perfidy

Fine fine fine fine fine. First things first. 

On empire as a non-indeterminate duality:

Buckethead, semantics aside, I'm willing to grant you your orthodox definition of "Empire" if you will grant me that there exists no empire/not-empire duality between which poles there is no ground for indeterminacy. I think that may be the single most opaque sentence I have ever written. 

On good and evil as non-indeterminate duality: 

Your point is well taken that the Cold War skewed US perceptions of good/evil (again not a Manichean duality). Furthermore, it is wrong to argue that since we made the mess, we forfeit the right to clean it up later. What a stupid argument, that I hear all the damn time! However, some Chicken Littles feel the US is currently in danger of allowing the same thing to happen once again in the opposite extreme. Christ, even AA doesn't require you to actually fix every problem you ever caused. Especially if that means ignoring especially inconvenient ones. 

On convenience: 

I don't think for a second that anyone in the Administration sits in a windowless room, night after night, brooding and plotting in a black leather wing chair about their cunning plans to break the spine of the American will and leave them putty--putty! to be molded like, er, putty into a complacent and docile nation of ciphers. 

That being said, the road to hell is paved with you know what, and good intentions never excuse wretched results. If certain members of the Government wish to make it easier to obtain information about any citizen under any circumstances, for the sake of convenience, that deserves much questioning. If certain agencies of Government wish for the power to detain US citizens at will and try them in a military court, that deserves ridicule. If those same agencies wish to reserve the power to strip US citizens of their citizenship, then I man the walls and start shooting on sight. Fuck good intentions, and fuck convenience. I, and all Americans, deserve to live free from fear of our government. Liberty is constrained when a citizen fears his leaders at every turn. Fuck good intentions, and fuck convenience. 

On Pat Boone: 

I WAS going to let this slide. But you know what, I can't now, so you asked for it, you're effing well going to get it. 

Eminem is a whole lot like Pat Boone. Like Pat, he is a popular and wildly successful practitioner of a mature form of the popular arts. Like Pat, he has become popular by drawing on, reinterpreting, and arguably sanitizing, the fundamental tropes of his chosen genre. Like Pat Boone, he is a white boy singing what started as the modern folk music of black America, and he's become famous by being that music's emissary to white America and the pop world. And like Pat Boone, he's really fucking good at it. 

However. Eminem is much better than Pat Boone. Pat Boone is and always was boring. The music is competent but unremarkable, and his singing is too straightforward to really grab you. His talents were a great voice, charisma, and a stage presence, all of which went down easy back in the day. Eminem has the same exact things going for him, but he has more too, plus he's fun. No more "controversial," but fun. And better. 

Pat Boone never engaged in self-mythologizing like Eminem has, for instance. Do you realize that each of Eminem's first four albums have engaged a different aspect of his persona, and totally convincingly? Eminem, Slim Shady, Marshall Mathers, they are all different characters, and within the mini-dramas of his singles, Eminem plays them off one another masterfully, if you care about that kind of thing. What's most remarkable about that is, from day one, he had to have planned this out. To do that, and to pull it off, is pretty awesome. 

Eminem has wicked flow -- he wraps lines around the beat, rushes them out, bites off words, falls completely off the meter, and somehow makes it right back to where he needs to be. Lots of black rappers can't touch him -- Biggie Smalls, Old Dirty Bastard, Mase (where is he now???), Missy Elliott, Nelly, they all have/had rudimentary rhythmic skills. (Admittedly, Biggie, ODB, and Missy all make their limitations into major strengths). Eminem writes funny, vivid lyrics. His ability to create a character, okay, caricature, with only a few lines is unmatched in current hip-hop, and his hooks kick ass. But yes, you are right. Eminem is like Pat Boone. He doesn't innovate, he perfects. Innovation is left to Timbaland and Missi, Prince Paul, N.E.R.D., perpetual outsiders like Aceyalone, and all the thousand kids in the Queensboro Houses who don't even remember who Schooly D was. It's been almost fifty years (FIFTY YEARS!!!!) since Pat Boone cleaned up Ain't That A Shame and had a hit with it. Who do we remember? Fats Domino. Eminem is probably headed for the same shabby dustbin, to rest beside Snow, Young MC, and Technotronic, but he's so much goddamn fun right now, that I could give a shit. Q.E.D.