Buy Or Don’t Buy

Or, “How A Cliché Changes Its Usage, In Five Easy Steps”

I: Status Quo

November 4, 2005:

What’s more important: talent, coaching, or swagger? These quotes may help you decide. Each tells us something important about that magical gait.

[...] FOX’s Adam Schein, on the Cowboys’ rout of the Eagles a month ago: “Finally, swagger and aggressiveness from the Dallas Cowboys.” Maybe the nefarious Cowpokes swiped it from the Eagles. Or maybe Barry Switzer just misplaced it in the team offices a decade ago.

Chris Harlan, Beaver County Times, on Monday’s Steelers-Ravens game: “Ray Lewis was wearing jeans, but the Ravens’ swagger was still there.” It’s a key ingredient in upsets, and stars like Lewis can horde it for five years after a Super Bowl win and project it telepathically from the bench.

Pro Football Weekly’s college scouting report on Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder. “Plays with a sense of urgency. Very confident. Has a swagger.” It can be spotted by trained scouts, who no doubt watch for signs of it at Senior Bowl practices.

[...] This is serious stuff. [...]  With the exception of some rookies in tight situations, all football players are confident. Swagger must be equivalent to super-duper-ultra-confidence, not to be confused with cockiness, which we all know is bad.

II: Appropriation

August 8, 2007:

No one on the corner has swagger like us

Hit me on my burner, pre-paid wireless

We pack and deliver like UPS trucks

Already going to hell, just pumping that gas

III: Mainstreaming

September 6, 2008:

No one on the corner has swagger like us

Swagger like us

Swagger, swagger like us

Mr. West is in the building

Swagger on a hundred thousand, trillion

Hey yo, I know I got it first

I’m Christopher Columbus, y’all just the pilgrims

IV: Watering Down

August 7, 2009:

And now the dudes are lining up, ’cause they hear we got swagger

But we kick ‘em to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger

V: Self-Parody

January 5, 2010:

According to the Kansas City Star, [Justin] Bieber says, “I have a swagger coach that helps me and teaches me different swaggerific things to do,”

Yes! There’s more: “He has helped me with my style and just putting different pieces together and being able to layer and stuff like that.”

Study Questions:

1: What does the word ’swagger’ mean today?

2: What does the concept of ’swagger’ mean to you? What did it mean to you five years ago?

3: Are there other clichés that have had their meanings changed or obfuscated over time due to their usage in popular culture?

BONUS: Where does this line from Sufjan Stevens’s ‘The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us’ fit into the timeline?

All of my powers, day after day

I can tell you, we swaggered and swayed

Please submit your answers in the comments.

We get it. Kurt Cobain was an icon. He was a major player in the grunge movement and proponent of teenage angst back in the 1990s. But he’s dead. He died back ‘94. But for some reason, people keep doing things to his memory that just… miss the point of “who he was.”

The latest: Kurt Cobain on Ice!

Is it just me, but does that skater kind of look like Mel Gibson?

It is apparently “Talk in Third Person Day.”

No.

If you do this, I will first lose respect for you then despise you for the rest of the month.

I don’t like children. I like them even less when they do things for attention and admiration. And when they perform in costumes to adult-themed songs, just forget about it.

Enjoy. Or not.

Portuguese Lady Gaga:

6 year-old Ke$ha

Parents? Where are you?

I first realized I liked Joanna Newsom when I listened to “Colleen” and thought it sounded a lot like Kate Bush; I first realized I loved Joanna Newsom when I looked up the lyrics to “Colleen” and discovered it was about a woman in Victorian England coming to grips with the fact that she used to be a whale.

But for her being one of my favorite musicians, Newsom’s LPs always left me the slightest bit cold. I couldn’t get into her debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender, for a mixture of good and bad reasons. I can’t hear beyond the frog-child squawk of her early vocals, but beyond that the songs on the album seem to me like cute little arts and crafts projects you appreciate, buy and then leave on a shelf and never think of again. And while her 2006 follow-up Ys is a beautiful album, it’s also extremely heavy (the ending of “Monkey & Bear” still puts me in a weird place) and a little bit distant. Its 11-minute behemoths feel more like museum exhibits than songs: You can admire them from afar, but they’re definitely Joanna Newsom’s songs, not yours.

It wasn’t until I stumbled around Hype Machine and found some live tracks that I discovered my favorite Newsom song, a new track called “Esme”:

» Oh I’m buying this…

Going off Nate’s previous post, what is going on with this commercial?

Is the cat food laced with LSD? Cat ladies, why do you want your cat to go on a magical adventure without you? Are cats more pure than humans, being that this cat has an opportunity to go on a murderous buffet and doesn’t?

Basically, why CGI cat? Why CGI world? Can’t you just sing the meow mix theme song and call it a day? Or have a cat lady declare how her kitty deserves the best?

Side note: have you ever noticed the cats printed on cat food cans? They looked trapped. Creepy.

(Help Me)

Sara and I are very confused about this commercial:

What is going on with these two? Are they lesbians — or, being the only two young nuns, are they just very good friends? Also, are nuns even allowed to wear bikinis, or is that a hint that they are leaving the church altogether? How will we ever find out??!?

The most offensive part of my day is undoubtedly the 30 seconds I spend walking through the parade of advertising that is the 47-50th Street subway station. For the past few months the ads in this station have been exclusively for the little-seen and little-loved Spike-TV comedy “Blue Mountain State.” Most of them are offensive to women in a number of different ways, but one in particular is offensive to ME.

I’ve never seen “BMS” and I’m sick of Thad Castle. More accurately, I’m sick of characters like Thad Castle. “Look his expression! You can tell that he’s totally repulsive – and he doesn’t care who knows it!”

I don’t have a problem in the abstract with fictional people being douchebags. In fact, some of my best characters are assholes. But ever since the golden days of Stifler this particular type — the gross dumb alpha dog — has been an excuse for writers to get away with using their laziest, laziest gags. Dick joke, fart joke, puke joke, goodnight.

(Also, while looking for that picture I discovered that Thad Castle has a Twitter, and it’s every bit as lame as you’d expect.)

But this isn’t the only archetype I’m tired of. You and I will explore some more — after the jump!

» Oh I’m buying this…

I owe Jay Leno an apology. For much of my life I’ve thought of him as a complacent old hack on the wrong side of history, with nothing better to do than spent his time telling humorless and mean-spirited jokes to an audience that thinks predictability breeds hilarity. I was making the cardinal sin of youth: assuming that things as I experienced them were things as they had always been.

But then yesterday I saw a clip of Jay on “Late Night with David Letterman” from 1984. Leaving aside the strange fact of Jay and Dave’s old college-buddy chemistry — which gave me a sense of how Harry Potter in Prisoner of Azakaban must have felt learning Sirius Black was best man at his parents’ wedding — the most fascinating thing about the clip is that Jay was funny once. Like, really funny:

It’s like discovering the Beatles after only listening to Paul McCartney’s solo albums.

You can see in 1984-Jay the roots of the things that are so dislikable about modern-day-Jay (the voice, the smugness, the easy targets), but in addition to some crack comic timing he’s also got a sly wit, relaxed charisma and some sheer smarts – things he seemingly shed like a heavy coat the second he got “The Tonight Show.” And in contrast to today’s calculatedly apolitical Leno, whose stuff never stretches beyond “Politicians: they lie and have sex sometimes!” the Leno of old is almost progressive. Faced with the prospect of a David Letterman interview in Playboy, you think this is the joke Jay would go for today?

Rather that being one of an unspectacular man ascending to great heights, Jay’s story becomes something more interesting — and I think, much more tragic: a talent watching his skills get slowly sapped by age and fortune. It turns out that lame comics are made, not born. This, of course is the essential idea behind “Sick Boy Syndrome” as explained the film Trainspotting: that once we get old, we simply cannot hack it anymore. It’s sad but it’s true — and it makes me wonder what other people we laugh at now used to actually be good at what they did.

My extraordinary results can be found in a magical place: after the jump!

» Oh I’m buying this…

Last April in Comedy class I was given the task of performing a five-minute stand-up comedy routine. Being the groundbreaking envelope-pusher that I am, i was determined to fill my five minutes with what i deemed ‘anti-comedy’: jokes that were so purposefully unfunny that they circled back around to become funny again.

But as I performed my act, I noticed something strange: No one was laughing at my jokes. In theory, this should have been a good thing — after all, unfunniness was what I was going for. But I got the feeling I was doing it wrong.

As it turns out, ‘anti-comedy’ is a subtle art; you can’t just go with the first bad joke you think of. You need to massage the badness. Take a look at the master of the craft, Norm MacDonald:

And it’s not just for shaggy dog stories. You can also use it to make fun of comedians you look down upon!

But until now, the societal benefits of anti-comedy have seemed slight. Until Jimmy Kimmel used it to mock/shame Jay Leno.

Nice work, Jimmy! We can only hope that anti-comedy will be the key weapon in the war to drive Jay Leno off of the airwaves forever.