Pop Vultura Category
What’s my skeleton in the closet? Pop culture. I’m facinated by pop culture. I like to pretend it’s a side-effect of my sociology degree: pop culture is an excellent barometer of where American culture is, since we seem to live on a steady diet of whatever entertainment crap we’re fed. The crap that’s popular tells you a lot about the people injesting it. But part of me thinks I just like it.
Live Oscar Blogging
27
Feb
2005
In: Pop Vultura
I have to watch the Oscars for work. Hence, live blogging.
You can read my bits by clicking the MORE… link below, but my favorite Oscar rambling comes from Salon:
The lowest point of the evening — which was actually the high point, because it was the only thing that sucked hard enough to be actually interesting — was Hispanic Korner, where all the Latinos were quarantined. Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz, representing the beeg teets of Meheeco and Espain, introduced one of the two musical numbers that didn’t feature Beyoncé…..which shall henceforth be known as “iBanderas! : The Unquenchable Thirst for Shame.”
Antonio Banderas, looking like he just took a swim in Julio Iglesias’ sebum pond, was sitting in what looked like an adobe Mexican prison set, or El Grande Castillo del Taco Bell, braying with Carlos Santana, who was grimacing with simulated guitar-passion behind his Blueblockers. It was a Latin musical travesty to rival J.Lo’s swan-dive into obsolescence at the Grammies. “J.Lo has finally found a duet partner!” said Wayne Brave. Jesu Christo. Next time, instead of letting Banderas disgrace himself to represent Hispanic culture, perhaps the Academy should just cut to a shot of stuffed bullfrogs dressed like mariachis. Or maybe a cute terra-cotta lawn sculpture of some drunk guys wearing sombreros, having a siesta. Or a pinata, shaped like a burro. Ai caramba.
Editing Room Floor’s Bogus Journey
11
Feb
2005
In: Pop Vultura
I’ve been getting better at nailing my blurbs for the buzz bin … but my blurbometer was broken today, and everything kept coming out much dirtier than I intended. The resulting blurbs were too off-color for the context (the company I work for is owned by an international entertainment empire — as one troll so judiciously pointed out a few weeks ago). And sadly, as the copy editor explained, “The mouse hates cock.”
The Longest Yard
While watching this trailer, we started noticing a “drip drip drip” sound in the background. Then we realized that was the sound of our brains dribbling out through our nostrils from the sheer stupidity of the trailer. Now that those pesky brains have drained, we think we’ll watch the trailer again, and we’ll enjoy it this time!
Ghost Rider
Hotty McHotterson Eva Mendes has been cast to play Nic Cage’s love interest in this action flick. We are resisting the urge to make an “I gotcher longest yard right here, Ms. Mendes” joke right now. Oops: we failed. Stupid Nic Cage. He’s always stealing our girlfriends.
The Itty Bitty Titty Committee
You know what’s funny? Chances are pretty good that if it wasn’t the title of a new movie starring Elisha Cuthbert, we wouldn’t be allowed to talk about titties such committees here at [site].com. But now the floodgates have opened and we will talk of these titties itty bitties and their committee continuously. Ms Cuthbert, we salute you!
Kids these days!
11
Jan
2005
In: Pop Vultura
A year or two ago I saw this hilarious video online of some German kid rapping on Star Search. In trying to find it for a coworker, I first came across this campy as hell page full of boy German singers and then finally found my way to Lil’ O, the 11-year-old German rapper who won that Star Search competition. I ran babelfish to translate some of his page and got this: The video for this clubbigen TRACK with clear hit potential already is in the box and saves so some surprise. Clubbigen! Tee hee.
I never could find the Star Search video, but apparenly Lil’ O got a record deal and released an Eminem rip-off single called “Party.” Here are some of the lyrics:
Nobody else makes a hard and fist fight as me
I just wanna say one thing, I don´t take E
If I could I just really introduce myself
I´m like the rapper who has drugs laying on his shelf
If any motherfucker says: This is the geatest shit!
Then you can look in the charts, bitch, this is a hit!
And if you wanna sing go on, you can make it fit
But don´t worry my little Pistols are gonna make you quit!
The video is pretty funny — but I’m mostly just fascinated by the fact that it’s totally ok for an 11 year old to rap about smoking huge amounts of weed, murdering people, and taking pills. Is it because he raps in English so it’s sort of cute to the Germans? I’m certainly not offended by it, but why is it that in America kid rappers tend to rap about kid-appropriate things? Li’l Bow Wow (nee Bow Wow) raps songs with titles like “Basketball.” I wonder if this is like the difference between European and American babystrollers…that’s a topic for a different day.
Related topic: Boyz to Men — A guide to prepube soul stars. Or, does success stop when the nuts drop?
(lyrics to “Party” after the break — I lifted them from some german site, and the spelling reflects transcription by a non-native English speaker)
Bollywoody
28
Dec
2004
In: Pop Vultura
A few weeks ago at work, I was writing a blurb about a new movie project that’s gotten the green light: Gangsta, MD. The film will be a remake of the Bollywood hit, Munna Bhai MBBS, about a gangster who lies to his parents about being a doctor, and then actually goes to medical school to restore his honor. He saves people with “magical hugs” and compassion and there are lots of song and dance routines.
Dre and I are on a Bollywood kick lately, so I netflixed Munna Bhai … and we loved it! Bollywood films definitely have a lock-down on over-the-top cheese, spectacle, and maudlin emotion. Munna Bhai was totally ridiculous, and thoroughly enjoyable. More-so than I’m guessing the American version will be.
This is another chunk of my former book proposal. Since this won’t be used in the proposal I’m finishing up now, I might as well give it a home here on the web.
And so I traded following along with what was popular in my school for a deep obsession with what was popular in America. Everyone else might know where Mudhoney was recording their new album, but I knew about Paula Abdul’s failed voice lessons. (In retrospect, naturally, I think I’d much rather have known about Mudhoney, but I was pursing my universal truth and I liked dancing to Paula Abdul, so damn it, I wasn’t going to learn about Mudhoney to impress anyone.)
My obsession with popular culture was an absolutely mystery to my mother. She didn’t watch TV (other than Beverly Hills 90210, which we would watch together back when each episode still had a moral), and complained of too many ads telling you to be skinny and rich.
Naturally, she was (and is) right. But I was desperate to understand what was going on with the world outside the log walls of the house. I needed to know how the other side lived. I was trying to build a worldview, and the best way to understand the mind of the masses was the get right into the thick of the culture food they (we?) are fed daily.
Out in the stucco world, there was a lot of cheese and synthesizers. It was cheese and synthesizers that my mother heard in the staccato snaps of “Tainted Love,†which caused her to observe, “I think that finger snapping is just a machine, Ariel!†It was cheese and synthesizers that was Madonna singing “La Isla Bonita†through the headphones of my bright red plastic AM/FM walkman as I danced around my room (probably doing the proto-Squidly Diddly) as I thought to myself, “So this is what it feels like to be a teenager!†The cheese and synthesizers of the Rick Astley videos I watched with on MTV when I babysat my infant cousin.
My obsession was met with a little contempt at home. My mother found it all a little shallow, in that “people are starving in Africa and all you want to talk about is hairspray?” sort of way. Naturally, this only reinforced pop culture’s magnetism. If my parents had rejected many American cultural values, that clearly suggested that my best bet was to embrace them wholeheartedly. I would relish a supersized McDonald’s french-fry for every lentil I’d ever eaten. While my parents danced around the house to Holly Near and African drummers like Oletunje, I would don my red plastic walkman and croon Jody Watley songs to myself (”I’m looking for a new love, baby, a new love.”)
I did everything I could to transform my corner of our happy hippie home in a pop culture shrine. During my Tiger Beat era, I carefully taped photos of Mackenzie Astin and Scott Grimes to the rolling lumpy log walls of my bedroom. The hardwood floor with its braided rugs and rocking chairs didn’t match very well with my flats and pegged pants, but I did the best with what I had. And the slick wood floor was good for practicing the running man, and I videotaped myself with our VHS camcorder to perfect my moves.
My father helped where he was able: when I got my first jeans jacket, he gave me a very cool Harley-Davidson patch that I proudly sewed over my heart. My dad did, after all, ride a motorcycle, and THAT was cool…assuming you overlooked the fact that it was a commuterly Suzuki cruiser with a windshield. Again: I worked with what I had.
Despite being an absolute teetotaler, I was drunk on hormones and drunk on popular youth culture. Finally, some bright plastic to outshine my parent’s natural fibers. I took pictures of myself with my hair parted near my left ear, brushed over my eyes, pouting into the camera. Somehow seeing myself in this pose helped to confirm my desires to be a part of the majority. Granted, I was wearing little peace sign earrings, but the ‘60s were sort of trendy in the late ‘80s, and my folks appreciated the nod.
Strangely, I still tap into this hysterical rush of youth and excitement — it’s usually when I watch a really slick dancing video, all those lithe bodies moving in unison. My pulse quickens, my breathing gets a little shallow, suddenly I feel invincible and cool, a little cocky and ready to dismiss some oily bulging dancing boy with a flip of my long blond hair. I watch one of these videos and I’m overtaken by the rush of power and restlessness.
In other words, the videos that make me feel like a teenager now make me feel like I’ve done cocaine. When watching videos, my first reflexive thought is, “YES! I’M TOTALLY RENTING A LIMO AND GETTING AN EIGHTBALL AND GOING CLUBBING! LIKE, TONIGHT!â€
And I like that feeling. It’s probably why I still listen to so much pop music. It’s a sense of synthesized looping on a grand scale. Emotions about as genuine as the rush of hormones and endorphins after your first hand job. A rush of energy as sincere as a mirror and a razor blade. And it costs. Eight balls? Expensive. Being a teenager? Taxing. Keeping up with pop music? Exhausting.
Despite the exhaustion and expense of this compulsive need for pop music, I continue my dedication. Last year I paid $65 to go see Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake in concert in Los Angeles.
I ended up seated between a 9-year-old girl and a gay couple (one of whom wore a shirt that said, “I want Christina in the front/and Justin in my rear.) I was dressed to the hilt, dancing my ass off in my platform boots and dreadlock extensions. The 9-year-old and I sang along with every single Justin song, mugging and snapping our heads back and forth with all the anti-Britney songs. The boy in the front/rear t-shirt was clearly high on something, and had terrible high person rot-breath, but loved to dance dirty…including a few minutes he spent bumping and grinding with the 9-year-old. I laughed constantly, and reveled in that feeling of knowing every word to every song. There it was again: the intoxicated rush of being perfectly at home with the masses. None of my friends would attend the show with me, but I was far from lonely. Me and several thousand of my peers shared an intimate little moment together, passing the blade as we turned the mirror.
The following weekend, I attended a premier underground event of the West Coast’s intentional rave community. A few hundred people gathered on native land north of LA to camp and celebrate a decade of full moon parties. This event was notorious, the dance collective known up and down the coast, and the music spanning the best of the wrinkles in the colon of electronic music’s many sub genres.
I found myself half naked basking on the sun in the middle of a small river, listening to what’s known as IDM (intelligent dance music) bleep over the speakers in a clearing, and thinking to myself, “I wish they would play something I could dance to…something like Justin Timberlake!â€
Again: a cultural crime. Passionate members of underground communities are not supposed to feel this way. My underground compatriots have trouble reconciling my obsession. I have low credibility when it comes to musical taste. People nod and smile at my enthusiasm, but wince visibly at my choices.
Perhaps if you grow up already jacked into the cultural arteries of America, it feels better to separate off into an esoteric corner, root around in the underground until your nostrils are packed with soil. But for those of us who came of age just outside of the realm of popular culture, that intoxicating rush from snorting a huge fat line of manufactured tastes off a mirror is inescapable. You can look at your reflection, wipe the residue of commercialized good times off your nose, and get read to crawl into the back of Britney’s limo.
My pursuit of the pursuit does have its limits. To name a few: brazil waxes, trucker hats, The Passion of Christ. I tend to have a strange knee jerk against modern hipster-ism, the uber-trends of my urban peers. I find myself again and again returning to the comfort of not the elusive coolness, but the easily accessible lowest common denominator popular. I don’t get the same thrill out of exclusionary trends — those that are too expensive, too elusive, to esoteric for the masses. Certainly I enjoy these subcultures and their fetishized elitism, but when it comes to the straight rush of pop culture, the joy is in the accessibility.
Live Oscar Blogging
27 Feb 2005 In: Pop VulturaI have to watch the Oscars for work. Hence, live blogging.
You can read my bits by clicking the MORE… link below, but my favorite Oscar rambling comes from Salon:
The lowest point of the evening — which was actually the high point, because it was the only thing that sucked hard enough to be actually interesting — was Hispanic Korner, where all the Latinos were quarantined. Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz, representing the beeg teets of Meheeco and Espain, introduced one of the two musical numbers that didn’t feature Beyoncé…..which shall henceforth be known as “iBanderas! : The Unquenchable Thirst for Shame.”
Antonio Banderas, looking like he just took a swim in Julio Iglesias’ sebum pond, was sitting in what looked like an adobe Mexican prison set, or El Grande Castillo del Taco Bell, braying with Carlos Santana, who was grimacing with simulated guitar-passion behind his Blueblockers. It was a Latin musical travesty to rival J.Lo’s swan-dive into obsolescence at the Grammies. “J.Lo has finally found a duet partner!” said Wayne Brave. Jesu Christo. Next time, instead of letting Banderas disgrace himself to represent Hispanic culture, perhaps the Academy should just cut to a shot of stuffed bullfrogs dressed like mariachis. Or maybe a cute terra-cotta lawn sculpture of some drunk guys wearing sombreros, having a siesta. Or a pinata, shaped like a burro. Ai caramba.
Editing Room Floor’s Bogus Journey
11 Feb 2005 In: Pop VulturaI’ve been getting better at nailing my blurbs for the buzz bin … but my blurbometer was broken today, and everything kept coming out much dirtier than I intended. The resulting blurbs were too off-color for the context (the company I work for is owned by an international entertainment empire — as one troll so judiciously pointed out a few weeks ago). And sadly, as the copy editor explained, “The mouse hates cock.”
The Longest Yard
While watching this trailer, we started noticing a “drip drip drip” sound in the background. Then we realized that was the sound of our brains dribbling out through our nostrils from the sheer stupidity of the trailer. Now that those pesky brains have drained, we think we’ll watch the trailer again, and we’ll enjoy it this time!
Ghost Rider
Hotty McHotterson Eva Mendes has been cast to play Nic Cage’s love interest in this action flick. We are resisting the urge to make an “I gotcher longest yard right here, Ms. Mendes” joke right now. Oops: we failed. Stupid Nic Cage. He’s always stealing our girlfriends.
The Itty Bitty Titty Committee
You know what’s funny? Chances are pretty good that if it wasn’t the title of a new movie starring Elisha Cuthbert, we wouldn’t be allowed to talk about titties such committees here at [site].com. But now the floodgates have opened and we will talk of these titties itty bitties and their committee continuously. Ms Cuthbert, we salute you!
Kids these days!
11 Jan 2005 In: Pop VulturaA year or two ago I saw this hilarious video online of some German kid rapping on Star Search. In trying to find it for a coworker, I first came across this campy as hell page full of boy German singers and then finally found my way to Lil’ O, the 11-year-old German rapper who won that Star Search competition. I ran babelfish to translate some of his page and got this: The video for this clubbigen TRACK with clear hit potential already is in the box and saves so some surprise. Clubbigen! Tee hee.
I never could find the Star Search video, but apparenly Lil’ O got a record deal and released an Eminem rip-off single called “Party.” Here are some of the lyrics:
Nobody else makes a hard and fist fight as me
I just wanna say one thing, I don´t take E
If I could I just really introduce myself
I´m like the rapper who has drugs laying on his shelf
If any motherfucker says: This is the geatest shit!
Then you can look in the charts, bitch, this is a hit!
And if you wanna sing go on, you can make it fit
But don´t worry my little Pistols are gonna make you quit!
The video is pretty funny — but I’m mostly just fascinated by the fact that it’s totally ok for an 11 year old to rap about smoking huge amounts of weed, murdering people, and taking pills. Is it because he raps in English so it’s sort of cute to the Germans? I’m certainly not offended by it, but why is it that in America kid rappers tend to rap about kid-appropriate things? Li’l Bow Wow (nee Bow Wow) raps songs with titles like “Basketball.” I wonder if this is like the difference between European and American babystrollers…that’s a topic for a different day.
Related topic: Boyz to Men — A guide to prepube soul stars. Or, does success stop when the nuts drop?
(lyrics to “Party” after the break — I lifted them from some german site, and the spelling reflects transcription by a non-native English speaker)
Bollywoody
28 Dec 2004 In: Pop VulturaA few weeks ago at work, I was writing a blurb about a new movie project that’s gotten the green light: Gangsta, MD. The film will be a remake of the Bollywood hit, Munna Bhai MBBS, about a gangster who lies to his parents about being a doctor, and then actually goes to medical school to restore his honor. He saves people with “magical hugs” and compassion and there are lots of song and dance routines.
Dre and I are on a Bollywood kick lately, so I netflixed Munna Bhai … and we loved it! Bollywood films definitely have a lock-down on over-the-top cheese, spectacle, and maudlin emotion. Munna Bhai was totally ridiculous, and thoroughly enjoyable. More-so than I’m guessing the American version will be.
This is another chunk of my former book proposal. Since this won’t be used in the proposal I’m finishing up now, I might as well give it a home here on the web.
And so I traded following along with what was popular in my school for a deep obsession with what was popular in America. Everyone else might know where Mudhoney was recording their new album, but I knew about Paula Abdul’s failed voice lessons. (In retrospect, naturally, I think I’d much rather have known about Mudhoney, but I was pursing my universal truth and I liked dancing to Paula Abdul, so damn it, I wasn’t going to learn about Mudhoney to impress anyone.)
My obsession with popular culture was an absolutely mystery to my mother. She didn’t watch TV (other than Beverly Hills 90210, which we would watch together back when each episode still had a moral), and complained of too many ads telling you to be skinny and rich.
Naturally, she was (and is) right. But I was desperate to understand what was going on with the world outside the log walls of the house. I needed to know how the other side lived. I was trying to build a worldview, and the best way to understand the mind of the masses was the get right into the thick of the culture food they (we?) are fed daily.
Out in the stucco world, there was a lot of cheese and synthesizers. It was cheese and synthesizers that my mother heard in the staccato snaps of “Tainted Love,†which caused her to observe, “I think that finger snapping is just a machine, Ariel!†It was cheese and synthesizers that was Madonna singing “La Isla Bonita†through the headphones of my bright red plastic AM/FM walkman as I danced around my room (probably doing the proto-Squidly Diddly) as I thought to myself, “So this is what it feels like to be a teenager!†The cheese and synthesizers of the Rick Astley videos I watched with on MTV when I babysat my infant cousin.
My obsession was met with a little contempt at home. My mother found it all a little shallow, in that “people are starving in Africa and all you want to talk about is hairspray?” sort of way. Naturally, this only reinforced pop culture’s magnetism. If my parents had rejected many American cultural values, that clearly suggested that my best bet was to embrace them wholeheartedly. I would relish a supersized McDonald’s french-fry for every lentil I’d ever eaten. While my parents danced around the house to Holly Near and African drummers like Oletunje, I would don my red plastic walkman and croon Jody Watley songs to myself (”I’m looking for a new love, baby, a new love.”)
I did everything I could to transform my corner of our happy hippie home in a pop culture shrine. During my Tiger Beat era, I carefully taped photos of Mackenzie Astin and Scott Grimes to the rolling lumpy log walls of my bedroom. The hardwood floor with its braided rugs and rocking chairs didn’t match very well with my flats and pegged pants, but I did the best with what I had. And the slick wood floor was good for practicing the running man, and I videotaped myself with our VHS camcorder to perfect my moves.
My father helped where he was able: when I got my first jeans jacket, he gave me a very cool Harley-Davidson patch that I proudly sewed over my heart. My dad did, after all, ride a motorcycle, and THAT was cool…assuming you overlooked the fact that it was a commuterly Suzuki cruiser with a windshield. Again: I worked with what I had.
Despite being an absolute teetotaler, I was drunk on hormones and drunk on popular youth culture. Finally, some bright plastic to outshine my parent’s natural fibers. I took pictures of myself with my hair parted near my left ear, brushed over my eyes, pouting into the camera. Somehow seeing myself in this pose helped to confirm my desires to be a part of the majority. Granted, I was wearing little peace sign earrings, but the ‘60s were sort of trendy in the late ‘80s, and my folks appreciated the nod.
Strangely, I still tap into this hysterical rush of youth and excitement — it’s usually when I watch a really slick dancing video, all those lithe bodies moving in unison. My pulse quickens, my breathing gets a little shallow, suddenly I feel invincible and cool, a little cocky and ready to dismiss some oily bulging dancing boy with a flip of my long blond hair. I watch one of these videos and I’m overtaken by the rush of power and restlessness.
In other words, the videos that make me feel like a teenager now make me feel like I’ve done cocaine. When watching videos, my first reflexive thought is, “YES! I’M TOTALLY RENTING A LIMO AND GETTING AN EIGHTBALL AND GOING CLUBBING! LIKE, TONIGHT!â€
And I like that feeling. It’s probably why I still listen to so much pop music. It’s a sense of synthesized looping on a grand scale. Emotions about as genuine as the rush of hormones and endorphins after your first hand job. A rush of energy as sincere as a mirror and a razor blade. And it costs. Eight balls? Expensive. Being a teenager? Taxing. Keeping up with pop music? Exhausting.
Despite the exhaustion and expense of this compulsive need for pop music, I continue my dedication. Last year I paid $65 to go see Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake in concert in Los Angeles.
I ended up seated between a 9-year-old girl and a gay couple (one of whom wore a shirt that said, “I want Christina in the front/and Justin in my rear.) I was dressed to the hilt, dancing my ass off in my platform boots and dreadlock extensions. The 9-year-old and I sang along with every single Justin song, mugging and snapping our heads back and forth with all the anti-Britney songs. The boy in the front/rear t-shirt was clearly high on something, and had terrible high person rot-breath, but loved to dance dirty…including a few minutes he spent bumping and grinding with the 9-year-old. I laughed constantly, and reveled in that feeling of knowing every word to every song. There it was again: the intoxicated rush of being perfectly at home with the masses. None of my friends would attend the show with me, but I was far from lonely. Me and several thousand of my peers shared an intimate little moment together, passing the blade as we turned the mirror.
The following weekend, I attended a premier underground event of the West Coast’s intentional rave community. A few hundred people gathered on native land north of LA to camp and celebrate a decade of full moon parties. This event was notorious, the dance collective known up and down the coast, and the music spanning the best of the wrinkles in the colon of electronic music’s many sub genres.
I found myself half naked basking on the sun in the middle of a small river, listening to what’s known as IDM (intelligent dance music) bleep over the speakers in a clearing, and thinking to myself, “I wish they would play something I could dance to…something like Justin Timberlake!â€
Again: a cultural crime. Passionate members of underground communities are not supposed to feel this way. My underground compatriots have trouble reconciling my obsession. I have low credibility when it comes to musical taste. People nod and smile at my enthusiasm, but wince visibly at my choices.
Perhaps if you grow up already jacked into the cultural arteries of America, it feels better to separate off into an esoteric corner, root around in the underground until your nostrils are packed with soil. But for those of us who came of age just outside of the realm of popular culture, that intoxicating rush from snorting a huge fat line of manufactured tastes off a mirror is inescapable. You can look at your reflection, wipe the residue of commercialized good times off your nose, and get read to crawl into the back of Britney’s limo.
My pursuit of the pursuit does have its limits. To name a few: brazil waxes, trucker hats, The Passion of Christ. I tend to have a strange knee jerk against modern hipster-ism, the uber-trends of my urban peers. I find myself again and again returning to the comfort of not the elusive coolness, but the easily accessible lowest common denominator popular. I don’t get the same thrill out of exclusionary trends — those that are too expensive, too elusive, to esoteric for the masses. Certainly I enjoy these subcultures and their fetishized elitism, but when it comes to the straight rush of pop culture, the joy is in the accessibility.
Hey there. I'm Ariel Meadow Stallings, a native Seattleite who's written my way up and down the Left Coast. Electrolicious is where I post daily randomata, but I also write for a living. My first book, Offbeat Bride, was published last year.
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