Power to the People Making AdSense with Their Mouths

Is Jessica Hopper Dennis Hopper's hard-partying, hard-faced, wildly fuckable daughter who ultimately just wants to be cuddled in the middle of the night?

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Of course not.

Sulky points me to this tinyluckygenius, who judging by her screen name thinks some pretty good things about herself, and suddenly I'm reading pseudo-art blog posts that try to take a Strokes angle on the trials and tribs of loving music and being a feminist at the same time (apparently these things are at odds, sometimes).

None of this would really be a thing if Sulks didn't point out to me that this lady did some simmering a summer ago by starting a big thing about the Magnetic Fields guy being a racist, all of which was pretty ridic in the wash (I'm not together on all the details, but from what I hear Hopper dissed the singer for writing in the Times that he liked music and listing only white performers), but illustrates the power of baby girl's angles.

My knee-jerk has me urged to riff all over this as lamezoid bligablag in a similar way that Keyhole dissed Manohla Dargis for taking a throwaway feminist jab at Transformers.

But on second thought, are we so wrong to hate on someone for being unnerved by Kelly and The Game? Feminist reactions to chauvinism in hip hop are usually beside the point in my mind but not totally without merit, and it's not like the genius doesn't have any moves. Plus you don't want to always be the guy who's defending meatheaded stuff about hating women as not really hating women or "just words."

The cityskape is alive with a lot of ugly stuff, and some of it is probably even worth blogging. Living in Taco-town has taught me that much, so I gave the tiny dancer a chance. I zipped to her most recent post and suddenly she even had me going with her on a ride for a sec:

So out of desperation, you and your friends go the bar you hate trying to make good on yr efforts, and the vibe is like an episode of Cheaters and everyone is acting like the James Spader character in an 80's teen drama and you sit there sucking down yr ice water and thinking "I put on shoes for this?!"

Good refs, the sentence has speed and the lady is doing some observations. The shoes thing is maybe a little Sex and the City, but hey it's 2007 and L7 and Bratmobile now mostly appear on XM 54 between midnight and one a.m., so I can't blame Hopper for some pomo third-wave pogoing, even if generally I'm not for it. We can at least relate to hating what you're doing in the search of fun, and there's some directions you can take with an observation that's acute like this.

So, Hoptown, where you driving this motorcycle? To a graveyard with a pocket full of acid tabs? In other words, are you taking this lonesome cityskape snippet to a place that will make us understand this internet-and-80s-mediated world a little better? Do you love them ho's?

You walk home with your best friend, each carrying an end of yr bent up bike, trying to remember the chronology of the Husker Du discography and it's all the lame-fun you need right there. Aging loners waxing nerdy in the night light.

NO!

Hoppers doesn't even close us out with a complete sentence. Yeah you're a feminist but you ain't [got] a predicate.

But this brings us to an interesting juncture. I've thought before about music being largely a thing that mediates our life and permeates through our personalities, illustrating our prejudices and highlighting our personal experiences more than being a thing that just sits outside ourselves that we can critique in a sorta highfalutin' way. I've also claimed that I would rather read reviews that contain anecdotes and illustrative examples and bracket notions of whether a tune is good or not in favor of discussing its intersection with real life, something music writers are rarely interested in.

So maybe the situation is that to get at this arty approach to "culture" minutely defined as that which media-savvy people with B.A.'s and some connections to magazines think about, we're going to get some stuff/criticism/anecdoting that isn't totally heartfelt, maybe even a little hateful, and / or not really interested in the right things. And a bajillion people are sometimes going to read it.

Blogger/journalists who can sometimes write a sentence can get surprisingly far in this game, regardless to the level of thought in their ideas or the checkability of their refs. And sometimes an odd perversion of PC comes through and people can even be attacked over it??? And without complete sentences! I'm gonna write awktown and I'm gonna mean it.

But, as they say, we're all just bloggin.