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Aesop Rock is the Ben Marcus of rap. Like the author of Notable American Women and several extremely strange essays for McSweeney’s and The Believer, Aesop Rock (nee Ian Bavitz) tosses words in strange contexts and weird rhythms, twisting their meanings and granting ordinary words power that they lost long ago. Sure, a lot of times you won’t catch his exact point on the first listen–or the twentieth, for that matter. But for Aesop, the environment and feeling that his lyrics impart has always been more important than individual lines. Not that he doesn’t craft stuff you can’t help thinking to yourself at strange points during the days, but it will be more to puzzle out what he means.

His 2003 effort, Bazooka Tooth, was sprawling, messy and unfocused at places; supposedly the exploration of an alter ego (named Bazooka Tooth, natch), the production fuzzed over his lyrics and overlaid them on top of each other. Running at the upper end of the CD’s capacity–over 70 minutes–Aesop’s explorations of the character were mixed with Definitive Jux boasting and the sudden expansion of the city at one minute in time. Though good, as a hip-hop concept album, it couldn’t hold a candle to Mr. Lif’s I, Phantom.

So Fast Cars, clocking in at just over thirty minutes, represents a focus that Aesop Rock hasn’t had in years–it feels like an album squashed into EP length. It’s chock full of goodness, and there’s a lot to like here. The fuzzy lyrics are gone, as well as some of the more avant-garde staccato rhythms that he experimented with on Bazooka Tooth. What’s left is the smooth flow from Labor Days, and a surpringly focused set of songs on militarism, religion and other bugaboos of life in America these days. On “Fast Cars,” the title track, he comments that he’s “live from the ultra-fly sham city bunker where cults multiply alarmingly / Hush little baby, timeout / The black market mockingbirds can sing not a lick but lean to peck your eyes out.” For Aes Rock, terror lies behind every corner of the city; it’s unavoidable. On “Zodiaccupuncture,” he reminds the listener that “the hand cannons won’t ask about your zodiac, boy.”

The production is hit or miss. Aesop Rock splits the production duty with Blockhead, while “Winner Takes All” is produced by Rob Sonic. Half the songs are standard Definitive Jux beats, with heavy bass and Vangelis-style synths in the background evoking a future dystopia here today, and these tracks kind of all run together (though Aesop does vary his flow enough to keep them distinct). But both “Holy Smokes” and “Rickety Rackety” stand out. Blockhead builds “Holy Smokes” around a glockenspiel sample and adding drum beats that vary in intensity as Aesop vents about the Catholic Church sex scandal and the commercialization of religion. “Rickety Rackety” runs on a bouncy bass beat that propels even El-P to throw out a good verse or two. Considering this is Definitive Jux, the fact that you can actually dance to it is mindblowing. “Rickety” is hands down the best song on the album, grabbing that beat and using it to contrast the style of Aesop Rock, El-P and Camu Tao. El-P’s slightly off-rhythm lyrics and Camu Tao’s fast delivery complement the more measured style that Aesop Rock has cultivated throughout the entire album.

The album may be short, but that’s not a bad thing. Aesop Rock takes time to sink into, thanks to the density of his images and weird playing with language. But as an added bonus, the album comes with a booklet of all his lyrics from the past five releases–including Float and theDaylight EP–so that you can finally sit down, and figure out what he says and apply some English major techniques to this stuff. Don’t let his absurdity throw you off–there’s a lot in Aesop Rock’s lyrics, and it’s worth it to sit down with him for some relaxation and some cathartic city terror.

Hey, remember electroclash? That wonderful combination of electronic dance music with punk guitars and sensibility, that powerful weapon of mass distraction? Those international superstars with lasting power, like Fischerspooner and Peaches? Do you remember rocking out on the dance floor, with a Long Island in your hand, to “Emerge” and doing everything you could to forget that (a) 9/11 happened less than a year ago and (b) this particular aesthetic had been done before, back in the 80s, that decade that you were faking nostalgia for?

I don’t, particularly, as I was pretty drunk that entire summer. But for a while there, electroclash (or, y’know, dance-punk, which is what it was) was set up to be the next big thing from NYC. It eventually fizzled out, but not before leaving a bunch of great party albums like Fischerspooner’s #1 (and only), and two out of eight of the 2manyDJs mixes by the guys formerly known as Soulwax. And a couple of singles by James Murphy, aka LCD Soundsystem, aka half of the production group the DFA. Soundsystem caught people’s attention–especially the attention of the

A radical proposition: let’s stop making fun of the French. “Cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” however clever it might have been at first, is old and played out; that whole “Freedom fries” thing was way overrated as humor and as an insult. Besides, any culture that can throw out anything as good an album as M83’s new Before the Dawn Heals Us clearly has something going for it.

M83 throws everything they’ve got at you: spiraling guitars, percussive drums and weird synthesizers. They switch moods as fast as they switch riffs; going from post-apocalyptic pastoral landscapes to full power–Oh hell, I’m just going to say it: It’s a concept album about nuclear war.

“Fields, Shorelines and Hunters” starts out as a just a simple bass drum beat underneath a few synthesizers, eventually devolving into a burst of static. The weird, NES boss-battle riff that starts out track six (alternatively named by the Atari logo, an asterisk and, on my iTunes, “6.”) disappears almost immediately in a mess of guitars and drums that themselves disappear to a fast paced beat seconds later, then come back underneath some synthesizers that can only be described as “soaring.” And then the next track, “I Guess I’m Floating,” takes all of that away for the sounds of children playing on a school playground and a series of short three-note sequences that provide some constancy over bass that ebbs and flows. And then it’s back into Nintendo level music again.

But it’s later in the album–as it flows into “Teen Angst” and “Safe” and “Let Men Burn Stars”–that the nuclear war thing–okay, maybe I’m reading too much into this–really pops up. “Falling stars exploding on the sea / God it’s beautiful! / The land and the roses slowly disappeared,” sings Anthony Gonzales on “Safe,” and then “A wounded angel is smiling at me,” as the synthesizers swell back up. It makes more sense listening to it than reading a descriptions of it. On “Teen Angst,” he sings “The planet is dying.”

So yeah, there’s an element of cheese-eating: the synthesizers get ridiculous at a couple of points, and the lyrics–especially the female vocals in “Moonchild” and “Car Chase Terror!”–take a little time to grow on you. That “Car Chase Terror!” is supposed to be a dialogue between a mother and daughter fleeing Satan, but are both voiced by the same vocalist, doesn’t make it any easier to understand.

But M83 never lets you get comfortable with just a simple riff unless it’s buried under lots of other stuff. For that reason, it doesn’t have the warmth of Air’s Talkie Walkie, or even the Virgin Suicides soundtrack. That’s not a particular problem, considering that it’s as powerful in its own right, creating a sense of distance in a way that still encourages engaging with the album. It’s the sort of thing that demands to be listened to on huge, good speakers with the lights turned low. It’s an album that should wash over you like an flowing tide or a nuclear blast. M83 understands that there is beauty in destruction, and throws at it you with force.

This article originally appeared in The Declaration on 22 April 2004.

Recently the Cavalier Daily bounced its business page (this was reasonable: no one read it, fewer wanted to edit it) in favor of a health and sexuality section. This probably seemed like a good idea at the time, and for the most part it is. There are articles about STDs, condoms, drugs–stuff that the average college kid should be paying attention to, but isn’t. And then there are the sex columns. They are titled with bad puns that would make even the Dec blush: “The G-Spot,” “How Come?” And they are filled with supposedly cutting edge information that just about everyone already knew.

There was an old Poodah joke about “Lee Camp’s Original Comedic Thought of the Week,” which slimmed the former CD humorist’s column down to four words of unoriginality: Men don’t like shopping! Amusement parks are crowded! Similarly, the new sex columns are just as banal: Men who ejaculate too early are bad in bed! Women may or may not enjoy the taste of semen! Relationships are hard! As the urinal said to the sink, “No shit.” For fuck’s sake–this is supposed to be edgy?

I remember being in high school and voraciously reading every one of Susie Bright’s columns over at Salon.com. This was a heady time, in the late days of the Clinton administration, when just about everything seemed to be focused on sex, money, and how people, from whom you didn’t expect it, were getting sex and money. So on the poster child of the new journalism, you could read about dot-com start-ups and sex columns and a serial novel by a former call-girl.

The novel was okay, and it was certainly better than either “Silicon Follies” or that new Dave Eggers one that I haven’t read past the first couple of paragraphs. And Bright’s column was, to this high schooler, fucking awesome. The logic worked along this line of reasoning: “Hey! Girls! Having sex! And I can read it in the computer lab of my all-guy Catholic school! ALL RIGHT!” Her column wasn’t that bad; often times it touched upon things other than sex. I enjoyed it. I also liked to consider myself fairly sexually liberated, despite the fact that I was a virgin.

Bright writes about sex intelligently, with the aim of enlightening her readers and maybe, maybe getting them slightly aroused at 4 pm on the fifth floor of a Manhattan school, although there’s a few things she missed in retrospect. Here’s Bright, writing about her plans for a new book in a Salon essay:

I want to examine the dark side of sex, and ask just how much deliverance we can expect from the sexual revolution. I’m going to look at the connection between beauty and eroticism (they’re not the same thing, you know). I’m going to tease out the role of envy in sexual repression. (link)

Bright understands that the whole issue of human sexuality is anything but simplistic; that it’s not a one- or two-sided issue, or even a spectrum, but a whole multi-dimensional mess that would make M-theory physicists get lost (and most do). Even sexual orientation is completely up in the air. There are so many facets to the human personality, so many different ways we get turned on and off, that it’s not a simple issue of “here is a hot [object of desire], go nuts.” These are good questions that need to be asked, and answered intelligently. In her columns, Bright would dissect the etiquette of a porn shop, or maybe how to sleep with a hotel concierge. She always understood, though, that this wasn’t for everyone, but that some people would benefit from her writing about it.

I fail to see, though, how anyone benefits from the over-simplified situations written about in the CD’s sex columns. The first one I read–Katja Schubl’s article about “one-minute men”–isn’t written to enlighten, but rather to scare the poor boy into doing a good job. She talks about longing for sex while in Germany, only to come back to a boy who doesn’t satisfy her; she dumps him without a second thought. Way to strike a blow for deep, lasting relationships, Katja. Even if one accepts that her goal was just to get her rocks off, Schubl’s article is the opposite of erotic or instructive. Instead, it gives the fear to the poor boy taking a girl to bed for the first time: it doesn’t matter how witty or compatible you are, it only matters how you are in the sack (and for God’s sake, you better be a demon). Moreover, it assumes that there is only one type of relationship on the planet, that sex is simple. (Her column this past Monday only further reinforces that she can’t comprehend, or at least write about, more than one style of dating.) Cut-and-dried “advice” like this, or the article about how men can improve the taste of their sperm, take away the joy and discovery of sex: they leave you robotically pumping and sucking away, wondering why you aren’t having sex like everyone else.

In his essay “Books in Bed,” Jonathan Franzen reveals his own anxiety about sex writing (or, to be more specific, writing about sex). He takes on Bright (unfairly, I believe), Dr. Susan Block and a host of other sex writers with the same ferocious intensity that Penn and Teller reserve for feng shui experts. “Their work creates the bumbling amateur,” he writes. “Their discovery of sexual technique’ creates a population bereft of technique.” Taking something private and making it part of public discourse doesn’t mean that everyone will suddenly have amazing sex lives; it means that everyone has higher expectations than they can handle. It means that sex becomes another measuring stick, laying right besides your car, your clothes or your stack of cds, for what you are as a human being. The one thing that should have remained outside the American desire for normality has, paradoxically, become the center of it.

Although Bright understands that sexuality is complicated, she is also of the school that our SEXUAL REPRESSION needs to be broken through to a glorious world of hot nights and hotter days; here’s Bright again, this time from her personal webpage:

Sexual expression is THE most repressed form of American speech. You can rail against capitalism in this country, you can tele-evangelize from a pulpit that only exists in your mind, you can be gross, gratuitously violent, and just plain insane, but in this country, you cannot say certain words in public because they are SEXUAL, you cannot look at certain pictures in public because they’re SEXUAL and you cannot articulate many ideas to the mainstream because their SEXUAL nature deems them inadmissible. (link)

This is true (if a little bombastic), especially in these heady years of the waning Bush administration. But, at the same time, it ignores that we are swimming in so much sexual obsession that it’s impossible to get away from. It’s hard to say that there are pictures you can’t look at, due to their SEXUAL nature, when billboards of slim models in skimpy underthings cover Times Square; when Victoria’s Secret ads (Is that you, Bob?) and specials are all over TV; when a show like The Swan gets airtime on Fox; or when the flimsy dress of a singer falls apart on national TV and the entire nation convulses.

But because of this notion that all sexual expression is “repressed,” many people mistakenly think that sexual expression is “edgy.” Any time sex is talked or written about, it’s shocking, or it’s immoral, or it’s transgressive. Howard Stern is a “shock jock” with a lot of job insecurity at the moment. And MTV and Virgin Records were prepared to ride the wave of edginess following the Super Bowl halftime show to record sales and profit. None of these things are edgy, whatever “edgy” means. They’re pedestrian. I couldn’t care less about a middle-aged woman’s pierced right nipple. Or the adventures of a woman getting evaluated on Stern’s show (that’s less edgy, more sad). Franzen’s against all sex writing, for reasons I can understand if don’t agree with. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with an honest examination of sex–or rather, the stuff that happens around sex (i.e. dating)–but when it becomes tinged with the touch of edgy or transgression, it’s got something to prove. The writing has an air of desperation–please find this arousing and interesting and exciting! Christ. Instead , it has the same tiring quality of writing that liberal use of shitty cussing has. (Are you tired of the cursing in this article yet? Good. I’ll stop.)

Granted, it’s this edginess that sex writing is supposed to erase. Writers of sex columns will tell you that their intent is to get rid of this feeling, to make talking about sex normal and acceptable dinner-time conversation. So why does Gretchen Zimmerman discuss her sexual history and self-identify herself as a slut? Did she really think she was reclaiming the word for millions of “sexually liberated” women around the country? No. She could have said “sexually liberated.” Instead she used a word with a negative connotation to catch the eyes of her readers, not to mention reinforce the whole Madonna/whore thing that everyone in this country seems to have trouble with. It appeals the prurient interest more than the rational parts of the brain, which makes sense, because there’s no rationality to sex. The brain may be an erogenous zone, but sex is just the pleasurable banging of parts against each other like mammals have been doing for millions of years. To talk about sex, and only sex, is to limit oneself drastically in one’s subject matter, one in which it’s impossible to say anything new.

More importantly, it’s almost impossible to make it interesting or essential. Reading about someone else’s sex life is like listening to your roommate talk about that dream he had last night: it’s long, it’s rambling, it makes little sense and has no point. It can be somewhat amusing, if done well, but you’re not going to walk away with a better understanding of your roommate or humanity in general. Who cares that he found himself chased by little three-foot tall H2s while running on the surface of the sun? Who cares about someone else’s sexual history? I’m not better off knowing these things about a complete stranger (who, with my luck, I’ll have a discussion with next semester). I am, in fact, worse off, because the private details of his or her life are now a part of the public sphere. I have to put up with them, regardless of whether or not I want to.

I’m going to make a bold statement here: we shouldn’t really talk about sex. I don’t just mean in columns, I mean on cell phones, in coffee shops–anywhere. We can talk about dating all we like, because dating is about relationships between people and therefore infinitely fascinating and infinitely complex. But sex is the most private of acts, one that people should keep to themselves. There’s no need to open the blinds and show our naked selves to the worlds, because it’s hard enough to show our naked selves to the one we’re sleeping with. We gain nothing but a quick smirk in the back of Wilson 402. We lose nothing but a respect for intimacy and a sense of discovery that is our birthright as college students. If you don’t mind losing that, go nuts. Just don’t tell me about what you find.

“I don’t intend to challenge President Bush to a contest of who’s a more regular guy,” Mr. Kerry writes in his new campaign autobiography, “A Call to Service,” even as he does so. In the same book, he boasts that he’s “the son of a public employee” (in the diplomatic service) and “a charter member of one of the most selective but fastest-growing sports clubs in the world: the Nascar fans of Massachusetts.”—Frank Rich, The New York Times, 23 November 2003

Listen: I know John Kerry doesn’t really watch NASCAR. You know John Kerry doesn’t really watch NASCAR. The American people know that John Kerry doesn’t watch NASCAR. John Kerry is a blueblooded, Massachusetts liberal. He does not watch NASCAR anymore than I watch NASCAR, and while I appreciate the sight of Democrats trying to reach out to our Southern brethren, this is not the way to go about it. People don’t like to be talked down to, and the first time Kerry’s in South Carolina and someone asks him about an obscure car—like, say #47—or driver that he hasn’t been briefed on from the one guy on his staff who went to Emory, this whole thing is going to blow up in his face.

Or is it? I mean, sure, I don’t watch NASCAR, and no one I drink with watches NASCAR, but surely lots of people around the nation are in love with it. Right? I mean, it’s got rising ratings, and an almost complete lack of black people, so people in the South have to love it. It’s in the state constitutions!

But I don’t buy into this. I think people watch NASCAR for the same reason I watch football: I have no idea what the hell is going on beyond the vaguest of parameters, but it’s still a lot of fun to kick back with your friends and watch two differently dressed groups of players run lots of complex plays that clearly mean something if you pay attention to it long enough and drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Substitute “cars in circles” for “football players” and I think you’ll see where I’m going with this. You’re watching the game/race, and you’re paying attention, but more than anything else it’s hanging out with friends that’s the important thing. It’s only when women got involved that they had to make up excuses for it.

This, I think, is key to how NASCAR started:

Wife: Hey, what are you boys up to?

Husband: We’re watching Joe and Danny drive around in circles in the backyard.

Wife: Oh. Is it a race?

Husband: Um. A race? Yeah. They’re racing.

Wife: Well, that’s nice. Y’all want any sweet tea?

And from that point they had to keep making up more and more stuff, and paint numbers on the cars, and start analyzing statistics and finally come up with the Winston Cup circuit in order to add the necessary legitimacy. Guys hanging out and talking and watching people drive around in circles? Weird. Guys hanging out and talking and watching sports? Fantastic.

They’re all in on it, y’know: everyone who really watches NASCAR is saying the same thing: “Feck off. Feck off to my wife. Feck off to the people in the North. Feck off to college students who write highly sarcastic articles about NASCAR. We all gonna watch some cars drive around. Really fast.” Every time someone buys into the hype and takes it seriously, they laugh. Every time some Northern politician uses it to prove he’s “just like them,” they’re going to laugh their asses off. Because they know better.

Which brings us back to Kerry and the problem of Southern Democrats. Angry White Males, or NASCAR dads, or whatever it is we’re calling them now, aren’t going to be fooled by a sudden switch in Kerry’s demeanor. It took Bush fifteen years to erase the stigma of his roots, and he had to become a born-again Christian. Clinton was a Southerner. Kerry and Dean are from New England, and it’s going to take a lot more than shallow declarations and Harley-Davidsons to overcome forty years of Republican propaganda. Hammer home on Enron and corporate scandals. Beat the free-trade drum and the loss of American jobs (and to the North, play it as “the exploitation of poorer countries”). Play the services card—if not universal health care, think of something else. Play the economy card. But for Christ’s sake: leave NASCAR alone. It’s only when you don’t really see the appeal of it that you understand that appeal for the first time.

I’m sick of hearing about generation Y. There’s a hand-me-down attitude in the name, an implied dismissal of everything that our generation has worked for in the past twenty-three years. We’re not a generation defined by our love for technology, for video games, for cable television and fourth-graders that curse like sailors (and almost as much as we did in fourth grade). We’re not defined as the generation that sends everyone to college, or the generation that has skyrocketing rates of depression. We’re the generation that, simply, came after Generation X. It’s as if our older slacker brother finally got a job and handed down all his old T-shirts. And that’s some fucking bullshit.

Let’s face it: if you were born after 1980, and if you’re reading this you’re probably my friend and therefore born after 1980, you’re getting shit on. You’re besieged by the siren calls of MTV and TRL. You’re constantly swimming in a sea of advertising, mostly dedicated to your demographic, mostly selling sex with hotter women than we will ever meet and the joys of getting drunk on new, classier malt liquor. You’re being forced to watch prodigies like LeBron James and Alicia Keyes and Conor Oberst found at an ever younger age, making you feel old at twenty. And on top of all this, you don’t even have a proper name for your generation.

In the mid 1990s, right as Gen-Y started to pick up speed, there were a couple of other terms that were flying around. There was the Nintendo generation, raised on Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog. There was the Internet Generation, which was a pretty good fit. We grew up with the internet; it hit maturity right around the time we were discovering we now had hair in our nether-regions and our voices were cracking. It even went through a crazy high-school love affair with the kindly gentleman from New York, Wall Street. But then snowball.com decided to appropriate it for it’s advertising–THE DESTINATION FOR THE INTERNET GENERATION–and it slowly went out of favor. Not to mention that it abbreviates to the iGeneration, which makes it seem like all of us were invented by Steve Jobs.

Still, how’d we end up with such a derivative, boring name like Gen-Y? Laziness, I guess. Without a Dennis Coupland to come up with a catchy title, and the other titles focusing on just a tiny aspect of our personalities, magazine writers and editors fell into a rut and did the easy thing. After all, Generation X used to be called the post-boomers, which was even an even more boring and condescending title–they were the “after” generation. But there seems to be a greater acceptance of Generation Y on the part of the kids, at least until they start to think about it and realize what’s going on. And there’s also the problem of how we behave, and whether there’s a big difference between us and those who have come before.

Do we have ideas? Is there a philosophy forming in college dorms and student ghettos that’s noticably different from ten years ago? I’d have to say yes. For one thing, there’s much less of Coupland’s knee-jerk irony, and a huge rise in tasteless jokes. (Why’d the baby stop crying? Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.) But that’s not really a sign of difference, more an evolution. But what is different is the way upward mobility has become the new religion of America, followed by most people exactly the same way Catholics treat their beliefs. Instead of getting baptized, going to confession, receiving Communion and being confirmed, all without any real sense of what the religion is about, the new sacraments are: doing well in high school, taking a Kaplan course to beat the SATs, going to a good college and coming out with a high-paying job. Why are we doing this? Because it’s what we have to do in order to survive, just like Catholicism is what I’m supposed to do in order to get eternal life in heaven.

This same, godless, assembly-line approach to life gives yield to the other thing we do, which is find something, anything to believe in. The number of niches that have been created just so that we can be part of something bigger than ourselves is absurd. There are: frat boys, sorority girls, indie kids, fundies, neo-hippies (pot and adderall!), goths, politicos, and any number of smaller subcultures that don’t have easily assigned names. If something’s got potential, people will latch on to it. Look at the Dean movement online, or the Draft Clark thing, and you realize that people are putting their faith in someone, devoting huge amounts of time to him, purely because other people have already put their faith in him. Anything that makes life a little more enjoyable, that could make things improve even the tiniest bit, is worth the effort.

But the defining aspect of our generation is the growing sense that we’re screwed, and the other two behaviors are intimately tied into to this. There’s our ever-increasing dependence on technology, to the point where an internet virus causes huge financial losses and a power outage shuts down an entire quadrant of the country. (People: the New York blackout might have been the biggest blackout ever, but a hundred years ago there were no blackouts. (Because there was no power. Shut up.)) There’s the extremely short-sighted policies of the Current Administration, and even those who think Bush is God are a little worried about their future. There’s the ever-greedier behaviors of corporations; people who unironically wear advertising on their T-Shirts because they just don’t know any better. There’s the dawning realization that corporations do not have our best interests at heart, and the frightening on that there’s not much we can do about it. You see it in the eyes of everyone–no matter who you talk to, they’re spooked about what comes next. Another huge attack? Not being able to find a job after graduation? Robots taking over our economy within twenty years? (That one’s a stretch.) Even fundamentalism is a way of coping with the modern world–having an omniscient, omnipotent Other in control of everything slows the world down, gives everything some meaning. It’s a fight against science, and science is a fight against mysticism, and the battle lines have been drawn.

We’re fucked. The whole damn generation is the Fucked Generation. No one’s really been willing to come out and say it, and so we’re generation Y: the bastard sons of that bitch Generation X. Striding purposefully forward with no real destination, fake family units smiling brightly into a future clouded by fog and microprocessors and RFIDs, grinning in the face of total destruction. This is who we are. Say it loud. Say it proud. Give yourselves a new identity–not one that’s derived as a matter of after whom we were born, but one that’s a function of what we are. Force it into the national discourse; make the Times and the New Yorker bleep out our name. Make the people understand we don’t like what’s going on, and we’re just about ready to start making some changes. Because if we don’t, it doesn’t mean we’re any less fucked. It just means we’ll be sitting around asking, “Y us?”

So here’s the thing about Chuck Klosterman’s new book: he’s stolen almost every idea I had for when I published my first in two, three, or ten years. Romantic love as a Hollywood concept? Yeah, I’d thought of that. The importance of Saved by the Bell to a certain generation of young people? Yeah, I’d gotten that too. The NBA as the only sport that matters? Check. Presenting the table of contents as a CD track listing? That was my ace in the hole.

What I’m getting at is that I should be pissed off, or offended, or something, since I’ve now been beaten to the punch on just about everything I had to contribute to popular culture. Surprisingly, though, I’m not. Because Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs is not only better written than I could manage at this point, it’s also probably more insightful than I ever get. And, oh yeah, he’s an editor at Spin and I run a tiny-ass mezine.

So here’s a quick briefing on what “cultural criticism” is: it’s a way for guys who are too obsessed with Pop Culture (capitals are necessary) and know it to turn things around, rationalize their behavior. It’s okay that Klosterman has watched nearly every episode of The Real World three times, identifying with the protagonists like close friends, because he’s smart enough to realize that this is dumb. He’s also smart enough to argue that everyone’s been affected by the quintessential reality program to some degree (at least, those of us of a certain age), resulting in a lot of people who are, for all purposes, one-dimensional. You’ve got your guys who are party animals, the folks who are quiet intellectuals, the folks who are screamingly ignorant, and your Pucks. He points out that as the producers realized that boiling down the roommates to their defining characteristic equaled drama, the MTV-watching populace did essentially the same thing.

And so it goes for a wide range of topics: why soccer is a loser sport (it’s for those kids who aren’t good at anything else, because you can’t be bad at soccer); how the “downer ending” of Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back: Non-Special Edition led to slacker culture and a stoned Winona Ryder singing “My Sharona” in a gas station; how children’s cereal ads lay the groundwork for hipsters and other elite groups in college and beyond; the strange, Rapture-oriented world of Evangelical Christians.

There is a problem with this approach, though, and that’s that it tends to solipsism, a definition of which is handily included among the epigrams at the start of the book. Almost all of these essays are directly from Chuck’s mind; there are not a lot of external sources that he quotes other than his friends and associates (though there are many hilarious footnotes regardless). The best essay in the book is, hands down, “Appetite for Replication,” in which he goes on a road trip with a Guns & Roses cover band called Paradise City; he gets a lot out of the descriptions of the band members, how they react to others on their tour. It’s not surprising that this is one of the two essays that appeared in magazines first. Everything else is new to this book, and it suffers somewhat because of this.

Even then, he stumbles on some cultural news that’s pretty revealing. In an essay about The Sims, that game where we try to remake our lives as much as possible on a computer, he writes this about his seven-year-old cousin, Katie, as she tells him to ignore the backstory of his Sim:

“It was uncharacteristic for Kate to be so unwilling to tell harmless lies. If she had been playing with her Barbie Dream House and I asked her why Barbie had four pairs of shoes but only two decent outfits, Katie would have undoubtedly spent the next half hour explaining that Barbie purchased the extra shoes while shopping in Hong Kong with Britney Spears and planned to wear them to a cocktail party in Grandma’s basement. . . . [But] in the world of The Sims, Katie won’t color outside the lines of perception.”

It’s a pretty damning account of the effect computers have on kids imaginations, and it’s no less powerful because Klosterman stuck with someone he knew pretty intimately to write about.

But I guess the beef I’m getting at is that the book never really comes together as an argument. It’s great that he details all these things about how we are and how we behave in such a highly connected, corporate driven world (though he does, strangely, omit chat rooms and instant messaging and the web except for a brief chapter on porn–at last, something original to contribute!). He says at the beginning that everything is connected, even if nothing matters on it’s own. But the problem is that he doesn’t really write about these connections. He doesn’t talk about how The Sims is connected to internet voyeurism, or how the characters can emerge as one-dimensional as the characters on The Real World (and how can you miss that, when half the Sims Family Album pages are wanna-be Kristof’s directing The Real World LCXI: Bobby’s Computer?). He doesn’t draw parallels between Saved by the Bell and the cereal commercials, even though they were presumably shown in between one another. If you’re going to have an essay titled “George Will vs. Nick Hornby,” and have it be about baseball and soccer, don’t you at least owe it to yourself to reference how Nick Hornby added to the previously mentioned John Cusack Experience mentioned in the first essay, “This Is Emo”? Klosterman has all the pieces there, but he never really puts them together. Maybe that’s what he intended, though. I’m sure that he’d say this is exactly what our lives are like today.

I write a lot. I barely finish anything. In an effort to finally clear out my hard drive of those huge, space-filling Word 97 files, it’s time to spread the unfinished gospel to the world. I present to you: Decent But Unmotivated Week! Because I’ve got nothing better.

David Cross - Shut Up You Fucking Baby

For all those still angry that I’ve seen Radiohead and the Beta Band live when all you’ve seen is a giant puddle of water, I give you this: two years ago I drove up to Manhattan for what promised to be one of the greatest comedy concerts of all time. It was called Eating It, and it was a special edition of a weekly showcase that took place at the Luna Lounge. Where normally it was a few, under-the-radar comics that hadn’t yet earned their Comedy Central Presents episode, the show I was supposed to see was topped up with big names. Janeane Garofalo. Marc Maron. The Upright Citizens Brigade. God help me, even members of the State were supposedly reuniting. And headlining the show was the irrepressible David Cross.

If you don’t think you’ve heard of David Cross, you’re wrong. He may not be a big name celebrity, but he’s appeared in so many things that once you figure out who he is, you’ll be slapping your forehead like a Matt Groening character. Or something. But anyway: he’s one of the original “meta-comics” (and yes, even I’m getting tired of “meta” now), half the creative force behind HBO’s seminal Mr. Show, and he’s had cameos in more movies than you’d care to imagine. I was going to see him, live, and was willing to pay for tolls, gas, and parking for the drive to Manhattan to do so.

I think you see where this is going.

Mr. Cross never showed up, for reasons I don’t remember. The show as a whole was still pretty damn good, but I always felt like I had missed something special. With the release of his first solo comedy album, I’ve learned that I did.

Radiohead - Amnesiac

I have a riddle for all you loyal Dec readers that may sound like apostasy from the guy who drove 750 miles to Toronto to see Radiohead play live last fall. I want you to keep an open mind about it, even though, by now, your eyes have been drawn to the paragraph below and you are, as you come back to finish this sentence, seething in anger and rage and wanting to meet me so you can punch me in the face. I promise I will explain everything.

Here is the riddle:

Q. What do Radiohead and the Dave Matthews Band have in common?

A. They’re both better live than on albums.

Some of you may be wondering, what the hell is wrong with this kid? How the fuck does he compare Radiohead with Dave Matthews? How dare he say Radiohead is better live than on record? Didn’t he “get” the masterpiece that was Kid A? How it worked only as an album rather than a collection of individual songs?

Well, yeah. And don’t get me wrong, I liked Kid A. (Just ask my roommate, who was a second-hand listener to little else during September and October.) Also, with Dave Matthews, “better” remains a relative term. Finally, I am definitely pushing this comparison as a way to trick you, loyal Dec reader, into reading the rest of this article. But I digress.

Amnesiac, as most Radiohead fans know, consists mostly of songs that were recorded at the same time as Kid A. It has been described as a more commercial work than Kid A. It has been described as a warmer work than Kid A. It has been described as a return to their earlier, more accessible albums. It is none of these things. Yes, there are songs that are commercial and songs that are as warm as Radiohead gets.

True story: a few months ago this girl gets on the bus and sits down in the back. She’s been talking on her cell phone since she was at the stop, and she continues to chat with her little sorority friend all the while she’s riding. She covered most of the standard “riding on the bus” talking points: the unnecessary declaration that she’s “on the bus right now,” that she’ll “be there in, like, four minutes”–but she also carried on a fascinating conversation about her friend, her friend’s boyfriend, and her ruthless attempts to sleep with said boyfriend any way she possibly could. Despite the fact that there was another passenger on the bus, despite the fact that the bus driver does in fact have ears, this girl went on and on about something that normally wouldn’t even be discussed in private.

It’s stories like these that illustrate my biggest argument against the New Mobile Order: it’s impossible to go anywhere without hearing about where people want to meet up with their friends, or where they are right now, or whether or not the test came back negative. For some reason, talking on a cell can convince a person that they are less than alone. There are no crowds, no one listening in, not even the caller on the other end of the line. The interior monologue has become exterior, with predictable results.

But if the high probability of losing one’s reputation doesn’t faze the American public anymore, the possibility of losing one’s life still has a hold on us. At least in theory. Why else the maelstrom of sniper coverage back in October? Why else do people pay so much attention to whether eggs and butter are currently good for you, or the Washington Post devote space on the front page about how cancer is now more like a chronic disease than a death sentence? Life and death issues grab hold of our consciousness damn near immediately (it’s the reason for those heavily-hyped, under-reported sweeps segments on the local news). Yet there are people, otherwise perfectly sane (minus their willingness to discuss herpes in a coffee shop) who still use a cell phone while they’re driving.

Let’s be fair: any kind of distracted driving can be dangerous. I once ran my car into a Jersey barrier because I was trying to change a CD. People who eat or drink (non-alcoholic beverages) while driving are arguably just as distracted as the person talking on a mobile phone. Even holding conversation with someone else physically in the vehicle can be distracting enough to cause a crash.

In the latter case, that second set of eyes can make up for the distraction. In the first three, even though you must take your hand off the wheel and focus elsewhere for a moment, it’s only for that moment. The CD or radio station gets changed and you’re done; the bite of a burger or sip of coffee is ingested and you’re done. But the cell phone’s distraction is constant; your hand is up at your ear as you try to maneuver into that sinister turn with one hand and an elbow. It’s still there as you crane your neck around to check for oncoming traffic, still there as you slam on the brake to avoid the car that you didn’t see. Every time someone cuts me off, or forces me to swerve at the last second, or decides to play judgement stop with my vehicle as the traffic cone, they are invariably speaking on a cell phone or from North Carolina. Or both.

Naturally politicians have jumped on the issue, passing cell phone bans first in New York City, then expanding outward to the whole state. Several other localities have joined in, though a nationwide effort died in the Senate (which is just as well, because there’s a freakin’ amendment for this type of thing). They typically ban only hand-held cell phone use by the driver, advocating the new hands-free models instead.

Also, naturally, there’s been a backlash against the new laws banning cell phone use by drivers. In an article last December for Wired News, Lauren Weinstein argues that “evidence exists that hands-free cell-phone conversations in vehicles produce about the same level of distraction to drivers as handheld cell phones.” Regardless of whether or not this is true (it’s the about the same level of distraction as any conversation), it’s not the distraction of the driver that is most important–it’s the reaction time. If you’ve got to put down the phone in order to grab the wheel and evade danger, it’s those extra few moments that mean the difference between ramming whatever’s in front of you and stopping just short.

Weinstein goes on to say that the delay of this study in California indicates that “merely talking on a cell phone doesn’t necessarily mean the phone contributed to an accident,” and that the “study’s results were inconvenient for cell-phone ban proponents” because they only included collisions in which the cell phone was the causative factor. Yet the Bay Area Times article states that because of a California Highway Patrol policy, cell-phone use only counted if there was a witness or definitive evidence–evidence easy enough to hide in one’s pocket before the cops showed up. And even if it wasn’t the immediate cause for the accident, cellular usage’s tendency for both distraction and increased reaction time don’t offer much plausability for having prevented it, either.

There’s a tendency in American culture to claim a right to just about everything: the right to speed, the right to a huge car, the right to own the latest gadgets and use them as they please. Cell phone usage in cars is one of these new spontaneous rights, and unfortunately, it does infringe upon the rights of others. And let’s face it: would it kill you to wait until you got home or to your office to use a phone? Do you really need to check your email while merging lanes at eighty miles per hour? Fine. Use mass transit. But stay the hell off the roads.

Occasionally, the government actually has to step in and prevent people from being stupid. Cell phone bans are not a cure-all solution to the me-first attitude of today’s drivers–there isn’t one–but they do contribute to making the roads safer. In an age when we freak out about possible terrorist attacks that are much less likely than being killed in a car crash, a few minutes without conversation for meditation won’t hurt a bit. Oh, and can you not tell me about how your leg was all bloody while I’m sitting at the coffee shop? Thanks, man, I’m just trying to read.

“But he’s from Canada,” she says.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” I pause and look down at my coffee. “What are you saying, that I should have a problem with Canadians?”

“No. I’m saying that, on previous occasions, you have made fun of Canadians. And I have trouble believing you now think this guy is actually really cool.”

“Well, why is that so wrong? What is your problem with this?”

“Well, for one thing, he’s Canadian. And he’s such a smarmy guy, too. That mustache he used to have always freaked me out when I watched him on TV. And he pretends that he knows the answers to everything. I just think it’s not modest.”

“Who cares about modesty?” The coffee is burnt. “What if he really does know the answers to everything?” There’s no real reason for us to keep coming to this coffee shop, except that I work here. Which is how I met him in the first place.

* * *

He came into Espresso King one day, about a week ago, walking confidently through the open doors. No modesty necessary for this guy, no sirree. It’s right before we close. I was working the counter, and was just about ready to head home. There hadn’t been a customer in over an hour, so I’d been busying myself with sidework–cleaning, juicing oranges, whatever. He walked up to the register–there was a Jeopardy try-out in town, that’s why he was there–and rang the little bell we have for service.

I put down the orange juicer and walked over to help him.

“Can I help you?” I asked, with that fantastically bored tone of voice that only baristas can truly manage.

“The cost of a tall double Americano.” He got right down to business, this guy.

“What is $2.25 plus tax?” I asked him.

He seemed pleased by this. “Excellent. I will have a tall double caf