MC Lars: Serious Goofiness

Now I finally realize the essential difference between all those hipsters and me. How could I have possibly missed MC Lars and his post-punk laptop rap album “This Gigantic Robot Kills” this year?

I am a confirmed nerd: English Major? Check. Former D&D Fanatic? Check. Chess Player? Check. Avid Reader? Check. College Debater? Check. So how could I have missed the latest hit in the nerd-core hip-hop genre? Didn’t I get the message when I heard previous tracks like “The Raven” and “Ahab,” which are based respectively on Edgar Allen Poe’s eerie poem and Melville’s endless tome Moby Dick?

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a lyrics guy. Don’t get me wrong, just like everyone else I listen to music primarily for the sound. But when I take off on a wave of resonance that elevates me to a higher plane of existence the last thing I want to hear is some lame cliché repeated about fifty times. I must admit that I have my guilty goofy dance hall pop pleasures, but the music that I come to know and love, the music that becomes a part of my life, must have something more.

The places in which I find this sublime blend of music and lyrics are varied. I can find solace in anything from Bob Marley to Sage Francis to Benjamin Gibbard, and a thousand tracks in between. But the one thing that all of my favorites have in common is that they give me something to think about while I follow their muse through dark twisted alleyways, get lifted up on soaring breezes, or moved to dance to pounding beats.

Which is not to say that MC Lars' latest effort is stuffy, intellectual fare. He skillfully samples plenty of punk, ska, and hip hop loops to keep you moving, sprinkles in funny clips from viral YouTube videos (“Don’t tase me bro!”), drops enough pop culture references to make US Weekly jealous, and isn’t afraid to lay down plenty of goofy joke tracks, which have become his trademark. But what’s remarkable is how he fuses into this hip-hop mish mash so many literary references. And not in a merely name-dropping sense, either. He actually seems to understand what these writers wrote, and incorporates their ideas into his post-punk madness in ways that are pretty compelling.

Think about it. When was the last time you heard a hip-hop song that references Bukowski, Emerson, the legend of King Arthur, and Descartes while still finding time to drop references to random pop culture icons like Kobe Bryant and Hot Topic? Or better yet, when was the last time you heard an entire song the lyrics of which revolve around the murder, revenge, Oedipal incest, unrequited love, suicide, more murder, and general insanity of Shakespeare’s Hamlet?

It all makes sense once you learn that MC Lars (or Andrew Nielson as his mother saw fit to call him) has a degree in English Literature from Stanford, and he studied at Oxford. This is a genuinely smart dude who has found a unique niche in the less-than-profitable world of twenty-first century American music. More power to him.

Lars is a self-consciously “white” rapper and he does have multiple self-referential moments including most obviously his self-deprecating “White Kids Aren’t Hyphy.” This catchy track includes a shout out to Sage Francis, a master of intelligent flow from the East Coast who shares Lars’ melanin-deficiency but raps on the opposite shore and with a lot more severity and grimness.

Lars also recently tweeted props to the “mid-era work” of Eminem and despite the obvious differences between the two (Lars’ PG lyrics for one thing) some people can’t seem to help but see a similarity. I think the comparison is apt, but there is one big difference. Both are clever. But MC Lars is also seriously smart.

Sex, Vampires, and Mormonism

Having been raised in the Mormon Church I couldn’t help but wonder what the whole Twilight thing was all about. After all, Stephanie Meyer is among the top three most famous Mormons out there right now (along with right-wing wacko Glenn Beck and moderate Republican Mitt Romney). Plus, about nine out of ten of my female high school English students have read these books, my wife is a huge fan, and the movie stars are all over the tabloids. So over the summer I picked up the first installment of the Twilight Saga and was more than a little disappointed at what I found. 

Admittedly I am not the target market for this book. Perhaps if I were a teenage girl I would find Bella’s gushing, obsessive, all-consuming fascination with Edward endearing rather than pathetic. And perhaps I would find the idea of sparkly vampires intriguing rather than goofy. And hey, maybe if I was still in high school I would even understand why a one-hundred year old vampire would have even the slightest desire to sit through high school Algebra (let alone sit through it dozens of times as the movie absurdly suggests).

But that is not to say that I don’t see why it is so popular. Stephanie Meyer manages to tap into a primal and really quite fascinating human psychological phenomenon in her novel—the amalgamation of sex and death. Being familiar with the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault who have argued that sex and death are inextricably fused in the human psyche (Foucault’s native language—French—even refers to orgasms as petit mort or “little deaths”) it’s easy to find the psychological spasm that triggers an obsessive fascination in some Twilight fans which borders on lunacy.

My wife said it best, though, when I asked her about her fascination with Edward and Bella: “He can’t have sex with her because if he did he would lose control and kill her. That is so damn sexy.”

Indeed. Desire is fueled by denial. The forbidden fruit is one of the oldest concepts in literature, an idea as true today as it was thousands of years ago. We always want what we cannot have, and Edward is the ultimate unreachable aspiration. Combine that with his mysterious nature and the not-irrelevant fact that a quietly charismatic British guy with high cheekbones and a strong chin plays him on screen and you have all the makings of a pop culture sensation.

It is a bit surprising, though, that Stephanie Meyer barely even nods at her faith in the novel. There is an incident where Bella prays for help at a particularly rough juncture, but there’s no explicit mention of Christianity or its tenets anywhere to be found. I did see a bit of doctrine shining like a ray of sunlight through Edward’s keen metaphysical musings (A vampire who believes in Intelligent Design? Really?) But overall it’s clear that she went out of her way to make the book as secular as possible.

Think about it. Bella is definitely not a Mormon teenager. None of the trappings of Mormonism—the three hours of church each Sunday, family home evening each Monday, Seminary Bible classes every morning before school, temple trips on the weekends, mutual on Tuesday nights—none of the things that make Mormon culture work can be found anywhere in its pages.

Still, though, it’s often observed that the Twilight saga is surprisingly moral for a vampire story, even chaste in its way. I wonder if that’s really what’s going on here, though. By tying sexuality up with fear and fascination Stephanie Meyer is fueling the fire that makes pre-marital sex so attractive in the first place. And Bella wants it—she’s not chaste by choice, and that’s the really interesting thing about the story.

In a lot of ways I think it’s like any other brand of fundamentalism. On the surface it condemns premarital sex in favor of abstinence, but its real effect may be quite different. Study after study has shown that making kids take abstinence vows and teaching abstinence in schools doesn’t decrease rates of teenage sex. Plus, for the devoutly religious the condemnation, fear, and guilt makes a healthy sexuality almost impossible. Guilt and anxiety drive a morbid fascination that turns one of the most basic and essential acts of human life into a frighteningly compelling obsession.

It may be that the fixation on this sex = death equation drives many young people to rebellious promiscuity, early pregnancy, unconsidered marriage, or a long drawn out adolescence spent wavering between morbidly obsessive fascination and unmerciful self-loathing.

If there’s an alternative to these choices, I wish I knew what it was. But in the mean time I hear there’s a sequel to Twilight and the film adaptation is due in theatres any day now. Maybe Jacob will prove an easier lay than Edward. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Monopoly Taking too Long? Just Follow the Rules

I really do like Monopoly. And not just in the vague nostalgic way that a lot of people do; I seriously think it's a cool idea for a game. Designed during the great depression and incorporating many of the lessons learned from that economic disaster, it creates a microcosm of our national economy in a way that is really pretty ingenious. I played a game with my son, niece and nephew just the other day but before that it had been several years since I last played Monopoly (other than the time I talked a few of my friends into joining me for a game of "Broncopoly"--sweet!) and the reason is pretty simple. Any time you bring up the idea of playing Monopoly you hear the same thing, "Oh, that game takes way too long." So you end up spending a few hours playing Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit or Scrabble or whatever, which is all well and good, but I think that Monopoly is getting a raw deal here and I think I've finally figured out why.

I've noticed that the first thing you have to do when you join a new group of Monopoly gamers is figure out what the hell the rules are going to be. This is because no one has ever actually read the rules of the game. Think about it, have you ever actually read the rules or did you learn by playing with people who said they could teach you? I rest my case.

The biggest problem that I have with made up Monopoly rules is Free Parking. For some reason everyone puts the luxury tax and income tax in the middle of the board for whoever lands on Free Parking. Some extremists also put doctor's bills and other fees charged by the Chance and Commity Chest cards in there too. I even played with a girl once who insisted on putting a $500 bill in the middle of the board at the start of the game and when somebody won it she wanted to put in another one for the next person too.

No wonder your game of Monopoly takes so long; that's like giving your miniature economy a massive economic stimulus every time someone happens to land on free parking. In the rule book (page 6) it says, "A player landing on this place does not receive any money, property or reward of any kind. This is just a 'free' resting place."

Think about it. The object of the game is for everyone to go bankrupt except for one big winner. Well, if you're constantly injecting more and more money into the economy, how do you ever expect to drive anyone to bankruptcy? Just as Aunt Maggie is about to go bankrupt she lands on free parking, collects fifteen hundred dollars, and builds hotels on the purple group instead. Well, that just added another four hours of die rolling to your Monopoly adventure. Had she gone out of the game she'd have handed her properties over to your little sister who already controls two other Monopolies with hotels and who would have been able to put you, Uncle Earl and Grandma Josephine in the poor house in less than an hour.

So the key is to put the income tax and luxury tax where it belongs, in the bank--remember the lessons of supply side economics, raising taxes takes money out of the hands of businesspeople and entrepreneurs and thus hurts the economy. If you're taking that tax money and putting it right back out into circulation through the Free Parking space it won't have the same dampening effect and the game will take that much longer.

There are a lot of other things that bother me too, like the almost universally ignored fact that there are only supposed to be twelve hotels and thirty-two houses on the board at any one time. The rules actually state that if players want more houses and hotels than are available the bank should start auctioning the remaining units to the highest bidder--yet another way to drive up prices and ruin the economy. Limiting supply is disastrous economic policy, as Charles Darrow knew back in 1934 when he designed the game, but when people run for the little red and green legos and allow every property on the board to be developed the gross domestic product of your little economy increases dramatically, everyone grows richer, and the end of the game grows further and further away.

Supply-side economic theory is great for real-life politics but in a game designed to replicate the great depression you've got to set the stage for economic disaster. Well, that or else have a lot of caffeine and dig in for an all-night Monopoly marathon.