FEMININITY AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF BAD POP MUSIC

Bros, I'm confused. Are you attracted to this? Broads, is this empowering?

Seems that recently all artistic media has become about gimmicky advertisements for the self. I am selling me, that's it, nothing else. Look. Seriously, look here.

Seems very strange.

I really like the scenes toward the end when Beyonce's alone rocking the Brooklyn chic (via bangs and a big t-shirt) and just dancing without any actual like, gimmick gimmicks.

This phenomenon seems interesting to me in the context of how women have developed a sense of self-worth and artistry since the advent of the 'lame as shit pop music' phase the world went through in the eighties, where no one was selling anything, just trying to one-up each other in the area of absurdity.

Recently, even the 'alt-est' of music videos is about near-shameless overexposure and self-presentation above like, substance or something. Check out this 'think piece' music video starring Miranda July:

Now when it comes to women talking to women about being women, female solidarity is famous for promoting 'self-empowerment', which i thought was a paradox, but damn, Beyoncé convinced all her single ladies to be single ladies, by selling her very much in a relationship self (via the Sasha Fierce gimmick).

"I am selling myself by telling you to sell yourself, and it's working because of this fucking catchy hook"

Seems weird.

Do you guys remember the '90s when the singer-songwriter was actually just venting/making really good music unabashedly and for mostly cathartic/therapeutic reasons?

What happened to that? What happened to the tortured artist? No one does that anymore. Actually, I take that back.

Laura Marling - New Romantic [NEW]
Uploaded by urlov. - See the latest featured music videos.

I take any and all opportunities to plug this woman. And it's because she is living honestly. Anti-folk is about people gathering around music that is too honest. I think that I prefer music that is honest about life's sorrow and each person's alienation. But what does this type of music say about women/femininity?

A woman who is honest about her flaws could be intimidating to the majority of men. I think claiming oneself, including one's flaws could potentially be very attractive if the woman doesn't ruminate and regurgitate the same five topics of her own morbid reality. I think putting a sarcastic spin on one's flaws is the most important aspect about this self-projection. One woman who does that well (ironically and without any actual sex appeal, in my opinion) is Amy Winehouse.

Unfortunately, I'm not plugging that though.

A terrible example, is any hardcore emo broad behind a guitar.

If you align your personal brand with vampires, how can you expect anyone to take how not serious you take yourself seriously?

Or that chick could just be riding the trend wave, which I think is unlikely. I should have done a more comprehensive blog post about 'trend wave and fashion' back when this video originally came out.

C-razy. When I say 'unabashed,' I don't think I mean 'Lady Gaga unabashed'. She seems so over-the-top with her grime-loving, flaw-embracing persona, that it's not ironic at all, it's just a lie. She is lying to you to get you to listen to her music. She does not want your love or your lover's revenge, she wants you to look at her.

Oh wait...

WAS THIS A BRANDING MISTAKE LADY GAGA? What are you saying about women/yourself? You're an attention whore? Okay.

I'm really curious what these girls are 'going for':

Is this female empowerment or does it just make these girls seem like humongous bitches? I can't tell. I like that they're getting money, and 'our pocket's never hungry' is a fucking awesome line, but what kind of bros do these girls attract? Seems like it could be the 'hoodrat, dating/married to a fat chick, saw this girl at the club, banged her in the back of my rented suburban and went back to one of my five babymommas/welfare sugamommas' crowd.

Not attractive.

What do you think girls are 'going for' these days as far as projecting themselves as attractive, trend-setting, talented, or honest musicians? Is it the end of the Pussycat Dolls era? I haven't seen an act like that in a while, but maybe I'm speaking too soon.

BONUS EARLY DRAKE AFTER THE JUMP

WTF IS A ROMANTIC COMEDY?

It seems that 'Hollywood', the autonomous entity that is responsible for producing and distributing feature-length films, thinks that a large percentage of Americans are interested in watching 'movies' about men and women 'falling in love'. I'm curious why this happens. Wha the fuck are 'bromanitic comedies?'

This is a recent 'romcom' that I saw in movie theaters. I think it was about two broads and two dudes who were confused about their lives and were lookin for love everywhere but where love happens. At the end of the movie everyone had sex with each other and seemed to feel good about their life decisions.

I'm unsure if this is something I would want to happen in my life. I think if I met a broad and was interested in having sex with her, or spending a substantial amount of time/my life with her, I would introduce some kind of mutually entertaining gimmick we could align our relationship with. 'Love' isn't one of the gimmicks I would use. I would prefer a phrase, like 'you're an insensitive dick,' or something, to base the relationship around, so that when that phrase lost its novelty, the relationship would clearly be over. I think this is a better source of prolonged feelings of attachment and stability than trying to convince each other we are 'in love.'

Here's the trailer for another film I saw recently:

This trailer is extremely misleading. It seems like whoever made this was attempting to market to the demographic of 'slam piece-smashing bros'. The actual movie is about two fellas who accidentally 'fall in love' while trying to fuck hella bitches in different milieus around Washington DC. They meet two girls, sisters, at a wedding, and end up living 'happily ever after' with them after a lot of situational, physical humor happens.

As unrealistic as the main premise seems, I think the thematic subversion, acknowledging that 'everybody is looking for love' is fucked and inaccurate. The fact that people pay money to watch these types of movies and make 'Hollywood' more wealthy seems really silly to me.

Here is a trailer for a movie about vampires that are in love (it's in high definition and might have a commercial at the beginning. sorry bros):

There is a serious amount of hoopla surrounding this film. I don't think it's actually a 'romantic comedy' but the main plot devices used in=between the 'really fucking serious' scenes involve people saying things that seem like they should be laughed at. At the end the vampire bro eats his girlfriend by accident while in a hemophilia-induced blood consuming rampage. I didn't enjoy watching that.

I think what's 'really happening' is that Americans enjoy watching famous people seducing each other and being seduced. There's nothing really deep or interesting going on here. Maybe people want to feel like everyone is crazy so that they feel less crazy on a daily basis by relating their lives to some 'insanely funny' movie about people looking for meaning in their lives.

Bonus movie trailer after the jump.

Wha the fuck.

BOOK REVIEW: TAO LIN — 'SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL'

Author Tao Lin's rapid ascent into the realm of literary celebrity over the past four years, coupled with the seemingly constant threat to his career's stability that he himself fuels with gimmick-driven, narcissistic self-promotion, are entertaining for the chuckling masses of well-informed blog readers and lit junkies to observe in various forms on the internet. But these aspects of his life and the polarized quality of his growing mythos are only small fractions of what are worth gleaning from Tao Lin's never-ending stream of memetic output, because he is also a fantastic writer.

His latest release into the physically world as opposed to the digital is the autobiographical novella, 'Shoplifting From American Apparel', a thorough and thoroughly entertaining look into the life of Sam, a New York-based author, wandering through a clusterfuck of daily human interaction, while maintaining a sort of cognizance of what is going on in the context of time passing at a definite pace. The novella is full of the main character’s passionless advances through life and conveys an appreciative sense of the sadness and beauty offered a meager, intuition-guided youth of 'the fucked generation'.

Author, Tao Lin, drinking champagne.

The book is an easy read that I have managed to get through fully, twice, and skimmed over repeatedly to grasp clever minutia amidst the relative insanity of the narrative. My favorite part includes a day trip to Atlantic City, in which Sam wins eight hundred dollars, and then voluntarily loses all but twenty to save for a steak dinner he, with his vegan sensibility and awareness of how ‘shitty’ he might feel after, doesn’t buy. The book is full of moments worth reading and re-imagining using one’s knowledge of the author and the intrigue of his celebrity, while it is also excruciatingly precise in its narrative structure, and thus, worth its weight in poetic substance. I enjoyed reading ‘Shoplifting From American Apparel’ both times, and loaned it to a friend yesterday, who despite his many obligations to school and his girlfriend, has already read halfway through it.

To purchase 'Shoplifting', either visit The Tao Lin Store
Or increase his rating on Amazon by buying it for substantially cheaper here.

Tao Lin's Official Website

BOOK REVIEW: NOAH CICERO — BEST BEHAVIOR

NOAH CICERO, author — BEST BEHAVIOR (2009)

The other day, novelist Noah Cicero, The Human War (2003), The Insurgent (2009) published a rough but comprehensive (and maybe solitary) draft of his latest novel, Best Behavior, on his blog for his fans and fans of Kmart Realism in general to consume. The cast of characters for the latter half of the book include fictional transcriptions of some of today's renown internet literary personas (a group of hipster poets all three to ten years his junior), characters Cicero captures in a terse, potentially offensive recounting of his experience traveling to New York for a Nylon (not mentioned by name in the novel) Magazine photoshoot.

BRANDON SCOTT GORRELL, author — MY HAIR WILL DEFEAT YOU (forthcoming, 2010), and TAO LIN, author — EEEEE EEE EEEE (2007), RICHARD YATES (forthcoming, 2010) are depicted in the book as characters Jason Bassini and Hu Chin. (image courtesy HTMLGIANT)

The first half of the book is an in-depth look at the people the main character, Barry Baradat, surrounded himself by in his home city of Youngstown, Ohio — a group of working class midwesterners, trying to make their way through life's hardships and seemingly constant miseries, all of whom he finds he's grown to know and feel emotionally invested in — prior to the shoot, in the face of his own daily struggle to maintain charismatic, though detached, involvement in life's never-ending duties and necessities. Each introduction to a character that Barry interacts with at length, is accompanied by paragraph after paragraph of descriptive embellishment, giving the reader insight into the lives of each, flawed-to-perfection character.

I really enjoyed reading this book, partly due to my own first-hand experiences and reminiscences about the specific group of writers and artists Barry interacts with, but also out of genuine appreciation for Cicero's attention to detail and his ability to unabashedly stand by his beliefs as an American, a man, and 'an outsider,' while still acknowledging his and his peers' status as 'the fucked generation,' interacting, seemingly, in the dense mists of arbitrariness, anxiety, and constant alienation, in a vague attempt to achieve a personal sense of success and, the ever-elusive, knowingly unmaintainable, 'happiness.'

(Click the post title to view Cicero's blog/the novel)

MY EX KEEPS TRYING TO GET BACK 'TOGETHER' WITH ME

I think that relationships are about one person causing another person to feel consistently 'good', 'not alone', 'secure,' and vice versa.

Any circumstances that create 'extreme friction' to the point of feeling persistent discomfort due to the actions or personality of a person that you are frequently in contact with, propagates the expunction of that relationship, in my opinion.

That is why I broke up with my ex.

I don't understand what caused her to think that reuniting two clearly conflicting personalities would be good for her or positive in any way, but she's trying really hard to 'get back together' with me.

She seems to think that 'everything will be okay' if I let her back into my life, but I'm pretty sure one of us will become homicidal first.

Besides, I am enjoying 'playing the field' and the life of an attractive bachelor.

Despite the fact that I don't want to be with my ex, I do want her to be happy, sort of like how I want my favorite sports team to win the world series.

Besides, I only ever had vague feelings of it being possible that she was 'the one' or that we would be dating for more than a couple years at most. Not sure why she is making such a big deal about this.

It's been four months. I think that she should 'act like an adult' and have sex with someone else. Seems like I am 'more than okay' with that happening.