Gaga – ILANA MERCER

Grammys: Great Porn, Maybe, But Music It Was NOT

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 01:17:16 +0000

I used to have some respect for Lady Gaga. With all her pretentious Yoko Onanisms, Stefani Germanotta, Gaga’s real name, is actually a hard-working and, at times, polished singer.

But to watch Gaga, at the 61st Grammy Awards, perform a number called “Shallow” was to endure an assault on the eyes and the ears.

Legs permanently splayed like an arthritic street walker, Gaga traipsed around catatonically, attempting to head-bang, but getting disoriented. Some things are best left to a macho, metal-head guy.

Gaga’s look was not a good one. But her sound, which is what counts here, was positively terrible. Yet, Gaga—lugging microphone and mount around like a geriatric with a walker—was a highlight in what was a pornographic, cacophonous extravaganza.

Aside the gorgeous Alicia Keys, host of the 2019 Grammys, who is talented and charming, and Dolly Parton, a consummate pro—the event showcased the gutter culture that is the American music scene. The country is truly in the musical sewer.

The petulant female artists, so proud of their seized power, showcased power, all right—but it was all in the hips, the pelvis, and in thrusts and twerks of the tush. Not one transcendent, inspiringly beautiful dance move did these throngs of crass stompers execute, on the pimped stage.

Janelle Monáe? The sum total of this artiste’s musical “talent” is simulating sex on stage. “Let the v-gina monologue,” she hissed venomously at her adoring, masochistic fans, while moving her nether regions to a base, atavistic beat. Indeed, in an orifice, Miss Monáe has found the right interlocutor.

Let us stipulate for the record that this is never about lyrics. Cardi B screaming that she “likes morning sex” but that nothing in this world does she love “more than checks” is not an issue.

Put it this way, if the greatest composer ever, Johann Sebastian Bach, set his divine, god-like cantatas to the saucy, naughty lyrics of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, would I decry his sublime composition as immoral? Don’t be daft. The music of J.S. Bach would still be sublime if it were set to Cardi B’s gutter language.

My point: Cardi B doesn’t make music. The category for which she and her sisters should be nominated, if I am being charitable, is street theater.

Incessant, asinine, genital-speak is one of the things that distinguishes these female artistes (as in “a person with artistic pretensions”) and makes them particularly repulsive. Do they not realize some things are best left veiled and mysterious?

Women of Monáe’s ilk are first to robotically protest the objectification of their sex, but are complicit in ensuring that The Act itself suffers the very same fate: sex has been made an object, a fashionable accessory, part of an empowering, emasculating life-style.

Screaming there was aplenty at Grammys No. 61. But good voices? None at all. Informed we were that the insipid Kacey Musgraves, a two-chord whiner, is what passes for country music, these days.

While I don’t much care for the country twang, for a while, country music was the closest to rock one could get. The riffs, the relative facility with the instruments, and the musicians’ manliness—amid the rapid queering of rock outfits—resembled the rock of yesteryear. But Kacey Musgraves versus the fabulous Faith Hill? Never the twain shall meet. Why, Musgraves makes me miss Sarah McLachlan and her soft-pop Lilith bosom buddies.

The only great melodies on stage, February 10, 2019, were the few achingly beautiful old songs botched by the newbies’ ugly warbling.

Yes, it’s the custom to yodel and ululate. Nobody learns to sing properly. An example of a caterwauling duo was Chloe x Halle, who absolutely mutilated the exquisite, evocative “Where Is The Love,” performed, in 1972, by Donny Hathaway and the heavenly Roberta Flack.

Again, not one memorable song did I hear, sporting a decent chord progression and some melodic variety; not one vaguely competent guitarist or instrumentalist: nothing at all. As musicians, most of the performers were objectively G-d-awful. Moving melodies, harmonic complexity, gorgeous arrangements, furious licks, superb singing and impossible time-signature fluctuations—by the sound of it, these are competencies lost.

Players (Chris Cornell – “When Bad Does Good”) sustained one or two pitches and exhibited little proficiency on any of the instruments they belabored (St. Vincent, “Masseduction“).

In all, instrumentalists these days can mostly only strum, and produce an amorphous blend—an ill-differentiated, sloppy sonic porridge. Such a structureless cacophony pleases the lazy ear because it’s repetitive, and chock-full of blurry, angst-riddled crescendos.

This deficit in skill is understandable. Why bother acquiring instrumental proficiency, instruction in composition or voice training, when a guitar is just a sexy prop? Swaying hips, a jutting pelvis, bedroom whispers or affectation and attitude (Dua Lipa, H.E.R. ) will get you all the attention and fame you crave, because these gutter-culture commodities are what’s in demand.

Which is where Cardi B comes in. “Be Careful” (an actual Cardi B number, in whose video she culturally appropriates the “Kill Bill” wedding scene). Even if you forget that a glorified lap dancer is not a musician; don’t get addicted to this woman’s audial porn.

As to H.E.R, formerly Gabi: She calls her winning album an “EP,” which stands for “extended play.” My point precisely. What my trained ear hears is aimless, skills-less, stream-of-consciousness, monotonous musical phrases, characterized by little to no harmonic resolution, other than spasms of caterwauling.

And the winner is … Give it up for technology. The tartlets I watched “sing” at the 61st Grammys would have been even more inaudible and tuneless were it not for the mighty Auto-Tune: the “holy grail of recording,” that “corrects intonation problems in vocals or solo instruments, in real time, without distortion or artifacts.”

Indeed, this T & A line-up would be reduced to even more embarrassing grunts, out-of-tune yelps, and bedroom whispers, if not for the Auto-Tune technology.

Image courtesy of RT

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Libertarianism Lite

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 07:00:00 +0000

A certain establishment-endorsed libertarianism is currently being touted on the Fox News and Business channels as the only legitimate brand of libertarianism. This life-style libertarianism, or libertarianism-lite, as I call it, tends to conflate libertinism with liberty, and appeals to hippies of all ages, provided they remain juveniles forever.

As I noted, when defending Ron Paul, in 2008, from attacks by the same libertarians,

Beltway libertarians … are moved in mysterious ways by gaping borders, gay marriage, multiculturalism, cloning, and all else “cool and cosmopolitan.” Judging by Reason Magazine’s “35 Heroes of Freedom,” “cool and cosmopolitan” encompasses William Burroughs, a drug addled, Beat-Generation wife killer, whose “work is mostly gibberish and his literary influence baleful.” … Madonna Reason has exalted for, as they put it, leading “MTV’s glorious parade of freaks, gender-benders, and weirdos who helped broaden the palette of acceptable cultural identities and destroy whatever vestiges of repressive mainstream sensibilities still remained.” That sounds like the unscrambled, strange dialect spoken by a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies. [Or is it “Wimmin’s Studies”?]

Much as the Left does, libertarians-lite divine, in the country’s founding documents, all kinds of exhortations to let it all hang out. Similar kitsch and clichés were solicited from historian Thaddeus Russell on “Stossel,” earlier this year. Russel’s banal history-from-below has it that we owe our freedoms less to the Founders’ political philosophy, than to the “saloons and speakeasies, brothels and gambling halls, to antiheroes such as drunken workers who created the weekend; prostitutes who set the precedent for women’s liberation, madams who owned land and used guns, and provided cutting-edge of fashion, … criminals who pioneered racial integration, unassimilated immigrants who gave us birth control, and brazen homosexuals who broke open America’s sexual culture.” (HERE. )

To listen to this particular “Stossel” guest, the unions, and not the Hebrews, gave us the Sabbath.

(Actually, the Founders had quite the affinity for the Hebrew Bible. Some of them even spoke Hebrew—a feat that would have required a lot of that Puritanical discipline dissed by Russell as regressive and oppressive, during the Stossel segment. The American Founding Father would not have needed “drunken workers” to teach them about the spiritual and ethical significance of a Sabbath.)

Naturally, I’m down with any lifestyle the individual chooses, just so long as he or she doesn’t visit violence on others, as the Transportation Security Administration does daily. But the typical life-style libertarian is a lot more laid back than the hardcore libertarian about government goons who’re engaged in legalized crime.

Take Reason Magazine’s Nick Gillespie, lightweight libertarian in-residence on “Stossel” and on “Freedom Watch.” Gillespie wasn’t that worked-up about the War on Terror or the TSA during his umpteenth appearance on Fox Business’ Stossel. This hipster had less-than harsh words about the TSA, protesting only that a well-intentioned effort had gone terribly wrong. Gillespie, who is at his most passionate when discussing life-style laissez-faire, also seconded the general impetus of the War on Terror, if not its more diabolical aspects.

Here serious libertarians get worked up. The War on Terror is a ruse that greases the skids for unconstitutional state expansion. As for the homegrown terrorists of the TSA: each and every one ought to be jailed for every assault perpetrated, their department dismantled.

More material: Liberty loving adults are left cold by fast-talking juveniles (old and young), wearing trendy eye-wear, who insist that the cultural foot-and-mouth that is “Glee” and Gaga is the very essence of American freedoms. Grown-up Americans get that to conflate low-culture with American liberties is absolutely asinine. (And very much the embodiment of life-style libertarianism.)

As the libertarian law goes, all human beings have the freedom to act-out in any way they like, so long as they abstain from aggressing against non-aggressors. Life, liberty and property: That’s the holy trinity of authentic libertarianism; the very essence of leave-me-alone, negative, American liberties. The rest is either fluff or ancillary; libertinism is subsumed within a larger, more-inclusive category of liberty.

Ordinary, gun-toting, homeschooling, bible-thumping Middle Americans remain unmoved by people who draw their paycheques from foundations, think tanks, and academia, and wax orgiastic about MTV and Dennis Rodman. This stuff might appear sophisticated, but it is reductive and shallow—a post-graduate cleverness that lacks philosophical depth.If you’ve read this column with any consistency, you know that it doesn’t object to risqué expression; only to artistically worthless cultural products. Joining the Idiocracy, in my opinion, is never liberating, and things that addle the brain permanently are, ultimately, not liberating. Still, I can see how libertinism can be freeing in many ways.

Blasé libertarianism certainly has crossover appeal—it plays well with silly sorts both at the Daily Beast and at Fox Business. This fare, however, is unlikely to catch-on in real America.

Personally, I believe in the paramountcy of privacy. If “civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,” in Ayn Rand’s magnificent words, then sexual exhibitionism – homosexual, heterosexual, gender-bender, and other – is anathema.

The heroic and creative inner struggle is what brings out the best in man. My heroes are in the Greek tradition: Silent, stoic, principled yet private; the American Founders, not life-style libertarianism’s philanderers.

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