The Greatest Song Ever of the Week

The Greatest Song Ever of the Week is Cunninlynguists' “Southernunderground.”  To listen to this song is to confront hip hop in its totality.  Put bluntly (pun intended), this song is a monster, in all senses of the words.

Cunninlynguists is not an act I plan on sharing with my girlfriend anytime soon, let alone my mother.  Hip hop has all different kinds of misogyny it can throw at you, but “Southernunderground” features the type that might be most least favorite: the hate that technically proficient emcees often use to assure the listener that they aren’t bougie.  In the span of two minutes, each of the three emcees manages to write off women as sexual punch lines.

The frustrating thing is that Cunninlynguists clearly don’t need to rely on tired, hateful clichés, because they are obvious master of their forms.  These dudes typify the early 2000s come up of the underground, where rappers could conjure up internal rhyme schemes so complicated it hurts to try to plot them, all without sacrificing any delivery or charisma.  Listening to “Southernunderground,” it’s no longer worth arguing that anything besides hip hop is the highest, most advanced form of oral expression that we’ve ever seen.

Non fans need not apply.  Much of it is completely indefensible.  But it is wildly creative, completely addictive, and never compromises anything.  It’s hip hop.

Guns in Schools

Last week, the Washington Post ran an article which describes how the school system in Butler, Pennsylvania is hiring former state troopers to serve as armed security guards.  The article is fantastic and presents about the best possible case for arming school employees.  The officers who are serving in Butler Schools deserve nothing but our respect, and the Butler School System deserves all credit for demanding that only the most responsible, best trained personnel serve in these positions.  That alone allays my greatest fear, which is civilians with guns taking shots at people besides the bad guys.  In an emergency situation, I have a hard time imagining anyone but a trained professional hitting the person they need to stop.  With trained officers, there's a much lower (but, to be sure, a non zero) chance that they choke.

It still won't prevent the unthinkable.

The sad, bad, awful truth is that so many of these tragedies end with the gunman turning the gun on themselves.  A lone ex-cop with a pistol isn't going to deter someone who has already decided to die.  We have multiple examples of serial killers whose planning is as thorough as it is horrifying.  Think about the bombs the Colorado movie theater shooter set up in his apartment or the planning the Columbine kids did.  These dudes can be smart.  They can and will scout their targets.  And the first bullet they fire is going to head directly for the armed security guard.  The guard is a sitting duck.  

And I repeat: no one has told me how we are going to pay for an armed guard in every school.  There are roughly 15,000 schools in the United States.  Say we can find enough retired officers to staff every school and that, out of generosity, the officers all agree to take a $30,000 salary.  That's 450 millions dollars.  45 plus seven zeros, before we factor in the cost of training and benefits.

It's simply not a viable solution.

Dream Weaver

I have broken the Seventh Seal of the New Age Apocalypse.  I have started to keep a dream journal.  If you don't, I cannot recommend it enough.

I never gave dreams much thought, even when I encountered therapists who encouraged me to treat them more seriously.  The psychological approach to dreams seems so clinical and cold to me, and, although I never consciously had this thought, I think I always wanted my dreams to remain free, wild, and mysterious.  The idea of putting dreams on the couch seemed to rob them of all their potency.

Thanks to Arthur Magazine, I know I'm not the only one that feels that way.  The cover story of their big comeback issue is an interview with comic book artist Rick Veitch, who has spent the better part of 20 years writing and illustrating his dreams for over 20 years.  That's his work on the cover.

Something about the combination of dreams and comic books spoke to me.  Comics are one of the last places where the free, wild, and mysterious can still bubble up into the larger culture, unless you think a Norse god teaming up with the Tin Man and an unfrozen WWII soldier is standard everyday happenings.  I love comics but have never been able to participate in the creative process.  I can't draw, and I haven't written any fiction since high school.

Rick Veitch tells me I don't need to do either.  All I need to do is dream, and I can play with the same magic he does.

So, yeah, I started a dream journal this weekend, and I am already amazed at what I am uncovering.  Thus far, because the cosmos has a sense of humor, the primary benefits I have seen have been psychological.  I am amazed at what writing and rehashing my dreams has told me about how I carry guilt around.  Some of the details have been painful to write down, but doing so has let me walk around this week with a little less weight on my shoulders.  Being aware of some previously subconscious coping mechanisms has let me understand myself a little better, and I'm able to be just that much gentler with myself.

Thus far, I haven't dreamt up the next great superhero franchise, but, hey, the Dream Every Day Project is less than a week old.  Give it time.

Fox News Doesn't Like Yoga

Every time Fox News says anything, I am reminded of a conversation I had with one of my favorite colleagues at Wake Forest.  She would give some small extra credit to any student who went to an on-campus political event and wrote a page about it.  Our conversation revolved around a student who had attended, and written a piece about, a talk by David Horowitz, a semi-famous right wing bomb thrower who has written some pretty abhorrent screeds about Muslims, African Americans, and other groups.

Our disagreement centered around whether the student should get the extra credit.  My colleague did not give the student extra credit and explained to him that Horowitz was closer to hate speech than legitimate political dialogue.  She reasoned that our job was to broaden students minds and make them more tolerant of difference, and that Horowitz's message was fundamentally opposed to that goal.  Clearly, she would not give extra credit for someone who attended a Klan rally, and she saw this as closer to that than to legitimate political dialogue.

I agreed with her that Horowitz often trafficked in racism and other unacceptable isms but that the solution was to engage his ideas, not to shut them out.  In my opinion, the modern conservative bluster industry has made far too much hay through claiming to be shut out of certain institutions like academia.  Better to welcome Horowitz's ideas into civilized debate, because they can't survive it.  A good teacher should be able to engage Horowitz's arguments and show, without malice and bias, that they are ridiculous and reprehensible and point students towards more thoughtful arguments that square with a person's conservative leanings (or liberal, or libertarian, or whatever).

My bias is to include.  It's not a fool-proof policy.  Certainly, hatemongers throughout history have preyed on people's inclination to give them space to express views that led to devastating consequences.  But I have faith that people will see the light and gravitate towards good arguments.  Moreover, I think when you don't let trolls get under your skin, their arguments will implode due to sheer ludicrousness, and everyone can have a little chuckle at the implosion.

And that is why I can't get too excited by anything Fox News says, especially not when they blame yoga for making Americans into wusses.

What Racism Looks Like in 2013

You ask what factors predict a person's likelihood of becoming a serial killer.

You run this photo.

And yet the words "white" or "Caucasian" appear nowhere in your article, and the first mention of gender is buried in the second half of the article.

I mean...

Slang Rap Democracy

You don't know what cysage is, although you've certainly cysed a bunch of shit.  Maybe you're thinking about cysing this post.  It might not be a good post, but you like me, so you're going to share it on your wall.  Boom.  Cysage

Nor do you know what a cuban b is, which is really unfortunate, because you've ABSOLUTELY cuban b'd a boatload of stuff.  If I know you, I've probably done some shit to piss you off.  If we're still cool, you've cuban b'd my nonsense.

Both those terms come from Southeast DC.  I only know about them thank to the FiyaStarter Crew, hosts of the funniest podcast on the Internet.  Every Thursday morning, you can wake up and download three hours of unfettered opinion, presented by gentlemen not at all interested in how you think they should sound.  They're doing what groups of guys do every day: busting each others balls in language only they can understand

What's crazy is, these DC motherfuckers have absolutely changed the way I think.  I was reading something the other day that didn't make any sense, and I said, aloud, "man, what a cyse."  I called it a cyse because that's what it was.  It wasn't just bullshit, although it was that.  It wasn't just a pain in my ass, although it was that too.  It was someone writing something that they talked themselves into believing, and all my fellow FS heads are nodding right now, because if that ain't a cyse nothing is.

In other words, a podcast has changed my reality.  That was the squarest example I have yet seen of the Digital Age's direct influence on the deepest workings of my poor little brain.

I guess it surprises me every time I think of someone cysing or cuban b'ing some stuff, because some part of me clings to an antiquated view of the relationship between our physical and digital selves.  Often those of us who spend so much time on the Internet think of our real lives as separate from our online lives.  In my experience, that distinction is artificial.  There's not a whole lot of difference between Bryan Shelly, the entity who moves through the physical world, and the various bshelly logins I use in various corners of the digital world.  Really, the only difference is that bshelly is a little more prone to yelling.

What I find most interesting is, as what has happened with me and cysage, how my digital life influences my "real" life. For a long time I have realized the effects of, say, the choice the web sites one frequents impacts one's view of current events or even their evaluations of public figures.  But this was something different.  This was something akin to learning a word that has no counterpoint in my native language, like, oh, schaudenfreude.  Prior to learning the German word, I guess I could have imagined the concept, but the word itself distilled the concept to its essence and allowed it to be more fully integrated into my life.

Potential for good here?  As KBadd would say, "SURE!"  I find it kind of heartening that three regular dudes from DC can bring me into their world enough to change mine.  Maybe the loftiest dreams of the Internet as a place where people, rather than massive corporate entities, control the majority of the content are long dead, but my experience with Fiyastarter shows that normal people can reach out across time and space to shape other people's concepts of reality.

Everything and Nothing That You Were

Yesterday, as part of its year in review, the New York Times ran a memoriam for Beastie Boy Adam Yauch that didn't sit well with me. Specifically, it maintained that MCA was never down with the Licensed To Ill-era frivolity:

"“Fight for Your Right” created expectations; the Beasties met those expectations by touring with cage dancers and a giant inflatable penis and hosing one another down with Budweiser onstage. But they weren’t those guys, not really....Even in “Licensed to Ill”-era interviews, you can see the Beasties already growing weary of playing the roles they’d assigned themselves."

This, frankly, is a load of shit. Yauch himself, in a quote the author includes, noted that he was more than willing to play along with the shenanigans: “I went and got drunk and made some stupid music.”

I have a problem with any attempt to scrub a person's record after they die. To do it after a Buddhist dies seems especially disrespectful and clueless.

Look, MCA was an asshole. He was a guy who gleefully made a lot of money putting women in cages on a stage.

And then he changed.

When we pretend, "oh, he was always this saintly person, they didn't REALLY mean all the bad shit they did," all we do is miss the fundamental lesson: Adam Yauch was an asshole. In my life, I have certainly been an asshole. If you haven’t been an asshole, you’ve been something else that you’re not proud of.

You know who else was things he wasn’t proud of? The Buddha. I prefer not to get into the Buddha’s previous lives stuff, but even if you accept that he was the end result of a lot of lives dedicated towards awakening, at the beginning of that chain of lives, the Buddha was not special. He was not a saint. He was as far from perfect as the rest of us. At some point in his chain of lives, the Buddha was an average guy.

And then he changed.

He got better. He found calm, and he knew that if he, vile sinner though he might be, could find enlightenment, anyone can.

When we make people we admire into saints, we rob them of their humanity, and we lose the most critical message of their lives, which is that anyone can be a hero. Anyone can wake up. It doesn’t take someone special. It doesn’t take a saint. It takes you, and you can do it right now. No matter what you or I have done, an end of our suffering is available to us. It is our birthright, it is our destiny, and we can have it right now, in this moment.

Happy New Years.