The Marshall Mathers LP: Too immature, even for me

As someone who has memorized Superbad in its entirety and who got ready to go out last night by drinking to old Cash Money videos, it’s very rare that something is too immature and distasteful for me. Unfortunately, it’s gotten to that point with most of Eminem’s catalogue. I would never dream of downplaying his talent or writing ability, but as I take baby steps towards adulthood, I find that I cannot listen to his music without cringing.

Today I say goodbye to The Marshall Mathers LP after one last listen. It’s a sentimental moment for me, and I’m fighting to hold back tears as I write this. The Marshall Mathers LP (MMLP) played a major role in my youth and each song brings back a flood of memories.

When it came out in 2000, I was twelve years old growing up in the suburbs of Delaware. My peers and I loved rap, as it was the most compelling and badass music of the era, but we couldn’t help but notice that most of our favorite rappers didn’t look like us. We could recite the lyrics of entire albums, but as rough as our recess football games could get, we didn’t quite relate to the tales of violent street life.

Eminem tapped perfectly into our prepubescent angst. “We lost to St. Andrews in lacrosse and now Mom wants me to take out the garbage?!” I’d turn “The Way I Am” up loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage, shadow box at the foot of my bed and feel a burst of righteous empowerment. “They can’t make me take out the garbage, and they can’t make me do my algebra homework either. It’s my life and I don’t give a fuck.”

And my goodness could the man put words together. His songs had strings of cadenced multi-syllable rhymes that made the ABAB schemes we diagramed in English Class seem hopelessly pedestrian. “Pigeon-holed into some poppy sensation that got me rotation at rock’n'roll stations.” Eminem combined the verbiage of Edgar Allen Poe with the emotional maturity of a potty-mouthed fourth grader, which is remarkable. Whether remarkably impressive or remarkably pathetic is in the eye of the beholder, but it is remarkable nonetheless.

MMLP is Eminem at his peak as both an incredible lyricist and an abnormal psychology case study. Because the album resonated so strongly with me, it brings a flood of memories when I listen to it. It makes me nostalgic, but it’s the same kind of nostalgia I get when I remember waking up out of a blackout hugging the toilet in my freshman year bathroom. It’s kind of funny but it’s painfully embarrassing at the same time. When I listen to MMLP, my thoughts aren’t “those were the days,” but more along the lines of “wow, we would actually spend entire lunch periods arguing about who had the largest penis,” and “yeah, I’m glad I’m not in junior high anymore.”

I’m not sure exactly which part of the album was the tipping point that made me decide I could not listen to it as a decent adult. Maybe it was the chorus to “Under the Influence:” “So you can suck my dick if you don’t like my shit, cuz I was high when I wrote this so suck my dick.” Maybe it was the deranged “Kim,” in which he describes the murder of his wife in vivid detail and channels the spirit of a sick killer. Maybe it was that he spends an entire verse of “Criminal” describing his disgust and hatred of gay people and then finds it necessary to include a skit with a graphic simulation of gay group sex. Maybe it’s that he acknowledges and disses the Insane Clown Posse. Maybe it’s the two appearances by Bizarre, a less talented and more perverted version of Eminem who describes raping both his sister and his cousin in the same verse. Maybe it’s Eminem’s claim that if Jennifer Lopez were his mother, he would still impregnate her, creating a new brother and uncle (I actually still think that one’s funny. As I said before, I’m taking baby steps toward adulthood.)

There is very little mature rap music, but MMLP falls into his own category of immaturity. It goes beyond the good-natured if unrealistic alpha-male posturing and violent boasting of most rap, and becomes pathetic and depressing. I’m going to miss listening to the album, and even as I cross my fingers for Drake’s debut, I admit that it’ll probably be a long time before I hear a rapper that talented. But at a certain point, you have to let go of your childhood, and as an adult I just can’t bring myself to listen to MMLP. At least until the next time I get fired or have a break up, when I really have a deep angst that others can’t understand.

This Week on House M.D. (and next week too)

Tune in Monday for an exhilarating new episode of House. A rare strain of flesh eating bacteria is terrorizing hospital patients and the experts have no idea what to do about it, except for one man. House has a theory on how to stop it, but it requires a dangerous procedure that could risk the patients’ lives. The people in charge say it’s too reckless and forbid House from doing it, but he doesn’t listen to rules. He’s a renegade and a curmudgeon, but he’s a damn good doctor. Tune in and see if House’s refusal to listen to the medical establishment will pay off or ruin his medical career.

In defense of Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame speech

One of the main reasons we love sports is that they’re a very thinly veiled metaphor for war. For the first six million years of human evolution, we adapted to survive in violent conditions. The relative peace and safety we now live in is a very recent development. Suddenly, we’re supposed to sit in a cubicle for fifty hours a week, shake hands and smile politely. We weren’t built for this, so it’s not surprising that so many people spend their week counting down the hours until Sunday, when they can scream viscerally as modern day warriors try to break their opponents’ spirit. Most people do not have an outlet for their aggression and competitive fire in their daily life, and sports provide a tremendous release.

Michael Jordan broke the spirits of his enemies as well as any man who ever lived. He made it his life’s work, and when he could still do it we loved him for it. The people who say that Jordan was idolized for his grace and athleticism miss the main component of his mystique. Carl Lewis also defied gravity. George Gervin also made beautiful poetry with a basketball in his hands. Michael Jordan is placed on a plane above all other athletes because of how brutally he vanquished his competition.

During his Hall of Fame speech, Jordan offered us a glimpse into the psyche of a ruthless competitor. Instead of describing the glory of winning championships and being loved by people around the world, Jordan’s speech consisted almost solely of anecdotes about adversaries he crushed. Its critics found it at best unpleasant, and at worst the ramblings of a bitter sociopath. It was akin to a war hero giving a speech where everyone expected him to lament of the losses of his peers and thank God it had ended, but instead described in vivid detail the people he killed as if he had enjoyed each act of violence. People would shield their children from such brutal words. They would keep their distance from the speaker out of fear and repulsion. They would harbor serious and justified doubts about his ability to function in a regular job in a peacetime society. But goddamn would they want him to fight on their side again if another war broke out.

A man with the resolve and mental toughness of Jordan is capable of being a great hero or a great villain. Jordan is a hero because he used his powers for good. Had he put his determination and killer instinct to work as an assassin or drug kingpin, there’s little doubt he would have excelled and murdered dozens. Fortunately for us, and underworld figures everywhere, he entered an arena where the only casualties were John Starks’s pride and Karl Malone’s championship aspirations.

Though not as vicious as Jordan, all people possess some degree of aggressiveness and violent tendencies. We know it’s wrong, but we cannot help but respect and admire these traits in others. (How many times have you watched Scarface or The Godfather?) While we can dream of a utopian world where these traits did not exist in people, and lament on how peaceful it would be, these traits are hard wired into our genetic code and here to stay. Michael Jordan’s legacy should be that he showed us how to channel these aggressive and violent tendencies into something constructive, using them to improve the world.

Sad Elitists: The literary critics who trash Harry Potter

If you want to make sure people realize that you’re a pretentious pseudo-intellectual who had a miserable childhood, be sure to mention how much you dislike the Harry Potter books. Readers who consider their tastes sophisticated consistently dismiss the books as cute, but of little literary value, when the novels are almost guaranteed to become the most influential and important fiction since Shakespeare. On top of that, they’re damn good books (even if the wizardry aspects are kind of fruity).

Rowling is truly an amazing author. She describes characters and plot so precisely that adapting her novels into movies was a relatively easy process, even with millions of fans itching to tear them apart for not remaining true to the books. She has a tremendous wit, and draws humor from the plot rather than resorting to contrived or obvious jokes. Most significantly, even though her books are about children, she covers the most difficult issues in literature. She addresses weighty topics such as death, jealousy, racism and fascism with a well-defined moral compass. She does not become preachy and generalize her characters as one-dimensional saints and villains, however. She develops them to be faceted and complex, making the reader empathize with their struggles to do the right thing when it is not always clear what that right thing is.

Detractors of the books hate them because they are written simply, without long words, convoluted sentence structure or difficult metaphors, which in their minds make the novels somehow less compelling. Those with this outlook on literature only read to fill their empty space where most people have a soul with some detached superiority that comes from reading books that most of the population will never read or be able to understand. It’s not surprising they would hate a book that makes millions of people experience a joy they will never know. Even with their postgraduate degrees and encyclopedic knowledge of the postmodern canon, these elitists could never create fiction that changed the world as Rowling did and they will never forgive her for it.

Shakespeare’s plays stood the test of time because they broke down all barriers. They come across as very literary today because the language sounds weird to us, but they were actually written in a style that was very straightforward for its time. Everyone in a town, from the ruling elite and nobles to illiterate peasants, attended his plays and could relate to the story and characters.

Rowling’s books are the closest thing since Shakespeare to achieving this. The Harry Potter series has transcended every social barrier and, in an era where people allegedly do not read books, become beloved around the world by everyone except the self-proclaimed literary elite. If you think this reflects poorly on society, you should go cry and wipe your tears with the pages of one of the desperately subversive and nihilist novels hailed as a classic in the past two decades, as you tell yourself how much more cultured you are than everybody else.

Peace and Justice Studies: Turn your diploma into Kleenex

At my alma-mater you can major in Peace and Justice Studies. Apparently, white guys were jealous of Women’s Studies and African American Studies majors and needed their own way to waste $200,000. The first lesson of this major should teach that economic prosperity correlates almost perfectly with a nation’s levels of peace and justice throughout history. Students would then be forced to intern at oil companies. Instead, they take a bunch of courses that teach how evil America is for being more fortunate than other nations. This doesn’t set it apart at all from most liberal arts courses, but it distracts from the major’s far more nefarious purpose.

If a school tried to offer a major in curing disease, people would condemn it for being a fucking joke. If you actually wanted to cure disease, you would have to study biology and chemistry in undergrad and then do years of grad school and years of research after that before you could even pretend to help in the fight against disease. If anything, society and civilizations are far more complicated than the human anatomy. Some day we will cure cancer, but we will never stop people from killing and persecuting each other. The idea that people expect to achieve this in four years of vacuous watered down courses on white guilt is absurd enough that only a college freshman could believe it.

Peace and Justice Studies isn’t actually about peace or justice. There is no course on the injustices perpetrated by radical Islam or the way physical violence is glorified in urban American society. The major is entirely about getting rich people to give money to useless people who work at NGOs. The statistics about the dire poverty and suffering in which most of the world lives and catalogue of terrible things done throughout history by rich white people that Peace and Justice Studies classes teach are used to trigger feelings of guilt in these same rich white people. This guilt rarely stems from actual imperialism, but from memories of cheating on spouses, sucking up to pompous bosses, and backstabbing friends in high school to move up in the social food chain. Fortunately, the successful have long ago suppressed such feelings and are unable to locate their origin. This leaves them ripe for some one with social conscious (it says so on his business card) to solicit a donation for his do-good organization. The rich person’s guilt is erased, the do-gooder gets to head a prestigious organization without ever learning practical skills in college, and most cities in the world remain urban war zones ripe with disease. Everybody wins.

It’s the oldest scam in the book, and it never fails. Condemn something everybody does, in this case possessing aspirations of wealth and ancestors who acted brutally in the 1700′s, which triggers their guilty consciences. Then sell these same people a remedy for that guilt. The church called their remedy indulgences and made a killing off of it for centuries. The key is convincing people that they’re evil, and then society grants you moral authority, or in layman’s terms a license to print money. Since people are fairly evil as a general rule, the convincing isn’t difficult. On second thought, a degree in Peace and Justice Studies isn’t such a bad investment after all.

Shameless Exploitation: Otherwise known as the NCAA

Take a step back and actually look at the situation in the NCAA. You have incredibly talented kids, many of them coming from poor backgrounds, generating millions of dollars of revenue and not getting a cent. During March Madness or Bowl Season, networks, sneaker companies, coaches, athletic directors, announcers and sponsors all get paid. The kids who actually play the games get nothing. They put in intense physical labor, compromise their health, and a bunch of rich white guys make money off it. And this is somehow right because it improves the purity of the game. What a load of shit.

The concept of amateurs being more pure exists only in sports and porn. Would it make any sense if actors had to spend a few years working pro bono on network shows that made huge profits before they could earn a salary? Would you want to eat at a restaurant where the chefs weren’t paid and you didn’t tip the wait staff? Would it somehow be more pure if you got an amateur tattoo artist to put your crew’s logo on the side of your neck?

People have no sympathy for college athletes because they are jealous of them. It’s hard to feel sorry for guys who bang the girls we fantasize about and are worshipped like rock stars. Some of them will go pro, and a select few will become exorbitantly wealthy, but the majority won’t, and memories of cutting the line at keg parties won’t pay for therapy for the chronic back problems left over from the playing days.

It’s great that amateur athletes love their sports enough to compete for free. Most teams at the collegiate level make no money, but for a select few it is a business. NCAA athletes have no say in the TV contracts that get negotiated or the state-of-the-art arenas and stadiums that are constructed. If money is made from their work though, how is it possibly right that they don’t get any of it. If college sports want to be amateur events, they should let the players’ classmates and parents attend for free and eliminate TV timeouts. The reality is that high-level NCAA football and basketball hasn’t been at all amateur for years, and the kids working the hardest are getting absolutely shafted.

College Basketball: Far inferior to the NBA

It always kills me when people say that college basketball is better than the NBA. What gets me is that people can’t just admit they like it because it allows them to harken back to their collegiate days when they weren’t fat or it has more white players or March Madness is like crack for sports gamblers. Those are all dumb reasons, but they’re at least true. Instead, people always make up some dumb excuse that makes them sound like some psedo-basketball purist. They don’t play any defense in the NBA, they say. This statement doesn’t deserve to be dignified with a response. The organization where JJ Redick got 25 points a game in its most competitive conference can’t really claim to have a monopoly on defense. They don’t run a team offense, they say. Yes, God forbid a team has a balanced attack that includes driving and posting up instead of stacking the perimeter because the rules give 3 points for a 19 foot shot that 8th graders can make regularly. But the game is purer, they say. They’re competing for the glory, not for some NBA contract. People who say this deserve to be shot. I defy anyone to have watched a UConn team in the past five years, and tell me that Rudy Gay and Hasheem Thabeet were sacrificing blood, sweat and tears because they so badly wanted a bunch of business majors to have the life-altering experience of getting loaded on Crown Royal and flipping cars in celebration of a national championship.

College basketball games are more dramatic to ignorant fans, but that’s only because the talent level is that much worse. A team isn’t coming back from a 10 point deficit in two minutes because the other team’s point guard could run through a press without using his left hand. Even Shaq and Dwight Howard don’t miss pairs of free throws with the clock winding down, making comebacks rarer still. Players in college dive on the floor and fall over awkwardly taking charges. This is because they are less precise and graceful in their motions, but announcers always try to spin these spaz-like movements into examples of how hard they are working. They make it seem as if Tim Duncan doesn’t want to win because he never trips over his own feet while he executes a basic turnaround jumper and punch the air like he’s having a seizure after he makes the shot.

There’s no excuse to not watch the NBA if you’re a sports fan because it has the best atheletes in the world. Almost all of the NFL’s best athletes, including Randy Moss, T.O., Tony Gonzalez, and Julius Peppers are failed basketball players who admit that they prefer it to football. If you put LeBron at tight end for the Browns he would easily have 20 touchdowns next season. Try to obtain video of All-Star closer Bobby Jenks passing an elementry school’s fitness test. CC Sabathia will master a triple axel on skates before you find it. Don’t even think about mentioning soccer. If Rajon Rondo and Monta Ellis had played soccer all their lives they would be breaking the ankles of some Portugese guys so badly it would be inhumane. In fact, France’s best athlete, Tony Parker would murder any of the national team’s midfielders in a foot race, agility drill, or strength competition. If you really want to get into it, Anderson Varejao is the best flopper in all of Brazil and Sasha Vujajic looks more like a metro douchebag than Christino Ronaldo. Once Shaq chokeslams Brock Lesnar, there will be no arguement left.

The NBA is the highest level of athletic competition in existance. If you want to see less athletic players with fewer skills make more mistakes and only stay with their team for more than one season if they’re not that good, then by all means college basketball is for you.

A related article that further shows the hypocrisy of college fans

Girl Talk: A make believe musician

Girl Talk is the single biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people. The first time people got the idea to mix instrumentals from pop songs with vocals from rap songs it was kind of cute. You’d listen to Eminem rapping over a Brittney Spears song for thirty seconds and think, “Hey that kind of goes together.” Now you have this hipster scum convincing people that he’s creating some revolutionary form of art, making millions of dollars and earning critical acclaim.

The first problem with mashups is that they sound terrible. Music fans around the world have heard 3-6 Mafia played over Neutral Milk Hotel and thought, “How did I never think to listen to these two groups at the same time? Oh yeah because it sounds dissonant and shitty.”

Mashups have found a niche because hipsters’ indie rock of choice can never be played in a social setting. Putting on an Arcade Fire record at a party will have everyone in the room standing around awkwardly and reminiscing over sad memories of not fitting in during high school. Mashups solve this problem by putting hipsters’ favorite songs over a danceable drum beat. No one will actually dance, but it allows socially incapable young people to engage other hipsters on conversations with “Hey, I recognize this song,” which soon leads to, “Hey I saw them in concert one time and they were awesome,” which inevitably concludes with, “Hey, wanna go smoke a bowl and talk about it?”

As with most of society’s woes, Kanye West is to blame for the influx of mashups. While rap has always relied on sampling, most producers at least tried to use relatively unknown songs and obscure them to the point they’d be fairly difficult to recognize. Kanye was too lazy to do this, so he began lifting full songs and having people rap over them untouched. It wasn’t long before hipsters realized they could do this same thing, except eliminate the original rapping. Once it was cool for Jay-Z to rap over an existing Doors song, it was only a matter of time before some bearded hipster who was too lazy and untalented to make his own songs could play a Jay-Z verse at the same time as a Doors song and call it new music.

This concept excites hipsters to the point of climax. See, as dedicated music fans they spend all day criticizing it, causing them to feel superior to the people the actually create it. When Girl Talk sells out concerts and is listed among Pitchfork’s albums of the year, it feeds their deluded belief that they can be important to music even though they never took singing lessons and didn’t make the high school jazz band. It’s only a matter of time before they run out of music to mash up and have to mix old mash ups together. “Oh my God, did you hear how he mixed the drums off track 4 from Feed the Animals with the xylophone breakdown from track 8 on Night Ripper, it was so brilliant.” God help us all.

Open Borders: Let’s see how fast we can go bankrupt

Let’s not step up border security and allow the deluge of illegal immigrants into our nation to continue. Then, let’s put in place universal health care and expensive public schools that their children will have full entitlement to. Then, let’s act shocked when an increase in the lower-class population causes our onced balanced budgets to turn into deficits. It’s cool, we’ll just raise taxes or something. Oh, not on you, on the rich people. Maybe if we give California to China they’ll call it even.