I always liked this page from Frank Miller & Lynn Varley’s Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the book, alongside all of the stuff with Supergirl. I like it more for the dialogue than anything else, though Miller’s formless, chunky Batman is an obviously great take on the character’s design. But this bit is killer, from Hawkboy’s mouth to Batman’s heart: “Thanagarians do not believe in fate. We do not believe that anything is beyond the power of mind and bone and muscle and will. I do not accept these deaths. I do not accept this crime.”

I really dig that bit, despite the Ayn Randiness of it. I like how it perfectly sketches that character out, giving him a moral immovability that’s also present in characters like Rorshach. There is Justice and there is Crime, and one must be eliminated at all costs.

Hawkboy discusses his life as if it were a conflict, a constant series of battles between Us and Them, the Just and the Fallen. There is always something To Be Triumphed Over, which ain’t necessarily the best way to look at the world. The directness of the statement appeals to me a great deal. It posits a world where change is not only possible, but possible due to the direct intervention of human hands. If something’s gone wrong, you reach out a hand, you take hold, and you fix it, and that thing has no choice but to bow to your will.

“I do not accept these deaths. I do not accept this crime.” That mentality sits at the root of a lot, if not most, superheroes. With precious few exceptions, your average superhero is doing something that is wildly illegal, but they’re doing it for “good reasons.” When people talk about how cape comics have fascist or authoritarian elements, they’re talking about Superman bending a dictator to his will, Batman creating a surveillance state for the protection of the people inside it, the Punisher playing at executioner. They are the Good Guys, so what they do is by definition Right and Just, even when it is illegal and horrible, because we know their hearts are in the right place.

This sort of doctrine really only works in comics, where you can “avenge” someone’s death and have that be an actual ending or provide closure. Real life doesn’t work like that. There are a lot of things that will bow to the power of mind and bone and muscle and will, but then there are greater things that will never bow. You will have to accept death. You will have to accept crime. You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you’re too poor to afford boots, right? But it’s nice to think about a world where we have total control, instead of none.

Yo! Welcome to a manga-less edition of ThWiP. Due to some kind of big Japanese holiday, Gaijin Dan doesn’t have any ammo, so he’s taking the week off. My backup comes in the form of Matlock and Space Jawa.

I did an article for Den of Geek of Top 25 Comic Characters Who Owe Everything to an Actor’s Portrayal. That was a fun one to write. Too bad it pissed off Reddit. Apparently, they took the “Everything” part a bit too literal. Ah, well. My next list article is bound to piss off even more people. It already got my editor mad for me saying that Popeye is a bad movie.

The best omissions I’ve heard from readers are Josh Pais as movie Raphael, Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime and maybe Tom Hiddleston as Loki.

Now for comic panels.

Animal Man #23
Jeff Lemire, Steve Pugh and Francis Portela

Avengers #18
Jonathan Hickman and Leinil Francis Yu

Avengers Assemble #18
Kelly Sue DeConnick and Barry Kitson

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First off, it pains me to say that after forty-plus issues, Venom is cancelled. I’m bummed, not just for the obvious, but because I wanted to see if it could have outlasted the 90’s solo series, which went a full 60 issues. I can’t say I’m too surprised. The whole demon subplot (which is still a dangling thread) really hurt the momentum and the symbiote’s been tossed to the sidelines as a character, always being drugged up and being a mental non-factor. It’s a weapon rather than being a creature.

They did just give him a teenage girl sidekick and that had potential. Ah well. Chances are he’s going to be killed in the big upcoming Spider-Man crossover when Doc Ock Spider-Man goes too far or something. You know, regular Spider-Man never did blow a gasket over Venom being a government agent and member of the Avengers. You’d think he would have had a passionate opinion about that, but all he ever did was make a joke about the Punisher and tell Venom to please not kill Carnage.

Whether Venom’s set to die or not, he currently has another series to call home in Thunderbolts. Recently, Thunderbolts was pretty bad, mainly because it was written by Daniel Way, who wrote 11 issues of… I’m not really sure. It was a bunch of twists and turns and I found myself not caring for a lot of it. Frank Castle strapping a landmine to his chest and jumping onto a guy was pretty sweet, though. That and it gave me one of my favorite Deadpool quotes with, “You may kill me first, but I fucking guarantee I’ll kill you last.”

Charles Soule took over as of issue #12 and already it’s felt like a breath of fresh air. #12 was a Punisher-centric story that turned his “banging on the side” relationship with Elektra into something more dramatic as she’s given him reason to kill her down the line. Then #13 was kind of average because it was an attempt to clean up Way’s mess by explaining who the hell Mercy is and why she’s on the team when she’s yet to do anything of note or interact with anyone other than Red Leader. For any of you who haven’t been paying attention, Leader has been resurrected and he’s red. He’s currently the intelligence of the team, although he’s given limited intellect to work with to keep him from remembering who he was. Right now he’s just a timid follower of General Ross, retaining his personality from before he became an insane supervillain.

The big problem with the series has been that it hasn’t delivered a hook. Sure, I get that it’s taken the Thunderbolts name because of General Ross’ nickname and how they’re a bunch of dark heroes with blood on their hands, but why are they together? The first issue had Ross recruit everyone and it gave the idea that they were going to be a non-mutant version of X-Force. Even though it took fourteen issues, this week’s issue FINALLY gives us an idea of what the series is really all about.

And it’s a pretty awesome idea.

Right there! Why couldn’t they make this clear from the very first issue? Hell, the second issue or even sixth? Why did we have to wait that long to get this great hook for a series about a group of heroic killers working together? I mean, you’re the fucking Thunderbolts! You know what the original Thunderbolts were known for? Telling us why we should be reading it from the end of the first issue! Imagine if Citizen V unmasked in the middle of the 14th issue.

“The Selfish Avengers.” All members of the team (outside of Red Leader and Mercy) get a chance to lead the team into a mission of their choosing. If Deadpool wants them to kill Sabretooth, they will all go off together to kill Sabretooth, go back home and ask Elektra who she wants iced. It kind of has a low-rent Illuminati feel to it.

So far the first choice has gone to Castle, leading to this exchange.

I hate it when comics get so obsessed with decompression that by the time they get to the point, people have stopped reading and it dies. That’s what happened with Chaykin’s Squadron Supreme and I have a feeling it’s going to happen here. I don’t have too much experience reading Soule’s stuff, but so far he’s turned Red Lanterns around and he’s been doing good work on Swamp Thing.

All that I’m saying is to give Thunderbolts a chance. Which is really the opposite of giving peace of a chance.

Quick hit, because I have a question but no answer and I haven’t had one of these conversations in a while:

Superman is, as depicted in the comics, essentially perfect. He’s an upright, straightforward, and moral man. Like Captain America, the choices Superman makes are generally the ones that we would consider correct or moral. There are exceptions, obviously, but in general and in canon, Superman is the moral center of the DC universe.

The one thing about Superman, the franchise and character, I’ve never been able to figure out is his relationship with Lois Lane. There are a couple minor things that bug me—Superman is literally the Best Man Alive, so every story where Lois gets jealous because he’s hanging out with some other lady is silly at best—but the biggest one is the Superman/Lois Lane/Clark Kent triangle.

How does that love triangle not make Superman look really dishonest? Superman is Clark, Clark is Superman. They’re both reflections of the same core person, who is generally unfailingly honest and moral. But he lies to the woman we’re supposed to believe he loves. He actively lies, in fact, concocting schemes and routines that’ll maintain his identity at the expense of Lane’s career and personal life.

I know that this is partly the result of the friction that comes when stories for children are haphazardly turned into stories for adults, and the horrifying juxtapositions that situation tends to bring with it, but it’s also something that’s stuck around as the character has been continually rebooted into someone meant for adults, rather than children. That means that it’s a significant part of the character, something with deep roots and importance to basically every single portrayal of Superman.

But, knowing what I know and feeling what I feel about Superman, it seems like one trait that’s in extreme opposition to his usual portrayal. I can’t bridge the gap between Superman being The End-All Be-All Of Goodness and lying to Lois Lane.

So what’s the deal? How did you make this work situation for you?

Hey! Panels! Yeah! Pretty light week, though. Even Gaijin Dan has less than usual and Space Jawa and Dickeye only have one panel to toss my way each. That’s okay, though. Infinity kicked enough ass to satiate my hunger.

Elsewhere, I wrote some stuff from Den of Geek. I did a review of the Mega Man/Sonic crossover Worlds Collide and also a review of Phineas and Ferb: Mission Marvel, the cartoon crossover that involves Venom ringing doorbells and running away. I have a huge article ready and done, hopefully to be posted sometime in the next few days.

Batman #23
Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, James Tynion IV and Rafael Albuquerque

Batman ’66 #7
Jeff Parker and Joe Quinones

Batman: L’il Gotham #5
Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs

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So now that I have a new writing job, you’d think that I’d dedicate more of my time strictly to writing. You’d be right, but yet these days I’m finding my attention being dragged away by something incredibly stupid that can’t help but captivate me.

It’s the phenomenon that’s sweeping the internet. I bring you, Salty Bet!

So what is Salty Bet? Salty Bet is a 24/7 site that streams MUGEN matches and allows its users to bet fake money. The odds and payout are calculated based on how much people have collectively bet on which character.

I think I might be getting a little ahead of myself. First I should explain MUGEN. MUGEN is a program that’s been around since 1999 that lets you custom make your own fighting games. You get to put together your own roster of characters from Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Mortal Kombat and really anywhere. Like I said, it’s completely custom. You can have anyone from Rolento from Street Fighter Alpha 3 to a terrible series of MS Paint frames turned into something halfway playable. Programmers from all over made thousands of characters of varying quality.

I paid a good amount of attention to MUGEN back in the early 00’s. What I found was that a lot of the enthusiasts and detractors both took it way too seriously most of the time. This was during the time when fighting games were still 2D and easy to rip onto your computer, so there were a lot of faithful depictions of mainstream fighters. I’ve seen people looked down upon for basically having fun with MUGEN. Like, say, making a version of Sagat with two eyes and crazy attacks that he never had. Or maybe Ken with angel wings.

Things got looser as the years progressed, mainly because MUGENgineers had to find new ground. 2D fighters were dying out and they were running out of characters to rip. I stopped paying attention for a while, but I always saw some kind of “Marvel vs. DC” or “Marvel Superheroes 2” type project. As a whole, more people tried to make either original characters based on preexisting sprites, upgraded characters or flat-out new guys. And it’s awesome.

Detractors of MUGEN mainly point out that the whole thing is pretty worthless because it’s the most unbalanced garbage in the fighting game universe. And they’re right! But that was never what MUGEN was about to me. I think I actually played MUGEN once. The rest of the time, I played around in CPU vs. CPU mode. I mean, what’s the point of having Sub-Zero and Ryu in the same game if you can’t just sit back and watch them duke it out?

That’s what Salty Bet is all about. Just showing random AI-based exhibitions isn’t really enough, even with the people in the chat going nuts over it. Salty Bets includes the ability to bet fake money. You start off with $400 and you can bet however much on each match. Based on the bets, the odds and potential payouts are tabulated and the fights begin. Sometimes it’ll be obvious. If one character has over a million salty bucks gambled on them while the other has maybe ten thousand, it’s going to be a slaughter. Like clockwork, one of the people who bet on the underdog will announce in the chat, “I have made a terrible mistake!”

They also say a bunch of sexist shit, but we don’t have to talk about that right now.

If you bet away all your money, luckily there’s a bailout system that doesn’t let you go under a certain amount. I heard it was $10, but these days I’m finding myself at $28 an awful lot. They also refer to this place as the “salt mines”. If you donate money to Salty Bet, you’ll always have a minimum of $666 and can go all-in on your heart’s content.

So how do you know who to bet on? It can be hard. Sometimes you might see two guys from the same game who aren’t even comparable. One will dominate while the other just stands around and gets killed. It’s a pile of different things to take in mind, such as move set, speed, hit points, hit box, damage and AI. For instance, Takuma Sakazaki from the latest King of Fighters game looks really well-animated and all, but he will just stand around and punch every now and then when he isn’t getting his ass handed to him.

There’s also an influx of Dragonball Z characters. Those guys are a crapshoot. They’re mostly very small, which gives them a tiny hit box. In other words, if their opponent keeps punching most of the time, they aren’t going to land most of their attacks. The DBZ folks also tend to have super attacks where not only do they shoot laser beams, but they kill their opponents in one hit. The drawback is that the AI in these guys are usually terrible, so even if they have three bars, they’ll still just take a beating and abstain from trying to go for the easy win.

It’s also important not to listen to the advice of the chat. They might be telling you that Kabal is “real”, but they’re just trying to convince you to bet everything on him. That in turn increases their winnings when Kabal turns out to be totally shitty and eats it in five seconds.

Watching Salty Bet can be a fun showcase of the original/edited characters, especially in the superhero sense. I’ve seen Lex Luthor, Green Lantern, Black Adam, the Atom, Plastic Man, Flash, Jean Grey, Mongul, Mr. Fantastic, Darkseid, Thanoseid, Astonishing-style Cyclops, Iron Lantern, Wonder Woman, Thor, Carnage, Scream, Agony, Sandman, Kitty Pryde and Mole Man. Some of them are really expertly done (ESPECIALLY Sandman). There’s also an Ash from Evil Dead who pops up a lot and some really cool Mega Man characters redrawn from the Mega Man from Marvel vs. Capcom.

It will eat up your hours if you let it, but just remember one piece of advice: NEVER bet against Rare Akuma, Ronald McDonald or Silversamurai. Betting against Silver Samurai is fine, though.

If you’re on tumblr, you’ve probably seen this fantastic gif set of Rinko Kikuchi talking about chocolate from this interview with What’s Up Hollywood:

If you’ve ever been around me for forty-five seconds or more, you know that she be to chocolate like I be to rap. I want to have conversations about rap all the time, give or take a few minutes in the day. Sometimes it’s over something big, sometimes it’s over something small. I like rap so much that I feel like saying “RAP MUSIC!!!!” is a coherent way to say “This song bangs.” I’m painfully earnest on this subject to an absurd extent.

So here are some loose thoughts on rap, because sometimes all you have is an idea, not an essay:

A lot of my love of books, and crime (or crime-inflected) stories specifically, comes from how basic acts, usually acts of violence, are turned into something more poetic or interesting than the flat statements like you’d see on the news. I really like this thing I read in Charlie Huston’s novel Skinner, his latest release: A single bullet that perhaps goes in one ear and out the other, like a complicated idea quickly dismissed for the effort it requires.

There is an elegance there that works really well. The mental image of a thought considered and discarded is a peaceful one, while a bullet passing through a head is anything but. But there’s a middle ground in there that makes the line sing. It’s very vivid and easy to imagine.

I get the same feeling out of that line as I do out of this sort of line, from Fabolous’s “Can’t Deny It” off the album Ghetto Fabolous: When the time’s right, I’ma put this nine right/ to the left side of your head, push ya mind right.

There’s a parallel in there that I really like. I feel like the rappers who are best at this sort of rap tend to be talented at creating innovative threats and boasts. Being direct is all well and good, but eventually you’ll have to make another song and you can’t reuse your old stuff. So rappers get creative, and that’s where they start to shine.

Shyne’s “That’s Gangsta” is another crime song I like a lot. Where Fab doubles down on his punchlines, winks, and sly grins, Shyne opens his mouth and a flood of apocalyptically nihilist lyrics come flooding out. He flips Rakim:

I got a question as serious as cancer
Where the fucking safe at? Somebody better answer

and:

Got dead gangstas rollin over like, “Yo, this nigga cold”
The way he cut his coke, his murder game, to his flow

and even:

Mac-10s, crushed rocks, and drops
The best respect the feds only—cops

and especially:

Riches my only reason for being, shit
I never had hope until I sold dope

So yeah, this song made an impression on me. The beat is memorable, too.

What got me earlier today, though, was hearing the sample on that beat on a new song. The sample’s Foster Sylvers’s “Misdemeanor,” and it’s been sampled more than a few times. I’ve heard it in other songs, but not in years, so when it popped up in a song called “Love Traps,” off Pete Rock & Camp Lo’s 80 Blocks From Tiffany’s 2, I sat up and paid attention.

It actually took me a second to figure out where I knew the sample from, since this song is pretty far from “That’s Gangsta” in sound, lyrics, and approach. But I kinda dig it, so I went digging.

There’s a neat symmetry in Shyne flipping that Rakim line on “That’s Gangsta,” because Eric B, of the legendary Eric B & Rakim, made a song called “Love Trap” back in the day.

And from here, I could easily fall down a rabbit hole. I could make an infinite number of connections from song to song, taking my own constantly shifting trip down memory lane, with just this at my base. Rakim leads to lyricism, which could loop back around to Fabolous (he’s nice) or anywhere basically, and from there, I could go anywhere. It’s all connected.

I tried to write an essay earlier this week about this RA the Rugged Man song, “Lessons.” It’s a catalog of things Rugged Man has experienced, from labels telling him to find a black dude to rap with to knowing Norah Jones before she blew up. Rugged Man is a talented dude, so even though this song is seriously just a series of one- and two-bar anecdotes, it still manages to be not just coherent, but pretty fascinating.

I couldn’t make the essay work, but I was going to focus on this line: I don’t want fans that don’t know who G Rap is.

At the time, I took it as Rugged separating the real from the fake, and I was into it for that reason. ’cause, you know, fake rap fans are annoying, and they probably didn’t even listen to real hip-hop, and several other equally tiresome thoughts. I’m older and smarter and hopefully less annoying now, and I still like the line, though I read it much differently.

It’s about curiosity and history to me now, about being in a constant state of learning about the music and culture. It’s not a requirement—I won’t hold out the “You Must Be Able To Name Three Big L Songs To Vibe” signs for now—but it enhances the experience of listening to rap so much to know a little bit about a little bit.

I talk and think about context a lot in terms of criticism or social issues, but it’s true of even something as culturally neutral as “music.” Connecting those dots is so much fun (I’ve done it before on here) and so enlightening that I can’t imagine listening to rap and not wanting to dig in. Things branch out to weird places, songs show up in weird places (remember the Numa Numa song? Just Blaze, TI, and Rihanna sure did), and sometimes you discover people who are right up your alley, despite being before your time.

Here’s Big Daddy Kane and Big L rapping together (kinda) on “Platinum Plus”:

They used this Big L verse on Lyricist Lounge Volume 2, sans Kane. That’s a shame, because Kane says this:

If you block the cash, we locking ass
I’ma put it in your chest like a Stockton pass
Only out to earn figures like we please
But I don’t mind to burn niggas like CDs
Now: exhibit, styles I kick with it
[*COUGH*] Pardon me, but I’m fuckin sickwiddit

Got me fanning myself like I’m in church over here.

Here’s Big L and Kool G Rap getting it in on “Fall Back”:

More head from chickens, it’s time to turn the ape loose
Bust out the cage and let the gauge loose
Blow the feathers out of your North Face goose
It’s G Rap coming back with a clique of brave troops
Have y’all niggas running for home base like Babe Ruth
Have you holding holes in your body like you play flute
Lay you down til you get found up in the sprayed coupe
Prepare for the takeover—give you the face makeover
The seat of your Rover, sheet draped over
Be found on the block with the street taped over
or comin out of deep coma, your speech made slower

What I like about G Rap is that he raps like this pretty much all the time.

Yo, hey! ThWiP time. Light week this time around, what with it being me, Gaijin Dan, Space Jawa and Jody. First time in forever there’s been no overlap in panel choices, so that’s a thing.

I have a review up of the newest Axe Cop cartoon at Den of Geek. Tomorrow it’ll have my review of the Archie Comics Sonic/Mega Man crossover, so give that a look if you remember.

This week I read Burn the Orphanage from Image, which I highly suggest. It’s essentially any given Final Fight/Streets of Rage brawler game written in comic book form, starring the well-rounded hero, the big, strong guy and the street-smart young woman. No turkeys found in drums in this issue, sad to say.

Okay, let’s do this like Brutus.

Atomic Robo: The Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur #2
Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener

Avengers #17
Jonathan Hickman, Nick Spencer, Stefano Caselli, Marco Rudy and Marco Checchetto

Batman ’66 #6
Jeff Parker and Jonathan Case

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On tumblr, franzferdinand2 asked:

What are your favorite pieces of comedy? Like, from movies, tv shows, stand up, etc.

Talk about the best question for a Saturday morning! Let’s get it:

My most favorite stand-up bit ever, like bar none forever and ever amen, is Richard Pryor’s “History Lesson,” off That African-American Is Still Crazy, a bonus disc on a boxed set of his work (my set is old, but it should be on No Pryor Restraint: Life In Concert (7 CD/ 2DVD)). He starts with talking about the black revolution lasting just six months before dudes went back to singing groups, how the Bicentennial was celebrating two hundred years of white folks dominating the world and killing natives, and ends the first half of the bit with “But it only happens in dreams, though… you motherfuckers killed dreams.”

He’s got a lot of pointed, crucial, hilarious stuff in here, and goes off on this tangent about America getting away with two hundred years without getting murdered that I like a lot, and then he flips it and asks:

I wonder how it would be though if niggas was taking over? See, if niggas take over tomorrow, not only would white people be in trouble, a lot of niggas would be in trouble. Be in court for lot different shit, though. A motherfucker’d be in court for…

“What’re you here for?”

“Trying to get someone to murder him.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, he was fucking with me your honor, so I tried to kill the motherfucker.”

“Come here. Why did you make this man angry at you? Twenty years.”

There oughtta be some shit like that, you know? It oughtta be against the law to make a motherfucker want to kill you. I think that would be a good law, ‘cause a lot of people are in jail for killing good people… that needed to die at that particular moment.

I don’t know why, but this kills me every time. Just slays me. The whole scenario is outrageous, but then you realize that what he’s saying is that black people are no different from whites.

Immediately after, he says, “I’ma win you motherfuckers back. See a little racism sets in, I love it, then I can fight against that. ’cause humor… breaks through all that shit.” And he laughs a nervous laugh and goes, “Does-doesn’t it?”

Dude is basically the boss of all bosses, and the way he knows how to work the crowd and throw jabs at them always impresses me.

But I also really like this Hannibal Buress bit called “Bomb Water” off his Animal Furnace album:

The album is amazing, from the intro to the outro, and I could easily pull like five “favorites” off it, but “Bomb Water” is too hard. I don’t even want to talk about it because you can just listen to it. By the time I got to “sippable bomb water” I was through, straight laid out, and the bit stayed great even after that.

Later in the album he says “Why don’t we let time kill Jimmy Carter?” and that’s part of another favorite bit. “Nah Jeezy, those are closets.” I’m listening to this album right now.

My favorite bit of comedy tv is Space Ghost Coast 2 Coast‘s “Flipmode.” There’s a transcript here but you really have to watch it. It’s perfect, as far as I’m concerned. Every joke hits. Maybe it’s because SGC2C had built up a lot of goodwill with me by this point, but honestly, it’s just incredibly funny and utterly nonsense. None better, forever.

My favorite comedy series, at least at this specific moment in time, is gdgd Fairies, which is like… absurd extinction level event-quality meta-humor. It’s exceedingly low-quality visually, but at the same time, it’s the perfect quality for the show’s sense of humor.

It’s about three fairies who live in a forest and have conversations. The conversations start as something innocuous before getting complicated thanks to one character’s stubborn laziness and then absurd thanks to another character’s prankster nature. Then they play hypothetical games or do things like trying to raise the popularity of the show by staging a livestream. The third segment in the fifteen-minute show is usually Dubbing Lake. The fairies watch a lake, and in that lake they see what are basically wacky and brief youtube videos. Old men doing weird things, Mochida Fusako guest appearances, gorillas watching a knight and another guy make out, and so on. Then the voice actresses improvise dialogue, music, and everything for those clips, often shedding their character entirely in the process.

It’s great. It sounds like the least appealing thing ever, but it’s so well-written (there’s an impeccable time travel joke, a great Super Mario Bros. joke, several DARK jokes) that I ate it up.

There’s a sister show, Straight Title Robot Anime, that’s about a trio of robots try to end the thousand-year robot civil war by mastering humor. They do this by explaining how a type of joke works, trying and failing to make those types of jokes, but the failure itself is usually a great example of that type of joke, and then they do things like run hypothetical situations to lower the tension of the robot war. Things like “What if everyone made dramatic glances at each other?” and “What if the robots kissed instead of fighting?” and so on. It’s not gdgd, but it’s pretty good.

The closest American joint to these is The Eric Andre Show, which is uncomfortable and amazing. It’s like nightmare comedy.

I don’t read a lot of funny books, but Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) was great, I really like Erma Bombeck, and Baratunde Thurston’s How to Be Black was fantastic. But the GOAT is probably ego trip’s Big Book of Racism!. It’s devastating and hilarious and should be required reading for anybody talking about race on the internet.

I’ve been doing this thing on Twitter for a month or two that I’ve just been calling “rap tweets.” I’ll get off work, head home, and chill outside while tweeting with people about raps. Usually it’s me picking three songs and sending out three tweets each, plus some conversation. I like it a lot, honestly. It’s low key, a nice distraction, and easy to do while doing other things. I just love talking about music, and rap specifically, and it’s cool to be able to do that with people on Twitter who are into it. Immediate feedback is nice, I guess.

I found an essay on gamers and geeks taking over rap on a video game site the other day. I saw it at work and decided to tweet about it that evening, after I’d had time to read it. But when I actually read it, I disagreed with basically every single point because I’m a snob/obsessed/whatever. It was ignorant of the greater context of everything in the article, including rap history and greater cultural trends. But it did make me think about the intersection of so-called nerd culture and rap music and how it’s been misrepresented over the years. There’s a gap between the perception and the truth, as there often is, in how we talk about rap and what it contains.

That essay prompted this one, in an indirect way, but really, I feel guilty for not posting here more often and that essay just gave me an excuse. So walk with me a minute while I talk about these three songs, each of which I like a whole lot.

If you asked me to boil down what I like about rap to just one sentence, I couldn’t, but I’d mumble something about “coded language” before you realized I was trying to cheat. The fact that a lot of things have two or three meanings is really impressive to me. I like having to do the work to pull the rhymes apart and see how somebody else created a puzzle. It’s fun, and it’s funny, and Beanie Sigel’s “Mac Man” is a great example why.

It’s a thugged out version of Here’s A List of Video Game Characters, where Beanie Sigel shouts out, references, or interpolates some aspect of a video game character over the course of a song. So you know, Latin King Koopa, Donkey Kong brings in weed by the barrel, Sonic can’t catch Beans because he’s good at Track & Field, and plenty more in that vein.

Beans places himself at the top of the pyramid as Mac Man, which is great, but then he also ties together every single video game he mentions in a story with a coherent plot and cast of characters. And I know that’s Tommy Westphall/Wold Newton conjecture, which is whatever, but it’s also funny. People, usually people who don’t listen to rap, talk about this kind of rap as if it were full of stoney faced thugs and ice-cold killers, but it really wasn’t. Jokes are a huge part of the style. 50 Cent, DMX, even hardheads like the Boot Camp Click had jokes. Otherwise this song is ridiculous.

XV’s “Mirror’s Edge” is sorta sadboy rap, but that’s cool, because I like that, too. I like this song so much because the metaphor is so strong. A lot of times I feel like metaphors for life in rap tend to be thin-but-good, like the idea that pigeons evolve into phoenixes on Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein. It’s kind of dumb when you think about it, but it’s a really powerful and direct image. It’s strong and you can hook into it.

But in “Mirror’s Edge,” the central metaphor is dead-on. The video game is about Faith, a free-running messenger in a super-clean fascist utopia. The song takes the danger of the free-running and applies it to being happy with your life. It’s obvious when you read it: “It feels like I’m runnin’ on walls and I don’t wanna touch the ground/ And if they say that I’m lost, then I don’t wanna be found.” Obvious, but good.

“Super Brooklyn” is by the Cocoa Brovaz, who used to be Smif-n-Wessun of the almighty Boot Camp Clik on Duck Down Records. But they got cease-and-desisted by the gun manufacturer and switched to Cocoa Brovaz. “Super Brooklyn” is great because it leans so heavily on the Super Mario Bros. samples. (The album this came from, Game Over, also featured Eminem and Masta Ace on a Soul Calibur beat. I can’t find the interview where he’s asked about it now, but he only found out this song even came out within the past few years. He’d given a verse to someone and it ended up on there. Rap is weird.)

I feel like this song shouldn’t work half as well as it does. It’s weird, it’s not really something you want to play at high volume except for novelty reasons, and the rhymes and music are wild dissonant. But I dunno—it works for me. Sometimes songs just go.