Originally, the OTI editorial staff was going to make this a break week for the Overthinking Lost series, as Mlawski is on vacation.  However, rather than finding out what happens when we let the clock reach zero, I decided to race to my computer and punch in the numbers.

In addition, it has been a while since I have Overthought anything, so I saw this as the perfect opportunity for me to go back to the island.

Now might be a pretty good time (or in fact a bit too late for some readers) to mention that I’m going to depart from Mlawski’s cardinal rule—there will be substantial Lost spoilers in this post, so only read on if you’ve watched through the end of season 5 or don’t mind learning things that will substantially bias your viewing experience of the whole series thus far.  There will also be major spoilers for The Wire.

Why would I gleefully break protocol after you’ve all been so careful not to reveal any of Lost’s big mysteries in the comments for the past few months?

Because I’m special—the rules don’t apply to me.

[Ed. Note: Seriously. There are substantial Lost spoilers after the jump, up to and including everything that has aired. And pretty substantial spoilers for The Wire as well, covering the whole series. Don't read on if you're not prepared.]

Back in the fall, Wrather wrote an excellent series of posts on Gossip Girl in which he analyzed the  literary, psychological, cultural, and socioeconomic aspects of the teen soap opera.  However, six episodes into season, it seemed that the show’s second season was going to be a huge disappointment  and that the exploits of Serena, Blair, Chuck and company were simply not deserving of that level of scrutiny.  As a result, the project fell by the wayside.  Since then, the series has not only supplied ample guilty pleasures (including girls going wild, drunken rooftop-ledge shouting matches, and illicit teacher-student affairs), but has also provided substantial food for (over)thought,  most recently on the philosophical bases of punishment and the relationship between the police power of the state and economic elites.

But as a performer and lyricist he (Kanye West)’s got nothing. The celebrity thing is annoying, but it’s his music that brings out the ass-suckery.

He has, in my opinion, no flow as a rapper and no skill as a writer. Nothing really important to say. No clever word play (which is arguably one of the foundations of rap). Nothing.

-sarielthrawn, April 17, 2009

Are we even surprised that he (Kanye) may have never seen any ‘Robocop’ movies? He probally [sic] thinks anything by Tyler Perry is genius!

-CyanideSmoker, April 17, 2009

After my last article for this site, in which I discussed the disjuncture between the Robocop films and the Kanye West song of the same name, a few of our readers left the comments that you see above, calling into question the very premise that Mr. West is worth Overthinking. Chief among the complaints were that Kanye’s skills as a rapper are sub-par and that his lyrics are as vacuous as the most banal of his peers. I had been planning on jumping in on the discussion, but by the time I had gathered my thoughts (and refreshed my memory of several of Kanye’s songs), several days had passed (which amounts to years in internet time), so I just let it drop.

Then, last week, the internets were abuzz with the leak of the new Clipse single, “Kinda like a Big Deal,” which features a guest verse by Kanye. Hearing him rap (rather than autocroon) made me think again about the debate about Yeezy’s merits as a lyricist and rapper. In particular, my attention was captured by this quatrain near the beginning of his verse:

Spittin fire on the PJ in my PJ’s
Fire Marshall said I took it to the Max like TJ
Yeah people I said Marshalls, replay
I guess I’m like the Black Marshall meets Jay

At first glance, it would seem that the haters are right—this guy isn’t saying anything! After all, ‘Ye uses the word “marshall” three times in four lines and apparently just keeps saying the letter “J” over and over to make his lyrics rhyme. However, as Fenzel’s discussion of Dragonball has recently shown, repetition can be a powerful device for creating meaning within works of art. After the jump, I’ll parse the layers of meaning in these lyrics and will show how viewing this brief quote in the context of Kanye’s total output as a rapper challenges the notion that he has “nothing really important to say.”

It has been a rough week for Kanye West.  First, South Park eviscerated him by skewering his egocentrism (and excessive use of autotune), then he went and proved them right by emptying his soul on his blog about his hurt feelings and sincere desire to be a better person.   Although I don’t usually like to kick a guy while he is down, the whole series of events reminded me of a lingering complaint that I have had ever since Kanye’s most recent album, 808s and Heartbreaks, dropped back in November:  I am fairly certain that Kanye West has never ever seen any of the three RoboCop movies, even though one of the songs on the album is named after the film franchise’s titular character.

Have you ever wanted to be the singer in the greatest rock band on earth?  Do you hate rehearsing/lugging equipment/ drug and alcohol scandals? For the past ten years, the Punk Rock/Heavy Metal Karaoke band has provided one possible solution to this age-old conundrum- the Rock and Roll is provided and you just add the vocals.   What separates PRHMK from all other karaoke nights?  There are no cheeseball videos, no teleprompters for lyrics (you can use a printed out lyrics sheet if you need it), and you’re backed by an experienced three piece band.  Whether you’re onstage screaming out Dead Kennedys lyrics or in the crowd pumping your fist and spilling your beer while watching strangers howl their way through “The Number of the Beast,” Punk Rock Heavy Metal Karaoke is an exhilarating experience.

[The "Musical Talmud" is our ongoing series that finds the true meaning behind pop music lyrics. See also Part 1, "Don't Stop Believing," Part 2, "The KKK Took My Baby Away," Part 3, "I Want It That Way," Part 4, "Chinese Democracy," and Part 5 "Happy Xmas (War is Over)."]

Oh no, here it comes again
Cant remember when we came so close to love before
Hold on, good things never last
Nothings in the past, it always seems to come again
Again and again and again

Looking at these lyrics, it is tempting to infer that they are lifted straight from one of the 80s many monster ballads, or really any other romantic pop song.  The sentiments are grand, the word choice is general, and love is mentioned in the second line, for chrissakes.   However, this inference couldn’t be too much further from the truth- these lyrics are the opening line of “Neon Knights”, the lead track on Heaven and Hell, Black Sabbath’s first album after replacing Ozzy Osbourne with Ronnie James Dio in the late 70s.  For those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Dio’s body of work, let’s just say he’s known for being heavy on the “Monster” and rather light on the “Ballad”.  Here he is performing “Neon Knights” with Sabbath back in the 80s:

Based on the title,  first verse, and one viewing of the video, it is tempting to dismiss “Neon Knights” as just another example of the excesses the dungeons and dragons wing of 1980s Heavy Metal.  After all, Dio is the singer who Tenacious D idolizes/lampoons as the patron saint of singing songs about wildebeests and angels and soaring on the wings of a demon.    However, if you stick with me after the jump, and I’ll show how Ronnie James Dio succeeds in transforming a four minute metal song into a treatise on the nature of social order.

One of the videos that made it into our Super Bowl ad roundup was the Conan O’Brien ad for Bud Light, in which his agent/manager/ambiguous guy in a suit convinces him to make an embarrassing Bud Light Ad  by assuring him that it will “only be seen in Sweden”.

The message of this spot seems to be “Drink Bud Light because it is a beer for awesome-non-Eurotrash-American Dudes!” In the world of the commercial, the only way that the effete Swedes could be convinced to drink Bud Light is with fire, mesh tops, and cheesy techno.  But does anyone really still hold this view of Europeans?

Over the past week, the Overthinking It team has subjected the Back to the Future trilogy to a level of scrutiny it definitely deserves, pointing out a wide variety of paradoxes, inconsistencies, and unanswered questions regarding the series. Because these analyses have focused on the logical, metaphysical, and technological aspects of time-travel within the plot of the three BTTF movies, they haven’t touched on what I consider to be one of the most interesting puzzles in the series:The Huey Paradox.

The Huey Paradox is jointly produced by two features of the BTTF trilogy: the overwhelming number of references to Huey Lewis throughout Back to the Future, along with his near absence in the other two films in the series. Songs by Huey Lewis and the News are the first and last music that you hear in part one of the trilogy: Marty listens to “The Power of Love” as he skateboards to school (and again after getting a kiss from Jennifer under the clock tower), and “Back in Time” plays on his clock radio the morning after he returns from 1955 (and is reprised over the end credits). In addition, Huey Lewis himself makes a brief cameo as one of the high school teachers who deems Marty’s band “too loud” to play at the school dance, cutting off their instrumental noise-metal rendition of “The Power of Love” after about 30 seconds. Huey also reappears briefly as a fedora-wearing man who briefly stares at Marty’s “life preserver” puffy vest in 1950s Hill Valley.

On the same night that MTV unleashed The City upon the world, the network also premiered Bromance, a reality competition show in which 9 dudes vie to be the new best friend of Olympian offspring/former Hillster Brody Jenner. The ostensible motivation for the show is the increasing visibility of bromances- male homosocial relationships characterized by reasonably high levels of physical and emotional closeness. Although the concept of homosociality itself doesn’t imply anything other than a social relationship between two members of the same sex, a number of gender/queer studies theorists have argued that muted sexual desire has long been an intrinsic component of homosociality in Western culture, and that shifts in what kind of behavior society defines as “gay and therefore bad” have historically driven changes in the prevalence of homosocial romantic friendships.

Indeed, a number of mass media trend pieces have postulated that the recent surge in the amount of bromantic behavior depicted in film and television has been driven in large parts by the integration of a number of aspects of gay subculture into the mainstream, which in turn has lead to more widespread social acceptance of man-on-man affection.

Is the cultural moment of the bromance really indicative of increased mainstream acceptance of homosexual norms and behavior, or is it just the status quo in new, more homoerotic clothes?

In a recent discussion of Ghostface Killah’s new Christmas song (which is imaginatively called “A Ghostface X-mas”), the hip hop blog Straight Bangin’ offers an explanation for why there are so few holiday rap songs (compared with other musical genres):

An odd element of hip-hop’s ascendancy is that despite its mainstream appeal and mass audience, the genre has injected many “urban” and non-standard themes into the discourse without experience a mutual equilibrium, absorbing more of the standard fare with which it now mingles.

While this insight is generally correct, it is also an oversimplification of the multiplicity of ways in which hip hop engages with the popular culture. In reality there is a spectrum, varying from a very simple incorporation of pop cultural tropes as the building blocks for rhymes to a more complex negotiation and two-way assimilation of mainstream practices and discourses and subcultural identities and meanings. Although this tension has played over the nearly 30 year history of the genre, it is encapsulated in the surprisingly wide variety of hip hop Christmas songs that have appeared throughout the years.

A brief tour through three common hip hop holiday tropes (and no shortage of ho, ho, hoes), after the jump.