"Who cares. Didn't read it. This is not news. Do better"/"Why do I feel like these characters are being forced on us? Nobody cares."

"Who cares?"/"Congratulations - this might be the most vapid article the Washington Post has ever published"/"Thanks for explaining this, WaPo. Now I won't be tossing and turning tonight wondering"... etc. 

These are the comments on what is the second-most-read article at The Washington Post right now:

 

Sample text: "With the internet swirling with theories about Megan’s lyrics, Minaj took to X (formerly Twitter) to voice her displeasure with the song and announce her follow-up 'Big Foot,' which she released on Monday. The title appeared to be a reference to Megan’s 5-foot-10 height and the fact that she was shot in the foot...."

It took 2 reporters to write it... these 2...

I would watch a movie about those 2 reporters trying to collaborate to fulfill this writing assignment. A bit like another remake of "The Front Page," you know, that sort of thing.

"A lot of pop music does sound the same. Literally! In the past five years, the number of new songs on Billboard’s year-end 'Hot 100' chart that interpolate old songs has more than doubled."

"As the streaming money came to overshadow album-sales money, these sonic callbacks have become an increasingly popular way to make a hit song. Olivia Rodrigo, Beyoncé, Maroon 5, and Nicki Minaj — who had a recent No. 1 hit with her remake of Rick James’s 'Super Freak' — have all recently published songs that incorporate interpolations.... Publishers have spent the past few years paying hundreds of millions of dollars for legacy-artist catalogues, and one way to wring more value out of those catalogues is to pitch interpolations. Merck Mercuriadis, founder of the publicly traded music-IP investment firm Hipgnosis Songs Fund... says this strategy works because 'classic songs are already part of the fabric of our lives.... Nicki Minaj and Rick James being No. 1 has just sent 1,000 artists, producers, and songwriters searching for the next holy grail."

From "Invasion of the Vibe-Snatchers: Pop Music Is Regurgitating Itself Faster Than Ever" (Vulture).

Is "interpolation" a technical term in music? Wikipedia says:

In popular music, interpolation (also called a replayed sample) refers to using a melody—or portions of a melody (often with modified lyrics)—from a previously recorded song but re-recording the melody instead of sampling it. 

Here's Wikipedia's list of interpolated songs, where I learn, for example, that Eminem once interpolated the Little Peggy March song "I Will Follow Him." I can't believe I listened to that. I can't hear it. The Little Peggy March song is part of the "fabric of [my] life," but if there's some echo of it somewhere in that evil Eminem song, I missed it.

"The White House has invited me & I think it’s a step in the right direction. Yes, I’m going. I’ll be dressed in all pink like Legally Blonde so they know I mean business. I’ll ask questions on behalf of the ppl who have been made fun of for simply being human."

Tweeted Nicki Minaj, quoted in "Nicki Minaj hits back at Biden White House after it claims vaccine-related phone call, not visit, was offered/Earlier this week, Minaj faced backlash after she wrote a tweet asserting that a friend of her cousin's became impotent from the vaccine" (Fox News). 

Also quoted: Terrence Deyalsingh, Trinidad's health minister, saying he'd government had "wasted so much time" over Minaj's tweet about someone in Trinidad experiencing swollen testicles: "There is absolutely no reported such side effect or adverse event of testicular swelling in Trinidad."

ADDED: Fox is really on this story. Here's another article: "Nicki Minaj compares cancel culture in US to China after vaccine blowback: 'Don't ya'll see'/Minaj is waiting to get the vaccine until after she's done more research."

"I remember going to China and they were telling us you know, you cannot speak out against, you know, the people in power, there, etc," Minaj said in an Instagram Live video on Wednesday night. "Don't y'all see that we are living now in that time where people will turn their back on you … but people will isolate you if you simply speak and ask a question."

AND: It will be interesting to see who, ultimately, wins Minaj. 

"[T]he study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease."

"This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21.... [T]he latter finding may be explained by the fact that unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past.... [S]ome COVID patients are in for 'soft' hospitalizations, where they need only minimal treatment and leave relatively quickly; others may be on the antiviral drug remdesivir for five days, or with a tube down their throat.... [T]his study suggests that COVID hospitalization tallies can’t be taken as a simple measure of the prevalence of severe or even moderate disease, because they might inflate the true numbers by a factor of two."

From "Our Most Reliable Pandemic Number Is Losing Meaning" (The Atlantic).

And as long as I'm here, blogging about coronavirus: "Nicki Minaj tweets coronavirus vaccine conspiracy, spotlighting struggle against misinformation."

In case you haven't seen her tweet — which would be funny if it weren't so consequential — here it is:

My cousin in Trinidad won’t get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent. His testicles became swollen. His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding. So just pray on it & make sure you’re comfortable with ur decision, not bullied

— Nicki Minaj (@NICKIMINAJ) September 13, 2021

Don't laugh that off. She has over 22 million followers on Twitter, and the fear that she's stimulating is very likely to determine decisions about whether to get the vaccine. How do you feel "comfortable with ur decision" if there's a possibility of impotence (which also reminds you that you've also heard that infertility could be a side effect)? She wants you to "pray" — which is a different method than science — and resist bullying.

 And Minaj is out there defending herself. Here she is pushing back Joy Reid:

The two white men sittin there nodding their heads cuz this uncle tomiana doing the work chile. How sad. https://t.co/4UviONyTHy

— Nicki Minaj (@NICKIMINAJ) September 14, 2021

"When I got pregnant, I was f**king freaking out. Everybody around me was like, ‘No, this never happened before.'"

"'Every artist that had a baby, they already put in years in the game. This is your first year. You’re going to mess it up. How are you going to make it?’ While I was pregnant, I kept telling myself, I can’t wait till I’m back out there. I’m going to look hot, and I’m going to be that bitch. Four weeks after giving birth, I was supposed to start rehearsals for a fall tour with Bruno Mars and I couldn’t even squat down. People don’t really talk about what you go through after pregnancy... When Kulture was born, I felt like I was a kid again; everything was making me cry, and I needed a lot of love. I feel ­better now, but sometimes I just feel so vulnerable, like I’m not ready for the world yet."

Said Cardi B in a W interview quoted at Tom & Lorenzo. She didn't go on that tour, she "sacrificed that to stay with my daughter," and that explains, she says, why she physically attacked Nicki Minaj:

[S]he saw that Minaj had liked, and then unliked, a tweet disparaging Cardi’s mothering skills, something Minaj has denied. “I was going to make millions off my Bruno Mars tour, and I sacrificed that to stay with my daughter,” Cardi went on. “I love my daughter. I’m a good-ass fucking mom. So for somebody that don’t have a child to like that comment? So many people want to say that party wasn’t the time or the place, but I’m not going to catch another artist in the grocery store or down the block.”

Nicki Minaj is sued over her use of an upside-down-heart on an "I [heart] Nicki" T-shirt.

Her people didn't just use the idea of an upside-down-heart that is (on closer look) a pair of breasts, they used exactly the same image of upside-down-heart breasts that the plaintiff had (he says) created and copyrighted for his "I [heart] Venice Beach" T-shirts. The only difference between the 2 "hearts" is the shade of pink for the part of the "chest" not covered by the red bikini top.

Here's the TMZ report, with a photo of both shirts.

How lame to use that exact image, which wasn't perfectly drawn. I guess the idea is to get right on the line where viewers perceive a heart — and wonder why it's upside down — and then pop into the realization that it's breasts. Maybe it was clear that the effect worked on the Venice Beach shirt, and you don't want to tinker with what has proved reliable.

Of course, it's generally pretty awful to want to wear an image of breasts on your chest, but I guess it's better for Nicki Minaj fans to celebrate her body knowing that she herself is selling the shirt than it is to buy a shirt that celebrates the bodies of women on the beach who are not saying I want you to isolate and make a fuss about my breasts and who do not make any money off the shirts.

Who is supposed to want to wear these shirts — men or women? A woman wearing either of these shirts is wearing breasts over her breasts and likely to be understood to be saying hey, look at my breasts... I've got real breasts under here... think about that. A man wearing either shirt — especially the Venice Beach shirt — seems to be saying... well, it depends on how the man looks, doesn't it? I'm cycling through different mental pictures of men and getting a lot of different messages. I'll just say you'd better be awfully cute and happy looking if you wear that.

Speaking of originality, the "I [heart] X" design goes back to a trademark owned by the New York State Department of Economic Development.

The logo was designed by graphic designer Milton Glaser in 1976 in the back of a taxi and was drawn with red crayon on scrap paper. The original drawing is held in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

I encourage you legal folk to discuss the difference between copyright and trademark in this Venice Beach/Nicki Minaj problem. I assume there's no trademark claim and that the copyright problem — if there is one — could have been avoided by drawing the shape slightly differently.

But I will go on to wonder who first got idea that a heart, flipped, looked like breasts? Ah! But here's a superseding question: Why do we have that simple ❤ shape in the first place? It doesn't look that much like the internal organ. Consider the possibility that the resemblance to breasts is the origin story for the heart shape. Here's "Ever Wondered Why The Hearts We Draw Look Nothing Like The Shape Of Real Hearts? Here’s Why":

5. It looks a pair of woman's breasts

The ideographic heart when inverted, is roughly triangular in shape with two round lobes occupying the base of the triangle - it is a fair supposition of a woman’s breasts pushed together probably by a corset which exaggerates the pair of breasts and narrows the waist.

So the heart shape looks like breasts even before you invert it and may even be the reason we have the shape in the first place. But you notice the number "5" in the explanation above. It's one of 7 ideas about why the shape has that form, including that it was a way to draw a woman's pubic mound and — all of these are inverted ❤s — the vulva, buttocks, and testicles.

I looked through 52 photographs — a whole deck of cards — of the fashion at last night's VMA's.

Maybe I did it so you don't have to, or maybe you'll go through — here — and challenge my ratings:

1. Miley Cyrus
2. Lizzo
3. Nicki Minaj
4. Demi Lovato

Remember, it's the VMAs, not the Oscars. There's supposed to me some weirdness and playfulness in the glamour.

I'd never heard of Lizzo before, but her strange getup got me to look at her for a long time, to notice a very beautiful face, and to look up her music and listen to this:

I encounter 5 items of celebrity news.

1. The snake that bit one of the dancers in a rehearsal of the Nicki Minaj song "Anaconda" was a "boa constrictor named Rocky who has been in the entertainment business for 15 years." A boa constrictor is not an anaconda, but the snake had no way to know the song was celebrating some other species of snake. Nor do I think the snake could take offense at the lyrics and think something like: That's all I am to you, something that reminds you of a body part of one of your kind, not as a unique individual with many facets to my serpentine being other than serving as a hyperbolic metaphor for the human penis? Do you even know about the snake's penis? Am I simply a big penis to you? Do you even know who I am? I am Rocky, a veteran of 15 years in the entertainment business! I think a boa constrictor bites when it feels threatened, so if the 15-years-in-the-entertainment-business snake bit a dancer, he must have felt really scared. He doesn't know his name is Rocky, a name that connotes a tough guy. He's just a snake. He doesn't know what snakes mean to us, and he's not really in the business, is he? Not from his perspective. He's not getting any coins, as Nicky might put it. He's a confused, frightened creature in an incomprehensible environment, fighting for survival. And that's our favorite phallic symbol.

2. Jennifer Lopez says: "I like being in a relationship. I’m not one to like, whore around, and stuff like that — that’s not my thing." Is she calling other ladies "whores"? Is that allowed these days? She used "whore" as a verb, naming the action, not the person. That might be a love-the-sinner/hate-the-sin kind of attitude, but then she didn't ever say whoring around is bad, only that it's not her "thing." Do your own thing. That's what we said in the 60s, often along with its corollary: Let it all hang out. The Isley Brothers sang: "It's your thing/Do what you wanna do/I can't tell you/Who to sock it to." Some people — like Jennifer Lopez — find that their thing is having sex with their own spouse. No judgment. It's all good. You whores.

3. That bad old billionaire racist Donald Sterling had fallen out of the news, and here's V. Stiviano rescuing him from that fate and averring that the old man is gay and she was his beard. This is not attention whoring — is that word permissible? — because Stiviano is fighting against a lawsuit filed against her by Sterling's wife Shelly, who accuses her of being "a thief and an embezzler," which provides the basis for a counterclaim of defamation.

4. To stop his descent into into a condition I think is called Jack Nicholsonism, Leonardo DiCaprio must lose 10 pounds. "He has given up pasta – and he loves pasta... He also plans on working out more and he is taking his bike wherever he goes." DiCaprio is about to turn 40, and his girlfriend is a 21-year-old model named Toni Garrn, who apparently either wants to make very sure we pronounce the "r" in her name or is a pirate. We're told of Garrrrrn that "Of course she doesn’t care" that Leo is fat. Why would Leo be with anyone who would say she cares that he's fat when he's fat? I love you just the way you are. That's what Billy Joel sang, back in 1979, stealing, he admits, the last line of the 4 Seasons song "Rag Doll," which was inspired by a squeegee-man girl who extracted $20 from Bob Gaudio. Did Joel have any particular person in mind? Yeah. His first wife, and she didn't even like the song. Joel went through 2 more wives, including a 23-year-old that he married when he was 55. Oh, but don't be too mean to Mr. Joel. He has "battled depression for many years," and once tried to kill himself by drinking furniture polish. Furniture polish? "It looked tastier than bleach." But good luck to DiCaprio, whether he chooses to remain boyishly cute or become the jolly roué. Flabby or toned, he'll always be cuter than Billy Joel, and good for him for never divorcing anyone. He has never married.

5. Speaking of fat, Warner Brothers is in trouble for "fat shaming" in its new direct-to-video Scooby-Doo movie "Frankencreepy." Some curse causes Daphne Blake to go from size 2 to size 8, but size 8 is depicted more like size 22, and Tom Burns of The Good Men Project writes: "It's sad to think that my daughter can’t even watch a cartoon about a dog solving mysteries without negative body stereotypes being thrown in her face." But apparently, there's an argument that the curse is that each character loses what she (or he) is most afraid to lose, and the only reason Daphe loses her fine figure is that she's too damned in love with it in the first place. This notion of curses tailored to each psyche is familiar. In one of my favorite movies, "The Witches of Eastwick," Satan (the above-mentioned Jack Nicholson) curses the various women with their own fears, and in the case of Cher, the fear is snakes. Watch Cher wake up in a bedful of snakes. Can somebody check the IMDB page on those snakes? I want to know how long they've been in the entertainment business and what are their degrees of separation from Rocky?

"You are my wife!" exclaims Nicki Minaj in praise of a 19-year-old singer.

On "American Idol" last night. Nicki Minaj is a female. Whether we're talking same-sex marriage or not, however, proclaiming one of the contestants to be your partner in marriage is edgy for that family show.

Minaj is always coming up with new ways to say "I love you." (For example, last night, she also said "You are a little marshmallow that I want to eat.")

I appreciate the effort not to be boring, and it must be a great effort, when you listening to hundreds of song performances and then must say something. Imagine trying to think up something new to say that advances your image as a sexy, edgy pop star but isn't too dirty for a prime-time network show aimed at kids and the parents who watch TV with their kids. You can't say that you want to have sex with the contestant. You have to take it down a step.

ADDED: I just remembered that Minaj also said to one young female singer: "I love your boobs." To be fair, the singer was wearing a dress with a tight bodice that had high-contrast triangles marking the nipple location.

Steven Tyler appears in drag on "American Idol" and quotes Bob Dylan's "Talkin' World War III Blues."

He came out as if he were the last contestant and maybe it took half a second to recognize the big rock star (who was on the judge's panel last season). The news reports of the little stunt emphasize the drag and the (miniscule) surprise, but even where the lyric is quoted, the attribution to Bob Dylan is missing. Here's the NY Daily News:

"What the, what?" Randy Jackson said when he got a first glimpse of his former co-star on stage.

"My name is Pepper. I'm going to sing a song called 'Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa, Our Love Going to Grow, Wah Wah,'" he joked to judging panel. "But before I do I'm going to judge you all (bleeps) first."

I'm not finding any news reports that place the lyric — which I have engraved on my brain — in the old Bob Dylan song. "Talkin' World War III Blues" has 12 verses of Bob talking his way through a dream he had about walking through post-nuclear NYC, with all the people gone from the "lonesome town." Here's the 9th verse:

Well, I remember seein’ some ad
So I turned on my Conelrad
But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill
So the radio didn’t work so well
Turned on my record player—
It was Rock-a-day Johnny singin’, “Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa
Our Love’s A-gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah”

Tyler said "Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah," by the way, just like Dylan, not "Wah Wah," as the Daily News would have it.

Now that you get the reference, is there anything to be made of it? Maybe Dylan was making an in joke at the time and Tyler was referring to that joke. Maybe Tyler wanted to alert us to the threat of nuclear war. Maybe Tyler wanted to wink at Dylan fans. But the best clue I found — as I did a Google search to see if anyone had recognized the Dylan quote — was an article from back in November about  friction between Tyler and current-season judge Nicki Manaj. Tyler had said in an interview:

“If it was Bob Dylan, Nicki Minaj would have had him sent to the cornfield! Whereas, if it was Bob Dylan with us, we would have brought the best of him out, as we did with Phillip Phillips....”

Manaj thereafter tweeted:

“Steven Tyler said I would have sent Bob Dylan to a cornfield??? Steven, you haven’t seen me judge one single solitary contestant yet!”

And:

“I understand you really wanted to keep your job but take that up with the producers. I haven’t done anything to you. That’s a racist comment.” 

Racist because it's against her... or because sending someone "to the cornfield" is a reference to slavery?

“You assume that I wouldn’t have liked Bob Dylan??? why? black? rapper? what? go f— yourself and worry about yourself babe.”

To quote Bob Dylan — especially while dressed in a garish blonde wig and big inflated breasts — is to tweak Nicki. Talking blues is related to rap, somewhere in the ancestry. The quoted line, which is talked, is about singing, singing like a rockabilly guy — "Rock-a-day Johnny" — and Tyler was acting as though he were going to sing the song Bob Dylan heard. Dylan is all alone in his dream, looking for company, and in his desperation, he turns on the radio, and then puts on a record, and it's this pop culture idiot, singing nonsense — ooh-wah, ooh-wah —but it's very poignant, because, after the war, Bob is longing for any kind of a voice. In the 10th verse, he calls the telephone number where a recorded voice says the time, and he listens to that voice, repeating the same time — 3 o'clock, the time the war started — for over an hour.

So Steven Tyler had a lot to say, if anybody wants to notice. He's saying we don't get artists like Bob Dylan anymore. The music industry — like NYC after the bomb — is devoid of real people. We're desperate for a human voice. And Nicki Manaj is the embodiment — for all her voluptuous physicality — of emptiness. He was spoofing her, critiquing everything, crying out for real human art, which — for him — Bob Dylan embodies.

But did anyone hear him? He pranced out as a clown. He was dressed as a woman. It resonated in the hollowness that has always been television. In drag, with that wide smile, he even looked like Milton Berle.



IN THE COMMENTS: In this post where I chide others for missing the Dylan reference, Mumpsimus dings me for missing a reference:

"To the cornfield" refers to the SF/Horror story "It's A Good Life" by Jerome Bixby. Or, more likely in this context, to the Twilight Zone episode based on that story.

Dust Bunny Queen links to this TZ clip.

Is this Mariah-Nicki thing going to work?

Is anyone watching?

We watched the first hour last night (with the rest saved on DVR), and, well, it seems the problem is that Nicki Manaj came to play. She's prepared. She's like the Tracy Flick of "American Idol." She's studied, and she's ready. If this reality show were "Survivor," she's be voted off immediately, because she wants it so bad. Meanwhile, Mariah Carey obviously believed she could simply swan in and be Mariah. That's enough in itself. How awful to have to be one of 2 women, when the other woman wants it so bad. It's like the wife and the mistress.

But there isn't even a husband. Unless America is the husband. But America, in "American Idol," is a whole lot of young girls. And what do they care about a wife and a mistress clawing it out? Poor Mariah! Don't tell me Keith Urban/Randy Jackson count as the husband who will step up — in this exaggerated TV sitcom — and choose the right woman, the true sweetheart, the wife, Mariah. These men are oblivious to the psychodrama. They're floating along aimlessly as if the only thing really happening is a talent show, where various young people try to sing as well as they can, and modestly knowledgeable judges give honest assessments.

Oh! My heart breaks for Mariah. But I must say, Nicki has won it all. She came to win and she crushed the competition in the first hour. Congratulations! But... is anyone watching?

"I want a little black girl to stand up in the front of her classroom and read a poem by her favorite poet and I want that poet to be me."

Says Jasmine Mans, a University of Wisconsin junior who was just named one of Glamour Magazine’s Top 10 College Women:

After a video of Mans’ performing a poem criticizing Nicki Minaj received nearly 475,000 views, she steadily gained fame through appearances on HBO’s “Brave New Voices,” Black Entertainment Television, billboard.com and Broadway.

Here's that video. And here are the rest of her videos.

"J-Lo, can you scoot over a little bit?"

Telling Jennifer Lopez to move her sublime ass?

There really is only room for one female on the "American Idol" panel. Whenever they've squeezed in a second, they've wrecked the dynamic. Sorry to deal in stereotypes here, but the way the judges' panel has been structured since the first season, there's a woman, in the middle, performing a stereotypical female role. Paula Abdul pioneered this role, empathizing with everyone, speaking from the heart, and squealing special love for the boys. Paula got ousted, and other females had there time in the middle seat, but now they've got Jennifer, and Jennifer has far outstripped Paula. And I love Paula, but Jennifer is the queen.

She was low-key in her response to Nicki Minaj: "I don't know if there's enough room for both of us." A demure reference to her most famous body part, and a fully justified expression of intention to keep it firmly planted in the center seat.