If great hip-hop artists produce minor hip-hop artists, as RZA brought us Method Man and Biggie Diddy, Gucci Mane may achieve greatness on October 5th, when Waka Flocka Flame attempts to achieve with _Flockaveli_ what OJ Da Juiceman sort-of eventually … Read More
Editor’s Note: What follows is composed from features published in The New Yorker between September and December 2010. No alterations beyond rearrangement were made to the texts, excepting those that ensured gender, tense and number agreement.
Close your eyes. Are they closed? No, good point, I guess you’ll need to keep them open to read the Powerpoint. Okay, close them when you can, and otherwise close your inner eye, or eyes. The number of inner eyes … Read More
A week and a day after I saw Dan Deacon play his new DVD, Ultimate Reality, at Bard College, I saw him buying a camera at B&H in Manhattan. B&H is probably what the Nazis feared the planet would look like by now: an electronics store run and mostly staffed by Orthodox Jews, every item carried from the shelf to the salesman to the register by conveyor belts, each one tricked out with neon blue trim.
When browsing classic disco blogs—always maintained by sweaty, foreign men, a tendency I have learned from the pictures of themselves they publish inexplicably—one can only judge the quality of the records by their album covers. There are no band biographies, no album reviews, no other photographs: it is a cultural archive without history or salesmanship. Determining quality with so little information is a delicate but logical process, the mechanics of which can only be explained by example.
WICKEDEST CENSORS—CNN “Hey, can I call you Joe?” she asked. “[Off-mike],” he responded. BEST MIXED METAPHOR—SARAH PALIN “The barometer there, I think, is going to be resounding that our economy is hurting.” MOST GERUNDS—SARAH PALIN Gerunds are for the weak, … Read More
You might have heard that a half-black man named Barack Obama is running for President. This sounds ridiculous, but the last few weeks have revealed that some have not.
I had never heard a Jonas Brothers song before the first week of this school year. I was throwing a pre-game for Lawnparties, offering Tequila Sunrises and mojitos in the a.m.—the youngest oldest thing Princeton students do. The eclectic and up-to-the-minute iTunes playlist I had made for the occasion had run out, and some roommate of a friend had taken over the computer to keep the mood going. “‘Burnin’ Up’!” someone requested. Probably the new Usher single, I thought, and then a nineteen- or twenty-year-old played me my first Jonas Brothers song. “Don’t they wear chastity rings?” I asked no one.
“Morphing Double N______.” That was the link I clicked on, the link at which I knew that researching this article, on lolcats of all things (a joke so quirky-yet-plain that it netted coverage in Time), was going to lead me all the way down, through every level of adolescent offensiveness into the final stage.