“we’ve basically heard it all several times before as far as people ripping into liz. I dunno… she’s got a good record as a feminist writer, whatever feminist means anymore. just because she wants to be skinny and hot should not negate what’s she’s said in her songs over her career.

also, it’s just music and just a concert tour. I don’t think Liz, or anyone at my company, has much of a cultural agenda in mind. Maybelline wants to promote and encourage girls to realize that it’s ok to have “attitude” and that having an attitude or being opinionated is your right as a human being. but it’s really more about selling makeup than anything else.

it’s shameless capitalism. I’m not going to defend it to the death, but despite its faults it works better than pretty much any other from of economics or government.

and I say it’s better to have a Chicks with Attitude tour with actual musicians and writers than it is to have whatever Brittney’s last tour was with nothing but farce and show and sleeze.”

“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” Chicken Little screeched, terrified they would not heed her and would be
found the next morning, buried among the intellectual debris.
She pecked and pecked at them with her sharp little beak until they finally agreed to be awakened. The three readers rose up and shuffled outside to be greeted by a warm, summer rain falling steady as a heartbeat, wondrous and quiet as unexpected relief from pain. “Why, Chicken Little,” said one reader, “it’s only a summer shower come to feed the land. It feels great!”

this in response to Meghan O’ Rourke’s saying:
Not only will Ms. Phair alienate her old fan base, as she has defensively acknowledged in recent interviews, but in trying to remodel herself as a contemporary Avril Lavigne or Alanis Morissette, she’s revealed herself to be astonishingly tone-deaf to her own strengths. Lyrically, this album has little of the potent acuity of her early deconstructions of relationships, and musically it has none of her tactile immediacy.

reading the koranic interpretation post, i thought to myself, why is dude talking about irshad manji and reminding readers that religious injunctions are socially constructed when he could be telling us about koranic interpretration under the abbasids wrt the mutazila and soroush and things/people i have never heard of… can’t see what’s interesting abt this letter either.

oh yeah, and our rap can kick your rap’s ass:
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Trpkgnbthsl.htm

if it’s “just marketing” or “just to sell some makeup”, then that’s fine, people have been using hotties and sex to sell commodities for ages. i just don’t think she should be taken seriously otherwise. when a tour preaches “grrrl power” in one breath but then “hide those blemishes, grrrls, with this product”, it kind of falls flat.

it just seems like posturing. rather than push the boundaries, they’re reinforcing the norm. if her art is to be regarded as “just music” and “shameless capitalism” then it can be disregarded just as much britney’s tripe.

where do i get my $0.98 in change?

she went to see liz phair, what did she expect? and sympathy for the usurping new feminism, no less?

re:rap, rap-like is why our rap can kick your rap’s ass. the realness.

Though that article did pitch stuff in a crooked way, by suggesting a deep level of alienation and disembodiment.

Basically, this shit is guaranteeing that we end up with a full generation of women like Annie Hall, leaving their bodies to sketch or thing or something while abandoning their flesh to the patriarchy. That kind of duality can’t be good or healthy–it’s too Christian.

I guess the point is just the aforementioned conquest of cool. People are taught “here’s the new shit. Learn this subversive new shit.” But you know what? It’s like O’Brien giving Winston the Book in 1984. He knows that if Winston thinks he’s being subversive, he’ll be more willing to love Big Brother. (And, yes, my hate using sexuality to refuse to address the serious problems of gender equality comes up in discussions of the novel, too).

This is why the only culture I do these days is downloading mp3s and wondering when I’m going to go see Harold and Kumar.

But also, don’t be too mean to Liz Phair or the concert. It’s more of, sadly, the same.