I wonder if Andrew Wiggins will be as good for KU as I hoped DeShawn Stevenson would be. That sentence should not make any sense to sane individuals, even sane individuals who followed Kansas basketball with ritualistic intensity in the late 90s, which, I guess, might actually make them insane, thus placing me squarely into that camp. Oh well.
But back in the late 90s, DeShawn Stevenson was the shit, which also makes little sense. Stevenson these days conjures up two distinct, incredibly awesome images.
Thomas McDermott won the first Boston Marathon, back in 1897. He suffered from cramps and blisters most of the way and by the end could peel some of the skin off the soles of his feet. He vowed to never run a marathon again but by the next year was back in Boston, finishing a minute faster. I suspect he must have experienced the same tortuous emotions, the grueling pain that is in fact pleasure of the highest so many marathon runners have experienced at Boston for over a century and hoped to again on Monday. Continue reading →
Defeating the world is not as hard as it sounds, particularly in March. In this awesome month of green beer, spring break and college basketball, the world becomes an opponent of many coaches and athletes, with nearly everyone involved in college basketball regularly declaring that “it’s us against the world.”
Yes, somebody hasalreadysaid and will continue to say those exact insufferable words during March Madness, or they’ll say something similar, perhaps explaining that nobody, and they mean nobody, believed in them. Or, if the timing is just right, they’ll say both.
“It was us against the world,” Louisville’s Peyton Siva said to USA Today upon making the Final Four last year. “Nobody believed in us.” Continue reading →
I stared down your hollow hall. Lined with what looked like static stars in a sky divided into fourths. Your beams spending summer swelling, spitting beads of sweat from bubbles, an uneven topography.
A long time ago in yuppie years, I sat in a coffee shop in Dallas, uninspired on a Friday afternoon to complete something or anything that could be considered productive. In moments like this, I reach. I try to read something to pump me up, maybe an example of really good writing or something that just makes me laugh. Or I turn to music, which Brew House colleague Rustin Dodd once-termed a performance enhancing drug for getting work done.
So on this day I set out to create an HGH-Winstrol infused cocktail of music on YouTube, and I termed it “Work Mix.” I remember jamming out to this particular batch of about 20 songs off and on and then I kind of forgot about it. Until today. For some reason I was on my YouTube account and came across the prestigious “Work Mix.”
And holy shit, I wonder what kind of drugs I was on, performance-enhancing or otherwise, that day. This mix is the worst/best collection of songs ever compiled. And I’m now in the second go-round of listening to them thing from beginning to end. And now I am going to share it. The greatest/most eclectic/this guy is huge weirdo/is there seriously a Miranda Cosgrove song on here?/ performance-enhancing work mix ever concocted. Continue reading →
Sometimes it gets bad and goes wrong and the walls press in close. The air is cold in spite of the sun and the wind whips through three long-sleeve layers.
I hate many things about year-end lists. For one, I hate the phrase you see when you encounter a list — “It’s that time of the year” — which is really code for “OK, here’s a list because we need to provide something to click on while everybody goes on a two-week holiday bender of eggnog and Christmas cookies.”
But I also love many things about these lists. Sure, they’re gimmicky and lazy. But they’re also important. Life is fast, and hard, and busy. And sometimes, we need people to remind us what happened. I have been doing this list here for a couple years now. And I’ll go ahead and recycle what I wrote last year. Sure, it’s lazy. But then again, so are lists.
When I think back to (2012), I know I won’t think of one monolithic theme or narrative. Life doesn’t work that way. Not for me. But I will remember certain moments… and certain songs. So here we go, finally, the 12 songs I will remember from 2012.
It’s been a while since our last Diary of a Bad Movie. Blame it on my lack of cable in State College. In Dallas, I could choose, on demand, from a list of nauseating mediocrity. I’m not so lucky in the east.
Thankfully being home for the holidays has allowed me to catch up with a true stinkbomb of a film, New Year’s Eve, on New Year’s Eve nonetheless.
Going into the movie, other than knowing it will not be any good, I know Seth Meyers is in it. All I know about Seth Meyers, as my dad reminds me, is that he is not even enough of a screen presence to be featured in Saturday Night Live skits. And he is in this movie. This movie.
This movie, of course, contains a jumble of characters, like the regrettable Valentine’s Day, whose plots and thus lives are somehow intertwined and interrelated. Yes just like the world. In the same way the actions of a rice farmer in Japan extends to sales of wheat futures in the United States or something, the pain of Ashton Kutcher being a hipster will lead to Jessica Biel giving birth to a baby faster. Yes this math does compute in the mind of a studio exec.
Selecting from On Demand: It turns out this movie is one hour and 58 minutes long. A test of endurance. I’ll see if I can get through. Here we go… Continue reading →
Bill Walton served as the color commentator for the Missouri-UCLA game on ESPN on Friday night. It was Walton’s first time on air in some time — he’s apparently been battling health issues — and it turned into a perfect symphony of basketball and poetry.
Walton, calling a game in the same building in which he played in college, was in rare form. Missouri guard Phil Pressey, who had 19 assists, was, according to Walton, a breathtaking savant of basketball genius, a sight to behold, a glorious revelation of playmaking and poise, a gift for all-time. (OK. That’s sort of what he said.)
It all reminded me of the greatest call in the history of basketball… ever.
His name is Mac Lethal, a rapper. He writes fast little rhymes. He posts them on YouTube. Sometimes, they go viral.
It happened again this week.
On Tuesday, Mac Lethal published his latest creation, a video titled “Oh My God! You Need To See This!” (Or at least, I think it was titled that for a while. And then I guess it changed.) It (was) a fantastic title, especially for a video that, presumably, was made to go viral. But the content of the video isn’t all that important. In this case, this was a screed rap against the lunacy of the Westboro Baptist Church, an emotional outburst of words and beats in the wake of the wounds of Newtown, Conn.
But this post isn’t really about Lethal’s latest video, in and of itself. This is more about Lethal, or what he represents, or what talent and ambition represent in today’s free-store culture. I’ll pause to note that these thoughts are incomplete, these ideas bloggy and undeveloped.
But let’s start with Lethal. He is a Kansas City native. Put out a few albums. Raps about the Royals. A year ago, he was living in a somewhat crappy apartment in Overland Park. The kind of place any late 20-something would live.
And for me, this all makes him interesting. He’s been around the KC rap game for years, showing up at shows in Lawrence, hosting shows on the radio, playing a cultural character in a Midwest city with too few of them.
He is not famous. No, not in that way. But if you live in Kansas City, you may have HEARD of him, and you might think you should know who he is, and in this odd Internet age, that can be part of this bizarre realm of not-really-famous fame.
“Hey that’s Mac Lethal. He’s the Kansas City dude who raps insanely fast and writes sort of ironic songs. I guess I’ve heard of him”
Maybe if a Kansas City rapper would have made it big; maybe if Tech N9ne had produced a best-selling, top-40 single, the environment would be different. Not better, mind you; but different.
Last fall, Lethal released a YouTube video of him in a kitchen, spitting out some of the fastest lines you’ve ever heard, an ironically goofy cover (at least, that’s the way I took it) of Chris Brown’s “Look at Me Now”.
The fact that this YouTube video now has more than 27 million views is important to our overall thesis here. But it is, perhaps, just as interesting (although maybe not all that important) that Lethal could gain such click-ified success by rapping lines like: “Gotta butter up another one, and put it on the skillet, another couple minutes until it’s done-done / ain’t nobody fucking with this kid, so tell Jerry Sandusky I’m gonna kill him with a stun gun.”
But all this Internet fame, all this viral success, all this bizarre creation of art, well… it leads to few questions.
What do you do after you create a video with 27 million views… and then go viral again? And has Mac Lethal passed a threshold … an invisible barrier of internet fame, never to return again? I guess what I’m saying is this: If Mac Lethal has ambitions, dreams about being an artist who supports himself on his work… does becoming an Internet sensation hinder this pursuit?
Part of Lethal’s appeal, part of what makes him unique, is how home-made it all feels. He creates a beat on his iPhone, he sits on his couch, he spits out a perfect rhyme on the “first” take, and then he turns the camera off. This is not Rebecca Black, we’re told, or some methodically planned lip-dub proposal; this is hip-hop in its purest form.
And it’s quite brilliant, in its own little way. But here’s the question: When you get 27 million views while rapping about flapjacks, can you maintain authenticity?
***
Seattle is a music city. This is the rep, anyway. For years, a young rapper named Ben Haggerty plowed away in the local hip-hop scene. He performed at local shows, appeared at Seattle sporting events, and earned thousands of clicks on YouTube.
He was not famous. But he was notable. A white rapper from Seattle with a little bit of talent. If you asked people around the Seattle scene, they might say something like… “Yea, I’ve sort of heard of him.”
But how does somebody like this break through?
Earlier this year, Haggerty released a song called “Same Love”. It was a serious song about serious stuff.
Within a few weeks, it viral. A few weeks later, it went to No. 1 on iTunes. At some point during all this, Haggerty performed on the Ellen Show with his producer, Ryan Lewis.
She introduced him as her hero: His name is Macklemore, a rapper.
I thought off Macklemore the other day when I watched Mac Lethal’s latest creation. Maybe it was the similar names. Or the thought of two underground musicians taking on an admirable, emotional issue.
And then I scrolled through the “About” section on Mac Lethal’s Westboro rap.
It had the lyrics, and some info on Lethal’s facebook and twitter pages. And then it had this message:
