God, has it been 100 installments of this garbage already? Well, I said we’d be doing something special and I wasn’t lying. The regular update is merely the appetizer.
So for those of you seeing this for the first time because of the allure of triple digits, here’s the skinny: every week, me and my crew (usually 4L boss man David Brothers and readers Was Taters and Space Jawa) supply panels for all the comics we’ve read from the previous Wednesday. Each panel is meant to be a breakdown of what the comic is about. The essence. The chance to sell it and show off its tone. Give you an idea of what its contents are all about. Yes, some people actually enjoy this. Go figure.
Now let’s get moving.
Avengers #16
Brian Michael Bendis and John Romita Jr.
Avengers Academy #18
Christos Gage and Andrea DiVito
So, yeah, Summerslam was the other day. That ending sure was a thing that happened, eh? While the use of Kevin Nash is head-shaking, I’m okay with the split angles. Why? Because you aren’t allowed to beat Cena in a feud unless it’s unceremonious and he gets distracted by someone else to the point that he forgot about you. That’s how it’s worked for Sheamus, R-Truth and now CM Punk. It’s the best we can get.
The highlight for me was Sheamus vs. Mark Henry because I dig everything Mark Henry-related from the last several months. His matches feel like a Godzilla movie, only with better workrate. I absolutely loved the creative ending of Sheamus going through the guardrail and failing to crawl his way to the ring in time while Henry stood triumphant. It also led to this gif from Jerusalem:
Other than that, Orton’s match with Christian was so good that it makes me forget that I like Christian as champ better. Barrett going over Bryan is how it should have been and the opener was good fun. Really, WWE should have just stretched everything out with this angle. Summerslam should have been Cena vs. Mysterio, which I still believe to be a money match that they wasted by throwing on Raw with no hype. The disappearance of CM Punk could have lasted up until after the main event, where he would have made his big appearance to mess with Cena. Then save all the champion vs. champion drama for Night of Champions, which works great because of the goddamn title. All the Nash/Del Rio stuff would have made it a bit easier on a lesser PPV like that.
The Damon Albarn Appreciation Society is an ongoing series of observations, conversations, and thoughts about music. Here’s the ninth, where I talk out why Hodgy Beats of MellowHype is ill and how he interacts with Left Brain’s beats.
I liked Tyler, the Creator’s Goblin, but I think MellowHype’s Blackendwhite is a better album overall. I’ve got a free giveaway code for the entire album, too, so if you want it, leave a comment on this post (using your real email address, obviously) telling me your favorite rap song, favorite rap album, and why for both.
MellowHype is lyricist Hodgy Beats and producer (mostly) Left Brain. It’s not really in the same vein as Tyler’s aggressively transgressive lyrics at all, though Hodgy isn’t afraid to… go dark? Is that the best word for it? But nah, Hodgy puts me in mind of Fabolous, in terms of being lyrical, and AZ or The Lox or Nature, cats with real ill flows and a variety of styles. It’s funny that my brain goes directly to New York when trying to draw a comparison for Hodgy, but I can’t really think of any LA cats who spit similarly. Hodgy feels a little like 1997-2002 NYC to me, you know?
I think it’s because of how he spits. He’s a clever dude, with a strong grasp of wordplay and flow. His voice is real distinct, maybe a little on the high side, which gives his rhymes a certain flavor. Something like “F666 The Police” feels like Los Angeles to me, with that real aggressive Ice Cube “fuck the police” stance, but his flow skips all over the beat, and almost setting the pace for the beat, instead of vice versa. His first verse speeds up, too, and then slips back down a gear when the hi-hats (I think?) drop out. He’s not just killing time over a beat–he’s genuinely part of the song.
(Tyler’s verse on “F666 The Police” is great, too–crude, evil, and hilarious. “Well, that’s not happening, captain/ Not this time nigga, BAP! BAP! BAP! BAP!/ ‘Houston, we have a nigger down/ And the nigger that did it loves them gun sounds'” never fails to slay me.)
It’s that cleverness that really hooked me into Hodgy. I’m not a backpacker any more, but that sorta thing dies hard. You’ve gotta come with a lyrical spherical dirigible because of me your girl is hysterical that’s an empirical miracle at some point to really impress me. Smart dumb rhymes like that, dumb smart rhymes (Young Jeezy: “Big wheels, big straps, you know I like it super-sized/ Passenger’s a red bone, her weave look like some curly fries/ Inside’s fish sticks, outside’s tartar sauce/ Pocket full of celery, imagine what she telling me/ Blowing on asparagus/ the realest shit I ever smoked/ Ridin’ to that Trap or Die/ the realest shit I ever wrote/ They know I got that broccoli, so I keep that glock with me”), just give me something to make me grin and I’m good. And Hodgy does it on his first verse on the entire album:
Uh, it’s a Monday night, I’m comin’ home like it’s Friday
Live everyday high, burnin’ kush on the highway
On my way to Rico to make it final in the mornin’
Forgettin’ to study up for my final in the mornin’, fuck it
It’s only a final and plus it’s borin’, however
Tyler’s back hittin’ spinals when the chords end
Skeleton elephant golden elements bezelin’
We spit because we’re sick and irrelevant to your relevance
I’m comin’ down, but not from my high
I should live in a plane, shit I feel that fly
What I like is how he starts the verse like he’s dragging his way out of bed, and then starts hitting you with layered internal rhymes and rhythms (“Friday day” -> “day high” -> “the highway”), and then keeps stacking with the N sounds in the next few bars, and then doubling down on the whole affair with “skeleton elephant golden elements bezelin'”. And then one more line about how he raps (“sick and irrelevant to [you]”) that matches the flow of the previous bars and then he drops down a gear in complexity and pace.
This is good stuff, and “Primo” is a real weird song to begin an album on. It’s actually sort of like Bone Thugs’s “Mr. Ouija” in my head, but without the clear introduction that comes before it on Creepin on Ah Come Up. “Primo” (like “Mr. Ouija”) should theoretically be the song that sets the tone for the album. Sort of a “This is what you’re going to hear.”
But nah. It’s just something to ease you into tracks like “Gunsounds,” which is a hard hitter. Left Brain’s beat is all impact, with no softness or singsongy messing around. Hodgy rides the beat with hard breaks between most of his bars and then he pulls back from that and kicks another thick cloud raps before easing back again to the wide open bars.
I’m a big believer in the “He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper” team-up. TI and Toomp, Common and NoID, Nas and Premo, David Banner and TI, Mannie Fresh and Juvie, The Clipse & the Neptunes, all of these cats work real well together. The beats match the rhymes, but are just off enough to pull out something great. The rapper has to work a little, and he shines. Left Brain and Hodgy Beats work together real well, and Hodgy gets to kick a number of different flows over the course of the album.
I’m a fan, man. At 11 tracks and a shade over half an hour, this is a lean album. I don’t want to skip any of the joints, but “Gunsounds,” “F666 the Police,” “64,” and “Deaddeputy” are songs that definitely stand out. If I’m just listening while I write (like I am right now) I might play them a few times in a row, but if I’m bumping the album as a whole, they give me something extra special to look forward to. And I can’t even front, I forgot about “Igotagun” every single time and get caught by surprised by that double time flow and then halting flow in verse two (“swag-me-the-fuck-out”)
Something cool: I copped the MP3s ages ago, bought the MP3 album this year, and then bought the vinyl because I like it that much. Turns out the vinyl pressing is transparent. I’ve got a white album (Big Boi’s Sir Lucious Leftfoot
The long version keeps drifting on me and not coming out correctly, so let me try and boil it down:
The words you choose to use simultaneously reflect and create the world around you. If you make an effort to be effusively positive about things, you’re going to attract people who either share in or enjoy your positivity. The odds are good that they will be positive, too, setting up a situation where you both feed off each other. If you want to keep up a too cool for school distant air, and so your version of effusive praise is “Oh, yeah, that was cool,” then you’re going to attract like-minded people who understand you. Make sense? Everything feeds on everything else.
“Black Spider-Man” otherizes Miles Morales. (It also ignores that he’s half-Puerto Rican, but that’s another conversation entirely.) He’s not Spider-Man. He’s black Spider-Man. He isn’t the new Spider-Man first, or Ultimate Spider-Man first. He’s black Spider-Man. Which is funny, because Barry Allen and Wally West were just the new Flashes. Hal Jordan is a Green Lantern, but John Stewart is the black Green Lantern.
It foregrounds Miles’s race in a conversation where his race should be irrelevant. His race is probably going to end up being just as big a part of his character as it was for Peter Parker–which I do think was a fairly significant part of that character–but in terms of who the character is and how we refer to him, “black Spider-Man” is garbage.
It sets up the adjective-less Spider-Man as the default, and therefore superior, version. Black Spider-Man will always be second-best because he wasn’t first. Comics fans in particular like to prize the original flavor, or whichever flavor was dominant whenever they began reading, so you can’t tell me that isn’t true. Every time I read “black Spider-Man” I taste battery acid. It feels mean, like the most important part of Miles’s character is that he’s (whisper this with me) not white!
Every single person who has dropped the “Batman of Africa” phrase into their news report, writing, solicits, interviews, commentary, criticism, or emails is lazy. Plain and simple. Every single one. If they aren’t mocking the phrase, they are lazy. Whenever I see it, I want to (and usually do) stop reading whatever page I’m on. There is no Batman of Africa, just like there’s no Batman of South America or Batman of Europe. There are Batmen of France, Argentina, and cities, but there are no Batmen of continents. David Zavimbi, Batwing, is the Batman of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or maybe the Batman of Fake-Kinshasha.
“Batman of Africa,” like “black Spider-Man,” plays into these subtle, but still awful, racial and national stereotypes. Africa is “AFRICA” in people’s minds because lazy, racist fiction and news painted it as a monolithic dark continent full of black people. Lies cloud the mind. Africa, like any other continent, features an astonishing amount of ethnic diversity, whether native or immigrant. You don’t even have to open a book to know this. Charlize Theron is African, man. More specifically, and more respectfully, she’s South African. She’s from Johannesburg. She’s famous.
But the mental image that leaps to mind when people say “Africa” is bone nose savages, savage warlords, savage child soldiers, and AIDS savaging the countryside. Not Egypt, or the Ivory Coast, or a continent of one billion people, most of whom are just like us and go through many of the same trials and travails that we do. There’s no diversity in “AFRICA!” That fact is ugly and stupid. It’s 2011. What’s wrong with you?
David Zavimbi, presumably, is Congolese. “Batman of the Congo” has less of a ring to it, but it doesn’t make you look as unforgivably ignorant as “Batman of Africa” does.
Being black is no more remarkable than being white. Miles Morales is notable for being the first black Spider-Man, particularly in Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, but it isn’t his blackness that makes him special. It’s the fact that he’s not Peter Parker. The fact that he’s half-black, half-Puerto Rican, (and how cool would it be if his dad was a dark skinned Puerto Rican and his mom was light skinned black?!), that it looks like he’s taking part in a lottery to get into a good school in the preview images, and that he’s thirteen years old is just sauce. It’s not the meal. It’s part of the meal, sure, but you do yourself and the character (or rather, the concept, what the character represents, or something, because we do not respect characters ’round these parts) a disservice by boiling him down to “black Spider-Man.” He’s so much more than that, judging by the press run Marvel just went on, that breaking him down to being the black Spider-Man is… it’s garbage, it’s lazy, it’s stupid.
It makes you look like Stormy.
This is drifting.
Black Debbie doesn’t exist. I probably could’ve left this at the Sealab video and been good.
Summerslam was last night and I’ll review that one in a later post. First and foremost, I want to discuss the hilarity that is NBC’s Wrestlemania 27 special. Every year, NBC does a one-hour special that condenses Wrestlemania into a bunch of highlights. Not sure of the appeal, especially since this year’s was so bad, but it’s there.
At Wrestlemania, the big match was Triple H vs. Undertaker. Triple H had a badass entrance with “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Metallica playing. Undertaker also walked down like a badass to Johnny Cash’s “Ain’t No Grave”. Herein lies the problem. NBC decided that ponying up the cash to play the Metallica song on their broadcast was fine and dandy. But Johnny Cash? Nope. They weren’t going to waste a dime on that.
It happens. Throughout all these DVDs I watch, they remove a lot of music due to rights issues and replace them with other stuff. Undertaker’s Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock themes are replaced with his Big Evil “You’ve Done it Now” theme. It would make sense that NBC would just put his regular theme over the Johnny Cash one. Right?
Nope. Instead, they decided that the perfect song would be “ET” by Katy Perry. I’m not joking. What were they thinking?!
Take one down, pass it around and we’re on Week 99. Got the regular crew with me this time with David Brothers, Was Taters and Space Jawa. I was going to say that ThWiP would take a big hit from the exodus of all the Flashpoint tie-ins, but it’s going to be pretty nuts next month when I find myself reading every single DC #1 for review purposes. Why do I hate myself?
Batgirl #24
Bryan Q. Miller and Pere Perez
Batman and Robin #26
David Hine, Greg Tocchini and Andrei Bressan
Yeah, so as it is right now, I have Day Seven of the countdown ready and done, but I still have to proofread it and all that. Considering I won’t be able to get to that until after I get home from watching Summerslam with my friends and… well, the fact that there are eleven entries in total, I can officially say that I have shit the bed on this. Again. My apologies. I took too long watching the shows, didn’t get any head start whatsoever and between this and my job got burned out very quickly. No matter, for the four people still reading these things, I’ll have them up and done over the course of the next week.
In the meantime, Bearnt!, who has uploaded a bunch of various clips onto YouTube for me finally found this holy grail of wrestling promos that I’ve been wanting to rewatch since Randy Savage died. It’s from the lead-up of Wrestlemania X. Randy Savage had a match with champion Yokozuna and had it in the bag until Savage’s rival and former friend Crush came in to stop him. The hatred between the two has become so heated that they aren’t allowed to coexist in the same locker room area.
That may be my favorite wrestling promo of all time.
Stay tuned tonight for Summerslam Countdown: Day Seven and This Week in Panels: Week 99.
With Summerslam just a couple days away, it’s not hard to notice that there are so few matches announced. One of those guys who has nothing going on is the Miz and that brings up an interesting pattern. See, the Miz has never wrestled a single Summerslam in his entire WWE career. Check it out.
2011: Rey’s injured, so the possibility of Rey vs. Miz is down the tubes. Will most definitely appear on the show in some way, but having a match is up in the air. 2010: Was going to cash in his Money in the Bank briefcase, but decided not to as he would be joining Team WWE in the main event. Was going to wrestle in the main event, but Cena had him replaced with Daniel Bryan. 2009: Got fired and banned from Summerslam (Summerfest?!) by one of the guest Raw General Managers. 2008: Even if he and Morrison were still tag champs, it wouldn’t matter. The only tag match on the show was a mixed tag. 2007: Is too busy feuding with Balls Mahoney to be of any importance to the big picture.
The dude just can’t catch a break. I’m pretty sure that the Hurricane never got a Summerslam match either, which is kind of weird. See, the big DVD box set of the first 20 Summerslams are split into four packages and each package has this awesome collage of stuff from those five years. Stuff like posters, Dibiase angrily pointing, Cena punching Jericho, Diesel and Michaels posing, etc. One of them features, rather prominently, a picture of a guy in a Hurricane mask in the corner. I don’t remember seeing such a thing and I can’t remember the Hurricane doing anything of note, let alone appearing, yet there it is.
