Last time I paid for a haircut, I was laughed out of the salon. I’m going bald (slowly—there’s still some good years left, ladies), and had made the unfortunate mistake of covering my peak with an early-Beatles shag, hiding its recession from all eyes, including my own. I asked Jennifer, the hairstylist at the outlet mall to make me look like an E.R.-era George Clooney, who for those of you unfamiliar with 90s TV looks like a Roman Empire-era Julius Cesar. Trimmer in hand, Jennifer complied, at the end of the process leaving me not only balder than when I started but with an uneven peak that made me look like I’d been hit on the top of the dome with a baseball bat. When I asked her to shave the other side so the ‘do would look even, Jennifer laughed.
I’d never been derided by a hairstylist before, and I haven’t since, because from that day on I’d gone DIY, giving myself a 50’s “Buzz” with a Wahl Clip’N Trim, which is a powerful, if not entirely delicate, means of haircuttery. This continued for over a year, until I was tending bar at Meconi’s Pub and Eatery when Renee of Renee’s Salon walked in and ordered a beer.
At this point, I was sporting a more rugged version of the Clooney I’d asked of Jennifer, albeit with about a six-day beard to round out the edges. After some idle chitchat (Renee’s something of a regular), she eyed my ‘do with a concerned look, and after a pregnant pause, informed me that it was “Industry day” tomorrow, and I could get the full Renee’s treatment for around 20 dollars, which I assumed must have been a substantial discount.
The next day, I wandered down to Pacific Avenue to try to find Renee’s. It was difficult, and I was stranded at a traffic light when I saw her walking down ninth street with the sun in her California blonde hair and a little lapdog at her leash. She invited me to the Fireman’s Park to help Mi Shu do her business, and soon after we were back at her salon to let the haircuttery begin.
After giving me a trim that left the conical nature of my head more understated and the billowing plooms of sidelocks held better in check, Renee moved on to my beard, an eight-day affair that crept down from my sideburns onto my lower neck. She trimmed off the neck hair, leaving me with a well-kept beard, then asked if I wanted the rest shaved off.
She suggested chops, and the results were just hilarious enough to keep:
Renee offered me a discount if when she walked into the bar that night I was still sporting my Ambrose Burnsides. After several minutes of waffling I conceded, and have since oddly received numerous compliments on my ridiculous hypermasculine facial sculpture.
On my way out, I asked if bikers and tattoo artists came into her salon asking her to help them look the way they did, and she said yeah. It’s too hard to do something like that yourself, I guess. Interesting think-piece material: Hardcore guys and their attachment to the girly “creative” types (be they sexed male or female) who actually have the artistic skill to rend them as menacing as they sometimes look. Further thought: Is the tattoo and the piercing and the long hair still a commitment to self-mutilation and therefore “taking a stand,” or simply too conformist and specific in its message to mean anything at all?
This song makes a lot more sense as a message than “This Is Why I’m Hot,” but does little to make sense of just what space MIMS occupies.
I picked this up from allhiphop.com, it’ll be there for a little while longer. Further search for the track, which must just be a mixtape dumper, reveals a realraptalk.com message board thread indicating that the beat was jacked from an unknown Fabolous song, or at least sounds enough like it to appear jacked. Meanwhile, Grape_Rom, djpositiv, kartoon, and kolizon2003 an argument about as apathetic and unresolved as “This Is Why I’m Hot,” albeit more concise:
Grape_Rom: this beat sucks… This song sucks…
Djpozitiv: yes…SUCKS to me!
[. . .]
Kartoon: yo lay off dude
Kolizion2003: thanks
Perhaps MIMS’s semi-success has to do with little more than rhyming mediocre over jacked beats and just making songs that lack internal coherence. “This Is Why I’m Hot”: “I can sell a mill saying nothing on the track.” He knows what he’s doing but not how.
Not last night, but the night before, I was working at the empty bar, making “funocopters” with the coasters by flinging them around like frizbees, occasionally landing one in its proper place, on the bar, in front of a chair, where an imaginary and buxom patron would gratefully glance my way, order a PBR, tip me fifty dollars, then lean over the counter to kiss me. I work at a divey place.
After fifteen minutes of coaster-tossing, the manager, D, came in from some work in back, ordered a Red Hook, didn’t pay for it, and said “follow me.”
He broke out a ladder from the utility closet, climbed into a crawl space over the game room, and proceeded to hand down to me an Ampeg amp head, a dual-15” 400-watt speaker cabinet, a patch cable, and a lock-nut Ibanez metal shredder with tuning knobs on the bridge and a mint-green Corvette-style paint job.
We set up shop in the corner and D quickly blasted off to Volume Level Ten, picking away some Metallica riffs and occasionally stopping to flex his fingers and stare at his hands. “Hurts to bend the strings,” he explained. He had been cutting metal to repair some element of the bar six months earlier, the machine blade slipped, and hot, sharp metal nearly sliced the fingers on his left hand clean off. These Metallica licks were the first notes he’d played since the accident.
Soon he graduated to some “Eruption” and some Nuge, a real 80’s wailer. He’d moved from the East coast to LA, Axel Rose style, with big dreams. Woke up at 30 with a bad hangover and no record deal, shucked north and started a restaurant. The details of the trajectory are unclear, but the arc suffices.
After some abortive Hendrix “Foxy Lady” efforts and a few more beers, D passed the guitar OVER THE BAR to me. In what must’ve been the luckiest stroke of fate cast on me in at least four days, just at that moment a dude and a chick walked in. They work at the restaurant next door, a Texican high-end meat market type joint. I whammed out a big E-minor chord and gave the whammy a little shimmy. I was in business; the Ibanez played like a true axe, hardly any action, easygoing frets, just begging for a shredding.
“What’s going on here?” asked the dude in what must be the only possible reaction to a bartender who just stroked a dipped-out chord.
“Nothin much, just jammin’,” I punctuated this last with some Blues-Box wheedles. “What’ll it be?”
She ordered a Citron shot with a sugared rim--and he--a vodka with a Coke back. I passed the guitar back to D, who jammed some Dokken riffs into the couple’s ears. The couple tried to sit through the onslaught, but they just couldn’t hang. I knew from previous conversations with the dude that he was into techno music and DJing, so it didn’t surprise me that D’s guitar heroics didn’t pass his muster.
They left in a hurry, and as soon as the door closed, D jammed out on some more minor pentatonics, business be damned, pausing only to yell, “You don’t like it! Fuck you! Don’t come back!”
I had to kick D out of his own bar at about 1:45 a.m. FYI George Lynch is from Spokane, WA. Maybe the West isn't as soft as I thought.
Looking for some hot metal to pour into the moulds for the grand re-opening of the ideelz factory, I hit up the Billboard Hot 200 to see what was at the top of the charts.
I’d actually heard “This Is Why I’m Hot” in the car a month and a half ago driving with my friend Jeff from Sea-Tac to downtown Tacoma without realizing, or caring to remember, that it was called “This Is Why I’m Hot.” I listened all the way through, withholding judgment for maybe a guest verse or a change in the beat, but before I knew it the song was over. I didn’t hate the track but I wasn’t sad to see it go, either.
Seeing “This Is Why I’m Hot” at the top of the charts a couple days ago, I didn’t recognize it at first. The title conjures up images of a Pussycat Dolls–like group, a breathy chorus enumerating the various reasons why the hot singers are, sexually speaking, hot. Maybe in more ways than one, i.e. turned on as well as pert of breast and pouty of mouth . . . or maybe there would even be a couple lines saying something like, “I’m wearing a parka / In your apartment / But you’ve got the heater on / Turned up to one hundred and one / (CHORUS) This is why I’m hot.” The name of the performer, MIMS, didn’t provide many indications otherwise. Maybe each letter stood for the first name of the hot girls that sang about why they were hot? Monica, Irena, Michelle, and Serena.
Thanks to Google Images for help assembling the MIMS supergroup.
Anyone who has seen the video and read some Wikipedia and some Yahoo! Shopping understands that MIMS is not an acronym for four hot women who sing in breathy voices, but rather is an acronym for Music Is My Savior, which is the title of his album. Anyone who has taken this much time with the song, trying to find a reason to care about it, is probably only a little more “meh” about the whole thing than really disappointed in the song’s failure to provoke any reaction whatsoever.
Is there anything to be said about this? I thought “This Is Why I’m Hot” worthy of an easy write-off; of course it’s Number One. Remember Daniel Powter? Gargabe-y riff-raff write vacuous tunes all the time and they nevertheless become the "hot"test chart-toppers of their day(s).
In the shower this morning, though, a couple thoughts hit me. First, unlike with Powter and other boring groups that crack their way into everyone’s drive-time and therefore the top of the Billboard Hot 200, I had actually made a conscious decision to NOT have anything to think about MIMS. With Daniel Powter, it had been more of an involuntary reaction the songwritery garbage that I’d dealt with since I was eleven, sitting by the radio waiting for the Gin Blossoms songs to end, hoping that I would be able to cue the Record Button on the tape deck in time when the opening riff to Smashing Pumpkins’ “Today” would start. That is, Daniel Powter faded easily into the background for me, like other people’s conversations at a restaurant; they simply don’t matter. I only think about Powter when I see his name on the charts or at Yahoo! Launch.
For whatever reason, though (maybe simply because most Rap songs manage to deliver), I feel a need to find something exciting in radio rap, and can usually content myself with at least a couplet of clever word-play, a pun that has been dragged from far enough back in pop culture or the animal kingdom to merit discussion or at least quotation, or a brag so ostentatious it is actually just a joke. I didn't find any of these things if "This Is Why I'm Hot."
Structurally, the title of “This Is Why I’m Hot” suggests a sort of middle-school five-paragraph-essay structure that revolves around a well-articulated thesis. Thematically, it suggests that MIMS should at some point state that he is hot for one particular reason.
In Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” Juvenile's “Back That Thang Up,” and many other instances, a hip hop song’s titular deictic has an obvious referent or at least gives the listener a chance to guess. Snoop Dogg gives us context clues like “When a nigga get a attitude,” so we know that the “It” we’re supposed to drop is likely a heavy object, and we’re probably supposed to drop it on someone’s head. If you bought “Back That Thang Up” with the Explicit Content sticker on it you know for certain that “Thang,” to Juvenile (in this particular case) means “Azz,” but “Damn you look good [. . .] You’s a fine motherfucker” gave radio-listeners enough hints that “That Thang” was more likely a body part than, say, a pickup truck.
MIMS doesn’t give us any such help. “This Is Why I’m Hot” doesn’t yield anything so direct or obvious as the help Snoop Dogg and Juvenile gave us. The line “This Is Why I’m Hot” does not, in itself, explain why MIMS is hot, and the surrounding verses aren’t any help. What is the antecedent of “This”? One might suppose it is the smattering of imagery and directly stated instances of hotness contained in the verses, the structural ingenuity with which MIMS put together his rhymes, or, if MIMS assumes that people are watching his video, maybe he points to his face, his balls, his chain, anything to give the listener a clear answer to the central question of the song: Why is MIMS so hot?
The verses aren't super, a monotonous rhythm over and over again, and the rhymes about cars etc. aren't really spectacular or even particularly convincing. Do we even really believe MIMS when he says he's hot? MIMS makes brief efforts at rectifying his argument: "I'm hot cause I'm fly / You ain't cause you not." MIMS’s best defense of his position is a combination ad hominem and weak tautology. I most vividly remember a song’s failure to address its central question from Wee Sing in Sillyville, a video I watched in middle school and high school:
Those four yellow guys, the Yellow Spurtlegurgles, sing an adaptation of “Auld Lang Syne” that, like MIMS, leaves the listener dissatisfied: “We’re here / Because we’re here / Because we’re here / Because we’re here” ad infinitum. There are, however, numerous mitigating circumstances that don't apply to MIMS.
For one, the Spurtlegurgles are singing for kids age 3-6. Furthermore, they are at least trying to answer their question, and one feels, through their unending repetition, a certain level of commitment to resolving the issues at hand. MIMS, on the other hand, can’t even endear himself to us with his preoccupation with the issue. He hopes his “This” will suffice: that’s the way it is, it is what it is; Do not pay attention to this song.” MIMS probably got bad grades on his five-paragraph essays in middle school, too distracted because the heater was on too high and he was wearing a parka, or Monica, Olga, Serena, and Eve were beginning to blossom into womanhood.
MIMS’s failure to write a good five-paragraph rap song really isn’t as frustrating as it is boring, in part because no one really asked MIMS why he was hot in the first place. MIMS is just a hard-working hip-hop artist who owned NYC for a couple weeks with “This Is Why I’m Hot,” which in turn yielded him a record deal, major airplay, and his current position on the pop charts.
To wrap this up in a somewhat cute fashion, we’ll quickly address two final problems with “This Is Why I’m Hot.” First, like Eminem’s “Smack That,” "This Is Why I'm Hot" song presupposes a future in which its own existence will impact its structure. For anyone to ask “Why is MIMS Hot,” people must know MIMS. How do people know MIMS? Because he’s on the radio, explaining why he’s hot.
Second, it is for precisely this circular logic of its own existence that “This Is Why I’m Hot” finally merits attention. Imagine yourself stranded on a scorchingly hot desert island. At first you tried merely to physically escape, sending smoke signals, writing “HELP” in huge letters in the sand. As you got used to the island, though, you set up shelter, found food, and otherwise adjusted to the environment, so you turned your efforts toward maintaining your sanity and your sense of self. You started painting, creating masks, and searching for signs of other life on the island.
You’re digging for roots one day when you strike a bottle. There is a message written on a piece of paper on the inside. It bears only the words “This is why I’m hot.” Hope wells up inside you. Someone has been here before. No answer is proffered because the important thing is not the answer but the fact of asking it. No meaning is conveyed by the immediate structure of the language, but on a higher level, an immensity of meaning emerges. Someone has been hot! They knew why! And they want you to know, too!
MIMS's "This Is Why I'm Hot" similarly contents itself to be an artifact of MIMS's existence more than a testament to any particular topic or idea. "This is why I'm hot" amounts to "I'm here," and, like a bunch of starving, scraggly Robinson Crusoes and Tom Hankses, America listened, but not really very carefully.
