blast-o-rama. • issue 046 • 2021-04-11
blast-o-rama.
issue 046 • 2021-04-11
Farewell to a Great
This week surprised me with sudden, shocking, and sad passing of rap music icon Earl Simmons, better known to the world at large as DMX (or Dark Man X) at age 50. A man who could write tracks which were as rough and revealing as they were poppy and earworms, there were truly few rappers out there like him, let alone able to thrive as strongly as he did in the TRL area among the Britneys and Backstreets of his prime era.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and try to write anything near definitive about the man’s career or legacy, instead, I’d like to do what I do best here, and share good content.
Throughout his nearly three-decade career, DMX came to embody passion, rawness, and pure emotional honesty like few hip-hop artists ever have, barking his way through hits like “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” and “Get at Me Dog” one moment, and repenting and philosophizing on tracks like “Slippin’” the next. His was a decidedly anti-commercial approach, but it worked, and it made him the genre’s first new superstar in the wake of the killings of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. To this day, few have been able to reach the heights he did—he’s the only rapper to have his first five studio albums debut at no. 1, and he was the first living hip-hop artist to have two projects go platinum in the same year.
But amid the triumphs—which also included starring roles in movies like Belly and Romeo Must Die, a lucrative record company and lifestyle brand in Ruff Ryders, and more than 15 million albums sold in the U.S. alone—DMX wrestled with addiction and mental health. The latter half of his career was marked by false starts and aborted comeback bids as he became more known for his bankruptcy and arrests than his music or spirituality. Even in his more introspective moments, like a 2013 interview with life coach Iyanla Vanzant, the specter of addiction loomed large: “Just because you stop getting high doesn’t mean you don’t have the problem, because it’s a constant fight every day.” But as he told it, his struggles were about more than just drugs—they were rooted in the violence he endured at the hands of his mother, his betrayal by the person he considered a mentor, the isolation that led him to grow closer to dogs than he did most humans. And no matter how much he achieved, that darkness followed him.
or the uninitiated and an entire generation of people born in the new millennium, DMX is an angry uncle known for club tracks like “Party Up” littered with whistles and barking. It’s strong work everyone can wind to, complete with fantasies of smacking Superman with his “dick and the mic,” but it’s not the basement. If you want to know about how Earl Simmons had his teeth knocked out by his mother and her boyfriends or why X turned to stray dogs as his only friends when he was 14, you gotta listen to It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot. For an entire generation of kids that fell through the cracks with no one to turn to, they had Dog.
Rest In Peace, DMX. There were few like you, and the world is a little darker without your unique voice in it.
Now, onto the things…
Thing #1: Your Browser Never Forgets
Not to blow up my own spot, but my day job is one related to the world of advertising and marketing technology, the not-so-beloved half of the Internet which basically fuels the half which we do love.
I try to bring a sense of ethics to the role, but as Lauren Goode at Wired explores, there’s a massive blind spot that I hadn’t even thought of…
I still a photograph of the breakfast I made the morning I ended an eight-year relationship and canceled a wedding. It was an unremarkable breakfast—a fried egg—but it is now digitally fossilized in a floral dish we moved with us when we left New York and headed west. I don’t know why I took the photo, except, well, I do: I had fallen into the reflexive habit of taking photos of everything.
Not long ago, the egg popped up as a “memory” in a photo app. The time stamp jolted my actual memory. It was May 2019 when we split up, back when people canceled weddings and called off relationships because of good old-fashioned dysfunction, not a global pandemic. Back when you wondered if seating two people next to each other at a wedding might result in awkward conversation, not hospitalization.
Did I want to see the photo again? Not really. Nor do I want to see the wedding ads on Instagram, or a near-daily collage of wedding paraphernalia on Pinterest, or the “Happy Anniversary!” emails from WeddingWire, which for a long time arrived every month on the day we were to be married. (Never mind that anniversaries are supposed to be annual.) Yet nearly two years later, these things still clutter my feeds. The photo widget on my iPad cycles through pictures of wedding dresses.
Of the thousands of memories I have stored on my devices—and in the cloud now—most are cloudless reminders of happier times. But some are painful, and when algorithms surface these images, my sense of time and place becomes warped. It’s been especially pronounced this year, for obvious and overlapping reasons. In order to move forward in a pandemic, most of us were supposed to go almost nowhere. Time became shapeless. And that turned us into sitting ducks for technology.
Thing 2: What Does It Take To Develop Just One Dose?
As we’re all excited about, I’m sure, many of us are finally eligible for our COVID vaccination shots. As amazing a triumph as it is, it’s even more astounding when you consider the efforts that each company took to make this happen in roughly a year’s time.
Jeff Wise for The Intelligencer looks at the journey to develop the vaccine from everyone’s one-shot provider, Johnson & Johnson:
From the start, J&J struggled to catch a break. The pharmaceutical giant played it safe during development and lost crucial time, failed to get FDA approval for parts of its U.S. production chain, missed several delivery targets, and wound up with a vaccine that underperformed its rivals in clinical trials. Then, another obstacle: Last week, the New York Times revealed that the new batch J&J had pledged would be delayed even further, after a mix-up at a subcontractor’s production facility ruined 15 million doses. The Biden administration has since directed J&J to take over every aspect of vaccine production at the plant.
The setback was significant, but not fatal. The facility where the mix-up occurred was part of a production process that relies on a precise orchestration of timing, engineering, and logistical expertise across multiple continents, which makes it vulnerable to bad luck and human error. But the system is also resilient: When the batch of J&J doses was compromised, alternative supply lines were available to compensate for the failure. Here is how that entire tempestuous journey unfolded — the breakthroughs, the setbacks, and the way the pieces came together to bring vaccines to millions of arms.
Thing #3: The Very Real Struggle In a Fake Sport
This weekend marks the 37th annual edition of WrestleMania, the Super Bowl of Pro-Wrestling, a surreal mixture of sport, entertainment, rock and roll bravado and athletic exhibition which has been, depending on your side of the fence when it comes to the activity, a showcase of some very talented individuals, or one of the dumbest things in the world.
I — personally — tend to fall on both sides of the spectrum, but having grown up with the “sport” in my life (to where we regularly combine its presentation with the world of drawn art in my work with Super Art Fight), but you, as someone either converted, disinterested, or lapsed, might be intrigued by the story of one Becky Lynch.
As Elle writer Molly Langmuir puts it:
The director Werner Herzog once declared in an interview, “Sometimes, just to see the world I live in, I watch WrestleMania.” Sitting up in the stands that night, though, I didn’t know what I was looking at. I’d thought of pro-wrestling as a low-brow soap opera for men that could be dismissed as silly if it wasn’t for the violence, misogyny, and racism. I’d also assumed it appealed mostly to working class white men, and since this was a group that tended to support Donald Trump, I figured the same was true of WWE fans. So I’d been confused when I heard about Lynch, who was widely expected to win.
About eight months earlier, as a floundering mid-level player, she’d begun to demand, angrily, the recognition she claimed to deserve. In the moral universe of pro-wrestling, this would normally mark the moment a wrestler went from a hero, known as a babyface, to a villain, or heel. In Lynch’s case, it transformed her into one of the WWE’s biggest stars (and its biggest merchandise seller). Lynch’s moniker? “The Man.” She was the “top dog, gender be damned,” she said. If the same people who found Hillary Clinton repellant could embrace Lynch, what did this mean about where women stood in America? Or was this just a ploy by the WWE to gain female viewers?
Since then, through a pandemic, a presidential election that contained the brutality of a grudge match, and an attempted coup that meme-makers immediately overdubbed with WWE audio, I’ve come to understand that many of the assumptions I brought with me that night were misguided. But of all the unlikely occurrences of the past months, at least one, for me, has been that as my sense of the world disassembled, it was Lynch’s story, and pro-wrestling in general, that helped me reassemble it.
Until next time…
Take time for yourself, gang. Sit outside, take in the fresh air, just pause and enjoy. You’ve earned it.
See you next week.
-Marty