There are two arguments I get a lot whenever I talk about music. Some people ask them with honesty, others spring them like they've suddenly latched onto something fantastic and have suddenly destroyed Magical Negro, and he will soon dissolve, his stuffs floating into the chaotic winds of time. The first one tends to always be this second kind.

1. You don't even like fun, dancey, or lighthearted music. You only like it when music examines serious themes, nothing can be just fun.


95. Robyn- Robyn (2005)

The above statement's pretty untrue. I loved Justin Timberlake's album and still listen to it like once a month, I think Rihanna's new single was genuinely fun and kind of cool, I've been advocating MIA a great deal, and just today on IRC I said that I agreed with a statement I had read; if Soulja Boy came to a concert near me and wasn't too expensive, I'd go and *gasp* have a lot of fucking fun.

No, the problem is I don't accept the fact that music is fun as a reason to justify your taste. I do in real life; contrary to what most of GW believes, I don't go home to my girlfriend, smash her head in the wall for misspelling a word in a text message while screaming about how stupid she is, and then go to the neighbor's house and yell about how they are wasting their time listening to shitty music like Creed. But when you enter a forum, dammit, you need to think about what you're posting. It's about discussion, not just listing your favorite bands and saying ITS GOOD ITS GOOD. Talk about why it's good; it's a music forum for christ's sake.

The problem people have here then is two fold. Either one person has to admit that they are biased in a certain way to appreciate the music or the other person has to admit that they are biased against it. Believe it or not, this doesn't mean it has to stop at JUST MY OPINION and can lead to a more indepth discussion about the themes of music and genres. For instance, I think Soulja Boy would probably only be fun in the context of a club or a concert because he's really not very talented otherwise. Rihanna's new single is one I'm biased towards because I like to see pop music take trends towards more production and weird vocal shit and less towards “These are my lyrics/they are so meaningful/easy to cover on acoustic guitar/you are so beautiful”. Conversely I think Justin Timberlake's album was very good in every way and someone else would have to admit a bias against that kind of stuff if they disliked it.

I don't know where Robyn falls in here, but I do know I really really fucking love this album.

BEFORE I SAY ANYTHING ELSE: Robyn has the worst fucking hair on the planet it seems. Do not WATCH THE VIDEOS, just listen.



Robyn is a Swedish popstar who has four albums so far and this one fucking rules. There's something about the way she does her shit that is just so much fucking fun to me.

This is a cover song (so no lyric stuff) but she adds a pretty great flair to it and this girl fucking bleeds PIZAZZ. It's almost sickening! This shit is what Gwen Stefani and Fergie wish they could be but won't ever come close (because they fucking suck you're shit if you like them this is a fact).

She loves weird bleepy synths and squashed drumlines. This girl bleeds attitude and somehow never sounds false to me, which is weird, and I'll get into it later. Let's have an original song.



There's another video of the song btw, this is Robyn's video and Kleerup did the other. Robyn has two types of songs, the kind filled with weird poppy girl power and then the weird kind of soulful ballad, and this is the second of the two. I could post the lyrics, and might as well:


What's neat about this song isn't just the production or the lyrics, although the production is stellar and the lyrics are inoffensive. Robyn's voice is able to sell stuff that I don't think other singers do as well, male or female. She's full of passion when she's doing the insane girl shit, and she's full of weird emotion when she does the other kind. Here's a great example:



It would be so easy for fucking Mandy Moore or someone to cover this song and fuck it up. But something about Robyn's voice, how it seems almost about to crack, really sells the song. “But there's no accusation, no need for denial, if you hadn't heard that whisper, would be no tear to wipe from your eye” she almost whispers before hitting that chorus “You're right, some words are best unspoken”. I've wondered why she can sell these lyrics so much better. Some of it is talent and actual emotive ability; Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs had the similar ability to sing a song that other people would easily fuck up but emoted the fuck out of it and made it great (“Maps”).

But I think a lot of it is this weird ability I've noticed foreign born singers are beginning to use. People like Jens Lekman and Gogol Bordello are using all these weird turns of phrase in their music that just come off well because they are an honest expression of someone who knows English but isn't trapped by a fear of sounding ridiculous. Some of these singers go over the top (hey Regina Spektor talk about some more quirky fucking Wonderbread) but the few that manage to hit that point hit an honesty that most pop singers lack. They ARE having a fun time and she DOES see an eclipse in his eye where she used to be or he DID dream he was in a kangaroo's pouch when he chopped off his thumb or whatever ridiculous thing they say. It's refreshing and while probably bordering into some ethnocentric insensitivity (“look, it's Borat singing” is really not the impression I want to give off) I think it adds a quality of honesty and general quality to the work.

Why Doesn't GW Talk About This?

I really don't know. We have a lot of Euro GWs, they have to know about her. My guess is that she's got a stigma in Europe what with being played alongside shit like Girls Aloud, so posting about her is committing musical heresy. Good thing I trump that heresy with my big fucking dick huh!

Why Would GW Like This?

It's a lot of goddam fun! If you don't like the songs I posted, check out Konichiwa Bitches. If that doesn't work, try Handle Me. I really doubt you could go through the whole album and not find a song that made you break into a smile and think “awesome!”

The second argument is one I get more on a personal level.

2. You rage about audiences and how shitty indie or emo or whatever music and their effects. But you never talk about the misogyny and violence in hiphop. How do you justify that?


94. Eminem- Curtain Call: The Hits (2005)

It's pretty obvious I'm not making a recommendation of an album; this is a greatest hits collection after all and only includes three new tracks. However, the title of the series isn't “The Best Albums” but the “The Top Albums” and I get to define that, and right now I choose to define it by importance. And Eminem was once the single most important artist on the planet. A white rapper, Eminem crossed race lines and instantly inflamed the gay, feminist, hiphop, black, Christian, legal, and intellectual community. By my calculations, he's the second highest selling hiphop artist of all time, sliding in behind Tupac Shakur, and had the height of his popularity while most of us were in school and listening to the radio. And yet, Eminem's name never comes in GW or in rap topics in general. When it does, it's always with some degree of embarassment or as a kind of an aside. That's why I chose Eminem for this article; because he's important, dammit, and I think his story has a lot to tell us about the hiphop, and the music, industry.

Before Eminem, hiphop was clearly a black man's game. Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls had been dead for about three years when Eminem finally released his first major album (the one before is actually not a bad album, even if it's just him jacking other people's flow), The Slim Shady LP. A lot of hiphop fans like to claim The Slim Shady LP did well because it was a good album produced by Dr. Dre before he fell into his current stagnation. I and most other people have a simpler hypothesis: it's because he was white, angry, and not Vanilla Ice. Ask any republican, there's no one who can get quite as angry as a lower class white male without a father. Eminem's popularity skyrocketed. I mean, this was fucking ridiculous. After The Marshall Mathers LP came out, Eminem quickly went from one hit wonder to clearly the most influential rapper of the decade.



“Stan” was a good example of Eminem at his best; a story rap, it featured a psychotic fan who, because of a post office accident, never recieves a reply from his idol “Slim”, or Eminem. At the end Stan drives off a bridge and Eminem recieves the envelope only to realize that this was the person in the news story he watched last night. It doesn't feature clever wordplay or neat analogies, but it's a story and he tells it with a degree of passion and a kind of neat beat behind it.

But I cannot go any further without addressing the real reason behind Eminem's success in detail. He was furious. Angry at a mother who did drugs, a father who never loved him, a culture that hated him, Eminem's hatred poured out in almost every song he wrote. Even “Stan” ends with an act of extreme violence; Stan drives off that bridge with his pregnant wife locked in the truck. That same album came with the most terrifying and hateful song I think I've heard in my entire life. The first time I heard it, I knew a bit about it; Eminem supposedly acted out the murder of his wife and played both roles. I thought it would be funny, because you know, a dude acting like a woman and doing some ridiculous story rap like that, it has to be funny.

It wasn't.

Three years after I first heard it, it's still not funny.

After I heard the song in its entirety, I released a breath I didn't know I had been holding and I wished I could do something with my hands. “Kim” is not a song I will link here. It is not funny, it's not particularly good, but it's hateful and that's Eminem. He was nothing but a little ball of hatred. He created a character called Shady who was supposed to deliver the hatred but it was all hate. Kim was his wife. She tried to kill herself after hearing the song. Eminem's hate is what sold his albums, because he was fucking raunchy and angry and mean.

And he ran out of it. Eminem's career started to go downhill after The Marshall Mathers LP. Because he couldn't rap MORE about violence, he started to become reflective and The Eminem Show and Encore featured forays into politics, family life, and hiphop culture. One of the better songs to come out of this was “Like Toy Soldiers”



“Toy Soldiers” is regarded as a weirdly prophetic song; two years after the song came out, the rapper being killed in the video by a driveby, Proof, was killed in a similar fashion. But Eminem never realized something about his new direction; he had no metaphors, his production wasn't that great, and he wasn't great at flow. People liked him because he was so angry and controversial. His popularity began to wane, especially as he began to rap more and more about his daughter, who quite frankly no one really gave a shit about except for him. Curtain Call is, so far, his last album, although rumors of King Mathers persist. It's a confused list of songs, going from his famous sarcastic portrayals of pop culture to his weirdly serious songs about his daughter, and ends with this one:



This song is fucking awful. It includes a maudlin and awful beat, and includes terrible lines like “Have you ever loved someone so much you'd give an arm for them, not the expression,” *rolls up sleeve to show sleeve of daughter* “literally give an arm for them” (this is not what literally means, you have to actually cut off your arm for someone), has him roleplay his daughter asking to give him both a coin and a locket (that's not confusing as at all), and includes a lot just weird non-sequiter songs. It's about his daughter as well and has a chorus that sounds like he's dead, but...he's not.

But in the end, I can't help but feel it's a somewhat accurate portrayal of the man's life. It's a confused song with mixed messages that kind of stumbles through the parts about his daughter, and most of all, it's a song of regret. Eminem kind of wishes he'd never done any of this shit, and I think you can tell. Sure, he's pinning the reason on his daughter, but I think what happened is he ran out of stuff to hate and realized it was all he was. It's frustrated and confused and angry about something, and it's the best and worst of Eminem all together.

So what's this all mean? Well when Eminem was at his height, feminists, gay rights advocates, Christians, they all hated him. Other than his opening up the race barrier in hiphop, Eminem will be also known for really getting white middle class America afraid of the effect that hiphop is having on kids. So we go back the question: how do you listen to misogyny in hiphop and condemn other music mentalities?

First off, I think hipster kids are kind of annoying. I'm not a HIPSTERS UGH guy because they don't really bother me too much but when they do, they are a pretty annoying subculture. Indie music caters to these people. I don't like those genres because they make annoying audiences.

More importantly, I think hiphop is a pretty clear case of art mimicking life being a circular process. Do kids follow their hero's style of dress? Yeah, of course they do. But if you're going to suggest the real issue is that Eminem's a dickhole and kids will learn to be dickholes too, whatever. Eminem's sexism and homophobia is a symptom of a society that secretly endorses sexism and homophobia, not an extension of the problem. He wouldn't have sold as well as he did if he wasn't saying what a lot of people secretly think is the truth.

I have problems with musicians when it affects their music. It'd be nice if hiphop didn't have much misogyny in it, but it does; I'm not going to ignore a whole genre for it. I may rail against hipsters sometimes but I still like a lot of the music. Hiphop can be misogynistic and no one was the greater offender than Eminem, but I don't see that as having any real social consequence. Just like GTA and comic books, hiphop bears more than its share of blame for a society that teaches children women are objects. Hiphop may have made the word “bitch” ubiquitous in the world of women, but the hatred behind it existed before hiphop and if you got rid of it, would still exist.

Why Doesn't GW Talk About This?

GW doesn't like rap much, and Eminem isn't as relevant anymore. He also doesn't release shit regularly (his last non-mixtape/greatest hits album having come out in 2004; mkkmypet would be nine years old) and generally isn't very GOOD. But it's strange how his name went from the biggest in hiphop to almost silenced, and I think it's because of his near meteoric descent. Tupac died and became immortal; Eminem started sputtering about his daughter and we'd all like to forget that nasty chapter.

Why Would GW Like This?

They probably won't (and if they do, they shouldn't get Curtain Call, which is pretty awful and was just an excuse for a soapbox). Eminem was awful at making good metaphors, had a shitty flow, and really specialized at angry songs and most of GW has convinced themselves rage is just a four letter word Dragonforce throws in to rhyme with “dragon's age”. Songs like “Lose Yourself” I feel still have appeal and hit on the best parts of his rapping personality, and while he's not much of a rapper, he is pretty good when you want to get a little pumped up and ready for something.

Questions, thoughts, confused yet again by an article addressing two comments towards me being an opinion as well? Shoot em up heh.