Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Like a secret refugee from the former Soviet bloc, or a highly sensitive nuclear technician from North Korea's nuclear program, I'm secretly immersed now within the opulent splendor of a Chappaqua, NY living/ learning unit, replete with the largest fully integrated plasma screen television you've never seen (connected to wireless computer components like the keyboard I'm typing on right now), a kitchen and dining room straight out of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, perfectly plotted, planned, and positioned, and a baby grand piano, expertly tickled by my good friend Rei Anayami, whose impromptu house--sitting arrangement leaves me with the most comfortable typing situation I've ever had.
It's beautiful here. Serene, thoughtful, with a classical soundtrack thanks to Rei's exquisite piano skills. It's just perfect.... almost. Someday, I hope to have a place like this that Angel and I can enjoy together. Someday...
Happy pictures in utilitarian frames sparsely dot the internal landscape. Bright eyed cherubs smile with unblemished innocence from the photos. Rei does her best to inform me of who's who, but I'm clueless. Right now all I hear is music. Insistent, throbbing, pounding music. I want to lose myself in the melodic tones and harmonized precision of this moment. Never the greatest fan of classical, I suddenly realize why countless generations have focused so much passion and ego into the genre. It can move you -- if you let it. I wish I could.
One can tell from a cursory examination of the stark white walls and the bright, open windows that love flows easily in this place. Still, I cannot help to characterize the love as outside my comprehension. I know how to love with fiery passion and steely resolve, with unbreakable determination and total clarity. I never considered love as art. I watch Rei at the piano from afar, on the couch. Her lithe body sways with her tactile sonics, enraptured by decibels so divine I can barely perceive their holy grace, her angelic poise. I'm like a lesser known Centurion in Marcus Longinus' troop -- I may have the good sense to know that something profound is taking place, but I can't tell what it is, nor what it means. I'm struck dumb.
That's my problem with Chappaqua -- I very rarely feel outside of my element, or my station in life, but here, I can't help but notice my plebian proletariat perspective. I am a writer who pens hate as volunteer work, who delivers opinion as hydrochloric acid balloons dropped from the 36th floor of whatever office building you work in on your unsuspecting, vulnerable head. I'm ... unworthy.
My first visit to Chappaqua was to spend Thanksgiving with Angel's family. Warm loving people -- to each other. Outcast, unwanted, refused, I sat in the basement of their large, expansive, roomy upper-class abode, mad with a world that teaches distrust where blackness emerges. Angel alone wanted my presence. I'll never forget how much she trusted me.
That Thanksgiving didn't turn out well for either of us, and set much of the tone for our relationship's family interaction for the next four years. Now, I'm back in Chappaqua, again marveling at the rich man's life, liberty and happiness, and find myself oddly pleased. Before, I was anarchist, saturated with palpable wet hate, pregnant with a demonic desire to destroy all that rejected me. Age has yet to bring me wisdom, but the unabashed nigger rage that once alienated me from all of Chappaqua's New England natural woodland beauty and whitewashed suburban calm has now transformed into sheer ambition. I need a career. I want to provide Angel with all of this affluent bliss, and more. I want our children to have the benefit of their amazing private schools and voluminous libraries. I want a daughter of mine to play Chopin... and Davis. She will read Baldwin and Didion, Douglass and Anthony, Arendt and Morrison. She will be perfect, heavenly -- divine, just like her mother.
Yes, I feel envy. I never said I was a good person. But I realize still more that the job hunt is the most important aspect of this trip. If a plasma television larger than Montana can motivate me, why not? Given the sudden loss of Johnnie Cochran today, this country needs more young Black men to study law. Sure, you may remember him for the O.J. acquittal, but fighting police brutality was his legacy, and he proves that one can train himself to become a essential professional, indispensable and necessary, loved and feared, famous and infamous, a community icon, a role model, a Black superhero. Johnnie Cochran displayed for all concerned that the professional Black man was more dangerous than any lesser stereotype. Chappaqua's moneyed residents and their Cornell student progeny despised him more than every hip hop thug in low-slung, loose fitting, homosexual-inviting Sean John jeans. Here was a brother with a brain. A nation of millions couldn't hold him back; America must fail in its instinctive inhibition of my progress as well.
So, I'll get the job first, then pursue the juris doctor. Wow. Chappaqua does wonders for my ambition. I should visit more often.
It's beautiful here. Serene, thoughtful, with a classical soundtrack thanks to Rei's exquisite piano skills. It's just perfect.... almost. Someday, I hope to have a place like this that Angel and I can enjoy together. Someday...
Happy pictures in utilitarian frames sparsely dot the internal landscape. Bright eyed cherubs smile with unblemished innocence from the photos. Rei does her best to inform me of who's who, but I'm clueless. Right now all I hear is music. Insistent, throbbing, pounding music. I want to lose myself in the melodic tones and harmonized precision of this moment. Never the greatest fan of classical, I suddenly realize why countless generations have focused so much passion and ego into the genre. It can move you -- if you let it. I wish I could.
One can tell from a cursory examination of the stark white walls and the bright, open windows that love flows easily in this place. Still, I cannot help to characterize the love as outside my comprehension. I know how to love with fiery passion and steely resolve, with unbreakable determination and total clarity. I never considered love as art. I watch Rei at the piano from afar, on the couch. Her lithe body sways with her tactile sonics, enraptured by decibels so divine I can barely perceive their holy grace, her angelic poise. I'm like a lesser known Centurion in Marcus Longinus' troop -- I may have the good sense to know that something profound is taking place, but I can't tell what it is, nor what it means. I'm struck dumb.
That's my problem with Chappaqua -- I very rarely feel outside of my element, or my station in life, but here, I can't help but notice my plebian proletariat perspective. I am a writer who pens hate as volunteer work, who delivers opinion as hydrochloric acid balloons dropped from the 36th floor of whatever office building you work in on your unsuspecting, vulnerable head. I'm ... unworthy.
My first visit to Chappaqua was to spend Thanksgiving with Angel's family. Warm loving people -- to each other. Outcast, unwanted, refused, I sat in the basement of their large, expansive, roomy upper-class abode, mad with a world that teaches distrust where blackness emerges. Angel alone wanted my presence. I'll never forget how much she trusted me.
That Thanksgiving didn't turn out well for either of us, and set much of the tone for our relationship's family interaction for the next four years. Now, I'm back in Chappaqua, again marveling at the rich man's life, liberty and happiness, and find myself oddly pleased. Before, I was anarchist, saturated with palpable wet hate, pregnant with a demonic desire to destroy all that rejected me. Age has yet to bring me wisdom, but the unabashed nigger rage that once alienated me from all of Chappaqua's New England natural woodland beauty and whitewashed suburban calm has now transformed into sheer ambition. I need a career. I want to provide Angel with all of this affluent bliss, and more. I want our children to have the benefit of their amazing private schools and voluminous libraries. I want a daughter of mine to play Chopin... and Davis. She will read Baldwin and Didion, Douglass and Anthony, Arendt and Morrison. She will be perfect, heavenly -- divine, just like her mother.
Yes, I feel envy. I never said I was a good person. But I realize still more that the job hunt is the most important aspect of this trip. If a plasma television larger than Montana can motivate me, why not? Given the sudden loss of Johnnie Cochran today, this country needs more young Black men to study law. Sure, you may remember him for the O.J. acquittal, but fighting police brutality was his legacy, and he proves that one can train himself to become a essential professional, indispensable and necessary, loved and feared, famous and infamous, a community icon, a role model, a Black superhero. Johnnie Cochran displayed for all concerned that the professional Black man was more dangerous than any lesser stereotype. Chappaqua's moneyed residents and their Cornell student progeny despised him more than every hip hop thug in low-slung, loose fitting, homosexual-inviting Sean John jeans. Here was a brother with a brain. A nation of millions couldn't hold him back; America must fail in its instinctive inhibition of my progress as well.
So, I'll get the job first, then pursue the juris doctor. Wow. Chappaqua does wonders for my ambition. I should visit more often.
Monday, March 21, 2005
Hey everybody! New innovations abound here at JamesLambJr.com. Thankfully, my lovable webmaster, Angel (who I pay in backrubs, footrubs, and anything else she needs), has now added these wondrous pieces code called trackbacks. You probably know way more about them than I do, but since everyblogger who's anyblogger has one, I figured it would be a welcome addition here as well.
But since I need to figure out how these things work, I'm going to add in a couple of random thoughts about the recent Terri Schiavo case.
1) State's rights usually work against black people. I was taught, growing up, that's state's rights were usually a code phrase for minority oppression. I still believe this. However, this doesn't mean that the concept of federalism should be completely tossed away by the usually criminal, usually corrupt, usually interest-conflicted Tom DeLay.
2) Terri Schiavo died fifteen years ago. It's sad, it's tragic, but I really don't care. People die everyday, all over the world. People die under similar circumstances everyday in the United States. Every life is precious, every single one. The real question to ask here is why we, as a country, allow our politicians to pick and choose who deserves to live.
3) Angel should never type for me. She told me just now that the second point was more than one point. If it is, I'm sorry. See, I believe that readers of JamesLambJr.com are complex enough to handle more than one point at a time. I still believe this. I have faith in you, and I hope you have faith in me (typer's note: pompous prick!). This reminds me of Madisonian pluralism... you see, the real problem with the religious right in this country, is that in their hyper-Christian "judge and then judge some more" conservatism, they forget that in this nation, no one faction should ever gain complete and total control over our federal government. Last night, I watched Madisonian pluralism, not to mention separation of powers, individual right to privacy, and the rhetorical skills of Representative Barney Frank, burn to the ground. Sad, I'm sure, but that's what we've come to expect in this America.
4) If you'd like a serious commentary on the Terri Schiavo debate, check out reappropriate. Angel gives a detailed overview of the biological and political issues presented by this case. I might get around to a detailed political post, but right now I'm having fun pissing Angel off. (typer's note: Dear, GOD, electroman. This was supposed to be a two-line post to teach you how to trackback. Brevity is the soul of wit...)
I hope she'll forgive me if I rub her some more! ... But if not, have Tom Delay write a bill to save my life!
(there.... how's that for witty!)
But since I need to figure out how these things work, I'm going to add in a couple of random thoughts about the recent Terri Schiavo case.
1) State's rights usually work against black people. I was taught, growing up, that's state's rights were usually a code phrase for minority oppression. I still believe this. However, this doesn't mean that the concept of federalism should be completely tossed away by the usually criminal, usually corrupt, usually interest-conflicted Tom DeLay.
2) Terri Schiavo died fifteen years ago. It's sad, it's tragic, but I really don't care. People die everyday, all over the world. People die under similar circumstances everyday in the United States. Every life is precious, every single one. The real question to ask here is why we, as a country, allow our politicians to pick and choose who deserves to live.
3) Angel should never type for me. She told me just now that the second point was more than one point. If it is, I'm sorry. See, I believe that readers of JamesLambJr.com are complex enough to handle more than one point at a time. I still believe this. I have faith in you, and I hope you have faith in me (typer's note: pompous prick!). This reminds me of Madisonian pluralism... you see, the real problem with the religious right in this country, is that in their hyper-Christian "judge and then judge some more" conservatism, they forget that in this nation, no one faction should ever gain complete and total control over our federal government. Last night, I watched Madisonian pluralism, not to mention separation of powers, individual right to privacy, and the rhetorical skills of Representative Barney Frank, burn to the ground. Sad, I'm sure, but that's what we've come to expect in this America.
4) If you'd like a serious commentary on the Terri Schiavo debate, check out reappropriate. Angel gives a detailed overview of the biological and political issues presented by this case. I might get around to a detailed political post, but right now I'm having fun pissing Angel off. (typer's note: Dear, GOD, electroman. This was supposed to be a two-line post to teach you how to trackback. Brevity is the soul of wit...)
I hope she'll forgive me if I rub her some more! ... But if not, have Tom Delay write a bill to save my life!
(there.... how's that for witty!)
Friday, March 18, 2005
God paged me, he'll never see the lie he wants to see
God told me, I've already got the life, oh I say...
--"Got the Life", Korn, on the album Follow the Leader
I can't believe this shit.
Brian "Head" Welch, former Korn guitarist who left the multiplatinum nu-metal act last month to focus on his Christianity and spiritual growth, is currently working on a solo album after preaching from the pulpit, sharing faith issues and plans for 'cutting edge Christian products' for young Christians interested in pop culture with Stephen Baldwin, and being baptized in the Jordan River. In Israel, working on solo material for a new album, Welch emailed MTV News to discuss Israel and his new music. According to MTV.com, one of the tracks discussed extensively was -- in his exact words -- "a personal letter to 50 from God."50 Cent's personal reaction to the track will determine the possibility of the song's public release.
I'm still shocked. Rock is dead. Today's pop culture moment shines brightly upon rap music, as evidenced by the 1.1 million albums sold by 50 Cent's The Massacre in it's first four days of release. In a music industry besieged by the mp3 revolution's online pirating, hip hop artists produce album sales through the promotion of tried-and-true African American stereotypes heavily marketed to disaffected suburban youths who associate 'cool' with urban Black misogynistic criminality. Authentic youthful rebelliousness in my generation became synonymous with syncopated Black rage; my parents' generation foreshadowed this trend when the White Student Left in American college campuses generated political awareness through the involvement of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) with the 1960's Civil Rights Movement. Racist oppression of Southern Blacks -- segregated public and private facilities and businesses, terrorized Black citizens without police protection, Black voter neutralization through open intimidation, abject Black poverty -- encouraged affluent White college students to rethink their notions of equality and social justice, and many concluded that their aristocratic privilege required personal political involvement on the behalf of oppressed peoples foreign and domestic. SDS grew and evolved to its mid-Sixties position as the America's preeminent White Student Left organization, an integral force behind the anti-Vietnam War protest movement.
However, increased militancy among young, educated African Americans played upon Sixties-era White guilt, as racist fear and racist sympathy mixed and multiplied within collective leftist White American youth, sometimes with controversial results, as during the 1969 Takeover of Cornell University's Willard Straight Hall by members of the Afro-American Society. A complex chapter in university history, the Willard Straight Hall Takeover dismantled all notions of an independent White Student Left on American college campuses. At will, irate elements of the Talented Tenth could assert dominance over the radical Left agenda simply by announcing their presence upon the ideological stage. The Black Student Left, drawing from personal experience with political, economic, and racial oppression, sterilized their considerate White radical leftist brethren, brothers-in-arms who hated and feared Black Power as much as the Establishment administration. Neither group proved happy to finally include African Americans into the hallowed halls of academia in large numbers; today's progressive organizations on major college campuses include very few persons of color in their ranks. In the intervening years, the modern corporate university evolved balkanized campus environments, where identity politics rule separated, tribal student sub-populations, broken, disaffected, and powerless against all corporate directives from imperial university administrations. To enter college in today's America imparts harsh life lessons in Hollywood-style typecasting: no matter your personal behavior, integrity, or people skills, your race, class, sex, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability, age, citizenship, eating habits, political affiliations, and personal ideology determine without your consent how all others interact with you. Still, nothing matters more than personal authenticity. One who can transcend his original sociopolitical positioning in order to completely translate without error or inefficiency their personal political perspectives to the dissonant collective maelstrom (forcing the disordered cacophony to listen and understand on their own accord) exhibits irresistible strength, attains universal notoriety, and harvests paralyzing fear. standing alone and unfazed amongst the once mewling masses now silent and awestruck by his effortless countervailing power, the authentic Ubermensch stands triumphant, the prototype revolutionary who makes irrelevant the adolescent human 'quest for truth' so popular in higher education. In an endless ocean of lost souls, Robinson Crusoe is the new messiah.
But Jesus Christ was Black. Throughout American history, White fears of Black authenticity rule supreme -- today's colossal dominance of rap music/ hip hop radiates a profitable side-effect of this recurrent American phenomenon for manipulative music conglomerates. Jazz, the blues, rock music -- all African American creations considered utterly counterculture, radical, and beyond the American mainstream at their inception -- gained early support as musical genres from this sociological truth as much as their inherent beauty and artful melodic poise, especially among the mainstream White audiences that later appropriated and perverted the genres (to varying degrees) for their own purposes. The methods to this truly American madness alter and change through historical accident, but the overall point stands alone -- Whites consider themselves inauthentic in comparison to oppressed minority groups, and they apply this dynamic in both political and cultural ways. White flight and white guilt present a double-headed coin only Harvey Dent could love; how else would one explain why affluent liberal Democrats refuse to send their children to the very same public schools they champion? Mind you, I am no fan of school vouchers in any sense, but I recognize that conservatives (read: White folk who are too indifferent or too racist to care about Black people) recognize and defeat their white guilt to feel no remorse over their white flight, and promote methods that enable other people to follow suit.
In the meantime, their children eagerly await and absorb every scrap of urban Blackness they can find. The very same poverty-stricken, uneducated, enraged Black underclass white flight flees at every turn magically manifests inside the rich refugees' domestic spaces, conjured by the very children the guilty White parents intend to save. In music videos and radio airplay, in clothing choices and slang usage, Zachary and Bethany engage, absorb, and exude a quasi-authentic proletariat Blackness that horrifies the affluent parents worse than Stephen King or Wes Craven could ever hope for. Zachary, the young towheaded son who idolized his stockbroker father at age seven wears at seventeen overpriced RocaWear State Property hoodies with baggy, saggy Sean John jeans and industrial strength Timberland boots, chanting "G-G-G-G-G-G-UNIT!!!" at every opportunity. This splendid blond beast freestyles with his homies on the weekends before hitting up after-hours clubs in a purple haze under the moniker "Z-No" to entice other drunken barely legal bimbo to remove their pink thongs and baby blue halter tops for promiscuous, unprotected sex none of the participants can remember eight hours later. Meanwhile, sister Bethany, nose bleeding on her glittery pink Kimora Lee Simmons Baby Phat spaghetti top, sits on a cramped bathroom floor beside a cold porcelain throne filled near capacity with Bethany's brownish alcoholic vomit, listens to the droning monotony of downstairs surround sound speakers basing The Game's new single "How We Do" feat. 50 Cent, and forgets her aspirations, whereabouts and personal identity as another muscular Caucasian square-jaw invades the upstairs bathroom to retrieve her nubile pale body for another anonymous round of nonconsensual, unprotected sexual intercourse. The music changes. Downstairs, partygoers bump and grind the addictive bass of Queens' native 50 Cent's latest hit "Candy Shop", with singer Olivia belting a saccharine chorus that glazes over Bethany's biochemical fog; as moist, warm, pinkish flesh rips and tears, yielding under sexual terrorism as ancient as humanity itself, recreational substance abuse overcomes Zachary, and an ecstasy overdose stops his immature heart and claims his hedonistic life. Paradise lost.
The quest for authenticity displays the absentee anonymity culture that plainly characterizes mainstream White America. To counteract the abysmal emptiness that young White children express in such self-defeating behaviors as bulimia, anorexia nervosa, narcotic addiction, depression, overeating, cutting, alcoholism, plastic surgery, etc, a growing number of White youth engage their spiritual selves through intense Christian study and belief. Far beyond the "What Would Jesus Do?" crazes of yesteryear, serious Christian reflection has swept much of suburban White America's children, revealing not so much a conservative backlash to the sex, lies, and videotape of hypersexualized, testosterone-drenched, naked, nubile Britney Spears media from Viacom sister companies Black Entertainment Television and Music Television (where Paris Hilton's latest cell phone oral sex fixation is breaking news) but rather a desperate, heartfelt plea for real life direction. To avoid death, the little children come unto Him.
Brian "Head" Welch's born-again Christian conversion achieves importance given this history. As a member of the unceasingly angst-ridden nu-metal outfit Korn, Welch and his bandmates made themselves quite affluent by recording the soundtrack for disaffected, disassociated White suburban youth culture. Paranoid delusions over stunning hard-rock backbeats won Korn the hearts and minds of Nineties-era skateboarders throughout the country. In my junior year of state-enforced secondary school education at Woodrow Wilson High School in Portsmouth, Virginia, roughly Spring 1998, I purchased Korn's third studio album, Follow the Leader, in an effort to branch away from my longstanding love affair with Marilyn Manson. Korn was the next logical step -- hip hop tinged alternative rock that respected the chaotic brilliance of both a kick-ass party and party ass-kicking. Besides, state-sponsored socialization alienates only those willing and able to consider the consequences, and I hated high school. So I based Korn. With songs like "Got the Life", "Dead Bodies Everywhere", and "Freak on a Leash", I exorcized my inner extra-terrestrial. At seventeen, I forced ostracism into faded oblivion through damaging Discman decibel levels. Some drank. Some smoked weed. Some fucked their gonads raw. Follow the Leader's track nineteen, "Pretty", violently reverberates a former mortuary student's morose screams against my eardrums. "What a disgrace. ... Who do I ... feel sorry for?"
I live without pity. Brian "Head" Welch found God. Congratulations. While I have no desire to denigrate anyone else's religious beliefs, I live without religious belief of any sort, and have no desire to appropriate anyone else's. The real trouble with the young Christians of my generation lies within their eager submission to prefabricated notions of moral structure and decent living in order to avoid the difficulty of forging their own moral core, on their own terms, with their own minds. Organized religion ultimately tells people what to think, largely so they don't have to. It's not intentional; just the basic side-effect of marketing morality to wandering, nomadic intellects who prefer bourgeoisie ease over proletariat war, even as they masquerade underclass violence and swagger to ejaculate primitive Supermasculine testosterone to attract other weak-willed, stable mates, the masked macho mating dance of Macaulay Culkin Dilbert's throughout our nation's gray-paneled Microsoft XP smart cubicles. Furthermore, one who willingly accepts his universal truth from an external source finds no problem with the promotion of universal understanding to others, regardless of their pithy previous moral foundations. Hence, the upcoming sonic missionary work Welch promises 50 Cent.
What unabashed gall! The Christian God, or to use Welch's theology, the 'Big Guy', deems it necessary to use Welch's music as a conduit to bring 50 Cent into a sanctified lifestyle? Regardless to how this very 'emissary' imagery totally discounts the most basic innovation of the Protestant Reformation (the whole 'direct connection to God through prayer' stuff), the very notion that Welch can describe his music as a 'personal letter to 50 from God' borders on the absurd. Personal letters shouldn't require impersonal self-appointed couriers who beg for media attention by namedropping the Negro of the Month. Even more grotesque was the overt Christian paternalism of his description. To use the imagery of Laurence Fishburne's stern character Furious Styles from John Singleton's Boyz In the Hood, the archetypal hood flick, to describe an Almighty disappointed with Curtis Jackson's behavior misappropriates stereotypically absentee Black male fatherhood for loathsome White male behavior control fantasies, an unholy blackface for race domination purposes. This parallels American chattel slavery social paradigms, where Protestant Christian slaveowners promoted the 'paradise hereafter' rhetoric of Christian theology to convince their human property of the universal justice that death alone would release Africans from their inhuman bondage and unfree labors. Welch's comments remind us of Euro-American missionaries who continue to double double toil and trouble in the arid deserts and lawless jungles of Africa to bring civilization to the bastard heathens of the dark continent, as they have for centuries. Missionary zeal, a trend expressed throughout Western Civilization's Judeo-Christian theological underpinnings, erases the conscious thought and intellectual confusion that Christians so often consider troubling before they find Christ and drink the opiate sacrament of his innocent blood. A personal religious epiphany is not enough. The missionary Christian must convert the entire world to their barbiturate brainwashing, or suffer the wrath of an angry God, so bored with knowing everything and having all possible power that He wastes His endless time manipulating the fragile free will of his own mechanical animals to suit mysterious purposes only He can know. Well… that is, Him and His human automatons on Earth, like our friend Brian "Head" Welch, High Priest Emissary to criminal Negro capitalists and street pharmaceutical distributors everywhere.
American Christianity can produce amazing feats of uncut hypocrisy! Brian "Head" Welch was a founding member of Korn, one of the hardest mid-Nineties popular rock groups supported my a mainstream record company; he wasn't a lead alto in the Harlem Boys Choir. Child abuse, rape, discrimination, drug use -- these were the subjects that tried Korn's souls, leading to the major progenitor of the rap-rock musical fusion that left pop culture with the 'angry White male' music of Limp Bizkit. Roughly a month ago, Welch says goodbye to the misogyny, the violence for violence's sake, and the psychological hurricane Korn called home, and now wants to chastise 50 Cent? Did "Head" undergo a full-frontal lobotomy in the Jordan River? That's how good it is to be White in America -- your unimpeachable moral certitude blinds everyone from the disgusting totalitarian evil of your message. Wrap yourself in a flag or carry a cross on your back (or film a guy carrying a cross on his back), and you no longer have to deal with the wretched nakedness of your pitiful human frailty. You believe in something greater than yourself. You care only for helping those less fortunate agree with your angelic perspective. You achieve utter and complete moral and social bliss. You are high, arisen, heavenly -- so high, in fact, that you may belittle, malign, and judge everyone who doesn't roll up pages of Revelations for makeshift Blunts of processed traditional thoughtspeak virtue.
No one needs religion to mold morality into them. Free will's radiance shines brightest when used. Real life is confusion and contradiction -- we live in a nation where our leaders' promote the sanctity of life so much that Christian conservative Congressional members subpoenaed a brain-damaged woman in an effort to block her husband from removing the feeding tube keeping her body's machinery alive, but wring their hands in fake stress while sending youthful men and women to fight and die in Iraq to support a democracy there Americans will never enjoy. Christian conservatives respect marriage enough to deny that union to loving homosexual couples. Christian conservatives love children, so much so that when children conceive children without the economic means to care for them properly, they still encourage the youthful, immature parents to disrupt their lives and development to birth this new life they can neither handle nor pay for. Christian conservatives so respect the Ten Commandments that they wish to display that ancient scripture in legal courthouses where convicted felons are sentenced with capital punishment, 'thou shall not kill' be damned. Perhaps Brian "Head" Welch's newfound Christian conviction allows him clarity when others see only a gray, cloudy sky. Perhaps it all makes sense to him. But in the real world, his racist devaluing of 50 Cent's behavior (the sheer assumption that God is pissed at 50) proves to this commentator that Welch should put down the stones and pick up his guitar. Then he should run, before some random security guard in 50's entourage imbeds nine hollow points in his ass.
God told me, I've already got the life, oh I say...
--"Got the Life", Korn, on the album Follow the Leader
I can't believe this shit.
Brian "Head" Welch, former Korn guitarist who left the multiplatinum nu-metal act last month to focus on his Christianity and spiritual growth, is currently working on a solo album after preaching from the pulpit, sharing faith issues and plans for 'cutting edge Christian products' for young Christians interested in pop culture with Stephen Baldwin, and being baptized in the Jordan River. In Israel, working on solo material for a new album, Welch emailed MTV News to discuss Israel and his new music. According to MTV.com, one of the tracks discussed extensively was -- in his exact words -- "a personal letter to 50 from God."50 Cent's personal reaction to the track will determine the possibility of the song's public release.
MTV News:
"The Big Guy speaks through me a lot when I write, and I have a song for 50 Cent I wrote in the Holy Land. I feel like it's a personal letter to 50 from God, so I'm going to give it to him personally and see what his reaction is," Welch wrote. "If it's a positive reaction and he's willing to talk to me, then I'm not gonna release it, but if the reaction is not positive, I'm going to share it with the world."
Welch said he doesn't fear retribution from 50; rather, he feels protected by the fact that he's merely acting as an emissary between God and the former Curtis Jackson.
"It's not a mean song, but it is like a loving father disciplining his son and telling him how it is -- kind of like Tre's dad in the movie 'Boyz N the Hood,' " Welch continued. "There is really no way he can come back at me through music because it's not from me ... it's from the Big Guy. Even 50 respects the Big Guy."
50 Cent's spokesperson at Interscope Records had no comment on the songs.
I'm still shocked. Rock is dead. Today's pop culture moment shines brightly upon rap music, as evidenced by the 1.1 million albums sold by 50 Cent's The Massacre in it's first four days of release. In a music industry besieged by the mp3 revolution's online pirating, hip hop artists produce album sales through the promotion of tried-and-true African American stereotypes heavily marketed to disaffected suburban youths who associate 'cool' with urban Black misogynistic criminality. Authentic youthful rebelliousness in my generation became synonymous with syncopated Black rage; my parents' generation foreshadowed this trend when the White Student Left in American college campuses generated political awareness through the involvement of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) with the 1960's Civil Rights Movement. Racist oppression of Southern Blacks -- segregated public and private facilities and businesses, terrorized Black citizens without police protection, Black voter neutralization through open intimidation, abject Black poverty -- encouraged affluent White college students to rethink their notions of equality and social justice, and many concluded that their aristocratic privilege required personal political involvement on the behalf of oppressed peoples foreign and domestic. SDS grew and evolved to its mid-Sixties position as the America's preeminent White Student Left organization, an integral force behind the anti-Vietnam War protest movement.
However, increased militancy among young, educated African Americans played upon Sixties-era White guilt, as racist fear and racist sympathy mixed and multiplied within collective leftist White American youth, sometimes with controversial results, as during the 1969 Takeover of Cornell University's Willard Straight Hall by members of the Afro-American Society. A complex chapter in university history, the Willard Straight Hall Takeover dismantled all notions of an independent White Student Left on American college campuses. At will, irate elements of the Talented Tenth could assert dominance over the radical Left agenda simply by announcing their presence upon the ideological stage. The Black Student Left, drawing from personal experience with political, economic, and racial oppression, sterilized their considerate White radical leftist brethren, brothers-in-arms who hated and feared Black Power as much as the Establishment administration. Neither group proved happy to finally include African Americans into the hallowed halls of academia in large numbers; today's progressive organizations on major college campuses include very few persons of color in their ranks. In the intervening years, the modern corporate university evolved balkanized campus environments, where identity politics rule separated, tribal student sub-populations, broken, disaffected, and powerless against all corporate directives from imperial university administrations. To enter college in today's America imparts harsh life lessons in Hollywood-style typecasting: no matter your personal behavior, integrity, or people skills, your race, class, sex, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability, age, citizenship, eating habits, political affiliations, and personal ideology determine without your consent how all others interact with you. Still, nothing matters more than personal authenticity. One who can transcend his original sociopolitical positioning in order to completely translate without error or inefficiency their personal political perspectives to the dissonant collective maelstrom (forcing the disordered cacophony to listen and understand on their own accord) exhibits irresistible strength, attains universal notoriety, and harvests paralyzing fear. standing alone and unfazed amongst the once mewling masses now silent and awestruck by his effortless countervailing power, the authentic Ubermensch stands triumphant, the prototype revolutionary who makes irrelevant the adolescent human 'quest for truth' so popular in higher education. In an endless ocean of lost souls, Robinson Crusoe is the new messiah.
But Jesus Christ was Black. Throughout American history, White fears of Black authenticity rule supreme -- today's colossal dominance of rap music/ hip hop radiates a profitable side-effect of this recurrent American phenomenon for manipulative music conglomerates. Jazz, the blues, rock music -- all African American creations considered utterly counterculture, radical, and beyond the American mainstream at their inception -- gained early support as musical genres from this sociological truth as much as their inherent beauty and artful melodic poise, especially among the mainstream White audiences that later appropriated and perverted the genres (to varying degrees) for their own purposes. The methods to this truly American madness alter and change through historical accident, but the overall point stands alone -- Whites consider themselves inauthentic in comparison to oppressed minority groups, and they apply this dynamic in both political and cultural ways. White flight and white guilt present a double-headed coin only Harvey Dent could love; how else would one explain why affluent liberal Democrats refuse to send their children to the very same public schools they champion? Mind you, I am no fan of school vouchers in any sense, but I recognize that conservatives (read: White folk who are too indifferent or too racist to care about Black people) recognize and defeat their white guilt to feel no remorse over their white flight, and promote methods that enable other people to follow suit.
In the meantime, their children eagerly await and absorb every scrap of urban Blackness they can find. The very same poverty-stricken, uneducated, enraged Black underclass white flight flees at every turn magically manifests inside the rich refugees' domestic spaces, conjured by the very children the guilty White parents intend to save. In music videos and radio airplay, in clothing choices and slang usage, Zachary and Bethany engage, absorb, and exude a quasi-authentic proletariat Blackness that horrifies the affluent parents worse than Stephen King or Wes Craven could ever hope for. Zachary, the young towheaded son who idolized his stockbroker father at age seven wears at seventeen overpriced RocaWear State Property hoodies with baggy, saggy Sean John jeans and industrial strength Timberland boots, chanting "G-G-G-G-G-G-UNIT!!!" at every opportunity. This splendid blond beast freestyles with his homies on the weekends before hitting up after-hours clubs in a purple haze under the moniker "Z-No" to entice other drunken barely legal bimbo to remove their pink thongs and baby blue halter tops for promiscuous, unprotected sex none of the participants can remember eight hours later. Meanwhile, sister Bethany, nose bleeding on her glittery pink Kimora Lee Simmons Baby Phat spaghetti top, sits on a cramped bathroom floor beside a cold porcelain throne filled near capacity with Bethany's brownish alcoholic vomit, listens to the droning monotony of downstairs surround sound speakers basing The Game's new single "How We Do" feat. 50 Cent, and forgets her aspirations, whereabouts and personal identity as another muscular Caucasian square-jaw invades the upstairs bathroom to retrieve her nubile pale body for another anonymous round of nonconsensual, unprotected sexual intercourse. The music changes. Downstairs, partygoers bump and grind the addictive bass of Queens' native 50 Cent's latest hit "Candy Shop", with singer Olivia belting a saccharine chorus that glazes over Bethany's biochemical fog; as moist, warm, pinkish flesh rips and tears, yielding under sexual terrorism as ancient as humanity itself, recreational substance abuse overcomes Zachary, and an ecstasy overdose stops his immature heart and claims his hedonistic life. Paradise lost.
The quest for authenticity displays the absentee anonymity culture that plainly characterizes mainstream White America. To counteract the abysmal emptiness that young White children express in such self-defeating behaviors as bulimia, anorexia nervosa, narcotic addiction, depression, overeating, cutting, alcoholism, plastic surgery, etc, a growing number of White youth engage their spiritual selves through intense Christian study and belief. Far beyond the "What Would Jesus Do?" crazes of yesteryear, serious Christian reflection has swept much of suburban White America's children, revealing not so much a conservative backlash to the sex, lies, and videotape of hypersexualized, testosterone-drenched, naked, nubile Britney Spears media from Viacom sister companies Black Entertainment Television and Music Television (where Paris Hilton's latest cell phone oral sex fixation is breaking news) but rather a desperate, heartfelt plea for real life direction. To avoid death, the little children come unto Him.
Brian "Head" Welch's born-again Christian conversion achieves importance given this history. As a member of the unceasingly angst-ridden nu-metal outfit Korn, Welch and his bandmates made themselves quite affluent by recording the soundtrack for disaffected, disassociated White suburban youth culture. Paranoid delusions over stunning hard-rock backbeats won Korn the hearts and minds of Nineties-era skateboarders throughout the country. In my junior year of state-enforced secondary school education at Woodrow Wilson High School in Portsmouth, Virginia, roughly Spring 1998, I purchased Korn's third studio album, Follow the Leader, in an effort to branch away from my longstanding love affair with Marilyn Manson. Korn was the next logical step -- hip hop tinged alternative rock that respected the chaotic brilliance of both a kick-ass party and party ass-kicking. Besides, state-sponsored socialization alienates only those willing and able to consider the consequences, and I hated high school. So I based Korn. With songs like "Got the Life", "Dead Bodies Everywhere", and "Freak on a Leash", I exorcized my inner extra-terrestrial. At seventeen, I forced ostracism into faded oblivion through damaging Discman decibel levels. Some drank. Some smoked weed. Some fucked their gonads raw. Follow the Leader's track nineteen, "Pretty", violently reverberates a former mortuary student's morose screams against my eardrums. "What a disgrace. ... Who do I ... feel sorry for?"
I live without pity. Brian "Head" Welch found God. Congratulations. While I have no desire to denigrate anyone else's religious beliefs, I live without religious belief of any sort, and have no desire to appropriate anyone else's. The real trouble with the young Christians of my generation lies within their eager submission to prefabricated notions of moral structure and decent living in order to avoid the difficulty of forging their own moral core, on their own terms, with their own minds. Organized religion ultimately tells people what to think, largely so they don't have to. It's not intentional; just the basic side-effect of marketing morality to wandering, nomadic intellects who prefer bourgeoisie ease over proletariat war, even as they masquerade underclass violence and swagger to ejaculate primitive Supermasculine testosterone to attract other weak-willed, stable mates, the masked macho mating dance of Macaulay Culkin Dilbert's throughout our nation's gray-paneled Microsoft XP smart cubicles. Furthermore, one who willingly accepts his universal truth from an external source finds no problem with the promotion of universal understanding to others, regardless of their pithy previous moral foundations. Hence, the upcoming sonic missionary work Welch promises 50 Cent.
What unabashed gall! The Christian God, or to use Welch's theology, the 'Big Guy', deems it necessary to use Welch's music as a conduit to bring 50 Cent into a sanctified lifestyle? Regardless to how this very 'emissary' imagery totally discounts the most basic innovation of the Protestant Reformation (the whole 'direct connection to God through prayer' stuff), the very notion that Welch can describe his music as a 'personal letter to 50 from God' borders on the absurd. Personal letters shouldn't require impersonal self-appointed couriers who beg for media attention by namedropping the Negro of the Month. Even more grotesque was the overt Christian paternalism of his description. To use the imagery of Laurence Fishburne's stern character Furious Styles from John Singleton's Boyz In the Hood, the archetypal hood flick, to describe an Almighty disappointed with Curtis Jackson's behavior misappropriates stereotypically absentee Black male fatherhood for loathsome White male behavior control fantasies, an unholy blackface for race domination purposes. This parallels American chattel slavery social paradigms, where Protestant Christian slaveowners promoted the 'paradise hereafter' rhetoric of Christian theology to convince their human property of the universal justice that death alone would release Africans from their inhuman bondage and unfree labors. Welch's comments remind us of Euro-American missionaries who continue to double double toil and trouble in the arid deserts and lawless jungles of Africa to bring civilization to the bastard heathens of the dark continent, as they have for centuries. Missionary zeal, a trend expressed throughout Western Civilization's Judeo-Christian theological underpinnings, erases the conscious thought and intellectual confusion that Christians so often consider troubling before they find Christ and drink the opiate sacrament of his innocent blood. A personal religious epiphany is not enough. The missionary Christian must convert the entire world to their barbiturate brainwashing, or suffer the wrath of an angry God, so bored with knowing everything and having all possible power that He wastes His endless time manipulating the fragile free will of his own mechanical animals to suit mysterious purposes only He can know. Well… that is, Him and His human automatons on Earth, like our friend Brian "Head" Welch, High Priest Emissary to criminal Negro capitalists and street pharmaceutical distributors everywhere.
American Christianity can produce amazing feats of uncut hypocrisy! Brian "Head" Welch was a founding member of Korn, one of the hardest mid-Nineties popular rock groups supported my a mainstream record company; he wasn't a lead alto in the Harlem Boys Choir. Child abuse, rape, discrimination, drug use -- these were the subjects that tried Korn's souls, leading to the major progenitor of the rap-rock musical fusion that left pop culture with the 'angry White male' music of Limp Bizkit. Roughly a month ago, Welch says goodbye to the misogyny, the violence for violence's sake, and the psychological hurricane Korn called home, and now wants to chastise 50 Cent? Did "Head" undergo a full-frontal lobotomy in the Jordan River? That's how good it is to be White in America -- your unimpeachable moral certitude blinds everyone from the disgusting totalitarian evil of your message. Wrap yourself in a flag or carry a cross on your back (or film a guy carrying a cross on his back), and you no longer have to deal with the wretched nakedness of your pitiful human frailty. You believe in something greater than yourself. You care only for helping those less fortunate agree with your angelic perspective. You achieve utter and complete moral and social bliss. You are high, arisen, heavenly -- so high, in fact, that you may belittle, malign, and judge everyone who doesn't roll up pages of Revelations for makeshift Blunts of processed traditional thoughtspeak virtue.
No one needs religion to mold morality into them. Free will's radiance shines brightest when used. Real life is confusion and contradiction -- we live in a nation where our leaders' promote the sanctity of life so much that Christian conservative Congressional members subpoenaed a brain-damaged woman in an effort to block her husband from removing the feeding tube keeping her body's machinery alive, but wring their hands in fake stress while sending youthful men and women to fight and die in Iraq to support a democracy there Americans will never enjoy. Christian conservatives respect marriage enough to deny that union to loving homosexual couples. Christian conservatives love children, so much so that when children conceive children without the economic means to care for them properly, they still encourage the youthful, immature parents to disrupt their lives and development to birth this new life they can neither handle nor pay for. Christian conservatives so respect the Ten Commandments that they wish to display that ancient scripture in legal courthouses where convicted felons are sentenced with capital punishment, 'thou shall not kill' be damned. Perhaps Brian "Head" Welch's newfound Christian conviction allows him clarity when others see only a gray, cloudy sky. Perhaps it all makes sense to him. But in the real world, his racist devaluing of 50 Cent's behavior (the sheer assumption that God is pissed at 50) proves to this commentator that Welch should put down the stones and pick up his guitar. Then he should run, before some random security guard in 50's entourage imbeds nine hollow points in his ass.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Can you believe it! A revamped layout!
Thanks to the tireless and dedicated efforts of my love, Angel. She worked for over nine hours revamping my nigh unreadable site into an optic-friendly format. You've gotta love it! Check out her site at reappropriate.com to see her new layout as well.
So fellow readers, Enjoy the new visuals at jameslambjr.com. And if you're nice, Max and Mona won't have to 50 Cent your ass.
Thanks to the tireless and dedicated efforts of my love, Angel. She worked for over nine hours revamping my nigh unreadable site into an optic-friendly format. You've gotta love it! Check out her site at reappropriate.com to see her new layout as well.
So fellow readers, Enjoy the new visuals at jameslambjr.com. And if you're nice, Max and Mona won't have to 50 Cent your ass.
Monday, March 14, 2005
Practically every night, after some pixelated polygonal pretend pugilism via Steve Fox in Tekken 5 or some good-natured reality-tv debauchery with my partner-in-crime Angel, I read political blogs. (Mental Note: Just because you are on the Amazing Race does not give you a license to a) hit your spouse/ girlfriend or b) reference your sexual orientation as you climb a mountain or haul donkeys through an Andean backwater. No one cares. It's a race, not MTV's Newlyweds.) I have an entire section of my Favorites menu devoted to people's online ramblings on American politics, from the famous Daily Kos to the infamous Michelle Malkin. (Love the new picture, btw! Very Area 51.) Margaret Cho's blog is good for liberal laughs, while I can't help but laugh along with Ambra Nykol. Sure, she's a tad too conservative for me, but the lady can turn a phrase, and keeps her independence. I'm chill.
Essentially, as you know, I like political discussion. If you want to read some amazing commentary, check out Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. It's like reading everything you should be saying, with higher eloquence and better candor than you can develop on your own. (I'll comment more on my newfound hero later.) From the poli-style arenas, Frank Rich of the New York Times never disappoints. Seriously, this is the alpha male of postmodern political commentary; want a sensible linkage between Jeff Gannon and the demise of investigative analysis reporting? Rich is your guy. Recently, Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo has me more interested in the Social Security debate than ever before. But this post must thank Marshall for linking the most interesting political magazine I've kept up with in years, the Washington Monthly. Man, what writing. From dissecting Barack Obama's "great Black hope" hype to assaulting a million fractures in female boxing, the Washington Monthly - specifically Benjamin Wallace-Wells - asks the right questions and seeks the literal truth. But enough praise. It's too late and I'm too annoyed.
(To continue reading this post, click here. Your comments are appreciated, as always.)
Essentially, as you know, I like political discussion. If you want to read some amazing commentary, check out Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. It's like reading everything you should be saying, with higher eloquence and better candor than you can develop on your own. (I'll comment more on my newfound hero later.) From the poli-style arenas, Frank Rich of the New York Times never disappoints. Seriously, this is the alpha male of postmodern political commentary; want a sensible linkage between Jeff Gannon and the demise of investigative analysis reporting? Rich is your guy. Recently, Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo has me more interested in the Social Security debate than ever before. But this post must thank Marshall for linking the most interesting political magazine I've kept up with in years, the Washington Monthly. Man, what writing. From dissecting Barack Obama's "great Black hope" hype to assaulting a million fractures in female boxing, the Washington Monthly - specifically Benjamin Wallace-Wells - asks the right questions and seeks the literal truth. But enough praise. It's too late and I'm too annoyed.
(To continue reading this post, click here. Your comments are appreciated, as always.)
