This Week's Top 5, and RIP
Tomorrow or early next week, I'm going to write a big post about college athletics. It's something I believe strongly in, and have wanted to write for a while, and just haven't had the time to devote to it. In the meantime, I wanted to expound on this week's list, and give a shout out.
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This week's Top Five is My Top Five Eccentricities: Feat of SkyNet, Overpopulation Concerns, Geekiness, Germaphobia, and Being A Die Hard Fan of the NBA. Allow me to explain each in turn, started with the least eccentric:
* Being A Die Hard Fan of the NBA: I mean seriously, who likes NBA basketball? And I love it. LOVE it. Bill Simmons is right: there's only about 20 true NBA fans left, and I'm one of them.
* Germaphobia: Now I'm not a "true" germaphobe, where it impedes my ability to live a normal life. However, it would be accurate (this is probably Kyle's big ticket item on the list) to say I have "germaphobistic tendancies". For example, I refuse to eat or share raw cookie dough or brownie batter, as I am afraid of salmonella poisoning (this has been a bone of contention with many girlfriends over the years). It is not unusual for me to wash my hands 5-10 while cooking--especially when handling raw meat or chicken. So I've got some germaphobe in me.
* Geekiness: My nerdiness is well known to any who know me, even casually. This includes, but is not limited too: toy collections, love of cartoons, love of video games, choices of reading genres, movie selections, and the fact that I actually write a blog.
* Overpopulation Concerns: Yes, I really do worry about this. It's not a major concern yet, and no, I don't agree with those crazy bitches who have been documented by the media lately who think that having any children is an ecological and moral travesty, but I do think that we have reached the point where we need to start looking to the future and considering how large our planet is, how many resources we have, and how many people are going to be there at our current population growth. China already has a population control program in place--I'm not saying I know (because I don't) what it is, and of course don't agree or disagree with something I'm ignorant about, but the fact that a superpower in the world is already thinking about this issue is proof that it's not as eccentric as some people would think.
When our grandkids are surviving on Soylent Green, you'll wish you hadn't called me crazy! I mean, eccentric!
* Fear of SkyNet: SkyNet is (of course) the supercomputer in the Terminator movie series who takes over the planet and attempts to wipe out humanity. And yes, I do worry that this will happen someday. Crazy talk? Perhaps. But the myriad of sci-fi material on the subject is so popular partly because the idea is not totally farfetched. The Animatrix, the anime films released to provide additional stories to The Matrix movies, sucked. But watch the one good story--The Second Renaissance--which describes how the war between mankind and the machines began. Tell me that's not completely out of the question. You can't.
Am I advocating the getting rid of all computers? Of course not. I'm just saying, this is something we should be aware of, and why we should always have a "Manual Override" button.
I know, I know...I'm crazy. ;-P
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Finally, a eulogy.
I started listening to rap my freshman year of high school, in 1993. This was right after the emergence of West Coast rap, and right about the time the East Coast/West Coast War was beginning. I started listening because of basketball: when you're one of the few (or only) white boys on the team, then the "When in Rome" truth kicks in, and you listen to rap. I grew to love it, and not just the mainstream rap that most of white America listened to--to this day, I hate Puff Daddy and consider him the man who ended the Golden Age of Rap Music--but the artists who didn't get a lot of air play, the guys who didn't tour like premier artists did, the guys who were part of the "Underground". Well, one of the greatest underground duo's of all time was aptly named UGK; the Underground Kingz. This duo was Bun B and Pimp C, and they eventually rose to such popularity that you almost couldn't consider them underground anymore.
Sadly, Pimp C was found dead in his hotel this week. While the death of an artist that I admired is sad enough, what makes it even more depressing is that rap itself is dying. Say what you will about rap and the messages it conveys, in the past you could count on one--if not both--of the following traits: 1) it presented America with a starc picture of life in the black community, and 2) provided outstanding poetry from the exceptional lyricists performing the songs.
Rap today isn't that. Rap today is club music designed to get girls to shake their asses. That's it. There's nothing more to it than that. There's no unique beats--it's all the same bass beats repeated over and over again. The lyrics are the sadest thing; they are truly dead and gone. Most of the "rappers" today are kids who just repeat the same phrase, sometime even the same word, over and over and over and over and over again. The lyrics, the poetry that made rap music so exceptional is gone, replaced with mainstream club music. Rap is dead; hip-hop has taken its place.
So that makes Pimp C's young death even sadder; he was one of the last great practicioners of a dying art. So RIP Pimp C; you'll be missed, and the rap game has sadly lost yet another star. Unfortunately, there aren't many left who can properly mourn you.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This week's Top Five is My Top Five Eccentricities: Feat of SkyNet, Overpopulation Concerns, Geekiness, Germaphobia, and Being A Die Hard Fan of the NBA. Allow me to explain each in turn, started with the least eccentric:
* Being A Die Hard Fan of the NBA: I mean seriously, who likes NBA basketball? And I love it. LOVE it. Bill Simmons is right: there's only about 20 true NBA fans left, and I'm one of them.
* Germaphobia: Now I'm not a "true" germaphobe, where it impedes my ability to live a normal life. However, it would be accurate (this is probably Kyle's big ticket item on the list) to say I have "germaphobistic tendancies". For example, I refuse to eat or share raw cookie dough or brownie batter, as I am afraid of salmonella poisoning (this has been a bone of contention with many girlfriends over the years). It is not unusual for me to wash my hands 5-10 while cooking--especially when handling raw meat or chicken. So I've got some germaphobe in me.
* Geekiness: My nerdiness is well known to any who know me, even casually. This includes, but is not limited too: toy collections, love of cartoons, love of video games, choices of reading genres, movie selections, and the fact that I actually write a blog.
* Overpopulation Concerns: Yes, I really do worry about this. It's not a major concern yet, and no, I don't agree with those crazy bitches who have been documented by the media lately who think that having any children is an ecological and moral travesty, but I do think that we have reached the point where we need to start looking to the future and considering how large our planet is, how many resources we have, and how many people are going to be there at our current population growth. China already has a population control program in place--I'm not saying I know (because I don't) what it is, and of course don't agree or disagree with something I'm ignorant about, but the fact that a superpower in the world is already thinking about this issue is proof that it's not as eccentric as some people would think.
When our grandkids are surviving on Soylent Green, you'll wish you hadn't called me crazy! I mean, eccentric!
* Fear of SkyNet: SkyNet is (of course) the supercomputer in the Terminator movie series who takes over the planet and attempts to wipe out humanity. And yes, I do worry that this will happen someday. Crazy talk? Perhaps. But the myriad of sci-fi material on the subject is so popular partly because the idea is not totally farfetched. The Animatrix, the anime films released to provide additional stories to The Matrix movies, sucked. But watch the one good story--The Second Renaissance--which describes how the war between mankind and the machines began. Tell me that's not completely out of the question. You can't.
Am I advocating the getting rid of all computers? Of course not. I'm just saying, this is something we should be aware of, and why we should always have a "Manual Override" button.
I know, I know...I'm crazy. ;-P
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Finally, a eulogy.
I started listening to rap my freshman year of high school, in 1993. This was right after the emergence of West Coast rap, and right about the time the East Coast/West Coast War was beginning. I started listening because of basketball: when you're one of the few (or only) white boys on the team, then the "When in Rome" truth kicks in, and you listen to rap. I grew to love it, and not just the mainstream rap that most of white America listened to--to this day, I hate Puff Daddy and consider him the man who ended the Golden Age of Rap Music--but the artists who didn't get a lot of air play, the guys who didn't tour like premier artists did, the guys who were part of the "Underground". Well, one of the greatest underground duo's of all time was aptly named UGK; the Underground Kingz. This duo was Bun B and Pimp C, and they eventually rose to such popularity that you almost couldn't consider them underground anymore.
Sadly, Pimp C was found dead in his hotel this week. While the death of an artist that I admired is sad enough, what makes it even more depressing is that rap itself is dying. Say what you will about rap and the messages it conveys, in the past you could count on one--if not both--of the following traits: 1) it presented America with a starc picture of life in the black community, and 2) provided outstanding poetry from the exceptional lyricists performing the songs.
Rap today isn't that. Rap today is club music designed to get girls to shake their asses. That's it. There's nothing more to it than that. There's no unique beats--it's all the same bass beats repeated over and over again. The lyrics are the sadest thing; they are truly dead and gone. Most of the "rappers" today are kids who just repeat the same phrase, sometime even the same word, over and over and over and over and over again. The lyrics, the poetry that made rap music so exceptional is gone, replaced with mainstream club music. Rap is dead; hip-hop has taken its place.
So that makes Pimp C's young death even sadder; he was one of the last great practicioners of a dying art. So RIP Pimp C; you'll be missed, and the rap game has sadly lost yet another star. Unfortunately, there aren't many left who can properly mourn you.
posted by Michael Pondrom at 10:57 PM
1 Comments:
Mikey,
No worries about skynet.....that's what all the pimply faced haxx0r5 are for! They'll ping flood that bitch til it smokes, plus send it some trojans in e-mails with "Fr33 pr0n" in the subject line. All we really have to do is make sure Skynet is running windows 98. B.S.O.D. = bye bye skynet. Now if its running Leopard, we may be fooked.
Sad to hear about Pimp C. You couldn't grow up in SE Texas w/out listening to UGK.
--Jonathan
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