The first time I heard Paul’s Boutique, I was sitting by a friend’s pool.  High school summer vacation style, swilling cheap beer, listening to the usual mash up of random artists – Stones, Suicidal Tendencies, U2, Black Sabbath, INXS, Public Enemy, Bad Brains, Metallica, Zeppelin, the Cult, Boogie Down Productions, AC/DC, Guns n’ Roses, and the Beastie Boys.

If you were alive in the later Eighties, and you had working eardrums, there was no way you couldn’t listen to the Beasties.  They were one of the Big Three.  U2′s Joshua Tree was the monster mainstream album of the decade.  Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction was the Exile on Main Street of sleaze rock.  And then there was Licensed to Ill - the album that drove hip hop into the suburbs… the half-joking rock/punk/rap hybrid that had more quality cuts than almost every serious rap record that had come before.

The shock of the Beasties’ debut wasn’t its ridiculousness.  It wasn’t the band’s ludicrously cheap videos, or infantile lyrics in tunes like “Fight for Your Right” or “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.”  It was that these clowns actually had serious talent. Stumbling through the tracks of Licensed, you’d run into “Paul Revere” and “Rhymin’ and Stealin,” and have to check your ears. The Beasties were skilled. Chuck D, or KRS-One skilled.

But that was just a teaser.  The best of their catalog – a record radically divorced from everything they’d previously done, and much of what they’d do in the future – was waiting in the wings.

And that album, Paul’s Boutique, is the one I’ll always recall when I think about the Beastie Boys.  When I’m forced, unfortunately as I have been today, to consider them in the wake of Adam Yauch’s untimely death.  Because if you’ve ever listened to Paul’s Boutique, you know: This was the Everest of modern rap.  Some will argue; some will say it’s over-rated.  Contrarians and hipsters will assail that accolade simply because, in circles where people debate things like, “What’s the greatest rap record of the past 30 years?,” Paul’s Boutique is an immediate default choice.

For good reason.  Paul’s Boutique is the greatest rap album I’ve ever heard.  Above It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.  Above By All Means Necessary.  Above Straight Outta Compton, and Chronic 2001. No one has ever, or probably will ever, blend such a schizophrenic collection of disparate beats, oddball pop culture references, and obscure samples as the Dust Brothers and Beasties did on Paul’s Boutique. A sonic Jackson Pollack, the record took a truckload of talent, and balls, to pull off, and in its brilliance, wound up alienating much of their audience.  But it was worth it.  Scan any three minutes of the thing and you’ll understand.  ”Shadrach,” “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun,” “Eggman“… This was that one perfect album every band gets – where it’s firing on all cylinders, zenning a piece of art for the ages, one that entirely redefines its genre.

Paul’s Boutique is structured with a medley at the end, loosely imitating Abbey Road (the finest album of the Beatles’ catalog).  I suppose this could be read as arrogant for a sophomore effort, and probably would be by most.  I see it differently.  I see the Beasties sitting at the soundboard, realizing the genius they were putting down on wax, and running with the homage that fit – a nod from one unparalleled album to another.

Paul’s Boutique is as mind-bending today as it was sitting by the pool back in high school.  It is timeless, only getting better with age, and with it Adam Yauch is timeless.  If you doubt that, consider the video below and ask yourself, “If somebody told me this were a new tune, just released yesterday, would I doubt him?”  No, I don’t think any of us would.   That’s the bright line between brilliant and common music.

Thanks, Mr. Yauch, for being part of that brilliance.

Editor’s Note: I have a new piece up at ConstitutionalDaily.  Here’s a teaser:

Bush wasn’t so bad.  In fact, when I consider our situation today, I get a bit wistful for the past.

Before you judgmental sorts shred me for this heresy, allow me to defend myself.  Hear me out on the subject, and then reply as you will.

Bush recalls a better era. This is just fact. An era that wasn’t any more or less bleak than the present, but one in which things felt more dependable. A time when knew better who we were, what our place in the world was…

In the years that have followed, we’ve lost that sense of purpose.  Everything’s been ruthlessly commoditized, distilled to the sum of its basest utility, to be delivered furiously, unimaginatively, with the least encumbrance. All catch, no chase, and in the absence of that, a lack of charm and style in how we carry ourselves, what we are, and what we do. An age of, existentially, less…

You can read it in its entirety here.

I have a new piece up at ConstitutionalDaily.com, “Why I Do Not Eat Doughnuts.”  A few excerpts:

“Consider the endless varieties of vice in which one can engage.  Sex, alcohol, drugs, gambling, smoking… Each is bad for the body or mind.  But each also provides something else: A respite from the tedium, or stress, of the instant… You know a cigarette’s bad for you, and that fourth martini does no kindness to the liver, but running the cost/benefit analysis, a case can be made for doing either, or both, or both at once… There is no case in defense of the doughnut.

…And let’s not avoid the elephant in the corner, aesthetics. Peter O’Toole has smoked and drunk prodigiously his entire life, and though he’s haggard in his dotage, let me ask you this: Would you rather resemble him, or that two hundred and seventy pound human resources manager availing herself of free doughnut holes by the fistful in your floor’s break room?”

Read the rest here.

Following up on “A Few Fixes for Most of Everything Wrong,” I’ve enjoyed an ongoing debate with a supporter of the Occupy Movements regarding social inequality, overpopulation, wealth disparity, and a few other light topics.  Below are some highlights (his points are in bold, my replies in standard text):

Thank you for criticizing me.

What about the half a million Israelis demanding social equality, quarter of a million Londoners protesting against tuition fees and cuts to social welfare, and the Wisconsin revolt against anti-union legislation – are these class conflicts a mere sideshow?

How does one demand social equality?  I’d like to be the social equal of Jamie Dimon (or at least get reservations to the same places he does).  Should I be able to protest outside his office, demand I receive commensurate compensation, and be granted that for my efforts?  Should I be able to push through a law that says he can’t receive more than X times my income, and have any amount above that confiscated from him?…

See the main difference between you and what I would call the global working class is that they have an idea of community, of obligations to society and a belief that they are entitled to support when they need it.

I protested last year not because I wanted to feel important about myself or because something was lacking in my life, but because I knew there were alternatives and that only direct action could snap the general population out of their apathy and hopelessness.

Laudable.  And now it’s time for those who thought like you to offer a solution – to convert the heat and passion into a set of workable demands.  The world waits to hear from the United States’ street.  Most of it, however, expects more incoherence, betting the everyman here is too intellectually lazy, or the forces involved in OWS too disparate to reach consensus.  Frankly, I expect it.  I see little reason to think the angry and disenfranchised aren’t easily bought off, or won’t collapse into chaos as they did at the 1968 Democratic Convention.  But I’d be happy to be proven wrong.  I’d be happy to see dissidents emerge and clarify the desires of the crowds.  Which is why I asked for them.

What about the numerous radical thinkers (e.g. Hyman Minsky, John Gray, Nassim Taleb, Giovanni Arrighi, Paul Mason) who either predicted the crash or have written about workable alternatives to the current model?

…I assume you cite Minsky and Gray for the proposition we need more regulation.  I’d agree we need smarter, nimble regulation.  Merely “more” of it, which is all our incompetent Congress seems able to provide, prolongs the malaise.

Your specific proposals regarding healthcare, unemployment and indebtedness might do something to alleviate the situation. But the fundamental problem is that the rich control the courts, the media, and both political parties, and until that ends the cycle of debt slavery and pauperization will continue.

…I agree with you that there is gross disequilibrium between capital and labor right now, and that capital is stupidly overplaying its leverage in an endgame that will leave us with a grossly depleted consumer class, which will cause slowdowns in emerging markets, which will inevitably wipe out tomorrow many of the gains the short-sighted managers of this capital are realizing today.

But I don’t think this is a fault of the system.  I think it’s attributable to simple human stupidity, and short-termism.  Nobody has cared about anything beyond next quarter’s numbers in a very long time…

And this thinking persists because nobody persuasively criticizes it.  Nobody stands up and says:

You can read the piece in its entirety here.

Profanity’s an art.  Use too much, or varieties already too common in everyday conversation, and it’s dull… loses all its edge, all the punch it’s supposed to offer.  The same applies to insult.  Call a man something he’s called twenty times a week by his wife and your comment might as well be the hum of an air conditioning unit in the background.

Here are four profanities and insults people won’t forget.

Douchebag

Read the rest of the list at ConstitutionalDaily, here.

I rarely respond to critics, but a spirited response to my piece of a few weeks ago, “Help Wanted: Dissidents,” in which I took issue with the Occupy movements, warranted a reply.  And in offering one, I offered what I think are, at least conceptually, fixes for some of the challenges facing the country.

Let it never be said I only complain, and never provide solutions.  (Only 75% of the time.)

Here’s the criticism:

.    .    .

Healthcare:

Unemployment:

Indebtedness:

The Working Poor:

I recently did a round table discussion on the American Dream.  Here’s a part of the conversation I offered:

The American Dream is freedom to be left alone, to succeed or fail on your own.  It’s the promise that with effort, or luck, or both, you can find an unmolested happiness.  And when I say unmolested, I mean in the sense you aren’t bogged down with limitless barbed wires of mindless regulation and compulsion to participate in programs a government deems beneficial for everyone.  That you can make a living on your own terms, responsible for yourself.  It’s as much the freedom to fail, and perhaps die early as a result of your bad choices, as it is freedom to prosper.

But it’s not just liberation from a heavy-handed state.  It’s liberation from the tyranny of uncontrollable, stifling forces that would subjugate society to their small-minded  ends.  And by that I mean, it’s freedom from the chains of this silly corporate McWorld we’ve created.  Many of us – hell, most us – have no choice but to work for mega-corporations, organizations, or firms.  These companies enjoy relationships with the government that give them marketplace power far exceeding what they’d have in a true free market.  And with that power, they suck in everything around them like black holes, commoditizing and monetizing all interactions in our lives.  Chopping every transaction into a form of tradable economic units. Placing the majority of the country on a treadmill to nowhere, and rendering enormous numbers of us debt serfs from cradle to grave.

Consider the average upper middle class neighborhood.  Most everybody works for some monster corporation, hospital network, law firm, or financial company.  Their urine is tested once a year, their comments in the workplace are constrained by zero tolerance policy handbooks, their social media’s monitored by some creep in HR doing a monthly sweep to ensure against “brand damage,” and their retirements are tied up in some company pension or 401k. They shop at big boxes like Wal Mart, Target, and Coach, buy what they’ve been told is desirable in endless marketing messages they’re bombarded with every day, and watch news created by a handful of networks all owned by the same five or six multi-billion dollar conglomerates.  Once a month they walk to the mailbox and make a mortgage payment to a bank so enormous it doesn’t even know where their note is located.

Is this the American Dream?  No.  This is a society squeezed between corporate and government taskmasters.  If the Founding Fathers the Tea Partiers so often laud were alive, they’d choke back vomit viewing the mass of  blissfully incurious, told-what-to-do robots we’ve  become.

So no, you won’t find the American Dream on Main Street.  Main Street’s brain dead, a fenced-in pen where the herd sleeps.  And it’s been that way for years.  The American Dream is elsewhere, probably with the entrepreneurs.  With the kids starting the new businesses and hoping to never have to take orders in a hierarchy of bureaucrats or functionaries.  With the guy leaving his corporate or government job to do something he has a passion for because he realizes money alone is never going to be enough, and that the accrual of “stuff” – the rapidly depreciating status purchases and gadgets Main Street’s been manipulated into viewing as trophies of success – is but a temporary junkie’s fix, a fill-in for the fact that we’re not doing what fulfills, or even interests us.

And that right there is the American Dream: The promise you can forge your own way, carve your own road.  That you can be your own man or woman.  You might not  make a fortune in it.  You might not even succeed.  But You Can Try, and though the forces all around you are working overtime to corral you into robotry, to put you “back in line,” You Have a Choice.*  You can still say, “No.  Fuck that.  I’m going to strike out on my own and see where it goes.”

__________

* See also, this delightful little song.

You can, and should, read the whole thing here.

You do not become a ”dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. – Vaclav Havel

2011 will go down as the “Year of the Protester.”  For all the obvious reasons, the name fits.  And for what should be similarly obvious reasons, that’s a tragedy.

The world needs protesters now like a doomed airliner needs more stewardesses. The thing it really, desperately requires are dissidents.

Yes, there’s a difference between the two, a crucial one.  The dissident doesn’t scream in the streets.  He doesn’t sit in drum circles.  He doesn’t dress like in a fashion contrived solely to alienate others.  He isn’t incoherent by design.  Or a lost soul simply looking for some angry movement to belong to.

The dissident thinks. He’s formulated an idea, a plan, that challenges consensus, conventional wisdom, and the power structures in industry, government, and society that support the status quo.  He has an argument in favor of an alternative.  He can debate.  He offers a workable option that can rally millions of similarly thoughtful supporters – that silent majority we need to join the debate. Unlike the protester, who can spark what appears to be revolution, but is usually nothing more than replacement of his current oppressor with another, the dissident, by offering a formula for change, can radically upend the systems around him.

The dissident recognizes that screaming will always be cheap, and quickly forgotten.  But that a well constructed idea is sticky.*

If the difference I’m highlighting is opaque, allow me to offer a few concrete examples of dissidents.  It’s a good time for it, as we lost three huge ones last year: Steve Jobs, Christopher Hitchens, and Vaclav Havel. Each of these men, through the power of well reasoned, well crafted affronts to the accepted narratives, caused more change in their spheres of influence than ten years of Occupy Wall Street, or any other similar protest movement, would have in its.

Read the rest here.

1.

You may have heard of an economist named Tyler Cowen. If not, look him up, and read his book, The Great Stagnation. It argues, correctly, irrefutably, something the main stream media will never discuss: That the cause of the United States’ financial problems (and the world’s, for that matter) derive less from bad policy decisions, entitlement spending run amuck, or Wall Street malfeasance, than they do from simple lack of Big Innovations.  That we’ve run out of game-changing advances like electricity, television, automobiles, easily-tapped oil, the Internet, etc. That all of the “low hanging fruit” has been exhausted, and that all innovation going forward will occur in small increments.

He says this like it’s an entirely bad thing.

2.

I bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Double Black a couple weeks ago.  I had to get it as soon as it became available stateside because it’s a new product from one of my favorite distillers.  When I say “new” product, however, that’s mostly in name (and even there, it’s limited).  In substance, JWDB isn’t really new at all.  It’s a lot like Johnnie Walker Black, the almost already perfect gold standard of blended scotches.*

Around the same time, I stumbled onto Dr. Pepper Ten, a new quasi-diet soda that’s essentially nothing more than Diet Dr. Pepper with just enough enough sugar to add ten calories to the mix.

And about a week or so after that, cruising Itunes half-drunk, I ran across the Stones’ new deluxe version of the classic Some Girlsalbum.  Same old singles you recall – “Miss You,” “Shattered,” “Beast of Burden” – only with a second disc of new material added.

I bought all three, the two physically consumable ones several times since, and I couldn’t be happier with them.

3.

What do these products share?  What makes them such immediately likable innovations?  None are gimmicks.  None are non-inventions sold as inventions.  None are needless, useless, modifications of existing lines, like the “dry,” “ice,” or “low carb” beer fads of the past.**  None are Blu-Ray versions of movies packed with extra director’s commentary no one would ever watch, designed solely to compel people to buy new media players.  Quite unlike that obvious garbage, these products satisfy.

Read the rest here.

Labels are devices for saving talkative persons the trouble of thinking. – John Morley (1838-1923)

Call them unwashed, naive, incoherent… Misfits, miscreants, and malcontents. The damaged goods of society… oblong pegs in a world of square and circle holes.

Call the Occupy Wall Street crowds, and their organized labor supporters, whatever you like.

Just don’t call them Socialists.  They’re not, and should you do so– Should you offer that knee-jerk characterization - one favored by so many middle class wish-they-were-rich Republicans, and Archie Bunkers - all you’re effectively saying is:

1. “I am a tribal thinker;” and
2. “I do not understand, practically, how Capitalism works.”

Because if you understand how Capitalism really works (a thing hardly difficult to apprehend), and if you’re able to think beyond the “Labor organizers and protesters are necessarily Socialists” narrative fed you by the Right Wing, you already see Occupy Wall Street, and any strike by organized labor, for what they are: Capitalists using their capital, as good Capitalists do, to get more capital for themselves.

Consider this question: What is Capital? Capital is an asset. Could be paper currency, commodities, debt, or equity. It could be anything. It’s whatever you’re able to use to create more wealth for yourself. Hence, Capitalism’s essential definition: The use of capital to create more capital.

Labor is just another form of capital. The unions, the protesters… these people don’t have access to large pools of currency, or commodities, or stock, or anything else they can leverage to create gains for themselves.  They have only their toil, and the power that comes with being able to shut down another capitalist’s business, or cause enough social upheaval through protests in the street to compel the government to give them more money.

Sound like some of our country’s most successful industries?  Of course it does. Defense Contractors, Wall Street, Telecommunications Companies, Big Pharma… Every one of these sectors does exactly what Occupy Wall Street is doing every day of the week – petition the government for stuff.  In the case of those industries, for rules and contracts that give them more money, more competitive advantage.  The only real difference between corporations requesting Government beneficence and Occupy Wall Street is the former does its bidding on K Street, hiring lobbyists to ply Uncle Sam for favors.*

Read the rest here.