The Best Football Fan Raps →

I spent a lot of last week putting this together. Sadly, it required kind of a lot of research, but I was tasked with creating a comprehensive history of the NFL fan rap for Adult Swim.

It started as a thing players did for themselves in the 80’s — see the aforementioned “Super Bowl Shuffle” — and fell out of favor in the 90’s. That part has been documented before, but did you know that the modern era of football fan raps traces back to… Seattle in 2005? It was the perfect storm: The Seahawks in the Super Bowl for the first time, YouTube as a distribution means; the technology that meant that every fan in a bedroom could suddenly produce a track that sounded halfway competent.

From there, this shit is cray — there’ve probably been 5-6 new Giants/Patriots raps uploaded to YouTube per hoursince Championship weekend. If you want to see how the form has evolved from “Let’s Ram It” to “Arizona Diss Rap,” click the link, y’all.

The Road To Juggalo Recovery →

My name is Dan Solomon, and I am a Juggalo.

Well, like an alcoholic is always an alcoholic, I’m a Juggalo. I haven’t spent much time listening to ICP since I was 20 or so. I bought the Jack White single, though, and most of the songs that everybody made fun of, I thought were pretty funny. (Y’all, that “magnets: how the fuck do they work” line was a joke. You were laughing with them, you just didn’t realize it — which makes you the asshole, I’m pretty sure.)

Anyway. I never painted my face or anything, but Juggalos weren’t quite the same thing back then that they are now, so who knows how into it I’d have gotten if I’d been 19 years old in 2010? I always found it weird that there was so much Juggalo hate out there, in any case — not just because it’s got some seriously ugly classist/bullying undertones to it, in most instances, but because the group is a comedy group. They always were, and the butt of most of their jokes are themselves, so being all, “ICP is so stupid” always struck me as missing the point: these are the dudes whose own lyrics include gems like “What is a Juggalo […] / he’ll eat up Monopoly and shit out Connect Four” and “Fuck all 52 states!” They’re not expecting you to take them seriously.

So, I was bouncing some ideas around with my editor at Adult Swim a little while back, right around the time that this year’s crop of obnoxious first-person reports from the Gathering Of The Juggalos started coming out, and I wanted to write something that had fun with the idea of being a Juggalo, but which also was pretty firmly on their side. Hence, a 12-step program to help Juggalos leave the fold was born.

The comments section on this one is nuts, too. ICP haters seem to love it, and they talk all sorts of mean shit to the Juggalos who comment, but whatever — those people are assholes. I was honestly thrilled, though, to see so many positive comments from self-professed Juggalos. I’m glad they got it — it’s a gentle ribbing from somebody who understands, not an attack, and it was super fun to write (Cat Stevens, y’all!). Maybe the best part, though, was having an excuse to re-visit The Amazing Jekyll Brothers and The Great Milenko in the name of research.

So go on, Juggalos. It may not be a lifestyle you’ll be able to sustain forever, but I’m for you and not against you.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of the Cinema →

My first story for AdultSwim.com is up now. It is about the time last week that I went into a movie theater at 4 o’clock in the morning, having never read or seen any of the Harry Potter series and knowing nothing about the plot or the characters, and sat in the theater for 22 hours, alongside some of the most fanatical Harry Potter fans in the country, emerging as a full-fledged expert in the film series’ mythology.

(Yes, I know — I should really read the books, as they’re much better. But can you read 7 books of increasingly-preposterous length in a single 22-hour span while surrounded by laughing, cheering, and weeping fanatics? I have found no such opportunity to do so, so the Harry Potter series remains, for me, a film experience. But one with which I am now very familiar.)

11:33am: You know who I hate? Draco Malfroy. I’m not alone in this, either – Harry and Ron and Hermione hate him, too, so I think this officially makes me a Harry Potter fan, united with our heroes in hatred of that little blonde-haired prick. I want to throw Draco Malfroy into a Thunderdome-style arena with Prince Joffrey from Game Of Thrones and make them kill each other. Then the hippogriff can eat their corpses.

Insight like that available at the link!