Asim Chaudhry: 2021 Mangoprism Person of the Year

Chaudhry’s character Chabuddy G delighted us with his incessant peacocking, self-delusion, and capacity for reinvention

by

Danny Schwartz

Season Categories Published
MP414 Person of the Year

Dec 28, 2021


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For the last two years my favorite TV show has been People Just Do Nothing, a BBC mockumentary about a clique of man-children who run a shitty pirate radio station in West London called Kurupt FM. The Kurupt FM boys fantasize about mainstream glory yet remain stubbornly devoted to drum & bass and UK garage, commercially outdated strains of club music from the ‘90s and early ‘00s. People Just Do Nothing is a show about the slow death of big dreams, as well as the hijinks that ensue when delusions of grandeur persist.

I first learned about PDJN from the rapper Danny Brown, whose own artistic identity revolves around the fact that, against all odds, he didn’t develop a sustainable rap career until his 30s. “People Just Do Nothing is almost like my music—it’s so fucking funny and self-aware, but also so dark,” Brown said. “I don’t shed too many tears, but [the series] finale definitely struck a chord. For it to end the way it did—with main character MC Grindah realizing that he’s in his 30s and music is moving on without him, and he’ll probably never make it in the industry—that was something that was so close. I was pretty much like that.”

The best character in People Just Do Nothing is Chabuddy G, the relentless grifter played by Asim Chaudhry. A friend, manager, and hype man of Kurupt FM, Chabuds is not beholden to the same musical-biological clock as the group’s narcissistic leader Grindah. He is an undocumented immigrant from Lahore who has assimilated into the rhythms of London life in flamboyant fashion, a self-styled “ultrapaneer” who is constantly concocting new hare-brained schemes big and small. Each venture—the Kurupt FM studio soundproof walls, the knock-off designer T-shirts (“Dolce & Gabbana? Nah mate, Deepak & Gurdev.”), the asbestos-infested DIY nightclub—is doomed to fail. PDJN charts the excruciating downward trajectory of Chabuddy G. In each of the five seasons, his ponytail grows longer and his life takes a new turn for the worse. His Polish mail-order bride Aldona leaves him; he becomes homeless. But the hallmark of Chabuddy is that he never gives up, a testament to his self-delusion, desperation, and determination. He doesn’t change much over the course of the show, even as his prospects grow steadily more bleak. If anything, defeat emboldens him. With nothing to lose, he courts failure with gusto.

Chaudhry met the other creators and cast of People Just Do Nothing during college through music. They conceived the show as a take on the 2004 pirate radio docu-series Tower Block Dreams, filtered through their own experiences in hip hop, pirate radio, and fake garage crews. Chaudhry was known then as a battle rapper, and he operated behind the camera for the show’s early webisodes before debuting Chabuds on-screen, building out the suave persona he sometimes used to prank call brothels.

Chaudhry has notably appeared in DC superhero movies and Stephen Merchant projects, but no matter how far he goes as an actor, he will always have a hard time topping his portrayal of Chabuddy G. It is probably not a coincidence that his most iconic role draws heavily on his own life. Chaudhry has said that Chabuddy is a composite of his own dad, uncles, friends, and supremely overconfident UK comedy characters like Del Boy and Alan Partridge. Chabuddy claims to be the unofficial mayor of Hounslow, the West London melting pot from which Chaudhry hails.

The legend of Chabuddy G still grows in 2021. Earlier this year, BBC Films released People Just Do Nothing: Big In Japan, a film that picks up the threads of Kurupt FM three years after the series ended with a deeply bittersweet sense of closure and new beginnings (including the launch of an exciting new business venture for Chabuds). Chabuddy is still living out of his van when he gets wind that Kurupt’s pugnacious single “Heart Monitor Riddem” has become an unexpected hit in Japan. And so, he jets off to Tokyo with the Kurupt boys to capitalize on this seemingly golden opportunity. 

In the movie, as in the show, Chabuddy shares apocryphal biographical details from his past. For example, we learn that, in the ‘90s, he took over a Hounslow titty bar and saved it from certain economic death. Chabuddy exists in an alternate reality, one of his own invention—and indeed, what a life this man has lived. He’s like the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World™, but the opposite and even more interesting.

This year, the line between reality and fiction for Chabuddy G and Kurupt FM continued to blur. Chaudhry regularly posts as Chabuddy on Instagram and TikTok, dispensing questionable advice and realizing the character’s ultimate destiny as social media personality. The musically talented cast of PJDN put out an album of wall-to-wall Kurupt FM slaps, a showcase of their slick, call-and-response-heavy take on garage that illustrates how the group’s pronounced character flaws, more than the music itself, is the root cause of their depressing lack of success in the show. In the music videos, Chabuddy G can be found bribing used-car salesmen and bopping in the background with his black pleather jacket and Gator-skin shoes. Undoubtedly he is drenched in his “Sean Paul Gaultier” signature cologne. He even stars in his own song, “Aldona,” a funky lament about his ex-wife. (“She was so cold… yet so hot.”)

My own wife can’t stand Chabuddy G. As I’ve rewatched People Just Do Nothing several times in the last couple years, our opposing reactions towards the character has been something of an inside joke. While Chabuddy’s swashbuckling fashion choices, unwarranted confidence, and incessant peacocking tend to nauseate her, these things have brought me great joy. To borrow a phrase from the comedian Jaboukie Young-White, Chabuddy, by his nature, is always raw-dogging reality. As I have maintained a relatively staid lifestyle, his vivid, if pathetic, existence has resonated with me and given me vicarious pleasure. I admire his capacity for adventure. I am drawn to his complicated and largely invisible backstory and his instinct for reinvention. Hope springs eternal in the heart of Chabuddy G. He’s a self-made man, even if he has nothing to show for it. ▩

Bandcamp: 2020 Mangoprism Person Of The Year

The music streaming model is broken. Bandcamp offers a better way to consume music and support artists

by

Danny Schwartz

Season Categories Published
MP307 Person of the Year

Dec 29, 2020


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When I accidentally deleted my 15,000-song MP3 library six years ago, there was only one logical rebound: Spotify, the music streaming platform that offered instant access to millions of songs and the promise that such a tragedy would never again befall me. 

Since then, Spotify has become a Death Star, a streaming titan with 320 million global subscribers, a 36% market share (double any of its competitors), and an obscenely low payout rate that hovers around four tenths of one cent per stream—among the industry’s worst. The Swedish company is not yet profitable, but it is powering the music industry’s recent resurgence. According to the RIAA, revenue from recorded music in the United States increased by double digits every year between 2015 and 2019; in that span, the proportion of streaming revenue ballooned from 34% to 80%.

Still, it has become increasingly apparent that the streaming model is fundamentally broken as a way to fairly compensate artists for their work. By restricting artist revenue streams, most notably touring, the COVID-19 pandemic has cast a light on how little working musicians actually receive from streaming royalties. In May, the popular British classical violinist Tasmin Little (monthly listeners: 848K) tweeted that she had received £12.34 for half a year’s worth of Spotify streams. Earlier this month, the moderately successful rap trio clipping. (monthly listeners: 341K) tweeted, “this was the first quarter as a band where our Spotify royalty payments totaled about as much as our three personal Spotify subscriptions.” Last month, Spotify announced yet another mechanism for fleecing musicians: “Discovery Mode,” which offers lower royalties in exchange for an algorithmic boost.

By contrast, Bandcamp, the music marketplace geared towards indie acts, has gone out of its way to support artists in 2020. Beginning in late March, the company waived its revenue share on one day each month; these “Bandcamp Fridays” considerably raised Bandcamp’s profile and generated $40 million in sales that went directly to artists and labels. Bandcamp recently announced that it will continue the program through at least May 2021.

Even before this year, Bandcamp had earned a reputation for being artist friendly. Organized around MP3, physical media, and merch sales, the company takes a 10-15% revenue share and pays out within 24 to 48 hours. (For some perspective, iTunes took 30-35% and licensed music rather than sold it.) Its editorial site, Bandcamp Daily, is the internet’s best discovery-minded music publication; I can attest that they pay writers well (40-45 cents per word.)

Bandcamp’s actions this year to assist musicians weren’t extraordinary, but they were significant because they helped to put the abject failures of the streaming model in sharp relief. Part of the reason per-stream royalties are so hard to pin down is that artists aren’t actually paid per stream on Spotify and other streaming platforms, but rather receive a minuscule, proportional slice of a predetermined royalty pie. This is tyranny. Bandcamp is proof that there is a better way to pay artists for their labor.

The truth is that the Bandcamp model can benefit consumers as well as artists. There is a difference between streaming a song and listening to that same song in the form of an MP3, FLAC, vinyl, or CD that you bought. I believe that rebuilding my digital and physical music library over the course of the coming years and decades will give me a more meaningful relationship with both the music and the artists that made it. Last week, I pulled the plug on my Spotify premium subscription. For now, I’m a free agent.

Streaming is broken, but it can theoretically be fixed in a way that works for artists. TIDAL and Napster respectively pay about three and five times more per stream than Spotify. Resonate, a musician-owned co-op that cuts out the middleman and employs a pay-to-play concept, shells out 50% more per stream than Spotify. Entertainment lawyer Henderson Cole conceived the idea for a socialized streaming platform called the American Music Library, “a government-controlled music streaming service that anyone can access for free, similar to the public library system.” These are legitimate, ambitious ideas. For now though, Mangoprism is declaring Bandcamp its 2020 Person of the Year: for doing its duty to help musicians get paid during the pandemic; for valuing financial transparency and fairness; for showing that there is a viable alternative to streaming; and for laying the foundation for a significant and necessary cultural shift in the way musicians transact with their fans. ▩

Runners-up: Pop Smoke; BFB Da Packman; Ted Allen; Michaela Coel; the All Gas No Brakes guy.


DISCLOSURE/UPDATE: Six months after leaving Spotify for TIDAL, I have dumped TIDAL for Spotify.


Colin Kaepernick: Mangoprism Person of the Decade

by

Mangoprism Editors

Season Categories Published
MP115 Person of the Year

Jan 01, 2020


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Colin Kaepernick, whose modest but courageous act of protest cast a provocative new light on nationalism and racism in the United States, is the Mangoprism Person of the Decade™ spanning from 2010 to 2019.

Through his NFL career, Kaepernick attained outsized privileges with which few in the United States could identify. His decision to kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality, which ultimately got him blackballed from the league, is hardly one many of us are in a position to explicitly replicate. But the form his story took, of a person who happened to face down his particularly high-profile context with self-assured thoughtfulness, in effect sacrificing the relative privileges of his situation for a more interesting and meaningful existence beyond it, serves as a lesson that anyone can absorb and apply in concrete ways.

Drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in 2011 after a productive college football career at the University of Nevada, Kaepernick started his first NFL game in 2012. With a long stride and an improvisational playing style, he found immediate success, leading the 49ers to the Super Bowl and breaking Michael Vick’s playoff rushing record along the way. His 2013 season ended in a loss to the Seattle Seahawks in a dramatic NFC Championship Game. The game constituted a matchup of two dynamic black quarterbacks whose self-representations vis a vis Instagram were juxtaposed in a Seahawk’s fan’s viral post, which portrayed Russell Wilson amidst dogs, military personnel, and charitable events, and Kaepernick hanging with J. Cole and showcasing his impressive shoe collection. This post epitomized Kaepernick’s racialized media framing in the national consciousness. After a loss to the Seahawks, Kaepernick signed a $126 million contract extension with the Niners.

Kaepernick’s performance dipped somewhat in 2014 and 2015, but he remained the 49ers starting quarterback going into the 2016 preseason, when a reporter noticed him sitting down on the bench during a pregame rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. Mainstream national discourse regarding a spate of well-publicized police killings of unarmed black men had been influenced in part by the Black Lives Matter movement, and after the game Kaepernick told reporters: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

In order to render a more precise message amid bad faith interpretations regarding his lack of patriotism, he knelt for the anthem during a subsequent game, in part as a show of respect to U.S. military members, and he knelt during the anthem for the entire rest of the season, inspiring similar acts among other athletes in professional and amateur contexts across the nation. The protests came amid the rising pitch of the 2016 presidential contest, in which Donald Trump effectively used the kneeling movement as a cudgel to highlight the supposed excesses of a political opposition that did not respect America’s greatness. Kaepernick, beset by injuries, missed numerous games that season, while continuing to kneel prior to each of them. In 12 games, he passed for 16 touchdowns and four interceptions and occasionally demonstrated some of the flair that propelled him to the national stage in the first place. In March of 2017, facing a release from the 49ers, Kaepernick opted out of his contract.

In the time since, in a league where the likes of Nathan Peterman, DeShone Kizer, Blaine Gabbert, Mark Sanchez, David Blough, Geno Smith, and Devlin “Duck” Hodges have started games at quarterback in the last three seasons, no team has signed Colin Kaepernick. In October 2017, Kaepernick filed a grievance with the NFL – since settled – for colluding to keep him out of the league. That same month, at an owners meeting about how best to deal with plummeting favorability ratings and boycott threats from fans who were offended by players kneeling during the anthem, Houston Texans owner Bob McNair, a major financial backer of President Trump, said of the players in a majority-black league run by a nearly entirely white ownership class: “We can’t have the inmates running the prison.” This comment prompted much of his own team to kneel during the following game in Seattle, at which, according to a Mangoprism correspondent present at CenturyLink Field, some Seahawks fans could be found casting their hands to the air in disbelief as they screamed at kneeling Texans players to “grow up!”

One thing about this whole story – and decade – is that it could be challenging to parse the substance from the noise. Kaepernick made it clear that police brutality in the United States was the subject of his protest, but media perpetuated the asinine and incoherent narrative that Kaepernick and his comrades were protesting the anthem itself and all the things it represents. (FWIW, the MP editorial board agrees with Vince Staples’ assessment that the Star-Spangled Banner “don’t even slap.”) The internet in particular has supercharged the blunt meanings of certain performative shorthand identity markers by which a person can assert their tribal affiliation in the culture wars. Sometimes, the markers became so potent that we had no choice but to choose a side. As the anthem began, anxiety swept through stadiums at the start of every game the nation round and, whether on the field or in the stands, the very fact of one’s action – or inaction – all of the sudden became meaningful in itself (with a few notable exceptions, white players opted not to protest during the anthem). An invisible political ritual previously only explicitly considered on the fringes of mainstream discourse became entirely conspicuous to pretty much everyone. Does this matter?

As Ameer Loggins, who shared political reading materials with and had a class on black media representation audited by Kaepernick at UC Berkeley during the summer of 2016 told the journalist Rembert Browne, “Colin represents an inconvenience.” The NFL’s brand – violence, military partnerships, the lucrative Viagra marketing contracts that adorn its every game, its evident comfort at the center of American nationalism and consumer culture – proved shockingly fragile in the face of this gentle disruption of its harmoniously choreographed antiseptic image. Notably, the people who were triggered by this disruption stood not on the supposedly reactionary political left, but among the true believers, the diehards who have staked so much of their identity – or in the case of owners and ad partners, finances – in the NFL’s inane theatrics.

That a mere “inconvenience” could so shake such a powerful institution is a testament to the power of rhetoric and action that does not conform to the banal political platitude perpetuated in the interests of that institution. As the writer George Orwell wrote in his classic “Politics and the English Language,” political, as opposed to meaningful speech like Kaepernick’s, “give[s] an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Enjoining us to deal in authentic and thoughtful discourse generated from our own personal convictions and feelings, Orwell added, “probably, it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.”

Kaepernick, whose fabulous afro no doubt in itself rankled some of the more unsubtly racist owners in the National Football League, cut a powerful image on the sidelines that demonstrated his dissent from one of the most idiotic and thoughtless mainstream institutions in American cultural life. Kaepernick chose a meaningful life on his own terms and solidarity with those who have less power than himself, over mere status contingent on the edicts and regulations of the cynical power-hungry men who own the NFL and, more broadly, so much of American society.

For the inconvenient example he set, the Mangoprism editorial board is delighted to award Colin Kaepernick our highest honor: the Mangoprism Person of the Decade™. ▩


Runners up: Beyoncé, Marshawn Lynch