old news and reruns
I haven't played more Sonic Mania or Ancipital since their respective posts. I've had Glass Onion bookmarked for like a week, but haven't found the time or mental energy to commit to a new film experience. There hasn't been much in the way of new podcast or youtube content lately. I finished reading The Last War in Albion, and started Part 2 on Eruditorum Press, but I haven't finished reading the first post yet. I didn't make it far into the Jan. 06 report before deciding there wasn't a good reason for me to spend time on it. Sometimes life is just surviving, and that's totally ok, but it doesn't make for very interesting blog fodder.
When I'm not actively engaged with anything after work, my usual unwinding routine is watching old youtube videos I've already seen, which I guess is the modern equivalent of turning on the TV and watching whatever reruns are on. Sometimes this can be fruitful --- the whole reason I thought about Ancipital again is because I re-watched a Jeff Gerstmann stream from 2016 where he played a little bit of it. At the time, I was interested but could find basically no further information, but now I have a manual and a map, and I can finally go deeper with it. That's pretty exciting.
I was watching a vwestlife video from a couple years ago, one of many where he's talking about a radio, and as he scanned through the channels, I heard a snatch of music that made me think "wait, is that a cover of Informer??" Informer is a 1992 single by white Canadian reggae artist "Snow", who until recently was best known for being brutally clowned upon by Jim Carrey on an episode of In Living Color. I won't get into the whole appropriation discussion here, but I thought the song was okay and it's unfair to attack an individual white artist with a genuine love and appreciation for the black culture they're promoting when the real problem is the white supremacist institutions that cynically exploit them while systematically marginalizing the black artists who inspired them.1 2
Well, I looked it up, and believe it or not, a Puerto Rican artist named "Daddy Yankee" released a reggaeton song in 2019 called Con Calma, which is sort of a cover of Informer, but not really. The article calls it a "re-imagining", which is a weird term to apply to a song, but I guess that's the best way to describe it. Anyway, the song is good, and Snow actually performs a verse in the song and appears in the video. And you know what? Snow does a good job. I don't understand any of the lyrics, including the ones that are in English, and I don't know enough about music for any kind of meaningful critique, but it's a fun jam to listen to. Good job, Daddy Yankee and Snow 🦝
which isn't to say there aren't individual white artists who cynically participate in and enable this system for their own self-interest, there definitely are, and sometimes that line is blurry, but I don't think Snow crossed it. If you have an argument to the contrary, I'll hear you out. Now if you want to clown on him because you think he's a cringeworthy dork, that's valid, but I'm not gonna try to debate aesthetics↩
man. I guess I did get into it. I don't think the Jim Carrey parody was, like, some heinous character assassination that killed Snow's career, I just think it made some assumptions that weren't necessarily true. "Informer" was one of those novelty crossover hits and Snow would've been a one-hit-wonder regardless. Neither thing did lasting harm. And in the end, Jim Carrey is now a disgraced antivaxxer NFT shill and Snow's cool enough to do a song with Daddy Yankee,2.1 so who's laughing now? Probably Jim Carrey still. He's still super rich and stuff
2.1. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention one of the biggest reasons I find this whole development fascinating: the video has 2.6 billion views on youtube 🤯 PS --- sorry about the order/context situation with these footnotes↩