Sunday, February 8th, 2004

On CNN last night…

HOWARD KURTZ, host CNN “Reliable Sources” show: Let’s talk about tonight Grammy awards. It’s not clear whether Janet Jackson is showing up or is disinvited, but Justin Timberlake, why is he being allowed to even show his face? I mean, if I reach over — well, let’s not go there.

GLORIA BORGER, co-host of CNBC’s “Capital Report”: Show his face, much less anything else.

KURTZ: He’s the guy who liberated Janet Jackson’s breast. Why does he get to go on national television a week later?

BORGER: Well, you know, this is the question that I’ve talked to a lot of women about this, actually. Because while none of us believe Janet Jackson did the right thing, we also believe that she is taking the complete fall for this, that Justin Timberlake has distanced himself from Janet Jackson, saying nice things like, “I didn’t need this for my career.”

And yet he gets to go on the Grammies and sing tonight and she doesn’t.

KURTZ: Right after the — Right after the event he was seen on “Access Hollywood” saying, “This is pretty cool. We gave people something to talk about.”

And later he’s all “I’m clearly so sorry.”

BORGER: Really too different — Clearly too different stories.

KURTZ: Right.

BORGER: When you dissect it. But guess what? He gets to sing.

KURTZ: Jeff Greenfield, CBS dangles goodies before Jessica Lynch to try to get an interview with her.

CBS makes that music special deal with Michael Jackson, where he got a lot of money.

CBS then has MTV, you know, produce this halftime show, which not only featured this moment we keep talking about but, you know, rap lyrics like I want to get you naked.

Isn’t there a pattern of bad judgment here?

JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN senior analyst: They’ve had a bad track on this. I mean, you know, you could also raise some questions, since they were so shocked at this, they did have to approve the ads they ran at $2.3 million for 30 seconds, that featured, among other things, a dog biting a man’s crotch, a flatulent horse and a monkey making sexual advances to a woman.

So, you know, that used to be the Tiffany network and I guess they’re just in the same primordial ooze that the rest of us are in, looking those of us who look at it so we can comment on it while watching the tape 500 times.

KURTZ: So your view — you view, Jeff. You use the term hypocrisy bowl. There’s hypocrisy plenty to go around, because everybody who’s anywhere near a camera gets to both exploit this and denounce it and joke about it and hopefully get people to watch.

GREENFIELD: Yes, I mean, it’s kind of like the, you know, the confession magazines of the ’50s that used to run these lurid stories about sexual perversion while having the attitude of “Isn’t it terrible. Let us show you this again so you’ll know just how bad it is.” Yes.

KURTZ: So aren’t the networks, not to mention newspapers and magazines, which have run many, many articles on this, aren’t they as bad as Janet Jackson? She allowed the exposure, and everybody else is going to make sure that we never ever forget it.

MELINDA HENNEBERGER, reporter for “Newsweek” magazine: I don’t know, but I do think that overall the coverage has been valid. Because I think for a lot of people…

KURTZ: Not excessive?

HENNEBERGER: I’m not so sure, because I think a lot of Americans were really upset about it. I mean, if the FCC got 200,000 calls and e-mails on it, I think we have to respond, too.

KURTZ: But Gloria Borger keeps replaying it on her show.

BORGER: I keep replaying it. Well, and then we have debates over Justin Timberlake and over — but, you know, it’s also to be fair. Let’s just — it’s a diversion. It’s sort of a fun story at Janet Jackson’s expense.

KURTZ: Not Iraq.

BORGER: Yes. It is not Iraq. We are a nation at war. We deal with that. But that is one of those diversions that we can all relate to, because some of us got to watch it with our children, and we really didn’t think that was a terrific idea.

And I agree with Jeff. I thought a lot of those ads on erectile dysfunction and the rest during the Super Bowl were probably not a great idea either…

posted by @ 7:48 pm | 0 Comments

Sunday, February 8th, 2004

LOVELY HOW I LET MY MIND FLOAT, VERSION 1

Odyssey “Native New Yorker”—>Nas “NY State of Mind”—->Strokes “NY Cops”

posted by @ 4:42 pm | 0 Comments

Sunday, February 8th, 2004

Eric at the Stinkzone put me onto this Bravo documentary, Story of Jamaican Music. His post includes show and interview listings. Gonna check on Tuesday and report back.

posted by @ 9:46 am | 0 Comments

Sunday, February 8th, 2004

The best Norah Jones review ever likely to be written, by Ben Ratliff.

The best Neptunes/Timbaland article ever likely to be written, by your boy SFJ.

And they’re both from the New York Times. Fuck me!

posted by @ 9:24 am | 0 Comments

Friday, February 6th, 2004

Michaelangelo Matos gets an existential crisis over…Ninjatune and Mo Wax!

posted by @ 10:02 am | 0 Comments

Friday, February 6th, 2004

David Mays on his crusade against Eminem and whites in hip-hop. Is he Woodward or Bernstein?

posted by @ 9:48 am | 0 Comments

Friday, February 6th, 2004

Mike Davis on Hong Kong’s avian flu as the product of globalization.

posted by @ 9:45 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, February 5th, 2004

More genius posting fromJulianne Blazer on You Got Serviced. I (heart) b-boy/b-girl blogs. Back to the Bronx–the book, that is. I’m rewriting the 2 chapters on the gangs into one, while wishing I could do 17 more on just this stuff.

posted by @ 6:33 pm | 0 Comments

Thursday, February 5th, 2004

“SEPARATE IS SELDOM, IF EVER, EQUAL”

From yesterday’s ruling by the Mass. Supreme Judicial Court on gay marriage:

“The history of our nation has demonstrated that separate is seldom, if ever, equal. . . .

The bill’s absolute prohibition of the use of the word “marriage” by “spouses” who are the same sex is more than semantic. The dissimilitude between the terms “civil marriage” and “civil union” is not innocuous; it is a considered choice of language that reflects a demonstrable assigning of same-sex, largely homosexual, couples to second-class status. . . ”

I love this: the upshot of the ruling is that gay marriages begin in Massachusetts on May 17, the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

Sidenote: Mass. boy John Kerry opposes gay marriage.

I really wish I had time to parse this more with yall–there’s so much here, and one of my side journalistic obsessions has become the recent cultural history of integration–but I’m in the last 48+ hours of editing.

Soon come…

In other news, Dean may quit if he doesn’t win Wisconsin. Is this a way to rally depressed Deaniacs or an admission of collapse? Probably both.

Another sidenote: Wisconsin has often been the reversal point for insurgent candidacies. In ’88, when Jesse Jackson was stomping all candidates after the early caucuses and primaries, Dem centrist operatives ganged up on him in Wisconsin, while Ed Koch revived the famous Hymietown thang. He never recovered.

In the end, Jackson finished a distant second to the short guy with the uni-brow from-where?-Massachusetts.

posted by @ 9:47 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, February 4th, 2004

Greg Tate on Cold Mountain. Nuff said, believers.

posted by @ 11:32 am | 0 Comments



Previous Posts

Feed Me!

Revolutions

Word

Fiyahlinks


twitter_logo

@zentronix

Come follow me now...

Archives

We work with the Creative Commons license and exercise a "Some Rights Reserved" policy. Feel free to link, distribute, and share written material from cantstopwontstop.com for non-commercial uses.

Requests for commercial uses of any content here are welcome: come correct.

Creative Commons License