The Week in Yeah is Emerald Miasma's weekly round-up of the good, the bad, and the incomprehensible of pop culture, the world at large, and life in general, as seen by me.
So, Robin Thicke is now apparently a thing. Great. Awesome. Just what I wanted. The son of an ungodly wealthy man that made his bones being the dad on 'Growing Pains' is now one of the most important musicians in the world. I hear 'Blurred Lines' everywhere, and it makes me uncomfortable. A lot has been said about the song's misogynist bent, and I tend to agree mostly due to the idea that a song uses the term 'domesticate' to describe a woman. Oh, and the insanely demeaning video, lets not bury the lead I suppose. I'm not the biggest champion of women's rights, but I can pretty definitively say that any video where naked women have cars ramping around on their asses, have some dude blow smoke in their faces, and get chased around with comically big syringes (and indeed, it is quite comedic in its oversizedness) over a backdrop of mylar balloons spelling "Robin Thicke has a big dick" is pretty firmly in the misogynist camp.
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Robin Thicke is also a thief according to some (OK, many if you count internet commenters). It seems that the beat to 'Blurred Lines' is pretty similar to the beat to the Marvin Gaye song 'Got to Give it Up'. As well as the Funkadelic song 'Sexy Ways'. Bridgeport Music, the rights owners of both songs thinks that they're so similar that its threatened to sue for infringement. This led Thicke, Pharrell Williams, and T.I. to sue the rights owners preemptively to prevent further litigation on 'Blurred Lines'. Now, at first I thought that he totally ripped off 'Got to Give it Up'. But as I kept listening, I don't see it as theft. Too many differences. Its one notch above the 'Ice Ice Baby'/'Under Pressure' comparison. Now, is it wildly unoriginal? Of course. As for 'Sexy Ways', George Clinton says it isn't the same, and he would know better than most. The whole thing is just gross, and it makes me angry that I have to side with Thicke on something he clearly instigated by writing an unoriginal song.
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On to movies. I finally saw Antichrist after years of putting it off. Its obviously a very pretty film that is well done, graphic and unsettling. That's kind of the rub on it. Beyond that, I'm still not clear on what I'm supposed to take away from the film. To keep on the topic of misogyny (and don't I just love doing that), I can easily see why someone would have a misogynist interpretation of this film. Charlotte Gainsbourg is making Willem Dafoe jizz blood by crushing his balls with a rock. I, like most men, am anti-dick crushing. Put it on my picket sign: 'No Dick-Crushing'. She also states that its in a woman's nature to be evil and anchors him to a grindstone so he CAN'T LEAVE (subtle). All very valid reasons to call this movie misogynistic. But I don't know if I see it that way. I mean, Willem Dafoe is pretty much a dick in this movie, and not the crushed kind, but the kind that would take a grieving mother off medication, assign himself as her new therapist and throw her into SEVERE immersion therapy by force. Her child fell to his death while they were fucking in the shower. That's like 30 years of therapy or something. Now Sigmund Fucking Freud over here wants her to lie down in tall grass (probably riddled with Lyme Disease ridden ticks) and jump in fucking creeks. DICK MOVE, BRO. AAAAAND when his improbable therapy actually seems to have worked, he just kind of brushes it off like it wasn't THE BIGGEST DEAL IN THAT WOMAN'S LIFE. Mix in the weird research she was doing on witch trials or whatever and some manner of haunted woods and sure she's going to go insane. In the end, I can understand calling the film misogynistic, but I think its more of an indictment on men. Goddamn complex movies making me think and shit. WHERE ARE THE FUCKIN' CAR CHASES, LARS? Also, CHAOS REIGNS.
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Speaking of car chases (and on a much lighter note), I watched the original Gone in Sixty Seconds recently, and I HIGHLY recommend seeing it. No plot. Fuck a plot. That shit weighed down the remake. No backstory either really. All you need to know is that a dude needs 48 super expensive cars in five days, so he hires a group of car thieves/insurance defrauders to steal those cars. Who is this dude? Why does he need them? Not sure. Don't care. Doesn't matter. They manage to steal all the cars except a yellow 1973 Ford Mustang. Unfortunately, our main thief (named MAINDRIAN 'VICINSKI' PACE. Now that's a fucking name, bro.) gets caught stealing the last car. This leads to a THIRTY-FOUR MINUTE CAR CHASE. So great. The director/star/stunt coordinator of the film is a man named H.B. Halicki, one of Hollywood's greatest lunatics. Halicki had his own auto body shop at 17 and then parlayed that into a salvage yard at 21. After achieving so much, he just kind of decided to make a movie, and 'Gone in Sixty Seconds' was born. Halicki insisted on doing all the batshit stunts in this film and his subsequent films. In fact, he compacted 10 vertebrae doing the climactic stunt of this movie, and eventually died doing a stunt for the sequel. The sequel went unfinished, but was eventually released by his widow. The sequel also features THIS.
Dope.
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MUSIC! I'd say its fair everyone knows about Run the Jewels at this point. The El-P and Killer Mike project has become an odds on favorite as rap album of the year, and I can't really argue. As good as Czarface, Durag Dynasty and several other raps albums this year are, this is simply a cut above. Its El-P and Killer Mike at their best. Dethscalator is a band on the excellent Riot Season Records that just released their newest album "Racial Golf Course No Bitches". Like most of Riot Seasons releases, this is a heavy, noisy record. There's a big Jesus Lizard influence here, along with some Mindflayer and Gunslingers thrown in as well. No one's been able to make 8-Bit music work for them as well as Anamanaguchi has. Straight 8-Bit projects don't have enough depth (pardon the pun) to make them more viable to the general public, bands like The Depreciation Guild have tried integrating the genre into their work to varying levels of success, but Anamanaguchi is just so damn good at crafting melody out of old consoles. This is an excellent follow up to their 'Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game OST' and a must own for any chiptune fan. Finally, an album I have been listening to a lot that's not from this year. One of the weirdest albums made in recent memory was the soundtrack that accompanied Teen Mom Farrah Abraham's 'My Teenage Dream Ended'. There have been a lot of miscues in this girl's life (sadly, almost all of them recorded for posterity), and this is often pointed to as the biggest of them all. Well, those that realize that it happened say that. Its seriously hard to find this album anymore as its been stricken from her already tarnished record. Critics of this album call it laughably awful, and empirically yes the album is technically a mess. Her voice is so over-autotuned that it sounds like she's drowning in pixels. That said, I think that works to the album's advantage. This album plays like a deep therapy session. She's a confused single mother that most likely didn't realize what she was opening herself up to by going on MTV. Her child's father is dead as well, which can't help matters. In other words, she's got a lot of shit to unpack and she kind of did it on this record. 'My Teenage Dream Ended' is uncomfortably honest, which is why I don't have a hard time comparing this album to other works of outsider music like Daniel Johnston. the offer to do an album may have been presented for cynical, money-making reasons, but Abraham kind of fucked everyone on that and made something completely honest and unmarketable. Good for her.
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