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freestyle: mos def vs. lil' wayne. [hot spit.]

I’ll probably write a whole post about this soon, but for now, in the words Zach Galifianakis wrote for Natalie Portman, “I’ve got something I need to get off my chest.”

lil’ Wayne is NOT talented. You like dancing to his music, fine, that’s cool, but that’s a producer, not lil’ Wayne. I may dedicate my life to proving this. Normally, I’m not a guy who likes to hate on stuff in print. Yet, I’m just tired of people fawning over lil’ Wayne, calling him buuuulllshit like “best rapper ever,” when guys like Mos Def can write and freestyle circles around him. Have you heard The Ecstatic?!?! Not only does Mos actually speak of love, unity and faith while Wayne raps about nothing but crime, money and sex, but the Boogie Man sounds great doing it, while Weezie sounds like a drunk, self-conscious 12 year old trying to impress his big brother.

So, here is some freestyling from the gentlemen in question:

There are definitely a few clever turns of phrase in there, unfortunately they are separated by huge portions of inane nonsense that doesn’t actually mean anything.

It is normal to take breaks between thoughts, that is when you clutch. Clutching is when you use common rhyming schemes and patterns to fill space while you enter your next flow so you can keep freestyling without awkward gaps. Weezy seems completely unable to clutch, he also doesn’t have any extended flows but merely isolated phrases. The result is… annoying.

Now, time for one of the best freestyling emcees on the planet. Mos Def is a poet. Period.

Not really any clutching there either, but that’s because his brain seems to work really fucking fast and he doesn’t need to.

And, in case you thought Mos can’t do it every time:

Or, if you prefer stuff they actually wrote down:

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yeasayer – odd blood. [the band wagon.]

/you’re stuck in my mind/all the time/

I discovered Yeasayer completely by accident. It was all thanks to Donald Glover, aka, Childish Gambino. He used two of their songs on his mixtapes, which led Brian and me to starting doing some digging on eMusic. The result is that it goes down as just another reason for me to thank the heavens that Glover decided to show the world how great he is at everything.

My first experience of them without the amazing emcee stylings of Childish Gambino was their Feb. 9th release, Odd Blood. The CD is fantastic! For me, it’s this year’s version of 2007’s Boxer, and by that I mean that it’s the CD I listen to for the 50th time and I still find myself pausing from whatever I am doing and thinking, “These guys are fucking amazing!.”

/don’t give up on me/and i won’t give up on you/

I’m not sure what their genre should be called. Genres usually suck, it’s better to just have fun with the whole concept instead. Thus, the best I’ve come up with so far is neo80sdarkwavesynthpopawesomemusicyoucandanceto. Apparently they themselves have called it “Middle Eastern-psych-snap-gospel.”

Yeasayer hearkens back to those days when you didn’t necessarily have to share your angst and heartbreak by whining about it to slow, sad songs. The best of the 80s (we are all aware of all the bad, but forget that there was some pretty good shit too) was often when you could be dark or sad or even apocalyptic, but show it by creating music you could dance your pants off to.

/hold me like you used to/control me like you used to/

Want evidence? Watch this music video, which in the world of Scott fits the following equation: frowning + watching this video = metaphysical impossibility. Or, to simplify that a bit, watching this video ≠ frowning. This is true thanks to a delicious cocktail of awesome and 80s childhood nostalgia.

Just about every day I fall in love with another track on this album. From the ups of ‘Mondegreen’ to the more melancholy but no less percussive or synthtastic ‘Madder Red’ and/or ‘I Remember.’

Obviously, Yeasayer won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but if Yeasayer is tea then you can call me a tea-partier… wait, on second thought, don’t do that. Maybe Yeasayer isn’t your particular brand of whiskey, but if Yeasayer is whiskey, call me an 1800’s drunk in the wild west.

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My Parents Were Awesome

The possibility that my parents were ever young, attractive, and fun to be around never really crossed my mind until I reached adulthood.

Or, at least, until I felt like I had reached adulthood.

But yes, those two squares that brought me into this world kicking and screaming were, at one point in the not-so-distant past, young and invincible and in love like two dumb kids should be. That is, until they settled down, got married, and squeezed out a few little snot-nosed smartasses like myself. Did they ever regret that choice? Probably. But at least they enjoyed their glory days.

Your Mom Wasn't Your Dad's FirstA couple years ago, Canadian Club whisky had an advertising campaign that first brought the possibility of my parents ever being any fun at all to my attention. Known as the ‘Damn Right, Your Dad Drank It’ campaign, these ads are rife with the sexism and gaudy styles that make the 60s and 70s so lopsidedly appealing to me.

And, while these ads suggest that your mother was something of a whore and your father was closer to a cigar-smoking character from Mad Men than the guy that came to every one of your high school football games, you can’t argue with the fact that these things immediately make you think.

It’s hard for us to look into the future and accept the fact that we’re going to end up like our parents. Yet, someday you too will be the grizzled and greyed mid-lifer who has trouble getting out of bed in the morning. You’ll be the one holding up Christmas morning with your cantankerous grumblings about the holidays being such a big pain in the ass.

Difficult, though it may be to imagine, your parents were once like you.

My Parents Were Awesome‘ is the time capsule that I think best puts this into perspective. This blog lets you submit old photographs of your parents and posts them without any explanation beyond the names that get submitted with the image.

From the handlebar mustaches to the powder-blue tuxedos, our parents were actually once a cool group of people.

Before we came along, that is.

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cudikanyecommon.

I know this song and video are old news, but I like the song and the video is so clean and bright and nice to look at. Plus, this blog will never be shackled by the tyranny of the moment, we are going to post what we like, whether it was released yesterday, or six months ago, or in the 60s. We might as well make that clear right off the bat, we will not be timely… in part because we just can’t afford that.

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john wesley nelsonsonton: an extraordinary life.

It seems to me that it is a good idea to introduce each of our primary contributors here with a bit of a biography. However, it would be terribly boring to allow each of us to introduce ourselves. Instead, each of us will introduce one of the other writers here at RtM however we see fit.

Thus, I bring you the story of John Wesley Nelsonsonton, aka, Waldo Nelsonsonton, who, to my knowledge, will go by Wes or Wesle (no ‘y’ because he isn’t actually a man) here on RtM. For legal reasons, I should point out that this biography has been published before on a previous blog. However, there have been updates from recent events.

John Wesley Nelsonsonton was born in 1983 on a warm September morning in the dance hall of a socialist commune, just outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. The fact that he was named for the English preacher and religious reformer was actually a drug induced accident. His parents, in an acid induced haze, had actually intended to name him after another famous John. Rather than the founder of Methodism, they meant for his name to honor a comedic actor best known for his role on ‘Three’s Company,’ an American sitcom famous for it’s physical humor and sexual innuendo. Thus it can be argued that in light of the wishes of his parents, we might more accurately refer to our subject as John Ritter Nelsonsonton.

John’s parents would pay for their unfortunate drug habit in that their son more closely resembled his given name than his intended name. He was known around the commune much more for his religious devotion and uncanny ability to create small cells of believers who methodically went about their spiritual observance, than for his comic timing. Being atheists, with an abiding love of broad humor, this disappointed them terribly.

Excelling in school in all subjects but Math, he would have graduated at the head of his class. I say ‘would have‘ because the school at the commune didn’t give out letter grades, but instead gave out colors to correspond to the mood of their students. Being terribly frustrated at the absurdity of such a system, John was frequently evaluated with the color black and dropped out of school at the age of 16.

After dropping out, John held his head high. He moved to the nearby kingdom of Hyrule, where he saved Zelda, the princess of the realm, who had recently been kidnapped. The rescue led to a torrid love affair between the two, ultimately resulting in a tumultuous celebrity marriage that ended after only 4 months. During the divorce, John successfully sued for half the kingdom of Hyrule, only to lose it a year later after being indicted for tax fraud.

Having learned his lesson about trying to cheat your government, John decided it was high time he went to college. It was then, during his freshman year, that he would receive the nickname ‘Waldo’ that we all know him by now. The nickname was given to him by friends, this due to a combination of his fondness for horizontally striped red and white shirts, and his proclivity and adept ability to blend in to large crowds in order to avoid unwanted attention. As you all know, the nickname stuck.

It was soon after he’d adopted this new nickname that I came upon Waldo. The two of us became fast friends, only to have a bitter falling out my senior year (his junior year) due to an argument about the fairness of pudding being segregated based on color, or flavor. The two of us didn’t talk for three and a half years until 2006, when Waldo approached me with a challenge to a blogging battle of wits. I believe that both of us hoped, deep down inside, that while being brought on by our intense competitive natures, this challenge would reopen the lines of communication and thus resurrect our friendship.

In a way this did turn out to be the case, as a result of some bad translation software, our blogging challenge led to a misunderstanding in which the North Korean government thought Waldo and I were speaking ill of their “great” leader, thus they sent super-assassins to kill us. Obviously, super-assassins are nothing to be trifled with, and it was necessary for Wesle and I do join forces. We fought, sliced, punched, chopped, spooned, and outwitted our way through a series of terrible battles with said assassins until we were finally safe again. Wait, did I say ‘spooned’? Ha, no, that obviously isn’t true. I am totally straight. I meant doomed, like, we doomed our enemies. Yes, that works.

Anyway, we emerged from our battle with the North Koreans sharing the brotherhood that can only come from spilling the blood of common enemies together. We have been reconciled, and as it would turn out, things have gone so well that we came up with this little project here at Roused to Mediocrity.

Anyway, back to his life story. After graduating from college with a degree in Quantum Physics (and a minor in Marine Biology), Waldo moved to California where he lives to this day.  He’s written a number of books, including Love the Waldo Way: How to Get Any Girl to Fall in Love With You In Four Hours, Personal Finance and You: How Illegal Pirating is Actually the Best Way To Have All You Want and Still Invest in Your Future, and Fallen From Grace: My Story of Sinking From Hero of Hyrule to World Class Laughingstock and How to Stop it From Happening to You!

He currently lives in Sacramento, California, with his second wife, Margaret, and their two children Mario and Lopez.

*If you have any questions about the life of John Wesley [Waldo] Ritter Nelsonsonton, please feel free to contact me or buy my book on Amazon, published by TotallyReal Books – In The Shadow of Greatness: The Real Story of My Doomed Friendship With Waldo Nelsonsonton Because I Was Simply Far Too Awesome.

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world war z. [the as yet untitled book posts.]

I just finished World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. It was hugely entertaining! Written by Max Brooks, son of legends Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, the work is obviously modeled after Studs Terkel’s The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. The book is a series of “interviews” done by a UN researcher ten years after humanity’s victory in the Zombie War.

Clearly, there is a great risk that the book will be pure genre blood and gore with little or no compelling narrative, or it could become so tongue and cheek that it loses all meaning. Brooks manages to avoid both of those potential pitfalls, creating a really engaging read. It is in turns hilarious and moving and there is real humanity to be found within the gore.

Brooks did some amazing research, and thus his narrative is tight. WWZ works really well as an imaginative exercise in how actual global socioeconomic and political realities would shape a real zombie apocalypse. Brooks also does a great job keeping his zombies consistent. Often, a book like this can grow to have too many moving parts and the zombies would manifest whatever traits needed for the story at a given moment. This happens constantly in film, television and fiction. Brooks seemed to set a clear physiology of his zombies first, did loads of research about various nations, economies and governments of the world, and then imagined what would happen if Z-Day were to arrive.

Each of his interviewees, from scattered locales all over the world, told stories that felt like genuine fragments of the larger story he had created outside of our view. Brooks did the work so well that many reviewers have favorably compared it Orson Wells’ “War of the Worlds.” Much of what Brooks did worked as a skewering of bureaucracy, militarism and institutions, showing how each was practically organized to fail at any attempts to prevent letting the zombie outbreak turning into a worldwide apocalypse. The fact that he never left the ground level, always letting the characters truly tell their own stories, was what kept it from feeling like there was an agenda.

If I would make a critique it would be that there were times where characters seemed to lose an individual voice, instead sounding more like Brooks himself. This was especially true in that all of his true heroes shared his disregard for faith of any kind, something that would simply be impossible in the actual religious make-up of the world, thus it comes across as a short-sighted misunderstanding of the reality that not all people of faith are extremist Muslim terrorists and lunatic Pat Robertsons or Glenn Becks. Most likely, as it has been for every single calamity in world history, faith would be a part of the problem and a part of the solution in responding to WWZ. Yet, as I write that, understand that this is a tiny critique of a book which truly was a genuine pleasure to read.

The zombie genre can be quite a bit of fun, and this book would be a great introduction for those interested in entering the zombie milieu. It is a remarkably unique sub-genre in which we can explore our fears of the end of the world, can wrestle with the reality that when the world ends it will probably be humanity that pulls down our own curtain, and where we can engage in a hodgepodge of other fun little mental games. I could go on talking about how much I love the zombie genre for a while, so I will end that conversation here… for now.

This book is a fast, engaging read, and I recommend it to all you great folks out there in the internets.

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