Control Your Hose

I have a pet peeve.

I work in an office complex, not much different than similar complexes spread throughout the country, be it Des Moines, Deluth or Denver. Three floors. About 20 companies. And bathrooms on every floor. I drink a lot of water each day, so I visit these rest rooms five to six times per day.

Invariably, by 10:00 in the morning or so, there is a giant puddle in front of the urinal. A puddle that grows throughout the day. By the afternoon, there's almost no safe place to stand.

Why is it, that grown men--in the middle of the day, surely not intoxicated--cannot hit a simple little target? Assuming everyone in this building has at least 20 years of experience, why is that so hard? The designer of the urinal even accounts for this, as most urinals curve outward at the bottom.

Gentlemen: control your hose. It's a simple thing to do.

It's a Small, Small MySpace

Despite my previous aversion to MySpace, I've come to a conclusion: maybe it's not all that bad. Okay, so there are the occasional child predators and otherwise inane rambling and David Hasselhoff-idolizing. I never pictured myself spending much time on MySpace.

That is, until I discovered MySpace music. Yesterday, the entire Gnarls Barkley album streamed. (Side note: Crazy will be the blow out song of the summer. I know it. And we will all hate it by July.)

I also learned about these enterprising young lads. Their goal: releasing 12 EPs in 2006, on the last day of every month. The March one is pretty good; maybe I'll be able to check these guys out in Brooklyn this summer. MySpace was also the first place I heard Jose Gonzalez. My wife, she's so last century: she actually heard him on NPR. I don't even know what that is--there's no triple-Dub in front of it, so it doesn't work when I type it into Firefox.

Anyway, what's fascinating to me is that this represents a major step forward in the relationship between a band and its fans: a musician no longer needs the middle man (the record companies) to get its songs out to a wide audience. No more crappy tours, opening for a bigger band, with their fans anxious for you to get off the stage. No more pressing 1,000-disc runs and handing them out for free. Now, fans actually know your music at a show. You can get new music out there early to build some hype (like Gnarls Barkley did, although I'm disappointed they pushed the release date two weeks). But more importantly, you have an instantly marketable product . . . that is seen by 65 million active consumers in the 15 to 30 year old demographic. Also, because you have to sign up for MySpace (such a difficult prospect that I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't a few locked-down prisoners surfing around), there is a feeling of exclusivity. You can be the first person to discover someone, and instead of making a mix tape to share the music with your friends, you add the music to your site (or better yet, add the band as a friend and people will click through). This is essentially a form of viral marketing for people who want to find this information (as opposed to spam). I'm starting to think that, for $580 million, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation may have underpaid for MySpace.

Also, who doesn't want to be Tom's friend now? He's rolling in a share of that half-Billion dollar payday (yet he still can't fix the damn messaging).

I Predict a (Quiet) Riot

So, there's a lot of angry people in the world these days. We have the youth in France rioting, because they can't get those jobs that come with 40 vacation days a year. We have the people in Iraq rioting, because, well, I don't know. But I'd sure be pissed if some other country came in, blew up all my shit and tried to put a democratic government in place--only to talk about pulling out a year later. We've even got some people in India rioting, because some actor named Raj Kumar died.

Here, we have some major political issues right now, but I think the one with the most concern nationally is the immigration issue. I don't really know what this is about, other than it changes the classification of illegal immigrants from misdemeanor to a felony. However, I think these protests are the very symbol of what's wrong with this country: we can't even be bothered to protest; we have to let the immigrants do it. And they didn't even do it right! I expected some serious violence, or at least a little hat dance on an effigy of a congressman. Instead we get a sea of white. At least the French, Iraqi and Indian people can whip up a good riot.

I hope the Detroit Pistons win the NBA title this year. Maybe then we'll have a good chance at a decent riot.

We sold the house . . .

So now we are having a "Let's ruin the carpet" party.

May 6. Details to come. Debauchery ensured.

Because this is how I roll.

I'm supposed to be studying today, but I've hit a little bit of a mental wall. I'm preparing to take Level 2 of the CFA exam in early June. Honestly, I'm just not feeling it. I sat for and did not pass Level 2 last June, and it was one of the most disappointing moments in my life, not because I didn't pass, but because I felt extremely prepared and confident going into and leaving the exam. My score report was also weird, as I did poorly in areas that were my strengths, while I performed well in other areas that I didn't really study. I even paid $150 to have my exam regraded by hand, with the same result.

So here I am, wasting a lovely Sunday afternoon indoors. The Masters is on in the other room (the last update I saw had Mickelson in the lead with Couples and Jimenez, with Tiger and Chad Campbell one back). I'd love to squeeze in a run or lay by the pool. Instead, I'm sitting in my office in a really uncomfortable desk chair. I've been getting up at 5:30 to study three or four days a week for the past month, and I'm barely making a dent in the material. I started working through some problems today, but I don't have the answer key, so I'm not sure if I'm even doing things correctly.

I'm trying to decide: should I buckle down and study for the next six weeks, knowing that I will be extremely distracted (another trip to NY, visits from my parents and some friends, a trip to Hawaii, plus all loose ends that come with selling the cars, closing on the house and packing for the move), or should I forget about the studying, enjoy my last few months in Arizona and try my hand at Level 2 and Level 3 after grad school?

My Humps

I like the Black Eyed Peas. Or more accurately, I liked the Black Eyed Peas. I bought their first CD, Behind the Front, as a reward for acing a test when I was a freshman at ASU. Fallin’ Up, Clap Your Hands, Joints & Jams and Karma were my jams that year. I even memorized the skits between songs: “El Niño, what is it you came to do?” “Basically, I came to bring the rain.” “Haha, let me get my coat!” Live shows were amazing, and I saw the band at least three times between 1999 and 2002---though they were never big enough to headline their own tour.

The second album, Bridging the Gap, was a little different, a little weird, but still better than most other stuff I listened to. At this point, it was clear that Will.i.am had real talent and that the band would go as far as he could carry them. Though necessary to the band’s sound, Taboo and Apl.de.Ap didn’t really step up, with the exception of Apl’s Filipino/Spanish rapping. Will.i.am needed someone to play off, as some of the best early songs also had an anonymous female lead (mainly Sierra Swan), but it wasn’t until the Peas recruited Sarah Ferguson (“Fergie,” which makes her sound fat) from Wild Orchid that the band’s current Hip-Pop sound emerged.

I’ll admit it, I was into the sound when I saw BEP’s first appearance with Fergie at Coachella in 2003: Let’s Get Retarded and Labor Day (Holiday) were great live jams (it was always BEP’s live instrumentation backing band that gave their concerts such a unique energy). At that point, Fergie wasn’t fully integrated into the band’s songwriting dimension yet. The next album, Elephunk, reflected this dichotomy. In addition to Retarded and Labor Day, Hands Up and Hey Mama harkened back to the Peas’ roots. Where is the Love gave the Peas a radio hit, and it was the band’s first song to reflect its new pop direction. However, I think the standout song was Shut Up, a dynamic his side/her side duet between Will.i.am and Fergie that had me thinking Fergie’s addition to the band wasn’t all bad (though the crappy mash up with Linkin Park offered the first crack in Will.i.am’s artistic direction).

This brings me to Monkey Business, which is absolutely one of the worst, least cohesive and disappointing albums I have ever heard (interestingly, 12 of the album’s 15 songs have one- or two-word titles that sound monotonous and ambiguous: My Style, My Humps, Like That, Feel It, etc). Black Eyed Peas changed from its unique, choppy, jazz-based composition to a studio-driven, polished sound that included samples (the fast-paced but lazy Pump It), guest appearances (a surprising turn by Jack Johnson on Gone Going), and overproduction (the played out Don’t Phunk With My Heart, which I think is the furthest BEP can push the funk/phunk/fuck wordplay). I understand that expectations for the album were high, as Elephunk was the band’s commercial breakthrough, and that not every track from a 15-song album can be strong. Heck, even Led Zeppelin’s near-perfect fourth album (IV as it is affectionately known) contained two relatively weak songs: Rock & Roll (horrible title) and Misty Mountain Hop (abuse of keyboards).

Therefore, I don’t blame BEP or Will.i.am for My Humps. For this I blame America. My Humps was never intended to be ubiquitous. The band didn’t even release it as a single (at first). It was probably meant to be a joke: a harmless little song, buried on a multi-platinum album. Not until America discovered the song and not until it hit the top spot on iTunes did the Black Eyed Peas realize the phenomenon they started.

However, I do blame Will.i.am for other crimes against culture. He butchered the new Sergio Mendes album Timeless by turning it into another Black Eyed Peas monstrosity. He (and the band) changed the words to Let’s Get Retarded to make the song more friendly to corporate America. Now, thanks to the NBA ("it's faaaaan-tastic!"), people actually think the original name of the song is Let's Get It Started. And finally, he lent his “talent” to the Pussycat Dolls, working on their new single Beep, which is an EXACT RIP OFF OF MY HUMPS. Only Beep is a better song, and the Dolls are better looking than Fergie. No wonder Will.i.am is thinking about a solo album.


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It's also interesting how Fergie’s looks could decline so rapidly. I heard the phrase “Latin Carmen Electra” thrown around a few times, and she looked HOT in the Hey Mama video. However, in the My Humps video and recent appearances: not so much.




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Note: on the way back from lunch, I listened to Led Zeppelin IV. My bad: there are no weak songs here. Still, the song title Rock & Roll is pretty boring. I also appreciate the album's prognostic qualities, as Zep clearly predicted the New Orleans/Katrina disaster: "if it keeps on raining, the levee's going to break; if the levee breaks, we got no place to stay."