How dumb is Chris Brown? He fucked up sooooo bad. It’s like he not only killed the golden goose, but he also roasted it over a pile of burning baby seals and then ate it with his bare hands in front of the entire California chapter of PETA.
Seriously, until very recently his life could not have been any better. If you had stopped any random dude on the street two weeks ago and granted him a wish, he would have basically asked to be Chris Brown. “Well, it would be great to be young again. But wait, I would really like to have a fancy sports car. Although, I’d also like to have a hot R&B singer for a girlfriend. Maybe I could just be a celebrity myself…?”
Chris Brown has (had) all those things. He is 19 years old. He was dating Rihanna and he was on his way to perform at the Grammys in a brand new Lamborghini. What?! That’s like god decided to make sweet love to your life. You literally and tangibly had it better than 99.9% of the other humans on this planet. Why not just sit back and let amazing things happen to you?
Instead, Chris Brown decided to beat up a girl. There is no possible way he can justify that. I mean, what could he possibly say? She insulted him? She insulted his mother? She insulted him and his mother and his grandmother? So what? You’re Chris Brown. You’re in a $250,000 sports car with one of the most beautiful girls in the world. It should be pretty easy to keep insults like that in perspective. If I was in Chris Brown’s position I don’t think I would ever get mad. Rihanna could pee in my shoes and I’d be like, “That’s cool. I’m just gonna drive my Lamborghini over to Beverly Hills and buy a thousand new pairs of shoes. And then I’m going to have sex with, like, ten groupies at once. And then me and Justin Timberlake are gonna go catch a Laker’s game. Peace out.”
I guess it’s just a classic case of too much is never enough. This malady seems to strike a disproportionate number of celebrities - most likely because they are among the select group of people who almost always have too much. For you or me, just having the fancy car or the fancy girl or the fancy friends would probably be enough to make us feel pretty good. I’m sure plenty of people get a vicarious thrill just from imagining that they have those things. But for people like Chris Brown it probably takes more than a fast car and a hot girl to get his pulse pounding.
Unfortunately this seems to be a sad, but true fact of the human condition. The more we have, the more we want. This makes the pursuit of happiness an essentially futile task, since it will always be just out of reach. Which is a depressing thought, since I’m told that the pursuit of happiness is basically the whole point of life. Still, that’s no reason to go beating up your girlfriend. Why don’t you channel some of that anger into your art? You know, write a song about it or something.
That’s what New Villager did. The duo, which is equal parts California and New York, has composed a pensive little dance nugget called “Rich Doors.” This should have been the song they played during the meta-futuristic rave scene in The Matrix 2. The drums have a tribal pulse and the sparse lyrics have the quality of a poem spoken in the back of a long, dark cave. They seem to tell the story of someone who has it all and yet still searches for more, if only because there isn’t anything else for them to do.
If nothing else, it’s a beautiful song that is definitely celebrating something bittersweet. It could be celebrity excess or the meaningless pursuit of happiness in this lifetime. Their website leads me to believe it might also have something to do with The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, but I don’t really know what that is. So instead I will just assume it is a searing indictment of Chris Brown and domestic abuse. Listen to your fellow artists Chris. Stop the violence.
Recently a friend sent out a group email to what must have been every person on his contact list. In this email he explained his opinions on the 2nd Amendment as well as his fear that the new administration might curtail gun rights, and then encouraged everyone to act accordingly. Needless to say, within hours this disparate group of friends, acquaintances and total strangers were at each other’s throats arguing about what is officially one of the three most controversial issues in America today. I suggested that we open up the debate to abortion and religion while we were at it, just to make sure we pissed everyone off.
My friend didn’t go for it. Instead he decided to reign the whole thing by directing all further thoughts on the subject to him individually and not to the group as a whole. Which is a bummer, cuz I sure do loves me a good argument. Speaking of which, let’s talk about religion - specifically about the Amish. Everybody knows them as the guys with funny beards who are good with carpentry. They also refuse to use modern conveniences such as electricity or gas powered vehicles, and they have a pretty strict moral code.
Which is like, big whoop, right? Show me a religion that doesn’t have a strict moral code. Or one that doesn’t have funny outfits and strange superstitions for that matter. And that is my point. All religion is basically the same; believe in something that you can’t see, hang out with other people who also believe in it, and every once in a while get together in some kind of building to sing songs and read apocryphal fairy tales dedicated to it. Also, you should restrict your behavior in some way because the invisible thing is always watching you and it totally gives a shit.
The Amish are no more or less weird than any other religious group. But they do get extra points for their variation on the initiation ceremony. Jews have bar mitzvahs, Catholics have communion, and some African religions have that crazy teenage circumcision that I don’t even want to think about. All of these are events to mark a person’s maturity, or the point at which they can understand and accept the tenets of the faith on their own. Well, the Amish have “rumspringa” and it is fucking awesome.
It works like this: the Amish know that their lifestyle is not for everyone. Living in a semi-secluded community without any of the “English” conveniences can be hard, especially when the modern world is basically rubbing it in your face all the time. The Amish parents want to make sure their offspring understand what they’re giving up and that they have accepted the culture of their own volition. So what do they do? At age 16 they cut the little fuckers loose for a two year orgy of sex, drugs, and consumer electronics. Rumspringa!
“If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was meant to be.” That’s the idea, in a nutshell. The elders figure that it’s better to show the young ones what they’re missing rather than shroud it in mystery - which we all know would only make it more tempting. During the period of rumspringa, young Amish kids are allowed to move into double-wide trailers and spend their days smoking speed, watching cable television and having awkward pre-marital sex. They can even get shitty minimum wage service jobs to finance the whole thing. Surprisingly, most of them burn out on this lifestyle pretty quickly and return to their Amish brethren after only a few months. In other words, contrary to what the other religions would have you believe, a year or two of unchecked hedonism is actually a good thing.
Ironically, the LA band that calls themselves Rumspringa have reverse engineered this process in order to arrive at their sound. “In a modern age when image, shock appeal and technology invades every nook and cranny, it’s hard and rare to find that good ol’ rock n roll sound. ‘That’s why we declared ourselves to be on our own version of Rumspringa,’ says the band. ‘To step away from all the self-serving surface of the mainstream music culture and to get back to the heart of discovering the soul of rock through the roots of its creation.’”
Rumspringa (the band) is sort of like the Amish elders, who have accepted the simple style as the path to greater happiness. Yet, they have certainly had their wild moments, which you can hear in the hip hop iconography and dancey electro rhythms that have slyly made their way into Rumspringa’s songs. Sometimes it sounds like Jimmy Reed and !!! having a party at EPMD’s house and sometimes it just sounds like some indie rock kids with the blues. It’s hard to explain, but easy to understand.
So now we’ve covered guns and we’ve talked about religion. That just leaves abortion. Excuse me while I go write a quick email…
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