Action Bronson: Overcooked

by

Danny Schwartz

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MP00 Music

Nov 26, 2012


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Action Bronson Rare Chandeliers Cover

He is a morbidly obese white Albanian dude covered in tattoos, rapping about his years as a professional chef with vulgar, quasi-horrocore lyrics.  Something about Action Bronson just makes you feel uncomfortable.  Nothing about him makes any sense when compared to more conventional rap.  The only thing that harkens back to common ground is a slight stylistic similarity to Ghostface Killah.  Action Bronson built his appeal simply by being unexpected.

Over the past year and a half, Bronson exploded into the rap game as a promising up-and-comer.  Why did we enjoy listening to a fat Albanian chef rap?  He had no discernable street cred or monumental struggle – the conventional hip-hop narrative did not apply.  We kept listening because we had no idea what he might say or do next.  It was obvious that his tales were fictional – he wasn’t pulling girls or firing guns at the absurd rate his rhymes often declared.  But his lyrics still didn’t seem disingenuous – though his stories were fictional, they were interspersed with personal nuggets – lines about repping Queens as well as lines simply about food, from his life as a chef.  “Smokin’ heavy / artichokes spread over spaghetti / I flow for the green, snow and confetti”

Action Bronson’s most recent mixtape released last week, Rare Chandeliers, superficially promised the same shock value as his previous work.  The album art told us it would have everything we loved about Bronsolino – graphic violence, gratuitous sexual descriptions, weed, and a general sense of “What the fuck is going on here?”  But the tape itself comes up woefully short.  Rather than expanding his palate to include more flavorful, unique ways of making his audience squirm, Action Bronson regresses, exposing his artistic shortcomings and de-emphasizing what he does best – the unexpected.

On Rare Chandeliers, Bronson pairs with acclaimed producer The Alchemist.  The pairing seems like it should work.  Alc has the ability to make beats for any style, and Bronson’s style is one of the strangest.  But rather than working together to achieve a cohesive sound, the balance of power is tilted heavily towards Action Bronson.  In nearly every song, the beat switches for every verse, trying to match the stylistic and lyrical changes Bronson is making.  The Alchemist is seemingly trying to keep up with Action Bronson – the two seem neither cohesive nor compatible.  The Alchemist’s beats are too complex, too dope, for Bronson’s jumpy style.  This isn’t a knock on his skill.  He would simply benefit from working with stripped-down shittier beats that let him shine more – think Big L.

Action Bronson broke down his mixtape in an interview with Complex Magazine.  Describing both the tape and its namesake song he says, “At the end of the day, I’m just a fucking one of a kind, and so is Al. We’re just some rare chandeliers.”  He pinpoints the problem with the tape.  Action Bronson is too individualistic – he lacks the ability to develop cohesive, linear structure with anybody.  He is too accustomed to being the center of attention to allow The Alchemist to shine.  The dialectic between the two is non-existent.

While discussing the next song, “The Symbol,” Bronson states, “I’m trying to go with a theme here. I’m rap’s vigilante. I’m out for justice.”  In doing so, he reveals his main downfall as an artist: a complete lack of narrative ability.  If his narrative goal on Rare Chandeliers was to portray himself as a vigilante, it was an utter failure.  There’s nothing to suggest he is anything but a nutjob.  And there is nothing wrong with that – it was being a nutjob that made him successful in the first place.  Why deny the truth?

On “Eggs on the Floor,” the beat changes for each individual verse Action Bronson spits.  This song, and every other on the mixtape, could easily be subdivided into two or three different songs, each roughly 0:45 in length.  Neither and inter- or intra-song connection exists on this tape, exemplifying a lack of storytelling ability.  His stories are one-line, fictional tales – “Spin out the Beamer at the arena / bitches spot me like a Cheetah.”  The cleverness is there, but what does he say about himself in the process? Gucci Mane’s storytelling style is similar, but the sum of his one-liners is a tale about Southern trap culture.  The sum of Bronson’s individual stories is a garbled mess.  We have already heard him tell stories like this on previous tapes – this isn’t new or exciting anymore.

Even his style seems stale and replicable.  On “Modern Day Revelations” the Alchemist tries to direct him towards perhaps his closest hip-hop match: early Eminem.  The non-stop drug, violence, and sex references tie them together.  The beat drops, and it has the same basic melody and rhythm as “Guilty Conscience” from The Slim Shady LP.  But Bronson is simply not as talented as Eminem.  “Guilty Conscience” has three mini-stories tied together within a larger story.  “Modern Day Revelations” just has a series of clever lines tied together with no larger structure.  At the end of Bronson’s verse, Roc Marciano drops a verse in the exact style of Action Bronson, full of food, drugs, and uncomfortable imagery, and he does it better than Bronson.  He tells an actual story while still talking about “cracking crustaceans” and “crab dipped in the garlic.”  Roc’s verse was dope because we didn’t expect it from him – but we do already expect it from Action Bronson.

Perhaps if Rare Chandeliers was a listener’s first exposure to Action Bronson, they might derive the same uncomfortable pleasure the rest of us did when we first heard him on Bon Appetit ….. Bitch!!!!! or Dr. Lecter.  But having become accustomed to his appearance, his culinary past, and his vulgarity already, we have become desensitized to what makes Bronson unique.  The image of a morbidly obese redhead having violent sex being forced into our heads by his lyrics no longer hold the same disturbing value they once did – we have already been forced to imagine this in his previous works.  For Action Bronson to continue his ascent in the rap game, he needs to find a way to develop a compelling narrative or make his music as unexpected as it once was to us.  Otherwise, it seems that he has peaked.

The Metaphysics of a Really Big Smartphone

by

Jeremiadus

Season Categories Published
MP00 Life

Nov 18, 2012


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I bought the Samsung Galaxy Note II smartphone a few days ago. It has a 5.5 inch screen. That’s a really big screen. With a quad-core processor, 2 GB of memory, and the Jelly Bean Android operating system – along with a sophisticated pen technology to augment core touchscreen capabilities – the Galaxy Note II is probably the most advanced smartphone on the market. For technology geeks, it is the ultimate bling, aggressively massive and potent. By comparison, the Apple iPhone recedes into the shadows; feminine, shy, and demure.

I am not a big fan of tablets, probably because I like to use my computers for work, not pleasure, and tablets are really designed to consume media. Or, in the parlance of the technology and media savants, they are designed for people who want to “lean back”, not “lean forward”.

But I’ve always craved larger screens for my phones. Let’s be clear here. When it comes to smartphones, we’re not really talking about phones at all. We’re talking about small, powerful computers with woebegone phone applications shoehorned inside.  When it comes to assigning priorities for these devices, the goal of building a good phone with high-quality voice communication capabilities probably lands about 10th on the list.

Partly for that reason, when we buy a smartphone, we really care about the screen. The phone is an afterthought. In fact, you actually don’t need much of a visual interface to make a phone call. But for nearly anything else you are going to want to do with your smartphone, you will need a high-resolution touchscreen.

In the past year or two, we have begun to witness a screen size arms race. Where 3.5” used to be the standard, set by Apple – and Blackberry, with its built-in physical keyboard, could get by with an even smaller screen size – beginning in 2011, Android manufacturers began pumping out phones with 4” screens, then 4.5” screens, then – with the Samsung Galaxy S III – a 4.8” screen. In that context, the arrival of the Galaxy Note II with a 5.5” screen was all but inevitable.

Let’s itemize the advantages of a larger screen and then cut to the heart of the matter – what is the displacement factor of a large screen versus a smaller screen? In other words, what does the phone displace, not just in your pocket, but in your life?

Touch screens replaced phones with keyboards because they enlarged the display opportunity. This presented phone manufacturers with numerous feature options, ranging from web access to email to text messaging to music players to social media to maps and navigation, and ultimately to the tsunami of smartphone-tuned software applications available via the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.

The problem phone manufacturers faced, however, was that most of the features underwhelmed people when they had to squint at a 3” or 3.5” screen to use them. Usability suffered, too. Small buttons and keyboards, and the design shortcuts required to make them work in a Lilliputian screen environment, ultimately left phone purchasers holding nothing  but … a phone (albeit an increasingly lousy one).

The success of the iPad really resulted from this failure of the smartphone to fulfill its promise. The major issue was screen size. Once Apple nailed the design elements, and created a beautiful user experience, the larger screen sealed the deal because it allowed the full range of feature options to work as they were supposed to. The only problem that remained was portability. Apple provided wireless access for the iPad, but the 10” form factor made it cumbersome to tote around. And you still needed your phone.

Ahh, your phone. The intoxicating early success of the iPad placed in bolder relief the inadequacies of the smartphone. Only at that point did smartphone screen sizes and screen resolutions began to grow. And so now we have the Galaxy Note II, which is only a half inch smaller than the Kindle, and which is essentially a small tablet with a phone (and a pen). Typing still takes forever, but typing is no joy even on a full-sized tablet. And the predictive word options that display when I am typing on the Galaxy Note anticipate with uncanny accuracy what I actually do want to write. No one will use my smartphone to write a novel. But concept of the Galaxy Note is still fantastic.

And what makes it fantastic? It solves the conundrum of mobile technology; it combines  portability with usability. The Galaxy Note II is slender. It slides right into my front pocket. But the screen is large enough that I can watch Netflix (last night, Trailer Park Boys), easily read email, surf the web, jot notes, and read books and documents. I am less interested in leaning back than leaning forward. I truly wish I could more easily type on my phone – perfection would be the ability to actually write my novel on it. But there is no other phone that comes this close to delivering a tablet experience. If not for the metaphysics of the really big phone, I would call my possession of it a sort of Nirvana. Instead, it is a kind of hell.

The hellish metaphysics of a really big smartphone emerge from the displacement issues. My pocket is full. My heart is not. There is always this issue with visual technology. Does it kill your soul, pixel by pixel? I’m not talking about irradiating your brain. I’m referring to the particle of emptiness at the center of our being, around which our corporeal identity wraps itself and clings to because without it we have no space where we can turn back on ourselves and reflect and thereby become fully human. Without that particle of emptiness, we are dumb, and fully plantlike.

It amuses and even inspires me that so many people frame real life through their experiences watching Seinfeld, The Simpsons, The Family Guy, South Park, and Chappelle. That is the function of art, even (especially) comic art. The really big smartphone frames real life as well. Only without the comic art to offer redemptive compensation for time spent away from real life. Instead, the really big smartphone generally promotes a vacant absorption in a static or banal or simply meaningless and rote (booting, load time, buffering) screen experience. It roots us in a place where we lose access to our particle of emptiness. We vegetate.

For this reason, I am ill at ease. My really big smartphone is in my pocket. It combines portability and usability and fulfills my fantasy of a single device that can meet virtually all of my digital needs no matter where I am. But it drains my battery and makes me stupid.

Where does that leave me? With an existential dilemma. One simple way of thinking about an existential dilemma is when you can’t live with something and you can’t live without it.  Which is the case with my smartphone. How do you address an existential dilemma? With an idea that transcends the conundrum and allows you to resolve it. These days, I am reading Kierkegaard, who is mostly known for sticking it to Hegel. But Kierkegaard is also known for his pursuit of what one might call “the big idea”, the animating principle and goal around which one can organize one’s life, “the idea for which I can live and die.”

Kierkegaard speaks to me because he gets the concept of the empty particle at the center of our being that we must, at all costs, preserve. The really big smartphone obliterates that particle because, like much new technology, it seduces us.  Our interactions with the smartphone acquire mystical, totemic significance. The phone becomes a fetish, which is to say an end in itself that dislocates us.

Kierkegaard reminds us that the really big smartphone – as fantastic as it may be – is nothing on its own. It is merely a tool – a beautiful hunk of plastic, glass, and silicon – that we can use to pursue the big idea. It is not the big idea itself. This awareness restores us to sanity and makes us smart again.

Scumbag or Satirical Genius? The Mystery of Patrice Wilson

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Season Categories Published
MP00 Music

Nov 14, 2012


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When Rebecca Black’s now-infamous Friday was released in March of 2011, it unleashed a massive, unprecedented torrent of electronic hatred upon Black, then just a fresh-faced 13 years old. It took two weeks for Friday to become the most disliked Youtube video of all time–usurping Justin Bieber’s Baby for that dubious honor.

When the original video was removed from Youtube in June 2011, it had amassed 165 million views. It has since reappeared, and continues to receive a full spectrum of comment gold: from the sympathetic (“common [sic] she’s so sweet!!! <3”) to the simplistic (“Boy this does suck”) to the melodramatic (“Congratulations your [sic] next to Hitler in my Most hated person ever!!!!!!!”).

It didn’t take long for the Internet pundits (generally, a disparate group from the Youtube commenters) to transfer their hatred up the chain towards Ark Music Factory, the production company responsible for Friday and the brainchild of one Patrice Wilson. For a few thousand dollars, parents could have Wilson and the team at Ark co-write and produce a song and music video for their poptart-lusting pubescent.

Wilson was playing off innocent kids’ musical fantasies for a quick buck, the pundits said. It was a devious and exploitative scheme.

Last week, Wilson returned to notoriety with the drop of Nicole Westbrook’s It’s Thanksgiving on his Youtube channel. In the days since the song’s release, it has been viewed nearly six million times, received over 80,000 dislikes, and sparked a fresh round of criticism about Wilson: that he’s a leech, a crook, a scab on humanity for bringing such a musical abomination into the world.

Bullshit.

Wilson isn’t delusional about his work or malevolent towards the wannabe-starlets that employ his services–rather, he’s an artist of satire, mocking mass culture on an epic scale and occupying the tenuous oasis of parody where reality is ambiguous: no one is quite sure how serious Wilson is.

The “patomuzic” Youtube channel is a mausoleum of clichéd music video tropes. Glittery teenage girls squeal autotuned lyrics over chord progressions perfected by the Beach Boys played on bastardizations of synths made ubiquitous by Bieber and his pop posse; every Youtube feedback bar is a green stub with a long, red, negative tail. There are no illusions harbored here. Ark Music Factory does exactly what the name implies: converts the factory model of mass-production to the industry of lousy Youtube pop stars.

It’s an incredible sight–a stunning, disruptive critique of a musical culture based upon views and virality; where soul and chops are far less important than video aesthetic, artificial production perfection, and social media promotion. Watching more than a few videos consecutively on Wilson’s channel will make you sick–not just from the cookie-cutter atrocity, but also from how closely patomuzic emulates the Bieber image as a whole. The girls are younger and more awkward, the production is infinitely more plastic–but the pop aura is identical.

I’ve already mentioned Bieber several times, and that’s no coincidence. Bieber is the poster child for contemporary teen music culture, ubiquitous across social media, television, and magazines. And if Bieber is the prince of pop, Scooter Braun, his manager, is the king of hype. Braun is the 31-year-old marketing whiz kid who discovered Bieber in 2007 and catapulted him to fame. Braun was always precocious and ambitious–by age 20, he sat on the executive board of Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def Records, and his stock has recently risen above and beyond the dregs of lowbrow, teenybopper pop culture: this year, he’s been featured in the New Yorker and Forbes.

Braun represents the artists responsible for five out of the top 20 most viewed Youtube videos of all time. Three are Bieber songs, including number one–the aforementioned Baby, clocking in with an absurd 800 million views. Psy, the Korean rapper responsible for the number two most-viewed Gangnam Style (720 million), was picked up by Braun when his video began to go viral–a story that perfectly parallels Carly Rae Jepsen’s, whose Call Me Maybe (332 million) sits at number 18 on the Youtube charts and has inspired countless amateur video remakes by groups including the US Olympic Swim Team, the Marines, and the Miami Dolphin cheerleaders.

Wilson and Ark Music Factory exist as a farce of Braun and his Schoolboy Records. Braun’s strategy is to chase each hype wave and make it his own, using his tried and true Bieber techniques to elevate his artists to transient-iconic status. (Whether “transient-iconicism”–15 minutes of fame, on crack–leads to legitimate iconicism remains to be seen; while Bieber is certainly here to stay, Jepsen and Psy are a toss-up.) Wilson’s game is analogous. With each tragic, aspiring starlet, he applies the same tried and true overproduction methods to create a brand new, abhorrent pop song that mocks the culture it emulates. Even Wilson’s Twitter account mimics Braun’s, employing the same shameless self-promotional techniques, expressing interminable pride in his artists and channeling universally appealing themes about hard work, achieving one’s goals and enjoying life.

Wilson, like Braun, understands how to create hype. Friday and It’s Thanksgiving are indeed truly awful songs and videos. But what is most incredible is that they are awful on such a massive scale. The obvious contrast between Braun and Wilson’s respective methods of hype is also the key component in Wilson’s satirical brilliance: Braun creates positive feedback loops for his artists, while Wilson’s work thrives on hatred. Bieber has masses of “Beliebers” hypnotized by his every move and Jepsen has her song remade by stud athletes  and the President; Black gets a Hitler reaction video.

Wilson’s critique is so powerful because his music is so casually hateable. The layperson’s reaction to a Bieber video is at best thrilled elation, at worst complicit shrugging or resigned headshaking. The songs are catchy and the videos are well executed–it’s tough to argue with that. When a seven-year-old girl hikes up her T-shirt and copies all of Bieber’s dance moves, mothers are concerned; but the rest of us look the other way. When we see It’s Thanksgiving or one of Wilson’s other videos, however, we’re immediately appalled. “Is this what our culture has become?” we ask. It’s a reaction that can only be mustered by extreme disgust–a reaction that takes a Patrice Wilson-scale abomination of a music video to be triggered.

It’s a copout to decry Wilson merely for creating awful music. That’s far too simplistic. His work could be more aptly described as a new wave of avant-garde–pop art executed on a macro scale. If Bieber and Braun represent Hollywood cinema, then Wilson’s videos are the anti-Hollywood art films of Andy Warhol. Wilson takes the medium and mutilates it, just as Warhol did in films with hours of footage of people sleeping, eating, and making love.

The Warhol analogy is fitting. His prints and paintings enraged critics for their blatant commerciality and alleged betrayal of the art world, just as Wilson and his girls are despised for their bold production of atrociousness. Wilson’s business is based upon precise formulae for song, lyrics and video, while Warhol used silkscreening to replicate his work many times over. One such version of Double Elvis, a piece Warhol copied 22 times in various formats, sold this past May for $37 million. Even the name of Wilson’s Ark Music Factory can be seen as a reference to Warhol’s own “Factory”, the studio where much of his work of the 1960s and 1970s was produced.

Warhol would have loved Wilson’s videos. He once said that “when you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up something.” This concept of “exactly wrong” manifested itself in the carelessness of Warhol’s art: paintings with stray marks; fuzzy, amateurish film footage; a contribution to the BMW Art Car Project on which he is said to have spent only 23 minutes from start to finish. But a universally mocked and hated music video, viewed over 165 million times? A piece earning the title of “Most disliked video, ever?” Warhol would have been floored.

The delightful icing on Wilson’s satirical cake is that it’s impossible to tell how aware he is of the connotations of his own work. Although he channels Braun’s ruthless positivity with respect to promoting his artists, he’s certainly aware of the appalling quality of his releases and the hatred they muster from the Internet populous. He even produced a notably unfunny “official sequel to Friday” entitled Happy, which, at face value, looks like a sad, self-deprecating attempt to mollify the widespread criticism received by Black’s song.

It’s possible that Wilson is the villain Internet pundits paint him as–an exploitative businessman preying on the dreams of starry-eyed teenagers and their parents. It’s possible Wilson is, to borrow a term from an It’s Thanksgiving commenter, “trolling the Internet”–whoring for Youtube views through bad music, strictly for the hype.

It’s also possible that there’s much greater depth to Wilson’s work; that he’s acutely aware of the powerful cultural critique embedded in his hyperbolically corny, cookie-cutter tunes; that he’s making a conscious, subtle effort to rouse awareness and change in a flailing, diseased industry.

Watching a young, petite Nicole Westbrook croon her pitch-adjusted lyrics into a turkey drumstick, we’re not quite sure what to think. Do we pity Westbrook? She’s about have the ruthless eye and harsh tongue of the Internet focused on her for the next few weeks, yet surely by the fact that she’s working with Wilson, it’s what she signed up for. Do we hate Wilson?

The dolled up, shining faces of Westbrook and her co-stars parading around the screen bring another Warhol quote to mind.

“I love Los Angeles,” he once said. “I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.”

Maybe Patrice Wilson is a simple crook. Maybe he’s a brilliant satirist. Maybe he is caught in duality, a simultaneous desire to engage the industry and to critique it. Or maybe, Wilson’s intentions don’t really matter–his work stands on its own for interpretation, an enigmatic symbol of plastic America.