They’re like, “Say your name, and your power animal, and what you like to do,” and when it gets around to me I say, “My name is Deniz. I am a powerful animal, and I enjoy making statements.”

Later, she decorates the woman with sliced strawberries and whipped cream and icings of many colors while she is being fucked on a table.

[please note that the woman's restriction of movement is entirely voluntary and consensual as she attests to (after the icing has been washed from her) while sitting on a couch with a towel covering the naughty bits of her body, her face red with either excitement or shame or slapping, which is another thing that she likes, I assure you]

I can never be sure if the reason why I think Ipecac Neat is far and away the best P.O.S. album is because it’s actually better than everything he put out after it, or if it’s because it was one of the first hip-hop albums I ever liked, because I listened to it over and over and over and over in high school memorizing every word. This is the problem with all criticism: your response to every record you hear is conditioned by your life’s experience of music, by what you’ve heard and when and how many times and how you felt about it, and also by what you haven’t heard. So throughout this review let’s keep in mind that I got into rap through Rhymesayers and enjoy it now primarily through anticon., and that when P.O.S. makes references to punk rock I get them but when he makes references to rappers I generally don’t.

Things that were bad about Audition that are also bad about Never Better:

-almost all instances of singing
-songs about how no one will ever be like him (now in third person!)

Exciting new bad thing about Never Better:

-people chanting “yeah” in the background

Things that are good about Never Better:

-frequently employs heavy drums and thick bass
-frequently employs fast momentum-pushing drumrolls
-stef can still rap pretty dang good

What the fuck awesome:

-guest vocals by jason shevchuk

Problems that I have with this record which point to larger issues regarding mediocrity and stasis or maybe regarding growing out of certain styles of music or conversely getting so into old records that you don’t have space for new ones:

-i feel doomtree-fatigued, like i’ve heard a dozen records with all these people rapping on them, and rapping about the same things. where is the new? where is that which will make me feel like i’m listening to something that i haven’t heard before? where, i ask you, is attridge’s inventiveness?

I mean the record is solid. P.O.S. can rap like a motherfucker, and he doesn’t give a fuck what you think of him, and if he can be a little sentimental at times and a little over-pop-referential at others, at least he disses Obamarama in one song and sings a Fugazi lyric in another. So maybe the reason why I don’t feel it like I felt Ipecac is a problem with me, and not with the album. Maybe real criticism is impossible and we’re all just hanging out rationalizing our subjective emotional responses. Whatever. I hung out with Stef a couple weeks ago, I beat him at Super Smash Brothers, he was nice and funny and he told me that he really, really likes making rap records. So if he likes it and a lot of you guys like it, then what do one douchebag’s headphone-wearing musings on mediocrity and stasis matter?

“You must never let them know that you care or they will kill you.”

Dawkins [with smart-sounding British accent]: “Hitchens.”
Harris [pointing at Hitchens' podium]: “Hitchens.”
Hitchens [passed out drunk on his podium]: gurgle, snore

“I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.”

Chapter 1: All faith or dogma of any kind is fundamentally dangerous and an impediment to societal progress.

Chapter 2: Beliefs are assertions about the way the world is and therefore must shape the actions of their believers in drastic and potentially negative ways, and so they must be subject to evidence and, if necessary, modification in the light of that evidence.

Chapter 3: The positive things done by religious people throughout history are small exceptions in a long history overflowing with unimaginable brutality and violence.

Chapter 4: Holy fuck, Muslims are going to kill everybody unless we benevolent Westerners impose liberal dictatorships on them until they can get their heathen asses out of the 14th century.

Chapter 5: In the U.S. the infestation of religion at a government level results in the faith-based criminalization of things that are pleasurable and hurt nobody, like drugs; seriously, you guys, let’s legalize us up some drugs already.

Chapter 6: We must create an ethical system that is scientific and objective, based around the idea that all human suffering is bad, which ethical system leads us to the inarguable conclusion that torture is okay, and the fact that this conclusion makes you queasy is just too bad because what is a little nausea in the face of the OBJECTIVE SCIENCE of ethics?

Chapter 7: Eastern mysticism is a form of science which makes empirical assertions about consciousness.

Note how the book progresses from reasonable and incisive to alternatingly mundane and screamingly insane.

[this post is part 4 of a 156-part series, "The Twilight Zone"]

This episode sucked and I don’t want to write anything about it.

Two Songs by Uncle Slam:

“Weirdo Man”

Psycho ward
Is your home
You’re so weird
You’re so dumb
Momma’s boy
Daddy’s disgrace
Snivelling wimp
Psycho face

You’re so week
You’re a geek
You’re a creep
Stupid freak

You got a psycho face
You are a psycho case
You got a real weird plan
You are the weirdo man

WEIRDO MAN

“The Ugly Dude”

He was conceived just like the rest of us
But when it came down to birth
He had a face like a butt
And his parents thew up
He went to school and the kids were so cruel
They all would torture and tease
And point and laugh at the freak
Kick the ass of the geek
And as he grew so did the hatred inside
The time for action was now
The next one laughing would die

The next laughing was a beautiful girl
The would be victim of an ugly crime
The bitch did die

The blade was ripping, hacking, thrashing
Tearing flesh and bleeding nicely
Ugliness was in the air
Along with screams of pleasure and of pain
People ran to see the sound
Astonished at the sight they’d found
The ugly man was laying down
With fingers hanging from his mouth he laughed

Take a look at me now
I ain’t so funny no more
It ain’t no fun to be the ugly dude

“How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself!”