"That's because so little talent is required to become a rapper that for a few years the biggest selling rap song of all time was the 'Super Bowl Shuffle' by the Chicago Bears NFL team."

But in the end he's just like "I guess people just grow up with other people of the same race. Dave Matthews Band is integrated cause they're, like, jazzbos who know how to play instruments, so they met later."

But you do, Stence, you do!

For example, Hendrix was responsible for what seemed like 95% of the sound volume on his albums, with his white rhythm section puttering along in the far background.

Starting a rock band is often an excuse for trying to live out the male adolescent fantasy that you'll find a way to make a living hanging out with your buddies. That's also why rap groups tend to be absurdly overstaffed. Wu-Tang Clan has nine members, for instance. Similarly, NBA stars buy giant Lincoln Navigators to ferry around posses consisting of all their unemployable friends from junior high school.

The purpose of the article is more or less to praise the Dave Matthews Band for overcoming racial stereotypes and being so darned good.

I support this further clarification wholeheartedly.

Cobain, who blew his brains out in 1994, was indeed a blotto scarecrow.

GIL RIDS GANGSTA RAPPER THUG HELL

Coincidence?

Apparently.

umm, accurate? twisted? heartless? all three?

The Ratpure

Actually it was.

hahaha that's fantastic.

That was me (the guy who misheard, that is, not the one who's blotto).

Bloody Nile.

I never realized that the Ramones were actually a music-cleansing offshoot of the Aryan Nation!

They were nazis, schatzi.

"The band's first album, 1977's "The Clash," was as good as punk rock ever got, but that wasn't good enough for The Clash. With their notorious first single "White Riot," they had launched their career by imitating the power chording of The Ramones. These pathbreaking New York punks had developed an alternative to blues-based rock by stripping away most of the African-American elements of rock and roll, reducing it to its linear fundamentals."
I never realized that the Ramones were actually a music-cleansing offshoot of the Aryan Nation!

-- milozauckerman (wooderso...), January 31st, 2005.

he's not making that up, a lot of the early punks actually were trying to strip the black blues/r&b influence from their music!

Sir Elton John, looking like Mrs. Doubtfire on acid, officially welcomed rapper Eminem to the Celebrity Cartel by helping him perform his hit "Stan" at the Grammy Awards This is the tale of an increasingly deranged Eminem fan who, inspired by the rap superstar's fictitious songs about murdering his wife, locks his pregnant girlfriend in the trunk of his car and drives off a bridge.

The Academy gave Eminem three Grammies in Rap categories. Yet, in the grand tradition of the Grammies, it denied him the Best Album award, bestowing it instead upon those refugees from the Gerald Ford era, Steely Dan.

Both the malevolent gay-bashing rapper and the beloved homosexual has-been must have found their pairing somewhat demeaning. The craving for celebrity, though, often makes for strange bedfellows. In a world teeming with talented would-be celebrities, those few who've made it to the top try to constantly bask in each other's glamour to help them to stay on top.

The two took very different routes to the stage of the Staples Center.

Although never a musical innovator, Sir Elton was the most prolific composer of catchy pop tunes of the first half of the Seventies. Not long after his 1973 album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," however, he fell into a bit of a slump as a melody-writer. This slow stretch in his creative career is now entering its second quarter century.

Like a baseball pitcher who suddenly loses his fastball, Sir Elton has had to scramble to stay in the celebrity big leagues. He has done all the usual things: write songs for a Disney cartoon, compose a Broadway musical, tour with other nostalgia acts like Billy Joel, sing at a royal funeral, and raise money for fashionable gay causes like AIDS. All this hectic activity has helped him keep at least on the fringe of the limelight that he craves so much.

Eminem, in contrast, has become a hero and role model to white boys across America by showing that a white man can rap as agilely and as anti-socially as any black man can.

A diminutive 28-year-old originally named Marshall Mathers, Eminem appears to be a classic case of the Stockholm Syndrome. This tendency of victims to begin identifying with their tormentors is named after a notorious hostage taking in Sweden, where many of the captives fell in love with their kidnappers.

As a child growing up in tough Detroit neighborhoods, little Marshall was repeatedly beaten up by black thugs. In response, he started to identify with his tormentors. He became enamored of the worst aspects of African-American underclass culture.

Eminem is a writer of considerable wit and invention. As a lyricist, he resembles an undisciplined and repulsive version of Tom Lehrer, the Harvard mathematician and part-time musical satirist who wrote such brilliant parodies as "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park."

Eminem's tirades against male homosexuals grow out of gangsta raps' obsession with obscenities. Although middle-class Americans curse frequently, they've largely forgotten these phrases' anti-woman and anti-gay origins. For example, the popular expression "you suck" - which Bart Simpson taught first graders to use as a cooler version of "you stink" - actually has a quite specific meaning: "You willingly degrade yourself by taking on the female role of giving sexual pleasure to a man."

Eminem, who devoured dictionaries as a youth, explicitly spells out the disturbing roots of America's favorite obscenities. They stem from the ancient revulsion toward men who perform the sex acts favored by male homosexuals, such as, to pick a random example, Sir Elton.

Sophisticated listeners will generally get Eminem's jokes. He deploys three alter egos - Eminem, Marshall Mathers, and Slim Shady - to show it's all just a put-on. His self-awareness makes music reviewers wet themselves in excitement over his post-modernist irony.

The problem, though, is that Eminem also aims his songs directly at America's most dim, damaged, drunk, and drug-addled young men, the real life models for "Stan." It's a near statistical certainty that some of them will take his calls to violence literally.

Eminem is well aware of this, and responds by writing self-referential songs about it like "Stan." This drives music critics into further spasms of ironic delight. Yet, it does nothing to solve the problem that he's encouraging criminality.

Despite all of Eminem's verbal agility at deflecting responsibility, it's clear that songs glamorizing the thug life can induce some young men to act like thugs. The best examples are the gangsta rappers themselves. They don't seem to fully get their own joke. Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were murdered, probably by other rappers. Snoop Doggy Dogg beat a murder rap, but Puffy Combs is still on trial for a nightclub shooting. And Eminem was recently convicted of pulling a gun during a dispute. He awaits sentencing.

Eminem's vileness, though, made him the perfect vehicle for Sir Elton's return to the spotlight. At age 53, when men in other careers are finally reaching their professional primes, Sir Elton is 25 years over the hill. His fame is so great that he could go on organizing celebrity bashes for AIDS for the rest of his life, but the buzz about him is fading. So, who better to glom on to than Eminem, this month's most controversial figure in world history?

Eminem, in turn, needed a politically correct blessing from a famous gay activist like Sir Elton to keep himself from being pilloried like loudmouthed Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker.

Yet, even more, Eminem needed Sir Elton's help in entering the ranks of Permanent Celebrityhood. Andy Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. Andy, however, has been famous for saying that for thirty years. In truth, the number of big stars who ever become so obscure again that they have to get a real job is minimal.

But rappers are the big exception. A few like LL Cool J have managed to hang around since the Eighties, but most have a shelf life of no more than five years. The field is swarming with upstart competitors. That's because so little talent is required to become a rapper that for a few years the biggest selling rap song of all time was the "Super Bowl Shuffle" by the Chicago Bears NFL team.

As the first great white rapper, Eminem has the opportunity to break out of the rap ghetto and reach those sunlit uplands where he can stay a star long after he dissipates his talent. And Sir Elton can always show him the way.

This guy needs to die.

maybe he should stop writing about fashionable things like music before he gets his fashionable head bust.

or to post THIS picture:

http://www.allprodad.com/images/singletary.jpg

He also came off kind of pro-union in the Shakey review.

Is this the definition of neo-con?