Smoking IS Cool

Earlier this month a friend of mine and I were having a conversation and some how the topic of smoking arose. We talked about why we thought people smoked and what we had learned/been taught about it. After really thinking about it I came to realize that contrary to what we learn from our parents or what we learn in school. Smoking IS cool. I’m sure everyone here has heard “Smoking Isn’t Cool” but after really thinking about it more and more, smoking IS cool. Personally I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life. Mainly because I don’t want to, but after also thinking about it, I really wouldn’t look “cool” doing it or I’m not “cool” enough to. I’m a skinny, white, middle class, college kid, who is a computer science major, that’s just not cool, and I accept that. After really analyzing this I think that there are certain people who do look cool smoking. And ofcourse people who DON’T look cool smoking. I think smoking in our culture really holds a symbol of power. I can relate this back to myself because even though I’ve never smoked a cigarette, I have smoked my fair share of cigars. Why? because it was enjoyable the first time? because it wasn’t, but I did it again. Because of peer pressure? well possibly. Because it emulated a sense of power? I’d have to agree. Now you’re probably reading this and saying “well that doesn’t make any sense, you’ll smoke a cigar but not a cigarette?” but I also think that along with a sign of power cigarette also add a “bad ass” edge to them. And with some people, this just works….and with others, it really doesn’t.

Lets look at some examples I dug up off of the intertron…

Ron White, one of my favorite comedians. Just look at this guy, cigar in one hand, drink in the other hand I’m sure, this guy is cool and powerful, hands down. Anyone who tries to tell me that he doesn’t look cool is dead wrong. Watch his stand up sometime, he just gives that edgy, cool vibe which are the exact ingredients that make smoking cool.

Mary-Kate Olsen, God just look at this girl. Who would have thought this Full House girl would turn out to be such a bad ass. She is obviously filthy rich from the empire her sister and her have put together over the years. I’m sure shes doped up in this picture, but who really cares. This again is another perfect example of someone who looks cool smoking, they just fit that criteria.

Colin Farrell, I really don’t know much about this guy, but when I thought of cool people who smoke, he came to my head.

Marilyn Monroe, this is probably my favorite picture out of them all. I can honestly say that this is beautiful. She just screams bad ass. Think about it, 1st Playboy Playmate, Actress, Singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” and the whole Kennedy thing. This is the perfect formula for what I’m talking about. This IS cool.

Those were people I found who I thought look cool smoking, ofcourse there are plenty of people who don’t. Yes, I’m talking about you highschool preppy girls who chain smoke because they think it makes them look order or cool. Honestly you look SO dumb. Again, there are people who look cool smoking, and people who don’t. Lets take a look below.

Lindsay Lohan, Oh Lindsay…yes you’re an addict to every drug possible, yes you may not be the best actress, yes you were an amputee in “I Know Who Killed Me” and you still fucked like it was your job, yes I still think you’re hot anyway, but I’m sorry your not a bad ass, you’re not edgy, you don’t look cool smoking. I’m sorry…

Britney Spears, You were hot in that school girl outfit many years ago, now you’re older, fatter, have kids, and I think you may have gone crazy and shaved all you hair off? Sorry you fail. But K-Fed, definite bad ass for hitching you and he looks cool smoking.

Lucille Ball (Lucy), The reason I grabbed this picture was to show that not all 2000’s druged up celeb girls look bad smoking. Here is a perfect example of an American star that just doesn’t look cool smoking. Granted in that era everyone smoked, but everyone didn’t look cool.

When trying to find males who looked bad smoking I found it very difficult. I think this is because in our society males are looked at as powerful so they already have that first trait in the bag. Now having that one trait alone doesn’t instantly make you a “cool looking smoker” because if I saw Bill Gates light up a cig, I’d laugh….

So who do you think looks cool smoking? Who do you think looks bad smoking?

I Deconstruct My Thoughts At This Piano

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a huge Andrew McMahon Fan….

Jack’s Mannequin had a concert on Thursday at MSU, I had to go.

So, I headed out to East Lansing on Thursday afternoon to see this concert, smiling the whole way there. Every time I see them play live it gets better and better. This being the 4th time I’ve seen them live, I still was stunned.

The concert was at the Wharton Center which is very similar to Miller Auditorium here at WMU. There were 2 opening bands, “A Letter To You” – which honestly really sucked, and “Stacy Clark” – who I really liked, she sounded similar to a Michelle Branch. From being a Jack’s veteran I knew the exact protocol, they roll the piano out, everyone cheers, about 30mins later they come on stage. Like I said before the concert was great they played just about every song off of the “Everything In Transit” record and 3 songs off of the new unreleased cd, “Cellular Phone”, “Suicide Blonde”, and “Caves”. As always Andrew made sweet sweet love to his piano not missing one note (even though heavily intoxicated) this is something you really need to see inperson to understand, he really just plays the hell out of that thing, and ofcourse was funny as can be. My favorite quotes of the night were “This is a song about NOT killing the messenger”, and “Everytime I play a show on a college campus people seem to be twice as drunk as people at a normal venue, I find this ironic because they don’t sell alcohol at places like this…” *Crowd Boo’s* “…not like that would be unreasonable or anything…” He’s a very witty guy. The band also throws in covers of different bands during songs, this time they threw in U2’s “With or Without You” into “Dark Blue”, this to me and my friend Brian was awesome. For the well deserved encore he played “Me and the Moon” by Something Corporate which is one of my favorite SOCO songs and also my text message ringtone which I’m sure my roommate hates, so I had to record it for him. And then finally closed with his infamous cover of “American Girl” by Tom Petty where he came running up into the crowd right into our row, I was able to take a picture, check it out below.

This is really how close he came to us, it was really sweet. A kid asked me after the concert if I could e-mail him the picture, I looked at him and just laughed…

I can’t wait for the new album, and the summer tour.

P.S. – I love the blonde girls face in the full size picture…

My Music Memories

About 6 or 8 months ago my cousin wrote a post on his blog telling about “albums that make me remember”. I found this post very inspirational because it made me look back and recall the sound track of my life. Ever since I read his post I wanted to make my own revision of my favorites.

His blog started off with a quote I think everyone has said in their life time, I’ve really started to say it more recently “I think I’m getting older…”. Now I’m not by any means claiming that I’m an old, looking back on decades of living, I simply think that I can classify myself as “older” now rather than just a kid, or teenager. This reality started to hit me after high school graduation, moving off to college and really followed through when I came back home for Homecoming wondering to myself “why the fuck am I here?, my goal for the last 18 years was to leave this?…” But back to the focus on the memorable albums.

• Offspring – Smash
  • Everyone has the first CD they’ve ever owned, sadly for my generation most peoples were Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync, Britney Spears, Usher, or some shit like that, oh Spice Girls too. But not for me, I had an amazing music influence in my early years, mainly from my cousin Chris and my neighbor AJ. Most kids I knew had no idea who these bands were and thought I wasn’t cool for having this CD. I wanted nothing to do with that pop bullshit everyone else was listening too. Basically from age 6 to 12 if it wasn’t played on 88.7 (89X) I wanted nothing to do with it. Smash was the first CD that was mine. The funny story behind it was someone actually bought me the R.E.M. – Monster album which I wanted nothing to with (being a music genius at 7 years old) I send my mother to the store to exchange Monster for Smash not thinking twice about it. I wonder if I would have made a different decision now knowing what I know about music now…..nah. I can remember listening to this CD over and over again on my Magnavox radio that I shared with my bother Kevin. At the time I had no idea what 90% of the songs were talking about but I still loved it. “Self Esteem” was just a song with some catchy lyrics to me at the time, now I know what it’s really about and have lived the song far to many times in real life. This album takes me back to being a kid just having fun messing around, which is weird to say but I love it. To this day I still know every lyric to this album, just as you do to that pop album you got as your first CD, who’s cooler now?
• Green Day – Dookie
  • This is the second album I owned, similar story to the Offspring – Smash story. I was introduced to Green Day by my cousin Chris when he made me a mixed tape one of the times I was over at his house. I remember going over there and seeing his CD collection which was huge in my eyes at the time and wanting to listen to every one he had. Most of the time I’m sure I ended up pissing him off and messing up the order of his disks but i am still forever greatful for the times he let me sit in his room going through his music. But it was actually my neighbor AJ who got me really listen to Dookie, he is 4 years older than I am and had the Dookie album along with many other good albums. The other plus was his older sister was in high school so he had access to all of her music. AJ used to let me listen to the Dookie when we would hang out but, obviously, that wasn’t all the time. When I first got my own copy you can imagine I just listened to it over and over again. The really interesting thing about this CD is when I was younger I thought that I actually had a rare image on the back of my album cover. On every copy I’d ever seen there was a picture of the Sesame Street character Ernie crowd surfing, mine doesn’t have that, I didn’t know why? Now after doing some research I do;
    • “The back cover on early prints of the CD featured a plush toy of Ernie from Sesame Street, which was airbrushed out of later prints for fear of litigation. Some rumors suggest that it was removed because it led parents to think that Dookie was a child’s lullaby album or that the creators of Sesame Street had sued Green Day.” – Wikipedia

    Again with this album, I know every lyric to but had no idea what it meant at the time. This again takes me back to being a kid, just having fun. Recently I was buying some posters to decorate my dorm room and stumbled across one of the Dookie album cover. For those of you who haven’t seen it, its a very interesting piece of art work. So it was an obvious buy, no matter what the cost, i had to have it. It’s currently on the wall across from me as I type this now.

• Beastie Boys – Hello Nasty
  • I loved the Beastie Boys, i still do. Hello Nasty wasn’t my first Beastie Boy album, nor do I think it’s the best, it just has the most meaning to me. This album came out when I was 10 and again my peers thought I was crazy to buy it. This album reminds me of 4th and 5th grade, at that point I was finally starting to understand the lyrics in the songs I was listening too and the Beastie Boys (I think) have some of the best hip-hop lyrics still to this day (crazy white guys eh?). I remember playing basketball with my cousin Chris listening to this album and him asking me what I thought the best song on the album was. Like an idiot I responded “Intergalactic” which although a good song, was far to cliche. I now think the best song is “Putting Shame In Your Game” and understand what a cliche song is.
• Dr. Dre – 2001
  • 2001 was probably the biggest turning point in my understanding of music. I remember getting this album in December of 1999, my mom bought it for me because I did well that semester in school so this was my present. I can still to this day remember her standing with me at the store looking at the album cover with the pot leaf on the front of it and the back having just about every other word censored with a sticker. I still have no idea why in the hell she bought this CD for me, I owe my mom so much for buying me this. I can remember going home and putting it in my CD player and the first words coming to my head being “Oh Shit….Where Are My Head Phones?” this was like nothing I’d ever heard before. This was a whole new level of music, the main difference was that this was the first time I was in the same music crowd of my peers, I know this is because of Eminem in the track “Forgot About Dre”. This album doesn’t bring alot of memories back to me from that particular time in my life but the fact that it was truly revolutionary to my understanding of music. It is probably in my top 5 albums of all time.
• N.E.R.D. – Fly or Die
  • Oh high school….This album reminds me of high school and trying to understand everything (Girls, Friends, Parents, My Future). Pharrell Williams is probably one of the best music producers ever. If a pop/hip-hop song is good, and I mean truly good, Pharrell probably did some work on it. He is a genius with both lyrics and rhythm. The beats he creates stick in your head and will not ever leave. But this album really makes me remember “finding myself” as queer as that sounds. Fly or Die caries the theme of “I’m better than you, I don’t care what you think and I’m happy being like that”. That theme is perfect especially for being in high school. Everyone I’ve listened to this album with thought it was terrible at first but about 10mins in they’ve been hooked, thats just how Pharrell works. This really takes me back to my freshman year though, I can remember just trying to get the hang of everything and understand how it works. At this point in my life I had a new school, a new job, and a new love interest, a very confusing time as you can imagine. I actually got this CD from one of the users that used to upload to my FTP sever. This again reminds me of begin 14 years old and running a very large music server out of the computer in my basement. I would get uploaded anywhere from 2 to 4 gigs of music per day, it was like clock work. I would get CDs weeks before they came out and would sell them to my friends for $5, I made a fortune. I wonder if my parents really comprehended what I was doing in the back corner of the basement. If it weren’t for this server I wouldn’t have half the music I do now.
• Outkast – Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
  • I’ve always enjoyed Outkast but the real reason this album is so memorable to me is again dealing with my cousin Chris. As i’ve said before he is probably was the biggest musical influence on my youth. This album is special because I used to visit him several times a year up at MSU. One particular time I asked him if he wanted me to bring anything (which would usually have a response of “food”) and he surprisingly said the new Outkast CD ripped in 320kbps. Which to those of you don’t know is a very high quality rip sometimes difficult to find. But never the less he asked for it and I found it. So I brought it up with me and We put it into his computer which was hooked up to a very nice Sony receiver and a set of nice Sony floor standing speakers. As he hit play and the crazy sounds of “Ghetto Musick” vibrated through my entire body. Both of us looked at each other knowing that this was another sweet Outkast album. We listened to that CD probably 3 or 4 times during my visit, it’s truly memorable.
• The Beatles – Please Please Me
  • As I’ve talked about before the first CD player I ever had was a Magnavox radio that I shared with my brother Kevin. For those of you who know my brother Kevin and I, you know we don’t share. So basically this radio was mine. When we first got this radio we had nothing to play on there. We both had just spend our savings buying it together. So my dad who has a very very small music collection, maybe 10cds let me barrow his copy of Please Please Me. I’ve listened to this CD an insane number of times because it was all that i had for a long time. It’s very memorable though because at that time (about seven or eight) my dad took a job in Traverse City which is about 4+ hours away from where our house was. So basically he would leave Monday morning and come home Friday evening and I wouldn’t see him the whole week. I really disliked this because my dad is probably one of my biggest role models. So when he was gone I would listen to the CD he let me barrow and basically wait for him to come home.
• Jack’s Mannequin – Everything In Transit
  • This has to be my favorite album of all time. I’ve listened to this CD an unmeasurable amount of times, I know every word, and the meaning to every song. It’s truly an amazing piece of work by Andrew McMahon. The thing that is so amazing about this album is no matter what somehow it can always relate to my life and things going on in it. I got this album at the beginning of my junior year, again a very “new” time in my life. My own car, a new stereo in it that would blow your clothes off, and again a new love interest. But as I said before, this album seems to follow me as I get older, it always has some meaning. I have had this CD for over two years now and I’m still in love with it. I can listen to it over and over again with the songs never getting old and always being able to compare the lyrics to something going on in my life right now. Everything In Transit is like looking through a scrap book of your entire life. You couldn’t find one bad track on the CD even if you looked. Even though the album will make you both smile and cry I guarantee you will have a positive feeling at the end. Everyone has a CD that they can listen to constantly and it never gets old, this is definitely one for me.
• Clint Black – No Time to Kill
  • This album takes me back to when I was just a little kid, maybe 4 or 5. This is actually one of my dad’s favorite albums. He used to play this album (on cassette) while he would work around the house. I would always follow him around wanting to help him in any way I could. This would always be playing in the background. This album is also what sparked my love for country. To this day when I’m working on something I’ll usually always put country on.

There are of course many other albums that bring back memories, I could list them for hours. These are just the most important ones to me.

So what albums bring back memories for you?