I agree - not only is "Regulate" part of my relaxing-driving-music playlist, it also includes 50 Cent "In da club", so that I can cheerfully sing about how we're going to party like it's my birthday. Good times.
I remember in the late 80s all the kids at my upper* class Jewish summer camp were into Dre and Eazy-E. Nobody move, nobody get hurt...
There were also a bunch of lewd/X-rated rhymes we'd sing while canoeing that are derived from various working class or military chants. Curious how those made their way to that particular group of kids.
* I was pretty close to the bottom of the group economically, there were some kids whose parents would come on visiting day by helicopter or seaplane, or who owned nation-wide restaurant chains.
Nobody move, nobody get hurt
This phrase evokes Warren Zevon for me.
I'm mostly in the "silent C" club of rap music appreciation. I'm very verbal, so the words really make up a big part of my enjoyment of music, and I can't stand braggadocio, which kind of limits my ability to connect with rap. There are occasional flashes of raw brilliance, but mostly I'd rather listen to construction machinery.
Nobody move, nobody get hurt
This phrase evokes Yellowman for me.
In 2009, I was on a doc review project with a small group in a conference room of a big law firm, a setting permitting free-ranging conversation while we worked. It was a very good group; the others were recently-fired associates, victims of the mass firing of the previous fall. Average age mid-thirties, so they'd have been teenagers circa 1990.
Somehow the subject came up, and I referred to Rev. Calvin Butts, Senior Pastor of The Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. I noted that his televised image and voice were seen and heard at the beginning of Bone Thugs N Harmony's Rugged Thugged Bone, speaking against "thugs."
I don't know if it was just the fact of my knowing this, or an effect heightened by my hyper-white pronunciation of group and title, but my co-workers went into convulsions of laughter, one rolling out of his chair and slapping the floor.
Given the prominence of that video, I was somewhat surprised to hear Obama use the pejorative a few weeks ago in his news conference re:Baltimore and the distinction between peaceful protesters and opportunistic looters.
Wasn't G-Funk always comfort music? The whole point was that it's smooth and singable. Nobody (sane) puts on NWA to relax or say Public Enemy, but the whole deal with that specific kind of hip hop after 1994 or so was that it was supposed to be smooth and familiar and listenable. "Regulate" in particular was already always a comfort song.
"I'm mostly in the "silent C" club of rap music appreciation. "
The lub?
Speaking of both "Regulate" and easy listening, someone did the obvious thing.
8: I think that misses how the primary audience - white suburban teenagers - lapped it up because they got to feel trangressive and naughty. It's not like Babyface and Ginuwine, exactly. Now that's easy.
Like Sunday morning, heebie. Like Sunday morning.
Here's last.fm play history comparing Nate G's big hit with Outkasts's. Outkast is 80fold more popular.
http://www.last.fm/music/Warren+G+feat.+Nate+Dogg/_/Regulate
http://www.last.fm/music/Outkast/_/Hey+Ya!
The rhetorical analysis, that nobody listens to the violence in the songs, maybe or maybe not. I would claim that the issue with a lot of gangster hip hop is the prominence of a single word, the N-word, in many songs rather than praise of violence or ambiguous morality.
Talking about listening to profane hip-hop is kind of complicated. I think this is because there's a wide range of intentionality, both for the artists who use the word either as a near-meaningless punctuator or as a thoughtful part of socially charged vocabulary. Also for listeners, who may just want to listen to some Wu-tang rather than their arguing colleagues, or who may listen to the music as a basically conscious way to reinforce racist views while liking the beat. So a 2-dimensional space of contexts with only weak and fluid hints for where to place anything.
The very lyrics to "Regulate" explain the concept of G-Funk. It's funked out with a gangsta twist. The P-Funk samples make it easy listening, unlike N.W.A. and Public Enemy.
re: 8
Sonically, yeah. I expect that the teenage white audience weren't getting all of the references to late-70s funk, electro, and boogie,* but the lushness of it, and the fact that it was funky in a way that lots of hip-hop hadn't been for a decade or more, must have been a big part of it.
* at least Roger Troutman got paid, because a TON of G-Funk just straight rips off Zapp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhQ-D95VGFY
^ that's 1981, for fuck's sake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn8gSkpY3ZE
Fight the Power looks to be more popular than Regulate.
Straight Outta Compton and Gangsta Gangsta both are as well. So the premise, that G-funk is more popular than straight gangster rap, looks false.
17. Dre went from sampling to hiring a keyboard player to reproduce the hook being borrowed in the studio with a fatter more minimal sound pretty early. I'll come back with dates, but to the extent that anyone's interested, it'll be too late. I think that Dre was on of the first people to do that, replace samples with studio riffs.
Nobody (sane) puts on NWA to relax or say Public Enemy,
I do. Express Yourself in particular is pretty much the definition of easy listening gangster rap.
Also, this.
"The following comment entitles the author of comment #10 of this thread to one beer (PBR or equivalent cost). Redeemable only in person and only at a bar within 50 feet of the corner of Forbes and Murray in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."
That's a pretty interesting question as to whether the entitlement to a beer is created by 23, 24, both in conjunction, or neither.
11: I thought you were going to link this: http://youtu.be/hnahCol3lXs
Nobody move, nobody get hurt
This phrase evokes We Are Scientists for me.
I was just thinking the other day how I was so shocked when I got a cd of "the chronic" because of the curse words. I liked the radio versions w/o the swearing much more.
I been listening to A Tribe Called Quest lately — the easy-listening of easy-listening rap music.
Now here's a thing: I was a teenager around 1990 and people in my high school really didn't listen to rap. I grew up in a very conservative, discreetly racist, very white suburb of Chicago and...it just wasn't the done thing to listen to rap. This was the height of the culture wars/moral panic (NWA, etc).
As a result, I was never really socialized into listening to rap or hip hop and grew up kind of culturally deficient. (I went away to college and listened to, like, punk rock and then segued into post punk and free jazz and various dissonant things as people of my general obnoxious type tend to.) Admittedly, I'm kind of a prude and very, very little of the music that I listen to regularly has sexual content or curse words (even the punk I listen/listened to was very much on the "We Aren't Like The Frat Boys Who Drink And Curse, We Are Sensitive And Have Good Politics" end of the spectrum.)
I'd say it took me well into my thirties to develop the ability to listen to rap in any intelligent way and even now it's certainly not a thing that I have any kind of educated opinion about.
I only know "Regulate" because of Jens Lekman.
But it's just always struck me as weird that my town was actually so conservative/racist that even the thrill of listening to transgressive music full of cuss words didn't overcome the collective reluctance to listen to music by Black artists.
(Of course, music was much less accessible back then, particularly music by non-pop Black artists. I did have Living Color's album Vivid on cassette but that was because I was a weirdo. I used to listen to it on my dad's Walkman, which I was allowed to borrow, between classes.)
Like, I remember being vaguely shocked and impressed that my very first real friend at college had both all these Dead Kennedys albums and It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back. And she was from rural Missouri.
I've been trying to figure out a joke about Harding and his disinclination to regulate for almost ten years now and I'm starting to think it just won't happen for me.
Some DJ's play lassies fair
like Warren G Har.
But I'll regulate your ass
like I was FDR
31 is kind of parallel to my HS experience, although A. my best friend was quite deeply into rap, and he wasn't alone, but he was an outlier (he was also personally quite alienated, mostly due to his dad walking out on his family right before HS, and he also had a petty criminal phase, so it was surely rebellion music), and B. my school was almost completely devoid of goth, EDM, punk... really anything that wasn't either mainstream or metal. I mean, there weren't literally no kids into those genres, but we're talking in the single digits for any given one of them, in a school of 1500 kids.
It was weirdly homogenous despite the fact that there was definitely more than one SES class. But nobody was rich*, and there was (I think) a fairly steady curve between the working class kids and the UMC kids - that is, every decile between, say, the 3rd and the 9th was represented, and in vaguely equal numbers. Virtually all white, of course.
I've mentioned before the lack of cliquishness, and maybe that contributed to the narrow musical tastes: there weren't big groups of kids seeking to differentiate themselves through listening to "other" musics, aside, of course, from the metal kids, who were like 1/4 of the school. Did anyone listen to country? NAFAIK. I think even the redneckish kids listened to metal and/or classic rock. What a weird place.
*I'd be surprised if anyone's parents earned much more than $100k, or that anyone's family had enough wealth that salary wasn't 90% of income. I can't think of any part of the town where the houses were notably bigger or nicer than the ones where half the kids lived in
Will '90s music ever reach the level of ubiquity on the radio (in the US) that '60s music has had for the last, oh, fifty years? I don't think it will, because I imagine the typical radio listeners of each generation like this:
[Grandpa hears a song from 1968 on the radio]
"Woo, yeah! I'm still cool! Right?"
[Dad hears a song from 1992 on the radio]
"Stop fucking reminding me I used to be young, and play more Taylor Swift!"
I was a teenager around 1990 and people in my high school really didn't listen to rap. I grew up in a very conservative, discreetly racist, very white suburb of Chicago and...it just wasn't the done thing to listen to rap. This was the height of the culture wars/moral panic (NWA, etc).
Are you me?
37: It seems quite possible. Just a shorter version of the same pseud?
I was a teenager around 1980, and I didn't know rap music existed until a few years later.
16 - obviously you mean Nate G was 80 times less popular.
I don't remember being aware of rap music until "The Message". I liked it.
Everyone will be shocked unto fainting to learn that I have never really listened to rap.
In a certain sense, if you don't know anything about opera, rap is just a modern form of opera.
They both have whole bunches of singing about violence.
43: Martians find them to be essentially indistinguishable.
45: Except in rap, they aren't singing (usually)
My experience was the opposite of Frowner's, but I suppose that being a teenager in south FL in the '90s will do that. My teammates would bring rap cassettes bought on the street to listen to on the bus/scandalize the chaperones. I recall rousing renditions of "68 and I Owe You One, and "Gangsta Lean."
After further research, I've discovered that the song, by Afro-Rican, was actually called "68 & IOU 1."
My belief is that there is an exact moment when it became completely normal for whitey-white US suburban white kids to listen to hip-hop (as opposed to a somewhat-outlier, cliquey, occasional-listen hobby interest).* That moment was the summer of 1993 and the ubiquity of The Chronic. You can date it precisely.
*not me personally, I was so authentically "street" that I got into hip-hop about 8 years earlier because my good friend's record company executive dad worked on marketing the Krush Groove soundtrack.
Will '90s music ever reach the level of ubiquity on the radio (in the US) that '60s music has had for the last, oh, fifty years?
I think they are on to 80s ubiquity now:
"Why is it that the music I heard when I went to Six Flags Over Georgia as an adolescent -- REO Speedwagon, Journey, Supertramp, et al, all of which was contemporary Top 40 then -- is the exact same music I hear when I go to amusement parks today, 30 years later? It's like the soundtrack to theme parks got frozen in time exactly in my youth, and it creeps me out."
I think they are on to 80s ubiquity now:
I think that's because of people like me. I never stopped listening to stupid music but I did stop putting in the effort/expense of getting the stupid music in the newer formats, so I listen to the radio.
Hip hop wasn't huge at my school, but no 'genre music' really was. But there was a bit around. This was mid to late 80s, so I had some friends who were into breakdancing and graffiti and listened to classic east coast stuff: PE, Run DMC, etc and the Beastie Boys were pretty big around 'License to Ill'. There was quite a lot of rap around, but one music among many, rather than the dominant pop genre.
I was into metal so PE were my initial gateway in, then the usual stuff. I listened to hip hop pretty regularly, from 16 or so. I still listen to more hip hop than metal or hard rock, but not as much as I listen to soul/rnb, jazz, or classical.
52: hypothesis: there are times of the day or year that families go, when they play dadmusic, and times youth goes, when they play current music.
Nice hotels seem to go for 80s top40 right now, but they are mostly full of anxious smug 40-something's. Seemed a waste in Nashville though. Do really boutique hotels use more current noise, or antique hipness?
That moment was the summer of 1993 and the ubiquity of The Chronic. You can date it precisely.
If only they had come by it so honestly. No, the great suburban white kid hip-hop breakthrough was Ice Ice Baby at #1 in the Billboard charts in 1990.
Followed shortly thereafter by MC Hammer's Golden Pants.
Beastie Boys and Run DMC were acceptable rap groups in my (and apparently Frowner's) ultrawhite Chicago suburb. Maybe because they were white and/or performed with whites, or maybe because they were less gangstery/rappy.
No one thought they were racist because there were like 10 UMC black people in the high school and we were totally cool with them.
It's like you've never been to a wedding or bar mitzvah. They have a few newer things at bar/bat mitzvahs but still a shocking amount of 70s and 80s disco/pop.
We didn't even have ten UMC black people in my school. Or ten black people. Or ten UMC people.
And not a single bar or batmitzvah.
I think Spike has it in 56. Play that funky music white boy.
Beastie Boys and Run DMC were acceptable rap groups in my (and apparently Frowner's) ultrawhite Chicago suburb.
See also: LL Cool J. And DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.
The Fresh Prince was fine, because Carlton vouched for him, but I'm not so sure about DJ Jazzy Jeff.
The beastie boys first album was a turning point.
I saw the raising hell tour with Run-DMC/LL cool J/Ice T/beastie boys (who i missed because they went on first) in baltimore in 1986 and there were almost no white people in the audience. A year later with the joint Run-DMC/beastie boys tour there were a lot of white people in the audience.
56 is incorrect, and 57 is correct. Also, Tone Loc's "Wild Thing" was also acceptable.
The local AOR station used to play "Apache" for mysterious reasons. It was always 497 or so in their Memorial Day countdown of the greatest songs of all time. (500 was always "School's Out".)
Not so much LL Cool J, but yes to Fresh Prince. And Young MC was okay too.
No, the great suburban white kid hip-hop breakthrough was Ice Ice Baby at #1 in the Billboard charts in 1990.
Followed shortly thereafter by MC Hammer's Golden Pants.
I haven't bothered to google this, but my very clear recollection is that it was Ice Ice Baby that dethroned MC Hammer from top of the charts, so I think your chronology is backwards.
You're all wrong. The first rap to hit No. 1, also very popular in the white UMC high schools of New Jersey, or at least one of them, was "Rapture" by Blondie, in 1981. It was on the white pop radio stations incessantly. Run DMC was already on white radio by then also.
Yup, 68 was right. See July through December.
I missed many, many opportunities to start liking hiphop before most honkies because, even as a lonely, influencable fat kid, I just didn't particularly like it.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a country of 200 million may have integrated musically over a timespan of many years, some cities before others.
I wasn't arguing that 1993 was the first time a hip hop song had a white kid audience.* Obviously that happened earlier -- with RunDMC at the absolute latest. MC Hammer is way too late. It was a different point. It was the first time it became OK for your totally standard vanilla white kid to completely unselfconsciously identify as liking hip hop -- not just an occasional hip-hop inflected pop song -- as a thing as normal and regular as liking rock and roll.
*Rapture doesn't count, I don't think, though arguably white new waver interest in hip hop saved the genre in the first place, by creating the market that eventually attracted the first generation of new-school rappers like RunDMC.
J, Robot and me had the same high school.
Also, does Heebie G need to regulate this thread?
You best pull out your strap and lay them busters down.
Run DMC was popular in white America in the mid-80s almost exclusively thanks to Aerosmith.
TRO is right, you could say you liked those songs, but always with the mandatory disclaimer "oh, but I hate rap". That began to change around 1993.
Oh no! They're taking Heebie's wealth!
When did it become normal (obligatory?) For pop songs to have a rap section partway through? Which I like as recitativo secco, but its hard to work around for partner dance.
an exact moment when it became completely normal for whitey-white US suburban white kids to listen to hip-hop (as opposed to a somewhat-outlier, cliquey, occasional-listen hobby interest).* That moment was the summer of 1993 and the ubiquity of The Chronic. You can date it precisely.
I do agree completely with this point.
But maybe it was comfort music from the start, but the musicians were actually violent gangsters who killed each other and lived violent, crime-riddled lives. I feel like that counts for something.
79: Pre-gangster rap. I am dead certain about that, because I know my goddamn radio hits from middle school, and they definitely broke into a clunky rap bit in the middle of any Paula Abdul song.
81 is right.
but the musicians were actually violent gangsters who killed each other and lived violent, crime-riddled lives
At least according to some inconsistent accounts you can find on the web, Dre was a disco-spinning DJ at the pleasant, kid-friendly roller skating rink where I had my 7 year old birthday party.
That's bound to cause a man to snap and go violent.
Why else would they have closed all the roller rinks?
I think there is research supporting the argument that the majority of people form the musical tastes they will cling to like limpets for the rest of their lives during their late teens to no later than mid twenties, so whatever was ubiquitous then for each cohort is doomed to become comfort listening no matter how transgressive it seemed at the time.
"Limpets" is probably too spot on as a metaphor for 80s music.
late teens to no later than mid twenties
Age 33 according to one study.
I get that there's evidence for what the majority of people will consider comfort music. Is there evidence for significant numbers of people who don't seem to have a comfort music, just patterns of interest which can keep changing?
With the much-improved sound systems and quietness of cars these days, I find I hear things in classic songs I never heard before. This can freshen memories but there's no kind of music I repair to when tired or stressed. That's when I'm most likely to be impatient with whatever's on, in whatever genre. Sometimes have to give up altogether.
re: 85
I know that's conventional wisdom, but it doesn't really ring that true for me, anecdotally.
Just looking at my immediate family, none of whom are fanatical about music in the way that I am, it doesn't ring that true. My sister [41] listens to contemporary chart music, little bits of 'proper' dance music, and so on. Her taste isn't adventurous, and she's not a big music buyer, or collector, but a lot of what she buys or listens to, is going to be recent. The same would apply to my Mum [62], who is a bit more of a rock fan [and used to go to gigs with me at one time], but who also buys and listens to new stuff. A bit MOR, and safe, I suppose but it's not what she listened to when she was younger. My nephew was joking, a few years back, that his Gran drove about hunched over the steering wheel of her Saxo, blasting Kings of Leon. I wonder if it's gendered slightly? As in, women are more likely to keep listening to chart music, and pick up on new things from their kids. Perhaps not as wrapped up in music as self-identity as a lot of blokes, but more open minded.
A lot of my friends of a similar age, are people who still buy and listen to new stuff. Particularly the friends who are amateur or pro musicians, I suppose. And then, the other half, have fairly ossified tastes, but their ossified taste doesn't match neatly up chronologically with their actual age and what is contemporary with them. There's quite a few of a 'rockist' bent, for whom the best music is still the guitar-based music of the 60s and 70s, when they either weren't born, or were babies.
57: F, for how long I have yearned to meet another self! (With a mustache, no doubt.)
I grew up in a certain suburb on the Union Pacific/West metra line, but further west than the Oak Park/River Forest classy district. Unfortunately it is almost devoid of landmarks so I can't even hint in an interesting manner.
On the other hand, I did just learn that my childhood home - on one of the distinctly less posh streets and very small - is valued at $320,000 now, and the also-not-posh house we moved into when I was 13 has been knocked down and replaced by a profoundly unattractive mcmansion that sold for almost a million dollars a few years ago. Quand je me tourne vers mes souvenirs, je revois la maison ou j'ai grandi, indeed.
I can't even say which is the weirder realization - that the house where I grew up is still there with the poplar tree and the unfortunate prickly shrubbery all swept away, or that the other house is totally gone.
I bet the shrubs could have been popular if they tried to be a bit less prickly.
When did it become normal (obligatory?) For pop songs to have a rap section partway through?
I feel like this was normal with the mainstreaming of Freestyle music and New Jack Swing in the late 80s, though it largely fell out of style again until the last 10-15 years.
Semi-OT trivia: The Source magazine was started by two white Harvard undergraduates in 1988.
At my old house, they cut down the shelter belt my dad planted. They were Australian or Austrian pine. I never knew which because they never talked.
In my childhood house, there live my childhood parents.
They didn't retire to New Jersey to keep things balanced?
93: The best pop song with a rap section is Scritti Politti's Jacques Derrida, which is about....Green Gartside's abiding fondness for Jacques Derrida. (Who can blame him? Not I!) I am not, however, evaluating it on the quality of the rapping.
Also, unknown to me a genre has sprung up called - horribly! - "sophisti-pop" and Scritti Politti are apparently practitioners.
The list of sophisti-pop acts, is all Proustian and shit, for me. Because _that_ was the mainstream music of my high school years. Central Scotland, 1986. That was what the fashionable, but not weird, kids were listening to. Boys with permed mullets, or flicked 80s-Bowie quiffs, pastel Pringle jumpers, white socks. etc. Girls with high fringes.
Some of that music is pretty good, some [lots] of it is pretty awful. But I largely associate it with people who were wankers.
Ah, I was in the enormous suburb with a famous riverfront on the next line south. But your description probably holds for most of my former county. $300-350k is now the median house price there (for a suburb far from the city).
So, Frowner and F, which of you is Elwood and which is Joliet Jake?
Elwood is the name of a far-flung Chicago exurb.
93 was me.
I think, in South Florida at least, 2 Live Crew's As Nasty as They Wanna Be (1989) played the role attributed to The Chronic in this thread.
Yeah, 2 Live Crew was the shit that you felt tough for listening to, and didn't want your Mom to know. Of course, all I ever actually got to hear on the radio was the "clean" version of Me So Horny. A friend of my had the dirty version on cassette, though. I think I heard it once.
"I'm sitting at home watching Arsinio Hall"
I have no informed opinion on whether the theory I described above is true, other than that it would explain a lot I see in wider social circle. But also regularly have friends determined to broaden their horizons so that's fun when can send them towards new enjoyment.
On other fronts, patent case law. Ugh. Shoot me now! It helps if I pretend I'm parsing late medieval documents. A bit.
I was wondering about that. Gangsta rap seems to be the new elevator music.
"Why is it that the music I heard when I went to Six Flags Over Georgia as an adolescent -- REO Speedwagon, Journey, Supertramp, et al, all of which was contemporary Top 40 then -- is the exact same music I hear when I go to amusement parks today, 30 years later? It's like the soundtrack to theme parks got frozen in time exactly in my youth, and it creeps me out."
Is that a thing in the US, then? Real music at theme parks (as opposed to temporary fairgrounds)? I don't think I've ever heard anything other than instrumental music at English ones, and it's been too long since I've been to one in the US to remember.
97: I ran into Scritti Politti's bass player when I was at university; he'd given up on sophisti-pop and got into lecturing on cladistic taxonomy.
It depresses me that my dad went to lectures by JRR Tolkien and 110 is the closest I will get to that sort of anecdote.
patent case law
Worst amusement park soundtrack ever.
111: If it cheers you up, my closest brush with greatness is seeing Michael Keaton in a restaurant that has since been turned into a Pottery Barn.
I once ran into that corset romance actress with giant hair in north London, on the high street corner round from where we were staying, the one who was in all the Merchant Ivory and the like movies years ago, and then married that American director who does scary movies, I can't remember her name. Anyways, she has a surprising amount of acne scarring close up, so here's to the professional makeup artists! Good job! I went back and told the guys about my (one and only) celebrity sighting - was able to remember her name then - and they scoffed unbelievingly. Ha! She has an eccentric personal dress style, including steampunk-esque shoes, so I described the shoes, numerous petticoats & etc she'd been wearing, sent them to look her up on Tom and Lorenzo and they were forced to eat their words! Triumph was mine on this completely inconsequential matter!
114: Helena Bonham Carter?
You are so lucky!
OT: There's a rope hanging past my window and it is creeping me out.
Steve the Careless Pittsburgh Ninja strikes again.
It's gone now. Maybe he was reading over my shoulder.
Now there's feet and a voice saying things like you say before you slip and fall.
I think they're going to start removing the mortar from the edge of my window. In other words, lunch time.
It's really unnerving. It's very clear this is the first time this guy has been hanging from the roof of a building. He's been out there for ten minutes now, trying to get situated while talking to a guy on the roof. Or he's talking to himself.
|| I've been on my own little North American Tour the last 24 hours -- including an hour on the tarmac while they did weight and balance stuff (including taking my suitcase off the plane) -- but honestly nothing is worse than the airport CNN in SLC. My God, why are they talking about polling for the 2016 election?
"I do feel a little bit better."
Good for you son. Hopefully somebody upstairs is in tune with the letter and spirit of OSHA.
111: My parents' biochemistry prof in med school was Isaac Asimov, and I've never run into any member of Scritti Politti.
124: If it makes you feel better, airport CNN on Sunday in STL was broadcasting Rand Paul's filibuster thingy with almost no interruptions. Awful.
My mom was secretary to a future Nobel winner sometimes known as a founding father of AI. My father ran into Sinatra and Namath (separately) in Manhattan in the '70s (both times my mom said, "Why didn't you invite him home for dinner?").
They're always filming movies around here, but I can't recall every being especially close to anyone famous. I think Walter Matthau and Harry Morgan back when I was in college. Oh, and I once had a near miss with Robert Downey Jr. (at a toy store, buying presents for his kid), but I was delayed by a fight with BOGF.
A guy I knew decently well at CMU has won a Tony, but he's not that famous and I didn't know him that well.
(to return to an earlier point because perhaps someone here cares and certainly no one I know in the flesh does: I was actually pretty into Scritti Politti and Green Gartside generally - not least, appropriately enough, because he was one of the few white people of his genre and generation to get seriously interested in hip-hop and attempt to incorporate ideas from hip-hop without just appropriating the genre - but then he wrote these kind of dumb "I am too mature for socialism now, I am disillusioned with social reform and it is because I am MATURE and WISE now" songs which are precisely the kind of thing that well-off white dudes in their forties and fifties tend to produce and it really made me sad. I mean, I loathe almost everything Manic Street Preachers-related (speaking of well-off white dudes) but at least they've been able to write some music of relative nuance that's about being disillusioned with certain aspects of big-C communism while still being on the left.
Early is a great compilation, though, and "Perfect Way" is simply fantastic for the gym. I cannot get over the idea that Scritti Politti actually had several mainstream dance hits about Lacan.
124: If it makes you feel better, airport CNN on Sunday in STL was broadcasting Rand Paul's filibuster thingy with almost no interruptions. Awful.
I thought CNN was all car chases and missing white women these days? Or is airport CNN CNN International? In which case, it's even less clear why they'd be showing a filibuster.
Airport TV in Des Moines was tuned to some bland airport channel. They had a gameshow on, kind of like Password but with a super-botoxed host; married couples competed to guess the word when presented with a list of clues. One husband essentially outed himself (during the bonus round, where you have to come up with lots of words relating to the main word) by shouting the names of all the members of N-Sync while jumping up and down. Then they started a round that they said was sponsored by some health care company or other. The first answer turned out to be "urinary incontinence." The first clue for the next answer was "candida," and sure enough the answer was "yeast infection." I decided I was probably hallucinating and walked away. This was after an hour or so of Dr. Drew and his guests wailing about how nobody is really talking enough about the TRAUMA that the poor children went through in that Duggar thing.
130: The one about Derrida is ever so catchy.
The first answer turned out to be "urinary incontinence."
That's always what I try first.
precisely the kind of thing that well-off white dudes in their forties and fifties tend to produce and it really made me sad
I've seen them play and this was very much the mood, although part of that was the venue (the Lex on Pentonville Road). the opinionated academic walked out, several times.
I was once within a few feet of George Clooney. It turns out he's shorter, drunker, and more gnome-like than you'd imagine. Charming, though.
I am now remembering standing next to Al Pacino once and he is teensy tiny! Lilliputian really. And once sat next to that British therapy rock guy, again name escapes me, recorded a sing about Salisbury hill?, while he was politely enduring having his head bored off his body by some dude going on and on and on about some physics doohickey. But I had zero idea who he was until told later.
137: Peter Gabriel! OMG!!!
People who have been next to famous people are the luckiest people ....
136: But Eggplant wins! I'm going to just have to decide he's lying to prevent myself from dying of jealousy.
I have been encouraged to work faster and better by two Nobelists.
J P/ven and J Cus4ck were high school classmates. JC was self-absorbed, though objectively he makes nice movies. JP similar character, also did not smell good on many days, apparently had a wonderful family.
The interactions I actually feel best about are sustained contacts with talented people famous only briefly or to specialists. I hope that those keep coming-- I'm pretty convinced that young at heart is pretty close in meaning to still hopeful.
Airport TV in Des Moines was tuned to some bland airport channel.
The color of the sky above a port?
at least they've been able to write some music of relative nuance that's about being disillusioned with certain aspects of big-C communism while still being on the left.
Have you listened to "Song Of The Old Communist" by Leon Rosselson?*
* I've met Leon Rosselson, does that count as a celebrity encounter?
Wayne Henderson? There was a recent-ish book about him.
I was once on the same airplane with David Hasselhoff, but I didn't stand next to him.
I have stood next to Steve Vai, though. And I've met and talked briefly with Herbie Hancock and Harry Connick Jr. (Not at the same time.)
Two of those count, unfortunately.
AISTMMMBB Clare Danes and I barreled into each other as I was leaving and she was entering the religious studies building at a certain university. She seemed nice and was apologetic (as was I).
I've told my Tatsuya Nakadai story.
Some others.
Leon Rosselson counts by me.
Can't figure out "J P/ven"
Which two?
Also, I think I stood next to Bruce Springsteen once, but I couldn't be sure.
Fair enough. It would be difficult to top Thorn's celebrity encounter anyway.
149.5: Jeremy Piven!!!!
150.2: That was probably me . Bruce and I are hard to tell apart.
Thanks peep. Speaking of Piven this is a great pan:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/movies/review-entourage-the-screen-is-bigger-but-nothing-is-better.html
Watching the movie is like finding an ancient back issue of a second-tier lad mag -- not even Maxim, but Loaded or Nuts -- in a friend's guest bathroom. You wonder how it got there. You wonder how you got there.
A member of the Steel Curtain once told me to get off his lawn.
In early '88 I went to a civics program trip to DC, and a buddy of mine took a leak next to Al Gore in the Capitol. Given the year, this was a reasonably big deal.
Actually, I have met a couple of more recent Steelers. And I've seen the star of an episode of Doomsday Preppers.
A member of the Steel Curtain once told me to get off his lawn.
I read this as Steel Pulse until 155 clarified for me.
I'm sorta-kinda dying to know the identity of the musician in the comment linked in 151. Cough it up, Thorn.
154--the urinal sighting is a whole sub-genre unto itself.....my best: Vaclav Havel, Prague, summer 1990.
157: What, no, it's nobody impressive! Cellist (former by now, I believe) in the Pea/bo/dy Tr/io. I guess I put in another thread that Jian Ghomeshi was weirdly flirty once long ago, but not to levels that put me at risk for violence. That's the biggest musician name I can manage in this context, I think.
