So I've been following this guy Humanity Critic for a couple of weeks now. He's got some interesting stuff to say and a style to his writing that I like, appreciate, and will probably start to bite. HC is constantly Twittering and has put me on to some good links regarding Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State talk that's been going on.
Well last night I got a tweet about Busta Rhymes being a homophobe with a link in it and the link takes you to a video of Pharrell and DJ Premier talking backstage or in a Green room somewhere.
The whole setup is a little crazy because before seeing this I wouldn't have really thought that Premier and Pharrell would hang out. Premier is 42 but looks like he could be in his 50's and Pharrell's little skinny ass probably won't ever look more than about 19, so the visual is striking when you see the two of them together. Then consider that stylistically the two men are on opposite ends of the spectrum; Premier is straight old-school and Pharrell skates and listens to Steely Dan. But when you look at the variety of artists that both Premier and Pharrell have worked with and the success that they've both enjoyed, it's not that surprising that they would be kicking it.
In this video Pharrell is telling a story about Busta Rhymes. Not surprisingly, Pharrell is a pretty talented mimic and the way he relates the story is funnier than Hell. In addition to changing up his voice he also takes on the Busta's abrupt and strident body language, the extra loud tone, and the barking rhythm that makes Busta Busta. The conclusion of the story is that Busta is upset because some dude (one of the Jungle Brothers) that wanted to take a picture with him was wearing mascara.
I could go either way on this story. I'm not down with the homophobia, but tripping because some dude is wearing mascara doesn't really mean much to me. This isn't me defending Busta or going soft on homophobia. Just like accusations of racism, I like to wait until things are fairly clear cut before I level the charge of homophobia against someone. None of this is the point of this post, we're just getting to the incident that inspired this post's title in the next couple of paragraphs.
So like I said, I've been following Humanity Critic and I decided to follow up on this by leaving a comment on his blog at vibe.com. In order to comment you have to register, mildly annoying but really no big deal. They ask for your city and state, I type in Washington and in the drop-down list for states "DC" is nowhere to be found. Fuck me gently with a chain saw, I can't believe this just happened.
Now ten years ago or maybe even five, I could understand how something like this happened. But it's 2008, shit like this should have been straightened out a long time ago. It's incidents like this that have radicalized my thinking about DC statehood. When I first moved to DC getting representation in the House would have been enough to keep me happy, but now I say fuck all that! DC STATEHOOD NOW!!
As far as Vibe goes, I've always thought the magazine was kind of whack and now I have proof. Vibe.com I'm puttin' y'all on blast. This is some trifling, shameful shit. I find this diss of DC especially disturbing from an African-American oriented publication and website.
Who the hell is running your site that they didn't notice that you have ZERO users from D-Chocolate City-C? Maybe you just don't care that you don't have any users from DC, it's not like there are any black people there or anything.
Tom Lehrer, 1928-2025
4 weeks ago
