I'm fairly alarmed here.: May 2011

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Courtney Love, again!

Just reading this interview with Courtney Love on TheFix.com - a website about addiction and recovery.

Most of it comes off exactly like you'd think: the woman's brain has been so long addled that even when she's totally sober she sounds like someone threw a Tom Wolfe novel into a garburator and tossed some crack in after. By which I mean to say that the woman clearly has an intellect under there, and uses the fancy words in all the right places, but the ideas she tries to communicate are often transparently self-serving Hollywood bullshit (even to the point of highlighting her own dubious mentoring of Kelly Osbourne, Kristin Stewart, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton, bragging about buying both her pharmacists - one on each coast - big TVs for Christmas) and she just doesn't realize it...which is depressing.

This depressing-ness is only compounded by the fact that it's being relayed by someone who reads as wildly out of touch with reality. In my mind she's beginning to epitomize the celebrity who became a star because they had the ego to believe they deserved it in the first place, and multiplied by three thousand billion because she's been in show biz so long that nobody's said "no" to her in a meaningful way in like 20 years. It's not a nice thing to think about someone but it really doesn't seem like she can talk about anything other than drugs and herself (granted, this is an interview about drugs and herself, but I'm also thinking about every other interview with her - about her albums, about her daughter, about Kurt, about Twitter).

I guess the reason I find it depressing more than anything else is the fact that all her interviews are sprinkled with conversational glitter such as: "At the time, I was getting bundles of blow delivered to my house by a mulatto in a Nissan with a dragging muffler." Yes, I regret the use of "mulatto", but the sentence is such a perfectly hilarious way to start a story anyway. This is what I mean by intellect! She seems like the kind of girl I would hang out with a lot if she wasn't such a reckless shitshow all the time. I think maybe her problem is that she doesn't belong in the actual real world (where some people are accountants and some are poor and some are stupid and everyone's bored) and instead should be injected into a Tarantino movie - like Jackie Brown (the parts in Samuel L. Jackson's apartment with DeNiro and the blonde) crossed with True Romance (Alabama, duh, read the last paragraph of the article) and Four Rooms (where they find the dead hooker).

In 20 more years they should raid her house and film everything, Grey Gardens style. Or maybe not...something tells me she's a screamer.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Losing the plot

Watch this first:

I saw the video first in a Vulture update. the first time I watched it I was mostly apathetic. I was confused by the fact that only one of them was rapping.

Then I watched it again after reading this great Hairpin article about Kreayshawn, dubbing her a member of "basically that whole crop of young people who look and act like cartoons, and where you can't tell how much of the joke they're in on and how much of the joke you just don't get because you're old, or if everything is just stupider but funner-looking now." I think that's incredibly apt. But that conclusion made me start to hate it. The older I get the less patience I have for music that makes me think too hard or refer to the linguistic theories of Lacan. Kreayshawn wasn't coming to me: she was making me meet her halfway by insisting that I apply the patina of irony over fucking everything just to watch her wearing those GODDAMN MINNIE MOUSE EARS? And she can't even make her name easy to spell? I don't need another thing to look up obsessively like that damn Icelandic volcano!

Then I made Devon watch it. This started us on a long conversation about how annoying rat-tails are. As a hairstyle. Then I realized that Kreayshawn's friend didn't actually have a rat-tail but was imitating the look of one by installing a feather extension at the nape of her neck. Fuuuuuuck! Irony again? Or are we post-irony now?

So now I've listened to this song like six or seven times and I actually might be starting to like it. The Hairpin made a good point when they said that "One big room, full of bad bitches" was a rad hook. Am I getting the joke now or am I the joke? Or is this something more like Stockholm Syndrome? The thought occurs to me know that all participation or partaking in the "myth of cool" is a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome with an entirely different captor.

They tell you the first step in winning a war is knowing your enemy. But who is the enemy? The Illuminati or something?

Oh god, I just went and watched this fucking thing:

And now I have to go SLIT MY GODDAMN WRISTS for thinking this hard about someone so thoroughly moronic that she would say that Shakespeare "had swag". SHAKESPEARE DID NOT HAVE SWAG. HE HAD MOTHERFUCKING DIGNITY. I was just poised to make some crack about Shakespeare being an artist, but I realized that it's not Kreayshawn's fault if she isn't, like, booksmart in historical shit. It doesn't make her less of an artist in practice if she's ignorant of theory (not that I'm saying this qualifies as Outsider Art). But still. Shakespeare did not have fucking swag. He just didn't. Dumas had swag. Milton had some fucking SWAG. But not Shakespeare. Fuck you.

And take off that fucking hat!