Odd Future at Slim's, San Francisco

Attending an OFWGKTA show in these agitated and peaking moments is supposed to be my cue to wax off for paragraphs about OF jumping the shark into MTV segues, grotesquely off-base "black Juggalo" comparisons* by a XXL columnist (hmm, why does this link no longer function?), NPR providing just reasons for cancellation by publishing diary entries interspersed with somewhat reputable sources (challenging, really?), cosigns by rappers and moguls (Diddy removed his comment) and of course, references to Tipper Gore's war on vulgarity.

Fuck all this noise. I was there. Earl Sweatshirt was not. If I was 17, I'd say OF swagged that shit out. I'm 27 next month, so the show was mad dope.

* The XXL "Black Juggalo" editorial printed in full:

What if a group came along that was obviously a black variation on Insane Clown Posse, but no one seemed to notice or give a shit, because they were black, and because no one (who has a computer) knows enough about juggalos to say for certain whether or not someone actually is a juggalo, and because they’ve been championed by people who see themselves as being above listening to juggalo music. It looks like this is what’s happening with Odd Future.

Odd Future has been the talk of the hip-hop Internets for the past couple of weeks, especially amongst people who are constantly trying to figure out the next big thing and attach themselves to it, regardless of what it is. No shots at the late, great Combat Jack. Oddly enough (no pun intended), they didn’t merit inclusion on the cover of this year’s Freshmen Issue, the hilarious cover of which was revealed yesterday, even though it’s a well known fact that Odd Future is secretly signed to Interscope, one of the main pipelines to the cover of the Freshmen Issue and to the cover of XXL in general. I wonder if this was a mere matter of rank ineptitude by my benefactors at the dead tree version of XXL, like that time they included OJ da Juice Man (ayyyy) in the Freshman 10, despite the fact that he’d already been on the cover a few months prior(?!), and Wacka Flocka Flame ended up being the breakout star amongst Gucci Mane weed carriers, or if the TIs at Interscope didn’t want Odd Future on the cover of this issue, for whatever reason. They might not see people who read XXL – illiterate children, people in prison, men who like women of jurassic proportions (short arms and everything) – as being the primary demographic for Odd Future.

Odd Future made their big television debut the other day on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, or whatever it was called, and man was it the talk of the Internets. I can only imagine what it was like at the time on Black People Twitter. It must have been as obnoxious as when everyone all of a sudden starts talking about sports. Remember that time, a few years ago, when BET held some sort of awards show, and all of these ultra-obscure black entertainers (I’m talking Keith Sweat obscure) started trending, and white went all batshit? Up until that point, no one had been aware that Twitter is mostly used by black people, because black people tend to go on there at night, while people who work for a living are asleep. In the morning, there might be some weird shit like #uainthittingitright in the trending topics, but it’d be gone by 10 AM. These days, there’s enough black people on Twitter to dominate at all hours of the day and night. But that’s not why I wasn’t there during Odd Future’s performance on Fallon. I was probably busy either working like a Hebrew slave, self-medicating or making the most of this Reality Kings password, which somehow still works – which I guess could be included under self-medicating, but I like to keep my pr0n consumption and my alcohol consumption separate, because it makes me feel like a more well-rounded individual.

I didn’t get a chance to check out their performance until the next day. I awoke from my drink and fap-induced coma at the ass crack of one in the afternoon or whatever (which has been a real problem for me lately), logged on to the Internets, and that’s all anyone wanted to talk about. Seemingly every blog there ever was posted the video. People were still talking about it on Black People Twitter 12+ hours after the fact – which is like a week later in Internets. They don’t even talk about people who died for 12 hours, unless they died at night, and people were asleep, and so they didn’t get to pretend as if they give a shit. You would think that this Odd Future appearance on Fallon was roughly the equivalent of a circa ’93 Biggie Smalls making his television debut on that show Jon Stewart used to have on MTV, or whatever was big back in 1993. Let’s just say Martin, since I remember Biggie Smalls was once on an episode of Martin, and since I see this site is running huge, ridonkulous banner ads for Martin reruns. #culturalrelevancefail I hightailed it to Pitchfork to check out this video, out of a sincere interest to see something that good, and because I’ve been meaning to check out Odd Future anyway, since I read something in the Village Voice about how every song they ever made has to do with rape. Not that I find that kind of thing amusing, but I need to see for myself, like when my grandfather would purposely drive past the ho stroll on our way to church, back during the crack era.

The song Odd Future did on Fallon could have been all about rape, but it’s hard to say, what with the guy trying to rap through a ski mask, and jumping around all over the place like the monkey exhibit at the St. Louis Zoo. It could have been a song about that Jodie Foster movie The Accused, for all I know. I’ll have to reserve judgment on Odd Future until if/when I get a chance to hear them rap while standing still. In the meantime, I’m more concerned with the fact that they seem to exhibit juggalo tendencies. This first occurred to me when I saw them perform the other day on Fallon, jumping up on the furniture, getting all up in people’s faces, yelling at the top their lungs, which struck me as a real dick move, like cornering someone and them spraying them down with Faygo root beer. It occurred to me that you could probably run down the entire litany of juggalo characteristics and find some sort of connection with Odd Future. Insane Clown Posse, for example, has its origin in ’90s-era horrocore rap. I’ve heard Odd Future’s music described as horrorcore. I heard one of them even ate a roach, in the video that started that hilarious beef between Noz and eskay on Twitter the other day. Insane Clown Posse performs in Kiss-style face paint. The guy from Odd Future wore a ski mask on Fallon the other day. Odd Future is said to be obsessed with rape. A group of juggalos famously tried to rape Tila Tequila at last year’s annual Gathering of the Juggalos. Insane Clown Posse’s fanbase consists primarily of guys who live in their mother’s basements. Noz should probably consider moving back in with his parents, if he’s out here soliciting for donations like Lil Kim, or Jean Grae, who was trying to get money via PayPal before it was all trendy. (I see you, boo.) In fact, Nozologist that I am (nullus), I seem to recall him trying to bone up on Insane Clown Posse a while, for the purposes of contrarianism I’m sure, but he probably couldn’t bring himself to go through with it, because their music hit a little too close to home.

If I’d heard any music from Insane Clown Posse and Odd Future, other than the hilarious “Miracles,” and whatever that was Odd Future did on Fallon, I’m sure I could come up with even more comparisons. Indeed, I think it’s been so difficult for the media to discuss anything having to do with juggalos, because no one with the sense god gave geese wants to spend the time it would take to seriously engage with their music. They got some press, around the time when “Miracles” blew up, but it was short-lived. (This may have coincided with Noz’s sudden, brief interest in them.) This became clear to me a few weeks ago, when that congresswoman got shot at a Subway down in Arizona. A few days later, I was reading this epic report in the New York Times, which really was one of the more impressive things they’ve ever done, right up there with that Times magazine piece on Chris Matthews, and it was so obvious to me that the kid they were describing was a juggalo, but the Times failed to draw the connection, either because none of the umpteen people who contributed reporting to the story know Jack Schitt about pop culture, or because they were wary about assigning blame for such a heinous crime, for legal reasons. At one point, one of the guys Jared Lee Loughner went to high school with even discussed how frustrated Loughner would get with trying to understand how magnets work. (No bullshit, you can look it up yourself.)

You really had to read between the lines to get at the essence of that story, which was that this kid was a juggalo, who had a hard time getting with women. Because he was a juggalo, natch. His juggalo antics caused him to get thrown out of school, at which point he became obsessed with congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, similar to Robert De Niro’s obsession with Cybill Shepherd (who could blame him?) in the movie Taxi Driver. Apparently, this kid Loughner had met the congresswoman once before, at a campaign event in which he tried to ask her a question, but he didn’t get much of a response, because she couldn’t understand what he was trying to say – obviously because he was tongue tied, because he was smitten. Then he wrote her a letter apologizing. What a sucker. Normally, this is the point at which he would attempt to kill someone else, to impress her. Like her husband, who’s an astronaut, and obviously kind of a douche. He claimed he spoke to her while she was in a coma, like the rapist in the film Talk to Her (spoiler alert), and she told him he needed to go back into space. In Taxi Driver, it was the senator Charles Palatine, whom Cybill Shepherd worked for. John Hinckley, Jr. tried and (sadly) failed to kill Ronald Reagan, in an attempt to impress the aforementioned Jodie Foster, inspired by Taxi Driver. (See, it’s all connected!)

The difference between a juggalo and a regular nutjob is that a juggalo won’t even bother trying to kill the powerful man who stands between himself and his object of desire, which, on a Freudian level, might actually convince a woman to have sex with you. (I don’t want to hear any objection from women on this, unless they’ve had any actual experience with it.) The juggalo has been too hard up for too long. The juggalo is the American equivalent of those Japanese guys who spend their entire lives locked in their bedrooms, collecting Hello Kitty merchandise and fapping to weird anime pr0n, which, wouldn’t you know, often includes depiction of rape. Or so I’ve been told. We laugh at those poor Japanese guys, because they’re genuinely hilarious and because we’d like to think that there isn’t an analog here in the US, via “xenophobia.” But obviously there is. The juggalo movement, which has been around at least since I was in high school (I’m dangerously close to 30, has never been such a prevalent force in our society. That song “Miracles” was as big a hit as anything, in an age when the likes of Cake (2011 Cake) and Nicki Minaj can top the Billboard 200. The Gathering of the Juggalos was all over the news this past summer, in part due to the attempted sexual assault on Tila Tequila. (I wonder how this assault compared in severity to the “brutal, sustained” sexual assault on Lara Logan. Which struck me as similar in nature. But that’s a topic for another discussion.) And to top it all off a juggalo just attempted to assassinate a US congresswoman. I shutter to think what’s next. This could be a hot summer. Women might want to think twice about attending this year’s Gathering of the Juggalos, unless they’re desperate fat women.