They just don’t seem to be minting any new rock stars these days. Quick, name a rocker under 60. (Subscriber #7, I’m sure you can, but come on, Ty Segall is a niche artist.) Jack White, maybe? He’s well-known enough, I guess, but I bet you he can still walk down the street without being mobbed by fans.
So, rock stars are fading away. But the metaphorical “rock star” is still everywhere. Post Malone’s mumbled hip-hop anthem “Rockstar” was at the top of the charts for weeks, Rockstar energy drink is in every corner store, Rockstar Games is the video game company, and every other job listing describes what they want in a “rock star” contributor.
What do we even mean by “rock star” in the post-rock era?
Post Malone obviously means excess and debauchery (and the scene has definitely gotten excessive and debauched—this profile of flavor-of-the-week rapper Lil Pump is horrifying and sad). Rockstar energy drink just means everything’s turned all the way up: loud music, bright graphics, assertively gross energy drink flavors, and way too much caffeine. Rockstar games… yeah, also excess, both in the games themselves and in the long hours it takes to produce them.
What do employers mean by rock star? Not getting drunk and trashing the conference room, but still someone whose skills and performance earn them leeway for misbehavior. And obviously, a dude. (How many of you thought about Meg White when I mentioned her ex-husband Jack? Aside from subscriber #7?)
I’m guessing that in a few years, we’ll think of that metaphor as yet another overlooked sign of something amiss in our culture. (Although not that overlooked, given the number of articles with titles like “You Shouldn’t Hire That Rock Star Candidate“).
Anyway, one of the new rock songs bouncing around is called Sawed-Off Shotgun. It’s about giving in to mental illness, addiction, and pointless violence. Good times. If it ever gets any radio play, I look forward to finding out whether they bleep the words “shotgun” and “oxycodone” the way they would in a hip-hop song.
Not Good
Hey, you know ICE? Here’s how they do warrants. It’s… not good.
Some supervisors even gave their officers pre-signed blank warrants — in effect, illegally handing them the authority to begin the deportation process.
Hey, you remember what happened after Baltimore police were acquitted in the death of Freddie Gray? Cops rapidly decided that rather than comply with rules against brutalizing the citizenry, they’d just quit doing their jobs. Results were … not good.
The department’s officers responded swiftly, by doing nothing. In Baltimore it came to be known as “the pullback”: a monthslong retreat from policing, a protest that was at once undeclared and unmistakably deliberate — encouraged, some top officials in the department at the time believe, by the local police union.
…
Batts admitted he was having trouble getting officers to do their job. “I talked to them again about character and what character means,” he told me and other reporters following a City Council hearing.
That’s the truly cruel thing about it. We actually do need law enforcement, and too many poor and minority communities suffer from a paradoxical combination of not enough law enforcement and too much policing.
Mainstream Republicans
Rob Bishop (R-UT) claims that a Green New Deal is tantamount to genocide.
Republican voters in Pennsylvania explain their fears: melanin and socialism.
Not Mainstream
A Seattle radio host claims that triplexes and zoning reform are a socialist conspiracy. (Oddly, socialists often oppose similar changes by claiming they’re part of a neoliberal developer conspiracy…)
Cultivating Joy
Library forced to close when a moose takes a lengthy nap near the door.
Fainting goats are always a good time.
This dog is not very good at agility, but he is a very good dog who brings joy to those who watch him wander off-piste to beg judges to pet him, then start lounging in the cozy tunnel obstacle.
The entire Instagram account Round.Boys is awesome but this almost globular little puffball of a puppy is so, so, so good.
Secretly Ironic 