0

What was the point of that?

08.30.05 @ 12:05AM Tags

“Out of the Closet” has been up for three weeks now. So far I’ve failed in my ultimate ambition of getting sued by R. Kelly, but I have succeeded in getting 35,000 visitors to come to my nascent web site. Which is wonderful, although it’s kind of sad to think that the one thing I’ve done in life so far that’s been seen by the most people… involves riding R. Kelly’s coattails.

Whatever. Onward and upward. Thanks to everyone that listened; I hope it was good for a laugh.

Because websites are sophisticated beasts, I was actually able to see where many of the visitors were coming from. So I went to some forums to see what people were saying. Here are some quotes I found:

1) WTF this shit is crazy!!! The Part 2 is very…………..wow… Hopefully he doesn’t release a video for this…

2) This is some of the funniest shit I’ve heard in a while. I like the effort he made to dramatize it this extreme. And the climax with the UUUUUuuuuuu OOOoooOo variations,,…. GENIOUS!

3) Hahahahahah that’s so fucking hilarious. My brother, his 2 friends and I were all laughing so hard. I was in tears. It’s so badly put together at some parts but it still hilarious.

4) Whoever edited that is crazy.

5) the song is too damn predictable

6) probably some fat, unpopular kid with no girlfriend and obviously no left hand (you know what i mean) put this together…

I love it. Since it’s my site, I get to respond:

1) A video would have been difficult, although someone made a Sims version of the original (which even made MTV, briefly), and they could probably have some fun making a Sims video of this version.

2) Do I have to say it? There is something funny about misspelling “genius.”

3) “So badly put together.” Well, see, when you’re working with the vocal and backing all on one track, you don’t really have the luxury of… nevermind. I’m glad you found it funny.

4) Apparently I am not only “crazy,” but also simultaneously…

5) “Too predictable.” Wait–the song is called “Out of the Closet”–what did you think was going to happen? A sartorial exorcism?

6) This last comment was priceless. Except I can’t actually figure out what he meant by “no left hand (you know what i mean).” Presumably he was making some sort of masturbation joke, but really, how does only having one hand motivate me to remix an R. Kelly song?

In addition to masturbatory accusations, there were also a lot of “this guy has too much time on his hands” comments. Which I expected. But in general, I don’t understand people who say that. Is it more admirable to be giving most of your waking hours to a corporation in exchange for an ephemeral amount of money, as most of our population does, instead of doing whatever it is that warrants said pseudo-criticism? This type of comment is especially vexing when it is made by someone who has 19,476 posts on a Magic: The Gathering message board.

It’s been fun. No “special lowbrow edition” banner anymore. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming. Which is not at all regularly-scheduled.

Oh, and if you see Mr. Kelly, send him this way.

5

What is a Dechievement?

08.12.05 @ 7:03PM Tags

The concept of the dechievement is simple: in the struggle to “make it” as an artist, rising above the competition is not the only way of garnering attention. Essentially, if you are trying to stretch the boundaries of what’s been done before, it’s possible to undercut what already exists, rather than trying to hold yourself to a higher standard. Achieving greater heights is one way of making a name for yourself; dechieving is much easier, and is often more effective.

A dechievement is also sometimes referred to as a New Low.

Let’s use a mountain as an analogy for quality here. In this case your average artist starts off as middle-of-the-road, or in this case, middle-of-the-mountain. Now to achieve greatness through quality you’d have to get to the top of the mountain and plant your flag. This would require complicated planning of unprecedented routes up the North face, and tenacious navigation of the steepest slopes. It’d be much easier for you to get down the mountain via established and well-traveled routes, and then leave your mark there. But you can’t just stop at base camp and hang out with all the other hopefuls; no, to separate yourself from the pack you’d have to go lower, and plant your flag in a riverbed down in the valley, where there are no other flags. At this low altitude, your flag might actually be noticed. Every year only a few flags get planted at the summit, and only a few get planted deep in the canyon; the rest are all in the middle of the mountain, and no one remembers those.

The key to dechieving is to drastically undercut existing works to the point where what you’ve done is clearly intentional, so there can be no mistaking you as merely mediocre. Reaching New Lows is also an effective way of avoiding people’s instinctual ability to separate the wheat from the chaff; works that achieve New Lows separate themselves from the average and below-average by either being so bad they’re good, or by being so bad that they deserve their own category of bad. If you can manage to successfully lower the bar in this respect, you have achieved New Lows.

EXAMPLES OF DECHIEVEMENTS

For recent examples you can look to rap music for the (least) shining examples of this trend: at the time of this writing (July 2005), the dechievement championship belt is currently held by the Ying Yang Twins, with their song “Wait (the Whisper Song).” A couple years ago Khia held the title, with her song “My Neck, My Back.” Before that it went to Eminem for any number of his early tracks. Although Eminem was also a talented lyricist (and white, which also helped his popularity), he decided to use his abilities to achieve New Lows.

Here are some examples from the aforementioned songs. Remember that the above became popular not by really doing anything entirely new, but by being more violent, more explicit, more misogynistic, or just plain dirtier than anything that had come before. Caution, uncensored:

Eminem – Just Don’t Give a Fuck / Still Don’t Give a Fuck
The Slim Shady LP, 1999

Impulsive thinker, compulsive drinker, addict
Half animal, half man
Dumpin your dead body inside of a fuckin trash can
With more holes than an Afghan

I walked into a gunfight with a knife to kill you
And cut you so fast when your blood spilled it was still blue
I’ll hang you til you dangle and chain you at both ankles
And pull you apart from both angles
I wanna crush your skull til your brains leak out of your veins
And bust open like broken water mains (psscchhhh)

Khia – My Neck, My Back (Lick it)
Thug Misses, 2002

Lick it good, suck this pussy just like you should
Right now, lick it good
Suck this pussy just like you should
My neck, my back
Lick my pussy AND my crack

Then, you roll your tongue
From the, crack back to the front
Then ya, suck it all ’til I shake and cum nigga
Make sure I keep bustin nuts nigga
All over yo face and stuff

Ying Yang Twins – Wait (The Whisper Song)
United State of Atlanta, 2005

We need to make our way to the bed
You can start usin’ ya head
Ya like to fuck, have ya legs open all in the buck
Do it up, slappin’ ass, girl the sex get rough

Hey bitch
Wait ’til you see my dick
Wait ’til you see my dick
Hey bitch
Wait ’til you see my dick
Imma beat that pussy up
Beat the pussy up, beat the pussy up
Beat the pussy up, beat the pussy up
Beat the pussy up, beat the pussy up
Beat the pussy up, beat the pussy up

That was educational.

Thanks to the Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive for these transcriptions.

THE POINTLESS CENSORING OF NEW LOWS

I chose the latter two songs because, with a little bit of censoring, they both got significant radio airplay. Much like the censoring of another New Lows candidate–Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 hit “Closer”–the censorship employed on these songs wasn’t going to fool anyone. The chorus to the album version of “Closer” was “I wanna fuck you like an animal,” wheras the censored version was changed to “I wanna f_ck you like an animal.” What could f_ck possibly mean?! I don’t know, and neither do the kids. It’s a complete f_cking mystery.

The problem with changing a couple words in a song is that it does nothing to change the meaning of what is being said. And if we’re really worried about corrupting our youth (which I can’t say I am, although these are some rather egregious offenses), what a song is saying should be more important than the number of bad words it uses. For the radio version of the Whisper Song, “Wait ’til you see my dick” was changed to “Wait ’til I show you this,” which I’m fairly certain invokes the same imagery. But I do have a solution here. Instead of using the music video as a piece of promotion for the artist and album, you could use it to change the meaning of the song itself:

Wait ’til I show you this (the Ying Yang Twins present their collection of impressionist paintings)

Wait ’til I show you this (they show off a chalkboard full of advanced calculus theorems)

Wait ’til I show you this (in their backyard, they reveal a bocce court)

HOW BAD IS SUPERBAD?

Now I’m not categorically decrying the achievement of New Lows, because what most people do not admit is that achieving such depths of badness often requires a certain amount of intelligence. It is often a pragmatic decision made by the artist–or some controlling party behind the artist–to essentially not go for it. So this is not a declaration of the dechievement as a crime against the art form, or a lamentation of particular dechievements for corrupting our youth. Indeed, reaching New Lows is a sometimes-successful career move, and no one can blame someone for wanting to be successful.

But it certainly doesn’t take nearly as much intelligence to achieve New Lows as it does to try to create something new. New Lows can be a pragmatic decision, yes; but daring, no. As the author Mary McCarty was recently quoted as saying, “If someone tells you he is going to make ‘a realistic decision,’ you immediately understand that he is going to do something bad.” Or, in this case, superbad. Decomplishing New Lows is “realistic” simply because it is a career-oriented decision, and not at all risky. And this is the larger problem in our arts today: lack of risk-taking.

THE ARTIST’S DILEMMA

So here’s the conundrum. If you decide to try to create something new, you run the risk of no one understanding it. If no one understands it then you might have a deluge of negative reviews (if you get reviewed at all), and you might be written off as a failure. If you decide to go for New Lows and fail, however, you weren’t really trying anyway, so it’s no skin off your back; you wanted to create something bad, and you did (just not bad enough). And while you may not have made your mark, you’ll probably succeed in achieving New Lows the next time around, since it’s not particularly difficult (just lower the bar further). More importantly, you didn’t have to stick your neck out and risk having your head cut off like the guy who tried something new. So despite all the bad language, striving for New Lows is not at all dangerous–in fact you could call it a “pussy” move, artistically.

While dechievement in music often entails talking about genitalia, striving to do something that hasn’t been done before is what really takes balls. New Lows never last, because someone will always come along and achieve Lower Lows. But having balls? That’s worth remembering.

58

R. Kelly - Out of the Closet (REMOVED)

08.10.05 @ 3:00AM Tags

In August 2005 I had an idea to boost traffic to my site. It was a really bad idea: I thought, since R. Kelly’s Advanced series Trapped in the Closet is essentially a 20-minute song that uses the same beat throughout, could you take his tale of sexual infidelity and re-cut it to tell an entirely different story? With judicious editing one could rearrange all of his words — while sticking to the beat — and come up with a new, even more ridiculous narrative. Naturally, having nothing better to do — and based on a friend’s opinion that I couldn’t pull it off — I decided to try. The result was a five chapter story in which R. Kelly confesses to a number of sexual infidelities, including several episodes with men.

It worked: the parody received something like 75,000 views in a week (I’m on a different stats system now so I can’t go back that far), and a bunch of comments running the gamut from “this is the funniest thing ever” to “you must be the most pathetic human being in the world.” They’re all preserved here for posterity’s sake (they’re split onto pages, so only the latest are displayed unless you click on the previous page numbers at the bottom).

I knew it was a terrible idea, but since I couldn’t think of anyone else having done this before (that is, mocking a song by using the original singer’s own voice, and taking his words completely out of context), I had to see it through. Also, it goes without saying, although I’m saying it anyway, that the same guy who does ridiculous things like naming an album 12 Play–”because it’s three times better than foreplay”–should have the tables turned on him, sexually. Including the kitchen table. (That was a reference to another song of his, In the Kitchen, which does not touch on any culinary topics, although it may include references to cunnilingus). Because R. Kelly never released an a cappella version of the song, the audio editing took longer than I expected and took some fairly advanced maneuvering to pull off. And yes, I wanted to take the story in a different, preferably more original, direction, but I had to work with what I had–and the lyrics to Trapped in the Closet didn’t really lend themselves to anything else.

Anyway, I still think the resulting song is impressive from an audio editing standpoint, but I’ve taken it down — sorry I couldn’t “keep it on the download.”

0

On-demand publishing is cool. That is, if you find that sort of thing cool, or even remotely interesting

08.8.05 @ 11:12PM Tags

So I just found out about Lulu.com, which is a publishing website, primarily for books. Basically you can get distribution for a book you’ve written without having a publisher–they print and ship books on-demand (it’s kind of like what mp3.com was for music, back when it was useful). What a great idea–you could also use it to publish magazines, journals, etc.

CustomFlix is sort of the same idea for DVDs, although you have to pay setup and maintenance fees there, and DVD-Rs are not the same as commercially replicated DVDs. I think this on-demand publishing system works better for books, because DVDs are very cheap to duplicate professionally, whereas books are not (a year or two ago I evaluated CustomFlix for a DVD project, and the site only made sense if you were going to sell less than about 250 DVDs. For my project, which never saw the light of day, that number was 0, so it didn’t make sense).

The idea behind sites like Lulu, CustomFlix, and CafePress is to remove obstacles to getting a good idea distributed. I was going to use this to segue into saying the same thing about the so-called Digital Video revolution, but I feel like that’s been said a thousand times before, and I should probably mention the whole DV-is-enabling thing in my “About this site” section anyway, which I still haven’t written.

The other question, of course, is whether Lulu will just be inundated by bad writing and shoddy product, kind of like this website; of course it will. Now anyone with a computer can publish a book.

But that’s the way it should be, and not just for books, but movies, music, etc. The more the obstacles are removed, the more the emphasis is placed on the one thing that should matter the most: luck. Damn! I meant to say talent.

1

Is R. Kelly Advanced?

08.3.05 @ 1:43AM Tags

Damn. With the all-capitals formatting of the title you can’t tell that “Advanced” is capitalized. It’s supposed to look like this:

Is R. Kelly Advanced?

This clarification is necessary because the uppercase version of Advanced means something different than the lowercase version. Well, what is this difference? What does “Advanced” mean? I’m glad I asked! Chuck Klosterman introduced the masses to this theory with his Esquire article Real Genius: An introduction to the highly advanced theory of Advancement, an entirely new way to appreciate Sting, Val Kilmer, C-Murder, and other profound artists. It is highly recommended reading, but if you’re short on time (why are you visiting this utterly nonessential website?), here are some quotes:

Advancement is a cultural condition in which an Advanced individual—i.e., a true genius—creates a piece of art that 99 percent of the population perceives to be bad. However, this is not because the work itself is flawed; this is because most consumers are not Advanced. Now, don’t assume this means that everything terrible is awesome, or vice versa… The key to Advancement is that Advanced artists a) do not do what is expected of them but also b) do not do the opposite of what is expected of them.

The most Advanced hard-rock album ever was Music from "The Elder," by Kiss, the soundtrack for a movie that does not exist. Last year, rapper C-Murder was charged with murder. If you name yourself C-Murder and then you actually murder someone, consider yourself Advanced.

The bottom line is this: When a genius does something that appears idiotic, it does not necessarily mean he suddenly sucks. What it might mean is that he’s doing something you cannot understand, because he has Advanced beyond you.

It is my opinion that R. Kelly’s recent and bombastic 5-part saga, “Trapped in the Closet,” is undeniably and fantastically Advanced. The first time I heard Chapter 1 on the radio I had to stay in my car in the parking lot to finish listening to the song, in slack-jawed awe. The DJ then put the icing on the cake afterwards by stating, “Say what you will about R. Kelly, but the man is a musical genius.”

For clarification on this matter I e-mailed the co-founder of Advancement Theory, Jason Hartley (who runs the Advanced Theory Blog, which documents the transgressions of various Advanced artists), and he told me that if I felt I had a case for R’s Advancement, then I should put it forth. Well here it is: the Pied-Piper of R&B is not only Advanced, he may one day be inducted into the Advanced hall-of-fame.

Now I was going to engage in a long and academic discourse on this topic (that’s redundant–how many academic discourses are “short”?), but then I was hit by a different and unfortunate R. Kelly idea, which will be coming soon. If you have not heard “Trapped in the Closet,” or seen the accompanying long-form music video, I strongly suggest you visit R-Kelly.com and watch (and listen). Prepare to have your mind blown by Advancement in action.

UPDATE: If you have difficulty following the labyrinthian plot, please refer to these excellent cliff notes, which were posted the day after I wrote this. The plot is not actually complex, besides the parts that make no sense, but these cliff notes are very funny.