#ok so this started as a music rec thing and somehow became a whole ass essay about the unsleeping city and cities and what cities can be

[churchandstateofbeing]

anyone who ever loved unsleeping city ever NEEDS to listen to rainbow connection from the fucking. muppet movie (trust me) and new york i love you but you’re bringing me down by LCD Soundsystem (this one works best if you’ve seen chapter 2 but it works well w just season 1)

sometimes i turn on one of these two songs to just Think about unsleeping city because as someone who was also born and raised in a massive city that i love with my whole heart and soul it just makes me so full of emotion and i recommend this experience wholeheartedly. my thoughts and feelings about my city are so complicated and the unsleeping city is genuinely the only piece of media ive ever seen that really Got it. cities can feel so heartless and massive but also so magical and fantastic and full of life and hope. possibilities. big cities are about dreams and people and communities, but that means that they can’t stop themselves from changing, for better or for worse. ricky and iga and alejandro and the immigrant experience, the joy and beauty and family and community that a city can be for those who dare to dream. when puck tells misty to remember who her people are, he doesn’t understand that fairy was never hers, that the city is where she feels safe and free and alive. kingston’s elderly mother making him breakfast each morning and sneaking tupperwares into his pockets. it is a beautiful thing.

and sometimes you have to watch that beautiful this killing itself so slow as things and people change, watching the places you love close and the people in power steal them away from under you, when the city feels hostile and too big and lonely. kingston and iga walking around as the new york that they love feels like it’s getting stolen out from underneath them, as stores close or family becomes distant, being confused and hurt and sad as what they remember becomes fainter and the people around them forget what it once was. kingston being willing to kill pete if it means the city will be safe, leaving liz behind, choosing new york over the individual people around him ten times out of ten because it isn’t even a question; the betrayal he feels when epona attacks him in the subway. cody throwing ninja stars at billboards and yelling at construction workers because his mall is going to be destroyed and that’s his world. pete scrolling through his phone with a slice of pizza. sofia doing anything she can to invite people over or avoid going home, because her home is empty. sofia failing to fight the angels to get her husband back because he needs to watch the deer, cutting off her family because they’ve betrayed her so deeply. kugrash reading the letter in david’s office. cities really are easy to hate sometimes, because not every person and community is kind or good or noble, but there’s an illogical and impossible loyalty you feel even when it feels like the buildings will fall down and crush you, covered in this sick oppressive system on a hallowed holy ground, artificial and dirty and so big it’ll swallow you whole. and sometimes you have to accept that things are how they are, but you know that somewhere in here is the ability to fight and change and grow and be together and support one another- pete and nod at the diner and the museum, kingston opening his apartment so pete can get back on his feet, pete saving priya from the burning building and forgiving kingston on the train, ricky refusing to be anything but a good person even when things suck; kugrash traveling around nod on wally’s shoulders and saying it’s okay that you don’t forgive me and driving with esther to see her mother in the park and eating the bagel because even though he was horrible before he wants to be better and he believes he can be; everyone giving their spells to help alejandro catch the train and save nod; saving santa and willy and em and the art show guests and the bodega customers and la gran gata not because they have to but because they can. and while there are never easy solutions, justice can be served and your dreams can become reality- pete taking control of his reality, making his body and his magic his own; rowan talking to the american dream, you are my love and my only true love; sofia at the empire state building- there really is something up there if you go up to look for it, there are people who will fight with you, it is what it is and it is what it could be- the city is almost impossible to love if you aren’t aware that it loves you back, and it does, it does, it does.

[erlangs]

kpop recs

okaaay so i was bored and wanted to procrastinate so i thought why not??? keep in mind that this list isn’t exhaustive and there are probably more recs out there but here are just some of my favorites + why i would rec them!! a lot of the recs are on the popular side of things too but i also tried putting in groups that not everyone know of / listen to already ( i put the more popular groups down the bottom btw ).

day6: day6!!!! day6!!! i got into them like over a year after their debut lmao so i was a lil late but damn am i glad that i started listening to them?? they’re more krock than kpop probably but honestly....pls listen to day6.... a lot of people have been saying that some of their songs feel like anime intros too and i would agree?? like some of their songs would fit v v well into shonen anime intros tbh esp probs like sports anime? ANYWAY, they have a variety of songs like they have different sounds for some of their things but i think they still have a v distinctive day6 feel it’s just a matter of preference which sort of sound you like better? honestly, i would rec all their songs but i think for the purpose of this list my rec for them would be letting go (놓아 놓아 놓아). even without context the music video feels so Raw and Deep too imo but...with context lmao they left a keyboard untouched whenever there are scenes of them playing as a band and that’s bc one of their members left and that always makes me emotional. also, congratulations was their debut and you were beautiful is a continuation of that mv wise which i think is cool af. personal rec though? both tracks from the every day6 march ( how can i say is the title track for that one ). 

dreamcatcher: ok so as i write this they’ve only debuted like a couple of months ago but goddamn i love their concept. here’s a fun fact: they debuted on friday the 13th with a song and mv bearing a horror concept which is??? sick af??? their debut mv chase me basically is about the girls as ghosts haunting this place and it is SO COOL. ofc tho, trigger warning for horror!! i believe that the mv is part of the trilogy, and here is the second part of it called good night. the chase me mv i think is the BEST but i really really love good night as a song too. also !! they have rock sounds which is really cool!! ( also, pls listen to yoohyeon, sua and siyeon covering winner’s really really. )

laboum: MY GIRLS WHO DESERVE SO MUCH. i....honestly don’t even know what to rec for this list just bc i like everything they’ve done?? some i do like more than others though, but i think it also kind of depends on your taste and what you like?? if you like kinda like that cute concept then i would def recommend shooting love?? honestly, i myself am kind of like...picky about cute ish concepts just bc a lot of them seem to blur together but i really like shooting love?? it’s such a fun mv and is such a bop. if you’re here for something slower, though, give fresh adventure a listen. and pls support their latest mv ( as i write this ) hwi hwi which is such a catchy song i’m crying.

loona: they’re doing this thing where they’re releasing info about a member every month this year and they’re letting their members come up with a debut song and mv one by one until all their members are out to public. i think it’s a really cool concept too and they seem really really promising. i would recommend watching each of their individual debut mvs ( hyunjin’s around you is my favorite, but watch them all tbh ) and i still can’t get over how much i love their mv ( not featuring all their members tho as not everyone is “released” yet ) love & live.

pentagon: i....love them??? HONESTLY i have no idea what it is about them that makes me love them so much?? sometimes i’m like pls @ them but i really love them and i think their debut was really Solid too?? it’s an mv called gorilla and it just....really impressed me for a debut mv?? their second title track is called can you feel it and they also they have a super cute mv called pretty pretty lmaooo. in their second ep though ( five senses, with can you feel it as title track ) i really like the song engine!! if you like slower and chiller songs, give beautiful a listen too. the mv isn’t like a Spectacular concept or anything but i just love these boys and how much of cute losers they are.

kard: as i’m writing this they have currently not yet debuted but !! they released three project singles that are all such BOPS HONESTLY. kard is a coed kpop group with some really cool sounds. i’m just gonna list all three project singles here because i def think you should listen to all of them esp bc they’re kind of a trilogy song wise?? their first one is oh nana, followed by don’t recall ( a personal fave ) and their most recent one is called rumor. there are v interesting fan theories about the mvs too, especially for don’t recall.

triple h: they’re a project unit featuring hyuna and pentagon’s hui & e’dawn and their debut is!! really something!! their debut mv is called 365 fresh and holy fuuuck. trigger warning for blood, bruises, violence, murder and suicide, though, so please keep that in mind if you plan on watching. if not, the song in itself is such a Fresh song. i love the entire vibe of their entire 199x ep too.

vixx: kings of dance and vocals, ngl. i swear that they just get better and better and better and every time they have a comeback ever since like chained up they just get even fucking better somehow??? fantasy i really really love too and for the longest time it was my favorite song of theirs but then they recently dropped shangri la which is honestly....quite Something Else. i have admittedly not listened to many of their non title tracks either but i really like black out!!

f(x): i’ll be honest and say that i haven’t really listened to much of f(x) other than their 4 walls era but i love that era?? i love the mv to 4 walls too and i would 10/10 rec it. though honestly pls give the entire album a listen and personally, my favorite song from the album is deja vu.

blackpink: goddamn these girls got popular real quick. honestly one of my fave girl groups though I LOVE THEM SO MUCH and though boombayah i think is officially their debut mv whistle is honestly such a bop and also has a bomb ass music video?? their other two mvs playing with fire and stay are also sick af i just really love them. they got the #aesthetic.

seventeen: i’m just gonna keep this short bc i don’t think i know nearly enough about svt just yet but mansae is suuuch a fun mv imo as a whole group that’s their best mv just because it was really fun?? the song is super catchy too. but give their hip hop unit’s check in a listen too bc it’s Iconic tbh.

bts: they honestly deserve the hype they get?? so much?? you’ve most likely already heard about them but if you’re not into them yet or have yet to listen to a song and don’t know where to start my number one rec is blood, sweat and tears — which is also what got me into them — ( and here’s the japanese ver but keep in mind there are triggers for blood, murder & allusions to drugs, i like to think that the japanese ver is an alternate universe/continuation of the korean one and there are lots of theories on this that you can read up ). althouuugh bst especially the mv would set your standards very high i think?? but honestly....that’s a Must Watch if ur getting into bts. i know that it’s already v popular but it really really deserves the attention it gets imo. BUT the entire wings era is worth listening to and also pls listen to all their solos in the wings album ( my personal favorite is rap monster’s reflection ).

red velvet: probably another name that pops up a lot too and they have a really interesting concept tbh?? they have like this duality where red is like a more playful and fun concept and velvet is more classy and elegant in a way?? dumb dumb is a really fun example of the red concept and be natural for velvet!! russian roulette seems like a hit or miss for people too but i think the song is really cute!!

exo: again, who hasn’t heard of them?? monster was a Hit and deservingly so too. i honestly really really love the entire lotto / ex’act album too and i especially really like can’t bring me down from the album. but honestly, as much as how big of a hit monster ( and some of their other mvs like overdose and call me baby, amongst many others are huge hits too ) was, i think my favorite mv they did was sing for you. boy that made me feel things?? many fans speculate that the mv was kind of a tribute to kris, luhan and tao ( three members who left ) too and that made me even more !!! about it. ALSO ALSO they have a sub unit called exo cbx and i just rec everything cbx does tbh but before they became an official sub unit they did this song as an ost for a kdrama and i LOVE it so much it’s called for you.

got7: another really popular group so imma try not talk too much about them but honestly...i think just right is p much an insight into got7′s personality LMAO aka adorable losers. everyone loves all three of their flight log trilogy eras too but my favorite is the flight log: turbulence era. hard carry is a masterpiece that i keep on coming back to and skyway is my other favorite song on the album, followed by boom x3.

bigbang: i’m not even gonna get into this one because chances are you’ve heard fantastic baby or bang bang bang. listen to anything in their made album, basically. but i’m just gonna leave last dance here it was a Masterpiece.

2ne1: a disbanded group, which is really sad lmao. you’ve probably heard i am the best too but i just wanna rec come back home and falling in love. 2ne1 was what got me into kpop in the first place too and i love them.

soloists: i’m too lazy to link all the mvs and all but look into seo inguk, kim chungha, lim kim, ailee, lee hi, park jimin ( of 15& ), amber liu, kisum, dean, heize and i’m probably missing a lot of people.

[holdencaulflied]

a while ago (like two years!!) i was tagged in a “describe ur top 9 formative albums” and i’m supposed to be studying for psych but i’m bored so this is as good of a time as any to talk abt music i guess

these aren’t supposed to be my favorite albums altho a few of them could fit in that category as well- it’s more the albums that i grew with and that helped me define myself at various points throughout my life

don’t panic // all time low- this album bridged me from 5th to 6th grade, and also from elementary to middle school. it was the beginning of me moving past radio hits/what my parents played in the car to finding music that was solely my preference and while i look back at this phase with embarrassment now, listening to lots of punk rock probably helped me branch out and have varied taste in music like i do today. also backseat serenade still goes hard and it’s my guilty pleasure song

marry me // st.vincent- my first foray into alternative/indie music, and also to st.vincent, who still releases amazing albums to this day. but honestly this was the soundtrack to my 7th grade year, when i was moving past the fall out boy/atl/panic! at the disco stage. paris is burning is one of the first songs i remember crying about. i listened to this album so much it’s like almost sacred now like i don’t listen to it as much bc i don’t wanna ruin the opinions i have on it by finding flaws i just want it to be a defining part of my life

pure heroine // lorde- my comfort food of albums. this came out when i was in 8th grade and it perfectly encapsulated everything about growing up and being unsure of yourself yet feeling like you knew everything. i still play this album a lot because it has stayed consistently relatable and i can appreciate the lyrics so much more now. ribs, the love club, and buzzcut season are the holy trinity of lorde songs. also lorde was my first every live concert and that is smth rlly special that i will remember forever bc literally my favorite thing is experiencing music u love live. lyrics like “we’re slipping off the course we prepared” and “my heart jumps around when i’m alluded to” stuck with me SO MUCH and this whole album really raised my standards in that i began listening more to lyrics instead of just songs i thought sounded cool

modern vampires of the city // vampire weekend- 8th or 9th grade?? definitely at the beginning of high school, but super formative because this is when i really began digging deep into spotify and finding artists and music that people wouldn’t just recommend to me. i really started seeing music as more of just a hobby to smth constant. songs like unbelievers and step and obvious bicycle were stuff i would always tell ppl to listen to- especially this was before vampire weekend became super popular it felt like i had like my own little personal album. vampire weekend in general also led to my love for indie rock/pop which has consistently been my most listened to genre since 9th grade, and although i’ve definitely changed my overall music taste from vw, there’s a lot of forever good songs on this album.

transatlanticism // death cab for cutie- holy shit this album is one of the saddest things i’ve ever listened to, and that is including high violet by the national. i probably listened to this album of my own accord the first time in 9th grade because before that my dad used to play it in the car and i wouldn’t really pay attention. but then i listened to title and registration (which is one of the first songs i remember sobbing my eyes to) and was like dad holy fuck this song is incredible. and this album is so important to me because while my dad and i disagree on a lot death cab is a common love that i think just brought us closer together. its a whole ass masterpiece like expo’86 is SO SAD yet i smile every time it comes on, and most of the lyrics aren’t obscure and twisty like a lot of other bands i listen to, yet i feel like they always pack the hardest punch

bankrupt! // phoenix- this album isn’t as formative as it is an eye-opener. it was one of the first times i began to realize music could be just as political and make points just as effectively as any op-ed, sometimes even more so. i think i listened to it sometime in 10th grade, and the line “lost ur mind on a cruise ship, bartending crucial lies” made a bigger point abt capitalism and poverty than most article i’d read. also the songs are just fucking catchy and the production is pretty great. oblique city, sos in bel air, and chloroform are some of my all time favorite songs. also the transition from drakkar noir into chloroform is like incredible and i freak out every time i hear it. 

bury me at makeout creek // mitski- mitski is a force of nature in the form of guitars and words. her new album puberty 2 is amazing but i feel like this is the album that i really related to end of sophomore going into junior year. mitski is like a weird mix of straight up electric guitar and rock like remo drive and also soft-spoken indie like moses sumney and it’s great. last words of a shooting star is my favorite song off this album and the part where she is like “i’m glad my room is at least neat so when i’m gone i’ll be remembered kindly” is so!! like u don’t think abt life in terms like that but the fact that a lot of the time you’re only remembered by other’s perceptions of you is fucking sobering. 

i’m not your man // marika hackman- ok i’ve loved marika hackman ever since i heard her cover of i follow rivers by lykke li and this album!! holy shit!! it’s so versatile but also so honest and heartfelt and somehow brutally witty at parts. i listened to it probably when it first came out, which was like either end of junior year or summer before senior year and i’m definitely at a part of life where i need constant new music- like ppl are like manasa is my personal shazam bc i never can stick to one genre or artist and i can pick song recs out of thin air so the fact that i listened to this album for like three months straight is a sign of how incredibly good it is.on a more personal note i came to terms with my bisexuality around the end of junior year, and to hear marika hackman unapologetically refer to running away with girls/falling in love with girls was so relatable at the time. it still is. i love gina’s world, round we go, and violet with all my heart. yeah the lyrics are confusing and often obscure and it is often a hard album to listen to because there are virtually no catchy hooks or choruses that grab onto you but it’s incredibly written and means so much to me.

landmark // hippo campus- AND finally, the album that has been on repeat for the past few months. i’ve always loved hippo campus from the first EP they released back in like 2014, but this is the first full album that they put out and jesus christ did it deliver and give me everything i ever wanted! my two favorite songs by them (warm glow and the halocline) aren’t even on this album but it’s still so perfect! the first time i listened to it all the way through was transcendental. sun veins into way it goes is seamless and perfectly executed. and some of these songs are so so so meaningful and sad and others are just upbeat and fun but then you listen to the lyrics and it’s like oh shit wow there’s so much i didn’t catch. i love this album and this band with all my heart i’ve seen them live twice (50% of their concert funds go to planned parenthood) and it was incredible. the way jake luppen says “solipsistic overtones” in western kids is amazing. the whole of buttercup is great the first time i heard “holy hell i can tell that you hate me, dying moon keep me up keep me waiting” i died a little. way it goes i could talk about forever with lyrics like “degenerate, counter-culture crying socialist, hip-to-lazed crazed abstractionist” like oh my god the genius it took to rhyme that stuff. also the whole of poems and epitaph is amazing and makes me cry. i love this album the most 

[trendingnewsb]

6 Famous People Whose Origin Stories Are Dark Secrets

Nobody expects celebrities to actually be exactly the way they portray themselves publicly. Bruce Willis doesn’t go around killing terrorists every day (that probably happens, like, every other weekend). When you’re famous, it’s understood that you’ll have to bullshit a little and cultivate an image that appeals to your audience. But some do less cultivating and more top-to-bottom renovations. It’s always shocking when famous people turn out to be the complete opposite of what they’re famous for. And that’s the case with …

6

Kid Rock Was Born Rich And Grew Up In A Huge-Ass Mansion

No “celebrity goes into politics” story will ever be weird again, but the announcement that Kid Rock might run for Senate still managed to turn a few heads. After all, his biggest claim to fame was supposedly spending a summer “trying different things … smoking funny things,” and based on his ability to rhyme “things” with “things,” he surely has no better than an eighth-grade education, right?

Rock wants us to think he’s some rough-and-tumble country boy, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. His childhood home in Macomb County, Michigan recently sold for nearly $1.3 million, which we’re reasonably sure would be enough to buy whole towns around there. It turns out that his dad owned two luxury car dealerships and made some not-insignificant amounts of money.

Romeo High School “Your little rec center shall make a great showroom for our Bentleys. Papa will be most pleased.”

Mr. and Mrs. Rock’s “four-bedroom, four-bath, neo-Georgian colonial house” is over 5,000 square feet, has an indoor Jacuzzi, amenities out the wazoo, and the property itself contains an apple orchard. Rock has tried to flaunt his down-home country style and use it to smear politicians as “out of touch.” That doesn’t have the same gravity now that we know his past.

Adam Serwer/Twitter That’s a sad burger for so many reasons.

5

Rapper Rick Ross Was A Prison Guard

Florida rapper Rick Ross is best known for his songs about nonstop hustling and pushing it to the limit (“it” being all of the drugs). Hell, he got his name from a drug kingpin. That’s why it was kind of a shocker when it came out that Ross was a corrections officer (read: prison guard) prior to getting into the rap game.

After the story broke about his previous life of literally the opposite of crime, Ross originally denied it, but somehow the media managed to get ahold of pay stubs that proved it. For about two years in the mid-’90s, he worked as a CO in Florida. Granted, that makes him more of a badass than being a CO in, say, Terre Haute, Indiana, but it didn’t help his street cred any.

Florida Department of Corrections, Maybach Music Group His earliest songs were about how much he hated that Urkel kid who kept visiting his house.

Even 50 Cent took a jab at Ross in a rap to point out how dumb it was for Rozay to keep acting like he was something he wasn’t. After all, if you’re only learning about smuggling drugs and weapons from someone else’s case file instead of doing it yourself, can you sincerely say your raps come from the heart?

Probably thanks to some magical PR whiz, Ross finally owned up to his past. Rather than dismiss his old job as some kind of phase, he managed to call it a “hustle” in its own right. (We’re beginning to think that absolutely anything can be a hustle as long as one declares it so.)

4

Ron Jeremy Was A Special Education Teacher

Lots of people watch porn — about 67 percent of you are only reading this while you wait for some to load. Even the “casual” viewer can probably name a fair number of lady porn stars, but for some reason, about the only male porn actor most people can identify is Ron Jeremy. He’s been the mustachioed face of videotaped boning for decades, but believe it or not, that wasn’t really his Plan A.

On an episode of Judge Pirro, Jeremy admitted that his background was in theater, and that he’d gone on to get a master’s degree in special education. As in working with disabled kids.

Jeremy is happy to talk about his educator past, and always considered his teaching degree his fallback option, or “ace in the hole” (that’s probably not the only thing he’s called that). He majored in theater in college, and much like theater majors of today, he went and tacked on an education degree “just in case.”

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What Movie News Should You Know RIGHT NOW (11/24/17)

One time, Jeremy and a friend (the school psychologist) picked up a couple of women and brought them back to what they claimed was their “hotel,” which was in truth the school for developmentally challenged kids where they worked. The building used to be a hotel, so they didn’t lie, precisely, but that’s the kind of thing you’d expect from the future star of Ebony Humpers 2. They also told the ladies that they were going to a convention for doctors, which was pure bullshit. In the morning, Jeremy and his friend brought the women up to the “hotel restaurant,” cleverly disguised as a goddamned school cafeteria. (The kids there were reportedly quite thrilled to meet them.)

3

The “Blue Collar” Comedy Tour Is Pretty Well-Educated

The Blue Collar Comedy Tour is a group of comedians who joined forces when they realized they were essentially using the same shtick, so why not put on a show together? And put on a show they did, because as far as Larry the Cable Guy and Jeff Foxworthy go, their entire careers are an act.

Most people are probably smart enough to assume that Larry the Cable Guy is not in fact named Larry the Cable Guy. What fewer people know is that he’s as far from “Southern” as it gets. He’s originally from Nebraska, which is definitely rural, but not “The hell kind of accent you got there, boy?” rural. The closest he got was that attending Baptist University in Decatur, Georgia (to major in drama and speech), but even so, that means he went to Georgia to go to college. That’s like your friend who studied abroad in Ireland coming back to America with a Cockney accent.

Seriously, watch him duck in and out of his “Southern” accent. It’s creepy:

Foxworthy, at least, is a native Georgian. His accent is real. But asking him to host Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader was an interesting choice, because he almost certainly is — dude went to Georgia Tech.

Granted, he didn’t graduate, but that’s in part because he landed a job working for his father at IBM in mainframe computer maintenance. Foxworthy, for his part, has tried to downplay it. There’s an obvious dichotomy between “college-educated computer guy” and “redneck” in our culture, but Jeff thinks there’s a bit more nuance than that:

“Here’s the problem that the media makes: They tend to think if you gave rednecks a billion dollars they wouldn’t be rednecks anymore. Look at Elvis — he put carpet on the ceiling. We wouldn’t wear Armani suits, we would just go to every NASCAR race.”

Someone should maybe tell him that Armani makes rather comfortable sweatpants.

2

Only One Of The Beach Boys Could Surf

Surfing isn’t merely a fun beach activity — it’s a lifestyle, brah. As soon as people discovered they could ride waves, it became a culture in itself. Nobody embodied that culture in the 1960s better than the Beach Boys, with their songs about the beach, fast cars, psychedelic farm animals, and then the beach again. They knew everything there was to know about taming the wild waves and impressing those California girls with their surf moves. Right? Right?

Well, no. Only one of them could surf.

Dennis Wilson, the drummer, was the only band member who knew the correct end of a surfboard. In 1961, he told fellow Beach Boys Brian Wilson and Mike Love, “Hey, surfing’s getting really big. You guys ought to write a song about it.” And then more songs about it …

… and then a couple of albums about it …

… and then an entire career about it. Had Dennis picked another random hobby, today they’d be known as the Model Train Building Boys. The band basically owes their success to Dennis’ suggestion. Although he also introduced them to his buddy Charles Manson, so not all of his ideas were so good.

Sadly, Dennis passed away in the very California ocean he loved after falling off a boat at age 39. His legacy lives on in every pastel-colored surf shack up and down the Pacific coast, and in the hearts of every Los Angeles tourist who tries surfing with a Groupon on a Saturday afternoon.

1

Neocon Poster Boy Milo Yiannopoulos Was (And Probably Still Is) A Total Dweeb

Milo Yiannopoulos is … no, not the main character from Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire. He’s this guy:

You may know him as the firebrand Breitbart editor whose swagger lets him get away with spouting fascist rhetoric for a little too long, turning thousands of confused young men into his personal fan club and helping push them closer to all-out xenophobia. Yiannopoulos has been known to flirt with Nazi ideas and imagery, and — despite straight-up asking white supremacists for snazzy new Breitbart story angles — it’s all OK! He’s only “trolling.” When he talks about the evils of immigration or how trans people don’t deserve basic dignity, he’s not repeating the same backwards bullshit your grandpa used to complain about on the dinner table; he’s writing genius political satire, you see. Truly, a Voltaire for the age of Twitter. (Or Facebook, since Twitter banned his ass.)

But before all this, Yiannopoulos got his start as a rather inept and awkward tech writer for a bunch of websites, including Breitbart, and he looked like this:

That’s Yiannopoulos showing off his dorky, possibly Nazi ring, and presumably posing for his MySpace photo. Wonder what that profile would’ve entailed? Maybe something about how he likes to write poetry (read: plagiarize Tori Amos lyrics) for fun? Perhaps something further about how video game fans are losers and psychopaths, despite using that whole ridiculous #Gamergate saga to further his career? Months before “freedom of speech” became his battle cry and the excuse for his particular brand of outrageous dickishness, Yiannopoulos wrote a whole Breitbart column about how those goshdarn video games (which are enjoyed by “unemployed saddos living in their parents’ basements”) were probably to blame for the Elliot Rodger murders, and someone ought to do something about them.

How did he evolve his writing style from “angry letter writer at your local newspaper” to “edgiest shitlord on the internet”? He didn’t. His current work is largely ghost-written and researched by people he actively works to maintain uncredited and anonymous, because if he doesn’t get all the fame and attention, then what even is the point? Yiannopoulos is barely a person; he’s a crappy Halloween mask precariously placed on top of a heap of regressive ideas society had already flushed down the toilet. By the way, it was an unassuming teenage journalist from Canada who put the brakes on Yiannopoulos’ rising star by digging up his pro-pedophilia comments from 2016. (If it wasn’t for that, he’d probably have his own show on Fox News by now.) We’re sure it wasn’t the Universe’s intention to violently punish him in the most ironic way possible — it was just a prank, bro.

Isaac feels like a fraud pretty much every day. Follow him on Twitter.

Feel like Kid Rock has betrayed you? Don’t go cold turkey, instead try a KICK ROCKS shirt as a way to cope with the pain.

If you loved this article and want more content like this, support our site with a visit to our Contribution Page. Or sign up for our Subscription Service for exclusive content, an ad-free experience, and more.

For more, check out 13 Iconic Entertainers (Who Stole Their Whole Persona) and 5 Beloved Celebrities Who Were Nothing Like You Think.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 8 Quirks Of Famous Actors You Will Never Unsee, and watch other videos you won’t see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook. For real.

Check out Robert Evans’ A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization, a celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our civilization one seemingly bad decision at a time.

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6 Famous People Whose Origin Stories Are Dark Secrets

Nobody expects celebrities to actually be exactly the way they portray themselves publicly. Bruce Willis doesn’t go around killing terrorists every day (that probably happens, like, every other weekend). When you’re famous, it’s understood that you’ll have to bullshit a little and cultivate an image that appeals to your audience. But some do less cultivating and more top-to-bottom renovations. It’s always shocking when famous people turn out to be the complete opposite of what they’re famous for. And that’s the case with …

6

Kid Rock Was Born Rich And Grew Up In A Huge-Ass Mansion

No “celebrity goes into politics” story will ever be weird again, but the announcement that Kid Rock might run for Senate still managed to turn a few heads. After all, his biggest claim to fame was supposedly spending a summer “trying different things … smoking funny things,” and based on his ability to rhyme “things” with “things,” he surely has no better than an eighth-grade education, right?

Rock wants us to think he’s some rough-and-tumble country boy, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. His childhood home in Macomb County, Michigan recently sold for nearly $1.3 million, which we’re reasonably sure would be enough to buy whole towns around there. It turns out that his dad owned two luxury car dealerships and made some not-insignificant amounts of money.

Romeo High School “Your little rec center shall make a great showroom for our Bentleys. Papa will be most pleased.”

Mr. and Mrs. Rock’s “four-bedroom, four-bath, neo-Georgian colonial house” is over 5,000 square feet, has an indoor Jacuzzi, amenities out the wazoo, and the property itself contains an apple orchard. Rock has tried to flaunt his down-home country style and use it to smear politicians as “out of touch.” That doesn’t have the same gravity now that we know his past.

Adam Serwer/Twitter That’s a sad burger for so many reasons.

5

Rapper Rick Ross Was A Prison Guard

Florida rapper Rick Ross is best known for his songs about nonstop hustling and pushing it to the limit (“it” being all of the drugs). Hell, he got his name from a drug kingpin. That’s why it was kind of a shocker when it came out that Ross was a corrections officer (read: prison guard) prior to getting into the rap game.

After the story broke about his previous life of literally the opposite of crime, Ross originally denied it, but somehow the media managed to get ahold of pay stubs that proved it. For about two years in the mid-’90s, he worked as a CO in Florida. Granted, that makes him more of a badass than being a CO in, say, Terre Haute, Indiana, but it didn’t help his street cred any.

Florida Department of Corrections, Maybach Music Group His earliest songs were about how much he hated that Urkel kid who kept visiting his house.

Even 50 Cent took a jab at Ross in a rap to point out how dumb it was for Rozay to keep acting like he was something he wasn’t. After all, if you’re only learning about smuggling drugs and weapons from someone else’s case file instead of doing it yourself, can you sincerely say your raps come from the heart?

Probably thanks to some magical PR whiz, Ross finally owned up to his past. Rather than dismiss his old job as some kind of phase, he managed to call it a “hustle” in its own right. (We’re beginning to think that absolutely anything can be a hustle as long as one declares it so.)

4

Ron Jeremy Was A Special Education Teacher

Lots of people watch porn — about 67 percent of you are only reading this while you wait for some to load. Even the “casual” viewer can probably name a fair number of lady porn stars, but for some reason, about the only male porn actor most people can identify is Ron Jeremy. He’s been the mustachioed face of videotaped boning for decades, but believe it or not, that wasn’t really his Plan A.

On an episode of Judge Pirro, Jeremy admitted that his background was in theater, and that he’d gone on to get a master’s degree in special education. As in working with disabled kids.

Jeremy is happy to talk about his educator past, and always considered his teaching degree his fallback option, or “ace in the hole” (that’s probably not the only thing he’s called that). He majored in theater in college, and much like theater majors of today, he went and tacked on an education degree “just in case.”

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One time, Jeremy and a friend (the school psychologist) picked up a couple of women and brought them back to what they claimed was their “hotel,” which was in truth the school for developmentally challenged kids where they worked. The building used to be a hotel, so they didn’t lie, precisely, but that’s the kind of thing you’d expect from the future star of Ebony Humpers 2. They also told the ladies that they were going to a convention for doctors, which was pure bullshit. In the morning, Jeremy and his friend brought the women up to the “hotel restaurant,” cleverly disguised as a goddamned school cafeteria. (The kids there were reportedly quite thrilled to meet them.)

3

The “Blue Collar” Comedy Tour Is Pretty Well-Educated

The Blue Collar Comedy Tour is a group of comedians who joined forces when they realized they were essentially using the same shtick, so why not put on a show together? And put on a show they did, because as far as Larry the Cable Guy and Jeff Foxworthy go, their entire careers are an act.

Most people are probably smart enough to assume that Larry the Cable Guy is not in fact named Larry the Cable Guy. What fewer people know is that he’s as far from “Southern” as it gets. He’s originally from Nebraska, which is definitely rural, but not “The hell kind of accent you got there, boy?” rural. The closest he got was that attending Baptist University in Decatur, Georgia (to major in drama and speech), but even so, that means he went to Georgia to go to college. That’s like your friend who studied abroad in Ireland coming back to America with a Cockney accent.

Seriously, watch him duck in and out of his “Southern” accent. It’s creepy:

Foxworthy, at least, is a native Georgian. His accent is real. But asking him to host Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader was an interesting choice, because he almost certainly is — dude went to Georgia Tech.

Granted, he didn’t graduate, but that’s in part because he landed a job working for his father at IBM in mainframe computer maintenance. Foxworthy, for his part, has tried to downplay it. There’s an obvious dichotomy between “college-educated computer guy” and “redneck” in our culture, but Jeff thinks there’s a bit more nuance than that:

“Here’s the problem that the media makes: They tend to think if you gave rednecks a billion dollars they wouldn’t be rednecks anymore. Look at Elvis — he put carpet on the ceiling. We wouldn’t wear Armani suits, we would just go to every NASCAR race.”

Someone should maybe tell him that Armani makes rather comfortable sweatpants.

2

Only One Of The Beach Boys Could Surf

Surfing isn’t merely a fun beach activity — it’s a lifestyle, brah. As soon as people discovered they could ride waves, it became a culture in itself. Nobody embodied that culture in the 1960s better than the Beach Boys, with their songs about the beach, fast cars, psychedelic farm animals, and then the beach again. They knew everything there was to know about taming the wild waves and impressing those California girls with their surf moves. Right? Right?

Well, no. Only one of them could surf.

Dennis Wilson, the drummer, was the only band member who knew the correct end of a surfboard. In 1961, he told fellow Beach Boys Brian Wilson and Mike Love, “Hey, surfing’s getting really big. You guys ought to write a song about it.” And then more songs about it …

… and then a couple of albums about it …

… and then an entire career about it. Had Dennis picked another random hobby, today they’d be known as the Model Train Building Boys. The band basically owes their success to Dennis’ suggestion. Although he also introduced them to his buddy Charles Manson, so not all of his ideas were so good.

Sadly, Dennis passed away in the very California ocean he loved after falling off a boat at age 39. His legacy lives on in every pastel-colored surf shack up and down the Pacific coast, and in the hearts of every Los Angeles tourist who tries surfing with a Groupon on a Saturday afternoon.

1

Neocon Poster Boy Milo Yiannopoulos Was (And Probably Still Is) A Total Dweeb

Milo Yiannopoulos is … no, not the main character from Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire. He’s this guy:

You may know him as the firebrand Breitbart editor whose swagger lets him get away with spouting fascist rhetoric for a little too long, turning thousands of confused young men into his personal fan club and helping push them closer to all-out xenophobia. Yiannopoulos has been known to flirt with Nazi ideas and imagery, and — despite straight-up asking white supremacists for snazzy new Breitbart story angles — it’s all OK! He’s only “trolling.” When he talks about the evils of immigration or how trans people don’t deserve basic dignity, he’s not repeating the same backwards bullshit your grandpa used to complain about on the dinner table; he’s writing genius political satire, you see. Truly, a Voltaire for the age of Twitter. (Or Facebook, since Twitter banned his ass.)

But before all this, Yiannopoulos got his start as a rather inept and awkward tech writer for a bunch of websites, including Breitbart, and he looked like this:

That’s Yiannopoulos showing off his dorky, possibly Nazi ring, and presumably posing for his MySpace photo. Wonder what that profile would’ve entailed? Maybe something about how he likes to write poetry (read: plagiarize Tori Amos lyrics) for fun? Perhaps something further about how video game fans are losers and psychopaths, despite using that whole ridiculous #Gamergate saga to further his career? Months before “freedom of speech” became his battle cry and the excuse for his particular brand of outrageous dickishness, Yiannopoulos wrote a whole Breitbart column about how those goshdarn video games (which are enjoyed by “unemployed saddos living in their parents’ basements”) were probably to blame for the Elliot Rodger murders, and someone ought to do something about them.

How did he evolve his writing style from “angry letter writer at your local newspaper” to “edgiest shitlord on the internet”? He didn’t. His current work is largely ghost-written and researched by people he actively works to maintain uncredited and anonymous, because if he doesn’t get all the fame and attention, then what even is the point? Yiannopoulos is barely a person; he’s a crappy Halloween mask precariously placed on top of a heap of regressive ideas society had already flushed down the toilet. By the way, it was an unassuming teenage journalist from Canada who put the brakes on Yiannopoulos’ rising star by digging up his pro-pedophilia comments from 2016. (If it wasn’t for that, he’d probably have his own show on Fox News by now.) We’re sure it wasn’t the Universe’s intention to violently punish him in the most ironic way possible — it was just a prank, bro.

Isaac feels like a fraud pretty much every day. Follow him on Twitter.

Feel like Kid Rock has betrayed you? Don’t go cold turkey, instead try a KICK ROCKS shirt as a way to cope with the pain.

If you loved this article and want more content like this, support our site with a visit to our Contribution Page. Or sign up for our Subscription Service for exclusive content, an ad-free experience, and more.

For more, check out 13 Iconic Entertainers (Who Stole Their Whole Persona) and 5 Beloved Celebrities Who Were Nothing Like You Think.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 8 Quirks Of Famous Actors You Will Never Unsee, and watch other videos you won’t see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook. For real.

Check out Robert Evans’ A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization, a celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our civilization one seemingly bad decision at a time.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2zPu9tt

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2kMvDyo via Viral News HQ