Who’s the lying’ ass bitch now?

When the Fallon/Bachmann controversy first exploded, Questlove issued a statement claiming that his decision to introduce the Congresswoman to the show with the Fishbone song “Lyin’ Ass Bitch” was “tongue-in-cheek” and a “spur-of-moment decision.”

And yet…

In a Nov. 21  interview with “Rolling Stone,” Questlove told the interviewer of his plans to do exactly what he did:

“I’m gunning for Bachmann,” Questlove, a vocal Obama fan, told Rolling Stone. To put a time stamp on the comment, the magazine wrote that during the interview, he was “looking up walk-on songs for next week’s shows.”

Continued Questlove, “I want to try and do Fishbone’s ‘Lyin’ Ass Bitch.’ I just don’t know if I’m gonna tell Jimmy.”

Is this acceptable to NBC and to Jimmy Fallon?

(more…)

This has been one of the greatest years in the history of pop music, but you’d never know it if you rely on Rolling Stone, Spin, Billboard, Under the Radar, Mojo, Q, MTV, VH-1 or any of the traditional sources.

Outstanding new voices such as Marco Joachim, Cirrone or The Turnback would have had numerous singles in the top ten thirty years ago.

There are many reasons for the press’s lack of interest including economics, but there is a cultural reason, too. The establishment press long ago became suspicious of art for art’s sake. Beauty and good vibes are so bourgeoisie. It’s got to have an edge, an attitude or sucker punches about the failure of the capitalist system, the hypocrisy of religion, or the need to take public transport.

The movement reached its apotheosis in Spin’s infamous 1993 review of Jellyfish’s ‘Spilt Milk.’  The magazine’s reviewer dismissed the album as mindless ear candy, offering faint praise for one song, the vaguely classist ‘Russian Hill. ‘The reviewer thought it was about the haves versus the have-nots. Music shorn of socio-political content is ‘not relevant.’  It’s even worse if the band voices an opinion contrary to the kultursmog.

(more…)

***UPDATE: Once again the outstanding BH community embarrasses me with their insight. Stewart being bummed with Obama deferring to the legislative process is very revealing, and I missed it completely. Good catch. Please go on about your business of being awesome and note the updated headline.

The Left’s growing disappointment with Obama only has to do with his current approval rating. I can guarantee you that if the President did everything exactly the way he’s doing now but was at 55% approval as opposed to 39% and on his way to easy re-election, Jon Stewart and the rest would be overjoyed with the job Obama’s doing. The Left simply must blame “the job the President is doing” because they can’t face the fact that the policies Obama put into place have failed because those are the policies the Left has believed in for generations. To stare into the abyss and admit their own ideas don’t work is too much to bear. So instead, we get this:

Stewart in Rolling Stone:

“Obama ran on this idea that the system and the methodology are corrupt. It felt like the country was upset enough that he had the momentum needed to re-­evaluate how business is done. Instead, when he got elected, he acted as though the system is so entrenched that it has to be managed rather than – I don’t want to say decimated, because I’m not an anarchist or a nihilist. But I’m surprised at how much he deferred to the legislative process. He’s accomplished some things, and I’m sure he’s pleased with what he’s done, but I would have preferred to see something a little bit more transformative. They haven’t made the case that government can be effective, or accountable, or agile.”

And this:

(more…)

Oscar-winning screenwriter Mark Boal must be thrilled about this whole Libya thing, since he seems to be making a cottage industry out of articles, books and movies about American soldiers and how they are a bunch of incorrigible psychos whose desire to murder everyone they see is constrained only by their limited intellect.  Who knows what doors the latest “kinetic military action” might open for him in Tinseltown.

His current anti-soldier hit piece, The Kill Team, is about a group of disgraceful scumbags in Afghanistan who decided to murder several civilians.  With it, Boal seems to be following his tried and true formula – write something for publication in a past-its-prime magazine that makes American troops look like cro-magnons then work to turn it into a movie.  He took a Playboy article on Americans murdering each other and soon we had In the Valley of Elah.  You may have seen it – though the odds are stacked against it.  It was ignored by popular demand.

Another article, this one on bomb disposal experts, became The Hurt Locker, which took some of the bravest and most dedicated people in our armed forces and made them out as undisciplined, drunken, unprofessional clowns.  In fact, Boal got sued by one of the guys he allegedly wrote about.  To be fair, it did win an Academy Award . . . from the same band of geniuses who passed over Saving Private Ryan in favor of Shakespeare In Love and once picked as “Best Song” the unforgettable hit “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”  So, there’s that.

Boal’s technique is to chronicle the most degenerate fringes of the warfighters’ experience and repackage the most sordid episodes as its totality.  One can easily imagine the Rolling Stone editors eager for the chance to please their dwindling audience of aging Garfunkel-digging hippies and Chomsky-devouring clove-smokers with another prejudice-reinforcing piece about how those Middle-American Army guys are barely one step above gorillas.  Rolling Stone even promises a glimpse at the grim photos the mean old Pentagon doesn’t want you to see – as if there was some moral imperative for the military to provide gist for the jihadi propaganda mill.  Hey, that’s Boal and Rolling Stones’ job!

What is particularly cunning in his approach is that there is no excuse for the crimes these savages committed, and Boal uses this fact to deflect any kind of perspective.  Hundreds of thousands of young, heavily-armed and stressed American men and women have served overseas since 9/11.  Several dozen have murdered people.  You won’t find any city in America with a murder rate like that for that demographic. 

(more…)

Several weeks ago, Justin Bieber entered the political arena when a Rolling Stone article quoted him saying that he opposed abortion but supported Canadian-style health care. Although people can agree or disagree with such political stances, it’s difficult to dislike the young pop star who has worked tirelessly to achieve success. The documentary “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never” tells the story of Bieber’s meteoric rise to fame.

—–

The documentary fittingly begins by focusing on YouTube.com, the popular video site that has introduced millions of Americans to “the sneezing panda” and “the dramatic chipmunk.”  That site also serves as a launching pad for talented artists and it’s where Bieber was discovered by his manager. Before then, Bieber was just another youngster with a good singing voice who was making videos with his family.

Soon enough, the manager and others in the music industry show interest in Bieber but even with their support, his fame is never guaranteed. To become a megastar, Bieber travels  across the United States visiting local radio stations and performing on air. His popularity is never handed to him; he has to fight for it, one song after another. It’s difficult to imagine Bieber having to fight for attention but the documentary shows how driven he was even at a young age. While other young people may have given up, Bieber never stops working towards his goals.

(more…)

As the music giants stagger further into the wilderness bereft of their traditional sales tools, they continue to churn out tired, American Idol-inspired pop and rap records scooped up by suburban white boys who have never heard the Beatles.  Aided by industry suckerfish such as Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone, they tout their latest officially sanctioned “edgy” release.  Here’s Eminem with another bowl of anger.  Must be hard to stay so angry with all that money.  Here’s Christina Aguilera—or is it Lady Gaga—with another incisive critique of hypocrisy.  Only country music is expanding, due  to, perhaps, country’s insistence on singing about things that matter.

—–

There is another world out there, young pop bands shunning the traditional channels and using the internet to sell their exquisitely crafted, gloriously melodic pop.  Twenty-ten was another banner year in which it was difficult to limit the top ten to only ten.  Nevertheless, here goes.

1. Oranjuly formed in 2009 joining lead singer and writer Brian E. King who had already been working on these songs for years.  Every year it seems a one-man band emerges to stun us.  In years past it’s been Roger Klug and Josh Fix.  This year it’s Oranjuly’s Brian E. King who says, “I played everything but drums and cello. I did play drums on South Carolina though!”  Now the band is a five piece so they can reproduce these astounding sounds in public.  This time the Jellyfish comparisons are apt.  King also has a knack for sunny Beach Boys-style harmonies which permeate the record.  If architecture is frozen music this is the Taj Mahal. (more…)

So President Obama was just interviewed in Rolling Stone magazine, that thinning pamphlet for our country’s dwindling supply of pony-tailed pensioners. (AARP skews younger.)

When asked about Fox News, this is what our Commander-in-chief had to say.

I think Fox … is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful.

Okay. So, you’re the President of the United States, with both Houses under your control. You also have the most fawning press of any president in the history of the universe. And yet you let FNC get under your skin, because it’s the only network that doesn’t have a thrill up its leg?

Obama is like a sports team who owns the ref, the fans and the field- but refuses to play until the kid in the tenth row stops chewing gum. (more…)

The last thing I was worrying about was that The Other Guys would be too preachy.  Sure, Will Ferrell has a long history of deep, thought-provoking critiques of society and culture, so that should have been my big concern.  Also subtitles.  And having the last shot of the film be the word “Fin” superimposed over the freeze-framed image of a crying child alone on a beach symbolizing death or something. 

——

You know, sometimes you just want to go, have a drink or two, or three, or ten, and then sit in a movie theater and tune out the seemingly endless parades of nimrods, pinkos and sanctimonious deadbeats who make up so much of our society today.  You just want some guys to come on the screen and to do and say some funny stuff.  Maybe you want an explosion or two, perhaps a gratuitous shower scene – strike that, as shower scenes are never gratuitous.  Unless it’s a dude.  Or Kathy Bates.

The point is the last thing you want after a Dos XX prep and handing over $11.75 each for yourself and your life partner/designated driver is for a bunch of Hollywood half-wits to stop the fun to give you a PowerPoint briefing on their insights into modern politics – without even the PowerPoint.  And it appears that this is exactly what The Other Guys intends to do. (more…)

So, in that Rolling Stone piece that brought down General McCrystal, the writer spent three weeks with the troops.

What did he find?

Trash talk directed at bureaucrats.

Yeah, I know.

Here’s a fact: if someone followed me around for three weeks, they’d find far more worse. The storage container underneath my waterbed would put me away for life. Fact is, journos like me and those at Rolling Stone are so seedy, we could never survive the scrutiny we apply on others.

Simply put: Soldiers are better people than those who cover them.

But this writer followed the troops, who might as well be on Mars. That’s what Afghanistan is. A weird, scary place without decent cable. They don’t have time to worry about some slimy dickwad writer trying to ingratiate himself into their fold in order to get a damaging tidbit upon which to build a career. These soldiers deal with death. And that’s the irony. While those troops work like hell – in hell – to protect that writer from his own demise, he’s busy orchestrating theirs. How screwed is that? (more…)

Nidal “Gary” Hassan – All-American boy was haunted by memories of Gitmo, ‘Nam, Hiroshima INEVITABLY, ANOTHER SOLDIER SNAPS Distraught pacifist conscientious objector tormented by horrors of war, as far as you know Newsroom experts: stress, violence, stupidity, tragedy a way of life for GIs Former M*A*S*H stars say it’s finally time to disarm the military Hollywood insiders: Sean Penn early favorite for lead in planned Oliver Stone biopic

(more…)

In a world of Starland Vocal Bands, Lady GaGas, Bon Jovis, Snoop Doggs and 1910 Fruitgum Companies, it takes real talent to write a song so unbelievably horrible that it transcends mere awfulness and crosses the frontier into a whole new realm of sheer crappiness.  An artistic, musical and philosophical failure of staggering proportions, John Lennon’s “Imagine” is the worst song of all time.

Many feel this ballad is a touching hymn that gives voice to man’s yearning for a better world.  They are wrong.  “Imagine” is a cloying, boggy, sonic swamp of numb-skulled sentiments that sound like they were recycled from a bong-fueled, 2 a.m. bull session between a couple of pampered, credulous UC Berkeley lit majors.  It’s the national anthem of the hopey/changey crowd — all at once pretentious, smug, tiresome and intellectually bankrupt.  (more…)

I remember reading years ago that Lisa Marie said that, in private, Michael Jackson spoke in a perfectly normal (well…) male voice.  By the magic of Google, I found the piece and present it to you.  Tina Brown, Washington Post, March 2005.  Ms. Brown has a very sharp and unsparing take on America’s Peter Pan of Pop.  And in the Rolling Stone interview to which Ms. Brown refers, Lisa Marie is even more devastating about the man behind the man-boy mask:

Read Brown’s Article Here.

An interview with Jackson’s ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley by Chris Heath in Rolling Stone in April 2003 would support the “secretly sane” theory. “I was always saying [to Jackson] people wouldn’t think I was so crazy if they saw who the hell you really are,” Presley told Heath. “That you sit around, and you drink and you curse and you’re [expletive] funny and you have a bad mouth, and you don’t have that high voice all the time. I don’t know why you think that works for you, because it doesn’t anymore.” (more…)

Few shows illustrate how low the state of popular music has fallen than “American Idol.”  While AI regularly finds singers of talent, the songs they feature are mostly chestnuts.  The show also encourages the type of singing that is more at home on Broadway than in small smoky clubs.  The judges put an inordinate amount of focus on vocal pyrotechnics encouraging contestants to test the outer limits of their ranges.  The most exciting news to come out of the most recent season is the possibility that Adam Lambert might join Queen, replacing the ill-considered Paul Rogers.

I would love to see Adam Lambert join Queen.  I already know all the songs.  And that’s a problem.  Singer/songwriters have been moving off-grid since the nineties.  With the demise of the major music conglomerates, innovative talent understands it’s up to them to record and release their own material.  The internet makes this possible.  No one knows the extent of the effect downloading has had on the music industry, but if we are to judge from the reaction, it has been devastating.  The Recording Institute Association of America has brought suits against parents whose children illegally download songs. (more…)

You all know the drill. The recent vague and controversial DHS report on right-wing extremism, the cover of which DHS might just as well have put on the Republican Party platform. The endless puerile teabagging jokes from the fourth estate’s finest, giggling into their microphones like ten-year-olds who just found a tittie mag.

CNN reporter Susan Roesgen even called a Tea Party “anti-government and anti-CNN” when her pro-government handout rant to a Tea Partier was rudely interrupted. Ms. Roesgen took particular offense at a sign of Obama with a Hitler moustache. “Why be so hard on the President of the United States though with such an offensive message?” the offended Ms. Roesgen asked.

Yet in 2006, Ms. Roesgen was perfectly comfortable with this Satan/Hitler Bush mask, jokingly calling it a Bush ‘look-alike.’ I guess it all depends on which POTUS you’re hard on. Right, Suzie?

And therein lies the rub. Dissent was SO patriotic not so long ago, wasn’t it? Dissent against war, dissent against torture, dissent against wiretapping, dissent against Gitmo, dissent against rendition, dissent against government abuse of power. In fact, now-Secretary of State Clinton was quite vocal on the matter back in the day: (more…)

It wasn’t that long ago that my friend Bernard Goldberg told me he was never going to write another book. It was just a lot of hard work, he complained, and while he was working on one, virtually all joy was sucked out of his life. It made perfect sense to me. Besides, books take a lot of time to write and Bernie, who wishes he’d grown another foot-and-a-half so he could have competed in the NBA, still needs to work on his hook shot.

Well, he lied. But at least it was in a good cause. I just read his latest slice-and-dice of the liberal media, “A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media,” and I was reminded what a travesty the MSM made of the 1st amendment in its desire to ensure Obama’s victory. (more…)