As we enter the fourth week of the Glorious Revolution, Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs is getting a little bit overzealous.

“If we all register and vote, we will have the first black president in the history of America,” Sean “Diddy” Combs told the crowd Tuesday at the Shrine Auditorium before chanting “Obama or Die” - a declarative remix of his neutral “Vote or Die” motto from the 2004 presidential election, when he attempted to boost the youth vote.

This, honestly, was always a risk.  In any nation’s transition from a regime defined by its power-hungry leader and reliance on torture into a democracy, you run the risk of radical factions attempting to divert the fragile process towards a second and allegedly more “legitimate” form of tyranny.  Should you find yourself confronted by the roving “Obama or Die” squads, here are a few tips for dealing with them:

• You can identify such squads by their captains, who will usually be found wearing thick fur coats and Timberland boots in the middle of summer.
• If you find yourself confronted by Puffy, just ask him about how he influenced Biggie Smalls’ seminal album Ready to Die.  The intervening 45 minutes of boasting should allow you time to sneak your family and valuables out of your home, prepare a meal for the drive and Google map directions to wherever you’d like to go.
• Given the successes of O-Town, Danity Kane, Da Band and Day26, any death squad Puffy sends out should fall apart due to infighting and general lack of talent within a few days.

Please note, 101st Fighting Keyboardists, that the official position of the Glorious Revolution is to denounce and reject all death squad related activity against nonsupporters of our leader.  For now.

Also, Gateway Pundit worries that the Inaugural Ball will turn into the BET Awards.  Well, I hate to break it to White America, but any time more than ten black people are in the same large space, it always turns into the BET Awards.  You can look forward to Oliver Willis receiving Best R&B Album of 2007 at Netroots Nation, by the way.

I’ll be finishing up moving out of my old apartment today, but I did want to leave you with my new favorite road trip game.  It’s called Phil Collins Ruined Genesis: The Game.

The rules:

You must be taking a trip by car longer of at least 90 minutes or longer.  You must listen to the radio the entire time. 

You must start scanning stations from the beginning of your trip.  If you find a song you’d like to listen to, you may at most listen through to the end of that song and the end of the next song, should you so desire.  After that, you must resume scanning.  If the song is followed by a commercial break, you must resume scanning.  If you hear a talk program you’d like to listen to, you may listen until either a topic change or a commercial break.

The game:

In order to free yourself from the scanning, you must (and most likely will) find a Genesis song some time during your travel.  If you hear one, you must immediately stop and listen through to the end of said song, and the end of the next one, because you just happened on a quality radio station.  After that, you’re freed of your Genesis-defined confines. 

Yeah, I hate road trips.

No, L’il Wayne will not resurrect the game.

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I reviewed some anti-choice songs on this week’s podcast, with clips and everything. You have rap, heavy metal, and of course, wretched pop.  Music snobbery mixed with reproductive rights—-I had a blast making it.  Except for the part where I actually had to comb through anti-choice music for clips.

No, really.  R. Kelly was acquitted. 

And make sure their rooms lock from the inside.

Image irrelevant to post, but too cute to ignore.  Hat tip.

I steamrolled through the latest issue of Bitch.  Lots of good stuff in there, and highly recommended.  As usual, I’m only driven to blog when I’ve got a complaint, but I want it to be clear that this is, in the grand scheme of things, a minor issue in a sea of Teh Shitness.  And I was really eager when I saw an article by Jason Webber about a subject near and dear to my heart—-the feminist anomaly of Prince, the man who managed on sheer talent to become a megastar while playing with gender boundaries, exalting female sexuality, and causing many straight men with masculinity issues anxiety because they couldn’t deny the awesome power of Prince’s music.  Webber’s thesis is that despite all this, Prince is a mess of contradictions, being the most feminist man in the music industry on one hand and then on the other indulging in some gross sexism. It’s a great thesis, because a) it’s true and b) it has the potential to be a touchstone for how feminist men in general resolve the tensions between wanting to be good people and the temptations to bolster their egos, sense of masculinity, and for some, sense of naughtiness by indulging sexism.  How well does Prince succeed?  Should we applaud him for dealing with these tensions in himself in such a public manner?  Is that tempered by the fact that he’s so idiosyncratic that his own struggles don’t really translate into something other men can relate to?

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Posted by Amanda Marcotte at 03:15 PM • (12) Comments