That Crap Danny Listens To

What was the number one song on your birthday? You can find out here. Mine was "Let's Go Crazy" by Prince & the Revolution from the motion picture soundtrack to the movie Purple Rain. Do I remember this? Of course not.


"Prince is lame," cried the world when I was growing up and I believed it. Perhaps he was everywhere in 1984, but by the early '90s when my memory began he was nowhere to be found. I didn't consciously listen to a Prince song again until freshman year in college.

Now I listen to a Prince song nearly every day.

"Prince is lame?" But we were perfect together. As an infant did I subconsciously absorb the then ubiquitous Purple Rain soundtrack over FM radio, only to have it repressed during my childhood?

Innocent unconscious > repression > rediscovery > guilty pleasure > unrepentant conscious celebration.

A few years later I discovered that Jonathem Lethem's Tourettic private eye, Lionel Essrog, was a kindred spirit. He hears "Kiss" on the radio for the first time:

... twitching and throbbing within obsessively delineated bounds, alternately silent and plosive. It so pulsed with Tourettic energies that I could surrender to its tormented, squeaky beat and let my syndrome live outside my brain for once, live in the air instead.
"Turn that shit down," Minna said.
"I like it," I said.
"That's that crap Danny listens to," said Minna. Danny was code for too black.

Too black but too powerful to be ignored and Lionel tracks the record down. His reaction to what he finds makes perfect sense to me:

Prince's music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger. When I listened to him I was exempt from my symptoms. So I began collecting his records, especially those elaborated and frenetic remixes tucked away on the CD singles. The way he worried forty-five minutes of variations out of a lone musical or verbal phrase is, as far as I know, the nearest thing in art to my condition.

Faced with the absurdity of rational life in the modern world? Let's go crazy indeed. Zizek must have had Prince in mind when he advised us to enjoy our symptoms. Simultaneously unrepentant and devout, there is no line between prayer and orgasm. Horror movie screams live side by side with trite romantic couplets; wanton dominatrices masturbate in public, luring unsuspecting innocents back to their castle for a night of mind blowing pleasure; the drives and desires are looped ad infinitum, endless variations on endless themes.

A throbbing, twitching world, exulting in exhaustive repetition. Nothing is complicated.

One week later, "I Just Called to Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder was number one ...

What the end could look like -

25 Years of Tom Cruise being a Celebrity!!!

Nauseous, disgusted, Dakota Fanninged, impressed. These are all emotions I felt while watching Oprah Winfrey's Tom Cruise Ass-Kiss-A-Thon called "25 years of Tom Cruise". Watching past cast-mates and collaborators like Dustin Hoffman (who was actually more retarded in the shout out than he was in Rain Man) to Steven Speilberg to oh so creepy and 10 going on 75 Dakota Fanning sharing and telling glorious, flowery memories of their days spent working with Mr. Cruise deeply affected me. I was nauseous because it was disgusting, I was then Fanninged by Dakota Fanning and overall I was impressed that Oprah Winfrey would take time out of her busy schedule of giving things away to audience members to honor such an American Icon and level 4 Scientologist such as Tom Cruise. Not only did Mr. Cruise do a KILLER Jack Nicholson impression... he didn't jump on any couches! Cruise just sort of sat there with his chiseled features, smiling and possibly levitating audience members off-camera with his mind, while other celebrities talked about how "great" and "awesome" he is and was and would be to work with. I retract my notion that Oprah stopped doing what she does five days a week at Harpo Studios, each audience member received a Tom Cruise DVD box set (sick!) and a special edition of "Risky Business" (heyooo!). I can't wait till the 50th anniversary.