Like the Sun King prancing us through Versailles, Mariah Carey has shown us the “full blown salon” in her house as well as “the extended version” of her closet with its “gold leaf designs on the floor” where she briefed us on “the basics of [her] shoe room”. Emotionally uninflected until he discussed his car collection, The Game introduced us lovingly to his Bentley, Dodge Charger, and sassy lemon lime Lamborghini. And Bret Michaels graciously led us through his living room on a Harley Davidson, past his leather sofa that seats a thousand, and into his kitchen where he urgently displayed the contents of his fridge while a stripper made him a PB&J sandwich (crusts cut off because Michaels is a business man).

So, understandably, there were high hopes for the 2001 episode featuring Redman  at the height of his powers– the MC, producer, actor, two-time Grammy nominee, member of the Def Squad and collaborator with Method Man. But – as we stepped over his sleeping cousin, watched Red iron a sweatshirt on the floor of his two bedroom Staten Island home and looked at his totally normal bathroom– we slowly realized who was being played, felt thoroughly ashamed of ourselves, turned off the TV and did something useful with our time. MTV doesn’t do irony, but Redman used it as a medium to remind us that the goodness comes from keeping it real.

The post MTV Cribs – Redman appeared first on The Good Blog.

$hmyl (aka $hmyllinaire/ Lil $hmylan) burst upon the scene with Don’t Fuck With $hmyl and the controversial ‘Bitchez Dey Love Me’.  I’ve chosen ‘Don’t Fuck With $hmyl’ because it introduces us to Big Daddy D and the rest of $hmyl’s crew, who look a formidable bunch of street toughs.

In a world of homogenized rap music, cookie cutter pop and color-by-numbers rock it’s refreshing to see an artist like $hmyl break the shackles and force the music industry and pop culture as a whole to sit up and take notice.

Personal highlights include $hmyl hanging out of a car (his best friends ride?) giving us the finger, Big Daddy D’s obviously flubbed line that made the cut and the embarrassment on his face when he realizes that this is the take that $Shmyl went with for the video, $hmyl, in a moment that no doubt inspired Lil Wayne and Danny Brown, telling us that he spends a portion of his time “lickin’ flaps” and the flurry of punches directed at no one in particular at the conclusion of the song.

Please sit back and enjoy $hmyl.

NOTE: There’s a lot of really good hip hop coming out of Australia at the moment it’s just that this guy makes me laugh.

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But what truly makes R unique is a sustained self-delusional gravitas not exhibited by anyone else ever in the history of things. May we humbly submit exhibits A thru V – R Kelly’s In The Closet.

This twenty-two part film clip raises more questions than it answers. Like: is this a song, a movie, a theatre piece or a prank? How much did this work of art cost? Is the music replicable? Like, could he recall and reproduce these note sequences in concert? And at what point did R stop having someone in his life who could say “Hey… maybe having a film clip that is measured in chapters is excessive…” or “No.  Twenty-two parts is not a thing.”

Not since Chaucer’s Canturbury Tales has an audience simultaneously wondered with such force why a story is being told, why it is being told the way it is, and why, for the love of god, is it so astoundingly long?

But in spite of all this, it is utterly impossible not to be curious about where the fuck this thing is going. By chapter four you find yourself unable to look away yet utterly unable to say why.

Perhaps R just says it best in Chapter 3:

In a revelation that beggars believe, R has recently released 11 new chapters. They are a sequel to the ‘Trapped In The Closet’ saga. The obvious questions are:

-who in R’s life said to him ‘I’d really love to see MORE of Trapped In The Closet’?

-how could any human on the planet feel that Trapped In The Closet Chapters 1-22 left ANY questions unanswered?

Nonetheless, enjoy…

The post R-Kelly – Trapped In The Closet appeared first on The Good Blog.

Bible History #1 (Sodom and Gomorrah):

I attended Jewish day schools for my entire education. Which is to say that I spent many middle school hours actively not listening in Hebrew class and many hours with a highlighter in bible class, smirkingly seeking out any words and phrases vaguely sexual or scatological.

So you can imagine the kinship I felt when I first watched this episode of Professor Brothers. Its account of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah accords perfectly with the cosmology I developed from my religious education.  It’s a pity that Brad Neely is from Arkansas which was pretty light on Jewish day schools. We could’ve totally kicked it in Rabbinics. -SK

History Lesson (JFK):

I once attended a fascinating talk at the 92^nd Street Y where Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick discussed the Untold History of The United States. Basically their respective TV series and books delved into the idea that it’s often only the top line details of the events that shape our world that get remembered as history, and often the real, more interesting and more complicated details, people and events disappear into the ether much like time itself.

On this particular evening, Stone and Kuznich shared a detail of the Cuban missile crisis I had never heard before. Whilst history largely credit’s JFK’s nerves of steel with preventing nuclear war, it was actually the nerve of a Russian submarine officer named Vasili Arkhipov who, somewhere below the surface of the ocean, argued with against his captain launching the torpedoes and in doing so saved the world.

It is through that prism that I choose to view this history lesson cum indie electro pop music video from the Professor Brothers. Some of the details are familiar to us and we know them to be true: JFK was President, he was popular, he was a significant international pantsman of the highest order and he didn’t dig communism. But what else is true yet remains untold? Did he have great stats? Was he telepathic? Perhaps we’ll never know. But many who lived in his time and heard him speak have corroborated one important Professor Brothers fact – he definitely smelled like the future. -CP

Further viewing:

• Neely’s two other web series, Baby Cakes, America Now and China, Il.

The post The Professor Brothers appeared first on The Good Blog.

Bob Eubanks was the Newlywed Game’s (see separate post) first and longest serving host. He was 28 when the show first aired in 1966 – making him the youngest game show host ever – and approximately 175 years old when he finished that MC gig.

But idle hands are the Devil’s playground, so since the heyday of the show for which he is most famous, Eubanks has been excellently industrious: pursing “a career in the country music business”, making offensive comments and plugging his wife’s “Christian workout video”.

While his white-clad wife and her minions prance for the Lord, Eubanks’ voiceover tells us that Connection “is a Christian exercise video” [emphasis his]. Unlike your secular exercise videos, “[t]he exercises on Connection have been professionally designed to spiritually motivate you into shape.” Which begs the question, by whom, exactly? Who are these professionals accredited in spiritual exercise design? Is that a degree? Did they clinically test these moves until God could hear them? Until they were perfectly balanced between Prancersize and Marcel Marceau doing a squat thrust?

I don’t have such qualifications and I want to belieeeve but when Eubanks says “Now, I don’t care what shape you’re in, if you use the Connection video every day, you’ll soon notice a big difference”, I find myself a bit of a Doubting Thomas. Unless that “big difference” is your loved ones treating you as though you’ve had a lobotomy, it’s difficult to see how the “exercises” shown would have any impact on your health, weight or proximity to Heaven. Walking to the bathroom would be more physically taxing and more spiritual.

At $19.95 plus shipping and handling, Eubanks urges us to give ourselves “and a loved one” the gift of improving our lives through Connection. We’ll never know if homeboy was guilted or bullied into doing this or if he was actually complicit in this cynical attempt to profit off the fat guzzling, bible bashing hordes of middle America (who, let’s face it, deserve it). But they are no longer selling the video. So if you want to get fit or get spiritual, you’ll just have to seek out people who actually know what they’re talking about. Hallelujah.

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