Nas -- "N.Y. State of Mind" (1994)

I never sleep

'Cause sleep is the cousin of death

It's been quite a while since our last "Hip-Hop 101" lecture.  Did you think your professor was ill, had died, had gotten fired, or had run off with that hot French student who never wears a bra to class?

Never fear -- we're going to get through the class syllabus sooner or later.  (Cross my heart and hope to die!)

Nas (circa 1994)

New York City was the birthplace of rap music, but West Coast gangsta rappers like N.W.A., Dr. Dre, Tupac Shakur, and Snoop Dogg came to dominate the rap scene by the early 1990s.  But then a new generation of New York City MCs -- including the Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, and Nas -- burst on to the scene.

Nas -- his real name is Nasir Bin Olu Dara Jones -- was not quite 21 when his debut album, Illmatic, was released in 1994.  Some critics rank it as the best rap album of all time, and nearly all of them rank Nas very high on the list of the greatest MCs. 

Nas is a consummate storyteller who's not afraid to innovate and experiment.  (The narrators of Nas's songs include a fetus, a corpse, and a gun.)  His lyrics feature an extensive vocabulary and complex rhymes, but he never lets the fancy wordplay interfere with his flow. 

Nas often raps about life on the street -- his songs have an authenticity and nitty-grittiness that sets them apart from hip-hop poseurs.  (Some MCs seem to have learned everything they know about guns and drugs from the movies.  Nas's tracks often have a cinematic quality, but are more like documentary shot with a handheld camera than Scarface or New Jack City.)

I don't know if Nas is a fan of the Iliad, which describes Hypnos (who personifies sleep in Greek mythology) and Thanatos (who personifies death) as twin brothers.  I think Nas's description of sleep and death as cousins is more apt than Homer's description of them as twins -- sleep and death share certain characteristics, but are quite different.  (The Jewish Talmud says that sleep is 1/60th part of death -- more like cousins than twin brothers, in other words.)

Hypnos and Thanatos: "Sleep and His Half-
BrotherDeath," by J. W. Waterhouse (1974)

In "Enter Sandman," Metallica advises the little boy who is scared of the dark to "sleep with one eye open."  It is possible for humans -- especially children -- to sleep with one or both eyes open.  But if you do sleep with one eye open, you wouldn't see anything -- so it doesn't do you any good.

Nas probably isn't talking about sleep in the literal sense.  If the narrator of this song is caught off-guard by one of his many enemies -- that is, if he's "caught sleeping" -- his carelessness could result in his death.  

The CBS "eye"

Speaking of Jay-Z, he released a song a couple of years later that featured this line: "So I keep one eye open like C-B-S."

You get that, right?

2 or 3 lines believes in giving credit where credit is due, and I need to credit Rap Genius -- click here to read the Rap Genius commentary on "N.Y. State of Mind."

Here's "N.Y. State of Mind":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon:

Sir Douglas Quintet -- "At the Crossroads" (1969)

You can teach me lots of lessons

You can bring me lots of gold

But you just can't live in Texas

If you don't have lots of soul

It saddens me that Doug Sahm died of a heart attack in a Taos, New Mexico hotel room in 1999, when he was 58 years old.  And it troubles me that I had no idea that he had died until recently.  How could it have taken me almost 12 years to become aware of this?

Doug Sahm was the Texas equivalent of Oklahoma's Leon Russell.  Both were versatile and eclectic musicians who put out some great music of their own and who collaborated with a lot of great musicians.  Both have been favorites of mine for a very long time, and I feel a very personal connection to their music. 

Doug Sahm

Sahm was a child prodigy -- a pop-music Mozart who began performing at age six and released his first record when he was 11.  He was on stage with Hank Williams, Sr., in Austin, Texas, on December 19, 1952.  It was Williams's last performance -- he died in the back seat of a car on New Year's Eve.

The story goes that Sahm was offered a chance to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry, but that his mother said no -- she wanted him to finish junior high school.

As a teenager, Sahm joined a band that performed blues music, mostly at black R&B clubs in San Antonio.  He also got to know a number of Mexican-American musicians.

In 1964, Sahm assembled a band and persuaded record producer Huey P. Meaux (a/k/a/ "The Crazy Cajun") to record them.  Meaux named the band the "Sir Douglas Quintet," hoping to capitalize on the popularity of British invasion bands.

After moving to San Francisco, the band released an album titled Mendocino in 1969.  It included their two biggest singles, "She's About a Mover" (which had been a hit back in 1965) and "Mendocino." 

The Sir Douglas Quintet dressed the part of a British invasion band when they appeared on Shindig and Hullabaloo, but no one with half a brain would have been fooled.  For one thing, two of the band's members were Mexican-Americans.  For another, Sahm had an unmistakable Texas accent.  

Not only that, the Sir Douglas Quintet sounded nothing like a British band.  What did they sound like?  As the Allmusic website explains, they sounded like a little of everything:

[The Sir Douglas] Quintet mixed country, blues, jazz, R&B, Mexican conjunto/norteño music, Cajun dances, British Invasion rock & roll, garage rock, and even psychedelia into a heady stew that could only have come from Texas.

I went to college in Texas, but I never really appreciated it until I moved to Massachusetts to attend law school.  I then became an evangelist for all things Texan -- much to the amusement of my law-school friends, many of whom had never been west of the Hudson River.  You couldn't find decent Tex-Mex food within 500 miles of Harvard Square, but at least I could listen to Mendocino in my cold, spartan dorm room.

Bob Dylan and Doug Sahm

I had found Mendocino in a bargain bin at Grandpa's discount store in Joplin, Missouri, the summer before I started law school.  

Grandpa's is long gone -- it was the discount store in Joplin you went to if you couldn't afford to pay Walmart prices.  I have a vivid memory of getting three albums for a dollar at Grandpa's -- Mendocino, an album by a British group called Dr. K's Blues Band that I knew nothing about, and a Status Quo album that contained their hit, "Pictures of Matchstick Men."

Sahm moved back to Texas from San Francisco in 1971, and the original Sir Douglas Quintet disbanded shortly thereafter.  But Sahm continued to record and perform all kinds of music until his death.

Sahm's New York Times obituary called him "a patriarch of Texas rock and country music."  That's accurate, I suppose, but when I hear someone described as a "patriarch," I expect him to be an old geezer with a long white beard.  

That wasn't Doug Sahm.  He was the "Texas Tornado" -- the band he had formed after the Sir Douglas Quintet disbanded in the early 1970s was called the Texas Tornadoes -- and that nickname fit his energetic personality and frenetic performing style to a T.

Doug Sahm and his son Shawn

Writing shortly after his death, Margaret Moser of the Austin (TX) Chronicle captured the essence of Doug Sahm in an article titled "State Musician of Texas" -- which is a title he richly deserves:

When he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1968, Baron Wolman's photograph of Sahm wearing a cowboy hat and long hair with young Shawn Sahm on his knee single-handedly created the image of the cosmic cowboy for the nation and the world. It's almost laughably quaint to explain today why the cowboy hat and long hair were such an anomaly back then, but dang if Doug Sahm, then based in San Francisco, didn't make the dread redneck look cool. The Byrds and Burrito Brothers could wear all the satin Nudie shirts they wanted; Sahm and company were the real item. The cowboy hat and long hair became his lifelong look, uniquely Texas, uniquely Doug.

He wrote the music of a lifetime, a unique soundtrack for the Lone Star state of mind. He left children who carry on his music in their own unique ways. He made five decades of recordings that spanned the globe. He gave millions of memories to millions of fans and played goodwill ambassador to the world with pure Texas pride. Maybe it's time to establish a state musician of Texas.

Here's "At the Crossroads":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Bullet -- "White Lies, Blue Eyes" (1971)

White lies in her blue eyes

Evil's the game she plays

Most of the time, the band comes first and the hit song second.  But in the case of Bullet -- the band whose 1971 single, "White Lies, Blue Eyes," was a top 40 hit -- the single was released before the band was formed.  

Roget Pontbriand was a teenager when he was asked to play trumpet and keyboards and sing backup vocals for Bullet.  Later he played with KC and the Sunshine Band, Wild Cherry, and the Michael Stanley Band.  

Roget Pontbriand
today

Roget eventually left the world of pop and disco and became a jazz musician, performing with a lot of big-name recording artists.  Today he's a university professor of music and a composer and arranger.  

2 or 3 lines interviewed Roget for the great pop/rock music reference website, Songfacts.  Here are some excerpts from that interview.

Q: At first, I thought your name was "Roger," instead of "Roget" -- I'm guessing that happens a lot.  I'm assuming you're of French ancestry.  Where were you born, and where did you grow up?

Roget Pontbriand:  Both my father's grandparents were French, but I was born in Queens and lived in the Bronx until I was 8.  Then my family moved to Thomaston, Connecticut. Mine was the first "mixed" generation.  Both my paternal grandparents were French.

Q: When did you start playing an instrument?  Did your mother or father push you to take music lessons, or was it something you chose to do on your own?

Roget Pontbriand: I asked my father for a trumpet when I was 5.  When he asked me why I wanted a trumpet, I told him I was going to be a jazz trumpeter when I grew up. I taught myself to play the trumpet by listening to jazz records.

Q:  Who were your favorite bands/musicians when you were a teenager -- what kind of records did you listen to?

Roget Pontbriand: I loved jazz and Motown.  All my Connecticut friends listened to 70s rock.

Q:  Your became a professional musician at a very young age.  What did your parents think about that?


Roget Pontbriand: My parents did not approve of music as a career for me. I began to spend less and less time at home when I was a teenager, and moved out when I was 15.  I moved back to New York City when I turned 17.

Q:  Tell us about Bullet.  How did the band get started, and what was your role in the group?

Roget Pontbriand:  When Ernie Sorrentino recorded "White Lies, Blue Eyes," Bullet didn't really exist.  When the song started to move up the charts, a booking agent named John Apostle was asked to put a band together.  At that time, I had been playing with Joey Stann and the late George Ruiz  at an upper Manhattan club called Churchill's Plum.  John knew us and asked us to be part of Bullet along with Sorrentino and a drummer named Mike Micara.  Joey played organ and sax, and George was our bass player.  I played trumpet and keyboards and sang backup vocals. We shot the promotional photos for Bullet in Central Park the day after we met Ernie.

  

Bullet's agent, John Apostle, sang bass in the New York doo-wop group, The Capris, but was also a very successful booking agent, personal manager and concert promoter.  Apostle managed the careers of The Brooklyn Bridge, The Belmonts, The Crystals, Jay and The Americans, Tommy James and the Shondells, and Wild Cherry, and promoted concerts at Madison Square Garden, Nassau Coliseum and various other venues in the New York City metropolitan area.  Tommy James met his current wife, Lynda, at Apostle's offices, where she was working as a secretary.

Q: "White Lies, Blue Eyes" entered the Billboard top 40 on Christmas Day, 1971, and stayed there for five weeks -- it peaked at #28.  

Roget Pontbriand: We performed it on American Bandstand, the Merv Griffin show, the Mike Douglas show, and several other TV shows.  

Q:  What did Bullet do after "White Lies, Blue Eyes"? 

Roget Pontbriand: We recorded two other singles.  "Willpower Weak, Temptation Strong," which had amazing energy and should have faired better, but did make it into the top 100, and "A Little Bit Of Soul" (a cover of the Music Explosion's 1967 hit).  The group toured for two years -- with Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and the Temptations, among others.

Here's "Willpower Weak, Temptation Strong," which I think sounds a lot like a Grass Roots song.  The song is introduced by "Music Mike," a record collector who has a YouTube channel that features a lot of pop singles from the 1960s and 1970s, many of them relatively obscure.  (I don't know if Music Mike was ever a top-40 DJ, but he sure sounds like he was.)

Q: Do you have any good stories about life on the road with Bullet?

Roget Pontbriand: At our first concert, the roadies drove the truck into a snow drift and got stuck, so we had to rent equipment.  Another time we got stuck in a blizzard in Minnesota.  Our tour manager had gone ahead to our next stop.  We ran out of cash and had to leave a guitar at a toll booth.

Q:  After Bullet broke up, I understand you played with KC and the Sunshine Band, which was a Miami-based group.

Roget Pontbriand: My tenure with KC and the Sunshine Band was short.  The valve trombone player had quit -- some kind of power play was going on -- so I was hired by TK Records to replace him.  Two weeks later I was offered a position with Wild Cherry playing trumpet, which was my preferred instrument.  The former Sunshine Band trombonist was more than happy to return to them, so everyone was happy.

Rob Parissi formed Wild Cherry in 1970.  The band, which originally was a straight rock group, built up a devoted fan base in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the upper Ohio River Valley.  But disco was becoming popular, and the band's fans started asking them to play more dance music.  

One night at the 2001 Club in Pittsburgh, a table of black fans asked Wild Cherry if they were ever going to play any funky music, and the group's drummer uttered the phrase, "Play some funky music, white boy," when they were taking a break between sets.  The story goes that Rob Parissi borrowed an order pad and a pen from the club's bartender and wrote the song in five minutes.  "Play That Funky Music" was a top 10 hit in 1976 in both the US and the UK, and sold two million records.

Q:  I understand you got a lot of attention on one of your TV appearances with Wild Cherry.

Roget Pontbriand: When the group appeared on Dinah Shore's daily talk show, the sax player and I exchanged boots. His left boot was blue and his right one was orange -- with a lightning bolt up the side.  So my left boot was orange and my right one was blue.   All Dinah could talk about was those boots!  It didn't make our lead singer, Rob Parissi, very happy.  He wanted all the attention for himself.

Click here if you'd like to read the entire Roget Pontbriand interview on Songfacts.

Here's "White Lies, Blue Eyes," which is a classic three-minute, AM-radio pop song.  I'm guessing that I heard the song on the radio when it was new, but I can't swear to it.

Sleepy Sun -- "New Age" (2009)

There's peace in the mountains 

Where an old man sits in the warm sun

His own best friend

Are you your own best friend?  I think guys who spend a lot of time on the Guyism website are probably their own best friends.  (Especially late at night.)

According to Webster's, the noun suffix "-ism" has several meanings.  For example, it can mean adherence to a philosophical theory or system -- a Marxist is one who adheres to the principles set forth by Karl Marx, while a polygamist is someone who believes in polygamy.

The Guyism website says that "Guyism is all about you, the male Internet user, and what you need from an online experience."  What guys seems to most need from an online experience is the opportunity to look at pictures of fabulous babes, who are usually more or less déshabillé -- that is a core principle of guyism.  (I personally prefer more to less, but a little déshabillé is better than none at all.)

A typical Guyism feature

I became acquainted with the Guyism website quite recently.  I was browsing the  ESPN website or Yahoo! Sports or whatever when I stumbled across a link to a Guyism feature titled "WAGs of the 2012 Australian Open."

"WAGs" -- it stands for "wives and girlfriends" -- is an acronym that was invented by the British tabloids to describe the better halves of professional soccer stars.  It is now used by media around the world, usually but not always to describe the wives and girlfriends of athletes.

The Guyism feature included photo galleries for a couple of dozen professional tennis WAGs, a number of whom were tennis pros themselves.  The others are mostly models and actresses.  (The girlfriend of Mardy Fish, currently the top-ranked American tennis player in the world, appears at first to be an exception to that rule -- she is a lawyer.  But she is also a former Deal or No Deal briefcase girl.) 

Any of these lovelies could eat crackers in my bed without me making a fuss about it, but there one who stands out from the crowd.  I'm speaking of Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Brooklyn Decker, who is married to Andy Roddick, who was once the #1-ranked player in the world. 

When you click on Brooklyn's "photo gallery" link, you are taken to this video, which appears to have been shot for GQ magazine.  (That stands for "Gentleman's Quarterly," not "Guyism Quarterly."  Same difference.)

I watched the video -- to be honest, I may have watched it more than once.  Brooklyn's part was OK, I guess -- if you're into that sort of thing -- but what grabbed my attention was the music.

As the creator of a wildly popular music blog, you have to be highly adept in identifying and tracking down music you find on the Internet.  I quickly ascertained that the music that accompanies Brooklyn's video was a song called "New Age," by a psychdelic band from San Francisco called Sleepy Sun.  

"New Age" is from Sleepy Sun's debut album -- alas, it is not an eponymous album, but rather is titled Embrace.  The lead singer on that album, Rachel Fannan, subsequently left the group to pursue a solo career.

New Music Express described "New Age" as "a sprawling piece that cocks a snook at beady meditation in favour of some end times fire-and-brimstone noise."  (That's a good thing -- right?  "Cocks a snook" could go either way.)  It's everything that a neo-psychedelic song should be -- it's quite long (7:40), and features some apocalyptic but ultimately meaningless lyrics:

I know that we've been through this before

We are the souls of a dying race

I'll tell all the kids we'll burn in hell

I'll scream for peace in the mountain range

Let's get back to the subject of WAGs for a moment.  I naturally went searching for information about the WAGs of my favorite sports team, the New York Yankees, and found a slide show on the New York Daily News website titled "Meet the Yankee WAGs."  Click here and you can check out all 47 slides if you so desire.

That slide show had several pictures of Nick Swisher's wife, actress Joanna Garcia -- she's adorable (and so is he):

And there were pictures of the wives of Jorge Posada, C. C. Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, A. J. Burnett (who recently became an ex-Yankee), and even Joe Girardi.

Three of the very famous former girlfriends of Alex Rodriguez -- Cameron Diaz, Madonna, and Kate Hudson -- were featured.

But once more, A-Rod felt far short of the Yankees' "Captain Clutch," Derek Jeter.  Almost half of the 48 pictures in the Daily News slide show were of Jeter's girlfriends.  There was Minka Kelly (who starred in Friday Night Lights), Victoria's Secret model Adriana Lima, model and talk-show hostess Tyra Banks, model Vida Guerra (two-time winner of FHM magazine's "Best Butt Award"), MTV hostess Vanessa Minnillo (now married to Jessica Simpson's ex, Nick Lachey), singer Mariah Carey, Penthouse model and porn star (Derek, I'm shocked!) Cassia Riley, and several movie stars -- including Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Scarlett Johansson, and Gabrielle Union (who is now dating NBA superstar Dwayne Wade).

So far, Derek has not dated any Kardashians, but he's still a relatively young guy.

Let's meet a few of Derek's lovely ladies, shall we?

Adriana Lima

Vida Guerra

Vanessa Millano

Cassia Riley

Jessica Alba

Jessica Biel

Gabrielle Union

I could go on and on, and frankly I would very much like to do exactly that.  But I think I've made my point -- and hopefully goosed up my hit and page views significantly.  So I'll close with The Captain's current squeeze, Minka Kelly:

Minka Kelly

It's good to be Derek Jeter -- very, very good.  He hasn't gotten around to dating a Kardashian yet, but give him time!

Kim Kardashian

One final note before we get to our featured song.  I hope you ladies out there aren't shaking your head and saying "Tsk, tsk" about the Guyism website and the shallow, one-track-mind men who read it.  

There are some pretty appalling websites that attract large female audiences as well.  One that a friend pointed out to me recently is Jezebel, which covers "gossip, culture, fashion, and sex for the contemporary woman."

The typical Guyism reader may be a sports-and-porn-addicted simpleton.  But if this article is any indication, the typical Jezebel reader is a neurotic mess who is more likely to turn out to be Alexandra "Alex" Forrest than Beth Gallagher.  (Google "Fatal Attraction" if you need help deciphering that reference.)

Here's Sleepy Sun's "New Age":



Click here to buy the song from Amazon:

M.I.A. -- "Bad Girls" (2012)

Live fast

Die young

Bad girls do it well

We have a lot to talk about today, but first I need to say "Thank you" to the young lawyer at my firm who sent me a link to the music video for M.I.A.'s "Bad Girls" a couple of weeks ago.  (I don't think she's quite as bad a bad girl as M.I.A. is, but I hear she's in the same neighborhood.)

Let's get right to it: click here to watch the "Bad Girls" video.  As my son said after I shared it with him, "This is basically the bombest video in history."

OMG!

Let's try that again: O . . . M . . . G!!!

*     *     *     *     *

M.I.A.'s real name is Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam.  Her parents are Sri Lankan.  Shortly after she was born in London in 1977, her family back moved to Sri Lanka, where her father became a prominent political activist.

Civil war broke out in Sri Lanka in 1983.  M.I.A.'s family were Tamils, which is the second largest ethnic group on the island.  (The majority Sinhalese outnumber the Tamils by about three to one.)  Tamil separatist forces -- known as the Tamil Tigers -- were eventually defeated by the government army in 2009, after a 26-year-long military struggle.

The flag of Sri Lanka

M.I.A.'s mother took her children to live in India after the civil war broke out, and then moved them back to London in 1986.  Her father stayed behind in Sri Lanka, leaving it to the mother to make a living and support the family.

M.I.A. attended an art school in London, and mounted a successful exhibition of graffiti-inspired spray-paint paintings in London in 2001.  Jude Law was one of her first customers.

M.I.A.

About the same time, she became acquainted with the lead singer of the band Elastica, designed the cover for an Elastica single, and made a video documentary of the group's tour.  She began to experiment with a synthesizer and drum machine, and released her first single on a tiny independent record label in 2003.  M.I.A. utilized her MySpace page and file sharing to build a large online following, and eventually signed with a major record label.  Her fourth album is expected to be released this coming summer.

M.I.A.'s music is highly eclectic – it mixes electro/dancehall music, hiphop, alternative rock/punk, Tamil folk, and Bollywood-style music.

Her songs are usually political, and her politics are quite radical.  Given her upbringing, it's not surprising that she supports various third-world revolutionary movements.  

Nevertheless, she was once engaged to Benjamin Bronfman – the two had a baby together in 2009 – who is the son of billionaire Edgar Bronfman, heir to the Seagram's liquor fortune.

A pregnant M.I.A. with Bronfman

M.I.A. was in the news recently after performing at Super Bowl XLVI with Madonna and Nicki Minaj.  (Click here to read what 2 or 3 lines had to say about the song these three performed as part of the halftime show.)  M.I.A. thoughtfully omitted the word "sh*t" from her verse, but flipped the bird to the TV cameras instead.  

After the infamous Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" eight years ago, NBC and the other major networks supposedly had put fail-safe procedures into place to prevent indecent material from being aired.  But NBC censors were unable to blur M.I.A.'s middle finger in time.

M.I.A. at the Super Bowl

"She wasn't thinking," said a M.I.A. spokesperson.  "She's incredibly sorry."  (Sure she is.)

*     *     *     *     *

The "Bad Girls" video brought to mind the author Salman Rushdie and the fatwa (a ruling concerning Islamic law that is issued by an Islamic scholar) that the Ayatollah Khomeini announced after Rushdie's 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, was published. 

Khomeini

Khomeini viewed Rushdie's depiction of the prophet Muhammed in his novel as blasphemous, and called upon faithful Muslims to kill Rushdie.  Iranian officials consequently offered a bounty for Rushdie's death, which caused the British government to break off diplomatic relations with Iran.  

There were a number of attempts to assassinate Rushdie and others who were involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses.  One would-be assassin blew himself up while putting together a bomb he planned to use to kill Rushdie in London in 1989.  The Japanese translator of the book was stabbed to death, the Italian translator was seriously wounded in a stabbing, and the Turkish translator survived a fundamentalist mob attempt to kill him by burning down his hotel.  (37 people died in the fire.)  

Rushdie with his book

The UK reestablished diplomatic relations with Iran in 1998 after officials in that country pledged that it would not support future assassination attempts on Rushdie.

But the Iranian government has no power to withdraw the fatwa – only the person who issues it can withdraw it.  Since Khomeini died a few months after issuing the fatwa in 1989, it will remain in effect until Rushdie dies – hopefully from natural causes.

*     *     *     *     *

I bring all this up because I can imagine M.I.A. becoming the subject of a fatwa as a result of the "Bad Girls" video.  Not every fatwa calls for the subject to be killed as punishment – perhaps a fatwa involving "Bad Girls" would call for the faithful to boycott her music or send her rude e-mails.  

For one thing, I doubt that fundamentalist Muslims would appreciate the chic designer hijab worn by the dancers in the video.  (Hijab is a term that is often thought to refer to a Muslim headscarf/veil, but which really refers to all the clothing that conceals a Muslim woman's entire body, save only the face and hands.)  Hijab garments are not always black, but are generally a single color – preferably a relatively plain and simple color.  I'm guessing that no observant Muslim woman would appear in leopard-print or polka-dotted hijab.

Women wearing hijab

M.I.A. herself does not appear in hijab garments in the video.  (The black top she is wearing in the first minute or so of the video isn't exactly hijab either.)  Hijab is intended to promote a woman's modesty when she is in public, and M.I.A. does not seem to consider modesty a particularly desirable personality trait.  To the contrary, she seems to view bumping and grinding in front of the male extras in the video to be more like it.  

Some people think that the "Bad Girls" video – which features some mesmerizing stunt driving – is a protest against Saudi Arabia's ban on driving by women.  That policy dates back to a 1991 fatwa against gender mixing in public.  Some Saudi women are currently suing the government for refusing to issue them driver's licenses.

Maybe the "Bad Girls" video is an impassioned cry for women's rights.  Or maybe M.I.A. just enjoys riding around in cars that are being driven on two wheels or doing other crazy stunts.  Either way, I can't stop watching this video.

M.I.A. in the "Bad Girls" video

One final note.  When I was researching this post, I came across some references to "ghost-riding the whip."  Here's how reporter Paul Fahri defined the term in a 2006 article in the Washington Post:  

To ghost-ride, the driver climbs out of the car while it's moving at low speed. The ghost-rider then busts a move around and on top of the vehicle, usually accompanied by a thumping soundtrack from the car (or "whip," in urban slang). What they're attempting is to make the dance steps as gaudy and elaborate as possible and to stay outside the car as long as possible. It's all about self-expression. Or possibly cheap thrills. Or maybe the ever-popular youthful flirtation with bone-breaking, brain-damaging injury. 

There are ghost-riding videos all over YouTube.  Click here to view one of them.

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to view the official "Bad Girls" video.

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

Kanye West (feat. Rihanna) -- "All Of The Lights" (2011)

I slapped my girl, 

She called the feds 

I did that time 

And spent that bread . . .

Restraining order, 

Can't see my daughter 

Her mother, brother, grandmother
Hate me in that order 

Tolstoy's monumental novel, Anna Karenina, begins with these words:  "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

I'm not sure Tolstoy was right.  It's obvious that the family depicted in Kanye West's "All Of The Lights" is unhappy.  But nothing in the song indicates their unhappiness is particularly unique.  An unfaithful woman, a violent man -- and a child caught in the middle.   Same old, same old.

Kanye West

If the family's situation is nothing special, the song certainly is.  More than one critic has used the word "operatic" to describe "All Of The Lights," and that's as good a word as any.

"All Of The Lights" won "Best Rap Song" and "Best Rap/Sung Collaboration" at the recent Grammy Awards.   It was nominated for "Song of the Year," and I would have given it that award as well -- but everyone knew that award had Adele's name written all over it.

Speaking of "collaboration," this song has collaboration in spades.  Kanye enlisted the aid of no fewer than 14 of his favorite vocalists to appear on the song -- not only Rihanna, who is most prominent guest artist on the song, but also Kid Cudi, Fergie, Alicia Keys, John Legend, Drake, and Elton John.  

The reviewer for the New Music Express, Alex Denney, called it the "celeb-studded centerpiece" of West's fifth studio album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and went on to say that: 

In anyone else’s hands it’d be an A-list circle-jerk of horrid proportions, but through Kanye’s bar-raising vision it becomes a truly wondrous thing. 

Rihanna

"All of the Lights" is a song that only Kanye West could have put together.  He is the reigning genius of hip-hop -- few match him as either a songwriter, performer, or producer, and I don't think anyone else's sum of their parts is greater than Kanye's.

The Hype Williams-directed music video is just as remarkable an accomplishment as the song is.  It begins with a warning that it may trigger epileptic seizures, and you'll see why when you view the video.  

Trust me -- you want to view this video.  If you watch only one video on 2 or 3 lines this year, this is the one to watch.  (Full screen, please.)   

Click here if you'd like to buy "All Of The Lights" from Amazon: