two hot new tracks, I told Montero with irrepressible optimism. He's been in Pakistan, so he wasn't up on all this.

He moped on, But what about rock and tv and...Well, said I, what about that Killers song that goes, I don't shine if you don't shine and Sarah Silverman and Stephen Colbert with their own shows? Maybe it's just the first time I've descended from my mountain lair of intellectual superiority to pay attention, but this moment in pop culture seems just great to me. Fandamntastic. Seriously, do you watch Best Week Ever?

Of course I was positioning myself rather dangerously.

The very next day there was this adorable call-and-response on Wild 94.9:

Baby where'd you get your body from
Tell me where'd you get your body from
Baby where'd you get your body from
Tell me where'd you get your body fromI got it from my mama
I got it from my mama
I got it from my mama

At first I couldn't imagine who was responsible for this schlock. I should have put it together immediately that only will.i.am.shameless could make such a horrible, horrible song with a super catchy beat and only Fergie could lower herself enough to sing, All of this stuff right here/I got all this from my mama. As if family shit isn't crazy enough, now we have to bring in this creepy sexiness inheritance idea.

It didn't get better when I heard the new Justin Timberlake/50 Cent song, which sounded like a good idea at first. This track had "matchmaker" written all over it. By which I mean not that it sounded like it should have been on the "Fiddler on the Roof" soundtrack, but that it sounded like a pairing strategically designed by a focus group for audience maximization rather than an organic creative collaboration. I can just imagine some Yenta at the studio thinking, Fitty needs to reach more middle American white kids and Justin needs better hip hop cred...
Oh well.

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DEEP THOUGHTS

If the sexy never left




then why's everybody on my shit?











(Just ponder it.)

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!*POP*! Quiz

What rhetorical term applies perfectly to these lyrics from Wash Heights rapper Mims?


This is why I'm hot
I'm hot cuz I'm fly
You ain't cuz you not


HINT: It starts with a "T".

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Sexiest Voices

That title was just to lure you. Really I'm here to promote Stewpot.

Just kidding!

Top 5 SEXIEST VOICES

5. SEAN PAUL
Just a Jamaican accent goes a long way. All the better if he favors incomprehensibles like, "The gal dem Schillaci Sean da Paul." Picture him saying:

Just gimme the gees an we be clubbing yow.
Gal a make we please and we be thuggin' now.
Sippin' Hennesey an we'll be bubblin' yow.
Set we mind at ease we got to take it slow.

Also see what I mean about the popularity of my poultry? Hennessey! Sippin'--that sounds obscene!


4. COREY FLINTOFF
Picture him saying: "From NPR News in Washington, I'm Corey Flintoff."


3. SACHA BARON COHEN
Oh I know he's so played out right now, but I can't resist. Hopefully needless to say, I do NOT refer to the Borat voice, but SBC's real voice as revealed to me in his Golden Globe speech. (But the Ali G voice will do, too.) Picture him saying: "I thought to myself, I better win a bloody award for this."


2. PATRICK FITZGERALD
Brooklyn-bred prosecutor of the powerful. Hot. Picture him saying, "At the end of the day what appears is that Mr. Libby's story...was not true. It was false. He was at the beginning of the chain of phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government to a reporter. And then he lied about it afterwards, under oath and repeatedly." Who's your daddy?


1. SHOCK G
Don't think "Humpty Dance." Think "Freaks of the Industry." You know, the one who put the satin on your panties. Picture him saying:

Still bringin satin for them drawers/
Velvet for the mic and got a pound for the cause



I didn't do a ladies category. Any nominees from you lady-lovers? Keisha Cole?

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