M.I.A. Trashes Lady Gaga: An Analysis of the Gaga Phenonmenon

You wouldn’t automatically think Lady Gaga and M.I.A. have much in common, the way Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera do. Gaga is pure pop and M.I.A. is experimental. In the current issue of NME (The New Musical Express: a popular magazine in the United Kingdom), M.I.A. complains, “Lady Gaga sounds more like me than I fucking do,” before the release of her upcoming album due out this summer. Yeah, Gaga and M.I.A. share a certain effortless raspiness in their vocals and infuse electro-pop elements in their music, but the claim is a bit much. Gaga’s rasp is showcased in her piano ballads like “Speechless” and “Again Again,” more so than in her Billboard charting dance tracks. In contrast, M.I.A.’s vocals are always raspy, plus she’s rapping, not singing. Oddly, M.I.A.’s comment simultaneously offends Lady Gaga and herself. This subtle pronouncement of self-deprecation reveals M.I.A.’s insecurity as an artist. So is M.I.A. simply jealous of Lady Gaga or is she just trying to say Lady Gaga is a copycat? The motive behind M.I.A.’s unprovoked verbal slap in the face to Lady Gaga is certainly questionable.

M.I.A. uses Lady Gaga as an example of commercial success, to contextualize the state of music in an era of excessive consumerism and overexposed celebrities who peddle products packaged with the empty promise of a bit of glamour for the average Joe. M.I.A. mentions Lady Gaga three times throughout the interview, and armored each time with a clever backhanded compliment and perhaps a tinge of jealousy. M.I.A.’s biting discourse on Lady Gaga has spurred mixed reactions from fans of both artists.

Lady Gaga fans believe M.I.A.’s comments were an attempt to spark controversy and garner media attention. Why would M.I.A. feel the need to assert her relevance in pop culture? Probably because she’s been M.I.A. from the music scene for the last few years and has yet to satisfy her fans with a follow-up to the mainstream success of Kala, her sophomore album released in 2007. It’s not about the fame or the money for M.I.A., which is clearly evident in her refusal to endorse products or participate in anything too trendy/commercial/mainstream or lacking in substance (whatever that means.) She was asked to record a song for a Twilight soundtrack, an offer which most artists would not hesitate to accept. She explains, “Luckily, Jimmy [Iovine, chairman of M.I.A.’s U.S. label Interscope] had beef with the Twilight people, so he stepped in and told them to fuck off.” It’s not surprising that M.I.A. would rather not be a part of the Twilight enterprise/phenomenon. She’s just too cool to be associated with something as trendy and campy as Twilight, but even Radiohead appeared on the Twilight soundtrack. Pitchfork Media, one of the most pretentious music review websites, calls out her out, saying “When it comes to film, M.I.A. only fucks with Best Picture winners and, um, trailers for pot movies, apparently.”

Is it elitist to be selective about what projects you’re a part of? Well, I guess it depends on your criteria. Obviously, M.I.A. isn’t willing to associate herself with anything considered “corporate” i.e. you’ll never see her endorsing an energy drink. Not selling-out is important to her. She’s not going to compromise her artistic integrity to cash in, unless it’s for a good cause, which really translates into backing her own political agenda. When she is asked if it’s possible for a musician to “sell-out” in 2010, she skirts the question and cites her so-called “selling-out” show for MTV. Her defense was “They paid me a hundred grand and I built a school with it in Africa.” I’ll give her credit for her philanthropy, but this response drips with pretension. M.I.A. knows she’s no longer underground. Commercial success has revoked her hipster credentials. In other words she has lost the respect of the “I only listen really obscure bands because I’m too cool to listen to anything on the radio” niche. Maybe, M.I..A. thought targeting the world’s biggest pop star with a mass following would somehow salvage her anti-establishment reputation. It’s like when Spin magazine said “Radiohead kinda blow.” Another article about how Radiohead is the “vanguard of music” is redundant and well, boring. M.I.A.’s verbal attack on Gaga was a cheap shot and it worked, but probably not in the way she intended.

Anyone who has read the NME article or the Gaga snippets, M.I.A. fan or not, can see her arguments were poorly thought out. M.I.A.’s main complaint is that Gaga isn’t progressive but a good mimic, who “models herself on Grace Jones and Madonna, but the music sounds like 20-year-old Ibiza music, you know?”  Gaga never claimed she was progressive. In fact, Gaga has said, “I’m just trying to reinvent Pop in a fresh way; I'm not trying to recreate the wheel. Everything’s sort of been done before; however I feel that I can make it feel new and fresh - and still be commercial.”

Lady Gaga has her monsters (pet name for her loyal fans) and she has her fair share of haters. You either believe she’s reinvented pop as we know it, or you think she’s a rip-off of Madonna. Whatever side you’re on, there’s no denying she’s the reigning pop icon of the decade. How exactly did she earn this coveted title of pop icon? Well, the press and media would want you to believe she’s got an edge and style like no other. Given, oversized hair bows and bedazzled disco sticks are original creations by the Haus of Gaga (Lady Gaga’s creative team), but shouldn’t originality extend beyond quirky accessories or flashy gimmicks, at least when we’re referring to music? Then again, Lady Gaga is a package deal. Without the persona, the image, and the performance art, Lady Gaga wouldn’t be Lady Gaga. So is she just a modern day mash up of Grace Jones and Madonna?

Grace Jones makes it clear in an interview with UK's Guardian newspaper that she isn’t a fan of Gaga. She says, “I really don’t think of her at all. I go about my business.” Jones also confirms the rumor that Lady Gaga asked to collaborate with her. Jones says, “Yes, she did, but I said no...I’d just prefer to work with someone who is more original and someone who is not copying me, actually.” Jones is right about Lady Gaga’s outfits being similar to hers, but the tirade is excessive, just as M.I.A.’s complaints are. 

M.I.A. whines about how “people say we’re similar, that we both mix all these things in the pot and spit them out differently, but she spits it out exactly the same! None of her music’s reflective of how weird she wants to be or thinks she is...” M.I.A. may be referring to the song, “Chillin” by Wale featuring Lady Gaga released in June 2009. It’s undeniable how similar Lady Gaga’s voice, tone, and inflection are to M.I.A.’s on the track. The song even references M.I.A and “Paper Planes” in the second verse. Wale raps, “Yea, They Keep Sayin Where I'm From, My Name Wale/ Ho's Call Me Mr. Never Wear The Same Thing/ You Redundant, You Never Ever Change/And I'm The Same Way, M.I.A./ That Mean Cool And Dre Get High Like Planes.”

“Chillen” is the only song that supports M.I.A.’s claim and plus, Gaga is just featured on the track. One example isn’t enough to hold up M.I.A.’s argument. Perhaps, M.I.A. realized this fact midstream and decided to go on a tangent; pinning Gaga as the poster-child for what’s wrong with the music industry.

M.I.A. criticizes Lady Gaga for product placement, saying “she plugs 15 things in her new video. Dude, she even plugs a burger! That’s probably how they’re making money now- buying up the burger joint, putting the burger in the video, and making loads of burger money.”  According to Advertising Age, paid advertisements in the “Telephone” (Lady Gaga’s most recent single featuring Beyoncé) video include Miracle Whip, Virgin Mobile, Polaroid; unpaid advertisements include Wonderbread, Plenty of Fish.com, Heartbeats headphones, Chanel, Diet Coke, HP Envy, and Beats laptops.

M.I.A. may have slightly exaggerated the amount of product placement in the video, but she does present a valid argument. When artists endorse a product through their music, it just seems wrong. The artist becomes a (commercially viable) brand, and his or her image is the commodity. Whether or not a fan is aware of the somewhat subliminal product placement in lyrics or music videos, the artist is exploiting his or her popularity in order to sell x, y, and z. It’s slightly better when the artist’s image somehow captures the brand of the product i.e. Gatorade commercials featuring professional athletes. But in this case, Miracle Whip, a salad dressing/sandwich spread alternative to mayonnaise, in no way relates to Lady Gaga’s edgy, futuristic image. But she needs the money and she needs it for art’s sake. She has gone bankrupt four times and her tour has lost about $3 million to date. According to March 28^th’s issue of New York Magazine, Gaga refuses to compromise on any aspect of the stage show. She says, “I spent my entire publishing advance on my first tour…I’ve had grand pianos that are more expensive than, like, a year’s worth of rent.”

M.I.A.’s burger comment is amusing, but she jumps to the wrong conclusion. Gaga isn’t promoting products to pocket the money for herself, well at least not all of it. M.I.A. doesn’t grasp the concept of Gaga. Like Madonna and Grace Jones, Lady Gaga is more than her music. Gaga is fully committed to the public persona she has created. She explains, “I wouldn't want people to see me- me - in anyway except my music and stage performances.” Gaga doesn’t want to become a victim of overexposure. She says, “today with the media, and the way that it is, you see absolutely legendary people [Michael Jackson] - taking out their trash. It’s something that we as a society don’t want to see, but we keep buying into it; and I think its destroying show business.”

 What M.I.A. fails to see is how favorable having a public persona can be. Gaga’s act is not only for the sake of self-preservation. It also allows her to be completely immersed in the art she has dedicated her life to. She explains to New York Magazine, “What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth—and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.” Lady Gaga is a performative escape from reality. Her music is vapid but its fun. Who said music has to have a message to have substance? Gaga defends her music against critics who think she’s all style, and no substance with, “People believe electronic music is soulless - and it's not. Do you know why I know it's not? Because the soul that I feel from my fucking beautiful fans at my show cannot be a lie - it can't. I've never in my life seen the intensity in their faces - I mean they bloodsuck and kill to be together; I mean there's glitter, and there's sweat, and there's dancing, and there's hair bows, and they believe in it so much and it's real. In those moments: it's real; and they bring my music to life.” So Gaga’s music isn’t really groundbreaking, but at least our generation can finally point to a pop culture icon, who isn’t an embarrassing reality star or a peroxide blonde celebutante.  

Lady Gaga has yet to dignify M.I.A. with a response or legitimize the one-sided feud. If you haven’t been brainwashed yet by the hipster elites, trying to persuade you mainstream music has no merit, you’ll come to the realization that M.I.A. makes an ass out of herself in the NME article. Mainstream music is just music that becomes widely listened to and it can be good and bad- you can turn on Z-100 and hear Kings of Leon and then Ke$ha.

Lady Gaga’s music may have been considered “underground” pre-stardom, but now it’s mainstream because she’s achieved commercial success. She says, “I think dance music in America is - or was for a very long time - kind of like, underground, and 'gay,' and not on the mainstream, very ‘Oh, that'll never be played on the Top 40.' My fans aren't normal Top 40 radio fans, they're like crazy punk rock fans - with me tattooed all over them, with wigs, and throwing glitter and hairbows, and fainting all over themselves. So, when my record label heard The Fame Monster they said 'It's confusing, it's too dark, you look gothic, it's not pop,’ and I said, ‘You don't know what pop is, because everyone was telling me I wasn't pop last year, and now look — so don't tell me what pop is, I know what pop is.’”

            The only thing that saves M.I.A. from being completely pretentious is admitting the practicality of Lady Gaga. M.I.A. says, Gaga is “a talent and she’s got a great team behind her, but she’s the industry’s last stab at making itself important - saying, ‘You need our money behind you, the endorsements, the stadiums. Respect to her, she’s keeping a hundred thousand people in work, but my belief is: Do It Yourself.”

            Gaga did do it herself. Drawing inspiration from influential pop icons isn’t cheating. It’s impossible to call anyone original in 2010. It’s all been done before. People who think M.I.A. is more original than Gaga is only ignorant of the fact that M.I.A.’s influences are obscure (sampling African and Middle Eastern tribal music) and can’t be easily compared the way Gaga is to artists like David Bowie, Queen, and Madonna.

You don’t need to appreciate the art in Gaga’s bedazzled disco sticks and oversized hair bows to see her genius. She’s a living caricature. No idea or design is too wild for the Haus of Gaga. Lady Gaga can pique your interest just by looking at her. She starts a conversation. And if you’re sulking over sour grapes like M.I.A., at least you’ll get a joke out of it.  When asked about how important image and visuals are, M.I.A. says, “It’s not like ‘Haus of Gaga’ (laughs). Me blindfolded with naked men feeding me apples and shit.” 

M.I.A.	vs.	Lady Gaga
Political hipster	Image/Look	Futuristic dominatrix
500,000 copies of Kala sold in the U.S. to date	Record Sales	10 million albums sold worldwide
“Money is always the enemy of music.”	Motto	“For some people, fame kills it and becomes more important than the music or the performance. But for me fame is like rocket fuel. The more my fans like what I’m doing, the more I want to give back to them. And my passion is so strong I can’t sleep.”
Rolling Stone and Blender’s Album of the Year in 2007, earned a slot on Time Magazine’s “World’s Most Influential People” 2009 list	Awards	2 Grammies, 3 MTV Music Video awards, 9 Billboard Music Awards
“Paper Planes” reached #4 on the Hot 100 chart	Billboard Charts	6 number one hits on the Pop songs chart (tying her with Mariah Carey and Beyoncé)

ECO-FRIENDLY BUSINESS: Students for Fair Trade at Fordham University Working Towards Social Justice

Eco-friendly, organic, energy-saving and all-natural- These labels have become a part of the everyday vernacular of our consumer-driven culture. It’s hip and trendy, so of course we eat it up to stay trim in this health-crazed society. And all in the name of “going green”- an umbrella term to describe someone or something environmentally conscious. Amongst the other cringe-worthy phenomena of our celebrity-obsessed culture, “going green” is one of the few generational trends we don’t have to be ashamed of. Fair Trade is a movement that stretches its environmental conscience to include social justice ideals.

As a handsomely hand-carved soapstone figure of a lanky elephant was raised in the air for group inspection, I couldn’t resist examining the myriad hand-made Kenyan jewelry and Ghanaian chocolates organized on a long side table draped with tropical orange and green colored Ugandan fabric. Where was I? Not a bazaar, a marketplace, or flea market, but in a meager 200-square-foot corner room meant for storage space with an excessive amount of fluorescent lighting, nearly cheapening the alluring items. 

I continued to survey the crowded room brimming with artifacts as the group took inventory and tagged merchandise for their Valentine’s Day Sale the next day. I almost forgot I wasn’t visiting the Students for Fair Trade (SFT) store/office to shop but to research the fairly new organization still in its developmental stage, forming its identity.

SFT at Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus is an all-inclusive label for the organization. It is an academic and community service learning class (titled Fair Trade and Microfinance), a club organization, and a small business. SFT began in 2006 when Professor Kate Combellick, PhD. began teaching a College of Business Administration (CBA) class under the International Service Learning Program, which will be phased out next year and become part of Fordham’s Community Service Program. Dr. Combellick is the Program Director of the International Service Learning Program. She’s approachable, high-spirited, and down-to-earth. 

“We provide business, not charity,” Dr. Combellick proclaims as she stares intently into the video camera. Coincidently, I was not the only outsider attending the class meeting that particular day. Two members of the Audio Visual Club were there to gather footage for STF’s documentary in the works. The AV Club charged a mere fifty dollars for their services. Combellick provided a brief overview of STF’s mission without the assistance of notes. Not once did she fumble for words. Her impromptu, almost stream-of-consciousness speech demonstrated her breadth of knowledge and personal faith in Fair Trade. As I scanned the mid-size conference room, I didn’t see the usual shuffling of papers, doodling, or glazed eyes. No one was bored. This was not your average, run of the mill college class. The nine students, who all competed to take the class, have the privilege of learning practical business application in a non-conventional classroom setting. Anyone can opt to drop out of the class at any given time- a Combellick rule to ensure optimal commitment to the organization. 

According to SFT’s brochure, Fair Trade is “an organized social movement and market-based model of international trade which promotes the payment of a fair price as well as social and environmental standards in areas relayed to the production of a wide variety of products” including handicrafts, coffee, cocoa, tea, bananas, honey, cotton, wine, and fresh fruit. Fair Trade integrates local merchants and farmers in the global marketplace, where mass production and corporations dominate business.

SFT follows the same goals of Fair Trade, upholding its social ideals. Erika Pineda, one of the nine members of the club (which calls itself a team) says she “dreams about our Fair Trade methodology spreading like a virus throughout every university in the world.” Pineda manages the club’s marketing, which includes creating posters, brochures, and updating the fashion blog. In addition to the fashion blog, which showcases artsy photographs of Fordham students modeling Fair Trade jewelry, SFT has five other web pages including accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, a blog on Word Press and a dot org that provides general facts and contact information. The members of SFT are making use of every free of-charge outlet on the Internet to market the brand, the products, the mission and the events. This year’s sales events include the aforementioned Valentine’s Day sale called Fall in Love with Fair Trade and Love Fairly: A Chocolate and Coffee Tasting Event.

SFT’s mission statement encourages “economic expansion in developing countries by empowering fair trade businesses to increase profits and by creating solutions to achieve social justice and reduce poverty through the application of business skills and commitment to being men and women for others.” 

SFT is not your average “fashion for a cause” charity. Technically it’s not a non-profit organization, since it directly distributes a sum of its profits as micro-loans to their local artisan partners in Kenya which include Nyabigena Carvers Cooperative located in Nyamarabe, a small village in Kisii and Trinity Jewellery located in Mathare, one of the poorest areas on the outskirts of Nairobi. 

Nyabigena Carvers Cooperative is a civic-minded enterprise, which has sponsored a women’s literacy program and an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign. The artisans can practically carve soapstone, a naturally occurring material, into almost anything including Fordham’s mascot, the Ram, as suggested by Dr. Combellick.

During spring break, Dr. Combellick and the class will travel to Nairobi to give the Cooperative more ideas for carvings, buy new merchandise, and train their artisan partners on to use QuickBooks, an accounting software, to better manage their finances.

Sean O’Connor, another team member who is charge of expanding SFT to other schools, suggested bringing a sample pair of cufflinks without a mechanism, to use as a model to create a soapstone version. O’Connor says “cufflinks would expand clientele to include more men.” The idea has profit potential since most of the merchandise is jewelry meant for women. 

Also, Dr. Combellick feels the trip will give the team the opportunity to see the poverty first hand. Dr. Combellick has asked each student to prepare a mini-lesson plan for younger children to practice English. Community service such as this exemplifies SFT’s general concern for social justice. The business is utilized as a vehicle to provide financial assistance to artisans, in effort to stimulate their local economy, where living conditions are substandard and the people have limited access to employment, education, and basic needs. 

The broad scope of STF’s mission is daunting and ambitious, but the team stays focuses on running their business as efficiently and profitably as possible. STF is a work in progress at the moment. Its affiliation with Fordham is not altogether concrete. Combellick told the class of the faculty-circulated rumors of her pocketing money from the business, a reason why she has decided not to register her name under STF’s new Bethex account. The majority of the team would like STF to be independent of Fordham, in order to have more control of the business and avoid the bureaucratic constraints of the University.

Despite the financial and administrative quibbles, the team as a whole remains optimistic, especially since their trip to Kenya is nearing. Currently, STF is working on putting together selling packages for individual distribution, creating updated brochures, and starting an official store website to easily purchase products and manage inventory. STF seems like a pebble on the shoreline but its commitment to the Fair Trade movement is inspiring and worthy of recognition.

                                            Fair Trade Office

                                           Kenya Trip

Baby Blues

Armored and veiled with

sleek denial and lace-whipped

mechanisms against

saucy saccharine smiles.

I laugh and say we will never be

to sling the slurs and slips of

starry eyes.

We play one game of balancing

calculated coyness.

So I keep walking along to the

syncopated beats in my head

and the lanky boy next door

stares in disbelief.

No baby blues I say

tonight’s party and bullshit

Keep your champion beer pong title

while I cut blunt white lines

between us.

I blast Beastie Boys

to block your BK swagger

sauntering towards me,

No baby blues I say.

I need to shower and blaze.

Quality Teen Drama?: Skins Season 4

             American television has reached new heights with high-quality shows such as Mad Men, Dexter, and Damages. But a genre which seems to delve no deeper than puddles is the teen drama. This genre epitomizes campy performances and perfects cringe-worthy scenes. Shows like Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries have garnered high ratings but are merely guilty pleasures we’re too ashamed to watch with anyone else in the room. These shows depict adolescents as depraved deviants with flexible morals, consumed with sex, drugs, and partying. These shows reaffirm the paranoid fears of parents who have no clue where their children are at 10 pm.

Skins, a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award winning show which airs on BBC, is a show which does justice to the teen-drama genre. Yes, there is a vast amount of sex, drugs, and partying, but with substance and sophistication. Skins depicts the teenage years in all its complexity, embitterment, and melancholia. The show presents high school stereotypes as a mere façade, but a much needed mask to reveal the irony in each character’s lives. Skins continues its character-driven storytelling technique, in which each episode is devoted to one character’s story line. There is a total of 10 episodes a season, with the finale merging the individual subplots. Unlike American television, British shows normally do not drag seasons for no more than 12 episodes, compromising lucrative commercial airtime for logical, cohesive plot lines, less prone to losing the interest of fickle audiences.

Season 4 premiered on January 28, 2010. The first episode begins with a girl’s death due to a supposed MDMA overdose at a rave. The episode focuses on Thomas Tomone, a foreign exchange student from the Congo still in the progress of assimilating to a culture he considers too loose. He functions as a foil to the amoral behavior of the rest of the cast with his always earnest, always honest intentions.

The second episode focuses on Emily Fitch, the lesbian twin whose family utterly opposes her relationship with Naomi, another main character on the show, who came out of the closet at the end of last season. Emily fed up with her mother’s relentless jibes at her girlfriend and complete denial of her homosexuality, impulsively decides to move in with Naomi. The episode further builds on their fragile relationship.

Skins tries to outdo itself each season with more taboo behavior, where the audience is impelled to question whether or not it has reached a  point of saturation, in which the deviance is merely for shock-value and not necessarily plot or character driven. The excessive hedonism cannot be denied, but seems to act as a vehicle to reveal and emphasize the tragic flaws of each character. The well-crafted character development keeps Skins from crossing into vacuous teen soap opera territory.

Rumble At Rodrigue's: Security Guard Watches While Students Rage

             On March 5^th, Rodrigue’s Coffee House (Alumni House), Fordham University’s student-run lounge at the Rose Hill Campus held a free live show featuring the Brooklyn new-wave punk band, Japanther. The opening act Juxtapose, an electro-rap trio consisting of a vocalist/rapper, pianist, and drummer began the night with its jazz infused beats. Most people awkwardly stood around or lounged on the mismatched furniture along the walls, occasionally bopping their heads to the music. Having been to several Rodrigue events, I thought the same laidback vibe would continue throughout the night.

 During Juxtapose’s set, the crowd remained fairly reserved, even docile, or perhaps simply stoned. Surprisingly, the passivity started to waver as Juxtapose played its last song entitled “Radio Caroline.” Everyone was chanting; repeating the mantra, “Something else is bothering me.” The collective moment signaled the crowd’s approaching fervor.

While, Japanther’s two members, Ian Vanek, vocals/drummer, and Matt Reilly, the guitarist, were setting up, the crowd tripled and anticipation filled the room. I noticed several guys who looked as if they were preparing for a fight, loosening their shoulders, cracking their necks, sweeping back their hair, hands balled in fists, taking on a combat stance. At its peak, the modest establishment held more than hundred impassioned fans that night, well past the legal occupancy.

Any event at Fordham involving crowds and music usually translates into security guards on power trips, exercising an unnecessary amount of vigilance. But this was Rodrigue’s, a quaint, intimate setting for the hipster/indie/alternative scene at Fordham, so the security department probably figured one man was sufficient, to baby-sit a small assembly of lanky, tight-pants wearing enthusiasts of the obscure for three or so hours. The security department obviously didn’t do any research. For new listeners, Japanther’s music would seem to be mix of genres, and technically it is but if you’re a fan you know it falls into the current underground punk category.

Even with this knowledge, I wasn’t expecting a full- on punk show at Rodrigue’s, a stone-walled cottage sized, miniature loft space, reopened in the fall after a year-long intensive renovation. How would the modest establishment survive a typical punk show complete with a raging mosh pit, crowd surfing, stomping, and other impulsive, injury-prone antics? I knew I had to be cautious not to be caught in the center of the chaos, where everyone aimlessly pushed themselves and others in the contained circle managed by non-pitters. As the ritualized pummeling of displaced rage of post-adolescent angst ensued, I wondered when security would shut it down. But the frenzy continued.

I finally spotted the lone security guard during the middle of Japanther’s set, sitting at the corner of the room, barely conscious. He seemed unfazed by the raucous scene. Perhaps, he had faith in Bobby Cardos, who coordinated and organized the event.

The security guard only intervened when a zealous fan, a male with straight, shoulder length black hair crowd surfed and then proceeded to use the height to climb the wrap-around indoor balcony. The security guard casually pushed through the crowd and signaled Reilly to stop playing. Reilly mouthed “please” several times. Annoyed, the security guard whispered something in Reilly’s ear. Reilly patted Vanek on the shoulder and turned off the synthesizer. Reilly politely announced they couldn’t continue playing until the climber came down from the balcony. The crowd immediately rallied for the unidentified male to comply with the request. And of course he did, or else endure the rage of an adrenaline-intoxicated mob. Japanther played a few more songs, and even few extra impromptu interludes like Notorious B.I.G.’s “Party and Bullshit.”

At the very end of the last song, the climber once again reached the balcony, pulling down the twinkle lights hanging against the wall. The security guard simply shook his head. The show was over and Rodrigue’s remained intact and no one was seriously injured.  The mosh pit proved to be responsible, at least this time.

                                                          Ian Vanek, Matt Reilly

Cleaning on a Sunday Afternoon

And I’ll find a way to work
through the layers of deceit
to dig an excavation of wayward
delusions entrapped beneath us all.

As we ceremoniously rupture
the mortal receptors given
before birth, destroying
the sheer lining of living content
and never willing to say the words
nearly spilling from a fountain
of jagged half truths.

And the swooning snows slowly
covering the basket weaved welts.

Formspring.me @ Your Own Risk: Sign up for an inbox of word vomit

Did the creator of Formspring.me not foresee how disastrous allowing anyone to ask anything anonymously would be? The website kills. Literally. It’s cyber bullying at its worst. On March 22, 2010, Alexis Pilkington, a 17-year-old West Islip, NY High School graduate committed suicide, supposedly after her Formspring had been flooded with offensive comments about her. According to the New York Daily News, Pilkington’s parents do not believe that the comments were the main reason she committed suicide, citing that their daughter was already in counseling before she even created an account. However, her friends “blame insulting comments posted on Formspring.me, and vowed to boycott the social-network site.” What’s worse is that even after Pilkington’s death. Her Formspring page continued to receive vicious comments. Investigators will keep monitoring posts, but it seems pointless. The damage has been done.

Any so-called cyber bullying related suicide would be hard to prove in the court of law. Posting nasty comments on someone’s profile isn’t considered criminal. No federal law exists to prohibit cyber bullying, but several states, including New York, Missouri, Rhode Island, and Maryland, have passed laws against harassment through digital communication. The only federal law that comes close to addressing cyber-bulling is Title 18 of the United States Code § 875. According to the statute, “any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.”

Elizabeth Spiers, the website’s original editor, does not believe Formspring should be held responsible for users who are harassed online. She says, “When I was a teenager, plenty of anonymous bullying took place without the Internet (which we didn't have at my school and I didn’t have until college), mostly via handwritten anonymous notes left in lockers and whatnot. I don’t remember anyone suggesting that Mead should be sued for it, though.” She presents a valid argument. Bullying is a commonplace occurrence. Technology just provided another outlet for it. But then again traditional bullying can’t be made public knowledge, the way cyber bullying can.

Spiers, who has been mistaken as the creator of Formspring, is continually bombarded with accusatory emails. She answered one hostile post on her Formspring, stating how she still receives “some [emails] from parents who suggest their kids will get bullied anonymously thanks to the service and that Formspring should be sued if that happens.”

So why would someone create a Formspring account? Well, if you’re even mildly self-obsessed, it makes perfect sense. Having a platform where you answer questions about yourself is completely self-serving. The whole premise behind all social networking sites is the notion that people are actually interested in your life. But this addictive ego boost can easily become an outlet for verbal abuse. However, you do have the option to delete or ignore a question.

Formspring is oversharing on steroids. It takes Twitter’s microblogging to another level.

The site allows you to indulge in talking about yourself, while creeps are able to ask the most candid questions. Gawker.com, a blog about NYC’s media and gossip news calls Formspring the “sociopathic crack cocaine of oversharing.” Yes, it’s that bad. Some schools have even banned access to the website on campus. Despite, all the criticism, Formspring continues to grow and fuel the needs of narcissists and verbal abusers alike. If you become a victimized on Formspring, it’s your own fault. When you have a box with the caption ask me anything, it’s an open invitation, so really you shouldn’t be surprised if someone asks, “Why are you such an attention whore?”