Spotify Is Bad For Civilization – on Genre, "Music Discovery", and the Decline of Taste

I don’t often learn anything new in liberal arts classes, but when I do, it’s a revelatory experience.  Such an awakening occurred during the 5-minute break of a literature class when the conversation turned to one student’s musical tastes, or deficiency thereof.  “I’ve been listening to a lot of EDM,” remarked the three-year student of epic poetry, theology, and philosophy.  “EDM when I wake up, when I shower, when I drive…”  Everybody laughed, except for the Author.

As a somewhat avid listener of most kinds of music except for jazz and soul, which – let’s admit it – are horrible by themselves, and as the sole curator of a 177-hour-long list of hand-picked songs, I’ll confess that I, more so than other people, am predisposed to hate the implications of this statement.  Most people in this situation wouldn’t think anything of the student listening to EDM, and they certainly wouldn’t make it as far as passing judgment on that lifestyle.  “Live and let live,” they would say, or, “You do you,” or, most heinously, “It’s good that you’ve found something you’re really passionate about.”  I, conversely, found nothing whatsoever celebratory in it, and spent the rest of the class period mulling over such questions as, “What kind of EDM?” and “Who’s your favorite artist?” and “What the hell do you appreciate in EDM that’s any way artistically redeeming?”

Putting aside the banalities I associate with EDM (which is a euphemism for electronic dance music, which is itself an even more vapid incarnation of electropop music), the tendency of Millennials and consumers in general to blindly seek out and wolf down types of music based upon their disposition suggests a regrettable indifference towards the artistic process used to bring the music to them in the first place.  It’s easy to boast about your generation receiving arguably the worst pop music in the history of the world; I had thoroughly convinced myself of this dark reality back in 2014, a year that introduced and continued to feed us such innovations of musical gayness as Sam Smith, that Beyoncé album, Macklemore, One Direction, and so on.  Yet one could make this case for just about any year in music; if you only listen to whatever plays on radio, you will probably end up thinking yours is either the greatest or the worst era ever, depending on your temperament.

However, there can be no dispute that the youth of today, beyond producing and consuming the worst music of all time, have additionally assumed the worst methods thus far pioneered of discovering, listening to, and critically dissecting music.  This is on account of many things, some technological, others sociological, but music as an art form is undoubtedly declining as a pillar of our culture.  Whereas music formerly could only be experienced in public performances eagerly sought out by the middle-class, and later through radio and individually purchased physical records, the advent of the internet and of streaming services has enabled nearly everybody living in 1st-world countries to access untold stores of albums from every era and movement.  In theory this should come as a boon to musical literacy and – dare we say – diversification, but in effect these platforms have proven cancerous to their users’ acumen and mentality, systematically connecting them with whatever they already like and nothing else.  People develop an addiction to EDM, to metal, to Top 40, to whatever gets them “turnt up”, and gladly stay in ignorance of real music.  Their musical intake has backslid into something like Starbucks coffee or cafeteria chicken tenders: courses they consume just to sustain themselves, not knowing of or not having any better options.

“What kind of music do you like?” is a common icebreaker among Americans, one that has the potential to reveal a fair amount about an individual’s personality.  Of a man who says he listens to Kendrick Lamar or Public Enemy, one might induce he fancies himself an intellectual, politically conscious and keen to the demands of African-American neighborhoods.  Maybe he’s just like me and appreciates music that tries to say something, anything of pertinence to society.  Of a man who exalts the U2 of the olden days (before they totally sold out), one could presuppose a certain degree of spirituality and segue from that into a conversation about faith, the afterlife, or something as corny and poetic as the oneness of humanity.  Of a woman who says she likes Radiohead and thinks The King of Limbs is severely underrated, one could judge she’s either a tranny or a keeper, because women don’t listen to Radiohead.  Of a man who says that he likes Radiohead and believes Thom Yorke to be a messenger for our times, one could guess he’s probably a liberal male, and deal with that accordingly.

One’s favorite musical artist can be as telling a characteristic of one’s identity as one’s favorite author, city, pastime, historical leader, etc.  Bradley Nowell, Lou Reed, Fiona Apple, Jim Morrison, David Bowie, Tupac Shakur: these were more just content creators happy to make a living entertaining the masses.  These were (and continue to be) cultural icons, even idols who shaped minds and inspired hundreds to hone their craft, their voice, their style, or their sex lives.  At the mere mention of these names, one could form a mental picture not only of the artists’ outer bearing but of what traits or virtues they symbolized to their fans.

A collage of extremely wealthy and popular EDM “artists”

What could one possibly assume about people who admit to “listening to a lot of EDM”, except that they probably don’t have great taste in music?  What distinguishes a Kygo from a Skrillex or a Calvin Harris or a Tiësto or a David Guetta, artistically or as celebrities, and would an EDM fan be able to blindly source a new track by any of them?  Such a person would be a blank slate from their EDM taste alone, as would a majority of my generation, which has all but disavowed the celebration and disciplined study of idols in the arts.  Yes, there are the Beyoncés and the Kanyes and the Lady Gagas of the industry, people respected in most circles less for their music than for the ideals they represent (women’s liberation, not caring what others think about you, and being gay), but by and large Millennials have exported the rock god in favor of the pop star.  What do Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, Drake, Ariana Grande, J.T., Rihanna, and Taylor Swift mean to those who play their music?  What does the music mean to them, and could they explain the meaning to someone not acquainted with the record?  Would they listen to the record front to back more than once?  These, alack and alas, are dying practices in the 21st century.

This is not to call the pop star a strictly Millennial invention.  Indeed, every generation has had its share of safe and featureless junk that rapidly fades into obsolescence, only to be resurrected in a hastily made Totally 80s playlist and exposed to a whole new batch of suckers who think they love the pop music of their parents but wouldn’t bother themselves to buy or listen to any older album in its entirety.  This is the paradox of claiming to love music from the 80s or any other decade: by the very denotation of “80s music”, one both demarcates said music to a separate category from contemporary music, suggesting it’s less relevant or pure as art, and subtly dehumanizes the authorship of the older music by attributing its genesis to cultural trends instead of individual composers and performers.  Talking Heads, e.g., were not an amazing “80s Music” band; they were a very influential and creative band who were known for working in the new wave and art pop genres, who happened to flourish in the 80s, and whose lead singer went on to have a semi-successful solo career.

Nor do I wish to say that genuine musical artistry has expired; quite to the contrary, the internet, self-publishing, and crowd-funding have parted the floodgates to a deluge of artists who in past days may never have reached an audience outside their own town.  The sphere of music at our disposal has compounded in volume over the last decade, and yet Millennials have somehow conceived more and more efficient means of homogenizing everything that reaches their ears. Instead of listening to artists, stories, or sonic landscapes, we listen to genres and “moods”, effectively screening out any music that doesn’t match our spirits at a time or that we don’t already find pleasing.  We have music for pumping iron, music for hitting the beach, music for drinking fake, expensive coffee, music for getting drunk and upsetting the neighbors, music for spiting male conservative friends, and according to Spotify, even music for having sex.  Wired has an interesting article examining how exhaustively the company has wrapped itself around the lives of its customers, but this should already be apparent to anybody who has used the program more than once a day.  While music as a mindless supplement to other activities steadily proliferates, we see music for music’s sake increasingly regressing into an intimidating, alien concept, and not the kind that European leaders welcome into their society.  This is detrimental to any thriving culture.

A collage of song collections that are only good for one distinct occasion

For a service that seems ready-made to facilitate musical branching out and learning, Spotify habitually reassures users that they needn’t branch out or come in contact with anything they don’t immediately like. From its thousands of specialized playlists to its automatically generated personal recommendations to its front-page pop music advertisements (VIEWS by DRAKE available now, CLICK HERE!) to its archaic, Pandora-inspired radio functionality, which prioritizes or buries artists based on the user’s input, Spotify offers a wide assortment of tools to connect its paying subscribers with a decidedly narrow selection of music, and to shield them from most everything else.  This makes perfect sense from a strategic standpoint, as most businesses depend on satisfied, returning consumers, and most consumers want a fairly similar experience every time they visit a business.  In promoting such user-friendly systems, streaming providers like Spotify and Apple Music follow rather surefire regimens for building consumer trust, but in so doing they also undercut the very advantages of their existing at all, that being the freedom to listen to any album on demand.

Spotify bombards users of the free version with advertisements enticing them to subscribe and “skip away” until they find a song that’s just right for their current company or state of mind.  In the dark ages predating the internet and ADD streaming services, skipping away was not a viable or easy option, requiring one to record a mixtape or burn a CD in order to jump between several unrelated songs in a row.  Alternatively one could fumble through a collection of physical media to sate one’s longing for a radically different song, but the hassle involved in this exchange intrinsically motivated the listener to focus on one artist for 40 minutes at a time.  Certain LPs, such as The Dark Side of the Moon, played out as two unbroken, sweeping pieces of music, defying anyone twitchy enough to skip around and achieve the same emotional high encapsulated in the whole.  Pink Floyd’s albums, and others’ to a lesser extent, rewarded those who listened intentionally and persevered through the slower instrumental sections.  They were theatrical exercises in balance and contrast and bombast, ones that deserved to be heard in whole even by those who didn’t take to the band’s style.

The media distributors of today, in contrast, reward impatience and lackadaisical listening at every turn, encouraging people to downvote and hide away whatever uncomely, dissonant, or boring sounds accidentally pop up and disrupt their studying or cleaning or cooking.  If you don’t like that one song in Afternoon Acoustic, fret not and flip it over to Indie Chillout, where you may have better luck.  Are you really not digging the first 40 seconds of that weird 23-minute song called “Apostate”?  Skip that self-indulgent rubbish and never listen to another Michael Gira song again.  And by all means don’t try to make it through the last David Bowie album when you can just put on the “This is David Bowie” list for dummies that Spotify scraped together after he died.  Why would you run the risk of hearing a song you don’t instantly like when you could limit the breadth of your playlist to songs that millions of other like-minded people have already sanctioned?  Why would you bother finishing a 300-page novel either?  You’re a busy full-time employee or college student, most of the inspiring/poetic/so-true quotes are on Buzzfeed or Sparksnotes, and you’ll be able to watch the Hollywood adaptation in six months anyway.  And do you really have to stand for all those plodding, arty scenes of setup in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Surely there are hundreds of better entertainment options you could stream instead, and when those outwear their welcome too, you can change the show again.

As the shrewd guys at Red Letter Media noted in one of their 100-something Half in the Bag movie reviews (I remember not which one), modern men get DVDs out of magical grocery store dispensers, and in like manner they also get their vinyls out of magical thinking phone apps that know exactly what they want and when.  Somewhere along the line, frequenters of the Redbox became so numbed to what they were paying for that they forgot the films were even made by humans, that they could be viewed and evaluated critically as art.  Art films like It Follows and Goodnight Mommy would appear right next to franchise movies like Insidious Chapter 3 and Paranormal Activity 5, and at $1.50 each (or a paltry quarter with coupons), nothing was ventured or lost on any of them except a little gas and free time in the evening.  The element of risk removed from the equation, the layman’s perception of DVD rentals degenerated into an inexpensive form of momentary sensual stimulation, one release being as good as any other so long as it didn’t confuse or bore him.

The same principle applies to Netflix streaming, which highlights so many scores of B-movies on the front page that most people don’t feel burned if they waste 90 minutes on a made-for-TV presentation.  People could dig a little further into the app and find meaningful, visionary films by Park Chan-wook, Lynne Ramsay, Gaspar Noé, Bong Joon-ho, Stanley Kubrick, or P.T. Anderson, movies including Victoria, Upstream Color, The Shining, Nightcrawler, Risky Business, Oldboy, and those are just ones I already know to be good.  Nonetheless, whenever my friends fire up Netflix in the dorm lobby, we end up watching something like “Kung Fu Dunk” or “Timerunners” or “School of Rock”, because those are what show up first and they don’t really care what they watch for free on somebody else’s account.  We have more – and more varied – written entertainment sources within our reach than any other people in history, but we’ve lost the will to get anything other than entertainment out of them.

The same principle applies to digital music providers, which throw heaps of junk at unversed, probably busy listeners and congratulate them on “discovering” “new” music, when in fact they couldn’t put a name to what they’re hearing or differentiate it from the artist who played just before, and when they may have suppressed or skipped a bunch of truly different music to arrive at the cuts they tolerated right away.  The instant gratification model of Spotify (and Pandora, and Netflix, and any other Orwellian media assistant) is one that virtually precludes the user from learning to love any of the better artists working today.  I would not have become as big a fan of Bjork’s music if I had taken Spotify’s word that she was not for me.  Ditto with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, an album that repelled me on first listen, didn’t grab me on the second, and utterly enthralled me on the third, so much so I now agree it’s one of the seminal rock records of all time.  For others, this difficult album may have been Radiohead’s Kid A, Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, Swans’ Soundtracks for the Blind, Grimes’ Visions, Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra, or King Crimson’s debut LP, but following the recommendations of Spotify wouldn’t have led one to any of them. Then there’s the matter of Death Grips, an avant-garde electronic/hip-hop trio so musically abrasive and violent that I had to force myself to listen until, ten tries later or so, the separate layers started to feel harmonious, exhilarating, and frankly brilliant.  They are one of many groups that deserve to be heard despite the discomfort they initially instill, and that demonstrate how music can deliver terror and anxiety in equal measure as joy and reassurance.  Yet with the possible exception of some crossover Grimes tracks, streaming services do little to expose these bands to the uninitiated.

A collage of albums that wouldn’t benefit from skipping away

It’s often generalized that ordinary art comforts the disheartened while extraordinary art challenges the comfortable.  Liberals especially love to invoke this bromide in praise of whatever semi-fictional social-justice film is currently making the rounds at festivals, glibly passing off narrative flaws or distortions of truth under the façade that it’s a movie “ripped from today’s headlines” that “demands to be seen”.  If only these poseurs, and the streaming platforms they utilize, heeded the same guidelines of great artistry in their musical preferences.  When I told one of my Beatissima friends that I’d finally listened to The Life of Pablo and wasn’t all that impressed (along with many one-time fans of Kanye West), his response was something like, “To be honest, Cote, I really don’t give a ____ about your taste in music.”  And I don’t really blame him; after all, most of the people he grew up with didn’t give a second thought to “white people music”, erecting a kind of protective wall around the urban artists they most respected.  Likewise, the county and the homeschooled community in which I grew up never listened devotedly to rap music unless it came from Eminem or Lecrae, and the pop-ridden airwaves largely reflected stereotypes of Southern Californian superficiality.  My peers and I didn’t partake of much of any “black people music” as traditionally understood, but we didn’t partake of the best white music either.  As with 99% of Americans, we bonded over what the radio cycled ad nauseum and what our friends deemed cool, which in my case was a lot of film and video game scores.

Everyone is influenced by their surroundings, and one could argue that the bonds forged in these shared surroundings form the backbone of our culture.  Radio, paradoxically, has played a principal role in both reinforcing and poisoning the culture, uniting millions in enjoyment of certain artificially catchy hits while severely degrading the quality average people come to expect from music.  What differentiates and sets radio above streaming sites is that FM stations don’t attempt to lie to those who still make use of them. Enthusiastic radio listeners have always had a 1 in 12 chance of guessing what they’ll hear when they get in the car, and if they use that medium more than any other, they probably don’t mind the repetition and would freely admit to liking most mainstream music.  Spotify, on the other hand, sycophantically seduces listeners into thinking that they’re taking strides to explore new musical voices, when almost every feature of the program is modeled on pampering consumers with music guaranteed to comfort, never challenge them.

Streaming services, it goes without saying, don’t care about introducing listeners to extraordinary art, and most of their signature practices are antithetical to the promotion of extraordinary art.  Hipsters love to rag on Pitchfork and its slavish fanboying over certain rappers, but Pitchfork at least recognizes the expressiveness of music and endeavors to call readers’ attention to artists they would normally turn off or ignore.  The only thing that music streamers respect is the monthly fee they cash from all their users, and the EDM that keeps the money flowing.

"Deadpool" Wasn't That Offensive, and We're Foolish For Thinking It Was

Despite the great many things I liked about Deadpool, I didn’t much like how little it tried to make me dislike it.

2015 in Film: Black Mass, Beach Boys, and Why The Martian Appeals So Much To Liberals

So much “scientific accuracy”, yet no one bothered to science the sh** out of the script.

2015 in Music: More Top Ten and the Inadvertent Individualism of Grimes

Continuing the Author’s purposely disordered summary of the ten least worst albums he heard come out of 2015, which also happened to be the year in which he courageously started identifying hipstelf as hipstgender.  Pound Sign Dumb Wins.  For part one of hipst countdown and the other sections of this year-end recap, links have been helpfully appended at the bottom.

BØRNS, Dopamine –

Borns with a slashy thingy through the O isn’t the most original dude to leave a mark on indie pop this decade; he is basically aping Lorde’s singing and production style while swapping out the pessimistic teenage brooding for sappy love lyrics (“She’s sweet like candy in my veins.”  “Baby, baby, baby, baby... I’m thirsty for your ecstasy / so open up your heavenly gates.”) and more uptempo electronic beats, which people have gravitated to in the absence of any new Lorde LPs on the horizon.  While I want to knock him for veering too close to an innovative artist I’ve enjoyed much more for slightly longer, he’s still a decent, barely male substitute I have no difficulty recommending to Lorde, Glass Animals, Carly Rae Jepsen, Taylor Swift, or maybe even Kanye fans until the inevitable day he gets discovered by distributors and passes into the overrated club.

I do have some problems with Dopamine that have yet to be addressed.  First of all, when I said I’d recommend this to Taylor Swift and Lorde fans, I meant I’d recommend portions of it to people who want to hear almost exactly the same thing as portions of a Taylor Swift or Lorde album.  Take American Money, for example, which is an aggravatingly familiar copycat of Wildest Dreams, I Know Places, and Glory and Gore all in one. Maybe this is more indicative of the interchangeability of Taylor Swift’s melodies than anything, but it still bumps me how unoriginal this tune is.  Secondly, why did he take out one of the more fun songs from his EP (Seeing Stars) and replace it with some stinkers like Dopamine and Fool?  Thirdly, why is he staring at a naked girl on the hideous cover picture?  Is this supposed to indicate that he’s a big boy or a serious, grown-up artist now or something?  I give up, like I can’t even.  I’m just going to listen to the pools song or Dug My Heart again and forget the rest of this album’s nonsense happened.

Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit and Think, & Sometimes I Just Sit –

If Lou Reed was still alive and kicking but in a woman’s body, he would probably be making music like Courtney Barnett’s.  Barnett has a knack for grafting humorous lyrics and noisy guitar tracks that recall the best of The Velvet Underground’s regrettably short discography.  Sometimes she gets a little carried away in the clatter and the album becomes too brash for its own good.  Pedestrian At Best happens to be the most popular and most annoying single on the record simultaneously.  Just as Heroin, Venus in Furs, and All Tomorrow’s Parties were among the longer and finer cuts off of Velvet Underground & Nico, the better songs on I Sit Blah Blah Blah are those moderately paced enough to escalate to a point where the grandeur and clamor have been fully earned (Small Poppies, Depreston).  Anyway, even the songs that don’t make much of an impression musically still succeed in stringing the listener along with clever and unorthodox lyrics.  “Jen insists that we buy organic vegetables / And I must admit that I was a little skeptical, at first / A little pesticide can't hurt,” she muses on Dead Fox.  I should also note that the gayness level of this album is relatively high on the lyrical side of the equation, somewhere between Coldplay and Macklemore on the spectrum of heteronormatism, but I don’t like it strictly on account of that. It’s just good rock and roll.  Plus, that’d be pretty gay.  

Blur, The Magic Whip –

If you don’t know who Blur are, they’ve been around for quite some time, but you can excuse your own ignorance in this case seeing as how they took a 12-year break between The Magic Whip and their last venture Think Tank, which was perfection.  Blur are comprised of Gorillaz’s real-life founder Damon Albarn, who has brainstormed three additional bands on the side, insane guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James, and drummer Dave Rowntree.  The British band certainly has better albums under their belt than The Magic Whip, but their latest sticks within their traditional style of not having a style that carries over from each album to the next.  As the neon-lit cover might suggest, there are some video gamey, Nintendo-like loops speckled throughout, and I’d say the album as a whole has a poppier, more funky sound than past Blur projects, which depended more on Coxon’s aggressive guitar work.  It doesn’t veer as closely to the Gorillaz aesthetic as Think Tank did, but it’s still a good crossover point for Gorillaz fans to acquaint themselves with the rest of Albarn’s astonishing volume of composition.  As always, Albarn’s buttery, precise voice is a reassuring companion in what can be an off-putting, eccentric musical wilderness.

Elle King, Love Stuff –

If you listen to the radio or go out in public, you’ve probably heard the lead single from Elle King’s debut album Love Stuff, and you might just even hate it by this point.  It’s still bad-a.  The surprisingly gifted daughter of Rob Schneider first entered the music scene in 2012, with an EP that included both the bluesy Playing For Keeps and a frankly awesome live cover of the dirtiest song ever written, My Neck, My Back. Her first LP scales back the grime and sexy stuff to a radio-friendly proportion of innuendo (“They always want to come, but they never want to leave.”), but it retains a lyrical maturity and credibility that evades a lot of alternative rock releases.  Even saying nothing of Elle’s unique and powerful voice, the music represented here features a wide range of influences, from rock to bluegrass to R&B to actually bearable country, especially on later songs like Make You Smile.  Contrariwise, Under The Influence sounds like the James Bond theme that never was, and would have made a much better choice for opening Spectre than freaking Sam Smith, while the gloomy folk rocker Ain’t Gonna Drown with its dramatic aesthetics could have been pulled straight from True Detective, season one of course, because the second totally messed it up.  The album’s not without its weaknesses:  Kocaine Karolina rips off Bon Iver’s Skinny Love almost chord for chord and I find America’s Sweetheart rather irritating and trite.  For the originality and catchiness of her album, though, Elle King more than earns a spot on George Stefano Pallas’ still relevant 10 Mean Old Things To Watch list.

Grimes, Art Angels –

Up until this entry, I feel I’ve taken careful pains to avoid coming across as a mindless, undiscriminating sheep a la others in the hipstgender community, but I’ll probably be dispensing with all that discretion hereon out.  To listen to Grimes for the first time (or maybe second or third, all variables not being equal) is to experience an epiphany, one that hits you like a brick and a stolen kiss at once; in that moment you will realize just how shallow and bland and lame the rest of the music you’ve been indulging really is, but you will also see the reason for music’s being, the material, formal, efficient, and final cause, and it will incapacitate you with joy.  Going straight through Art Angels from beginning to end with headphones or the loudest home theater setup you can manage short of upsetting the neighbors is positively euphoric, there being not a single stumbling block in the 50-minute endeavor aside from maybe the finisher Butterfly, which sounds a tad generic after everything else until the guitar kicks in at the third minute.  This is an astonishing collection of music, one in which each unit not only works on its own but works in conjunction with the rest of a well kept machine, where all the songs draw inspiration from some different source yet masterfully adapt it to the central vision of a brilliant mind who knows exactly what she’s doing and how to do it.

How much grander does this feat appear when one recognizes that Art Angels was written, sung, played, and produced by one person who was working, for all intents and purposes, in creative isolation; who then conceived of, edited, colored, and directed all the music videos accompanying the lead singles, handing only cinematography duties over to her brother; who crafted not only 13 perfect songs but verily the 13 most enthralling and blissful songs of the year; who accomplished all of this and more without the interference of record label forces or collaborators trying to coerce a familiar, broadly marketable and “popular” sound?  It’s kind of a shame that Claire Boucher is such a Canadian eco-leftist in her private life, because she’s arguably created the quasi-Randian, individualist record of our times.  Some of her older fans have greeted this fourth LP’s “poppier” tone with cynicism and nostalgia for her stranger, dreamier landmark Visions, but Art Angels essentially does to pop music what Sandman did to comic books, what Myst did to 1st-person adventure games, or what Descent Into Hell did to fantasy novels, taking something widely celebrated and pushing it so far into the realm of uncorrupted, inexplicable sub-creation it sheds whatever made it knowable and archetypal – whatever made it popular – in the first place.

Those who admire Grimes admire her music intensely, but they know they’ll always be a small minority of the population, and I doubt the wiser of them would have it any other way.  If Grimes had made the professional connections and executive compromises necessary to produce a true and proper pop album that could gain traction in the mainstream market, Art Angels would be ruined.  The more people Grimes could theoretically have piled onto this project, the more the opportunities would have emerged for someone to neuter a once expressive, interesting piece of art into something soulless, safe, and dull.  Look at the sobering artistic nosedive that Maroon 5 have taken over their career, from the entirely self-written and enduring Songs About Jane, produced by two people, to the vapid dance-pop pablum that’s defined their last three unavoidable records, built by hordes of unassociated co-writers, instrumentalists, programmers, and producers like Sia, Ryan Tedder, Max Martin, Shellback, etc.  Again, what has Gwen Stefani made in her “solo” career that can rival the glory days of No Doubt and Sublime?

We could go on, but for the sake of time I’ll close it here: socialist pushover and millionaire elitist John Green would probably insist that an album of this stature shouldn’t exist without a team of hired editors and helpers – other writers to provide a different perspective, experienced producers to cut back on all the superfluous layers that Grimes naively puts in her initial drafts, maybe even backup vocalists to lessen the load on her of recording dozens of tracks all by herself –, all of them working in concert towards the utilitarian goal of making an album that the group as a whole finds pleasing and market-ready.  I don’t think a group of music industry professionals could have given us Art Angels as it exists today, nor do I think a team of 50-something animators in Activision could have made a better Portal game than the ten developers in Valve who did, nor do I think it’s better to marry multiple spouses than one, nor do I think that diversity and/or inclusion invariably enhance the product of one or a couple people’s imaginations.  I think Art Angels more than proves this point, and I think it proves that Mr. Green is full of stuff.

John Green and his New Castrati associates, posing as proponents of free expression and stronger “artistic” awareness in education (that being awareness of their own commercial dreck, which kids can buy for $15 on paperback at Barnes & Noble or $20 at their local cinema), remind me of a pivotal scene in Miloš Forman and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, in which Emperor Joseph II tells Wolfgang, “There are, in fact, only so many notes the ear can hear in the course of anything… Just cut a few and it’ll be perfect.”  “Which few did you have in mind?” answers Mozart.

Who moves the world?  Is it the John Greens and their YA death porn groomed by editing cosmetologists to pristine bestseller condition, or is it the Grimes, the Mozarts, the Ayn Rands, the Lars Von Triers, the doers, the makers, the shakers, those who write and direct and sing and orchestrate not because society needs to hear them but because they need to do it for themselves, to carry out their own purpose?  History will show.

Fast-travel to other parts:

Part 1 – Not Worth The Effort 2015

Part 2 – The Problematic Influence of Kendrick Lamar on Art Criticism and Society Generally
Part 3 – Top 10 Part 1 and Honorables

On Reality TV Marriage Proposals

Dear future wife,

It is really late, and I should be in bed.  Why I’m writing to you at such a time and so far in advance of our loving each other in kind is well beyond my ability to explain, though I’m sure it owes a little to me feeling kind of bored and horny, and who on earth will be a better object of my baser yearnings than you, my dearly beloved?  I justify my obstinacy in this hour by saying that I’m studying for an important test tomorrow, but the test is all about Genesis, and I’m half-listening to junky reality TV in the background as I read my notes.  I wouldn’t say this impairs my preparation because the program in question doesn’t intrigue me in the slightest and I’m only watching in anticipation that someone, anyone will dare to sing a song of actual, legitimate quality.  Alack and alas, so far I’ve been foiled by an endless succession of excruciating country ballads, sappy R&B soul, and sellout Ed Jazeeran singer-songwriter schlock.  I think it’s safe to say that no one will be singing Radiohead, unless they take a swing at Creep, you know, that Radiohead song everybody who doesn’t like Radiohead claims to like – the one from their most uninspired, generically alt-rock album Pablo Honey.  Hell, at this point I’d be astonished to hear anybody cover No Doubt, Maroon 5, or Pharrell, all of whom make decidedly safe and mainstream genre music that may still be too edgy and experimental for this show despite their leaders sitting on the judges’ – that is, the coaches’ panel.  What was I talking about?  Oh, right.  Netflix, Starbucks, Chipotle, Starbucks, Netflix, Spotify, iPhone, iPad, Facebook, Starbucks, Insta, Netflix, Radiohead.

Still, the deficiency of all these wannabe singers’ musical tastes is hardly Problematic enough for me to write a letter to my future wife, representing nothing more or less than the run-of-the-mill radio jams one should expect of such reality programming aimed at an audience that can’t be bothered to listen to Real Music even when it’s all online for no additional charge.  But tonight the show did something so vexing and abhorrent to my conscience that I couldn’t miss a chance to call it out.

Dearly beloved, when I ask you for your hand in marriage, I won’t be asking on a television show in front of hundreds of live strangers and millions of later couch potatoes.  How would it occur to me that such a gesture could possibly be a good idea?  If I truly loved you and strove to put your safety and needs before my own, why would I force you under such a spotlight and effectively strip you of your negating power in the most significant decision you’ll make all your life?  It certainly wouldn’t be to prove my own bravado or manhood, because how could you deny me before so many prying, begging, tear-filled eyes of so many lifeless, brainwashed proles?  How much more valiant, how much more earned would it be if I proposed to you alone in the untouched solitude of some romantic venue, or in the great expanse of nature, where no spectators would raptly look on our affair, excitedly beseeching your acceptance?

But my proposal will have nothing to do with proving myself a man; as far as I’m concerned, I already did that by convincing you to go out on a second date, saying nothing of the first date, which was in itself a Herculean labor to initiate and took a lot more stress and patience than they care to replicate in all the movies.  Regardless of the efforts I go to in order to win your heart, I won’t propose to prove a point or assert some confidence in my masculinity.  A wise man once thought silently to himself, “It’s not about you; it’s about her,” and so it goes with proposals.  It’s not about making me look good, at least not to anyone but you, and the point is really just to make you happy.  So it goes with weddings.  Nobody cares about the groom’s apparel, because the wedding’s not about him, so whose business is it how he got the bride to say yes?  It may be our family’s or our closer friends’, but it’s certainly not a stranger’s or the whole wide world’s.  It’s not the business of some random housewife watching The Voice at night after reading Wild or Lean In or Gone Girl or Unbroken or some John Green horse crap written for moody teenage girls.  It is only the most intimate, meaningful, and personal moment most couples will share before their wedding day.

Dearly beloved, why would I sensationalize that moment for myself, ruin its profundity for you?  Why would I take the most precious and pivotal landmark of our relationship and reduce it to a reality television farce for sadder people’s amusement?  What joy or rush could I derive from dropping to my knees like an idiot and embarrassing us in front of millions of people?

Dearly beloved, for now I’m finished ranting about reality TV and the nonsense people do on it.  Until the next time you don’t read my letter, I’ll be processing my feelings on the utter uselessness of makedown and the social causes that impel people to use it... I’m just kidding.  There are much more worthy things to get angry over in this world than makedown, and with such a quantity of outrage tinder proliferating in today’s news, I don’t get that outraged over makedown anymore.  Makedown is annoying, dearly beloved, and most men find it really stupid, but a little makedown never killed anybody, nor is it a part of womynshellf, unlike birth control, abortion, sex change surgery, etc.

Everything wrong with the GOP debate

Scattered thoughts on Republicans walking right into Rupert Murdoch’s trap.

Why Does(n’t) Everybody Hate John Green?

The following invective is based loosely on an unpublished letter to the prestigious Beatissima Garbage. It’s also the last invective the Author plans on writing for some time because they’re really quite taxing to prepare and it seems like every other post on these Files is an invective of some public idiot whose moral squalor should be abundantly clear to anybody with a brain.

There was a new movie in town this last weekend that you may have heard of if not for a news story about some guy shooting some people at a showing of the new Amy Schumer comedy.  The shooting in question should never have happened, firstly because private citizens have no business owning guns unless they’re part of The Militia and secondly because the theater had an explicit policy forbidding guns on its premises, but somehow the gunman managed to bring a gun into the theater and use it on people who didn’t have guns while racist white killer cops rushed to stop the violence.  The media saw an opportunity to bring up old, emotional attacks on gun rights while simultaneously pimping Amy Schumer for yet another week, and so Paper Towns was condemned, as all of its author’s works, to smolder in the fires of neglect and obscurity and effective censorship due to… lack of free support from American press and schools.

And that’s a real shame, because according to John Green, it would seem like the whole world has it out to suppress and mock and ban his manifold artistic masterpieces, which he claims at the same time have spoken deeply to millions of readers.  From Looking Alaska to The Fault In Our Stars to his latest movie starring a lesbian supermodel and some dreamy Nice Guy, Green has faced staggering adversity and bumps in the road to becoming a multi-millionaire YA writer, teenage idol, and internet celebrity, so much so that the incessant barrage of hate and ignorance has forced him to rethink his activities on social media and officially declare he’s neither a pornographer nor a pedophile.  He’s such a poor guy, okay?  Okay? Okay?  Okay?  Okay???

Where do I even start to document the torrent of cyberbullying and misdirected parental fury that’s been levied towards the downtrodden rebel visionary Mr. Green?  I could look at the incredulous reaction of Depew High School parents in 2008 to the news that Green’s Looking For Alaska would be “taught” to 11th graders in the government school’s English curriculum.  Certain of these religious fascists objected to the explicit descriptions of oral sex and foul language contained in Green’s novel, particularly in light of the school’s (probably 100% symbolic) prohibition on students using obscenities. I too would sympathize with these parents, not because I think 16-year-olds shouldn’t read about sex or swear words under any circumstances, but because I think there’s something incredibly depressing about a taxpayer-funded, supposedly educational institution willfully, knowingly presenting twaddle to teenagers as great literature.*  I agree with their petition even more in light of the petty hissy fit Green subsequently threw on his Youtube channel (more on that later), excoriating the parents for trying to tell other kids what they can read (for school credit), which, in point of fact, no one was trying to do.  By Green’s purely libertarian, freedom-minded reasoning, the very state of being on the mandatory reading list at one time not only grants him an entitlement to stay on and consequently profit from that reading list for the rest of his career, but also irrevocably establishes his work as an incontrovertible, great American novel that all kids must be exposed to for their literary benefit.

I could look at John Green’s snippy, melodramatic swipe at the Riverside school district for deciding to remove The Fault In Our Stars from middle-school libraries.

People who don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump often believe that Rush and Trump are arrogant and dismissive of their rivals in the business, but many of these same people would adore and lean on the word of a man who unironically boasted that teens would never learn of death or grieving without entering the golden gateway of knowledge that is his weepy fiction aimed at fragile teenagers.  Green essentially laid claim to charting thematic territory that’s never been covered in three thousand years of literature, and no one batted an eye at his arrogance.  Does he know that the school which judiciously removed his bestseller (unavoidable in bookstores and public libraries everywhere) carries scads of other, eminently better books also dealing with death, including The Giver, Bridge to Terabithia, and Tuck Everlasting?

Does John Green even care to read any books not written by John Green, and is that why he holds such an inflated view of his own importance to the social, moral, and mental development of teenagers?  Green has repeatedly derided overprotective parents for “condescending to teens” and wrongly assuming they lack the means of reading critically, but how much more condescending is it to suggest that young adults should only read books tailor-written for their age group and can’t extend their search for truth into works that were actually written for grown-ups by grown-ups who didn’t bother with leading fan clubs or forming shallow connections with their readers?  Are high-schoolers so stupid that they can only be pressured to think about the world through government schools prodding them to read John Green, Twilight, Divergent, and so on?  Have their mental faculties deteriorated so much that the only literature they can handle is such that one could compress the entire book into a cutesy Buzzfeed listical of “19 profound John Green quotes that will inspire you”?

Some John Green profundities.  Left & right drawings by Christina Luna for Buzzfeed.

To be fair, Green’s not the only one to blame for this debacle; he’s just a symptom of a larger failure on the part of educators to focus on the truly excellent in favor of popular material (cough Kendrick cough) that “engages” reluctant readers and doesn’t require much thoughtful commentary from the teacher.  The state of public education notwithstanding, though, the only one condescending to teenagers is John Green, who says he doesn’t foresee himself writing any adult-oriented novels because they wouldn’t be as “useful” as the YA garbage he’s cranking out.*  So too does Green condescend to taxpayers by pretending that access to his products is a vital societal need that must be subsidized under some made-up “right to read”. How many copies of Fault does the author deem the library must purchase in order to avert his accusations of censoring beloved material?  If half the school’s students want to read his novel and the library only has enough copies to accommodate a quarter of the body, are administrators suppressing Green’s ‘ideas’ by forcing children to go to another public library or – heaven forbid – fork over $10 at a bookseller for their own paperback copy?  Does the school have a compelling obligation to make any book available for anybody at any time, let alone a book as prevalent and ingrained in contemporary pop culture as A Fault In Our Stars? Wouldn’t the school’s funds be better spent acquiring texts that have been reviewed and studied for longer than two years and have outlasted transient, media-manufactured hype?

Instead of dedicating his intellect – given that he possesses one – to penning genuinely worthy art, John Green wastes countless hours tweeting, instagramming, and building a vapid, intelligence-numbing social media empire on such high-brow creative outlets as Youtube and Tumblr.  If you don’t know what Tumblr is, you can watch the amusing illustrated video below, but it’s essentially a blogging-Facebook hybrid with hastag functionality optimized for emotionally distraught social justice warriors who are too lazy to make a real blog, a la The Author’s Files.

One could argue that Green’s rigid attachment to every one of these networks is highly unusual, even childish behavior when practiced by a 37-year-old married author.  In fact, some anonymous and completely irrelevant person did argue just that about a month ago, using the very online outlet embraced by Green to ridicule him for his systematic takeover of the internet.  Quoth the eloquent tumblrer:

Nothing in this little rant was factually incorrect or unjustified, as John Green has in fact made a business of pandering to teenage girls and has cultivated a following that is undeniably similar to, if not indicative of a cult.  Green’s army of self-professed nerdfighters, united under the banner of nerdfighteria, have their own hip vocabulary (decreasing worldsuck), study their own holy texts, celebrate their own (probably well-intentioned) holiday, think they’re “made entirely out of awesome”, and revere their leaders John and Hank, who made a gimmick of addressing Youtube video-logs (think Avatar) to each other so as to give people the impression that they knew the brothers on a personal level.  The extent to which Green goes to convince girls that he’s their friend and fellow nerd-in-fighting can definitely be seen as creepy or unfitting of a grown-up father, and he shows no signs of relenting from that habit in the future.

Instead of acting like an adult and facing up to the reality that the internet will always facilitate rude and negative comments about celebrities (especially ones who are vastly overexposed), John Green immediately set out to prove the tumblr writer’s point, taking to the internet to complain about how painful and difficult it is being a multi-millionaire author who gets bullied and misportrayed by hate-filled meanies on the web.

But John Green was never accused of sexual abuse or pedophilia, i.e. attraction to prepubescent kids, who clearly aren’t the audience for Green’s books or video series.  In most areas of the world and many American states, the kind of girls Green sucks up to are fair game legally, but that doesn’t mean his obsession with pleasing them is healthy or right, which is all the internet person was trying to say through an obviously sarcastic, hyperbolic post.  We don’t arrest people for being creepy, but being creepy has never been a really honorable character trait.  Still, Green’s too pathetic and insecure to suffer a joke at his expense, so he resorts to inventing straw man allegations which makes him look like much more of a victim than he really is.  He goes on to sermonize about the “complicated dopamine rush” that fuels his detractors and squeeze some false humility into his defense (“my various shortcomings, which are legion”) before vaguely pouting about how the bully has made him unable to continue blogging in the same way he has been for the last four years.

“I just need some distance for my well-being,” he closes.  One does not get any more pitiful than this. Green has essentially embodied America’s 21st-century entitlement state, loudly and impishly tattle-telling on anyone who hurts his delicate nerdfeels.  Whether he’s appealing to the defenders of Free Speech or to the defenders of Humanizing, Social Justice Language – that is, Not Free Speech – depends only on whoever’s pissing him off on any given day.

This is an official poster tagline.

Do I think that Mr. Green is unintelligent, nay, an imbecilic jackass?  Maybe.  He once compared capitalism to a pizza, says that protecting religious liberty means women will no longer be able to buy cars, and smugly perpetuates the delusion that Islam is a religious of peace… because Muslims sects spend so much time fighting each other and no one interprets the Koran quite the same way.  But in so far as John Green’s goal in life is to make money and feel like he’s filling an important role in people’s lives, he’s very good at manipulating young skulls full of mush into loving him.  He gives shout-outs to his “hardcore badass feminist mom”, consistently speaks the language of his fans, comically rubs his forehead like a cartoon character whenever he gets upset, says sex before marriage is cool, and even uses one of his characters to lecture to progressive, conscious readers on why they should never call anybody a faggot (far be it from me to speculate why he hates that word particularly, even though I just did).

Green does an excellent job overall of appearing to stand for everything that nerdfighteria stands for while actually standing for nothing.  He calls himself a Christian to mollify Christian readers, except when being a Christian means standing by convictions that Millennials find “discriminatory”.  He considers himself a capitalist, except when being a capitalist means opposing the minimum wage, nationalized health care, or carbon taxes to reduce nonexistent Global Warming.  He peppers his teens’ dialogue with the word “retarded” out of realism, until someone tells him that is ugly and wrong, at which point he has a radical change of heart and apologizes for his “dehumanizing language”.  I don’t think Harper Lee ever apologized for using the n-word in To Kill A Mockingbird because it hurt the feelings of some bozo who doesn’t understand the concept of a book.  Harper Lee, ironically, had more balls as an author than misunderstood pajama boy John Green ever had.  The latter’s greatest condescension to his readership is giving them exactly what they want to hear and nothing else, then having the gall to label himself a martyr for the status quo.

Ever the philosopher, John Green can be credited for at least one profundity.  “Some infinities are bigger than other infinities,” quips Hazel Whatever in A Fault In Our Stars.  If John Green’s infatuation with his uselessness counts as an infinity, then that must make him the biggest infinity of them all.

*Here’s an interesting piece on the dilemma of grown adults gobbling up books written for kids.

Stuff I missed the first time through

* John Green saying that his made-up cancer-stricken lovebirds parallel Anne Frank because she too “just died of illness like most people.”

* John Green ‘accidentally’ appropriating a 13-year-old Tumblr user’s adorable, deep quote, passing it off as a line from Paper Towns, and selling a crapton of merchandise based on the words to gullible nerd fighters.

* John Green denouncing the philosophy of Objectivism as “repugnant” and extolling his noncommercial, “idea-sharing, consciousness-expanding, storytelling business” as a ”persistent and direct opposition to the ideas put forth in Atlas Shrugged”.  “We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul laboring in isolation.  We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature… so f*** Ayn Rand and f*** any company that profits from peddling the lie of mere individualism.  We built this together and we're going to keep building it together.”

No, John Green.  &#^! you and your You Didn’t Build That mentality.

The Author's Playlist: How To Get Into Christian Music

Over the same period when a bunch of animals were announcing their presidential runs, a bunch of other, less developed animals were razing a city to the ground for the death of someone in their pack, and another, higher-up but still less developed animal was urging us not to dismiss all these animals’ concerns because their actions just so happened to be inexcusable and animalistic, the Author’s Playlist on Spotify quietly passed the 48 hour mark.  Having argued about animals all year long and unsuccessfully tried to prevail on others the superiority of the human to the bestial, I’m seizing this milestone as an excuse to talk about something a little less contentious, because if there’s one thing that never fails to unite people regardless of their political or socioeconomic backgrounds, it’s the music we listen to and the inborn ability of all people to distinguish artistry from garbage.

In the end, the ratio of grimy, secular rap to “Christian” music in the Author’s Playlist has turned out roughly 1:1, which really isn’t shocking as it took me a long time to develop a taste for either one.  Getting into Christian music is a rather difficult feat for ears that have long been reared on film scores, classical music, arena rock, and other genres which are very musically complex and rich.  As with most styles of music, if your primary entry point into this art form is the radio’s or internet’s current heavy-rotation setlist, you’ll only ever hear a smidgeon of the stuff that’s actually worth your attention, and my heavy exposure to such impoverished stations is probably what led me to indiscriminately hate religious-themed music for such a long time.  Likewise, if the only Christian music you ever absorb is the tired, sometimes inane Chris Tomlin anthems performed to death by your church’s worship leaders with choruses that cycle ten to twenty times before the song is over, you may get incredibly irritated at the very thought of listening to Christian music, viewing it as a menial chore and an exercise of your eardrums’ patience for repetition. That’s how I felt about it for the longest time, and there are still moments in (otherwise great) outdoor Beatissima worship sessions where my brain will wander off from God and dwell on homework, writing, women, anything to get me through the neverending finale.

As with most genres, the key to enjoying Christian music is just to appreciate it as music without dwelling on its larger spiritual intentions. Once I got over the fact that I was technically listening to Christian music and started focusing on the instrumental or lyrical beauty behind the given recordings, what I once regarded as a nuisance or a boring remainder of Sunday school became an aural sensation and a rewarding complement to my other alternative, folk, rock, or indie pickings. To make this transition as effortless and affordable for the uninitiated as possible without the expense of hiring an official “transition team”, I and my fellow undergrads in Beatissima’s Cultural Arts department are so blessed to present this run-down of the very best in CCM, and we hope this proves to all working DJs at Air One or elsewhere that good Christian music and good music don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Inland by Jars of Clay

Any of Jars of Clay’s albums could make the cut for inclusion in this list (The Eleventh Hour and Who We Are Instead are particularly noteworthy), but Inland is probably their most daring and invigorating achievement yet.  If any group could stake a claim to headlining the soundtrack of my childhood, it’d be either Jars of Clay or Newsboys or David Crowder Band, although I didn’t consciously connect their music with their names until half a year ago.  There were a lot of U2 singles as well, some Enya here and Matchbox Twenty there, and the Moulin Rouge soundtrack was always a mainstay, but for the long family roadtrips my parents’ iPods would dependably return to one of six or seven albums by these bands, and as a result I sadly developed a kind of emotional numbness towards all of them.  Inland was a relatively new addition to my family’s library and I was beginning to tire of it until I left for Beatissima and gave most Christian music a well-needed break to explore a host of other artists recommended by college friends whose uncouth vocals or abrasive production hadn’t been embraced at home.  That’s artists with uncouth vocals, in case that wasn’t clear, though a good number of my college friends also have very explicit vocals. Most of those explicit friends have really sucky taste in music too, except for Billy, who’s contributed more to this Playlist than any other individual in spite of (or because of) all his eccentricities.  Huge shoutout to Billy.

All that’s just to quote a more mainstream Christian singer who said you never know what you got till it’s gone.  For the longest time I convinced myself that Jars of Clay were musically boring and unsophisticated, but it wasn’t until I dragged myself through a trough of Kanye-Kendrick-Glitch Mob-Radiohead-Jack White-Jai Paul-Weeknd/Banks-Arctic Monkeys-Black Keys-Sublime that I could genuinely respect and enjoy Jars of Clay for what they do so singularly from everyone else (and what everyone else does differently from Jars of Clay).  Whereas many faux-alt albums end up sounding like a disjointed hodgepodge of musical styles, Inland is fully itself with a perfect and deliberate composition of electric and acoustic textures.

Take the lead track, After the Fight, which has a very unusual interplay of irregular drum strikes, bass lines, and layered vocals I can’t describe that vividly but sounds strange and beautiful.  Saying nothing of its incisive, subtle lyrics about the confusion of man trying to make up his own conception of love, Age of Immature Mistakes has some of the most impressive guitar work on the album, with strumming so intense and grandiose it mirrors the ego of the narrator.  Reckless Forgiver features the most explicitly spiritual chorus of Inland’s offerings, where Dan Haseltine pleads, “All I want is peace like a river / long life of sanity / love that won’t leave too soon” with goofy, whining violin strings honing what seems to be the utter simplicity of his request.

There’s actually not a lot of proper or proverbial references to God on Inland, a refreshing oddity of a Christian album where the pervasive absence of theological language makes the band’s brief allusions to the heavenly and eternal that much more significant and profound as compared to some big churchy crowd pleaser like Our God Is Greater which has no sense of subtlety or, well, anything in that particular case. None of the songs are overtly “Christian” or blatantly sermonizing, but I think the unifying theme of the album is of trying and failing to find permanent solace in human relationships or in idealized, passionate romances.

As such, much of the album assumes a somewhat melancholy or frustrated tone that’s evident even in titles like Love In Hard Times (a wonderfully minimalistic and moving expression of desire), Loneliness and Alcohol (wherein loud, hard-edged electric guitars crash spectacularly against their quiet neighbors), Left Undone, or Skin & Bones, by which point the narrator has relented enough from his foolish humanism to recognize:“We’ve made an art out of neglecting what we don’t want to see / Love is skin and bones, trying to set us free.”  The final track draws on John Donne’s famous quote “No man is an island” but cleverly twists it from a comment on the unification and social nature of man to a statement about man’s dependency on and longing for God. “You’re leaving all / just burn it in the fire / of everything you once knew / everyone that knew you… pack up all your questions / just keep heading inland / come on home to me.”

There are a couple slower songs that bog the record down marginally, and “Human Race” is a genuinely terrible ditty whose happy, skippy beat is thoroughly at odds with its cynical, tactless lyrics.  While Inland as a whole is very thoughtfully worded, the fourth track sounds amateurish and desperate by comparison on account of its strained “unfriending”/TV references and unimaginative rhyme schemes (“Look in my eyes, touch my face; we’re limping along, the human race.”)  It doesn’t reflect their talent as a band and you should just forget it ever existed.  Still, even OK Computer had the whacky, robotic Fitter, Happier working against it, so the presence of a single dud should hardly be grounds for dismissing the album.  The bottom line is that Jars of Clay use instruments in interesting ways, vary each section’s sound just enough to avoid redundancy, and write mostly pensive words that reward closer examination.

For a depressing period of two years I was a budding music snob who fooled myself into thinking I didn’t care at all for Jars of Clay.  Then I met a bunch of real music snobs who transformed me into an even bigger snob who now humbly recognizes that Jars of Clay are one of the best things to impact music like ever, ever.  They have all the alternative-indie cred of Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, Modest Mouse, The xx, or insert hipster indie band you don’t listen to here on top of poetic, spiritually challenging lyrics that strengthen one’s faith instead of dumbing it down.  To quote the venerable Rick Berman, it’s so dense, every single bar has so many things going on.

"Breakfast at Tiffany's": Boys Only Want Love If It's Torture

A quintessential work in the canon of anti-feminist cinema, Breakfast at Tiffany’s openly ponders whether modern women and men can merely be best friends without the burden of binding commitment.

The Author's Musings vol. 1 – tyranny, TV, and Winterholiday songs

Well, it’s that time of the year again.  No, not the start of the long anticipated Winterholiday season, but the time when students the nation over are systematically broken and squashed beneath the baggage of their own imprudently accumulated homework.  This week also marks something like the three-month anniversary of the Author’s regrettable and short-lived stint on that leviathan of internet timewasters we aptly refer to as Facebook, since pictures of faces are pretty much the only media people bother to share there.  In recognition of these historic events and until the day on which the Author can adequately compress all of Facebook’s failings into a single post, we’ve decided to introduce a new feature of this website designed specifically for on-the-go enlightenment in tightly condensed, intermittently nonsensical, Mark Zuckerberg-approved packages.  In the meantime, you’ll have to wait a bit longer for the Author’s verdict on Interstellar, the Michael Brown riots, anonymous “debate”, and an abundance of other American horror movies.

* 25 years since its conception, The Simpsons remains a diamond in a rough of lackluster television propagamming largely in that its writers have the good sense to lambaste both sides of our politically polarized, eternally stagnant nation.  Contrast this residual masterwork with any gushingly homosexual sitcom or crime drama whining about radical tea party terrorists.  I hate network television, pound sign so much.

* A five-line conversation with real people.

The Author: Why do people like this show [NBC’s “Phony Scandal”] so much?
Phony Scandal fangirl 1: You know, this is the first network TV show in history to feature a black female protagonist and it has a black writer [so you can just shut your mouth]!

Phony Scandal fangirl 2: The writing is soooo good.

The Author: Is that why people like it?
Phony Scandal fangirl 1: That’s why I like it.

* There is nothing more discordant or depressing in music than a country singer with a ring in her nose.  Pound sign just like animals.

* Screw the critical elite, the consensus of the mind-controlled mob.  Obamacare doesn’t work, the most beautiful woman isn’t a celebrity, and everyone knows the best song/movie/book of all time isn’t on anybody’s top 10 list.  Unless it’s mine.

* I love it when performers on these singing/karaoke shows “play” an instrument for the first 20 seconds of their gig and then put it away for the rest of the song.  Pound sign bsing us.  Pound sign charming, not sincere.

* Johnny Depp is looking to revive his tarnished career by portraying a wolf in a new Disney fantasy musical,  Not a real wolf or a CGI wolf or any kind of wolf that we can actually take seriously, but a guy made up as wolf.  Oh well.  He can’t be worse than Olaf.

* Why do we moronically insist on using the catch-all phrase “studying” for labors which very often have nothing to do with studying and are solely a matter of menial labor?

* When you ask me, “What’s up?” do you really want to know what is up or are you merely greeting me with a false and formalistic pretense of interest in my affairs?  When I pass someone by in a hurry I never ask them, “What’s up?” because I don’t care what’s up and I never pursue a conversation out of dishonesty. Would you believe me if I said it took me a full month in a real-world setting to realize people don’t want to know what’s up when they ask what’s up?  Pound sign seriously, what’s up with that?

* Asinine anapests.

* King Obama answers Congress and the voters who determine Congress’ structure: “To those of you who criticize me for doing what I want all by myself without your permission, we wouldn’t have this problem if you only did what I wanted or gave me your permission.”

* In other news Stephen Hawking says that, “The development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race… It would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate.  Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Stephen Hawking is also overlooked for saying, “As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilization.  We have concluded the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons.”

And people think this joker is “smart”.

* You think it’s sad your computer takes three minutes to start up?  Mine takes five to shut down.  Pound sign perspective.  Pound sign Thanksgiving.

* Baby, It’s Cold Outside is one of the worst songs in human history.  Pound sign Frosty better watch out.  Pound sign Rudolph is running for the border.  Pound sign Satan is hiding out in his trash can.

* Speak of the devil: why is the live band at this university playing Santa Claus Is Coming To Town to an assembly of mostly grown teenagers and twenty-somethings?

* And Mary, Did You Know? is now officially the Christmas carol of all Christmas carols – dark, brooding, indescribably hip.

* We try to refrain from outside plugs at the Author’s Files, but this guy has officially usurped the Screen Junkies writers as my favorite movie critic, because that’s just what he is.  Your Movie Sucks is cynical, shrewd, irreverent, frequently profane, and doesn’t give any movie a free pass simply based on what other people say about it.  He can be a bit of a communist turd at times, but at least he exhibits a modicum of independent, rational judgment when it comes to film.  Well recommended for adults who like thinking about criticism, storytelling gimmicks, or the distinction between art and propaganda.

Really salty language throughout.

Moderation Fallacy

This is a tightly compressed sociopoetical rant I wrote for a contest with a really unusual prompt.  It lost. Enjoy and ponder it pensively.  I have a really good piece coming in short order, so this is holding you over until then.


Five, oh ye with sullen aspect downcast, what spurs thee now to slander thus thy station,
Between thy brothers one and ten,
The center of the single digits scale,
Dwarved on right by mortals nine, on left by nothingness immortal?

Five, who are the sum of two and two – so quoth He they claim is watching you –,

Deciding then one’s reason

Or damning one for treason,

Five, who settle not for rank indulgence, nor so meek a frugal life to champion,

Ye spurn both sides’ extremes in isolation,

For why should one his evil methods ration?

Oh Fie upon the right and on the left, each one of moderation so bereft!

Why resign thyself to none or nine, to one end’s vices when in middle lies

The opportunity to come partake of twice the wrongs for compromise’s sake?

Honestique – The Jennifer Lawrence Cult

The post in which I break my promise to talk about Obama’s fatherhood and talk about why I don’t like Jennifer Lawrence instead.

It’s no secret that the entertainment gossip industry goes through celebrity obsessions faster than this part-time blogger’s mockery can keep up; one day they’re sucking up to child molester Woody Allen and all those performers shameless enough to work with him, next they’re gushing over whatever awards dress the slave movie actress is wearing, and then they’re practically bowling themselves over to obtain an interview with the Marvel superhero’s on-screen girlfriend, but the last two years have largely seen these gaseous sycophants returning to one person over and over again.  The media have since informed me that Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence, embarrassingly identified in some circles as J. Law*, is officially the new – how do you say? – “it girl” in Hollywood, which basically means that celebrity idolaters across the spectrum are dutifully standing by, like dogs before their master, to answer her every beck and call, disseminate her every off-hand comment, and generally swoon before her every public appearance.

You’ve probably heard the clichés before.  Aside from being beautiful, talented, and committed to her work, Jennifer Lawrence also happens to be the most eminently relatable actress in the business, reeling in such well-deserved descriptors as “honest”, “authentic”, “real”, “a breath of fresh air”, and “down-to-earth”.  In fact, her acknowledged reputation for non-fakeness and realness was exactly the impetus I needed to sit down and write this post many months ago, at which point I had accidently initiated a conversation with some friends that ended up treading all these same talking points.  Fortunately enough, my decision to postpone this article’s publication until the present has given me a much broader repository of Jennifer Lawrence nonsense to draw from and also enabled me to opportunistically mine the hype surrounding the new X-men movie directed, appropriately enough, by the X-rated party animal Bryan Singer.

At first I’d thought that this Jennifer Lawrence cult – and I’m not even the first to call it that, judging by a quick web search – was a disconnected and mostly trivial affair, rooted in nothing more than manic though transient Hunger Games hype, but now I see that this conjecture sorely underestimates its true significance.  More than just a passing, movie-dependent fad, the Lawrence Cult is symptomatic of a greater cultural malaise, the much more dangerous cult that we shall for the moment call the Spontaneous Identity Movement.  The Spontaneous Identity Movement holds as a key tenet that society as a whole is better off when people are truest to their core selves, i.e. when they live in accordance with whatever their impulses and whims tell them to do at any particular moment.  Spontaneous Identity ideology rejects all forms of self-control and standards of social propriety as deceitful and inconsistent with a person’s inner being; as in Lois Lowry’s dystopian universe of The Giver, anyone who attempts to repress or hide whatever random, indecent thoughts and cravings he may experience is committing the penultimate sins of lying by omission and not-sharing, where the first sin is that of rational judgmentalism.  And so it is that Jennifer Lawrence, in all her honesty, down-to-earthness, and unadulterated vulgarity, claims her rightful throne as champion of this movement, withholding nothing from the press and treating no ground as sacred.  As a perennially single, problematically picky, and admittedly delusional male Youtube watcher, I admire Lawrence’s honesty especially for giving us a portrait of what true honesty is not or need not be, and for demonstrating that honesty removed from dignity and class is about as valuable and useful as a needle without a thread.

I don’t like that Jennifer Lawrence pretends to espouse a positive, empowering view of female body image while putting her own body through the very rigorous and unnecessary makeovers that she condemns for everybody else.  In a sense, she verily typifies the left-wing Hollywood elitist in that she continually prods her fans to present themselves a certain way but never abides by this advice herself. Lawrence is always running her mouth on how women should take pride in their figure no matter how people on television or in magazines tell them they should look.  Airbrushed images of women on fashion covers promote a harmful message for America’s youth by inbreeding false expectations of how “real women”, presumably overweight ones like Lawrence, are shaped.  One big hole in this, obviously, is that Lawrence herself is one of those people on television and in magazines who’s telling fellow women how they should try to look. Another is that Lawrence, despite her numerous self-deprecating protests to the contrary, is neither relatively fat nor physically unattractive, but frequently gets caught airbrushing herself as if she was, proving she doesn’t believe the very simple message she preaches enough to practice it in her own life. Most egregiously, though, Lawrence never attends an interview or event unless she’s caked in makeup, a product that women use solely with the intent to make their bodies look ‘better’ than nature’s design. Whether you call this enhancing natural beauty or masking it doesn’t change the final cause of makeup – the same one shared by digital airbrushing –, which is to make something ‘deficient’ look more like something else that it is not, to subvert what “real women” look like in favor of some social standard of femininity sponsored by people on television and in magazines, i.e. by people like Lawrence, who urges girls to love themselves for “who they are” while at the same time doing everything within her capacity to change who she herself is.  This is what’s normally called being a hypocrite – a real and authentic hypocrite, perhaps, but a hypocrite all the same, and no more real or authentic than the celebrity who doesn’t practice hypocrisy.

I don’t like that Jennifer Lawrence resorts to using bawdy, anatomical humor in order to characterize herself with interviewers.  Apparently the new Hollywood thinks it’s cool for women to court attention by making the crudest physical jokes they can come up with, but no amount of New-Age Feminist balderdash will ever convince this Author that vomit, urine, or genitalia jokes are at all becoming or acceptable of a lady – or anybody else, for that matter.  I would repost some of Lawrence’s finer (in the sense that Caligula made a very fine emperor or Saul Alinsky a very fine community-organizer) off-the-cuff wisecracks here to prove my point, but none of them are even funny enough to qualify under the Files’ lowest comedic standards.  If we were sincerely going to debase our website’s upstanding reputation with a lazy boob joke, then we’d at least be sure to pick something of a higher caliber than Lawrence’s all-too-bloated stock of boob jokes.  In any case, Lawrence comes forward with a new viral obscenity regularly enough that you’ll probably run into one of them sooner or later without even looking, just like I have.  The whole alleged “rape scream” joke at Cannes that popped up a few days ago wasn’t even her best gag in the big picture, even though it’s garnered possibly the most coverage.  Or would it be worst gag in the big picture?  Whatever you call it, it was a bad idea – a real and authentic bad idea, perhaps, but a bad idea all the same, and no more real or authentic than an idea that another celebrity actually thought through carefully before sharing with everybody else.

I don’t like that Jennifer Lawrence has attended and spoken at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation awards ceremony along with limousine liberal Harvey Weinstein and sexual pervert Bill Clinton. GLAAD is an extreme, anti-American, fascist fringe group that actively tries to usurp the leadership and undermine the sovereignty of private organizations that don’t relentlessly lobby for their homosexual agenda.  GLAAD is notorious for bullying, demeaning, and attempting to silence anyone who diverges from their singular, close-minded worldview on homosexuality.  Oddly enough, there is no room for ideological dissension within their diversitopia, as evidenced by their assaults on Phil Robertson and other conservatives who denounce the media-abetted normalization of sexual offenses; in fact, GLAAD goes so far as to issue an annual evaluation of television networks’ overall gayness, a report which they call the “Network Responsibility Index”, implying thus that televised content providers have a moral and social obligation to incorporate a certain, arbitrarily decided quota of homosexual and transgender “representatives” in their work.  Thus they allot Fox a “Good” grade for filling a merely adequate 42% of its primetime hours with gayness while reprimanding TBS and History channel with a “Fail” for declining to drum audiences over the head with a certain sexual lifestyle.  This is no less akin to censorship than the FCC’s since revoked Fairness Doctrine, which unlawfully strong-armed broadcasters into fairly representing all the sides of any sufficiently divisive issue they might cover.  Even the since-fired MSNBC ass Alec Baldwin has had enough sense to savage GLAAD as the “fundamentalist wing of gay advocacy”.  GLAAD is a sworn and open enemy of anyone who truly supports freedom of religion, association, or speech, especially in film, which one would think that Lawrence holds particularly dear.  The only credible circumstances under which one can support GLAAD are bigotry, devotion to some Secular theocracy, or intentional ignorance – one could be a real and authentic ignoramus, perhaps, but an ignoramus all the same, and no less real or authentic than those who carefully research a political action group’s history before lending it their approval.

I don’t like that Jennifer Lawrence makes statements that have no logical coherency to them whatsoever. Take, for example, the interview with Barbara Walters in which she said with a straight face, “I just think it should be illegal to call somebody fat on TV.  I mean, if we’re regulating cigarettes and sex and cuss words because of the effect they have on our younger generation, why aren’t we regulating things like calling people fat?”  Granted that making any interview involving Bawbawa sound logically coherent is a Herculean labor in and of itself, Lawrence is both factually incorrect and structurally nonsensical.  Unless you bundle ‘n____r’ and ‘fag’ with the common stock of obscenities, nobody is “regulating” swear words except for the FCC, and then only on networks.  Likewise, the only real, major sense in which the United States regulates consensual sexual activity is by protecting children below a legal age of consent from predators; in point of fact, public schools across the country and especially in urban centers like New York City encourage children to sexually experiment with one another and even provide class tutorials on how to do so most safely and pleasurably, complete in many cases with free birth control packages for the students to practice what they’ve learned.  But let’s pretend for the sake of argument that our government really has enlisted a nightmarish squadron of bedroom police for the moral enrichment of our children. Even if the religious right has succeeded in clamping down on Americans’ single most important human right (sex), what justification is that for further encroaching on our liberty by annulling a significantly less popular but still fundamental human right to express opinions that possibly hurt the feelings of others?  Lawrence’s syllogistic reasoning must read either as:

A) We rightly regulate things that are good.

B) We don’t regulate things that are bad.

C) Therefore, we should regulate things that are bad.

or as

A) We rightly regulate things that are bad.

B ) We don’t regulate things that are worse.

C ) Therefore, we should regulate those things that are worse.

Neither is structurally valid and each is based on premises which Lawrence apparently doesn’t hold as truth.  If her conclusion that we should restrict freedom of speech in so far as it offends fat people and corrupts the youth is predicated on the government’s just suppression of drugs and promiscuity and curse words, then one would think that Lawrence might take her role as model to young fans in these areas more seriously.  And yet she’s always swearing in interviews, making crude references to certain body parts, smoking in public, and jokingly recounting drunken anecdotes, all the while swearing that “as long as [she’s] Katniss [she’s] making conscious decisions” to be a good example for her female admirers.  As far as we can distinguish from this “role model’s” behavior, regulatory actions pertaining to the three aforementioned objects have nothing to do with a negative influence on the younger generation’s character, thereby mitigating Lawrence’s diagnosis that there’s an urgent need to criminalize comments about weight under the same rationale.  Lawrence goes on to ask Walters, “Why is humiliating people funny?” as if our 1st amendment rights are contingent upon our aptitude for being funny, which admittedly is a little funny for epitomizing the thought process of a blithering idiot – a real and authentic idiot, but an idiot all the same, and no more real or authentic than a celebrity who doesn’t speak like an idiot.

In spite of all that criticism, I must confess that I’ve fallen dreadfully short of Ms. Lawrence in this post, this woefully dishonest, inauthentic, unreal, up-from-earth excuse to take advantage of a superhero se-prequel. Contrary to the misleading prelude, I really do like Jennifer Lawrence, in the same respect that I like Steven Spielberg or Stephen King or Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise.  Each of them gets his job done at the end of the day, nutcase or not, and Lawrence does her job better than most everybody else.  Whether or not her spontaneous, untempered, and utterly brutal honesty makes her a good role model for young Katniss Everdeen wannabes and whether she exemplifies all that I respect in women is a wholly different question. I suppose I could write a follow-up entry in adulation of whichever lady does the latter, but then I’m sure I already have…

That little, red-haired girl.

* Get it?  It’s like J.Lo, but with an Aw at the end instead of an O?  Ah!  That’s just so cute… in a stupid, humiliating kind of way.

Post-script: As if I didn’t already have enough reasons to sneer at the J.Law cult, now it turns out that Lawrence is a devout agnostic, and not even an “I cannot comprehend the mysteries of the universe” sort of agnostic but an “I just throw all the religions of the world into a melting pot and worship everybody” sort of agnostic.  From her June interview with Marie Claire:

“I was brought up very religious, and then I let go of everything that I had been taught and started with what felt right to me.  I just kind of grew up and, for lack of a better term, grew out of it.  I don’t know whose beliefs are right or wrong, so I just believe in everything, and I don’t believe in anything.  When I’m worried about something, like if Nick or anybody in my family is on a plane, I’ll say a prayer.  It just makes me feel better to throw it out there to anyone—whether it’s to God, to the universe, to Allah—just please keep them safe.”