The Null Device

As part of VICE's "Kill Your Parents" issue, Jim Goad sets the record straight on a number of baby-boomer counterculture heroes:

He was many things … a First Amendment warrior, a womanizer, a hipster and a junkie … but the one thing a comedian is supposed to be—funny—he wasn’t. “Take away the right to say ‘fuck,’ ” came one of Lenny Bruce’s most famously self-serving lines, “and you take way the right to say, ‘fuck the government.’ ” Thanks, Lenny. We’re now allowed to say “fuck” in certain special circumstances. But the government fucked you harder. You turned rat on your drug-dealing friends, and it’s safe to assume your morphine overdose in 1966 was a hot shot delivered as street vengeance.

The Beatles were a great rock ’n’ roll band except they couldn’t sing, play their instruments, or keep a beat. Despite claims of being a “working-class hero” after he’d salted away millions, and in spite of his prophet-of-peace shtick even though he was an overweening sourpuss who couldn’t even get along with his bandmates or wives, this sanctimonious junkie is still embraced as a beacon of childlike truth-seeking. He was shot dead by precisely the sort of true believer his massive ego helped spawn. His murderer, Mark David Chapman, reportedly used to lead schoolchildren in singing a parody of his hero’s signature song: “Imagine there’s no John Lennon.” It wasn’t hard to do.

(via VICE) ¶ baby boomers contrarianism jim goad john lennon lenny bruce the beatles vice 0

New World Disorder has some unintentionally brilliant found hip hop lyrics. A representative sample:

we like all you ladies Lookin Sexy with a pepci
So dont look like your pussys tight man you know me
we can do it all night tell the brake of Dawn
But dont get me rong in the morning you got
Leave cause my mother will Bitch at me

Oh, and also via NWD, the latest Trucker Fags in Denial cartoon is up.

¶ comics found found poetry hip-hop jim goad teenage trucker fags in denial unintentionally hilarious 1

Über-misanthrope Jim "Answer Me!" Goad's new contribution to underground comics: Trucker Fags in Denial, co-authored with Jim Blanchard. With other episodes linked to from here. (Apparently it's soon to be a comic book from Fantagraphics, assuming they don't go under.)

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Rampaging redneck philosopher Jim Goad (of "Answer Me!" fame) on his time in the porn industry in Portland, Oregon, and the searing contempt he developed for the hypocritical polite fiction of "sex-positive" culture, and indeed anything else associated with the porn industry:

By and large, porn is stupid. Bad shitrock and bad haircuts and bad childhoods and bad, bad, bad taste. Its all a joke, told at its own expense. Pornography is little more than "Reality TV" without clothes.

(via FmH)

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