Posts by matt

On the treadmill today I was listening to last week’s All Songs Considered episode about odd musical pairings. Aretha Franklin and George Michael make an appearance, singing “I Knew You Were Waiting.” I was delighted to hear Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s “The Face of Love,” I’ve been a longtime fan of that one. Frank Sinatra and Bono’s rendition of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” got, um, under my skin, in the worst way.

But clearly the entire time I was stewing over what song I’d nominate. The answer that came to mind isn’t really a pairing, it’s just one song sampling another – Mariah Carey’s “The Roof,” based on Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones, Pt. II.” It’s not even Mariah Carey’s first rap pairing – for her prior album, she’d memorably recruited Wu-Tang’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard (may he rest in peace) to ride shotgun on the delightful pop romp “Fantasy.” But I’d still go with it.

I consider the song itself quite an underrated confection. Mariah had clearly taken to heart critical murmurings that her inevitable ascent into whistle register during her songs was an annoying crutch, a circus trick. So for the album on which “The Roof” appears (1997’s Butterfly), she toned it down. Her highest notes are mostly absent, barely detectable in the texture of the occasional harmony. And in fact, the album’s second number-one single, the Spanish-guitar-inflected “My All,” showcases her smoky lower register. (It’s hard not to hear “My All” as an answer to Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart,” another sultry, Spanish-guitar-filled, deep alto ballad with a very similar melodic structure.)

In “The Roof,” Mariah’s formerly unrestrained melisma just slinks and teases and flirts in the shadows, while a dozen Mariah clones harmonize lushly in sung whispers and sighs. Even in the background, her trills and coos are so delightfully precise that it’s amazing to think this is her holding back. Sometimes she’s just humming melismatically. And the production is top-notch – matching the vocal coquetry with barely audible strings and the hint of a triangle throughout that finally just takes over. It reminded me of something Sasha Frere-Jones once wrote about a Beyonce b-side: “Who feels comfortable with adding so much unexpected, generous harmony to a trifle about a delicious crush?”

The song, as I mentioned, builds off a sample by the gangsta rap crew Mobb Deep – a foreboding arpeggio picked out haltingly on piano keys atop a thrumming, bouncing bass line. The Mobb Deep song is an urban gothic nightmare – all the guns and money and swagger you’d expect, but instead of the usual threats or boasts, it foregrounds the fear itself. Shook – as in “scared to death, scared to look.”

So it’s an odd pairing – this scary Mobb Deep joint with a bit of sexy Mariah Carey cotton candy. It either loses or gains a bit of its oddness, though, when you consider the context.

Butterfly was a pivotal album for Mariah. It came right after she’d broken with her career-enabling ex-husband, Sony’s Tommy Mottola, whom she’d later complain had locked her into a cloying, sugar-pop chastity belt of a public image that obscured the R&B diva within. Fast-forward to today, when she’s perceived as having successfully reinvented herself in the contemporary R&B tradition. To me, contemporary Mariah is about as vocally remarkable as, oh, say, Ashanti (remember her?), but who am I to start railing about kids these days?

Until Butterfly, all we’d ever really seen of Mariah was hints of belly button. But “Honey,” the album’s first video, has her diving into a swimming pool in a bikini and stilettos. And suddenly, she’s an R&B queen! There she is on “Breakdown,” going toe to toe with Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony! (Another candidate for oddest pairing, but again I say – pop romp.) To complete this transition, to move fully from “virgin” to “urban,” she needs cred. She’s gotta go deep. Mobb Deep. Hence, “The Roof.”

And I love it.

Fashion-blogging on Snarkmarket? Just this once. I’ve got to hand it to any men’s fashion site willing to unironically hand its 2009 Clothing Store of the Year award to Old Navy. The photos aren’t quite as lush as the ones at Uncrate, the copy lacks that Esquire sheen, and I don’t approve of body text in reverse type. But taste is the important thing, and Unrefinery has it in spades. I also like that it’s budget-conscious; I’m willing to spend a little on fashion, but you will never see me spend $60 on a reusable grocery bag, no matter how vegetable-dyed its leather straps are. Unlike some prominent men’s fashion sites I know*, Unrefinery seems to accept that a man’s outfit can be complete without a blazer. I don’t agree with everything – shorts have their place, especially during DC’s maybe-hottest-summer-ever. But for the most part, I approve.

And I’m getting this jacket.

This week, I finished reading a wonderful book – God Says No, by James Hannaham. The protagonist, Gary Gray, has this endearingly earnest, not-too-bright, surprisingly perceptive and doomed sense about him that really made me want to root for him throughout. Gary’s an overweight black guy attending a Christian college in Central Florida; he gets his girlfriend pregnant just as he realizes he has to question his sexuality. These two events catalyze a series of fairly significant catastrophes in Gary’s life, and through each one, I wanted Gary to succeed, to attain what he wanted.

Spoiler ahead. Read more…

This Ask MetaFilter thread is the most gripping thing I’ve read in a very long time. It begins:

A Russian friend of mine may be in a dangerous situation in Washington, DC.

My friend and former student K arrived in DC yesterday, along with a friend. She came over on some kind of travel exchange program put together by a Russian travel agency called ‘Aloha’. They paid about 3K for this program.

The program promised a job offer in advance, but didn’t deliver. They said they would send one via email, but failed there, too.

Her contact in the USA barely speaks English, doesn’t answer her calls but does answer mine. He has asked her and her friend to meet in NYC tonight around midnight, with promises of hostess work in a lounge. Yes, I know how horrific that sounds- that’s why I am working all possible angles here.

She is not going to NYC but I need some help handling and understanding how to handle this- I have a friend helping them with a cheap hotel for the night, but that’s all at the moment. I am presently driving to LA and could fly her and her friend to meet me there on Saturday, but couldn’t house them indefinitely. I will be monitoring this thread over the next hour.

The ~200 comments that follow are epic. A must-read.

Big ups to the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which feels very Snarkmarketian to me. The movie unfolds in three distinct chapters, slowly developing an aesthetic and an argument, and finally posing a provocative question, or a few.

The first third of the film uses the lens of aspiring documentarian Thierry Guerra to give us a tour d’horizon of the universe of street art. We hear from a diverse cross-section of street artists from Shepard Fairey to a mosaic artist known as Space Invader to Banksy himself, while we’re watching footage of people taking to rooftops and subway stations to decorate the urban landscape.

Then we delve into the story of Guerra himself – this dude who channels his obsessive impulse to film everything in his life into a thorough record of the street art movement, compiling thousands of hours of footage of artists on the make. For such an ephemeral art form, this archiving is invaluable. Prominent artists cheerfully accommodate Guerra and his omnipresent camera, despite the heightened visibility it brings to activities that might not be entirely licit.

Guerra’s profile rises as the world he’s documenting starts to become more and more celebrated by the mainstream art community, which introduces tension: Street art is almost by definition a critique of mainstream consumer values. The movement rests on this fundamentally anti-consumerist premise of reclaiming private property for public expression. A mural on the side of a building defies our notions of commerce; the canvas can’t easily be carted off and sold, right? So what happens when the art does become property, bought and sold like any other commodity, auctioned off for tens of thousands of dollars at Sotheby’s, pursued by collectors?

The answer: Mr. Brainwash.

Guerra, realizing that his payday is not going to come in the form of a smash hit documentary, decides he’s going to cash in on his work a different way. By now, of course, he’s become a devoted observer of the process by which street artists accrue mountains of hype, use industrial production techniques to replicate their work on a massive scale, and make their subversive and ubiquitous art a sort of viral marketing campaign for their brand. So he takes the logical next step of turning this fundamentally anti-capitalist movement into the ultimate post-industrial capitalist phenom: developing an alter ego he calls “Mr. Brainwash,” who slickly deploys the street art system in a scheme to mint millions overnight.

(Side note: I say “slickly deploys,” but one of the facts the documentary makes hilariously clear is that Guerra is anything but slick. He’s this endearingly inarticulate, possibly kind of dimwitted, organization-challenged geek, basically. In other words, there’s no Evil Genius at work here. Or is there? This is one of the more fun implicit questions the film poses.)

Reviewing the film, a lot of critics have raised the question of whether this is all a monstrous hoax engineered by Banksy. The events in the film – including Mr. Brainwash’s LA art opening – are of course genuine, documented occurrences. But to what extent might Banksy have set up the rules of the game and forced the outcome? Lots of fun speculation to be had there.

If the documentary ended up simply asking “What is art?” it would have been a let-down. (Don’t get me wrong. It gets asked. Warhol comes up more than once.) A more interesting question is, “What is Thierry Guerra’s / Mr. Brainwash’s artistic masterwork?” Is it the footage? The anti-anti-capitalist art opening? The documentary itself, and the worlds it contains?

By the way, Mr. Brainwash lives.

I’m at the 11th annual International Symposium on Online Journalism this weekend, a series of panels led by luminaries in the online journalism industry and the academic world. Since y’all haven’t seen me ’round these parts since the last time I was in Austin, I figured I’d sheepishly show my face and resume the liveblogging. Apologies for whatever journo-wonkiness seeps in here. I look forward to your participation!

NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute is seeking the top ten works of journalism from the last decade. To seed their quest, they’ve selected more than 80 journalistic enterprises. I’ve tried to retain a detached cynicism, but I actually really, really, really like the list they’ve put together so far. It includes several of my favorites – James Fallows’ Blind into Baghdad, This American Life’s Giant Pool of Money, David Barstow’s Pentagon propaganda investigation, Atul Gawande’s look at the high cost of health care in McAllen, TX, and even Ezra Klein’s blog!

Bonus points for including the Daily Show.