Soul Meets A Milli (Death Cab for Weezie)

Benny and the Game

The first in what will hopefully be a series of mash-ups. I have too much time on my hands.

Benny and the Game - Milwaukee Cool Kids

Indie Rock: the New Black

The soundtrack for the new Twilight movie reads like a veritable pitchfork dream team, featuring Lykke Li, Bon Iver and St. Vincent, Grizzly Bear, and hipster messiah Thom Yorke. This may seem like a shocking twist for a series that exudes as much Transylvania-is-for-lovers-style teen angst as does Twilight (Cut my wrists and suck my blood?), but the Twilight 2 soundtrack is only highlighting a trend that has been going on for some time now, a trend I would like to refer to as the "emo-fication of Indie Rock".

It seems the moment things went wrong for Indie Rock is when "hot" bands discovered the Beach Boys, overshadowing the trend of Bruce Springsteen-posturing that had resulted in a Steinbeck-ian/Salinger-ian brand of Americana (see Boys and Girls in America, "(Antichrist Television Blues)") that felt rootsy enough to combat the spoiled, pretentious hipster reputation. That is until vocal harmonies somehow became cool, suddenly becoming featured in absurd genres like "bedroom-pop" (also known as filling-the-social-void-in-my-life-by-twisting-synthesizer-knobs-pop). Say what you will about the Beach Boys, but there is no denying that their lyrics are entirely recluse-emo (see Pet Sounds), which has undoubtedly seeped into the music of their indie branchildren. This has resulted in an entirely uninteresting crop of indie bands (bedroom-pop doesn't exactly produce the same compelling sex-drug-rock 'n'roll myths characteristic of arena rock bands) making music achingly perfect for primetime CW.

At the same time, Emo bands seem to be pushing away from the moody behavior that made them such a maligned subculture in the first place. Successful emo songs on pop radio seem to exhibit qualities antithetical to the emo persona. Cobra Starship is making "Good Girls Go Bad" rather than having bad girls make them feel not very good. 3OH3! are posturing as chauvinistic assholes (and even fitting in Helen Keller jokes).

And if you need more proof that Indie Rock is the perfect soundtrack to lofe affairs of the undead, there is always Vampire Weekend.

In Defense of Kanye West

It is hard to take this Kanye West episode seriously as it involves

A) The VMA’s
B) Taylor Swift

Stuff like this happens every year at the VMA’s just to grab headlines. Past VMA's featuring a slovenly Britney Spears performance, a Tommy Lee and Kid Rock fist fight, and Li'l Kim fresh out of prison still clad in her orange jumpsuit hardly make the VMA's seem like a forum for civility.

Also, Kanye West is prone to say things he should not. This is well documented. The man calls the former leader of the free world a racist and hardly gets half the facebook status attention he gets now after saying Swift's video was not quite as good as Beyonce's. This is who Kanye West is and this why we love him. If Kanye West didn't have such an overinflated ego and weren't perpetually making bad life decisions then what would his songs be about? Shopping at K-Mart instead of Louis Vuitton? Meeting a nice woman and building a swingset so that all the Li'l Weezys he plans to raise have a place to run around? Nobody wants "Jesus Walks" to be an actual Christian rap song. Kanye West is so appealing because he is such a caricature of the rapper persona. He is the embodiment of all of our selfish instincts and reminds us that maybe we are fairly responsible people after all.

No matter how you feel about the song, I think most people would agree that "Put A Ring On It" was a better video. If you saw the thing happen Beyonce looked downright pleased to have Kanye call her out until she realized that everyone was booing and THEN she started acting like it was some sort of travesty. And after seeing Taylor Swift’s live performance, cooing intimately in a subway as if her song about an unrequited crush was actually a truly emotionally jarring tale of heartache, it seemed like she needed to be taken down a peg anyways.

Let’s get over Kanye West interrupting award ceremonies and get back to what’s really important: interrupting health care reform town hall meetings.

Zooey Deschanel is Katy Perry

We live in an age in which corporations have the power to make and break the careers of whatever clean cut celebrity automaton that they see fit. These icons are packaged, marketed and, with the aid of relentless air time on local top 40 stations, sold to a public clamoring to latch on to the next big thing. In response to current trends, pop stars are branded with an often times ill-fitting image allowing, for example, Lady Gaga to refer to herself as "shock pop" even though the only thing shocking about her music is the possibility that "Just Dance" may be about date rape. While this practice has been commonplace in popular music for ages, it also seems to have infiltrated independent-minded subcultures that have risen in defiance of the mainstream. This phenomenon has particularly been evidenced by the parallel rises to fame of Katy Perry and Zooey Deschanel.

Katy Perry is the perfect example of a well branded popstar. As has been demonstrated by the arrival of Pink and Avril Lavigne in the public consciousness, Top 40 music seems to move in cycles as pop music becomes exhausted with itself and an "alternative" icon or two suddenly become famous. Ironically, these alternative icons never really change the mold of future popstars and are doomed to be sandwiched between the type of cookie cutter divas that alternative icons generally rail against in KISS FM playlists and the CD collections of pre-teen girls.

With mainstream divas like Jessica Simpson having a panic attack and getting fat and Beyonce being replaced by the pseudo-feminist, vomit-inducing alter ego "Sasha Fierce", Katy Perry was suddenly in the perfect situation to grace magazine covers with taglines like "Katy Perry grabs Hollywood By the Balls" or "Katy Perry: The Girl You Don't Bring Home To Meet Your Mother Unless You Want Her To Have An Aneurysm". Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" resonated perfectly with girls determined to get in touch with their bad girl side in order to attract the attention of fraternity meatheads and/or get back at their parents and it also resonated with guys who were all too excited to see girls make out with each other. Ultimately, everyone was happy except for the parents themselves and people with souls who saw Katy Perry's music as setting back both women and the LGBT community at least 20 years.

Zooey Deschanel also has proven to be perfectly marketable, winning the adoration of a sizable target market of hipsters who watch Annie Hall obsessively and harbor the misguided notion that girls do, in fact, pour over their painstakingly crafted mixtapes. 500 Days of Summer, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt's ceaseless need to be in a committed relationship with Zooey's "I'm so cute and quirky as I shout penis in a public park" character not only cemented Zooey's status as hipster sex symbol, but also signaled a perfectly timed paradigm shift within the indie community. The innocent romantic is now cool again. Going steady is the new drunken hookup. Websites like "Hipster Wife Hunting" show a formerly oversexed and sometimes bicurious subculture ready to become monogamous.

Really, Zooey Deschanel is just a response to former hipster sex symbol Scarlet Johansson, who has fallen out of favor due to her role in movies like The Nanny Diaries, He's Just Not That Into You, and most notably The Island in which Johansson commits the hipster cardinal sin of starring in a Michael Bay movie. In spite of a valiant effort to win back her once adoring fans with a Tom Waits cover album, Johansson was outplayed by Deschanel, whose She & Him record showed she not only has a more commanding voice, but also featured indie-cred builder M. Ward, resulting in the perfect soundtrack for flanneled folk to touch themselves at night. Ultimately, Deschanel's cutesy schmaltz provides the perfect foil to Johnasson's sex pot promiscuity.

Underneath the simultaneous rise of these two celebrities lies something suspicious. The two look like carbon copies of each other. Same pale skin, same heavy bangs, same big doe eyes. Lyrically speaking, Zooey Deschanel sounds an awful lot like Katy Perry imitating Kermit the Frog. Could Katy Perry be to Zooey Deschanel as Garth Brooks is to Chris Gaines? If true, the result could be a modern day Oedipus Rex style tragedy as hipsters nationwide gouge out their eyes upon discovering that the object of their affection is the same sexual object igniting frat parties nationwide. My friends, we may be in the middle of the great hipster swindle.

Know Your Hipster

You may not realize it, but hipsters have truly infiltrated mainstream culture. You may have a hipster as a neighbor, a coworker, or even a close friend. But who are these V-Neck wearing, Ray Ban sporting, seemingly anemic twenty-somethings really? You probably have found their behavior confounding. You may wonder whether or not a subculture characterized by apathy and irony can really be considered a counterculture. At some point you may have asked yourself whether or not a counterculture sense of cool is still nonconformist if that which is cool is uniformly agreed upon by a panel of subculture critics and mimicked universally by those immersed within the subculture. You may have tried to educate your hipster friends on the postmodern crisis that you see as embodied by the hipster mentality, only to find that the books that you recommended were neglected in favor of postmodern style defining magazines like Vice and blogs like Pitchfork.

My friends, while your intentions are no doubt pure, your actions are misguided! You need not try to convert these hipster friends back to mainstream culture! Instead, we must come to understand this unfairly maligned subculture! Thus, in my infinite wisdom, I have compiled a "who's who" list of hipster idols in hopes that society can finally come to understand and accept hipsters amongst their ranks.

Stephen Malkmus: Frontman of seminal garage rock band Pavement, Malkmus is truly the William Hung success story of indie rock. Crooning nonsenical lyrics atonally over songs that often consist of no more than three or four chords, Pavement's albums still somehow end up on most critics top ten of the 90's lists. Malkmus is a guiding light for hipsters who hope their lack of ambition and nonchalance can take them far.



Beetle Bailey is certainly not an obvious reference point for hipsters. After all, his service in the military exemplifies a particular tenant which hipsters rally against: civic duty. But don't be fooled by first glance. Beetle Bailey's commitment to napping and avoiding work have long been continued by a current generation of unemployed, apathetic hipsters living off their parents' upper middle class salaries. Plus, Beetle Bailey single-handedly made the flipped brim cap cool.


The Wu-Tang Clan: Hipsters can in no way relate to the Wu-Tang Clan. Songs about drug peddling, gun violence, and life-threatening situations are experiences that no hipster can connect to on any level. Yet the irony of the upper middle class listening to gangsta rap music is central to the appeal of the music. Also, hipsters have an inexplicable connection with the lower class (see also: PBR/Salvation Army fascination) inspite of the fact most hipsters have never worked a day in their entire life.


Allen Ginsberg: Another surprising choice for a hipster mentor. He's balding, smiles in photos, and would not look good in a pair of skinny jeans. Still, Ginsberg's classic poem "Howl" speaks to this generation of hipsters, particularly in its criticism of a prevailing sense of materialism and conformity commonly exemplified by today's hipsters. Also, he did a lot of drugs, which is cool.



Stefan Urquelle: The result of a lab experiment where nerd-of-note Steve Urkel (notice the similarity in names) successfully concocts a potion of "cool juice", transforming him from a socially awkward high schooler spurned by the far more attractive Laura Winslow into a smooth talking, fashionable casanova. The transformation of Steve Urkel is similar to the common development of many hipsters, who often start out as unpopular nerdy types before developing the same elitist, narcissistic mentality of the popular kids who once made their lives miserable.


So the next time you see a hipster smoking European cigarettes outside of the local vegan eatery, maybe instead of shouting obscenities in his or her general direction, pull out a Parliament of your own and chat about the latest Pitchfork review. You will no doubt be thoroughly enriched by the experience.

Rebirth of Autotune

As someone with a bad singing voice, this whole auto-tune craze is very exciting. After watching any episode of American Idol, it becomes instantly apparent that the possession of a good singing voice is inversely related to the amount of personality any given person possesses. This is why it is extremely disheartening for me to hear Jay-Z bash the rising auto-tune trend on his latest single "D.O.A (Death of Autotune)". But Jay-Z, isn't it true that studio tricks have been instrumental in creating some of the most groundbreaking works in the past (e.g. any drug-addled Beatles album)? Why cut down this phenomenon well before it has reached its full potential? And are we really supposed to take pop-culture advice from a guy who tried to bring rap rock back through his collaboration with angst-ridden suburban tween favorites, Linkin Park? Jay, why not take a look at the treasures Auto-Tune has blessed the world with thus far:

Zapp & Roger: "Computer Love", 1985
Zapp and Roger revolutionize R&B music by utilizing Auto-Tune on their single "Computer Love", a song that would sound more at home as the theme of Nick Arcade than as the soundtrack of any foray into love making. Still the song seemed prophetic, predicting the coming ubiquity of internet pornography.

Cher: "Do You Believe?", 1998
Cher returns to public consciousness singing a "Night at the Roxbury" banger. The world breathes a heavy sigh of relief as the music video does not feature an even older Cher once again in fishnet stockings on a battle ship.

Kid Rock "Only God Knows Why", 1999.
Kid Rock shows a sensitive side with this Auto-Tune inflected country ballad. Well... at least an attempt at sensitivity.

T-Pain "Buy You a Drank (Shawty Snappin')", 2007
T-Pain forecasts his Saturday Night sexual adventures. First he's going to buy you a drink, then he will take you home with him, and then he is going to make sweet love to you, and you will be all like "Ooh, Ooh, Ooh". And how could the ladies possibly resist a man with such a syruppy robotic voice who, when walking around night clubs, leaves a trail of money behind him like some sort of financially incompetent pied piper?

Snoop Dogg "Sensual Seduction", 2007
Snoop Dogg brings back the 70's with autotune, a keytar and a sexual magic carpet ride in a turban. The song takes its rightful place in the Snoop Dogg canon next to classics like "Murder was the Case" and "Down for my N****z"

Lil Wayne: "Lollipop", 2008
Lil Wayne jumps on the autotune bandwagon using the most obvious sexual metaphor ever. The world feels a little nauseous at the thought of having sex with Lil Wayne.

Kanye West 808's and Heartbreaks, 2008
Kanye West sets aside his usual grandiloquent, narcissistic rapper persona in order to release an album of spacy, slightly-less narcissisic jams sung through Auto-Tune. This new R&B singer side of Kanye is highlighted by a jeri curl mullet. Zapp and Roger lameness returns full circle.

Why stop here?