Pittsburgh rappers arrested for lyrics

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 4 Comments
Jamal Knox, Rashee Beasley and another unidentified person, in a grainy photo with no cutline courtesy of KDKA Pittsburgh

Jamal Knox, Rashee Beasley and another unidentified person, in a grainy photo with no cutline courtesy of KDKA Pittsburgh

Remember when Johnny Cash went to prison for confessing to a Reno-area murder in “Folsom Prison Blues?” I’m joking, of course: Johnny Cash was white. In unrelated news, two Pittsburgh rappers have been found guilty of intimidation of witnesses, conspiracy and making terroristic threats on the basis of a rap video posted on YouTube. Jamal Knox and Rashee Beasley are rappers in the same sense that they are adults, which is to say technically. But they did rap about violence against police officers in a song that mentioned two Pittsburgh cops by name. Both were sentenced to prison by Judge Jeffrey Manning, in what the Times calls a nationwide trend of prosecutors using rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials.

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“‘It’s me,’ someone says. It takes a moment to realize the words came from me.”

By Dan Brooks in Fiction 0 Comment
Charles Dickens, who would love Wattpad except for the part where he doesn't get paid

Charles Dickens, who would love Wattpad except for the part where he doesn’t get paid

The heading of this post is a quote from After 3, an online novel by Anna Todd serialized on Wattpad. I apologize for my poor scholarship, but I can’t tell if After 3 is the third part of one long novel titled “After” or the second sequel to the original. I’m new to this whole Wattpad thing, which I discovered via this article in the New York Times. It likens Wattpad to the serial fiction that dominated 19th-century literature, particularly in England. Like “The Old Curiosity Shop,” Wattpad novels progress in installments, reaching their readers not long after being written. Unlike “The Old Curiosity Shop,” no one gets paid for writing them. But readers can comment, so net improvement.

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Brooklyn artists live in marketing house, are marketing product

By Dan Brooks in New York 2 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddrQ5BPCcOk

Before you read this New York Times article about a communal house in Brooklyn that is also a new media company, you should know that the first person you encounter will be named Dickerman Cade Sadler III. Keep reading. It is important that you complete the article, in the same way it was important that the first Marines who entered Saddam Hussein’s palace search every room. Someday, history will need to understand this decadence. Welcome to the Clubhouse, a three-story house in Ditmas Park where “eight roommates, most of them musicians and artists, share meals and expenses, use a Google doc to keep track of their chores, and pitch in to shop for groceries and stock the bathrooms.” That probably sounds like a normal house to you, but it’s actually a brand/new media startup/final step in the substitution of lifestyle for art.

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“Phony experts on retainer” at Employment Policy Institute

By Dan Brooks in Epistemology 3 Comments
Thirty year-old Michael Saltsman, director of research for the Employment Policy Institute, whose face is gradually becoming evil

Michael Saltsman, director of research for the Employment Policy Institute, gradually becoming evil

Michael Saltsman has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Michigan, which qualifies him to be director of research at Employment Policy Institute. You may recognize EPI from virtually every argument over whether to raise the federal minimum wage, or from this New York Times article accusing it of being a purely political operation. The nonprofit has no full-time employees and pays 44% of its budget to the advertising firm Berman and Company, with which it shares an office. EPI pays Berman employees for the time they spend working on its research and advocacy programs, and it spends the rest of its budget on advertising. By all indications, EPI is a full-time disinformation-producing machine.

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Friday links! Passionate intensity edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment
Action Bronson, best and worst, unconvicted and full of passionate intensity

Action Bronson, best and worst, unconvicted and full of passionate intensity

The best lack all conviction, William Butler Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming,” while the worst are full of passionate intensity. He was talking about postwar Europe, but he might as well have described the world we would inherit a century later. Probably, Yeats’s claim is always true. You don’t get to be the worst without great confidence in what you’re doing, and the same qualities that makes the best better encourage them to doubt themselves. Today is Friday, and jerks continue to operate without a moment’s doubt. Won’t you waver along with me?

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