Being a left-wing political writer you may wonder why you don’t see more from me about the “gun problem” in this country.
Classic WWF/WWE announce team Bobby “The Brain” Heenan and Gorilla Monsoon – probably the greatest unheralded comedy team in entertainment history, but that’s another article. Image: WWE.Com
In the pro-wrestling world there was a fella named Gorilla Monsoon, who went from being a pretty legendary “big man” wrestler in the 60’s and early 70’s to being one of the best known “straight man” voices in the business as an announcer for the then-WWF, most often with “color commentator” and “heel,” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan
I could and probably will write at least one and probably multiple articles about him in due time but what’s important here is that he was known for his little turns of phrase, like “they’re literally hanging from the rafters here in [venue/city] tonight!” when announcing live shows and pay-per-views, or “external occipital protuberance.” (Gorilla: “Looks like Big John Studd got the Hulkster right in the external occiptal protuberance…” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan: “Yeah and he got him right in the back of the head, too!”)
One phrase I’ve thought of as long as I can remember as a “Gorilla-ism” even though I’m quite certain it’s really not is the phrase “conspicuous by his/her/their absence.” “The Hulkster now in the ring with the Big Boss Man, and conspicuous by his absence is the big fella’s manager, Mouth of the South Jimmy Hart.”
One of the things that the careful observer might notice tends to be conspicuous by its absence in my work is a whole lot of talk about gun issues.
An Unspoken Agreement
I do talk about them. Just not often, relatively speaking. You’d think I would, huh? Being a leftie, quite the lil tree hugger and empath for looking all big and burly the way I do, you’d think that every time this happens I’d be right there, outraged and demanding to know why this keeps happening and why nobody’s fixing it.
Here’s why I’m not:
It’s a waste of time. I did it for decades, and I’m telling you: it’s a waste of time.
We know what needs to be done. A vast majority of Americans favor common-sense gun regulation to help mitigate two of the biggest sources of gun violence: impulse purchases made in the heat of anger or depression, and background checks to ensure we’re not selling guns to people who have shown in the past to be incompetent to be trusted with a deadly weapon one way or another.
We’ve been talking about it for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough talking.
We’ve been asking why for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough asking why.
Pictured: not a well-regulated militia. (Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com, with some artistic modification by JH)
We know why nothing’s being done: because the National Rifle Association, acting as the public relations and political lobbying arm of the gun manufacturing industry, has spent a hundred years deliberately warping the intent of the second amendment out of shape, stoking and helping to perpetuate all kinds of evil including racism, sexism, domestic violence, and especially toxic masculinity for their profit.
They pay politicians to write laws in their favor; they pay media companies to make movies that make guns look positive and strong and powerful.
None of this is a secret or a “conspiracy theory” or in any meaningful doubt; there’s a century of – ahem – smoking guns marking the trail.
Gun manufacturers have conspired for a century to constantly reinforce messaging that benefits their sales against the best interests of public safety and the operation of a truly free society.
They do enough of it directly and openly so they aren’t accused of being a secret cabal, mind you, but they do plenty of it in back-door style deals as well – think in terms of product placement in films, but this is as much “idea placement” as for any specific brand or item.
Sold, American!
Tie it to all the good old American values like rugged individualism and standing up for what’s right and of course subtextual racism and the reinforcement of paradigms and ways of thinking and behaving that benefit mostly exactly the kind of people who you’d think would definitely start pushing their way around if they had a gun in their hand. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do and so forth. (Jim Jeffries’ American accent in his bit about “protecting my family” is so perfectly the sound of that attitude…)
In this way they keep the general public from being too clear-eyed about where they got the idea that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” and other corrosive and demonstrably untrue ideas on which the industry has relied for their profit-making for over a century now…to the point that we literally have more guns than people.
I don’t talk about that much.
I don’t talk about it because I’m sick of talking about it. I’ve talked about it all my life, and we’ve spiraled into such madness with this I swear half the instapundits on the internet spend their days hoping for the next one so they can churn out some saccharine clickbait about the horror of it all and cash in on those dead bodies.
The staid speeches, the well-researched data, the well-rehearsed catchphrases and talking points…they don’t work. They don’t work because a lot of people are really not terribly bright…
It’s George Carlin, if I have to tell you the audio’s NSFW I genuinely have no idea how you found me to begin with.
…and fear is among the most basic and powerful human emotions there is. There’s always something to be afraid of, isn’t there? Wild animals, roving non-white people, the dark, your own shadow…it’s a terrifying world out there! Why a fella barely dares get a cup of coffee without being armed anymore!
We’re not going to change until we’re collectively more afraid of having guns than we are of not having them. That’s the bottom line.
Until then, all the talk is just traffic generation and marketing to appeal to various discernible groups of people and position one’s self as being among them. Another sorting chute in the never-ending corporate game of human Plinko.
It’s cheaper and more versatile than a sorting hat. Courtesy of CBS without endorsement or permission under 17 U.S. Code § 107
It’s talking heads making money for themselves, and for the most part I think fundamentally most of them don’t really care about any of it much beyond that.
Certainly nobody on the right does, but I have a hard time taking the left seriously on this too…and frankly, I’m just “American” enough myself that I’m not sure I’d want to see the levels of restriction that exist in some places, even knowing that due to mental illness including major depressive disorder and a long well-documented history of suicidal thoughts, if common-sense gun laws ever were enacted I’d likely be among the earliest groups of folks declared unfit to own one. I’m okay with that.
Getting To The Point
Frankly, though, I’m almost as sick of seeing the feeding frenzy of the pundit class every time a tragedy happens as I am of seeing tragedies related to guns on the news – more to the point, as sick as I am of gun tragedies happening.
There’s no reason for any of this madness to happen except that it’s profitable for the gun industry and we’ve ignored that for so long, in part because they convinced us to do so in ways we weren’t aware of, that we ended up letting them buy a significant portion of our government – in BOTH parties.
There’s no solution for it except us deciding that the lives of innocent people are worth more than the profits of gun manufacturers – yes, including the jobs they “create.”
We don’t want to face that honestly and deal with it honestly, and until we do rushing to be the first out of the gate with an overwrought think piece every time a school is shot up amounts to an attempt to pimp out the resulting pile of bodies just so you’ll take me seriously as a leftist or whatever. It’s gross and disgusting and it’s pandering to exactly the base and shallow human inclinations that we need to lose if we’re going to survive, and it’s nearly always done for profit.
No. If I’ve got something to say about it, I will – as I am here and now – and pandering is exactly the opposite of what I do so I don’t know why anyone would expect it on this issue. (NB: I’m burying it here so I can get an additional chuckle at the expense of people who don’t read the article, but I’ve shut all the ads off on this article precisely to avoid “making money off a tragedy.” I don’t think I can turn off the tip jar on a post-by-post basis.)
The Point
Look, I’m gonna make the point before I end up doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t.
I don’t see where there’s anything left to be said about any of this, except it’s all monstrous and horribly shameful, we created it ourselves because we let our thinking be guided by greed, fear, and selfishness, and the resulting ongoing trauma against our nation and especially our children will remain with us in the form of accumulating child corpses until we deal with that and start letting our thinking be guided by something better.
Either that or it’s time to just admit that we’re okay with a few thousand kids dying every year for our own “freedom.”
In 2022, according to the CDC, 3,597 children died by gunfire in the United States.
In 2023, those children and already probably a thousand more are conspicuous by their absence.
Since a little after Sandy Hook, when I realized that not even an elementary school full of corpses would be enough to slap the stupid out of the haploamorous contingent in this country, for the most part the gun debate has been conspicuous by its absence in my work.
Once in a while I get emotional and fire something off – to be clear, I’m not at all saying “I don’t care” – but generally I don’t talk about guns and gun control much – particularly in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting.
Students at memorial fence following shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon May, 1998. Twenty-five years ago almost exactly from the date of this article. And it’s happening far more often now. Photo courtesy Ron Olsen (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Until I see some evidence that anyone cares enough to do something REAL about it, the subject will remain largely conspicuous in my work by its absence because I won’t be part of the reason we’re secretly not doing as much as we could about it – I won’t partake in the “collateral benefit” by deliberately creating content to play to gun violence every time gun violence happens in this country. I won’t give myself a pathway to being in any way motivated in my thoughts on the matter and the expressions thereof by profit.
The reason for that – while acknowledging that I understand there are plenty of folks out there acting in good faith to do what they think is best to address the situation and I was right along with the crowd in this behavior for a long while before reconsidering my behavior – is that as far as I’m concerned the part of the cycle where everyone in my band of the spectrum lines up to spew impotent outrage is morally equivalent to ripping the bodies out of their coffins and dancing with them at the funerals, and I just can not find a reason to be involved in that.
Until I start seeing people care about all the conspicuous absences in their local elementary schools because of our negligence – Covid and guns, just in the last three and a half years, how many young lives have we just cast aside like so much used tissue in the relentless pursuit of gratifying our egos and turning a buck? and the evil bastards who do this are often the exact same people accusing women of “murdering children” when they terminate a pregnancy! – I feel strongly disinclined to take seriously any complaints about the absence of my voice in this debate.
There are enough voices in the debate for another thousand debates like it. Could stand a few conspicuous absences there.
I don’t need to add mine to the chorus, by and large – not in the least because when I do (as now) I want it to matter, and it won’t if it’s the same navel-gazing bullshit I and ten thousand other self-important twits have spewed out a thousand times each in the last ten years.
When the conscience of this nation is no longer conspicuous by its absence from gun control policy, when our children are no longer conspicuous by their absence from our lives after they’ve been stolen by the madness of unfettered capitalism and induced stupidity for profit in the form of a firearm, then perhaps we’ll have something worth talking about.
Until then, the discussion remains thus:
we’re out of our minds on the gun thing in this country
we don’t want to get in our minds about it because it’s profitable and the world is scary
until we do, we’ll continue sacrificing roughly ten kids per day and climbing to the gods of profit and machismo.
Until we face that reality head on, there’s just not much to be said that will add anything of value to the conversation, no matter how well-researched, eloquent, or well-intended.
Until we face ourselves and admit that on the subject of gun control we’re absolutely off the rails and need serious re-evaluation, the most conspicuous absence in the arguments will remain our collective conscience.
hoploamory – (n.) a pathological love for weapons and weaponry at the expense of respect for other human beings or their safety
From the Neo-Latin “hoplo-” meaning armor, weapons, or tools, derived itself from the Greek “hoplon” with the same meaning (those familiar with Greek or military history should be thinking of “hoplites” here), and the Latin “-amory” suffix meaning “to be romantically involved with or attached to,” as in “polyamory.”
To practice hoploamory, in the intended contemporary context (which I’m allowed to define since I just invented the word, so there!), is to ignore the major trauma and damage being inflicted every day on our nation by our refusal to let go of our guns and all of the bad, half-baked, toxic ideas that surround them, and instead choose to embrace the bad, half-baked, toxic ideas.
You’ve seen the hoploamorous in action, guaranteed. These are the folks who have to flood every comment thread after a mass shooting with NRA-sponsored banalities like “guns don’t kill people, people do!” and “the first thing the Nazis did was take the guns!” (which incidentally is demonstrably bullshit.) The people who insist that their need to wear a high-powered rifle to the local grocery store isn’t a manifestation of their abject fear of basically everything, and their own abject cowardice in facing that fear, are hoploamorous. The “last line of defense” guys in camouflage gear who apparently have never heard of an F-15? Those are hoplophiles.
Subdef: hoplophile – (n.) one who is hoploamorous. subject to revision if I can figure out what the proper way to make -amory into the subjective singular.
I figure since I’m going to open the box on the whole gaming thing, which I really haven’t touched in terms of content creation in about 25 years, I should probably introduce myself in that context. Then I started writing and about eight hours later had a fairly cool and comprehensive article about the history of video games between 1975 and 1986, so I decided to go with it and do a multi-part project covering that history from my perspective as a gamer, and this is the first segment of that project.
This isn’t “the” history of gaming, it’s “my” history of gaming. This is what it looked like to me, as someone alive at the time, to the best of my memories. I’ve done significant work to ensure I’m not communicating any old urban legends or myths, but in the end this isn’t intended to be an objective article; it’s my subjective memories and opinions, augmented by research. Feel free to argue about it in the forum!
In this edition we’ll go from “In the beginning…” up to the calm before the Nintornado that blew through the industry in February of 1986. Note I’ve used the post splitter, so pay attention to that little navbar where the section title is, at the top and bottom of each page.
Early Days
I’ve been a gamer since before video games existed. Pong clones and two-word text parsers were hours of time spent before I was ten years old…and that was in 1980. We’re talking single-color monitors, 80×25 characters, and a “pixel” was roughly the size of your pinky nail.
When there were any pixels at all. There are none here, or there wouldn’t be if it was running on OG equipment. NB: This isn’t a really early beta of “Elder Scrolls VI,” but it’s closer than you probably think.
Whether it was early consoles like those PONG clones, ante-computer-geek text games and bad, blocky knock-offs of then-currently popular arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man, or just taking a screwdriver and shorting together the pins in the EPROMS on my VIC-20 while it was plugged in so I could see what it would do on-screen, I’ve always been deeply fascinated in computer imaging and gaming both.
Trivia point: the first thing I ever “hacked” was using what eventually became Norton Utilities to overwrite the contents of a floppy drive, directly to the disk as hexadecimal text input from the keyboard, to remove the copy protection and customize the load/splash screens on a bunch of old games like this. Then I’d take off to the local mall, go to the Radio Shack, load up a game on their demo box(es) and walk away. That was when I was probably 13, 14.
So yeah. I’ve been at it for a minute.
Over the last forty years or so of course video gaming has gone from a micro-niche targeted toward “kids” to become not just a multi billion dollar industry, but depending on your sources it’s arguably the largest sector of the entire global entertainment business. While one may quibble over methodology and rankings and calculations, certainly it can’t be argued that gaming has become an incredibly popular, and lucrative endeavor.
What’s your vector, Victor?
Around 1980 we started seeing some interesting innovations, beginning with “vector graphics.” This is a little different than the way we use the term today. In 2023, programs like Adobe Illustrator use “vector graphics” to draw scalable images that are defined by mathematical formulae in the rendering software. By contrast, “raster” graphic programs like Adobe Photoshop instead program an array of pixels with color and (in some cases) transparency information.
So a raw vector formula to create an “S” might (in the simplest implementation) describe mathematically a pair of sine waves, oriented vertically, calculated such that they intersect at each end of the “S.” A rastor formula for the same “S” on the other hand would basically be a small relational database or spreadsheet – a two-dimensional array – with each intersecting coordinate being described in terms of the levels of red, blue, green, and “alpha” (transparency) that each pixel will be programmed with.
The end result of this was no more blocky edges on diagonal lines traveling across horizontal CRT scanlines…but alas, still, no more curves at all.
Pictured: not curves. A screenshot of the vector-graphics game Battlezone. This screenshot is from a version ported for the US Army called the “Bradley Trainer,” which was used to train literal legit tank operators for the US military. The Battlezone monitors were green on black, not white.
Vector monitors (a whole different setup than your traditional CRT monitors and TVs, or modern LED displays) couldn’t draw circles either, but only straight lines between a series of points (think about the levels in the video game “Tempest,” which was one of the earliest memories I have of color vector graphics).
Lines, lines, everything is lines. Screenshot from the attract screen of Tempest (1980)
What made vector monitors sort of cool and different was that the lines were sharp. Where a CRT or television simply draws a series of horizontal lines that quickly “scans” from top to bottom, a vector monitor draws the lines directly from point A to point B. An old-school CRT draws a diagonal line as a series of horizontal lines with different characteristics at different points across the inside of the tube to create the illusion of a vertical line. Consequently – although it’s impossible to really show you here because you’re all not reading this on a vector graphic monitor – the resulting drawings are remarkably sharp and crisp when compared to traditional raster graphics.
Unfortunately limitations of computing power and the overwhelming prevalence of raster graphics in consumer products like TVs and (increasingly) computers made these games pretty limited in their ability to really capitalize on the improved visuals of vector monitors. Probably the peak of the field was the 1983 Star Wars arcade shooter, in which the player sat in as Luke Skywalker on a repeating three-level infinite adventure. (World record: five days on a single credit, played back and forth between two guys in the 80’s. Total score slightly over a billion points.)
Those funny things that look like asterisks on way too much caffeine are supposed to be fireballs. The other things are tie fighters, and a shooting reticle, and then the “guns” of your x-wing fighter at the edges of the screen. Courtesy Atari, Inc or whoever owns the game IP this week.
Unfortunately as you can see from the image, this really didn’t get us to the sort of photo-realistic pinnacle of graphic art that we youngsters were hoping to reach, but in 1983 plenty of us spent many many dollars in quarters hearing “Red five standing by!” and “Use the force, Luke,” and my favorite line “Luke, let go!” The first was Actually Mark Hamill and the second and third Actually Alec Guiness. I don’t know if they recorded the lines specifically for the game, or if the audio was pulled from the film soundtracks – in fact I just tweeted Mark Hamill to ask, I’ll let you know if he offers a canonical answer. He might, he’s known for being pretty cool with stuff like that.
Color! And More…
Around the same time vector games were rising, we also saw the introduction of color into early eight-bit games.
Carrying on a long-standing tradition of pretending that Americans in the old west were all the same color.
The first “eight bit” game is generally recognized as “Gun Fight,” a 1975 arcade game by Taito (worldwide) and Midway (North America). The use of the phrase “eight bit” can be confusing because now most people related that to the graphics of the game itself, but in reality this was the bandwidth of the CPU. Prior to “Gun Fight,” video games were created with “discrete logic” electronics explicitly, physically created for the tasks at hand. When Midway licensed the game for the US, they ported it to run on an Intel 8080 CPU, making it the first CPU-based video game.
At this stage of the technology, using a CPU allowed game developers to begin true game programming – the creation of game software to run on hardware that is intended generally for “computing” rather than specifically “to be a video game cabinet.” In 1979, the game changed completely with the introduction of the Galaxian platform by Nintendo in Japan. With various leaps forward in processing techniques, Galaxian was the first truly modern video game, with the now familiar “Pac-Man” graphics. Trivia note: Pac-man was originally developed on Galaga hardware, as were several others like Galaga and (if I remember correctly) Jungle King).
This was the dawn of the first wave of modern video gaming. With hits like “Space Invaders,” “Galaxian,” and “Pac-Man” raking in billions of dollars in quarters, gaming had started to carve a niche in the culture. Although a certain Italian plumber would ultimately take the role, Pac Man in particular was the symbol of everything exciting about video gaming in 1981 or so…
Leading us to the unlikely scenario of two hillbilly-lookin dudes lip-syncing an electro-synth pop anthem about a yellow pizza with a slice missing on what was then the most-watched visual music presentation in the US, Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.
Often called the “golden age of arcade gaming,” the period from 1980-1983 saw an explosion of arcade games, for the first time supplanting pinball machines as vice du jour for the nation’s misguided youth. This is where the classics really began – in basically a three year span you had Pac Man, Galaxian, Frogger, Space Fury (the actual first color vector game). In 1982 the first 16-bit CPU arcade game, “Pole Position,” was released by Atari, and with groundbreaking offerings like “Tron,” “Dragon’s Lair,” and “Space Ace” capping off the run toward the end of the wave, it was a pretty magical time to be a gamer.
This coincides roughly with the first real wave of home gaming consoles beginning with the Atari 2600 in 1977, which was the first “must have” home gaming console right up until they created a game so bad they had to bury it in an undisclosed desert location and it basically killed the platform.
Some say Atari died in 1979 when Nolan Bushnell sold out to Warner, but the gravesite’s been found and the body is definitely dated 1983.
The long version of the story is that Atari had been bought by Warner in 1979 and generated some 65%-ish of their 1982 profits…and then proceeded to lose about a half a billion dollars the next year, in part due to the failure of E.T. but also disappointing results from their port of Pac-Man – these two titles themselves owning about 85% of votes across the board for “worst video game ever.” Warner sold them off in 1983 and their steep decline continued. The brand has basically been used as a venture-capital electronics brand buoyed by its early 80’s reputation ever since, and by all accounts ceased being “the real Atari” in any way after being sold off by Warner.
Into the vacuum stepped a couple of quite decent contenders among a mess of nonsense like the Timex Sinclair. Although the Mattel Intellivision sported the first 16-bit processing in a home console and superior graphics and sound, a series of business missteps including the abominable attempt at creating an attachable keyboard that would convert the whole thing into a rudimentary home computer ended the Intellivision while the Colecovision – running on an 8-bit Z80 processor but coming out of the gate with the first home version of Donkey King that was ridiculously faithful to the original – started eating Atari’s console market share until similar missteps with their Adam ended that.
Fortunately for gaming, a revolution was around the corner.
And that’s where we’ll break it off for now. Stay tuned for part 2, coming soon!
I’ve talked for a long time about my love of gaming, going back to childhood in the 70s. For those of you who are interested there’s going to be a lot more content related to that showing up on my blog as well. Kinda tired of allowing my public life to exist under the shadow of the idea that poor people don’t deserve to have fun. So watch for that, I’m about to throw up a bunch of Fallout 4 stuff and get some basic things in place to start doing a lot more work on that and dishing out a bit of the lore and wisdom carried by JH The Gamer.
Insider secret: I tend to bury myself in reading books and gaming when I’m super depressed AND when I’m in that “percolating” mode where I’ve been through a bunch of experiences and now it’s time to sit down and process them and build the platforms for whatever’s next.
Breaking that stuff out into content mitigates some of the losses involved when I’m locked in some mental illness issue that includes executive dysfunction, by creating interesting and monetizable content out of the results…and all I really have to do is lean on the screenshot button and then write about and post the results when I’m in a more productive and energized space.
EZ mode, and as a bonus there’s zero ideological or ethical reason not to monetize it and push it as a “product” rather than feeling very averse to that idea the way I do about my social justice, public interest, and creative artistic work. MBAs & muggles cf. “long tails” and monetizing EVERYTHING, just the way capitalism demands. Plus it’ll pull some inevitable cross-traffic to my work.
Also, as part of the overall reorganization of everything I do, I decided to launch an explicit category here called “My Actual Blog” that will serve as the space for little “by the ways” and “slices of life” and so forth that go by and I feel like blogging about with no particular explicit intent or purpose. This is the first entry in that blog 🙂
I’ll set up a nav tree and proper landing pages and get it all plugged in to the menu and all that stuff soon. Meanwhile have a little gallery of screenshots from Fallout 4!
Going in I want to be clear up front that I think most of us are exceptional and the majority of those are exceptional in some positive, constructive, beautiful, and powerful way.
There’s a back side to all of that, though, that has become particularly visible in the wake of the rise of “participation trophy” parents and the embarrassed children they blamed for their silliness. A lot of folks who frankly aren’t nearly as exceptional as they think strutting around being aggressively average, that sort of thing. Folks who like to throw how exceptional they are around in situations where it has little or no relevance in an attempt to exert their will on some unsuspecting maitre d’ who does not, indeed, know who you am.
Being “exceptional” means you’re an exception to some things.
That means you don’t get to throw a fit when you realize the world wasn’t made for you. I mean you can complain and get up and change it if you want, but just sitting around whining because you’re outside the mainstream and the world was made for those inside of it isn’t going to accomplish anything.
You’re an exception. Own it. Expect that you will be the exception, but only when it is as inconvenient as possible to you, and never when you could really use a little magic.
Stop trying to mainstream your exceptionality, that’s the exact opposite of being exceptional by definition.
Expect that the world is not made for you, and when that is more than a personal inconvenience and rises to the level of being symptomatic of a larger social ill, then by all means stand up and say something. Use whatever thing at which you’re exceptional to make the world around you a little better.
Being What You Are
Rise to it. Be exceptional. I don’t mean be exceptional by showing up every time there’s a flooded drainage ditch so you can show off your big truck, I mean show up to do the work without worrying about the reward.
That’s how we got baby changing stations in a few men’s bathrooms, finally (and how we got them at all to begin with). It’s also how we mitigated the worst of the AIDS crisis (but only after a whole lot of people died for no good reason). It’s how we’ve won incredible advances in civil rights and elected the first people in our nation’s history to the our two highest executive offices who weren’t white men, over the last fifteen years.
You can’t just sit around constantly complaining about how broken everything is and how it doesn’t work for you, when you’re also basking in the pleasures and privileges of being exceptional.
You have to bring solutions, you have to be able and willing to separate your own interests and your emotional attachment to them as your interests from whatever work you’re doing that may relate to those interests, you have to be willing to accept that you’re fallible and have probably been wrong at least once in your life that you’re still unaware of.
You have to accept that the price of being exceptional, by whatever laws of the universe you happen to believe in (or none at all, it’s still observable reality) is the obligation to apply your exceptions to the benefit of others. Failure to live up to this obligation tends to end poorly one way or another for those who do so. I’m an atheist; I don’t pretend to know why that is or assert some higher omniscient power who is carefully doling out punishments and rewards. I just observe that it is so.
“Noblesse Oblige”
It’s tough for most people out here right now. If you think of yourself as “exceptional” in some way, you’re getting some kind of break on that. A break you can use to help others alleviate their own pressure.
There’s an old joke/parable/aphorism about a guy who falls into a sinkhole maybe twenty, thirty feet deep, breaks his leg, and can’t get help from the priest or kindly old lady or doctor or millionaire walking by. Then some ragged hobo jumps down into the hole with him and says, “Listen, I’ve been here before; I know the way out. Follow me.”
That is your obligation as a person of exception. Noblesse oblige can be a pretty arrogant and toxic conceit, but it very much applies here if you are indeed somehow “exceptional,” and most of you are, somehow. (And not in any self-deprecating “yeah I exceptionally SUCK” kinda way either!)
If you’re exceptionally intelligent you owe it to the world to help them understand the things you do and they don’t…and you owe it to yourself to try to find a way to do it with tact so everyone doesn’t hate you for doing it. This was one of my blessings and curses; “gifted child.”
Gifted Child – A Digression
This is a conversation I don’t like having, so I’m going to say up front that people who brag about IQ scores and standardized test results are stupid and insecure. (That said, there’s a whole lot of internet trolling that amounts to “what makes you think you’re so smart?” “Well, years of exceptional results on various standardized aptitude tests.” “STOP BRAGGING!” You can’t beat stupid.)
When I talk about being a “gifted child,” as was the standard term at the time, I don’t mean I took a couple of watered down “AP” courses that don’t even rise to the level of standard-level classes forty years ago. I mean I was one of the kids in the 70s that psychologists and education specialists spent a lot of time being fascinated with and subjecting to an entertaining array of testing and observation as a young lad.
I don’t like going in to it because it’s almost impossible without sounding like you think you’re “better than,” and that’s rarely the case – certainly it isn’t with me. I was a godawful human being in a lot of ways for most of my teen years and early adulthood, into my early thirties, and being a “genius” has definitely brought more cost than benefit thus far – it’s probably a good thing for all of us I was only broken and not evil.
It’s really not a value or character judgement. Some folks have a knack for auto mechanics or agriculture; I have a knack for understanding things. Some people are taller than me, too, or shorter. You probably play better basketball than I do. It’s just not about “better,” and that’s part of the point of the article; we’re all exceptional somehow and most of us have something unique and wonderful to offer the world, without a bunch of ego-serving artifice like participation trophies.
One thing you eventually learn – and usually the hard way – when you’re in a position like that is that you can never, ever, ever count on being the “biggest one in the room,” no matter what the test scores say, and chances are in that room of ten thousand people there may only be one or two who have a greater capacity for learning, innately, than I do…but there are nine thousand nine hundred of them who are better and smarter than me about something.
So about little John Henry The Gifted Child Who Never Lived Up To His Potential: If you put stock in such things – and at the time they did, currently there’s a more nuanced understanding and some issues have been found with execution that tend to reinforce biases of economics and prejudice against girls as well as cultural, ethnic, and economic minorities – my “IQ” was around 150, give or take five or six points depending on which day of the week I took the test and what kind of mood I was in (and I took a whole bunch of ’em). That’s not an internet quiz result, that’s straight up Stanford-Binet & WAIS/WAIS-R & similar batteries and evaluations, administered by qualified professionals.
By way of comparison, average is around 100. The real “big brains” of history are estimated in the 200+ range – DaVinci, Newton, Leibniz, J.S. Mill, Einstein. You run down and find folks like Decartes and Michaelangelo around 180-ish, until you get down into my neighborhood (say 140-160) where you find folks like Ben Franklin, Paul Allen, Emerson, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, FDR, Napoleon. A little lower and you start finding people such as Hillary Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Washington and the like around 120-130.
Typically people start being referred to as ‘geniuses’ somewhere close to 130 or a bit higher.
In 1983 in 7th grade I pulled a 650 math and 710 verbal on the same SAT taken in the same room with several hundred high school juniors and seniors. According to the numbers that placed me in the top 0.02% of test results – and that’s the old school SAT with essays and page after page of Miller Analogies.
Put practically that means if you put me in a room with ten thousand people, statistically I’ll be one of the two “smartest” people in it (and the other will likely be DaVinci). There’s a reasonable probability that your UNIT tests and DATs and other more modern intelligence tests that started coming out in the 1990s were developed or refined in part using data that originated with me and certainly with some of the roughly 1.4 million human beings on this planet who could properly be said to be “like me” in this regard, and all the tests and observations we went through in the 70s and 80s.
School personnel wanted to jump me twice – in first grade they wanted to put me in fourth, and in 8th grade they wanted to make me a high school junior taking a couple of college courses on the side. My folks said no, using the excuse they didn’t want me to be socially maladjusted (hah!) but mostly because it was a lot of hassle and some money and they didn’t want to.
So yeah, if you’re from that time or were there and remember those feel good news stories you used to see like ‘Third Grader Earns Fifteenth Doctorate?’ That was almost me, except I was from a deeply dysfunctional home. There’s a ton of writing I want to do about that whole experience.
I’m not that obnoxious neckbeard who’s constantly jumping in to conversations with “well, actually…” and “not all men!” and the like.
I’m the person that guy thinks he is.
The “advanced placement” kids of the 90s and 2000s and now are basically dealing with the ideas developed around people like me fifty years ago, which were then extended outward and more toward the mainstream and neurotypical (or at least the perceived ideals therein) as yet another way to stratify and define kids before they’re old enough to even know they’re individuals. There’s an aspect of the whole “participation trophy” thing here, too, but again that’s not the kids’ fault.
That whole “common core math” thing? That’s a ham-handed attempt to teach people who aren’t walking around with a brain and a half how to math like people who are…written by people who aren’t and who don’t understand the internal thought processes that make things “normal” people struggle with seem so obvious to someone like me that we can barely break them down far enough to describe. (Like the reality that profit motive is always a conflict of interest and therefore probably shouldn’t be a part of socially critical infrastructure systems like health care and criminal justice…) I recognize the behavior it’s reaching for, it’s just not quite getting there because the people who designed aren’t the people who think that way – I am, that’s why I can see it.
Unfortunately, it’s not the people who think that way, who design the curriculum; it’s the people who study the people who think that way and then try to interpret, describe, and explain it without being able to actually think that way themselves. A bit like if I were explaining a Matisse – I’ve got words to describe it all day long, but I couldn’t recreate it on a bet.
If you’re exceptionally talented at some creative art, you owe it to the world to give them the beauty you’re capable of – or the pain – so they can find the places within themselves those feelings exist and explore them and utilize them and, when necessary, survive them.
Not only that you owe it to all those poor souls who feel the same tempests and trials and terrors you do but lack your exceptional skill at communicating it and sharing it; you let the lost souls of the world know they’re not alone.
If you’re exceptionally wealthy you owe it to the world who doesn’t have a lot of wealth to do what you can to help people out; nobody EARNS a billion dollars, ever – more to the point nobody EARNS their way to being that far outside the top of the bell curve economically. At best one skillfully manipulates one’s self into such a position without violating too many ethics too egregiously along the way if they’re lucky and even care to try and act ethically.
Why do you “owe” this? Because without other people doing the same for you – usually without any idea who you are or will be or even that you, as an individual, exist – you would not be here. There isn’t a man, woman, or child alive on this planet whose existence is not predicated on millions of other men, women, and children paving the way for them. Tell yourself otherwise if you choose; that just means you’re also an arrogant liar who’s capable of successfully lying to themselves.
Getting There
Most anyone reading this or likely to or even able to is exceptional in at least several different ways simply for that fact. You’re literate, you have access to a computer, etc.
If we really want to reach that shiny, peaceful, prosperous, progressive future that we’ve all dreamed about and hoped for and seen on the covers of the sci-fi novels, it is absolutely up to each and every one of us to be at our most exceptional to the greatest benefit of those around us at every possible turn.
Is it possible to get it right every time? Of course not. But you work toward it. You strive, you don’t write it off as an impossible dream, only one that won’t be reached immediately and may never be so completely, but you can’t let that stop you because by definition that’s what striving means, it’s taking on the risk – and sometimes the reality! – of failure, learning from it, picking yourself back up and moving forward having done your best to improve yourself for the experience – if by no other means than not making the same mistake again.
That’s how we get there.
I haven’t always been a good human being, and I’ve never pretended to have been. But that hasn’t stopped me from getting better. Not as in somehow “cured” but as in improving in the ways that are important to me, like not being the abusive jerk I was until I faced the reality that I was making choices and started striving to choose better when I was around thirty. Sometimes I’ve failed, sometimes I’ve succeeded. Sometimes I’ve succeeded in ways that look like failures from the outside. Sometimes I’ve failed in ways that looked like successes. You keep moving, you keep trying, you keep breathing and doing your best.
We all need to be doing that, right now, together. We need to be supporting each other in the acknowledgement of each of our individual human fallibility and failure and loving each other in spite of and sometimes because of it.
We’re all pretty exceptional, and the list of people whose only exceptions are negative is pretty short. We owe it to ourselves, each other, and…well, the entirety of what we know as “reality” to use those exceptions together to create the best reality we can.
The other option is having less than the best reality that we can…and why would we choose that?
How do you find ways to use the things about you that are exceptional to help other people?
Well, we’ve come to the last 24 hours or so of voting in the 2023 Rock And Roll Hall of Fame “fan vote,” and I thought I’d start expanding my territory, so to speak, into talking more often about things other than politics, by taking a look at this year’s Rock Hall vote – in part because it’s a pretty fascinating class and the decision-making was definitely not easy.
Prefatory Matters
Because it’s early days and in a context that will largely be new to many of my current audience, there are a couple things I should say up front:
More than anything else, fundamentally in my core I’m a musician. Have been for 45 years now. I don’t mean I’m a hobbyist or I played guitar for five minutes in a high school jazz band, either. Just putting that out there as a pre-emptive ward against the inevitable round of “what makes you think you know anything about any of this” comments from people who might not like what I said about their favorite artist.
I’m not entirely a fan of the whole idea of a “rock and roll hall of fame.” At its essence rock – and its progenitors in jazz and blues and all the way back – has always been about the very opposite of halls of fame and self-congratulatory flatulence. There are issues with the personalities who control the hall and the preponderance of their favorites alongside the glaring lack of some genuinely deserving artists who just never sucked up hard enough to Jann Wenner. Disappoints me about him; growing up in the 80’s RS was kind of my connection to the authenticity and earnestness of the hippie movements, and watching him calcify into just another institution is a bit painful. That said, it’s a well-known and widely popular way of recognizing people who are important in my life and in many of yours as well, so I’ll appreciate it for being that and not take it too seriously.
“But that’s not Rock and Roll!” Piss off and take your mother and the horse your gatekeeping ass rode in on with you. THAT’S rock and roll. Dick.
It was a tough ballot this year, which hasn’t always been the case.
My natural inclination based the roots of where and how I came up as a musician would’ve had me picking Iron Maiden over either Zevon or Lauper, but as much as I love Eddie I couldn’t step back and honestly say to myself that I thought Maiden were more important to the business or influential in the world of rock and roll than Lauper or Zevon. In both cases even though I’m not hugely a direct fan of them myself, I’d have to be entirely disconnected to not be aware of their impact among so many artists of whom I am a direct fan, aside from my appreciation for their work.
I feel like Maiden deserves the run, and I may have given them the nod in a different field, but even taking out Zevon and Lauper you’re still putting them against some serious weight, including the Spinners, Missy Elliot, and George Michael.
Without further ado, let’s proceed. I’ve arranged the article to be broken up in pages, this one and then one for each of the fourteen nominees. You can navigate using the menus at the top and bottom of each page as you go through, bit like an image gallery.
Kate Bush
Kate Bush, 1985 publicity photo.
As a matter of personal taste, Kate Bush never really resonated with me and I was only barely aware of her when she was truly contemporary. I’ve since become more aware of and familiar with her influence and work, and of course the recent resurgence in her popularity after her 80’s hit “Running Up That Hill” was used in the popular Netflix series Stranger Things in 2022.
As a matter of objective musical merit as best as such a thing can be determined, I think there’d be a strong argument for her nomination in a weaker field. I suspect the bump in her Q rating that came from the recent exposure in “Stranger Things” may well put her over the top for the nomination in the end, and if so I won’t be very mad about it.
Her work with synthesizers and heavy reliance on multimedia elements in her stage shows long before the word “multimedia” was coined, combined with her uncompromising commitment to maintaining control of her music, unquestionably make her a worthy nominee.
That her work was far more popular and recognized in her native Britain isn’t really relevant; her influence is undeniable as is the respect she’s earned from her peers. Without her you’re missing a big piece of everyone from Enya to Tori Amos to her fellow 2024 Fan Vote contender Cyndi Lauper, to say nothing of male acts like Spandau Ballet and more modern successors such as Lady Gaga. All of these and thousands more – Bjork, the B-52s, on and on – owe Kate Bush some part of their careers large or small. In terms of her “place” in music in terms of history and style, I’d say she’s probably the critical bridge between Yoko Ono and latter-day descendants like Bjork, along with the B52s.
To cap it all off, she holds the one key requirement I think is most critical for defining who we really see as our heroes and laureates: she’s always been herself, unapologetically, come what may, and there’s never been anything rock and roll was more about except maybe sex. (Don’t give me that look, the phrase literally started its life as a euphemism for sex.)
While she didn’t make my vote choices I think she’s a worthy contender. Enjoy her first single, Wuthering Heights.
A Tribe Called Quest
Another artist who I wasn’t super close to at the time, but have come to understand and respect their place in their context in the time since. Tribe were hugely influential and represent a great culmination/intersection of every facet of rock musically, and they helped establish and define and entire group of sub-genres within the rap/hip-hop world through their own work and the establishment of the Native Tongues Collective, a group of artists generally seen as intellectual, often very positive and uplifting, and wildly experimental in their sounds; other artists in the collective included De La Soul, Queen Latifah, the Jungle Brothers, and Monie Love.
A Tribe Called Quest perform in 2009. Image courtesy Chalice L via Wikimedia under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License
From the bigger picture, ultimately they’re also fairly niche and I’m not entirely sure they’re rising above this pack to HOF level. Kind of the rap/hip-hip version of Iron Maiden in my mind, I guess, in terms of where I put them in the pantheon.
That said once again as with Kate Bush you absolutely must take into account the huge impact the band had on the overall sound. Most of the pop-hop stuff that’s hit in the last two decades can audibly trace back to these cats, including everything and everyone from PM Dawn to Pharrell Williams.
In spite of that, I don’t expect them to make a great showing this year but they should be nominated again, preferably directly instead of through the fan vote mechanism. Not only are they well deserving, I was somewhat surprised to find that a ton of the rap and hip-hop acts I was thinking “Tribe, but not…?” are in the hall already, which shows how much I’ve been paying attention. About the only folks I can think of who are eligible, fall within the broad scope of rap & hip-hop, and aren’t already in are Snoop/Death Row and KRS-One/Boogie Down Productions, so yeah. It’s fair time for Tribe, but I feel like they’re just fringe enough they’ll probably wait another 5-10 years before they get the nod in spite of that.
Iron Maiden
I was super tempted to vote for Iron Maiden out of sheer personal bias; my early musical career was filled with them. I was a long-haired white male rock/metal musician in the 80’s, of course I love Maiden. Covering “Run To The Hills” was an absolute requirement to prove you were a “real drummer” in my circle when I was about 14, 15 years old. Unfortunately for them and for my biases, that doesn’t rate them for HOF in this field. Maybe in another, but not this one. So let’s talk about objective merit.
As with our two previous contenders, the first thing that must be acknowledged is the immeasurable influence this band have had on their peers and successors. As one of the unholy trinity of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal along with Judas Priest and Motorhead, they can properly lay claim to the foundational slabs of every modern metal genre. The list of metal classics is ridiculous – Run To The Hills, The Trooper, Die With Your Boots On, Wasted Years, Two Minutes To Midnight, Number Of The Beast, Flight Of Icarus, Rime Of The Ancient Mariner are just the tip of the iceburg.
Another thing Maiden share with several of this year’s class of Fan Vote competitors is they tended to lay in heavy on the literary and historical references – more toward science fiction than the fantasy of Zeppelin or Yes, but no less literary for all of that. The Flight of Icarus, inspired by Roman myth; . While they only borrowed the title and not the themes of Heinlein’s science fiction classic “Stranger In A Strange Land,” they full out based entire songs on historical literary works from Coleridge (“The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”) to Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”), and ranging everywhere across the landscape from the obscurity of Ramsay Campbell and Cornelius Ryan to the now cliche Frank Herbert and Edgar Allan Poe references and, of course, the obligatory homage to one Aleister Crowley. And Umberto Eco, and Orson Scott Card, and the list is endless and we haven’t even talked about all the historical references.
Iron Maiden are unquestionably a great example of what Led Zeppelin’s frolics through Tolkien hath wrought on the metal landscape, but they’re also just great musicians. Drummer Nicko McBrain was one of the core go-to references for literally every rock drummer who came up in generally my time and context, and Steve Harris’ classic galloping triplet groove (which he doesn’t use as much as you think but is still an immediately recognizable staple of the sound of Iron Maiden) has worn the fingertips of many thousands of bass players aspirant to nubs. The classic-era twin guitar harmony attacks of Dave Murray and Adrian Smith are now joined by Janick Gers, who originally joined the band after Smith departed in 1990. All of this capped off for the majority of their careers by the unearthly voice of the returned Bruce Dickinson, a man not only well and truly ranked with Ronnie James Dio, Robert Plant, Rob Halford, and Chris Cornell as among the all-time legendary high vocals in rock history but so draped with esoteric hobbies from fencing to commercial airline piloting that on close examination he starts looking like one of those legendary historical characters like Nicolas Flamel. You could probably get a fun little conspiracy going that he’s the latest incarnation of the Comte de St. Germain.
In spite of all of this, in this class, they’re just not quite there enough to make the cut. While their impact within metal is unquestionable, they haven’t had such a big influence outside of “their lane” the way so many Hall of Fame artists have, and I also understand their enthusiastic appeal is, in the picture, pretty limited and niche. Plus there are already several NWOBHM bands in the hall.
In the end, this is another band I really feel should get an official, non-fan nomination and induction – and soon, while they can still perform! – in spite of their not quite making the cut on my fan ballot this year. Don’t hold your breath on this one.
Fun little make you feel old point: at the beginning of this video there’s a computer console from ‘the future’ showing a date in 2050. At the time of this writing, the time between this video’s release in 1987 and the present moment is about 36 years.
We’re nine years closer to the future this video depicts than we are to the past in which it was created. Let me grab a handful of Geritol while you enjoy some Wasted Years, and we’ll move on to our next artist…
Warren Zevon
Warren Zevon, 1978 publicity photo.
Here we come to the first of my five nominees, and the one that genuinely surprised me the most when I ended up going with him over George Michael, Iron Maiden, The Spinners, etc. The reason why is simply this: Zevon’s music but also the personality that informed it and the circle of musicians he was primarily part of – the Rolling Stone darlings of southern California in the 70’s, Linda Ronstadt and The Eagles and Jackson Browne and that whole circle of people – was a profound influence on all of those acts and hundreds more of similar type, and in being so holds primary responsibility for about a third of the music business in the 70s with resonating cascades still being felt today.
Zevon is my “dark horse” pick for the year, as much for his own work as for the work he inspired among friends and fans from Glenn Frey and Don Henley to REM, his collaborations and songs written for others, and also for his status as a “musician’s musician” or “songwriter’s songwriter” along the lines of Leonard Cohen perhaps, or John Prine, or Randy Newman; an artist you recognize almost more for their influence than for their own work, one who turns up on the lips of the people in your music collection far more often than it does in your actual music collection. His style, too, falls in line with those artists and other contemporaries and colleagues like Prine, Newman, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen – the storyteller and troubadour and slightly-off-average-joe, particularly the way he can pull powerful and poignant moments out of the chaotic banality of day to day life with just a few words and the right chord.
Zevon had and still has a ton of respect from some of the heaviest hitters in the game both musically and “politically” within the business (RS has always been in the tank for him), and of all this year’s nominees I’d expect Zevon to have the best shot if Jann Wenner decides to exercise some kind of power and override the fan vote. No disrespect to Zevon – the mainstream has always sucked – but without a straight nomination I don’t see him getting in on a popular wave. There likely aren’t two hundred thousand people on this planet who could name a Warren Zevon song that isn’t “Werewolves of London,” and there probably aren’t half that many who could bring the tune of one to mind on demand. Not to say he didn’t deserve more mainstream accolades, but it is a popular vote after all.
Still so conflicted about this vote that I started writing this entry arguing against including Zevon before remembering I actually voted for him.
Sheryl Crow
I enjoy Sheryl Crow’s work, and frankly in researching her in more depth for this article I realize I haven’t given her enough credit on one hand, and on the other hand she’s also pretty much everything that “Rock and Roll” shouldn’t be in ways I wasn’t at all aware of (to her credit she wears them well), but in the end the result’s the same.
I was aware going in that she got her start as a very well regarded backup vocalist both live and in-studio (Michael f’n Jackson didn’t duet with amateurs!), but was not aware she’d shipped 50 million albums, nor of quite the range and scope of other artists who have worked with her, so I owe her an apology for that.
I also wasn’t aware of her very Privileged Suburban Middle American Cheerleader Girl™ history (my feelings about which in general principle need no telling to anyone who’s read my more political work), which historically tends to speak poorly to an artist’s authenticity.
In spite of my own biases that really have little to do with her music I don’t mean to put her down. By all accounts she’s an extremely decent and conscious person, clearly a consummate professional, and there’s objectively no question that she is a tremendously skilled and talented singer, musician, and songwriter.
Objectively, Crow is much more deeply appreciated by fellow musicians than by music fans, who will generally be familiar with her radio hits (“All I Wanna Do,” “If It Makes You Happy,” “Every Day Is A Winding Road,” and a pretty decent, mostly note-for-note cover of Bobbie Gentry’s classic “Ode to Billy Joe,” plus maybe her cover of G’n’R’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine” on the soundtrack of Adam Sandler hit “Big Daddy) but not much more. Her distinctive clear, high, smooth tone is as immediately recognizable as McCartney or Ozzy or her former boss Michael J, she puts asses in seats, and she delivers on stage.
In spite of that, though, frankly if it’s time to start inducting early 90’s female rock acts I think Alanis Morissette would be a better choice for authenticity and the personal embrace of the whole “attitude” of rock and roll (which ironically is exactly why she’ll likely never be inducted after walking off last year’s show, citing issues of gender discrimination as the key reason why). I’d love to see L7 get a nod; if you’re really going for the boundary pushers and mold-breakers without trying to get into straight gutter punk or obscure unknowns, Fiona Apple or Sinead O’Connor or P.J. Harvey or Liz Phair are all equally meritorious and were all rising or prominent around the same time. If you want to get serious about it let’s talk Wendy O. Williams.
Plus – and this is where the “music snob” in me really comes out – it’s very relevant to note that every one of the acts I mentioned are to some degree and in classic rock and roll style known for being “difficult.” This generally amounts to people (mostly men) being angry when their expectation of deference and privilege meets a pissed off twenty-four year old woman with tattoos and rage in her eyes who’s absolutely unimpressed with your suit and tie, knows what she wants, is going to get it, and doesn’t care whether you like it…or who decides to use your show to be among the very first people to publicly speak out about sexual abuse by Catholic clergy by ripping up a photo of a much-beloved Pope on live television, creating a huge controversy and effectively ending a very promising career as a pop singer, simply because you believe it’s the morally right thing to do.
THAT, to me, is rock and roll. More Johnny Cash with his middle finger front and center, less Pat Boone covering Little Richard, please and thank you. See Bill Hicks’ remarks on this point for my general feelings on the matter.
Crow on the other hand is just a little too inside baseball, a little too standard-issue, a little too go-along-to-get-along, for me to feel that gritty, rubber-meet-road je nais se quois that, for me, is fundamental to everything that rock and roll really is. Sorry. I really have no dislike for her (in fact I’ve toyed with the idea of covering “If It Makes You Happy” myself, and I’m sure she’d be great fun to just hang and jam with), but in the end I can’t get past the number one filter for me when considering female rock artists in the particular context of their being female, which was best expressed years ago by Crissy Hynde of the Pretenders: “Remember you’re in a rock and roll band. It’s not “fuck me,” it’s “fuck you”!” Crow, in spite of being a fairly rare example of a female musician who wasn’t almost or exclusively marketed as a pair of boobs and a furtive aspiration amongst teenage boys, still feels like she falls just a hair too far on the side of “cool kids table” for the 15 year old raging little know it all who hated “poseurs” in me to put her over for this.
I fully recognize that’s likely exactly the reason she’ll get in (and also that it’s not entirely fair of me), if and when she ever does, but that brings us to the whole “really, a rock and roll hall of fame? what’s next, rock against drugs?” conversation and part of the premise of this article is we’re playing along with the core proposition that a Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame is a thing that should even be, and that as it is it’s more or less a fair representation of who musicians and fans think are the greatest rock artists of all time, and we’re not gonna go there this time because I’m trying to have fun with this…
The Spinners
Another very close call, and probably the most likely “sixth place” pick for me. For those unfamiliar, The Spinners were a vocal soul group in the 60’s through the early 80’s primarily (although a version of the group continues touring to this day), and represent the bridge between the past of doo-wop style harmony groups like the Drifters, the Platters and of Motown vocal groups such as The Supremes, The Four Tops, and The Temptations, and their successors like the Commodores, DeBarge, TLC, Boyz II Men, and even the boy bands from Backstreet to BTS.
I should make it clear that this isn’t merely because the group were influenced by those predecessors and then influenced others; they were part of those predecessors, their history actually beginning in 1954 but their greatest commercial success not happening for another two decades. While their sound became strongly associated with “Philly Soul,” the fact is they hailed from the Detroit suburb of Ferndale and had a pretty heavy disco tinge to their biggest, best-known songs, and ironically spent a big chunk of the first decade and a half of their careers at Motown.
After struggling independently for years and then not really finding great success in a decade at Motown (during which they were often sent to chaperone other artists rather than being used as artists themselves), The Spinners finally hit their groove in 1972 when they signed with Atlantic Records and started working with songwriter Thom Bell, and immediately struck gold with the surprise b-side hit single “I’ll Be Around,” which shot up to number 3 on the Billboard Charts in spite of the fact that it wasn’t supposed to be the song getting airplay – the intended a-side single, “How Could I Let You Get Away,” peaked at 77 – and the group exploded from there to become one of the best known, highest-selling, and truly representatives soul groups of the 1970.
The hits, as I said, exploded after they broke through, and the list is intimidating – “Could It Be I’m Falling In Love,” “One Of A Kind Love Affair,” “Then Came You” (with Dionne Warwick), their last big hits “Cupid” and “Working My Way Back To You” charting in 1980, but probably the song they’re best known for outside of genre fans is their 70’s semi-novelty hit “The Rubberband Man.”
The influence of this band is incalculable, with artists from Bowie and Elton John to Paul Stanley and Tom Morello and Chris Cornell mentioning them as influence and references within their own work. They’re every bit as endemic a part of the world and feelings of the 70’s as were the BeeGees or Styx or Peter Frampton, and they deserve recognition. Unfortunately they’re up against a tremendous class of competitors this year, and with the slate I had in front of me I couldn’t quite get there. If any one of the artists I voted for weren’t on the ballot, The Spinners would likely be my fifth pick…if for no other reason than my vivid memories of watching Wonder Woman and The Muppets do “Rubberband Man.” That’s cultural impact, kids.
Rage Against The Machine
Rage Against The Machine in 2007. Image courtesy Flickr user “Penner” via Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Do I even need to explain this? If the only impact Rage Against The Machine had was mainstreaming rap-metal crossovers with their blistering debut album featuring all-time greats like “Killing In The Name Of…” and “Bombtrack,” they’d be well worthy of this accolade, but the fact is that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
What Rage did was to define and energize an entirely new era of activism and speaking truth to power, in which the platitudes and calls for civility and decorum were firmly rejected with a rousing chorus of “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” Harnessing the power of the machine to destroy it while also hitting mainstream rock success with radio-friendly-ish stuff like “Guerilla Radio” and “Bulls On Parade,” Rage have used their platform to scream and aggressively demand social justice since their very first video for “Freedom” featured historical information related to imprisoned (and many say unquestionably framed) Chippewa activist Leonard Peltier and bold-faced on-screen calls for his release over a soundtrack of sneering, angry, and entirely well-founded criticisms of the so-called “freest nation on Earth.”
There’s probably not a standard-configuration rock band on the planet today that more successfully perpetuates and typifies the anti-corporate individualism of the hippie era. While it may be difficult to discern musically, thematically there’s a clear, bright connecting line leading directly from Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger through Buffalo Springfield and Ritchie Havens and CSNY directly to Rage, with a side trip through every Angry Young Man from Dee Snider to Chuck D along the way.
All of this, coming out of nowhere like a bullet in the head against a backdrop of lingering jingoism and nationalism related to the cold war, America’s emergence as the world’s “only superpower,” and the broadly popular Operation Desert Shield/Storm. At a time when much of the nation were as mindlessly patriotic as we’ve ever been, Rage stood up with a mirror and gave us no choice but to take a good hard look at ourselves.
That their fans have, over the years, included some incredibly right-wing figures who apparently had no idea what the lyrics were saying who later jumped up to express their disappointment at Rage “becoming political,” is just icing on the cake.
Unquestionably a vote for, and it should’ve happened the day they were eligible. “Freedom.” Yeah, right.
Soundgarden
Soundgarden performing at the Fox Theater in Oakland on 16 February 2013. Image courtesy Peter Hess via Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
There simply is no one band more emblematic of the “grunge” sound than Soundgarden. Not to take anything away from their friends in Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Mudhoney, Tad, Eleven, and a host of others, mind you, but for folks of a certain generation and cultural context the word “Seattle” evokes mental imagery not of space needles and coffee but of soaring, unearthly howling vocals delivered over weird tunings and time signatures with a dark twist of fatalistic hope and appreciation of the most obscure types of beauty and power found in the most hopeless and helpless places.
I could, and have, and will, write reams just about singer Chris Cornell, but the entire band are absolute masters of their craft. (Personally I think Cornell should be in as a solo artist too.) Kim Thayil does things with the guitar that nobody but the Jimi/mys would ever understand, an absolute riff monster with zero limits or boundaries to the things he makes his instrument do. Drummer (and huge musical influence on yours truly) Matt Cameron is an absolute perfect rhythmic blend of influences from the obvious and expected Peart and Bonham touches to out-of-left-field funk, jazz, and just plain unclassifiable grooves and fills, and the way his tunes and mixes his drums with nearly no resonance or reverb but still manages to get them to thump as hard as anything Bonham ever did is beyond masterful and definitely changed the way I and many other rock drummers approach the instrument. Finally, longest-serving bassist Ben Shepherd holds down the fort at the bottom end with all the steady pound and drive that great anchors like Michael Anthony and Cliff Williams bring to Van Halen and ACDC, but also with the riffing capabilities of a McCartney or Entwhistle. Plus he’s huge fun to watch on stage.
The band taken as a whole is simply mind-boggling. Effortlessly intertwining influences from metal, jazz, soul, and funk with alternate guitar tunings and weird overlapping time signatures (check out the polyrhythmic base of “Mind Riot,” where the verses have the guitars and vocals in 4/4 with the drums in 3/3, coming back together on the “one” every twelve beats), they didn’t just make music but defined it for a generation, every inch of the way in spite of each member’s intense desire to simply make good music without particular regard for commercial success.
The band’s early breakthrough album BadMotorFinger is rock-solid grunge perfection; I’ve often said that “Searching With My Good Eye Closed” (included below) contains absolutely every element of every great rock-metal tune ever written, flawlessly executed from fade-in to fade-out, and probably represents the pinnacle of the form. Then their followup, Superunknown, with its massive hit “Black Hole Sun” brought psychedelia firmly into the computer age. There is simply no excuse for this band not having been in the hall from the moment they were eligible, and the fact that they largely eschew such honors and pageantry is just another argument in their favor. I’d have voted for them in all five slots if I could.
I would also go on about how great this band is forever, if I could, but instead of that I’ll let you enjoy this masterpiece. I dare you to get through it without at least nodding your head along to the groove. Get headphones, turn it up, and strap in: it simply does not get better.
George Michael
George Michael performing in Houston, Tx 1988.
Oh, George Michael, how the years have forced a re-evaluation of you. Back in the day when I was coming up, George was mostly the butt of jokes by anti-establishment comedians like Bill Hicks (who once proposed Michael’s first group Wham! as a possible future contender in the “Let’s Hunt And Kill…” TV game show, right after Billy Ray Cyrus and Rick Astley).
Over time, however, the combination of Michael’s pop appeal and a more matured and developed musical sense elevated him to among the best soul singers of the 90s. Breaking out as a solo act first with the upbeat radio-friendly “Faith,” Michael displayed a great range and depth in deeper cuts (which later rose to prominence), particularly ballads like “Father Figure” and the deeply bluesy “One More Try.”
Michael’s later-career struggles with drugs and fame, including dealing with his bisexuality in public after years of scurrilous speculation, unfortunately tended to overshadow his music in the press, but he quickly evolved into an “old hand” on arena pop stages, collaborating with the usual galaxy of stars (his 1993 collaboration with original artist Elton John on a cover of “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” was well-received and very deservedly so) and occasionally stumbling over tabloid scandal until his unfortunate succumbing to what I call “lifestyle poisoning,” in this case an enlarged heart and fatty liver from years of drug and alcohol abuse, at age 53 in 2016.
Because of his association with pop music and the usual workings of that subsection of the business, folks tended to assume Michael was recording songs written by other songwriters but in fact he wrote most of his own material both in Wham! and as a solo artist, and was also a skilled instrumentalist who handled all of the keyboard, bass, and drums on his debut album himself.
Aside from the artistic merits of his talent, Michael was a vocal advocate for LGBTQ rights and identity at a time when that was a hugely unpopular and even dangerous thing, choosing to stand and be who he was rather than concede to the pressures of bigotry and hate that dominated the mainstream…again, very much rock and roll by way of attitude, proof the man wasn’t just a performer playing a role.
With all that said, his career just wasn’t quite deep enough or with enough lasting influential impact on the art form as a whole for me to feel like he’s rising to the top two-thirds of this year’s class, so unfortunately I had to pass.
Cyndi Lauper
Grammy and Emmy award-winning artist and LGBT equality advocate and honorary chairperson Cyndi Lauper sings “True Colors” with two youth performers to close the National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day event on May 9, 2012. Five youth performers from across the country were honored at the event for their stories of enhanced resilience following traumatic experiences. Visit www.samhsa.gov/children for more information.
Our next contestant is another artist who was unfairly judged as shallow and transient because of her pop roots and appeal, but who has proved over time to be a consummate professional with a stunning depth of musical knowledge and dynamics. Cyndi Lauper may simultaneously be the most and least predictable entrant this year. From the moment she broke on the scene as a solo act with her 1983 album “She’s So Unusual” and it’s catchy pop feminist anthem “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” Lauper’s wildly colored hair, thrift-shop-tornado style of dress, and unflinching and uncompromising commitment to being her unique self immediately served as a beacon to disaffected and bored teenagers of the affluent early Reagan Eighties, which eventually led to her emergence as a key advocate against homophobia and for safe sex and research in the early days of the AIDS crisis. (Her cheeky, less mainstream anthem, “She Bop,” was infamously – allegedly, I don’t know that Lauper’s ever confirmed it herself -a narrative about masturbation only nominally hidden behind paper-thin euphemisms. It’s also a pretty nifty bit of early 80’s experimental synth-pop, deceptively simple-sounding; I’ve included it below for you to check for yourself.)
Those who wrote her off as just a flash in the pan pop gimmick were thrown a hard curve when Lauper’s popularity proved much more than transient and her talent and skill proved more than sufficient to the task of validating her positive public reception. Her sophomore album “True Colors” featured a title track of that rare stripe that genuinely earns the title of “instant classic.” (Having it drilled into our heads by a decade of Kodak commercials probably didn’t hurt either!) Over the years her work on everything from Broadway show tunes to jazz standards has continued to delight and amaze, and every step of the way she’s never stopped being her essential self, this “weird little chick from Ohzoan Pawk” with the high squeaky voice, doing her happy colorful best to bring a little fun and beauty into the world and being a wonderful human being by any definition.
As the frosting on the cake, she’s always been extremely vocal and active in her support and advocacy of marginalized groups including the LGBTQ community, abused kids, and more, and again is just one of those rare people that you almost never hear an unkind word about from her peers either publicly or in “green room” chatter.
A nomination well earned, and she’s got my vote.
Missy Elliott
Frankly this is probably my least favorite nominee of this year’s class. Not to say I don’t dig her stuff or hate on her in the least, I just feel like there are a lot of women who have done more, gone further, and helped paved the roads Ms. Elliott started walking in the 90’s who remain unrecognized, like Roxanne Shante, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, or even Salt-n-Pepa. Worthy of induction? Probably, in the big picture, but I think she’s got some folks to get in line behind.
That said she’s sold forty million albums, was instrumental in the highly influential Swing Mob collective, and brought Timbaland to the world. She’s legit and well due her props. I just think there are better potential nominees reflecting the vital role of female rappers who I’d rather see get the nod first.
Willie Nelson
Is there anyone in the western hemisphere who need to be told who Willie Nelson is or why he deserves to take his spot in the Rock Hall next to his colleagues like Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee?
Willie Nelson and several friends with President Jimmy Carter, 1978. The woman to Nelson’s immediate right is fellow country music singer Jesse Colter.
Nelson would arguably be a reasonable inductee if his career had ended before his first album, having written the staples “Hello Walls” for Faron Young and “Crazy” for Patsy Cline before he was ever taken seriously as a performer by record labels, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.
One of the reasons Nelson has likely been overlooked by the Rock Hall for so long is likely that he’s often seen primarily as a country artist, in spite of the fact that critics have been observing that he’s far more than just that for fifty years, particularly after “Always On My Mind” became a hit for Elvis Presley. After hooking up with Waylon Jennings at the Opry in the mid-1960s Nelson embarked on his “outlaw country” journey, refining (or perhaps one would better say “unrefining,” a similar path taken by his contemporaries comedians George Carlin and Richard Pryor around the same time in the mid to late 1960s) his image from blazer-and-tie standard-issue country artists of the early 60s to the rough-riding dusty laid-back rope-smoker we know and love today.
After making the first stab at a country-themed concept album in the mid-70s with “The Red-Headed Stranger,” Nelson’s next release “Stardust” featured a collection of jazz and blues standards including the title track and an extraordinarily well-received cover of “Georgia On my Mind.” Throughout this period, Nelson continued collaborating with Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and other artists, eventually joining those two and Johnny Cash in an extraordinarily successful quartet called The Highwaymen, with whom he’d spend about a decade from the mid-80s to mid-90s among other work.
Included in that “other work” was the creation in 1985 of Farm Aid. Inspired by the 1985 Live Aid concert to help with famine in Ethiopia, Nelson along with John Mellencamp and Neil Young, got together and staged the first Farm Aid concert in late 1985. While organizers initially believed a single show would be enough to get the job done, they admitted later that they had woefully underestimated the complexity and scope of challenges facing American family farmerss, and the show became an irregularly scheduled ongoing event, almost-but-not-quite-annually, and has now been staged thirty-four times in the last thirty-eight years, with the thirty-fifth announced but not yet scheduled for 2023 and set to feature Nelson, Young, and Mellencamp along with current Farm Aid directors Dave Matthews and Margo Price and further acts TBA later this year.
With hundreds of songwriting credits to his name spanning across seven decades and two centuries there are few artists alive or dead who have had a bigger impact on rock and roll, and to this day Nelson remains a fan and performer of rock, recording (as one example) a stellar cover of Pearl Jam’s hit “Just Breathe” with son Lukas in 2012 (included below).
It’s honestly ludicrous that Nelson wasn’t in the hall thirty years ago, and long past time that oversight was corrected. Happy to cast my vote for him.
Joy Division + New Order
This is where I’m going to get in trouble with people, because the truth is this band have never resonated with me, at all, even a little tiny bit. As far as I can tell their most significant contribution to Rock and Roll was that t-shirt. I mean no disrespect to the tragically departed Ian Curtis nor to the rest of the band, I’m sure they’re all competent and exceptional musicians to have the careers they’ve had. But I’ve never heard a song by them that made me want to hear it again or cover it, including “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and while it may relate more to the way my life has subjectively intersected with their fan base, they seem primarily to me an act whose success is predicated mostly on people who like to impress other people with how edgy and alternative they are by name-checking a 45 year old British punk band.
Good band? Sure, I’ve got nothing against them on that level, just not my style per se. But objectively, listening to their music and looking for the things that I believe make great rock and roll, I just can’t merit the suggestion they belong in the Rock Hall at all. There are dozens of acts more worthy (and I’m not even under consideration so again, I’m not trying to generally crap on them as an act), whose contributions were more clear, substantive, and resonant, and I just don’t feel like putting them in the hall representing the punk wing before bands like X, the Germs, Devo, Bad Brains, MC5, and Black Flag makes a whole lot of sense from a perspective of “what impact did this artist have on music?” The Germs alone ended up squeezing out bits of everything from the GoGo’s (Belinda Carlisle was an early bassist and huge advocate) to Foo Fighters (Germs guitarist Pat Smear famously launched a whole new career as the guitarist for Nirvana and the Foos), and I just don’t hear that much impact musically from JD+NO that to me would rate their inclusion in the Rock Hall over that pedigree among many others.
Even if you set the “punk” aside and focus on the “new wave” elements, there are tons of acts more deserving of a place in the Hall who don’t have one, including seminal influencers like Simple Minds, Brian Eno, Depeche Mode, INXS, the Psychedelic Furs, Madness or The Smiths, just off the top of my head.
Sorry if that hurts feelings but there you have it, I’m sure not all of you think Chris Cornell is the king of all rock either.
Again, I’m not saying the band sucks or even that the fact they don’t resonate with me personally is a meaningful criterion for exclusion. I honestly can’t really stand the Smiths and Morrissey either, never did a thing for me, but I can recognize their influence and talent objectively and wouldn’t object to their inclusion if Morrissey would stop being a drama queen and just play the songs that people love out of respect for the people who love them, that being literally the only reason they weren’t inducted on at least two different occasions (2008 and 2014 if I remember right).
Objectively from decades of listening to other musicians across all genres talk about who they’ve been influenced by there are at least two dozen bands who fit comfortably into this slot and merit it far more, and that means for me there’s a long, long list of folks I want to see in the Hall before I’m interested in voting for Joy Division, New Order, or both separately or together.
The White Stripes
Finally we come to our last entrant, the White Stripes. Of all the bands I didn’t vote for this year, this one made me feel worst. I really enjoy Jack White’s playing and the Stripes stuff. The guy’s got crazy tone for days, just an absolutely insane experimenter with his sounds and production tactices, and I have absolutely zero problem with the idea that the Stripes are a great band and that Jack White is absolutely on a level that it’s completely reasonable to film an entire movie that’s just him, Jimmy Page, and The Edge sitting around shredding and talking about music.
Also in White’s favor (and the band’s by extension) is his obvious depth and sincerity of his love for the art. His intense absorption of influences very much reminds me of watching how the playing of the big British blues guys were influenced by American blues and then turned it around and inside out and learned to find their own blues and bring it out the other side having taken nothing away from nor given any slight their influences. Definitely another of those “musician’s musician” types…
…and that’s part of the problem. In spite of moving some units, to most music fan’s White’s still best known for “Seven Nation Army” and I feel like that’s about it in the minds of most music fans who are aware of him at all. Their loss to be sure, but like I said before, it is a fan vote, and that means a popularity contest, and I just don’t see the Stripes making that cut. Additionally, I feel like in spite of his very forward-thinking approach to his work the broad mainstream impact, either directly through commercial success or indirectly through influence, just doesn’t rise yet to Hall Of Fame levels. If it was a musician’s or guitarist’s hall of fame I’d vote for him without hesitation, but this is a little different animal, and there’s more than just your talent and skill that have to be considered; how many people even know who you are is also important, as is what the average music fan has to say about where you fit in their head. Taking those less-musical points into consideration, and given the field at hand, I couldn’t quite make the stretch this time.
You may also notice that in spite of the nomination being for “The White Stripes,” my remarks have been almost exclusively about Jack White. That’s not because I have any disdain for Meg White nor think poorly of her in any way, I’m just not finding much in my head to say about her one way or the other. She’s a good, steady drummer, but that’s also all – not any huge innovations or weird experimentations with time signatures or cross-genre grooves or anything like that. She seems like good people and I feel almost as bad about not having more to say in her praise and defense as I do about not voting for the band in the first place.
All that said I still didn’t vote for them, but if it’s any consolation, I really do feel bad about it and am happy to apologize to Mr. White in person at any time. (Rumor is he owns a place within ten or fifteen miles of where I sit.)
In Conclusion…
That wraps it up for the 2023 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Fan Vote. I hope you’ve found it interesting and informative. Definitely looking forward to hearing what you all think in the comments and on social media. Who did you vote for? Why? What do you think of my votes and reasoning, do I have my tone-deaf head up my butt or should I be getting a phone call from Spin this week? Did you learn anything new, did anything I put out there maybe give you pause for thought? Tell us in the comments and let’s fight about it!
We – the people, the “left” – are stronger every day.
We have it right. We know – at least in broad general terms – what needs doing to create a smooth transition into the next chapter of human evolution, and we know how to do it. All we need now is more people tuned in and turned on, so to speak.
It is absolutely critical to this effort to break the hold panderers and grifters have over left wing discourse in this country. I’m talking about the clickbaiters who don’t really do anything but copy and paste other people’s tweets into their branded template and call themselves activists, Twitter insta-pundits whose only discernible contribution to the discourse is being able to write “fuck” a lot and direct it toward right-wing public figures (James “Sweary History” Fell excepted because that’s his gimmick and he’s written books and done other things and has an identity beyond his Twitter handle). Superfluous grifters. The kinds of drizzling puddles of humanity that charge you five hundred bucks to “engage” with you for four tweets. The kinds of self-proclaimed “liberal” and “leftist” and “progressive” “activists” who are so bad at what they do that they will unironically create a campaign shaming mental illness and playing on violent racist tropes to defeat a candidate that was a laughingstock in the first place.
Now people are catching up and catching on, and the time is (at least of those presented thus far) optimal to start pushing hard on this whole concept of media and information literacy, discernment of sources, knowing who’s getting paid by your social media activity and making sure they really are who they represent themselves to be.
These people and others of their same basic mentality and ethical vacuum have spent ridiculous amounts of energy trying to end progressive integrity completely, and they have failed. They have failed because they understand neither integrity nor progress. Fundamentally they want to make money, and the way they’ve chosen to do that is by pandering to the political biases of people who think of themselves as progressive. In doing so, they’ve cratered genuine leftist movement in this country and did a great deal to give us President Donald Trump by throwing their weight behind status-quo middle-path capitalism in the hopes of making political careers for themselves through sycophancy to entrenched power.
They hurt us, and they hurt our country, and they made fools of us, and they took millions of dollars from us.
Now it’s time to return the favor. Not by going after them personally (because that’s petty and weak), but by ending the whole series of logical breaks, ethical corner-cutting, and self-deception that empowered their grift in the first place.
We must stop taking our cues on the left from people who don’t care about what’s right but only about what’s profitable. It’s a conflict of interest; if all you care about is numbers, it doesn’t take long to start making sacrifices to integrity in order to chase them.
The folks who do this are a big part of why instead of looking for new progressive leadership so we can all have the lives we want, need, and deserve, we continue looking at the old pillars of the center-right capitalist wing of the DNC, which is the wing that controls most of the party, hoping that somehow THIS will be the time when capitalism-lite works.
The win condition of capitalism is fascism. It’s unavoidable, and it’s time to start crafting whatever we decide to call the thing that is post-capitalism.
These bad actors don’t want to move past capitalism because it’s the only reason they have any power in the first place and they know that they can’t survive on a level playing field where merit and integrity are more important than one’s ability to buy their way in.
They’re part of the reason we’re not moving forward like we should be, and it’s time to shed their anchoring weight from the evolution train.
We have the numbers and we have the ethical high ground. They’ve got money, and right now that’s an advantage. We live in a capitalist system and to some degree are forced by that to need money; that’s why I have a Patreon.
The only reason people like Omar Rivera (Occupy Democrats) and Matt Desmond (Being Liberal/AddictingInfo) and other grifters and panderers like them aren’t out here doing the same thing I do, asking directly for contributions to help them stay alive and able to produce work, is they lie through their teeth about what they’re doing (generally lies of omission; they just don’t mention it). They’re living on what they make online just like I do, I’m just honest about it. I say “hey I’m doing this work and need to survive.” They want to sell you branded beach towels – the illusion and presentation of an identity offered as a for-profit saccharine homoncular pretense of activism, intended primarily for consumption by that particular breed of human who values style and social validation over truth and accuracy and progress. I and others like me – writers and activists of integrity – are trying to eat, pay bills, and have the equipment to put our skills and talent to the best use to make the world better.
It’s the same thing all these people who do kickstarters for books and stuff are doing; trying to survive and pay the bills long enough to do what they believe they’re supposed to be doing. “Pay me, and I can write a novel.” It’s really not that complex or underhanded, until people like the Occupy Democrats and Being Liberals of the world get involved and try to turn it all into a grift, and they’re terrified you’ll notice that some of us aren’t doing that, so they work to take us out before you do notice and realize you’re being taken for a ride by them. Since they’re starting from a position of power and are willing to make compromises to core principles (if they’re even able to recognize a compromise when they see one), they naturally have the upper hand against the rest of us.
The behavior tends to be self-rewarding and self-perpetuating; it’s hard to lose money by pandering to people’s egos…and when money’s the point, any damage done to discourse or our overall political health, for instance by allowing critical messages of truth and progress to be dulled and deflected by those more interested in pleasing those holding power, is just another bullet point on the collateral damage list.
With friends like that, the US left definitely does not need enemies.
That’s why it’s so important that we, the people, get it together on an individual level and take it upon ourselves to seek true literacy with humility and an open mind. In particular we need to be very cautious about allowing the knee-jerk emotional reactions of our ego to lead us into ignoring realities that are unflattering or unpleasant.
That set of problems solves itself when people get too smart to fall for cheap appeals to ego and bias in the first place. That’s what I’ve been working to do for these last dozen years or so, beyond a broader lifetime of other activism.
That’s why I particularly scare them and why I draw so much heat from them: because that’s exactly what we’re making happen and I’m the face of that.
Thanks for continuing to energize and support me and us and what we do here. We’re right.
We are right.
We have the answers we need.
Now we just have to push past the bastards that don’t want anyone to hear them.
A tiny snippet of a whole lot of Mr. Desmond and his friends proving once again how much they don’t care what I have to say, I’m not relevant to anything or anyone, and there’s no way in the world they’d be the types to gang up and dogpile someone who criticized them genuinely and politely over a minor error in a “news” article…for now a dozen years and counting.
Curating all this old content has me thinking…gosh I did a lot of great work in 2011.
2011, when I had equipment and fairly stable housing and transportation, and also wasn’t working full time (was in school; still very much full time but way more flexible, and I could integrate a lot of the work you’re seeing here as material for my classwork). Almost like there’s a connection there…
If I was the conspiracy type I’d note that all of this was happening and moving forward pretty well until I ran into Mr. AddictingInfo and his friends in September of that year who continue to this minute to openly and publicly exhibit the very behavior I’ve been calling them out on for over a decade and they continue to insist they’re not engaging in, *even while they do it right in front of your eyeballs.* The contempt these people have for your intellect is astounding.
Not to belabor the point, I’m just looking at the material I was producing and the reactions it was getting and wondering what would’ve happened if once again the “cool kids” hadn’t decided I wasn’t allowed to be “one of us” because they know they look like the half-assed pikers they are by any meaningful measure in comparison. They know that my entire raison d’etre is to do my best to help as many people as I can understand where we are, how we got here, and how to get out of it, and that includes divesting them of their ill-gotten and broadly abused power over public discourse.
Thanks to all of you who read, comment, share, like, and contribute. This is unquestionably the most difficult period of my life, coming on the heels of a series of very difficult periods interspersed with just bare stability that consumed the time I’d have rather been creating content. I’ve taken some really major hits, and I wish I was all mister stiff upper lip and roll with the punches, but I’m kind of sick of normalizing that crap. My life sucks, any fault in that of my own ended a long time ago and I’ve worked hard to set right what I could and stop doing things that would need to be set right later. I’ve helped a lot of people. Some appreciated it, some didn’t. Some just appreciate what I do.
But there can be no question that the rabid dogpile response on YouTube validates everything I’ve been saying about these clowns, and they showed up precisely as expected.
“C’mon now, who do you think you are? Hah! Bless your soul… You really think you’re in control?”
Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”
Sure, my life is really tough right now and I’m still not sure how I’m gonna fix it other than coming in to a LOT of money FAST. And I’m up against such BS; I had a major network admin tell me flat out that he could easily put me in front of Mackenzie Scott, but wouldn’t because I was linking to content on other platforms. Stupid little human crap like that for whatever reason just constantly floods my path, and I’ve been plowing through it like a North Dakota winter road crew for what seems like all my life, and now I’m finally just sick of all of it and not playing the game anymore…and that’s exactly what a whole lot of folks were hoping wouldn’t happen.
These people were betting I’d be long gone by now, and I’m not.
I’ve got my flaws. I’m about 60% nuts, really. Not in the sense of being genuinely unstable per se, I’m not that guy. I got way to close to BEING that guy a long time ago, and I put the brakes on that crap real hard. That’s not me.
But there’s this thing that so-called “normal” people have where they can tolerate being forced to exist in ways that are objectively intolerable. Our entire “way of doing things,” with money buying political power and the ability of a human being to survive and be their best without first committing half or more of their waking adult lives to generating profits for someone else in exchange for a tiny, tiny fraction of the value their work…those things are really insane.
Of course I’m aware that anyone who’s genuinely lost their minds tends to think they’re the ones who are sane and everything else is nuts. Trust me, it’s kept me up at night more than once. I defy you to suggest in any way that anything is working well and properly anywhere in the world right now for anyone but the wealthiest, and that there is a direct proportional relationship to the wealth controlled by a given individual and their sense that the world is currently well-ordered and sane.
Part of what’s nuts, and part of why I have kept circling back to Mr. Desmond and his abhorrent, ignorant business model over the years even as it has – to the great detriment of pretty much everyone but the people at the top, as usual, in this case the folks who are running these giant meme farms purporting to be liberal and progressive activists while the entire extent of both their activism and their expertise extends to reading the statistics at the bottom of every tweet, looking for keywords that resonate with the left, and pasting the popular ones into their branded template for distribution.
As far as I can tell not one of them has ever had a real job, but they’ll stand here all day telling you the journeyman tool and diemaker who’s been a musician for four and a half decades, put well over a million miles under his ass as a professional driver, spent years in desktop support and various network administration and database development roles, web design, media production, and a ton more is the fella who “refuse to work.”
People fall for that crap, and that’s nuts.
The people pushing it will push until their last breath to make you believe I’m the one who’s nuts for saying so.
The degree to which that small group of folks who doesn’t like me REALLY DOES NOT LIKE ME and will absolutely cross any boundary including trying to influence me to suicide, attempting to destroy me professionally, attacking my family, attacking my workplaces, trolling the social media of people who share my content in an effort to discourage that from happening (again, all of this happening in broad daylight while the people doing it tell you that you’re nuts for not believing them instead of your lying eyes), is beyond nuts.
I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I’m pretty broken and screwed up myself, but I seem to attract some real deep-core psychos, the types who will play out a game for fifteen or twenty years just to amuse themselves because they think they’re getting away with it. These twits at the big leftie pages are just one subset of a larger group of folks – still a tiny fraction of a minority of the people I engage with and talk to, mind you, but an incredibly loud and aggressive one – who fall into that “really does not like me” category, and near as I can tell the only legitimate complaint most of ’em have is either they don’t like my personality or I stopped pretending I was falling for their bullshit.
That’s pretty nuts.
Anyone telling you otherwise is not a reliable information source.
Anyone telling you the insane amount of time and energy I’ve had to spend dealing with all this nonsense over the years, including pervasive death threats, including hassling my parents when they were alive, threatening my kid when she was little, countless employers harassed, is somehow the reasonable and expected result of my unacceptably aberrant behavior is not only an unreliable information source, they’re a psychotic asshole and they need serious help.
The truth is we – you reading this and me writing it -have an incredible amount of power when we work together, and that terrifies the people who run the instapundit and bias-pandering clickbait ideology-for-profit accounts. When we work together, we can improve our collective information quality by improving our collective information literacy.
The way to stop falling for grifters is to understand how the grift works, so it works less effectively on you.
Now ask yourself this question:
Who’s the person you trust? The person who tells you that…or the person who spends a dozen years with all his friends ganged up to tell you the person who tells you that is the real grifter?
I don’t have exclusive command of THE REEL TRVTH or even “all the answers.” I’ve got a pretty decent dose of each, but I’m human and fallible.
What I do have is not just the iron-clad certainty but ironclad real-time evidence that these “leftist” heroes and “influencers” are mostly just a bunch of money-grubbing fascists selling you a cheap imitation of the principles and values you hold most dear. There’s a screenshot of it at the top of this post.
First Televised Presidential Debate – Richard M. Nixon and John F Kennedy faced each other in this event leading up to the 1960 US Presidential Election. The impact of these debates is still a lively subject among historians, political scientists, and communication experts, as there is significant consensus among most contemporary observers and those looking back at the debate that had the debate not been televised, Nixon may well have won it and possibly taken the 1960 election.
However, in spite of having a stronger command of the subject matter and possibly winning “on points,” Nixon simply looked horrible on camera – he was visibly sweating, his suit looked approximately the same color as his skin, and his facial expressions were sometimes unflattering while Kennedy came off polished, poised, and camera-ready. Nixon’s presence was so poor that Chicago mayor Richard Daley was quoted as saying “My god, they’ve embalmed him before he even died.”
While the contenders had three other debates, there wasn’t another Presidential candidate debate until 1976, after which they became standard in every Presidential election. Until 1984, these debates were sponsored by the League of Women Voters and broadcast on traditional, terrestrial television. Among other things, this made them subject to the FCC’s equal time rule, ensuring that independent and third-party candidates had access. In 1985 the Democratic and Republican parties came together to create The Commission on Presidential Debates (Wikipedia) which has since sponsored and hosted the debates, giving the two major parties significant control over the content…and the candidates allowed to participate.
The ongoing discourse about “cancel culture” and how to “take a joke” provides a chance to reflect on our continuing evolution.
All humor is based in pain. Much of it, in the pain of others. As Mel Brooks famously said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
Humans are always evolving as emotional and social creatures, always learning more about ourselves as individuals and a group, always moving forward. This means that some things lose their humor over time, again among individuals and in the culture at large.
One of the shifts we’re currently seeing is away from the schadenfreude of humor – the taking delight in someone else’s harm, rather than laughing with them and thereby at least in part at ourselves.
Consider the movie “Airplane!” There are three classic scenes in this movie, which still are funny in my opinion but would never get filmed in 2022: the “jive dudes,” the little girl with the coffee (“No thanks, I take it black. Like my men.”), and the panicking passenger getting the crap beat out of her. These scenes still play funny to me, and from what I see online people in 2022 watching them still laugh, if with a bit of cringe at the little girl.
Oh stewardess, I speak jive.
If you tried to put the jive dudes over as original work in a script today it would be shot down. Appropriation, patronizing, othering, racism – is it? or is it a joke on racism? or simply a bit of fun with caricatures of cultural difference, and the ‘racist’ aspect is something we’re superimposing because the men are black and they’re using a parody (they made up the lines) of what was called “jive” in the 70’s and we’d now call “African American Vernacular English” after figuring out “ebonics” wasn’t cutting it? – and great white hopes, portrayal of black men as incapable of communicating “properly.”
If my job is to vet project content for the probability of negative publicity I’m all over this, here in 2022.
Nobody – nor nearly nobody, I haven’t seen anyone take it on – is trying to “cancel” that retroactively, but if you tried to put it through a studio today they’d never let it pass…and it quite likely *would* create a bunch of rancor on social media as people debated whether Mrs. Cleaver was really an avatar for white supremacy.
The argument has merit, although I’m not sure you could really bring it home conclusively. You could make it strongly enough to cut the scene today using today’s values and mores, is the point.
This is the evolution of humor. We understand in 2022, because of 42 years of discourse between that scene and now, that while there is still humor there it’s also important to hold the ugly part to account and talk about it and understand it and maybe it evolves into something where perhaps if someone rebooted it today it’s more the white stewardess who couldn’t understand “jive” that’s the butt of the joke, something to mitigate the implication of punching down in the original.
I’m not trying to kill or cancel that scene, but I’m trying to say that humor, like all creative expression, *evolves* and when it evolves it’s generally because enough people finally figured out that the pain contained within some humor is a weapon, not a release; that people can truly be hurt by our words and portrayals of our perceptions of them so maybe we should try a little harder to not be dicks.
When I hear comedians, especially people like Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle who have been to some extent taken as progressive thought leaders, going on and on about “cancel culture” and “nobody can take a joke anymore” even as they crap all over everything people liked about them, what I hear is people who have become lazy, complacent, and selfish. They want to coast on EZ mode, doing the same routines (or at least sticking to minor variations on the same proven themes) over and over, while the audience is moving forward without them.
Humor is an expression of pain, and there are ways we can joke and reflect on being human and feeling pain, without inflicting it. With that said, those ways are going to change and shift and evolve too, and maybe something that’s pitch perfect today will be seen in twenty or forty years as almost criminally obscene, for better or worse, right or wrong.
Three words makes all the difference
Our job as people is to make sure we’re honest enough with ourselves to, in those moments, own our errors and do our best to set them right. Some of that has to do with the nature of our harm perception in retrospect; it’s hurtful but does it do harm? It’s hurtful to sexualize a pre-adolescent girl for humor, but was she harmed by it? Traumatized? (Did she even get the joke? And by the way, is it funny or not? Why?) What about the social impact, do we think there was a spike in human trafficking of little white girls to Africa in response to the coffee joke? (Let’s not forget the racism in play here, too.) The most likely reasonable answer to those questions is “no.”
Oh, just remembered the whole bit with Peter Graves and “have you ever seen a grown man naked?” Have to include that one, in this discussion. (Similar to the ubiquitous racism in two of the clips above, that one catches the casual homophobia prevalent at the time too.)
The entire humor in both of those bits is the uncomfortable, inappropriate tension. That’s the whole thing about it that makes you laugh. But it is too inappropriate to even tell the joke, in the light of our evolving understanding?
These kinds of questions are *always* in play. For instance I’m not sure George Carlin’s routine about the n-word is something he’d have done in the last decade of his life because we evolved to understand that word is hurtful coming out of a white mouth and directed at a black person, regardless of whether it’s “meant to be” or not. Carlin being a linguistic genius and also a bit of a trickster god on it, may have still done the bit…but I’m not sure. I think he would’ve put a great deal more thought into whether the joke (or the deeper points behind it) would be obscured or mitigated or negated by his use of that word, and most importantly whether his work could be used to “punch down.” I’m glad to have cultivated an audience that seems to have a pretty good instinctive grip on where the lines are and why.
When you stick to principle – “don’t punch down” – you’re less likely to make even an honest mistake, one borne of naive ignorance rather than malice, that hurts someone, and less likely to be whining about getting “canceled” while you’re selling out venues and appearing on every late night talk show. It’s still not easy mind you – knowing when you’re punching down is a function of empathy, which is also always evolving and refining – but it’s a good basic principle, and if you keep it in the back of your head while you’re doing your thing you’ll probably avoid saying anything you’ll wish later that you hadn’t.
