“sound like a plan to me, lil mama”

CnP HQ is all aflutter cuz our mans and nem emailed an mp3 of Fave R&B prodigy/future baby-dad? Ne-Yo singing nasty-nasty nastiness over 50 Cent’s “Get in My Car,” during which Young details exactly what goes down when you get with him. WHUH. I know my feelings on Ne-Yo may affect my reaction to the song, but there’s some tension and steamy hotness on there not alluded to on squeaky-clean “Mr. America” eem-offerings like “Stay” (a song he wrote not about a girl, but about HIS LOVE FOR SONGWRITING) and “that breakup song about hearing too many sad songs on the radio whose title currently escapes me, and whose weird karaoke video is a big OTT cocaine metaphor (why else is the girlfriend arrested?).” Both of which are songs I love, but this is a whole other dirty facet to dude that we’ll hopefully hear more of IN THE NEAR FUTURE. Also, pay attention to Ne-Yo’s fashion, his style is burgeoning, even whilst casually lamping he looks crispy. Guess Def Jam clothing allowance helps, but.
Check blog LOST for Papi Babylon’s rundown on Weird Beard America. Full disclosure: I used to be really into beards on dudes, I thought they looked professorial, and obviously “professor” is the most attractive occupation. But then the fake hippies went and fucked it up. One thing that would revitalize my interest: Ne-Yo, bearded, giving a lecture.
Berlin: the seventh borough. I love reading interviews with Kevin, she is so focused and I admire her specificity and forethought, as an artist and a human. However, this ende part got me steamed:
Pitchfork: I feel like it’s difficult for women who are smart to fall in love without realizing that they have to give up a little bit of their sense of humor, or ignore the irony of it. Maybe your intelligence almost gets in the way. I’m thinking of your line, in “Suspended In Love”, where you say, “I even acted like a girl.”
Blechdom: That’s what I mean. “I wore makeup one day.” “And I wore a dress one day. I was submissive one day.” It’s more like saying, “I was submissive, but not to you. You missed it. Your one chance to see maybe what it would have been like in an old-fashioned world.” I don’t know.
Pitchfork: Do you find those things– being in love, being smart, being a girl– incompatible?
Blechdom: I think…yeah, it’s hard. Fuck it. It’s hard.
I am wicked bummed on that shit: I am very frustrated by the limitations we women self-impose. Sex and femininity and feminism are all topics the third-wave never dealt with properly, never reconciled (tho they should be reconciled on an individual basis, to be sure) but saying you can’t be in love, smart, and “girly” all at once is a way of setting barriers for oneself, and a way of letting yr boyf off the hook for… what, being threatened by smart women? Not giving you the space to flourish? I don’t know. I do think it’s dangerous to seperate love/relationships from humor, feminism from femmeness, and especially “girlishness” from intelligence! Or to further the idea that cool, smart women have to “shrink to fit” (phrase courtesy Al Burian) the bounds of our relationships–that we do not deserve relationships in which we can grow and be our best, fullest, smartest most ambitious selves… or that we have to settle. Those ideas foster reactions like Maureen Dowd’s, the rigid and WRONG notion that intelligent women cannot live a multiplicity of identities–which, I think, drives some women away from feminism.
I am going to email Kevin and ask her what she meant.
Finally, I will now die happy: A Gabe, a Ghost, a Sea Lion.