ByronCrawford.com

The Shock Doctrine: Book Review

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
by Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein is the woman who wrote No Logo, which is considered a classic among broke-ass college age malcontents. Her latest, The Shock Doctrine, begins with a visit with a Canadian woman who fell victim to some insane scientist at a university in Canada back in the 1950s.

No, he didn't sedate her, prop her up against a chair and make sweet passionate love to her. That would have actually been preferable to what he did, if not genuinely enjoyable. (I'm not advocating that sort of thing, I'm just saying.) Instead, he subjected her to all sorts of electroshock and sensory deprivation, with the goal of erasing her memory.

The idea was that he could fix her personality by getting rid of the old one and then creating a new one, using audio tape. (I know.) It only half-worked. He managed to wipe out much of her old memory, but after that she was pretty much worthless. Her teeth were all shattered from the electroshock and her brain had turned to mush. Good for giving blow jobs, but not much else.

Klein uses this unfortunate ordeal as a metaphor for the economic "shock therapy" rendered in such Latin American shit holes as Chile and Bolivia by Milton Friedman and his gang of Chicago Boys, but it turns out there's also a literal connection, in the sense that in order to push such BS neoliberal economic policies on an unwilling populace, the tIs in said shit holes would often have to hook people up to the juice.

The N Word: Book Review

The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, And Why
by Jabari Asim

I hadn't planned on reading Jabari Asim's The N Word, but I just so happened to stumble upon while I was in a book store the other day and figured what the fuck. I was there looking for a copy of Michael Eric Dyson's silly new Know What I Mean?: Reflections on Hip-Hop, which I reviewed the other day, and I'd spent quite a bit of time looking for it in the music section.

I was about ready to say fuck it and cop something else, but then I figured I'd better check way in the back of the store where they keep most of the rest of the books by black authors. Come to find out, it wasn't even on the shelf with the rest of the books dealing with black issues, but rather on the sociology shelf, right next to all of the books on feminism, which must be where they're keeping all of the black books that aren't written by people who used to be in prison these days.

Not too far from the Dyson book, on the same shelf, was a copy of Asim's The N Word. Of course it caught my eye, because you 'bags know I can't help but be amused with anything contentious having to do with race. And the n-word has been in the news a lot this year, what with the Michael Richards incident, and the thing with Don Imus, and the NAACP trying to bury the dreaded slur once and for all. How serendipitous that a book having to do with usage of the term should be released at a time like this.

If I would've been thinking, I would've picked it up and flipped through it a bit just to make sure it wasn't some bullshit someone threw together, like these Michael Eric Dyson books. With non-fiction books in particular, you can get a pretty good idea of what it's going to be like in just a few minutes. But like I said, I had been in the store for a minute at this point, and I tend to relish anything having to do with racial strife the same way Eskimos enjoy fish. So yeah, I picked up a copy.

I think I may have flipped through some of it that day or the next day, and then I finished it off another day, after I'd spent the four hours it takes to read the Dyson book. I reviewed the Dyson book here on this site and then a few days later I posted about both of them on my Vox blog, where I mentioned that neither of them was particularly worth a shit. Jabari Asim himself must have stumbled upon this post while googling himself, because the other day I got an angry email from him wanting to know why I was so disappointed in his book.

Know What I Mean: Book Review

Know What I Mean?: Reflections on Hip-Hop
by Michael Eric Dyson

Perhaps you've heard of Michael Eric Dyson. In the past 10 years or so, he's put out about 15 books, including that one about Tupac Shakur that you could get for free if you picked up a copy of that god-awful Thug Angel documentary. I actually did pick one up, since the whole thing at Best Buy was probably a bit cheaper than you'd pay for the book by itself at a Barnes and Noble.

Up until just now it was the only Michael Eric Dyson book I've ever read. A couple of years ago, I meant to check out his book about how Bill Cosby is obviously batshit and would be one of these old black people you always hear about dying in house fires, except for the fact that he's worth roughly a gozillion dollars, but I figured I got the gist of it from his numerous appearances on TV talk shows over the years.

And really, a TV talk show is probably the best way to experience Michael Eric Dyson. I don't know if he sits around all day popping No Doz and poring over a thesaurus or what, but suffice it to say that he shows up to these damn things in full-on Cornholio mode. For a while now I've been convinced that a lot of the effect has to do with the ridonkulous level of speed and clarity with which he speaks, but still. I wouldn't want to take away too much from the guy. Lord knows I can barely order a pizza.

God Is Not Great: Book Review

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
by Christopher Hitchens

About halfway through reading Christopher Hitchens' new God Is Not Great it occurred to me that the book is ultimately kinda pointless. If I had to guess, I'd say the vast majority of the people who read it already realize that religion is bullshit, and I can't imagine very many people who aren't already of that point of view reading it and coming to that conclusion. That said, I'm always game for a good pile-on, and God Is Not Great is most certainly that.

The gist of Christopher Hitchens' argument against religion is that a) it's bullshit, in the sense that it's usually either invented out of whole cloth or "revealed" to someone who was probably just insane, b) it's no longer nearly as relevant, since we have modern science to explain, for example, what exists beyond the earth's atmosphere and why it rains when it does, and c) it's evil, in the sense that it's wreaked so much havoc on mankind throughout the ages and has been a general hindrance to the development of human understanding.

In three or four separate chapters, Hitchens goes to great lengths, with a barely disguised sense of glee, to describe just how full of shit the world's major religions really are. If you've spent any amount of time debating religion, my guess is that you're probably familiar with most of his major points. Basically, the Bible and the rest of these religious texts are full of shit that couldn't possibly happen, and if you actually take the time to research them, they're obviously just shit people made up and/or cribbed from various other religious text.

One thing I found especially interesting was a bit in the chapter on Islam in which he describes how it's arguably more bullshit than either Judaism or Christianity. Not that it matters one way or the other, but still. I realize it's anathema on the Internets to suggest that, given any two things, one could actually be better or worse than the other, but I think he makes a pretty good case for Islam being the worst of the world's major religions, which is a conclusion I arrived at a long time ago.

Similarly, if you've followed the news lately, I don't think I need to explain to you his argument for why religion is fucking up everything. Abroad, you've got crazed Arabs driving burning jeeps into airports. Meanwhile, back at home, you've got their crazed (though at least not particularly violent) counterparts building museums to explain to children how the world only came into existence 6,000 years ago, never mind the existence of dinosaur bones, which were obviously just placed here to test our faith.

Elsewhere in the book, he anticipates several arguments against his case against religion, and it's here where I think his argument goes a bit flimsy. For example, he tries to claim that while Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., an ordained Baptist minister, was our country's greatest civil rights leader, that doesn't really count because he wasn't a Christian, the reason being that he ran with a lot of godless communist types and was known to bang white bitches two at a time. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Also, there's a bit where he claims that this country isn't nearly as Christian as you'd think, since people are naturally inclined to lie about their religious beliefs to fit in with the crowd, and since most surveys that ask people about their religious beliefs are skewed to make more people seem religious than there genuinely there are. I don't doubt that this is the case, but if it is, it would be cool if he'd conducted his own survey, to his own specifications, that really did show that this is the case.

For the most part though, I enjoyed the book, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in the subject matter with the caveat that it's a bit more intellectually rigorous than it needs to be. It's not so much that it's hard to understand what he's talking about, but there's quite a few ultra-obscure literary references that you get the idea are only included to prove just how much smarter he is than everyone else. As if.

Total Chaos: Book Review

Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop
Edited by Jeff Chang

Though it was published by a different company, Jeff Chang's new Total Chaos is being put forth as a companion to his Can't Stop Won't Stop, obviously in hopes that at least some of the people who ran out and copped that will run out and cop this. Where as Can't Stop Won't Stop was billed as a history of the hip-hop generation, Total Chaos deals with the art and aesthetics of hip-hop. However, if you were under the impression that Total Chaos is the book where Jeff Chang finally discusses rap music, then you'd be sadly mistaken.

I reviewed Can't Stop Won't Stop when it was released in paperback last year and one of the main issues I had with it was that there was hardly any discussion of the actual music. The only two albums I recall being discussed at length were Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Ice Cube's Dead Certificate, and even in those cases the discussion dealt more with PE and Ice Cube's run-ins with the Jewish and Asian communities respectively rather than any artistic merit they may have had one way or the other.

Similarly, while Total Chaos purports to deal with the art and aesthetics of hip-hop, it's view of what hip-hop is seems to be anything other than rap music. Having devoted hours and hours of my life that I'll never get back to Can't Stop Won't Stop, I already suspected this was the case. But Chang confirmed my suspicions in the book's intro, in which he suggests that Total Chaos would deal more with rap music more, except that so much has already been written about it while so very little has been written about the various other forms of hip-hop art.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell: Book Review

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
by Tucker Max

I read a few of Tucker Max's stories a long, long time ago, maybe even before he was on MTV. I remember thinking they were hilarious, but I never read any more of them until recently, when I picked up a copy of this new book of his. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is an anthology of Tucker Max stories written from between the late '90s and 2005.

If you're not familiar with Tucker Max, his schtick basically involves consuming potentially lethal amounts of alcohol and then finding broads to hook up with. Granted this is the jist of pretty much every story every d-bag frat boy ever told since the beginning of time, but Tucker Max seems to have a unique gift for storytelling.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, the guy gets into some fucked up shit. I mean, Stephen King can tell a story, but how many times has Stephen King purposely jizzed in a girl's eye? Probably not very many. Tucker Max does all the time - or at least he claims. In fact, if these stories are to be believed Tucker Max should either be dead or in jail by now.

Because it's anthology of shorter stories rather than a novel or something, I'll just list a few of my favorites, not unlike I did with that Toure book last year:

-The one where he blows enough of a load in a girl's mouth to cause her to choke, and then breaks her ribs giving her the Heimlich Maneuver. Then he takes her to a hospital, where a doctor informs him that if you do the Heimlich right, you're supposed to break a rib. Bonus!

-The one where he bangs a fat girl on a dare, then throws her clothes out of a window and tells her she either has to climb out of the window to get them, or run really fast through his apartment so that his friends won't see how disgusting she is.

-The time where finally convinces his girlfriend to do anal, but uses way too much AstroGlide. The girl shits on his dick, which causes him to vomit, which causes her to vomit, which causes his friend who's hiding in the closet filming the whole thing to vomit as well.

-The one where he gets fucked up on absinthe, goes home with a girl and agrees to park her car for her, but ends up crashing it into a donut shop. He takes off on foot, runs several blocks and wakes up the next morning in a park with a dog licking vomit from his hair.

-The one where he has to decide whether to bang the girl with cervical cancer, who also happens to be carrying his child, or the one who's married and just had a miscarriage a few days prior, but also happens to have huge fake tits. (Of course he goes with the latter.)

And so on and so forth this thing goes for a good 250+ pages of drunken debauchery. The only story I didn't care for as much is the one where his conscience starts to get to him after a girl stops by his apartment to blow him before going out with another guy. I can see the role this story plays in the overall arc here, but I didn't find it that amusing as a story unto itself.

My other complaint, and this isn't so much a complaint, but I wonder how much of this you can read for free over the Internets. Personally, I find it much easier to read from a book than to read from a computer, but if you don't have the $12 to spare, it looks like you can read quite a bit of this at the Tucker Max website. Either way, I'd definitely recommend you check his shit out. Nullus.

Other People's Property: Book Review

Other People's Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in America
by Jason Tanz

Q: Who's down with O.P.P.?

A: White people, natch!

No but really, so many white people these days love hip-hop, but of course their relationship with the form is going to be a lot more complicated since they are, after all, cracka-ass crackas. Jason Tanz' Other People's Property is a sort of history white people's various interactions with hip-hop over the years.

The book begins with a sort of memoir-sy take on the author's own history as a fan of hip-hop as well as his various interactions with black people growing up in the Pacific Northwest and going to college at Brown University. (Obviously there aren't very many black people either in Tacoma, Washington or wherever Brown is.)

As a kid, Tanz has an issue where his one black friend calls him a Jew and an issue where he mocks his black busdriver. At Brown, he gets called a white devil by the chick from Digable Planets, who I'm pretty sure is not even black herself. He also gets harrassed for wearing a Malcolm X hat on campus. Aww...

The bulk of the rest of the book consists of Tanz traveling to places to chronicle the various ways hip-hop has expanded out from the inner city and into places like the rich crackety-crack commuter suburbs of New York, lily white Green Bay, Wisconsin, a nerd convention in Bellvue, Washington, and even, god forbid, Canada.

As amusing and informative as some of these are, it's true that the people Tanz chooses to cover don't necessarily represent the vast majority of white kids in this country who listen to hip-hop. In general, Tanz has a tendency to characterize white hip-hop fans as tourists rather with race issues rather than genuine lovers of the form.

Tom Breihan, for one, is pissed. In the review of O.P.P. he did for the Village Voice the other day, he wonders aloud whether or not white people who grew up in the suburbs (of Baltimore, presumably) have just as much claim to hip-hop as black kids from the inner city, since they did, after all, grow up listening to hip-hop.

Tanz doesn't really delve into that issue one way or the other, but, to his credit, it could be that it never occurred to him that there were people who thought like that. Which makes enough sense to me. Just because you don't view your own life as part of an overall narrative of cultural appropriation doesn't mean that it isn't.

Overall, I thought Tanz did a pretty good job of exploring white people's history in hip-hop. At just over 200 pages, O.P.P. is less extensive than its title would have you believe, but it hits on most of the main issues you'd like to see covered in a way that I thought was informative and yet still fairly amusing at times.

The Alphabet of Manliness: Book Review

The Alphabet of Manliness
by Maddox

Internets legend Maddox is the creator of the Best Page in the Universe. Perhaps you've heard of it. Released earlier this summer, his first book the Alphabet of Manliness reached as high as number 2 on the New York Times Best Seller list, albeit in some obscure category that no one really checks.

Namely, the Alphabet of Manliness is a sort of advice book for men, split up into chapter by letters of the alphabet. For example, A is for Ass-Kicking, B is for Boners, and so on and so forth. It's a bit different from the way his site is organized, and you get the idea that this was the publisher's idea.

The book only spans a little over 200 not so tightly-packed pages, and yet it's still split up into 26 different chapters - the result being that some of the best chapters are shorter than you'd like them to be while a few other ones could have just as easily been left on Maddox' hard drive or whatever.

Furthermore, each chapter is split up into subsections and bullet points and lists and illustrations and what have you, as if anyone who would read a book by Maddox is too ADD to stay focused for more than two or three consecutive paragraphs of text at a time. I wonder though if that's really the case.

Hell, I enjoy the guy's shit and I can read like the wind.

It's the rare occasion that I actually laugh while reading a book, even if it's supposed to be funny, but there a few points while reading the Alphabet of Manliness where I damn near fell out of my chair.

Easily the best chapter - and I've seen this noted in a few other reviews - is one called "Obedience," which is a sort of guide to training a woman as if she was a dog.

For example:

Feeding her filler foods (i.e. Taco Bell) may cause parasites to invade her body. If you suspect that this is the case, have a stool sample checked for worms by a qualified physician.

But my absolute favorite line from the book is this bit from a section having to do with feeding a baby hot sauce:

The baby seemed like he was loving it at first, but suddenly he started crying, so I did what I always do when babies cry: I put him in the garbage can. His mom started yelling and screaming, then she tried to punch me, so I stepped to the side and she accidentally tripped and fell down four flights of stairs, and then she accidentally got peed on.

While the book is ostensibly split up into 26 discrete topics, the chapters seem to alternate between humorous descriptions of manliness (e.g. a man hammering nails with his boner, or Chuck Norris digesting someone telekenetically) and how awful women are, the awesomeness of (some) boobs notwithstanding.

I probably would've liked it that much more had the content adhered a bit more faithfully to the content of his site, but what Maddox and his publisher have managed to come up with isn't such a bad compromise either - though the idea of compromise in general doesn't strike me as particularly manly. Hmm...

Bling: Book Review

Bling: The Hip-Hop Jewelry Book
by Reggie Osse and Gabriel Tolliver

I suppose it's too bad for Bling: The Hip-Hop Jewelry Book authors Reggie Osse and Gabriel Tolliver that the book is being released amidst this mini-backlash against hip-hop jewelry, what with Russell Simmons out shilling for those DeBeers bloodsuckers.

Still, you get the idea that hip-hop's fascination with all things shiny isn't going anywhere anytime soon. As Don Spears pointed out in the ever-prescient In Search of Goodpussy, it's just in a jig's nature to walk around with as much money on his back (if not in the bank or elsewhere) as possible.

Indeed bling, as it's come to be known, has been just as much of a hallmark of hip-hop culture as malt liquor or wanton misogyny going all the way back to the days when jigs like Kurtis Blow rocked skimpy little used car salesmen chains with anchor medallions and such.

As revealed in Bling, the early hip-hop figures took their fashion cues from the likes of the notorious Harlem drug kingpin Nicky Barnes as well as the Hell's Angels - both of which were patrons of a rather eccentric-looking fellow named Tito, who was one of the original hip-hop jewelers.

During the Golden Age of the mid-to-late '80s, once that crack money started rolling in, jigs began rocking gold fronts (which, as it turns out, weren't invented in the South) and big-ass "dookie" rope chains. Bling has lots of great pictures of this bullshit.

Then, for a brief minute in the late '80s, gold jewelry went out of fashion in favor of shit like beaded necklaces with Africa medallions and such. Fortunately (for the Jewish community), that seemed to last all of about two weeks before bling bling was back and bigger than ever.

Nowadays jigs are rocking platinum chains, expensive-ass watches, increasingly ridonkulous "grills" and all sorts of foolishness. Bling bling has become prevalent in our culture to the point where the term bling itself is actually in some dictionaries.

Bling the book does a pretty good job of charting the rise of hip-hop jewelry all the way from its lowly beginnings all the way up to its current ridonkulosness. The actual information about jewelry didn't strike me as interesting, but fortunately most of this is just hilarious pictures of jewelry-clad jigs.

Two things: The part having to do with Jacob the Jeweler was pretty skimpy, given his status as hip-hop's foremost supplier of bling bling/money launderer. And Paul Wall, who's done as much as anyone else to popularize grills, might not even be mentioned.

Otherwise though, Bling makes for amusing-enough hip-hop coffee table reading. I could give a rat's ass about jewelry - hip-hop or otherwise - but I still find myself flipping through it from time to time to chuckle at the sheer level of ignorance on display.

Bling links:

• Bling @ MySpace
• Bling @ Amazon

And after the jump is a Music Choice News segment on the Bling launch party, featuring the two old jigs who wrote it.

Armed Madhouse: Book Review

Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War
by Greg Palast

You'll recall that Greg Palast is the British (but not really) reporter who broke the story on how the Bush gang stole the 2000 election by having thousands of black people dropped from the voter rolls down in Florida. Back in January, I reviewed his other book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

His new Armed Madhouse is similar, but with updated information for 2006. In fact, if you've never read either of them, I'd say just pick up this new one. It deals with a lot of the same shit as the last one, i.e. economics, globaliztion, class warfare, oil, Hugo Chavez, elections, and so on and so forth.

The bulk of the book and - fortunately - the most interesting part has to do with oil, the war in Iraq, terrorism, and what have you.

Of course at the center of it all is oil. To use the parlance of our time, the US decided to "go in" to Iraq because a) Iraq has a shiteload of oil, and b) Saddam Hussein is an insane bitch, and who knows what he might do with said oil or the "guap" it generates.

Only thing is, after 9/11, the US couldn't decide exactly how to go in. Colin Powell's state department had its own plan which involved "going in," tossing out Saddam, and setting up a state-controlled oil company - all in the space of something like 90 days. Obviously that never happened.