The transition to Paul’s Boutique

I still chuckle when I think about listening to Licensed To Ill as a youngster. I certainly wanted to fight for my right to party and was way into girls. But my goodness, that album is ridiculous. Check Your Head and Ill Communication are more my wheelhouse, although I was never a huge Beastie Boys fan. I liked knowing they were out there doing their thing and I appreciated their music when it came on the radio, but I didn’t own their albums.

I recently bought Paul’s Boutique. Probably the most unfamiliar of all their albums for me. But I had heard so many amazing things about it. It was important. It was groundbreaking. It was epic. And after many listens, I certainly agree.

Even funnier to me is thinking about how that album was received at the time. Imagine, you have all the nonsense, riffs, and silliness of one album, embraced by the types of fans and record execs who love such things and the success that comes with. Imagine all that and then the next album to drop is not that at all. While silly at times, Paul’s Boutique is in a different universe altogether. It’s great hip hop that has stood the test of time. It’s exactly the type of thing people who loved the nonsense, riffs, and silliness would not at all love. Whoops. And it’s awesome, just awesome.

Manufacturing a crisis

Barely elected leader who fancies himself an authoritarian boasts hard and bloviates loudly that which he cannot achieve through any democratic arena of ideas and debate thus he turns to bully pulpits of all kinds in preparation for the complete unleashing of brute force in the way only fascists deploy with ends justified by any means necessary in their eyes of vanity and messages of vulgarity with the pitting of side against side aligning with the shameless actions taken throughout history by cowards and fools and murderers in the goal of keeping us all looking for any sort of firm ground to stand on.

How do we approach our time

We all have to deal with time. What we do with the time we’re given and how we approach it. On a news program last week discussing our current political environment, one of the commentators characterized time this way:

  1. Sports Time

  2. Strategic Time

  3. Evolutionary Time 

America does the first, and that’s bad. We think in tactics. The fight. The back and forth. And we make our decisions in that time frame while disregarding any larger strategy or big picture evolution, which is where the biggest problems we’re facing (health care, climate change, capitalism) currently reside. Nothing we do in sports time can really address the major factors.

On the Decades

The 80s were the decade of self absorption and me-me-me. Think American Pyscho. Everyone was too self-absorbed to care Christian Bale was murdering people. (Or maybe it was all in his head?)

The 90s, in response to the hair-sprayed look-at-me bangs of bad metal bands, were all hair down over the face like in the grunge bands that were saying please don’t look at us. We don’t want to be noticed, we want to disappear, and we don’t care about anything anymore.

In the 2000s, we wanted you to look, but it was going to be on our terms. Our voice, our image, our persona on whatever platform we were posting our own little story on.

The 2010s were a total rebuke and loss of trust in everything manufactured, glossy, contrived, mediated, and spoon fed. We don’t want anymore of it because we are most certainly over it.

The question is, how cyclical is all this? Will we return to the self-absorption of the 80s next, or is there another phase? Or do we keep expanding outward because there is so much of us now? Everything will always be new. And why do the framework of 10s matter so much?

If this is all a loop, does anything matter any more other than the present? If it isn’t, does everything matter more? Or not?

This was part of a larger conversation with Joe and Adam over Friday night beers at Krug Park.

Dems in the House

This is a big deal. Our politics may feel like doomsday heading right for us at breakneck speeds, but with the ushering in of the 116th Congress, you can put a marker on the side of progress. Today, we have a Congress that looks more like America than it used to. And it’s gearing up to actually do the people’s work, in the people’s house, because that’s what Democrats do. They represent more of America. An America that’s ready for a progressive burst forward. To start laying claim on the future as we see it. Health care for all, guaranteed jobs, humane immigration policies, climate change ready, free college, reining in capitalism, checks and balances, and on and on.

You want progress? Stick with the Dems, we’re only getting started.

Choose your own adventure

When I was first starting my career, I helped teach a class at the University. It was an advanced class in the communications school. Basically a creative thinking class, I can’t recall its real name. In it, there was a project where we asked students to come up with a new idea for a movie. Inevitably, every semester someone would go with the choose your own adventure concept. Nothing was ever great, but it was always interesting to think about and work through those ideas with the kids.

One thing they always had to deal with was how to get movie goers to interact with the film. Would there be a remote control? How would there be consensus in the crowd? Does there need to be extra light? Never once did we consider the movie taking place outside of a theater in your home while watching Netflix.

True, Netflix didn’t exist at the time. But we were always locked into the theater idea. It was so powerful. Turns out we were poor futurists. Watching Bandersnatch got me thinking about that class experience. If only we had left the theater behind. Once that happens, the idea seems a lot more natural.