Category Archives: Blog

Is Iggy Azalea the Female Vanilla Ice?

Posted on by

Rap singer Vanilla Ice in 1991. (AP Photo)

 
Iggy Azalea and Vanilla Ice are both white rappers who were marketed like pop stars while also trying to tell us they were hardcore rappers. They’ve both achieved incredible levels of success only to be hampered by questions of artistic credibility. In Ice’s case, those questions ended his career. In Azalea’s case, I think it’s a real possibility that we may see history repeat itself.

In the past year, Azalea had two singles simultaneously at numbers one and two on Billboards Hot 100, and her debut album, the New Classic, hit number three on the Billboard 200 album chart and number one on the Rap Album chart. She’s also faced a backlash that has repeatedly called her credibility into question. Some of it is certainly understandable: she’s not only the first white woman to hit it big in hip-hop, but also an Australian, compounding her outsider status. One of the biggest questions hanging over her is the very sound of her voice. In interviews, her natural speaking voice doesn’t have a particularly heavy Aussie accent, probably the result of her living in the US for eight years. But it is discernable enough to make her “rap voice” all the more questionable. The harshest criticism is that she isn’t so much rapping as imitating black Americans.

One of the things that always made hip-hop interesting was that rapping was an extension of the spoken word art form, with the idea that one’s “rapping voice” would be consistent with one’s natural speaking voice. It also stands to reason that because rap and hip-hop were linked to poverty-stricken communities, the form’s performers and fans have had little patience for pretense or artifice. White performers like Beastie Boys and Eminem never pretended to be anything more than what they really are: crazy Jewish kids from Brooklyn who were too smart for their own good, and a mixed-up guy from a Detroit trailer park who found both solace and purpose in hip-hop.

On the other hand, even 20 years after Vanilla Ice’s pop career faded out, his true background remains shrouded in confusion. The biography put out by his record company appears to have been different from his actual life story, and there’s no way to know how much was written and released with his knowledge or consent. There are also questions about who actually wrote his biggest hit, “Ice Ice Baby.” Ice compounded the embarrassment when made when he denied that the main sample was taken from Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.” (For the record, it was, and he did end up having to share songwriting credit with Queen and Bowie, in addition to paying back royalties.)

Another problem for Ice was that his own self-image of being a hardcore rapper was decidedly different from the kid-friendly marketing campaign that was rolled out, complete with action figures. At that time, two of the biggest acts in rap were New Kids on the Block and MC Hammer. Ice was supposed to fill a gap between the two.

The end goal was to have Ice do for hip-hop what Elvis Presley had done for rock ‘n roll. But while segregated radio meant that early rock ‘n roll was still fairly obscure to Elvis’ fans, when Vanilla Ice broke, “Yo! MTV Raps” had already been on the air for a couple of seasons. While Vanilla Ice was being embraced by bubblegum pop fans, he was being derided as a fraud by hip-hop fans. At the same time, the Milli Vanilli lip sync scandal broke (taking C+C Music Factory, Black Box, and Technotronic down with them). The rise of gangsta rap and grunge was in part a response to the years of actual fraud perpetrated by these acts, which left music fans hungry for something far more genuine and authentic. A lot of acts perceived as pop were suddenly guilty by association, simply for sharing the same genre.

And no one was hit harder than Vanilla Ice. In 1990, his debut album, To the Extreme, was number one for sixteen weeks, selling 500,000 copies a day at its peak. A year later, his follow-up live album failed to crack the top twenty, and his movie debut, Cool As Ice, barely made more than $500,000 at the domestic box office, getting pulled from theatres less than a month after its release. In 1992, Ice was so detested that the white rap group, 3rd Bass, scored a hit just by having Henry Rollins lampoon him in their video for “Pop Goes the Weasel.”
 

Iggy-Azalea

Perhaps then, Iggy Azalea could be on a similar career trajectory. Like Ice, there seems to be little genuine sense of who she is. A description of her hometown of Mullibimby reads similar to the bohemian arts haven of Taos, New Mexico. Azalea herself has talked about her humble background, and has said that she and her mother worked as house-keepers in the vacation homes of Mullibimby’s more affluent residences. When Azalea moved to Miami as a teenager, she went to work as a hotel chambermaid.

Aside from her song, “Work,” there’s little indication of the effect of her background on her as an artist. Frankly, she spends most of the song judging women who exchange oral sex for designer shoes. Perhaps her real crime isn’t being an Australian woman trying to sound black, but that she’s cultivated a mean girl persona to sound black. While trash talk is practically its own sub-genre, she lacks cleverness, and sounds like she’s punching down in order to build herself up.

So, is Iggy Azalea the female Vanilla Ice? In terms of marketing, absolutely yes. They were both sold to pop audiences rather than rap audiences. While Ice eventually said in an episode of Behind the Music that he sold out, Azalea doesn’t strike me as having any morals to compromise. As for actual talent, one of the things Ice had going for him was that he was a good dancer. He did also show some real promise as a rapper, and if he’d been in more of a position to hone his craft like Eminem, instead of being thrown onstage as a kind of rapping New Kid on the Black, he might have developed some genuine artistry.

For her part, in a recent radio appearance, Azalea was asked to freestyle, and she balked. If you can’t freestyle, you’re not a rapper—race and gender are irrelevant. This should end her career, but it probably won’t.

When I wrote that Rock is Dead, I didn’t put enough emphasis on the fact that the under-30 audience sees rock as old people music, the way my generation (Generation X, I suppose) saw jazz as our grandparents music. For young people today, music is electronic dance music, R&B, and hip-hop, all with a great deal of overlap. Younger music fans aren’t plagued by the same questions of authenticity in regard to race and genre because they learned music appreciation from the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. Also, Auto-tune has made it easier to sell attractive people who can barely carry a tune; I don’t see another Milli Vanilli-type scandal on the horizon.

So Azalea’s career trajectory may not parallel Ice’s, but that isn’t because she’s more authentic or talented. It’s just because the audience is willing to put up with less authenticity for longer. The public turned on Ice, but we’ll probably just get bored of Iggy.

We Like Liars That Seem Likable

Posted on by

A great deal has been said and written about the lying our public figures do, recently. After the “misremembering war events” scandal that brought Brian Williams down, Bill O’Reilly has been subjected to scrutiny over his claims of witnessing combat during the Falklands War. This past week, Secretary of the VA Bob McDonald has been criticized for claiming to a homeless man to have been in Special Forces – he was not. Chris Kyle, of course, is remembered as a hero by many, despite having a demonstrable record of lying about events (much of this occurred post-moral injury, when Kyle was suffering from PTSD). Hillary Clinton lied about being shot at by snipers and is polling stronger than any other potential Democratic candidate for President in 2016. Army veteran (who should goddamn know better) and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal lied about serving in Vietnam. Republican Congresswoman and military veteran (who should also know better) Joni Ernst has received criticism over calling herself a “combat veteran” using a very broad definition of “combat.”

People lie. There seems to be a fairly broad consensus along the political spectrum that politicians lie a great deal – whether you believe that “your” people lie less or less harmfully probably goes a ways toward establishing how one votes in an election (having become fairly disillusioned, I recently registered Independent, abandoning the Democratic Party). This explains why a state populated primarily by Democrats would elect Richard Blumenthal over his Republican rival, despite his – well – lying about combat. This explains why Democrats are happy to forgive Hillary for lying about being in combat (misremembering is not something that happens when you’ve been under sniper fire once), and why Republicans think that Joni Ernst should be given the benefit of the doubt for her admittedly less egregious (but still fairly stupid) description of having been in combat, when she was posted to Kuwait, quite far from combat. In this case, her description of herself as a combat veteran is less annoying than her repeated and ongoing defense of that untruth.

I should also point out that most combat veterans, myself included, don’t feel that combat experience gives one special insight about life that one would covet, save that combat is a situation to be avoided at all costs. When one considers that politicians who experienced combat throughout history continued to encourage or abet warfare, it’s impossible to conclude that there’s any real utility to combat as a morally didactic lesson, save potentially on an individual level.

It’s slightly different with journalism, in that, technically, in order to call oneself a journalist it’s important that one adhere to certain unwritten but widely-obeyed rules: don’t get involved in a story, don’t plagiarize, don’t lie. O’Reilly has already said he’s not a journalist, and has no credibility with people who aren’t a certain type of conservative – this seems to have insulated him from the brunt of the fury that resulted in Brian Williams’ demise.

And that’s fascinating! Williams, by defining himself as a journalist, made himself more vulnerable to truth-criticisms from people that watch his program than O’Reilly. (For the record, I was fine with him continuing as an anchor – anyone who thinks journalists, who are human, don’t directly or indirectly lie [routinely] should be banned from ever voting)

I wanted to compare how various public figures seem to be judged on their military lies, so I threw together a basic chart and mapped public perceptions of journalists and other truth-tellers onto it.

What I found was… well, not shocking at all, really. O’Reilly’s posse sticks up for him and he won’t be fired despite having lied I’ve put myself on the spectrum (right in the middle there) because if one is going to make a claim about a thing, well, have the sack to tell others where you fall.)
 

o'reilly

 
And Williams, who has a more discerning audience that is willing to entertain shades of gray, suffers by comparison:
 

william

 
And just to see how that works out with politicians – there’s the Republican case of Joni Ernst, who has claimed (playing off a credulous public’s unfamiliarity with battle and sympathetic media) that she was in combat because she was in a combat zone. Which is exactly like me saying I got the shit kicked out of me once at a bar because there were a group of guys at the end of bar muttering and looking over at me and I was really worried about getting the shit kicked out of me. Someone who had once gotten a severe ass-whipping would probably take issue with my claim, as I do hers. Let’s see if she’s going to be fired or held to account or not (remembering that this is a question of whether or not someone’s worthy of the trust, confidence, and respect of the public):
 

ernst

 
Looks like Ernst is gonna be okay – the Republicans have her back (not surprisingly), and the Democrats / media don’t feel like evaluating her claims on their merits, and calling a liar a liar. Of course, if they did that with Ernst, they’d have to do that with Hillary Clinton, the putative fundraising frontrunner for 2016, and – don’t forget – maybe our first female president. What does it matter if she happened to lie about – well, anything?
 

clinton

 
I’m also down on Clinton because of that “we need to go into Iraq” thing she did, which if anyone remembers, was basically responsible for all the horrors we see in the Middle East today – a place that used to be filled with sensible dictators who were amenable to bribes and arms deals and could be relied on to limit their war crimes to 25,000 or 30,000 dead every decade – a tiny fraction of the dead since we became involved over there. But it looks like she’s going to walk, too.

In conclusion, the lies that get told to us by our political leadership don’t seem to matter as much as the lies that are told by people who call themselves “journalists,” which may or may not involve abiding by a set of agreed-upon rules to tell stories in a certain way. And while “liberals” or “progressives” tend to evaluate journalists and people outside their group more generously than “conservatives,” both groups are equally bad at applying rigorous scrutiny to their politicians.

So it goes.

Misandry Everywhere

Posted on by

I’ve written a fair bit here and there about misandry and discrimination, prejudice, and violence directed against men. It seemed like it would be useful to have all the links collected in one place…so here they are, in roughly chronological order. I think this is everything, but if you see something I’ve missed, let me know.

Misandry and the Trayvon Martin Case

Misogyny Hurts Men Too

When Men Experience Sexism

On stereotypes of men in Orange Is the New Black

An interview with genocide scholar Adam Jones, who does a lot of work on violence against men.

What Hollywood Needs Is Fewer Strong Male Characters

On Andrea Dworkin, hating men, and the patriarchy.

On the film Black Sea and the disposability of working-class men.
 

45b2fba2bd0e5a6899d730316b13bfc4fd2e2b51

Utilitarian Review 2/28/15

Posted on by

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Comics vs. fashion editorials.

James Lamb on why superhero diversity isn’t enough.

Me on Static and how if you see racism you’re a supervillain.

Tom Syverson on The Bachelor, hysteria, and the pain of being an object.

Chris Gavaler on Paradise Lost, the first superhero story.

R.M. Rhodes on the contribution of art director John Workman to Heavy Metal.

Me on X-Men: Days of Future Past and the coming post-racial genocide.

Shonté Daniels reviewed the game Hot Tin Roof.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the New Republic I wrote about the limits of diversity and how Octavia Butler created the greatest black superhero.

At Ravishly I wrote about:

—I interviewed Dee of blackrocktumblr about genre, rock, and race.

—I wrote about our forthcoming dog.

—I write about how writers aren’t romantic heroes.

At Splice I cheered Rahm not winning because he is a terrible mayor.
 
Other Links

Kenya Golden on Amber Rose.

Alyssa Rosenberg on barriers to the entertainment industry getting more diverse.

C.T. May on Harlequin and feminism.

New Open Mike Eagle EP
 

Imago

Batman Never Goes Bad

Posted on by

joker_surf

 
Various people had informed me that the Batmobile drove off a cliff in the third season of the Adam West TV series. Budgets plummeted, single episodes rather than two-parters became the norm, direction was lost, and sadness reigned even among the giggling villains. Matt Yockey argues that the growing political turmoil of the 60s made it harder for the show to sustain its delicate balance between conservatism and satirizing conservatism, leading to incoherence, dwindling market share, and falling quality.

At least as far as the last goes, it ain’t necessarily Bat-so, though. The low points of the series aren’t in the third season, I don’t think — nothing is clearly worse than the first episode of the 2nd season, or than the limping crossover with the Green Hornet. There are certainly weak moments — the three-part trip to Londinium, largely composed of half-hearted jokes about how the British are so British, is pretty crappy, and the special sexism episode where Nora Clavicle takes over the police department is just about as offesnive as Chief Screaming Chicken. But, on the other hand, the shorter episode length and the sense of improvisatory confusion lends some episodes a manic genius rare in the rest of the series. The Joker surfing episode is particularly brilliant, abandoning all pretense of coherence as the Joker uses a machine to sap the abilities of a pro-surfer and challenges Batman to a surf-off because supervillains want to rule the beach? The whole episode seems like an excuse to get Chief O’Hara to declare, “Cowabunga, B’gora!”

So, if the quality doesn’t fall off, particularly, why do people insist it does? Hard to say…though I think there’s an impulse to try to find some aesthetic reason, or (with Yockey) some historical reason, or really any reason at all for the show’s meteoric ascent and equally meteoric fall. Everyone loved it, so the show must have been doing something right — then everybody stopped loving it, so the show must have been doing something wrong.

I do think popularity often has something to do with quality or aesthetic choices — but what or why is often hard to figure. Maybe Batman grabbed the zeigeist just right as Yockey suggests, and then the times passed it by. But then again, maybe people just got tired of it. Capitalism is prone to bubbles of various sorts; for a second there everyone wanted Batman, the way everyone wanted mortgage securities or tulips. Then people stopped wanting them. The tulips were never worth anything to begin with; Batman never changed in quality. But the market revalued them because that’s what the market does. It’s sort of like the Penguin infecting all the cash in Gotham city with a beetle-carried sleeping sickness. It doesn’t have to make much sense.

Noir Minus Shooting People

Posted on by

MainCapsule616x353

Hot Tin Roof gives you a cat, a gun, and makes you figure out the rest

Hot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore a Fedora by Glass Bottom Games is a noir themed 3D side-scroller starring Private Investigator Emma Jones and her feline partner, Franky. With Jones’ all purpose revolver, the two scour all over to solve the slew of unsolved cases that have plagued the world of Tin Roof.

The game is an innovative blend of mystery, platforming, puzzles and exploration. It finds inspiration in games like Metroid and Castlevania yet carves its own identity in with its 3D, noir roots sultry smooth jazzy shadow lighting and snarky dialogue. This is the most enjoyable part of the game, exploring Tin Roof and its civilian characters. It was fun and playful while maintaining a sort of seriousness I expect in a noir drama. Think less like Rockstar’s L.A. Noire and more “Radio Daze,” the Rugrats episode where Tommy, the masked detective, solves the mystery of “The Maltiese Woodchuck”.

The game rewards you for exploring outside of the beaten path, but going off the beaten path sometimes leads to a lot of confusion and aimless walking. Hot Tin Roof‘s world isn’t exactly easy to comprehend, and unfortunately there is no map system in the game. It’s a large enough world, with enough twists and turns, to make getting turned around incredibly easy. Similarly, the game doesn’t provide a solid way to point the player toward progress.

Hot Tin Roof does have a tip system to help you if you’re stuck, but even then those tips aren’t always useful. Further, tips can only be accessed at the police department, so heading back to get a tip is not always convenient. Hot Tin Roof relies on the player’s patience and intelligence to figure out where to go next, but unfortunately my patience wore thin quickly. The game does very little hand holding, which is great when you want to work through a puzzle on your own, but a little nudge now and then would have been appreciated.

I also faced a few issues with small bugs. Towards the end of the game, when I caved and checked a forum to figure out what to do, I discovered that there was a bug that prevented a conversation from starting that would have helped me know where to go next. There were other dialogue related bugs, where conversations were either cut off or didn’t pop up at all, but the developers have been routinely patching the game, so the minor problems I faced are already fixed.

Issues aside, there is still a lot to enjoy about this game. Jones’ revolver wasn’t perfect, but it was a fun tool to play with. Reloading the revolver felt slow at times. There is a shortcut to instantly reload, but it only reloads one specific bullet into each chamber. Sometimes a puzzle required different kinds of bullets to complete, so if I wanted, for instance, two bubble bullets and two fire bullets, I’d have to reload those manually. Since the gun is crucial for the entire game, reloading did lose its luster after the first few times.

But on the plus side, I never had to kill an enemy, and that actually felt really good. Rather than shooting baddies or pointing the gun at enemies to intimidate them, I used the gun to reach high places, burn boxes or find invisible items, among other things. Using a gun as everything but a weapon allowed the game to keep its not-so-serious noir charm. And hey, gathering new clues did feel rewarding, especially if I found them without having to hunt for too long. I may not have always known what I was doing, but neither did Jones, so we had that in common.

Hot Tin Roof does a great job of creating a world I want to solve crimes in. It requires intelligence, curiosity, and most importantly, patience, to solve all the mysteries Tin Roof face. The game is missing a few key mechanics like a map and hinting system that could have prevented the game from being infuriating at times, but even without it I found enjoyment in the city of Tin Roof. There were a few splendid moments where I felt like a real detective, running around gathering search and arrest warrants to capture the poor chump who thought they could get away Scot-free.

The Coming Post-Racial Genocide

Posted on by

maxresdefault
 
X-Men: Days of Future Past proves Bryan Singer’s genius as a director. You wouldn’t think that racial genocide could be boring, but Singer manages to make it so. Partially he does it through the standard repertoire of tedium; lax dialogue; a convoluted plot that goes nowhere in particular before flopping over and giving up; a style that leaves even moderately talented actors like Hugh Jackman and Jennifer Lawrence adrift and disconnected from any recognizable plot arc or emotion. The narrative calls for Jackman’s Wolverine to be mellow lest he zap out of the past into the future; he responds by alternating between bland-face and stressed-face throughout the film; you can hear the audible click as Singer asks him to switch them.

The central failure of the movie, though, is that it systematically tries to erase the thing it should be about. The storyline is about a future in which the X-Men are hunted down and killed by an inimical human race. It’s a movie about genocide. And yet, the mechanics of genocide figure nowhere in the film. Not a single person expresses hatred or prejudice towards mutants; even the evil scientist Trask, who builds the killer Sentinels, seems to have no particular dislike of mutants; instead he seems to see them as a convenient bonding moment for humanity; a way to unite the human species against a common foe. Trask is Ozymandias and he has no more ill-feeling towards the X-Men than Ozymandias had towards his giant squid. The closest anyone in the movie comes to an expression of racialized disgust at mutants is a nurse who comments to a disguised Mystique that having blue skin might make you feel bad about your appearance. Hardly the stuff of Nazi propaganda, there.

Just in case you missed the point that the genocide is really nothing personal, the script goes out of its way, over and over, to let you know that there were lots of good humans who fought with the mutants against the killer Sentinels. Also, to let said regular humans were thought to to be likely to have mutant kids. This then is a mutant genocide in which humans neither hate mutants nor really single them out for harm. And yet, it’s not like the film is especially squeamish in other matters; Wolverine murders several people in casual cold blood. Video game body count death tolls are fine, apparently, just as long as no one really means anything by it.

Over the course of the film you get to see Sentinels murder various X-Men multiple times. Each murder is then erased by mucking about in the past, so you get the visceral rush of seeing folks dismembered without having to worry overly about the consequences. That seems to be the movie’s whole purpose; to enjoy genocide unmixed with any historical or ideological resonance — to turn the Holocaust into an inoffensive special effects extravaganza. In the future, the movie promises, the past won’t matter, and superpowers will reign down death divorced from animus, or even really from brain functioning. Drones will watch drones blow up without hate, or apology. Or interest.