I want to suck (your blood).

Welcome to the desert of the vampire.

Oh, you thought Twilight had driven a stake through vampire mythos – that with its sparkly, daywalking Christian Rock Emo vibe, it had finally cast asunder the resonance and insight of the vampire myths and left them in shards on the dry, dusty ground of a vast cultural wasteland.

Well, you haven’t seen Vampirum Ad Absurdam – the true return to dust of Romania-via-Ireland’s tortured legacy – until you’ve seen the video to the late-2009 Timbaland single, “Morning After Dark,” featuring French recording artist ShoShy and sometimes, depending on the version, that sultry creature of the night: Nellie Furtado. Observe:

Count Dracula
Lestat Di Lioncourt
Blade
Angelus
Ultraviolet
Edward Cullen
Timbo “Crazy Eyes” McGee

Witness the final descent of vamp. And yet…

As any archaeologist can tell you, there is a lot of wisdom to be found in a ruin. Why has vampsloitation sunk so low? Why does it just not make any goddamned sense anymore? What are the key contradictions that have spoiled the saga of the bloodsucker?

What confusions and conflicts in our own society are reflected in this garbled attempt to serve so many masters at once?

All this, and a vampire who thinks “You’re dope enough yep,” and says “I’m like wow,” after the jump –

Last week, Fenzel wrote a thoughtful analysis of the song “Tik Tok” by Ke$ha. In the resulting discussion in the comments, OTI reader “Brimstone” had this to say about how the song furthers Ke$ha’s image as a “skank”:

I don’t listen to much modern pop but I’ve been a rock fan for ages, and male fans ‘glamorizing self-destructive behavior’ goes back as far as the blues, if beyond. The author of this piece is right – she’s doing the rock star persona thing, which ties into the Mick Jagger line. And that’s cool! Guys have been writing songs like this for decades… Nothing wrong with a girl doing it.

Brilliant observation, Brimstone. And to further illustrate your point, I’ve taken the liberty of re-recording a bit of “Tik Tok”…

as a Muddy Waters-esque old school blues song.

→Download Tik Tok (The Blues Version) [MP3, 2.6 MB]

Try listening to it. Thematically, it makes sense (well, except for the pedicure part) and isn’t nearly as weird as the picture above suggests.

More tellingly, the sum total isn’t that far removed from a Muddy Waters tune along the lines of “Hootchie Coochie Man”…

…or B. B. King’s “Let The Good Times Roll”:

Readers: what do you think of this unholy combination? Have you gained a new appreciation for Ke$ha? Or did I only succeed in sending Muddy Waters spinning in his grave? Sound off in the comments!

Update: Love the song? Digg it here.

I’m not going to say that Ke$ha is the next evolution of pop…

Eh, why not, I’ll say it, whether it’s really true or not – “Ke$ha is the next evolution of pop.” I sorta did anyway already. Let’s court controversy.

Observe:

But remember what evolution actually means. People often erroneously assume evolution is like progress. That is means things are getting better. Evolution doesn’t mean that at all; it isn’t normative. There is nothing inherently better about a rabbit that is white in the winter versus a rabbit that is brown in the winter.

Evolution is the product of things that survive and breed. It’s about adapting to hostile environments. Popular music faces a very hostile environment these days – sales are way down, noise is way up, and getting a single anything to last in the popular conscious for more than an afternoon is a herculean feat.

What sort of song evolves in this environment?

What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And when it wakes up in the morning, why does it feel like P. Diddy?

Read on. Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. Read read read. Tonight, I’mma fight ’till you see the sunlight!

This album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me I’d never amount to nothin’, to all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustlin’ in front of that called the police on me when I was just tryin’ to make some money to feed my daughters, and all the ni—rs in the struggle, you know what I’m sayin’?

—Notorious B.I.G., “Juicy”

I just threw away a lifetime of guilt-free sex and floor seats for every sporting event in Madison Square Garden. So please, a little respect. For I am Costanza, Lord of the Idiots.

—Jason Alexander, Seinfeld

Every culture recognizes the hustler.

Greek mythology devotes as much praise to Odysseus – builder of the Trojan Horse; blinder of Polyphemus; the man who outwitted Circe and Proteus – as it does to the legendary warrior Achilles. The Native Americans of the Midwest venerated the mythical Coyote, trickster extraordinaire, while the Norse had Loki, who could even change his gender. You can find more classical fables, from Aesop to Jean de la Fontaine, that honor the cunning prey overcoming the mighty predator than vice versa. From the Monkey King of the Ming Dynasty to Anansi, spider-god of the Ashanti, every human society reveres cleverness and wit.

These mythological gods and heroes play a variety of roles. Anansi was a storyteller; Coyote, the creator of man and the Earth; Loki, a thorn in the side of Asgard. But they all share the similar Jungian archetype of the hustler: the underdog surviving on his wit.

Smooth operator.

This is not a parody either, really. It's a... what is the word. Fiasco?

Man.  Writing about The Simpsons is hard.  Even though I’m still a fan, when I sit down to try to talk about the series, I find myself asking, “which series?”  It’s been around for so long… the show itself has changed, and I’ve changed, so the way I relate to the show has changed a LOT.  Trying to talk about all twenty years at once doesn’t even really seem possible.  Note that I’m not one of those people who says that it used to be good and then jumped the shark.  It’s just different now. (And it’s not just one before-and-after difference either.  I can think of at least three or four different phases in the show’s development — or rather, in the development of my relationship to the show?)

I cannot for the life of me figure out a way to celebrate or analyze their 20th season.  So instead I’ll just use The Simpsons as a jumping off point to talk about musical parodies, which have been much on our minds of late.

Overthinking It has hosted some posts of late debating pop-cultural parodies, like Starship Troopers and Steel Panther. These posts have generated some contentious yet rewarding discussions. In these posts, and the discussions that follow, a common question has emerged: does the fact of being a parody excuse the parody from being offensive? Is “I’m Just Kidding, Guys” a sufficient defense?

R&B singer Chris Brown has been something of a pariah since the Rihanna assault incident earlier this year. He’s back with a new album, and if you take a look at the cover, it will come as no surprise to our readers that it caught my attention:

Yup, that’s Chris Brown with what appears to be a Terminator-esque metal endo-skeletal hand, not to mention the liquid metal T-1000 spelling the name of the album in the lower right hand corner.

But this Chris Brown/Terminator connection is only the beginning. Some investigation revealed more strange connections in the world of romantically connected R&B singers and science fiction movies with robots. Behold, a Venn Diagram:

See how it all comes together, after the jump:

Lee:Ugh. “I Got a Feelin’,” the Black Eyed Peas, song, was nominated for the “Record of the Year” Grammy. What a joke. Though I don’t want to do it the service of even mentioning it on this site, it’s worth repeating that this is an awful, awful song. It has no redeeming quality.

Fenzel: TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT!!

Lee: Not lyrical, not musical, not cultural

Fenzel: LET’S LIVE IT UP!!

Lee: If anything, it actively subtracts from music in general for being so bad

Fenzel: I GOT MY MONEY!!!

Lee: As in, it makes other songs worse. Not just Black Eyed Peas songs, but the life’s work of other musicians is made less by the existence of this song

Fenzel: LET’S SPEND IT UP!!!

[Today, a consideration of Taylor Swift by frequent contributor Trevor Seigler. —Ed.]

By about the third or fourth time (well, maybe the three hundredth or four hundredth time) I’d heard Taylor Swift’s hit single “You Belong With Me,” I began to think she might be mentally unstable. You can’t miss the song, it’s on the radio constantly and so catchy in its own right that you’ll be unwillingly humming it to yourself for days. But the lyrics leave Ms. Swift open to the possibility that she might be some sort of passive-aggressive stalker.

VerhOeverthinking It week may be over, but a lot of the analysis we did on the work of filmmaker Paul Verhoeven carries over into other areas of the popular culture, such as music. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Steel Panther, the Starship Troopers of Heavy Metal.

1985 called. It wants its...everything...back.