Seven Red

1) Random Things I Don’t Want to Say on Facebook

A. I’m pretty happy about all the snow the South is getting, since we’ve barely had eight inches in Chicago this winter, total. Every time they describe another southern snowstorm, I smile, and even chuckle a little.

B. When foodies tell everybody what they’re making for dinner, I kinda roll my eyes a little bit and mouth the words “Fuck’s sake.” Also, people who post which bar or restaurant they’re going to. I know people probably roll their eyes when I post more 50-picture albums of my kids, though, so I guess we’re even.

C. Some people I know and respect are, surprisingly, name-dropping motherfuckers. Really. It’s beneath you.

D. Whenever Project Runway is on, I want to post “I have to question the taste level” as a status update, but then I forget, and then I don’t care.

E. Some people I know and respect are, surprisingly, pretty self-congratulatory in a way that makes me mildly uncomfortable. Isn’t it a little like walking into a crowded room and saying “Hey everybody! Here’s this thing I want to say that shows you all how great I am!” Or are people supposed to behave this way? Have I been wrong all along that there’s something distasteful and anti-social about that? Cuz it seems like people do it, like, ay-lot, and it seems like I always scrunch my nose up and pull my shoulders in when they do.

F. I’ve hidden posts on Mafia Wars and other such shite. Now they’re starting to use their status updates to tell me about it. I feel like joining the game. To kill them.

G. I’m kinda pleased that some people who always struck me as affected IRL retain their affectations in Facebook prose, but the sudden seeming authenticity of that renders their previous affectation less annoying, even though it remains affectation. Curious.

H. Facebook Axiom: You’re the only one of your high school friends who has really changed.

I. The way some people post music videos, it reminds me of that friend you had in high school (who hasn’t changed, by the way) who always tried to put music on in the car because he wanted you to like it too, and he’d play it off like he was trying to have a conversation with you, but would really be waiting for you to comment on how good the music is, which was always clearly signaled by the fact that he kept nudging the volume up a little for every minute you ignored the awesomeness of his new favorite song, even while acting all casual about it, so you finally had to say “Oh, what’s this?” and “It’s pretty good,” just to get him to stop that annoying behavior. Yeah, some people who post eight or nine music videos a day are like that.

Speaking of which.

2) Search Engine (or, The Hard-Headed Never Learn) – Some of the search terms that people use to find their way to Seven Red are hilarious. But my favorite so far is the person from Albuquerque who typed the following into Google: ‘”method man” “carpet get” explain.’ That led our New Mexico friend to this post on The Wackness, which cites the lyrics from Biggie and Method Man’s song The What?, to wit, “No question, I be comin’ down and shit / Yo I gets rugged as a muthafuckin’ carpet get.” Now, it would seem to me that the “explanation” for this verse could be pretty clear. Carpets get tore up (from the floor up, as it were). But more, no? In the early-to-mid 90′s, the term “rugged” was much favored in East Coast hip hop. Often paired with “raw” (as in EPMD’s Crossover “I speak for the hardcore/ Rough, rugged, and raw…” and later in The What, “Ninety-four, rugged, raw/ Kickin’ down your goddamn door”), the term was both a synonym for “tough,” and designated a style of rap that hadn’t yet been assimilated by the music industry. Its use in this case could also be a typical Method Man joke, switching from the signified to the signifier mid-line: “I gets rugged” turns back to the signifier (“rug”), from which it’s a short step to the new signified (“carpet”). We’ve already seen something like this in the lyrics from Protect Ya Neck (I mean ooh/ Yo check out the flow/ Like the Hudson or PCP when I’m dustin/ N*ggaz off/ Because I’m hot like sauce/ The smoke from the lyrical blunt makes me *uunh*), where the last word should be the word “cough” (rhyming with “off” and “sauce”) but Method switches it up to the actual sound of a cough (“uunh”), which rhymes with blunt, thereby introducing a new rhythm.  I’ve mentioned this moment before, largely because that simple transformation from the word cough to the sound of the cough is, for me, one of the singular genius moments in the maturation of hip hop lyrics, together with Rakim’s development of multi-word, multisyllabic rhymes that extend past the couplet (“The only time I stop is when/ Somebody drop and then/ Bring ‘em to the front cuz my rhyme’s the oxygen”). So that’s my explanation for our Google friend, but far more amusing is the situation that would have caused the search in the first place. So, our friend is sitting around listening to the song, hears the lyric “Yo I gets rugged as a muthafuckin’ carpet get,” and says “Hmm. What does that mean? I know, I’ll go Google it! Maybe somebody will be able to explain!” I kinda love that. So, there you go if you’re still searching, New Mexico.

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