bernot

“Neighbourhood Watch“, ou quand le street artist canadien Andrew Lamb s’amuse à détourner les panneaux de surveillance du voisinage de la ville de Toronto avec des collages des icônes des années 80 issues des films, des séries ou des dessins animés et des jeux vidéo… De Robocop à X-Files en passant par la famille Ingalls ou encore Mario et Ghosbusters, qui appellerez vous ?

Images © Andrew Lamb

Ayn Rand liked cats. She also wrote repetitive, long-winded books and developed Objectivism, the philosophical system for people who pleasure themselves over thoughts of laissez-faire capitalism and believe that self-interest is the highest moral purpose and that’s that, the objective truth, fuck you. But she also really liked cats, so much that she engaged in correspondence with Cat Fancy magazine on March 20, 1966, writing:

Dear Miss Smith,

You ask whether I own cats or simply enjoy them, or both. The answer is: both. I love cats in general and own two in particular.

You ask: “We are assuming that you have an interest in cats, or was your subscription strictly objective?” My subscription was strictly objective because I have an interest in cats. I can demonstrate objectively that cats are of a great value, and the carter issue of Cat Fancy magazine can serve as part of the evidence. (“Objective” does not mean “disinterested” or indifferent; it means corresponding to the facts of reality and applies both to knowledge and to values.)

I subscribed to Cat Fancy primarily for the sake of the picture, and found the charter issue very interesting and enjoyable.

Big up to Rand for even responding to bait — tying objectivism to cats is like applying the String Theory to jealousy. A stretch. And yet, she manages to do so, in the driest way possible. Because “values” — even the ones found in a cuddly, fuzzy, lovable kitty — are purely objective, because Ayn Rand is feeling objectively stating them. Unlike the emotions of people that sway their moral values to care for other, less fortunate human beings, chortle chortle, how delightful. (Text image: The Letters of Ayn Rand; hat tip: @mallelis)

The post Ayn Rand’s Actual Letter to Cat Fancy appeared first on ANIMAL.

"Do you remember the happiest moment of your life?"
"This one time I was in Hawaii with my family, and we were walking to the beach, and we came to the top of this giant hill. And I said, ‘I’m going to take it.’ And I put my skateboard down, and started rolling down the hill, and I got going so fast that the board started to shake because the trucks were loose, and toward the bottom of the hill I came to this crack, and the board got caught and I was thrown onto the pavement. I got all bruised and scraped and my mom was screaming because she’s a total freakout."
"That was the happiest moment of your life?"
"Yeah, I was just glad I took the hill."

These photographs capture an Alternative Model in Newcastle, taken on the 22nd of January 1949. The collection is undeniably ahead of its time, the photographs are of an unusually dark and suggestive nature. Nothing is known of their purpose or the model in the photographs; they are simply referred to as ‘Mr Steinberg’s Model.’






(via Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums)

Richard 'Rik' Mayall (7th March 1958 -9 June 2014) BBC Obit here

Coca-Cola was one of the three official beverage sponsors with a Getraenkedienst (beverage service) at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Athletic competition was a Nazi ideal and the Coca-Cola GmbH cashed in heavily on this infatuation by becoming one of the biggest sponsors of sports events, most notably the annual Deutschlandrundfahrt (National Bycicle Championships) and the Soccer Cup.

Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Getrank (One People, One Nation, One Drink) Olympic Games in Berlin 1936

Coca-Cola ad Third Reich 1935

Coca-Cola ads Nazi Germany 1939

Coca-Cola Nazi Germany 1938

Coca-Cola ad Third Reich 1936

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A mentally ill woman in San Francisco has been breeding and releasing untold numbers of rats into the city. NBC Bay Area reports:

Police say that when they last checked in on the woman’s room at a residential hotel, she was living with 300 rats in deplorable conditions.

“We found a small room that was completely infested with rats that had actually burrowed into the walls and gone into other units as well,” Animal Care and Control Captain Denise Bongiovanni said.

Not only is this gross, it’s a yet another depressing example of the effects of California’s broken mental health system. Perhaps if Reagan hadn’t shut down publicly funded mental health care during his time as governor, fewer people, and rats, would be living in conditions like this.

To be fair, the example rat photo NBC posted looks more “cute from a distance” subway rat than horrifying, “could probably kill your cat” Bushwick street rat. (Photo: Walt Jabsco/Flickr)

The post San Francisco Woman Breeds and Releases Hundreds of Rats appeared first on ANIMAL.

It seems like all that it takes to get things done in Democratic-leaning Kansas City, Missouri, is to have Republican bigwigs come to town.

Before the Republican National Convention site-selection committee landed in Kansas City on Wednesday, scores of weed-whacker-armed workers fanned out all over the Crossroads Arts District to get rid of weeds that have been growing through cracks in sidewalks for weeks. The Pitch has been in the Crossroads for ages, and longtime staffers here can't recall another similar concerted housekeeping effort.

Then on Thursday, we noticed that the (in)famous "Totally Nude" sign over the Temptations gentlemen's club at 1517 Grand was covered up.

City Hall for years has wanted to jettison the garish sign, but it has withstood pressure over the years.…

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Chinese Citizens Observe 25-Year Moment Of Silence For Tiananmen Square Massacre

by Taisia Kitaiskaia

Transcript after the jump.

Dear Baba Yaga,

While I’ve come to mostly accept the body I was born with and use for loving, working, and playing, I can’t help but feel uneasy about one physical feature. It’s not quite a hunchback, but my shoulders are fleshy and my back has a roundness below my neck. When I catch glimpses of my posture in windows or mirrors, I’m always surprised and disappointed. How can this be me? I stretch and do yoga, but I’m afraid it’s not enough to keep me from growing into a grotesque old woman. What should l do?

BABA YAGA:

) All mirrors tell the wrong story . Your cloak-hem has already brushed the ink-pool that mars all of us; the marring of being not as we thought we were. I sit at my mirror daily & make loud laughter, inking my brows & lips with the mar-muck–then I step : through the glass to glimpse other Sights. You have ) made a loveliness of yr body through the moving of it, & the mirror is a false confidant. Evermore, to be as I am is an honor & a magic.

Previously:: "I Got What I Wanted, So Why Do I Feel Hollow?"

Taisia Kitaiskaia is a poet, writer, and Michener Center for Writers fellow. She's taking questions on behalf of Baba Yaga at AskBabaYaga@gmail.com.

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erikkwakkel:

Doodle by bored medieval school boy

This 15th-century doodle is found in the lower margin of a manuscript containing Juvenal’s Satires. This classical text was a popular device to teach young students - kids - morals. The medieval teacher Alexander Nequam stated: “Let the student read the satirists […] so that he may learn even in his younger days that vices are to be shunned” (quote here). Spoken like a true optimist, because this page shows what young school boys like to do with rules: disobey them. And so in stead of studying the student who used this book drew a funny doodle in the lower margin: a figure with a flower in one hand and what appears to be a pipe in the other. Could it be his teacher? Doodles are of all ages but those produced by bored school kids are the most entertaining.

Pic: Carpentras, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 368 (here). Here is another example of school kids doodling.

Such a great tumblr, follow and you are bound to enjoy these discoveries

47-year-old U.K. man Angus Dean knew he was going to have to get creative when it came to unloading his 1990 Volkswagon Golf. The 24-year-old car is rusted and in need of repairs before it can be taken out on the road, so Dean clearly had his work cut out for him when it came time to attract potential buyers.

In order to make the car’s eBay ad more appealing, the enterprising estate manager borrowed an unnamed buddy’s life-sized sex doll to pose alongside the Golf.

“We did the same with a ride-on mower,” Mr. Dean told The Daily Mail.

Hopefully the ad makes it clear that the doll doesn’t actually come with the car. Also, we’re hoping that Dean’s buddy had the foresight to hose the doll down before sending it out on a modeling job, despite the fact that the anonymous pal insists that he only owns the doll for promotional purposes since it is cheaper and easier to work with than a living model.

Yeah. Sure.

“I’ve asked models if they would pose for eBay adverts before and most aren’t interested in it.”

“Poseable mannequins are ready, and do what you need them to do. You don’t get the fuss you might get with models. You don’t need to feed them or pick them up from the train station and you don’t need to pay them any royalties.” the owner told The Daily Mail. 

Since placing the ad, Mr. Dean has been flooded with potential buyers. So, basically, the takeaway is that life-sized sex dolls can potentially pay for themselves in the long run.

Source: The Daily Mail

My absolute first impression of Princess Ugg was that it’s like a baby Red Sonja, which may be what hooked me because BABY RED SONJA HOW ADORABLE WOULD THAT BE?? But that actually only tells half the story. We may start out introduced to a bonnie wee redheaded berserker, but this is really a tale of two princesses. A brash barbarian princess travels from her home in the frozen north to a sunny and warm “civilized” world for a more formal education, and is paired with the local, more traditionally feminine princess in your typical odd couple scenario:

And while that may sound like something of a clichéd set-up (I can’t help but think of how it played out in Wicked, for example) Princess Ugg quickly reveals itself as a princess story that hits all our favorite points about princess stories without falling into the saccharine pit of fluffy birds and mice that do your bidding and waiting for your prince to come rescue you. Which is not to say the book is without animal companions, as early on we are introduced to a talking eagle, and then of course is Princess Ulga’s faithful companion, Snorrl:

And I honestly can’t complain about a rideable wooly mammoth because who WOULDN’T want one of those?

The story may feel like one we’ve all heard before, but I’m enjoying the depth with which the characters are written and the heart they each display. The book begins with Princess Ugg learning valuable lessons from her mother, who appears as a strong barbarian queen in her own right. Princess Ugg’s father, too, is not some stand-in antagonist whose only character feature is to obstruct Princess Ugg. Instead he comes across as a compassionate and understanding parental figure. In fact, this book is rather riddled with interesting characters, none of which smack of cliché in and of themselves despite being set in a familiar sort of story. Which is pretty impressive for a debut issue where all of these characters are just being introduced. Generally it’s all too easy to rely on tropes and clichés to fill in character traits only to debunk them later, but Princess Ugg does a good job of making it clear from the start that while you may think you know the story, you don’t know the people in it or how they’ll be utilized by the story. Given that premise, I’m honestly hoping to see redemption for both princesses; it seems like an opportunity for not only the spoiled local princess to show hidden depths, but for the refinement of the brash barbarian princess.

Of course, what’s a good graphic story without the art to accompany it? Much of Princess Ugg‘s depth is expressed as much through the coloring and inks as the words on the page. The inks and watercolors both evoke a sort of older age of graphic novels, more Bone-era style than our more modern tights-n-flights exhibitions, and it’s a style that serves the story well for exactly the reasons outlined above; it first puts you in a place that seems all-too-familiar and allows you to feel comfortable even as the story gets subverted by interesting characters and a set-up to a vast and colorful piece of world-building. On a more personal note, I absolutely adore good watercolor and this book is lush with it, absolutely gorgeous in the depth and texture provided by the colors alone.

It’s definitely a great start to a good all-ages comic, the kind that gets categorized as YA or children’s lit but is really a good story for everyone, just minus the grimdarkgrittiness that gets something labeled as “mature” or “adult.” To be honest, there’s nothing immature about this, and I greatly anticipate seeing what kinds of themes and ideas the series decides to explore, as it’s set itself up quite nicely to go into a lot of deep and meaningful directions. At least, that’s my hope, and I guess we’ll see what happens when I pick up the next issue!

Princess Ugg is written and illustrated by Ted Naifeh and colored and lettered by Warren Wucinich. It’s available from Oni Press.

Jaydot Sloane is a webcomic author/artist at Vanity Games, where she updates three times a week with silly little gag comics that are almost entirely drawn from a real life of living with two dogs, three cats, her ex-husband and his girlfriend, her current boyfriend, and soon to be her first child. Kind of like Full House, if Full House were full of swearing and dog fur.

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A new study finds that users of classified advertisements discriminate against people perceived as black. Over a one-year period, economists Jennifer Doleac and Luke Stein placed fake ads for used iPods in local online classified. They included photographs of the product held by a hand. Some hands were light-skinned, others dark, and they also included a second potentially stigmatized identity, men with tattoos. Otherwise the ads were all identical.

Doleac and Stein found that buyers were less likely to contact or make a deal with black sellers; they received 13 percent fewer responses and 17 percent fewer offers. When they did receive an offer, the price suggested was slightly lower than that offered to presumably white sellers.

Buyers also seemed to be significantly more suspicious of black sellers. When interacting with a seller with brown skin, Doleac and Stein write:

They are 17% less likely to include their name in e-mails, 44% less likely to accept delivery by mail, and 56% more likely to express concern about making a long-distance payment.

Black sellers did especially poorly in the Northeast, when there wasn’t very much competition, and in markets that were racially isolated or had high crime rates.

Notably, buyers discriminated against people with wrist tattoos at about the same rate, suggesting that both tattoos and brown skin inspire similar levels of distrust.

---

This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site, as “Distrust for Black Entrepreneurs.”

Each year, volunteer artists from Japan travel to one of the poorest regions of India to share their talents with schoolchildren at the Niranjaya Public Welfare School. They join local artists at the annual Wall Art Festival to collaborate with the students on amazing works of temporary art in their school.

With the help of donations (mainly from Japan, Australia and New Zealand) the building that houses the Niranjaya Public Welfare School was constructed in 2007. Here, any student can receive a free education (including study materials), regardless of gender, caste or religion. This is especially important in Bihar, which has the lowest literacy rate in India: only 47 percent. About 85 percent of the population lives in villages like Sujata, in which the school is located.

With uniforms, computers and textbooks to buy and 12 full time teachers’ salaries to pay, the initial donations were not enough to continue on—they needed a way to guarantee funds for the school. Part fundraising strategy, part educational enrichment, the Wall Art Festival was born. Each year volunteer artists from Japan are selected to visit the school and, along with local artists, lead the children in a school-wide art project. The white walls inside and out are transformed into works of art that are complex, expressive and wrap themselves around the figures and dreams of the students within.

Japanese artist Yusuke Asai has participated in the festival for three years and brings a unique approach to the project. Rather than buying paints, he led students to collect various kinds of soil from the village to use as paint. You might think it would make for a bland painting, but you would be wrong.

The intricate designs he meticulously daubed onto the walls cover even the ceiling and the bookshelves at the back of the room. He took traditional Indian art as his inspiration, so his mural is reminiscent of intricate henna patterns. The figures break out of their borders, stretching limbs out and over the heads of the occupants.

They added straw to the floor, softening the atmosphere.

There is so much detail here that you could stay for hours admiring each piece of the magnificent puzzle.

Not every artist stuck to such meditative aesthetics. Mythological figures explode out onto this wall on waves of blue.

Another artist changed the very shape of the room, covering every surface in designs and symbols that look like they could be ancient etchings or alien language.

Some pieces recall textile patterns…

…and some recall childhood storybooks and puppet shows.

Some pieces were modern and simple…

…but the impact is undeniable. This child looks as if he’s about to be sucked into a vortex!

Realistic depictions of places the children may never see are brought right to their classrooms…

…alongside dream-like landscapes imagined in serene colors.

Monochromatic paintings with simple elements tell stories…

…while the figures dance around the students.

The school’s facade is also transformed for the event.

Even this elephant’s skin became a canvas!

Above all, this is an incredible coming-together of people. Across divides of class, culture and language, people gave of themselves and created a wonderful experience together. Undoubtedly, the participants walk away with an appreciation for art and education, but also for the good that exists in others.

It looks like an incredible experience for hosts and visitors alike.

Once the festival is over, the murals are all removed and the walls are returned to their original white. The excitement is over for now, but the donations delivered to the school fund another year of lessons and the experience lives on in the minds of all who participated.

Sources: Amusing Planet, Niranjaya Public Welfare Trust
Images: Wall Art Festival

Related Stories

• Tokyo’s 7 coolest public art pieces
• Guy lifehacks his way to flawless “Seven Samurai” wall art
• Saiyans, pirates, and Jesus all come alive on Japanese blackboards
• Japanese artist recreates Matsumoto Castle out of cardboard
• Parents create amazing Studio Ghibli mural for daughter’s nursery before she’s even born

Origin: Stunning murals bloom in an impoverished Indian school with the help of Japanese artists
Copyright© RocketNews24 / SOCIO CORPORATION. All rights reserved.

Prooffreader graphed the distribution of letters towards the beginning, middle and end of English words, using a variety of corpora, finding both some obvious truths and some surprising ones. As soon as I saw this, I began to think of the ways that you could use it to design word games -- everything from improved Boggle dice to automated Hangman strategies to altogether new games. Read the rest

Let’s say you’re a complete unknown in Arizona who failed to win as a write-in Tea Party candidate for Congress in 2012, and then lost a campaign for Phoenix City Council in 2013. Maybe you’d have better luck with some name recognition? So former nobody Scott Fistler legally changed his name to “Cesar Chavez” and is now running as a Democrat to replace retiring congressman Ed Pastor. Can’t possibly go wrong, because your Latino voters are going to see the name of the famous guy on there and figure that after dying in 1993, the activist and civil rights leader has rested up and deserves a seat in Congress.

We do have to at least agree that this much of Fistler/Chavez’s story sounds plausible: Fistler’s name change petition, filed last November, said plaintively, “I have experienced many hardships because of my name[.]” No doubt.

And just look at the huge mass rallies in favor of this fantastic candidate, as seen in these photos from his campaign webpage:

Never mind that the top photo is of supporters of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and the middle one is of a march honoring the California labor leader in Kansas. And the bottom one is Venezuela too.

Still, New Chavez guy tells the Arizona Republic, he’s a totally legit guy:

“It’s almost as simple as saying Elvis Presley is running for president,” Chavez, the candidate, said in a phone interview. “You wouldn’t forget it, would you?” [...]

“People want a name that they can feel comfortable with,” Chavez said. “If you went out there running for office and your name was Bernie Madoff, you’d probably be screwed.”

Plus, he’s got all kinds of qualifications, like “My name is on a lot of popular things,” he says. And also, he’s a military veteran, although he declined to tell the paper which branch of the service he was in, possibly to avoid compromising the safety of agents still in the field, we bet. He also wouldn’t confirm to the reporters whether he actually was the person formerly known as Scott Fistler, saying only, “I feel right in everything I do. I never broke the law,” and if those don’t sound like the words of someone who’s ready to be in Congress, what would?

Also, too, he didn’t want to say, one way or the other, whether he’s as Hispanic as his name: “I like to look at people as Americans and citizens of the world.”

People familiar with the real candidates trying to succeed Rep. Pastor aren’t especially worried that Emilio Fistlervez will fool many voters, seeing as how the real Cesar Chavez is pretty well-known as a hero who has rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

While Yr Doktor Zoom is leery of endorsing anyone with a fake name (since what are they hiding, huh?), we are definitely hoping that this guy gets enough signatures to make the ballot, and that please, dear god please, he’s included in any televised debates.

[AzCentral.com / Arizona Capitol Times via TPM]

Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. He is pleased to announce his write-in candidacy for U.S. Senate as Ronaldreagan Georgewashington Jesuschristalmighty.

A bear walked across I-90 in Washington on Friday morning, and then hung out on the median for a while. Clearly, the Bear Patrol was asleep at the switch. Unfortunately, traffic cameras couldn’t capture the bear on film, so DOT staffer Mike Allende decided to tweet this hyperrealistic doodle of the bear on the highway.

Can’t see that black bear in I-90 median on camera, but here’s what it may look like. pic.twitter.com/9QddUOYzxk

— WSDOT Traffic (@wsdot_traffic) May 30, 2014

As you can see in the photo, the black bear appears to be larger than a car, stands on two legs, and is generally amiable, waving at passing cars. At least one person in a passing car has noticed the bear. You really can’t tell that this is just a drawing.

WSDOT Traffic, Seattle PI

Kiev, Ukraine, March 2014.

In case you needed further proof that sexism is stupid, a new study reveals that hurricanes given female names end up killing more people than storms given male names, because people don’t even take storms with female names seriously enough.

Via Washington Post:

Storms with female names have historically been significantly more deadly because people neither consider them as risky nor take the same precautions, the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes.
Researchers at the University of Illinois and Arizona State University examined six decades of hurricane death rates according to gender, spanning 1950 and 2012. Of the 47 most damaging hurricanes, the male-named hurricane produced an average of 23 deaths compared to 45 deaths for female-named hurricanes, or almost double the number of fatalities. (The study excluded Katrina and Audrey, outlier storms that would skew the model).
The difference in death rates between genders was even more pronounced when comparing strongly masculine names versus strongly female ones.
“[Our] model suggests that changing a severe hurricane’s name from Charley … to Eloise … could nearly triple its death toll,” the study says.
Sharon Shavitt, study co-author and professor of marketing at the University of Illinois, says the results imply an “implicit sexism”; that is, we make decisions about storms based on the gender of their name without even recognizing it.
“When under the radar, that’s when it [the sexism] has the potential to influence our judgments,” Shavitt said.

“Oh, whatever. That’s just a lady storm! What’s a lady storm going to do to me? NAG ME TO DEATH??? Haha!” says you, right before you get blown off the front porch to your untimely demise. The study also set up 6 different experiments, asking 100-346 people in each group a series of questions about hurricanes, and found that people were significantly less likely to seek shelter if the storm had a female name than a male one, and predicted male-named storms to be more dangerous than female-named storms.

The researchers suggest that the meteorological society should re-consider their storm-naming practices due to the implicit gender bias that some people have that puts them at risk. However, the National Hurricane Center–which declined to comment specifically on the study, suggests that maybe people be less dumb and pay more attention to the hurricane itself rather than what gender its name is.

You know, I’m just going to say it–if you die in a hurricane because you thought it was going to be a “gentle lady hurricane,” our gene pool can probably stand to lose you. That might literally be the definition of “too dumb to live/come in out of the rain.”

Some quotes are made for blogs. This about about cheeseburgers is one of them.

As the Blogfather, I'm known for my elaborate collection of sweatpants.

For Andy Reid, it's cheeseburgers.

Let's start here. In this NFL Network video, Smith is asked about any good Andy Reid stories and he turns to cheeseburgers.

NFLN: Give me an Andy Reid saying. I know you got 'em.

Smith: He's a big cheeseburger guy. So he's always treating us to cheeseburgers. That's the one thing that's always coming out.

NFLN: What do you have to do to get a cheeseburger?

Smith: Just be on the team. You just have to be on the team and he's going to treat you to a cheeseburger.

This brings up one of the best Andy Reid quotes in his Kansas City tenure. Talking about his classic Tommy Bahama draft weekend shirts, he said: "You wear them and you can hide cheeseburgers underneath and no one will ever know."

Make sure you always watch the clip above with Reid saying "Cheeseburgers for everybody!"

Gotta respect a guy who enjoys a good cheeseburger.

“They’re coming to get you, Barbra!”

There is more than one version of why and/or how Marilyn posed in a burlap potato sack. The story is that Marilyn was once chastised by a female newspaper columnist for wearing a low-cut red dress to a party at the Beverly Hills Hotel. According to Marilyn, the columnist called her cheap and vulgar. Not stopping there, the writer then suggested that the actress would look better in a potato sack. So, Twentieth Century Fox decided to capitalize on the story by shooting some publicity stills of Marilyn in a form fitting burlap potato sack just to prove she would look sexy in anything. The photos were published in newspapers throughout the country.

Another story was that someone just made an off-the-cuff statement that Marilyn could make a potato sack look sexy and Twentieth Century Fox took the publicity stills to prove him right.






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Sadly not a day goes by when someone on social media doesn’t blast out some shoddily put together photoshop trying to show the tragic state of modern music lyrics. Not only are they painfully predictable, but to be quite honest, the overall sentiment couldn’t be further from the truth; and it’s time for what is perhaps some stinging reality for all of you lyric snobs out there. Like it or not, the so-called heroes of songwriting have on many occasions penned lyrics that are just as vapid and empty as those deemed uninspiring and lifeless in modern pop music.

To begin, a vast majority of the time, these image macros (no, they’re NOT memes) focus on one of two songs: Justin Bieber’s “Baby” and Beyoncé’s “(Run The World) Girls.”  There are a handful of exceptions to this rule, but these are the songs trotted out in nearly every case.  While some might want to believe these are representative of the catalogs of their respective artists, anyone who can look beyond bias knows this simply cannot be true.

Making matters worse, these cheap shots focus only on the chorus of those songs, yet most people of what we’ll call “The Grumpy Generation” are likely unaware of this, and assume it’s the entirety of the song. To finish off the point that these people are trying to make, in nearly every case they compare a verse section from an old song to these chorus sections, so naturally there will be a stark contrast. Anyone who knows anything about songwriting understands that there are massive structural and artistic differences between verses and choruses. Therefore, comparing one to the other (verses to choruses), especially across artists and generations, is simply working in untruths or for those hungry folks out there, comparing apples to bananas.

So, let’s take some of the more popular versions of this lazy music passion and actually make them comparable.

One of the most common is the comparison between the aforementioned Beyoncé song and pretty much anything by Queen, most often “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Now the latter is significant in the fact that there is no actual chorus to the song. So instead, let’s sample a handful of Queen choruses and see how they stack up.

Point made? Good. Let’s move on to one of the most hallowed song-writing teams ever: Lennon-McCartney. Yes, it’s bordering on sacrilege, but the oft-used juxtaposition between their writing (usually something from “Across The Universe”) to Bieber’s “Baby” is nothing short of nonsense. Let’s not forget that across their entire career, The Fab Four wrote their share of similarly predictable and uncreative lyrics:

Again, we are comparing choruses to one another, and just as much as those Beatles songs had other lyrics in them, the Bieber track did as well.  Refusing to allow such comparisons to exist on a level playing field is nothing more than willful ignorance and grasping for some sense of nostalgic superiority.

On the other side of the equation, to even remotely imply that there is a lack of quality writers in the modern music scene is something beyond laughable. Whether it’s the likes of Sharon Van Etten, Lionize, Warpaint or more well established performers like Beck, Tori Amos or Kanye West, both the mainsteam and underground overflow with brilliant lyricists. If you can get past any personal bias, the facts are there for your ears in great quantities.

Does this mean that Queen or The Beatles are somehow on the same level as today’s Pop Royalty? I don’t think anyone will make that argument, as there’s not much to support it. However, the reality remains that the constant bashing of pop lyrics is little more than lethargic curmudgeons who enjoy basking in nostalgia and yelling at kids to get off their damn lawns!

Joel Freimark hosts a daily music-related webseries HERE and you can follow his daily music musings and suggestions HERE as well.

Image: Pop2It

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