Recently, I've noticed that you and many of your crew are wearing these:
In Starbucks, in the grocery store, in the library, in the mall, in class, in the movies--they're everywhere. As such, I thought I'd take a moment to share a piece of advice:
Here are the fine folks of Columbus celebrating everything they most treasure: trashiness, abject stupidity, and mouth breathing.
Notice that these sorts of things never happen in, say, Ann Arbor. But I suppose we shouldn't expect much more from a population that congratulates itself every single time it successfully spells a four-letter word.
My non-partisan (read: not a Michigan graduate) friend said it best: Next time, don't even build a Borders in Columbus. You know these folks aren't reading.
A few years ago, Da Backwudz made some noise, and I took notice. I didn't articulate it at the time, but the group stood out because it combined southern hallmarks--heavy bass, tinny melodies, exaggerated regional vocal inflection--with the sampling commonly associated with other regional hip-hop forms. (Which is not to say that Southern rap music is devoid of sampling, only that the monolithic "southern sound" doesn't immediately call forth that association.) Their music had a local character that felt as though it was of Atlanta, however it was distinct, and far more engaging. Not much came of their debut, Wood Work, though, and I'd imagine that most people don't remember them.
My unscientific hypothesis about the group's demise is that Da Backwudz failed because its distinguishing nuance of style nonetheless sounded like a derivative. Though the combination offered was uncommon, the component parts seemed generic. Their voices were like so many others; the samples were available elsewhere; that southern bounce was almost insincere for being such a basic flavor. After a listener recognized that Wood Work reflected a novel idea, he or she quickly lost interest because the amalgamation was easily picked apart.
Last year, the Alabama-based group G-Side stood out for reasons that initially aligned it with Da Backwudz. On Starshipz and Rocketz, G-Side emerged as southern group apart from the easily ascribed cohort. A track like "Strictly Buzinezz," captivating for its laconic tempo and the humidity it conjured, mixed with a waling, swelling song like "We Own the Building" to present a rare combination of moods and styles. "G-SIDER" was a track on which the rapping indicated an intentional effort to exploit cadence. "Rubba Bandz" was the sort of emphatic two-step anthem which Lil' Jon wishes he could still put out. "Hit da Block" distilled a street-tale style that sounded less proud than measured, and was somewhat evocative of the Memphis hip-hop scene. Taken as a whole, the album sounded well reasoned and well crafted. The content wasn't groundbreaking and the rapping technique wasn't exemplary, but G-Side still made interesting music. Most notable, it sounded different, mixing styles and influences to create a unique brand of the southern sound. Taken with the group's proud repping of Huntsville, G-Side carved out a musical shibboleth, of sorts.
Last week, G-Side came back with a new mixtape, Huntsville International. Like Starshipz, the music sounds proud to stand alone. Huntsville is not different for the sake of being so, but it also is certainly on its own. Musical regionalism is increasingly a fiction as rap music travels across artificial barriers relatively easily. There are countless examples which make this case. And yet, stereotypes can make conversation easy, and it's hard to deny that there are still specific rap modalities that immediately cry out for characterization as "southern." Huntsville again plays with these conventions, fusing active drum kits and keyboard synth arrangements with Billy Joel samples. Or bubbling club rhythms with slower, Autotuned vocal filler and effete pop choruses. Or soul samples with syncopated bongo drums and heavy doses of southern vernacular. Or famous jazz piano riffs with Project Pat vocal samples and record scratches. More than anything else, G-Side has again crafted a product that invites curiosity and rewards repeated listens. The mixtape is fair from perfect--"Aura" is almost laughable, for example--but it is legitimately engaging, a rare quality, good or bad.
The New York rap snob in me would be remiss to neglect that G-Side does not immediately stand out for verbal dexterity or punch-line inventiveness. However, G-Side also is unapologetically effective, trafficking in plenty of rap conventions but also seizing enough latitude to rap in conversational style about prosaic details which are humanizing. The rapping technique makes G-Side likable, even if you have by now grown tired of hustling and paper stacking and whatever else. To say nothing of the fact that unlike the glitz and manipulation of, say, Baby and Rick Ross, G-Side wades into this staid topical terrain for many different reasons.
Listen for yourself and tell me that I'm wrong. G-Side succeeds where Da Backwudz failed.
I think this is law school talking, but my first question upon watching this: how does team management feel about Ron Ron wearing Lakers gear in these videos?
UPDATE: It's like Ron was rewarding me for posting his latest music video. Did everyone see this tonight? (Look at the 0:32 mark):
Hello friends, particularly those whom I've met in St. Louis. I am writing with important news: my time in Missouri is coming to a close. I have decided to transfer to Monmouth University.
I did not arrive at this decision hastily. I mulled it over for a long time during breakfast this morning. But as I weighed the positives against the negatives, two things kept tipping the scale in Monmouth's favor.
Last night, Monmouth beat FIU by 29. More importantly, the students were complete dicks to Isiah Thomas. They chanted "Magic hates you," they made fun of the time Isiah tried to kill himself and blamed it on his daughter, they of course made fun of the Anucha situation. They even rushed the floor after a 30-point blowout over an awful team just to celebrate beating Isiah. That is the kind of vindictive student body of which I'd like to be a part. True to the New York-area ethos, Monmouth will never forget. Neither will I.
Second, going to Monmouth will place me in close proximity to the Jersey Shore, an area which I'd like to make the focus of an amateur anthropological study. I understand that MTV will be delivering groundbreaking work in this regard next month, and I want to supplement that inquiry. How can you not be enticed by this?
My first entry point will be this question: I understand that the stereotypical "guido" lifestyle entails fake tan, chemically enhanced muscles, and impossibly vertical hair. But why fist pumping?! Is that a constant move in this community? It gets about a third of this commercial's time; does fist pumping constitute a third of the lifestyle's known activity? Like, are you fist pumping while you're driving? Or while you're paying for a Red Bull?
To answer these questions, to immerse myself in a community where a seething hostility toward Isiah Thomas finds fellow travelers, and to study the law (I guess), I'll be transferring to Monmouth.
I don't even care that it doesn't actually have a law school.
Have you felt as though your life were suffering from a deficit of listening to me talk about basketball? Were you yearning to hear me make jokes about white people? Step out into the sunshine, you huddled masses.
On Wednesday I stopped by the Disciples of Clyde podcast for a sprawling hour of basketball talk. It is all hoops, no filler. Needless to say, I was flattered to be invited back onto the show. Dan Filowitz is many things, among them an easy conversationalist and an impressive master of a deep body of NBA knowledge.
My friend and collaborator Ty Keenan traded some emails this week with me about how it hurts to root for a horrible NBA team. You see, he rides with the Warriors, so he knows.
- BK-One ft. Black Thought, "Philly Boy" Good lord, do I love this. Black Thought has always been able to wield an incredible sense of pathos. It stems from the combination of his voice, his lyrics, his common focus on tangible ideas and topics, the gravitas--real or aspirational--which the Roots have cultivated as part of the brand, and so forth. He has this presence which is conflicted and steeped in experience. One of the many reasons he is under-appreciated is that Thought emits power without being loud of flamboyant.
Bathed in a somber, sole guitar and a steady but understated drum rhythm, Thought sounds particularly resonant. This track feels like the musical equivalent of a dude standing on a stage with all the lights off save for one spotlight shining down and letting him control the room. It's a cool effect.
Also cool is this new BK-One album, which is probably going to end up as the year's second best, other than Rae Rae's.
Ever vigilant in her scan of the internets, my mother sent me an interesting link this morning: twelve observations about the economy from a Gluskin Sheff economist and Reuters columnist James Pethokoukis. There's a lot of interesting material here to consider, but my attention was stolen away by the first point. The bolded portion is Pethokouskis's observation based upon the Gluskin information:
1. For the first time in at least six decades, private sector employment is negative on a 10-year basis (first turned negative in August). Hence, the changes are not merely cyclical or short-term in nature. Many of the jobs created between the 2001 and 2008 recessions were related either directly or indirectly to the parabolic extension of credit.
If we assume Pethokoukis is correct to some degree--he's observing something which seems to be a positive correlation if not a direct result--it invites a question: how do you get back to creating sustainable jobs, not those built on the fleeting prosperity of credit reliance? I am not an economist or a financier, so I don't have a perfect answer. Even those people don't. But as a common-sense observer of politics, I am struck by an idea which the Democrats will never make a priority but probably should.
Our economy has been crippled by the parabolic extension of credit. Across the landscape, jobs driven by the service sector and the manufacturing sector are gone. Simultaneously, the energy system upon which this country relies is famously unsustainable, and it also carries the sad effect of destroying the environment. A path forward, then, should probably be investing heavily in the growth industries of new, cleaner energy. That is not a fresh idea, per se, and there is some focus on it, already. However, the sobering economic conditions can lend it the immediacy required to accomplish something meaningful if deft politicians can couple these ideas and push through the seemingly intractable opposition.
Now, will that happen? No. For many reasons--Democratic politicians are losers; they don't take risks; they are usually just as beholden to the same special interests as Republicans. Nonetheless, someone like Howard Dean should be on television all the time explaining that our economy, for all its former strength, was partially a fiction. And that the awful environment in which we find ourselves was created by unfettered greed and myopia. He should then explain that along with implementing regulation of exotic financial instruments and other too-high-risk devices that most of their own vendors don't even understand, the American economy requires sea change. Strengthening the economy in a way that guards against a similar systemic failure in the future demands heavy upfront investment in new industries that create lasting jobs and call for skilled workers (which would perhaps have the secondary impact of creating urgency around educational reform). That's the path forward, not solely hoping that credit flows more freely soon and limiting executive compensation. Those are easy, and almost silly as a result.
It's much harder and more expensive to demand investment in new, lasting jobs. It's certainly harder than hoping to return to the halcyon days around 2000. But yearning for a chance to make the same mistakes is the ultimate in madness.
Either The New York Times can't tell apart basketball-playing Stephens (racists), or it masked a chronicle of Jackson's eccentricity with a headline about a player, Curry, more likely to grab the average New York reader's attention.
I'm going with the former, as they've since changed the picture. But to be fair, it's a harmless error: spending so much time in such close proximity to such a deranged operation surely carries with it the risk of infection.
I just like the picture of Madonna holding a baby in a yarmulke
It's no secret that most rappers approach Jews with either casual contempt or the faint praise of positive stereotype. It's not that Jews are so affirmatively bad; they're not pushing weight or jackin' people up or terrorizing everyone. It's just that they're tightfisted, crafty, and always succeeding at the expense of others. Ask Ice Cube--no one wants some meddling Jew calling the shots. Sadly, that's just how it is--the sun goes up, the world rotates, we grudgingly recognize the Jewish element, and we do it all again the next day. Rap music!
In hip-hop, like most other venues, Jews are bankers, money lenders, T.I.'s running this rap shit, or, most sacrosanct, lawyers. Oh, the lawyers. Keep your whip newish, your ice bluish, and your lawyer Jewish. If you do, you're gonna stack chips and beat charges. This has become so universal that there are people who don't know what kosher is, but have no doubt that they want that kosher-lawyer paper. I go to law school; I know.
This is regrettable, of course, but it is what it is. The circumstance persists, people put up with it, and all is swept under the rug of a gorgeous soul sample or something that just makes you want to dance. For decades, Jewish people have consumed rap music, always issuing the token caveats required to otherwise enjoy a Clipse record without reservation. To be honest, it's much more worrisome if, say, Sarah Palin, or Bill Clinton, or even Mel Gibson thinks ill of the Jews than if Jim Jones joins that chorus. Though he shouldn't. (And, of course, we know how much esteem Jimmy harbors for the chosen people who keep him free.)
There is also the alluring, albeit intellectually bankrupt, notion that if you're going to paint a group with broad strokes, you could do worse than making it out to be competent professionals. That's why someone needs to throw a challenge flag in response to Jadakiss's verse on "Broken Safety."
Jada raps, "The economy is down/So you already know it's gon' be a lot of Hymies in the town." That's not right. He violates the delicate detente, opting against the Jewish lawyer trope, or even the Jewish doctor trope. Those are safe; people put up with that shit. Instead, Jada goes for the low blow, reviving the tired Jew-as-exploiter identity and inserting it into the contemporary economic climate. (You know, to the extent that a generic verse about drugs, money, and street life contemplates prevaling market forces.) Tough times? Can't help that all those hymies are sticking it to you while you're down.
And what's with "hymie," Jesse Jackson? Why not go for the fullMichael Jackson and just re-appropriate "Jew Me/Sue Me/Everybody do me/Kick me/Kike me/Don't ya black-or-white me"? That's lame. No one raps about a hymie lawyer. Stick to the script.
Why do I post this today? Why not? Just saying....
Maybe you could have punched a baby this morning to make the day complete.
For those keeping score at home, here are the numbers:
Last year, Michigan was 3-9 overall, 2-6 in the Big Ten. It beat Miami (OH) and Wisconsin at home, Minnesota on the road. It lost to Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan State, Notre Dame, Illinois, Utah, Purdue, Northwestern, and Toledo. Michigan missed a bowl game for the first time in 34 years, had its first losing season since 1967, and fielded the worst defense in program history (which, as of this season, is now 130 years long). It lost to a MAC school for the first time, it lost to Penn State for the first time in eleven years, and it lost to Ohio State for the fifth straight year.
This year, Michigan is 5-5, just 1-5 in the Big Ten. It started 4-0. The Wolverines have beaten Eastern Michigan, Western Michigan, Delaware State, Notre Dame, and Indiana at home. They've lost to Penn State and Purdue at home, Iowa, Michigan State, and Illinois on the road. The season's two remaining games--at Wisconsin and home against Ohio State--seem like sure losses. If I had to assign Michigan's probability of winning each game given how all three teams are playing and where the games will be held, I'd say Michigan's Wisconsin probability is something like 1/15 and Michigan's Ohio State probability is something like 1/25. That gives UM a 1/375 chance of finishing 7-5, and nothing better than a 3.3 percent chance of even becoming bowl eligible. Flipped over the other way, the Straight Bangin' Invented Metrics tell us that it is at least 96.7 percent probable that Michigan will endure its second straight losing season.
Some more numbers: Rich Rodriguez will likely close out the year with a lifetime Big Ten record of 3-13. He is now the first UM coach to lose at least five games in consecutive seasons. He will have put together the two worst scoring defenses ever. Illinois will have beaten UM in successive years for the first time in decades. Purdue will have won in Ann Arbor for the first time since the 1966. The only meaningful streak still intact will be UM's record for most games without being shutout. But who knows? Ohio State plays great defense, and the 2009 Wolverines now panic and make mistakes in the face of adversity. Rodriguez will be 0-2 against Ohio State, Illinois, Purdue, Michigan State, and Penn State; 0-1 against Iowa and Northwestern. His wins: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana.
2008 was a terrible season of change. A new coach with not merely a new system, but a new culture, had come from outside of the Michigan community to shake up something that had grown stale and far too self-reverential. Hard times were said to be the down payment required by a glorious future, so fans went along with it, by and large.
2009 was greeted with measured optimism. The roster's limitations were apparent to any objective observer, but plenty of schools had changed coaches and found their footing fairly soon after doing so. The best college football schools did so and then quickly won championships (Oklahoma, Ohio State, Florida). If nothing else, most people thought Michigan would be on its way to respectability, and then preeminence, by returning to a bowl, even if just at 6-6.
No one, though, expected this: a team to start 4-0 and then completely fall apart. No team that begins the year 4-0 should close it at 5-7. Especially not when the team that beat Notre Dame and was defined by its fortitude for a month and a half goes 1-2 against the three worst teams in the Big Ten (Indiana, Purdue, Illinois). What we are now witnessing is grotesque, because it bears the unnerving hallmarks of systemic failure. The 2009 team is not just a bad team; it might--might-- be the malignant growth spawned by a bad program.
For all of the balleyhooed tough talk about hard-ass country boy Rich Rodriguez and his toughness consigliere, Mike Barwis, the sad truth is that for two years, now, Rodriguez's teams have wilted when faced with adversity. He does the same, as West Virginia may have proved against Pittsburgh two years ago. Last year, this weakness was explained away by assigning blame to ill-fitted players, players used to the Lloyd Carr School of Enlightened Football for Gentle Poetry Fans. But this year? After two winters of Rodriguez workouts? After 21 months of the new regime that isn't so new anymore? Hard to find much solace in the old excuses as any signs of progress have been replaced by the same old problems. Most alarming among them is the team's tendency toward hysterical ineptitude. Something goes wrong, Rodriguez yells, and the team either quits or collectively chooses to emulate Mike Williams. Mike Williams being, of course, the Michigan safety who unquestionably enjoys the ignominy of being the worst starter on any BCS-conference team. (Nick Sheridan won this award last year, so that's one streak Rodriguez has seized, not ruined.)
As this is a post primarily concerned with numbers, I'd like to address the sum of these circumstances rather than exploring them at greater length. (Though his team with no poise that plays bad football wouldn't offer a qualitative shelter.) Anyone who has watched Michigan this year has seen its regression and the proppogation of bad football. But step back and think: Rich Rodriguez has suddenly crossed over into unchartered dark territory. By the numbers, he is the worst coach in Michigan's illustrious history. College football, of course, is a game of numbers, in some ways. Most wins, most Heismans, most years, yada yada yada. College football is into counting.
Count up the Rodriguez era in Ann Arbor and these numbers net out in a negative total. For an outsider like Rodriguez, who is already besieged by a misguided whisper campaign among a faction of loyalist "Michigan Men" who think Mike DeBord is how you spell "success," the numbers are going to be fatal. Unless he wins big next year--at least 9-3 with a New Year's Day bowl game, a win over MSU, and maybe a win over OSU--he won't weather the storm he's helped to amplify. Bill Martin will leave, old-timer David Brandon will arrive, and Rodriguez will be sitting in an office adorned by no trophies, awards, or markers of positive distinction. No, he will be the man who rather than helping old grandpappy Michigan look rejuvenated and venerable instead took him for a tour of cemetary plots. And the numbers will tell the story, because they are ugly and unlikely to get much better.
What has this coaching staff shown at Michigan that would make anyone believe it can engineer a significant improvement next season? In 2010, Michigan goes to Happy Valley, Columbus, and South Bend. It will return a bulk of its offense, but it also will return its entire defense, save for first-round-pick Brandon Graham. Can a 5-7 team get to 9-3? Not this team, and not with these coaches. Not when two years in, the bad special teams and dumb turnovers and horrible game management add up to something ugly.
Using a results-based approach, someone could make a case for Rodriguez to be fired on November 22 if Michigan ends the year as expected. The numbers would do the talking, and they'd say that Rich Rod is a bad fit at UM who might not be equipped to succeed under the unique weight that the job carries with it. The politics, the tradition, the varied stakeholders--it might be too much for Rich. And, to be frank, he's only made worse many of the macro-level issues--like growing irrelevance--that festered under Lloyd Carr.
I don't subscribe to this, mostly for practical reasons. First, Rodriguez's track record at literally every other school argues for another year of patience. Second, firing this coach is impractical and imprudent: he's owed too much money, the position would be viewed as toxic by qualified outsiders, and the instability would do more harm than another bad or middling season under Rodriguez. However, this is measured restraint, because, as noted, nothing that has happened for almost two seasons suggests that Michigan got what it thought it was buying when it spent so much for Rodriguez. After another damning loss and another embarrassment for a program which needed no more of either, Rich Rod is back to square one: show and prove. He has fairly made a bed in which he now must lie and endure questions about his competency and doubts about his methods. Everything he does, fairly or not, will be treated as a referendum on his future. That's what happens with you lose to Illinois and Purdue for two straight years.
I suspect that it's already too late for him, though. There will be no glory for him in Ann Arbor. There will be no beautiful miscegenation of college football royalty with from-bottom radicalism. There will be no Golden Era of Spread for Michigan football and Coach Rod. Instead, those numbers will stare back at him and everyone important until the searing gaze burns him up. Everytime Rodriguez is assessed, these horrible numbers from 2008 and 2009 will tell a sad, offensive story.
The Rich Rodriguez Era at Michigan will be over before it ever really begins.
