The Hierarchy of Nerds

Let me start by saying that I myself, am a horrible, tubby, introverted nerd.  I am allowed to make fun of nerds, because I am one of their kind.  Actually, like most nerds, I could fit into several of the below categories.  So don't get pissy at me for writing this, it's just for fun.  
Here, I propose a descending hierarchy of the coolness of each category of nerd.  There are as many kinds of nerds as there are people, so for the purposes of this article, I have lumped some of them together, where I feel the respective groups are of approximately equal coolness.  To my fellow nerds, I apologize for what you will doubtless view as a slander of your particular genre.  But let's face it... we just aren't cool.

1. Technology/Science/Math Nerds:  It seems to me that there is no logical case for any other class of nerd being the coolest.  Whereas most of the pursuits on this list have grim consequences like pimples, obesity, and borderline autism, being a tech/science/math nerd has awesome consequences like gainful employment, a hand in creating the future, and the respect of society.  Not to mention an opportunity to take sweet, ice-cold revenge on the jocks and cheerleaders that bullied you in high school by becoming their asshole boss.

2. Star Wars Nerds:  Though I do have a separate category coming for other science fiction fans, I believe Star Wars nerds deserve their own category, as they are possibly the most socially-accepted kind of non-productive nerd.  Basically, everybody likes Star Wars.  Those who nerd out on it may not be cool, but they're given a pass by society because their nerdly obsession is something universally accepted as cool.

3. Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter Nerds:  Basically the same deal as #2, but since both are rooted in books, and both classes of nerd are likely to spend a lot of their lives telling people that the books are so much  better than the movies, they lose some coolness points for constantly defending their obsession.

4. Social Media Whores:  This category's nerd status is definitely debatable.  For one thing, everybody these days uses social media semi-obsessively, and we're all shameless narcissists in the end.  But since this is an activity which can consume enough time to divert a person from real life, I argue it as a nerdly occupation.  If you post on Facebook more than 15 times a day, this is you.  If you post on more than 5 social networks a day, this is you.  If you have posted pictures of yourself in the mirror or holding the phone above your head to anywhere but your profile pic, this is you.  The reason that they are so high on the list, however, is that most of the time, these people do actually have friends IRL, and much of their activity does relate to occurrences in reality.

5. Video Gamers:  This category applies to fans of the first person shooter, action, and sports genres of video games, and stuff like Guitar Hero.  There are a great deal of these people, and they spend a great deal of time and money on these games.  But they are slightly cooler than my other category concerning video games, becasue the games these nerds play require dexterity and skill, as well as patience.

6. Comic Book/Baseball Card Nerds: Comic books are a somewhat antiquated, but still interesting and monetarily valuable trade.  Plus they have a strong foothold in popular culture these days with the success of the Marvel and Batman films.  At their best, Comics are a unique artistic medium, but at their worst, they are the source of some of the weakest writing and flimsiest ideas of all imaginative fiction.  And baseball Cards, while boring in themselves, are again, rooted in reality, therefore not that uncool.  But anyone who nerds out on that kind of stuff to a truly nerdy degree, is definitely not cool.

7. RPG Nerds:  As opposed to other genres of video games, RPG's really just require patience.  I will no doubt incur some nerd-rage on this point, but I let it stand.  If you're willing to fight enough pigs in the forest for 12 exp/pig, you will eventually get strong enough to master that next dungeon.  This category includes World of Warcraft and other MMORPG nerds.  Plus this category could arguably include D&D nerds, as it's a non-computer version of the same activity, but I place them in a different category, which will follow.

8. Star Trek Nerds:  Star Trek is just not generally regarded as cool.  Though I happen to think STNG is rad, I will admit that it is the general tendency of the Star Trek franchise to favor below average actors and cheesy production values.  This was true until J.J. Abrams hit the scene, but overall, I think it still holds.  Any class of nerds willing to wear those mauve spandex Starfleet uniforms deserves a place at #8.

9. General Sci-Fi/Fantasy Nerds:  Any nerd whose primary sci-fi/fantasy obsession does not fall into one of the aforementioned categories is generally of a lower class of nerd.  Anyone who thinks Star Wars was cool, but Babylon 5 or Dr. Who was really where it was at is a very uncool nerd indeed.  Anyone who reads those 3 inch thick paperbacks with pretty, realistic-looking paintings on the front (Game of Thrones is the only exception), where maidens talk to their cats, is a low class of nerd.  Anyone who wants to read through 155 pages of exposition about the genealogy of dragons or the structure of society in Beelegeuse is super-not-cool.

10.  Internet Nerds:  These are the people that spend all their lives on message boards, trolling and panning other people's innocent queries.  If you have ever gone off on someone in an online message board or chatroom or blog, telling them what a stupid n00b they are, this is you.  There is some crossover with social media whores here, but I think these trolls deserve their own low, low echelon of nerdliness.

11. Anime Nerds:  These people are even less cool, however.  Anyone that genuinely believes that there is more than a small, small handful of good anime movies (my votes all go to the works of Haiyo Miazaki), and that any of the long-running anime series are really worth watching (Cowboy Bebop is enough for me) is a very uncool nerd.  The sad truth is, 99% of anime is just softcore hentai (look it up if you don't know what it is), and anyone that proclaims to watch it because it's good is a liar and a nerdly, nerdish, nerd.

12.  Card Game/Hobby/Action Figure Nerds:  Now we're really getting to the bottom of the barrel.  Anyone who plays Magic: The Gathering, D&D or any non-computer RPG/TBS game is a whiny, pimply, nose-picking nerd.  If you have spent more than a single hour in a hobby/game store in your life, this could be you.  If you are on a first name basis with the AM shift cashier, this is definitely you.  If you play more than one card-based strategy game, this is so you.  And if you build model ANYTHINGS and you are not also an architect/designer or a child, you are one of the lowest forms of nerd.  Chances are you don't shower much, and your favorite food comes in a pressurized spray can. 

13. LARPers:  LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing.  It's RPG nerds cross bred with hobby nerds.  Unimaginably awful.  If you have ever worn a medeival-style tunic and a scabbard on a day that wasn't Haloween or a LOTR premier, this is you.  If part of you, deep down inside, believes you really might have the power to cast magic spells, you are a dirty, friendless nerd.  I also put all Wiccans/Witches/Pagans in this category.  It's fantasy roleplay, not a religion, and mainly an excuse to dress up like RenFest is every day.

14.  Train Nerds:  And now, we reach the very lowest form of nerd.  If you have more than one gauge of train set in your basement, and you have turned it on since the age of 7, you are the lowest form of nerd there is.  LARPers get to point and laugh at you for being such a simpering dweeb.  Tech nerds are so much cooler than you, they literally don't know you exist.  Put on your blue and white striped engineer hat and go die in silent obscurity.

You Gotta Fight... For Your Right...

[The following article was written by me and is re-published from http://bullseye-bullying.blogspot.com]

Growing up, I was a tender, sensitive child. Like many sensitive children, I was a target for bullies from an early age. It began when I joined a local soccer team and quickly found out that I wasn't very good at sports. The entire team used to gang up on me, including the middle-aged coach, who led the charge by responding to my inadequacy not with advice or encouragement, but with ridicule.

Pushed by my parents (who had only the best of intentions) to continue playing sports, I had similar experiences in tee-ball and basketball. By the time all the school children in my town were starting to get to know one another, I had a reputation.

Middle school was the worst. I had a handful of friends, and we were all outcasts, bullied to some extent by overlapping groups. There was one person in particular, who shall of course remain nameless, who singled me out from the very moment our eyes first met. We had apparently attended the same kindergarten glass, though I didn't recall that at the time, and he had remembered me all through grade school, even though we went to different schools. I recall the event as clearly as if it was yesterday, which begs the question if it really happened this way, or if this is a dramatized/traumatized memory:

I walked into 6^th grade English class, and this person was already sitting at a table. As I looked around for a seat, he said to me, in the most threatening tone he could manage, “Hey Pete. You don't remember me, but I remember you.” I made a face at him, and he immediately mocked me to his gaggle of goons.

From there until 8^th grade he made my life a living hell; trotting out many of the classic bullying moves in the process: kicking me into my locker, upsetting my lunch tray, mocking me in front of the whole school, etc.

When I went to high school I was still reeling from these experiences, and I was elated when I found out that the person in question had opted to attend a private high school, and I would never see him again. But high school held it's own challenges, less physical and immediate, perhaps, but no less condemning.

My response was to draw further inward. I got interested in Punk Rock and Heavy Metal, and through music found an identity that gave me enough confidence to get by until graduation. I learned to own my outsider status, to act as if it was my decision, not theirs. In the end, I became enough of a curiosity that by the time senior year came, I was friendly and conversational with everyone in my graduating class.

And when I went to college and I had the same experience so many of us have. All that class-warfare, the freaks and geeks vs. jocks and cheerleaders, that all melted away and suddenly we were just people. I never heard from most of my fellow graduates again, but the ones I have, even those that were bullies to me at one time or another, have met me as equals.

But sadly, my experiences left a lasting mark on me. By becoming so wrapped up in my outsider status, I found it difficult to become fully engaged with people who didn't share it. I may have owned it this time, but the feeling of standing outside looking in persisted. Years of being told I was insufficient had caused me to lack confidence at a deep level, and this showed up in the way I failed to apply myself to constructive activities, and I spent most of college in a marijuana-induced sleepwalk, wearing a girl-proof shell of fat and poor hygiene. I squeaked out of college in just under seven years with a degree in Philosophy, boasting a 2.1 GPA.

I moved into adult life, and immediately drowned in a sea of mediocrity. I was Salieri, constantly taunted by the ease with which Mozart outdid my most solemn efforts.

It wasn't until I met my now-wife that things really started to change for me. We met on E-Harmony; the perfect meat-market for those lacking confidence. Not that I am embarrassed about the way we met (quite the opposite), we were both at a point where we were looking for something serious, and we didn't want to waste precious years messing around with anything less. Through the process of our courtship, I taught myself the most important lesson I’ve ever learned: Fake It 'Til You Make It.

Confidence is a behavior pattern, a habit like any other. It can be adopted artificially, but quickly becomes natural with practice. And this is what all those bullies knew that I didn't.

The common wisdom is that bullies act the way they do because they are protecting themselves from their own lack of confidence by projecting their weakness onto others. I generally agree with this, and I think most sane, reasonable adults more or less agree as well. Bullies are, in a childish way, faking confidence, and eventually it becomes natural. By then, though, the habit has become hard to break; they know no other way of demonstrating confidence, so they keep on putting others down, sometimes well into adulthood. But I’d be willing to bet that nine out of ten bullies started out as a child that was hurting in some way.

All this brings me to several conclusions:

We, as adults, should not punish bullies for their activities in any extreme way. Who are we to punish a child for mistakenly acting out on their inner pain? Not only that, but punishment of the top-down sort has never been shown to be an effective means of modifying behavior. It may force compliance in the short term, but it breeds discontent with authority in the long term. I learned, as many victims do, that “telling” only makes the bullying worse. I’ve had bullies be forced to say they were sorry to me before. Their false apologies hurt more than their sincere blows. And no matter how hard parents and teachers work to make it safe for victims to come forward, the act of “telling” will always be bad, even in the absence of retribution. Running for help is a habit, and its one we'd do well to discourage in our children.

All adults know there is no shame I asking for help when we really need it, but in the adult world that help is most often in a collaborative setting. It's right for me to ask for help if I have a difficult and important work project that I won't be able to finish on my own. But asking to be rescued is something different entirely. Encouraging children to do that is the same as saying “If you fall off the horse, don't get back on, just wait for mommy to come and pick you up.” Encouraging kids to beg for rescue will breed weakness in adults, and like it or not, there are always, always bullies in life, even when we're grown up. They may not be trying to hurt our feelings, they may not have even been bullies as children, but there are always those who seek to take what we have, or to take credit for our good deeds, or who believe they are in some way better than us and deserve more. Nations bully each other. And running to the UN doesn't seem to prevent much conflict, does it?

As an adult there is often no one to run to, so to teach that habit – even if it's effective at the child level – is to do a disservice to future generations. The appropriate way to meet strength is with strength, and not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up. If we want to put an end to bullying, we have to educate victims on the nature of confidence at an early age. We should be teaching them to find their power any way they can; be it the intellectual route of nerds who eventually employ their bullies, the independence of freaks who go on to live fascinating lives, or sheer power in numbers. Kids could support each other by forming an anti-bully club, so if a bully wanted to take on one of them, he'd have to take on all of them. The only way to stop a bully is to tell them you won't stand for it. There's no reward for the bully if you refuse to take their taunts lying down. If you take a few knocks in the process, I think it's worth it. Taking punches builds character. Chances are a childhood bully won't murder you. I know there are some who encourage victims to kill themselves, but if the victims learn early to stand up to this kind of treatment, to find their strength and fight for their right to be who they are, to say to that bullies face, “Screw you, I have a right to be whoever I want, and I’m not going to let you take your self-hatred out on me!” I think we could actually see change.

I don't have any children, so perhaps I am speaking in ignorance. Maybe I will one day be so consumed by protective instincts that I will change my mind. But the sad truth is that in a world where people and nations compete for limited resources, strength is the only survival strategy. Birds don't learn to fly by being coddled in the nest, they learn to fly by being rudely shoved out, sometimes hitting the ground. Fish don't learn to swim by holding close to their mother, they learn by being abandoned and hatching to find a hungry eel waiting for them. And humans don't learn to stand up for themselves by asking their parents and teachers to do it for them. I dearly hope that when my child comes to me saying they've been shoved around by some bully, I still have the wisdom to tell them, “Next time, you shove back.”

Where Were We?

Ahem.
So I've moved the site, with all it's attending content, to blogger.com.
After a week of technical difficulties that prevented me from blogging, and several months of display issues that made the site clunky and unprofessional, I've decided that blog.com is behind the times.
Blogger has an app for my Galaxy Note 2, and I can blog from my phone easily rather than using the maladjusted browser app to battle my way through a post on blog.com.  It can also add location info and Google+ friends to each post.
Blogger also has superior integration with social media.  I recently joined Google+ (Along with a few other networks), and all the gizmos are built right in, without the need for any configuration from me.
The subscribe function is also far superior, it creates a feedburner account automatically, rather than you having to bounce from site to site copy/pasting info from field to field.
So for these reasons, all future posts can be found here.  Not that any of you ever types in my URL in the first place, I know the Facebook link is the only thing that gets you here.  And that's fine.
I've already spent as much time as I feel is prudent with blogging issues today, so I will pick up where I left off tomorrow, with my ruminations on With The Beatles.

I Loathe L.A.

[Repost From Old Site]
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin (He's this old guy who was smarter than you.)
In Los Angeles, we live in a nanny state.  A place whose government generally makes decisions based on what they perceive to be the "common good" of their citizens.  This well-intentioned pattern has continued nearly unmarred for longer than I have been alive.  And as a result, Los Angeles is among the worst places to live in any first-world country on the planet.  Short of famine, war and plague, there's not a whole lot you could do to make this place worse.
The streets are falling apart.  Half of the buildings are too.  The water tastes like rusty pennies.  The ocean is filled with trash.  Some neighborhoods are so dangerous that you can literally catch a stray bullet just driving past them.  The streets are so overcome with homeless that you don't even notice them anymore, their world is like like a shadow-dimension occupying the same physical space as ours, but never intersecting. According to 2009 estimates, nearly 20% of the population of Los Angeles County is made up of illegal immigrants.  Violent crime is so ubiquitous that a former LAPD officer can go on a 10 day rampage leaving four people dead and hundres more scared out of their minds, and the day it's over, his story is already eclipsed by the next rash of killings.  Traffic is so bad that it can take upwards of two hours to drive less than ten miles, and the air is so polluted as a result of this that some days it's against the rules to light a fire in your fireplace.  This city has been rotting from the inside for so long it doesn't even make sense.
I am reminded of Plato's metaphor of the cave, where people are born into bondage and are able only to see shadows cast by unseen puppet masters, while outside the cave lies the world you and I know.  The people of the cave believe those shadows to be the world entire.  Los Angeles has become so immersed in its own filth, it seems to have forgotten that it's supposed to be a city, a community, a place where people can go to make their living.
I say all that, only so I can say this:
For some reason, the things this city spends it's energy on are things like banning plastic bags from grocery stores, outlawing soda in schools and making it illegal to smoke cigarettes in your car.  There are commercials on local TV telling me to go vegan.  Sure, sure, the fiscal state of the city is a major issue in the upcoming election.  Sure, corruption is an issue.  But those things are and always will be jammed up by political gridlock.  The plastic bag, soda and smoking bans are the type of thing this city achieves. These are the things people agree on.  Nobody can agree that we need better infrastructure, or that we need double the amount of highways that we have, or that we need some useful way to help the homeless help themselves.  Nobody agrees on that stuff, so nothing changes.
If this were Sim City, I'd delete this game and start a new one.
P.S.- To all the wonderful people I have met here, I hope you aren't mad that I just shit all over your city.  Problems and all, Los Angeles is, at some level, a place like any other, filled with all kinds of people, good and bad.  And if you've lived here long, I think you'd be hard pressed to disagree with what I've said.

Why I Love Cops

[Repost From Old Site]
Back when I was a teenager, I thought I hated cops.  I had absolutely no real-world basis for this opinion, it's just that most people hated cops.  You tend to hear mostly bad things about cops, so it's easy to dislike them.  But I wasn't much of a troublemaker in those days, I was a straight-edge punk who spent most of his time writing.  I never really had any run-ins with the law.
In college, I was even more certain that I hated cops.  I was an advanced troublemaker at that time, and most of the things I did for fun were frowned on by the law.  I definitely had one rather dramatic run-in with the law, one that ended up with me in cuffs for the first and only time in my life.  The cops, while not particularly brutal, were less than cordial, to be sure, and definitely had difficulty seeing things form my perspective.
But in recent years I've put all those activities behind me, and in retrospect, I thank my lucky stars for that run in with the cops, because it diverted me from a path whose ending I can surmise would be much less fulfilling than the one I currently walk.  And in further retrospect, when I reflect on the type of people I associated with in college, I realize that I disliked most of them.  I wasn't a born criminal, like so many I knew in those days.  I was born into privilege, by worldly standards, and had much to be thankful for throughout my life.  My forays into trouble making were at most, a dalliance, a brief tarry on my way to a normal life.  Many with whom I associated in my tarnished past had a lot less to be thankful for, and had decided to take it out on the world.  I was never like that.  At worst, I rationalized a long string of selfish, short-sighted choices.
But some people - people I've met - are born scum.  It's possible to forgive some of their low-life activities, because, as I said, they have little to be thankful for.  But I am a person who believes in being responsible for one's own choices and actions, and in the final analysis, most scummy people choose to be scum and refuse to rise above it, even when given the opportunity.  Some people make only selfish, short sighted choices.  Some people never become aware of the consequences of their actions.  Some people take and refuse to give.  Some people believe that they have the right to use violence for personal gain. Some people, at a deep level, choose to hate the world, and therefore have nothing to lose.  And for these people, crime is a habit, an occupation, a lifestyle.
Not every criminal is a homicidal maniac, but the vast majority of them are some level of scum.  The vast majority of them are selfish, short-sighted people.  Even when I was acting like one of them, I knew they were bad news.  The negativity you feel in the presence of bad people is a tangible thing.  It's no wonder we call them scum; it's almost as if you can smell it on them, as if you can feel it on your skin when you're around them, as if they leave a trail of it wherever they go.
The police, while flawed in their own right, are society's only line of defense against these people.  In my personal opinion 90% of what is wrong with law enforcement is merely a side effect of high dosage scum exposure.  The scum leaves it's mark on many well-intentioned cops.  The most level headed of them still emerge with a grim view of human nature, and who could blame them?  I was surrounded by scummy people for a few years, and it nearly robbed me of my innate positive outlook on life.  Being friends  with scum has damaged me.  Can you imagine being their enemy?
One of the biggest problems with cops is that they treat everybody like they're a criminal.  If you were knee-deep in the filth of humanity day in and day out, you might make such snap judgements just as easily.  But in a cop's position, safety is an issue as well.  Not only is it easy to assume that a given person is scum because that's all you see, there's also the fact that if you do give someone the benefit of the doubt and you're wrong...  it could mean your life.  It's not safe for a cop to assume that people are just people.  It's not safe for them to look at me and see the nerdy, jovial kid who just smoked pot one too many times; they're forced to look at me and see a violent, hardened drug dealer who hides behind a harmless facade.
So I raise my glass to any decent cop who has managed to wade daily into human cesspools and return with even a glimmer of positivity in their eye.  I couldn't do it.  For those who are ruined by the job, who end up hating humanity, or who become so immersed in the scum that they turn out scummy themselves, I have only sympathy.  It's not their fault.  Few, precious few, who elect law enforcement as a career do it because of some inferiority complex, or a propensity for violence.  Few walk into that world with malicious intent.  The rest are just victims of the worst job on the planet.  They can hate me all they want, they can judge me unfairly, they can puff out their chests and act like they're better than me... so long as they keep me alive when I accidentally stumble into Inglewood in the middle of the L.A. night, or when I cross the river in St. Louis, or if I wander south of Prospect Park in Brooklyn.  Just keep me alive, and I'll always give the cops the benefit if the doubt.

The Body is a Temple

I ve yet to figure out how I can make him jump. Maybe if I start pumping iron...

[Repost from Old Site]
I am the proud owner of a brand new tattoo (it's still healing), thanks to my kind and gracious friend Julie and her unique wedding gift to my wife and I, and as a result I've had tattoos on the brain for the last couple weeks.
Those of you who have tattoos know that a) it's addictive, and b) when you have a new one, you spend a lot of time checking it out.  So given these facts, it's understandable that I've been dwelling on the idea of tattoos for a while.
I have two very patient, loving and open minded parents who accept me for who I am.  Even so, I know they weren't exactly thrilled when I got my first one, and I'm sure they're not elated that I've gotten another.  If they were to accept the fact that I plan to get several more as well, I'm sure they would be even less ecstatic.  But they take it in stride, because they know me.  They know what kind of man I am, and so long as I'm not getting a swastika on my chest or something stupid like a face tattoo, I'm sure they'll continue to bite their lips and sigh.  Which is a hell of a lot better than some people get.
There are a good many people out there who genuinely believe that getting a tattoo is a sin, and might send you straight to hell.  The reasons for this are varied, I'm sure, but the one we're all most familiar with is the old adage that "The Body is a Temple",  and therefore a tattoo is somehow a desecration of that temple.
My opinion on this is as follows: Who among us has been to a temple that is not decorated with the symbols and iconography that express the faith the temple was built to celebrate?  I, for one, am used to seeing stained glass windows, classic Orthodox icons, crucifixes, elaborate candelabras and censers in the temples I visit.  In both the Catholic and Orthodox Christian traditions (of which I am a part-time participant of both), it is traditional to have churches filled with such icons, to serve as points of reflection for one's faith.  If icons and crucifixes were tattoos, my churches would be as covered as a Yakuza boss.

So according to what I believe to be temple protocol, I choose to tastefully adorn my body with symbols that celebrate who I am and what I believe in.  And yes, Super Mario falls easily into that category.  To any who have known me through the years of my exile, it's clear that Mario (and my beautiful wife's accompanying tattoo of Yoshi) are elegant symbols that will always remind us of this time in our life, when we were newlyweds, separated from our families by the vicissitudes of circumstance, left to entertain ourselves in a lonely world where we had no firm purchase of friend or family.  And, c'mon... Mario is cool.  It's an enduring icon of the culture of 80's kids.  One my children will recognize as easily as I recognized Elvis before I ever knew a thing about him.  And that counts for something.
I realize that this article comes off as somewhat defensive, so let me dispel any rumors that I am a) having second thoughts, or b) bearing the brunt of someone's disapproval.  Quite simply, this is just another example of the purpose of this blog.  I, like many, often find myself occupying the quieter moments of my life having imaginary arguments with imaginary aggressors, as a way of clarifying my own thoughts and opinions.  The purpose of this blog is to take those types of internal musings, those conversations with myself, and put them to good use.  I'm trying to be a serious writer.  This is the warm up stretch before the marathon I'm about to run with my first novel.  So you can keep your little armchair diagnosis of hidden regrets!
And if you believe in something to the point where it defines you as a person, even if only in one chapter of your life, don't be afraid to decorate your temple with a symbol that will celebrate who you are.

Random Album Review: Quality Control by Jurassic 5

[Repost From Old Site]
I'm a white guy from the burbs. I was very unpopular throughout most of my schooling. Ergo, I am not as predisposed as many to identify with Hip-Hop as a musical genre. A lot of kids from my time and place were; jocks, mostly. But us rejects found ourselves identifying with stuff like punk, metal and limp-wristed indie rock.
Jurassic 5 is the group that turned it all around for me. This is the first Rap/Hip-Hop album that I ever truly fell in love with, and to this day it's one of the very few that I can actually sing along with.
The thing that initially attracted me to this band was the overall positive outlook of the lyrics, and the ensuing feeling of confidence-not cockiness-that the group projects.
Male bravado is an essential ingredient in a lot of Rap, but too often it takes the form of selfishness, pride and avarice. Though even this attitude can have a lot to offer, I found myself immediately in love with J5's swagger, because they never sound like they think they're better than you (except perhaps at basketball, see "Game") I heard "The Influence" on a compilation disc that came with an issue of some free music magazine I picked up at a record store (remember those?). The innovative DJ work of Nu Mark and Cut Chemist immediately set this song apart from the majority of Rap I had heard; the driving double kick drums and acapella loop give it an entirely different feel, not to mention the virtuoso ensemble rapping of the 4 singers. I had never heard anything like it, so I picked up the album.
"Quality Control" is overflowing with unconventional Hip-Hop that turns the norms of the genre upside down. Instead of greed and violence, one finds gratitude and humility ("Great Expectations"), woe for the urban male growing up under the influence of damaged idols ("Lausd") and unashamed, child-like fun (the brilliant DJ work on album-closer "Swing Set").
The six musicians of J5 (yep, six, not five) each have a unique point of view to contribute, and this, their first major label release, puts it all into sharp, harmonious focus.
A few years after hearing this album for the first time, I had the pleasure of seeing J5 live. It was the only Rap show I've ever been to (unless you count Ice Cube's spot on the inaugural Family Values Tour) and it was a unique experience that I will never forget. From the stunning performances of the songs I knew, to Nu Mark's incredible school desk beat-making set (literally banging out beats on a school desk borrowed from the local high school) to the avant-garde-ish performance the rappers gave using something that looked like a long spinning pool noodle (you know, the ones you used to float on as a kid?), the show was filled with memorable experiences.
And so is the album "Quality Control"