In the mid-90s, an East Coast vs. West Coast feud developed in rap music, focusing mainly around Tupac (from California) and Notorious BIG (from New York).  The feud started with verbal sparring, then evolved into shootings, then into diss tracks, and finally the death of both rappers.

Only in rap would diss tracks be considered worse than shootings, but whatever, the point is that this feud defined rap music in the 90s.  Unfortunately other rappers took notice of the popularity Tupac and Biggie gained during their feud.  Though feuding did decline somewhat, a number of up-and-coming rappers began adopting a gangsta attitude and creating their own feuds so as to emulate the success of Biggie and Pac.

There has never been another feud quite like the East Coast-West Coast feud in rap music.  Oh sure, VH1’s “Top Feuds” countdown show will tell you that Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff’s catfight over the love of Aaron Carter was worse, but I disagree.  Call me a feuding purist, but when guys get killed in drive-bys, I consider that worse than two skanks fighting over a white boy band rapper.  What can I say, I’m old fashioned like that.  Oh by the way, I’m not making this up, VH1 really did call Lohan-Duff a worse feud than Biggie-Pac.  But that’s irrelevant.

The reason I bring this up is because I believe we are headed toward another massive feud involving prominent figures in the media world.  Only this time, it’s going to be an all-out, verbally sparring, diss track making, blood-shedding, East Coast-West Coast feud…    between journalists.

Oh yes, journalists are the new gangsta rappers.

There used to be a time when being a journalist meant checking with multiple sources and reporting facts in an unbiased manner.  Those days are over.  Newspapers are cutting staff and traditional journalism is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.  However, despite what some people might tell you, journalism is not going to die.  There will always be a demand for news.  In fact, I would argue people these days have a more insatiable appetite for news than ever.  In the age of the Internet, when everything is old after 24 hours, we need new news and we need it more than ever.  Blogs can be interesting, but most of them just take a story from a more traditional news outlet and then put their spin on it or make stupid jokes.  You still need journalism.  After all, you can’t write a blog post about Barack Obama gaining in the polls and gettin’ ready to leave Michelle for a white girl if someone doesn’t first report on Barack gaining in the polls.

On the other hand, people don’t want journalistic integrity.  They say they do, but their actions don’t reflect it.  People just want someone to tell them what they already believe.  Look at the news shows that have gained popularity in recent years:  The Daily Show, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Maher, Hannity & Combs, etc etc.  All these shows do is take news and frame it in a way where it perfectly matches their audience’s worldview.  You technically get the news, but mostly you’re just being entertained or listening to someone you agree with.

So here’s what the field of journalism is coming to:  Reporters that are half traditional journalist and half opinionated blogger.  They go out and do the research and find out the facts, then spin those facts to appease their audience while making a bunch of jokes about Britney Spears and Kegel exercises.  They’re half Bob Woodward and half Jon Stewart.  Half journalist and half blogger.

And that’s how the bloodshed begins.  I don’t know if you know this, but bloggers are some of the cockiest people on Earth.  They think they’re part of some awesome movement, they think they’re single-handedly responsible for killing the newspaper industry, they think that every time they call Ted Stevens a douchebag they are literally performing the most important act ever, and that yet, despite all of this, they still think they are vastly under appreciated.  And here’s the thing:  Bloggers don’t actually do anything.  Trust me, it used to be my job.  It’s a joke.  You set up an RSS feed for all the major news sites, then every day when you get to work at 10:30AM, you scan through the list to see if anything is conducive to dick joke making.  Then you write a couple posts in between watching every new music video on YouTube and claiming it’s for “research.”  That’s your job.

So if bloggers think they’re so great now, wait until they’re actually reporting on something.  Wait until they are doing the legwork and discovering the facts and breaking exclusive stories.  The hubris will be off the charts.  Not to mention these new journalist/bloggers are gaining more mainstream attention by the day.  Soon blogger ego will be equivalent to Tupac ego in 1996.  And since we know that bloggers love to rip everything to shreds, and nothing is off-limits, including other bloggers, it’s only a matter of time until one of these new age journalists says something over the line and begins a feud with another journalist.  It might even start with something innocent.  Journalist A, of the L.A. Times, questions one of Journalist B’s articles in the Washington Post.  Journalist B gets pissed and writes in his online blog that Journalist A sucks and has no business questioning him.  Journalist A releases a podcast saying that Journalist B isn’t even on his level, and then Journalist B responds with a magnus opus in the Sunday paper titled “Journalist A is an Incompetent Reporter, and That’s Why I Fucked His Bitch.”  This causes Journalist A to unleash a cryptic viral video that’s just a picture of a Glock with gunshot noises and the words “You Done Fucked Up Now, Mothafucka.”  Next thing you know, Journalist A is found dead, covered in screenshot print-outs of his original article, Journalist B goes missing, only to have pictures of his bloody corpse surface on a social networking website 3 days later, and we’re engaged in a full-scale East Coast-West Coast journalism feud.  Reporters from the New York Times refuse to travel to California to cover stories, and employees of the Oakland Tribune know not to cross the Mississippi.  Reporters in Houston are forced to pick sides and staffs are divided, brother against brother.  Editors at the Portland Oregonian start to publish pre-emptive obituaries for editors at the Raleigh News & Observer, and vice versa.  Deaths within the journalism world skyrocket as parents blame reporting for their kids’ problems, while talking about the good old days when newspapers used to talk about something real instead of just bragging about guns, cars and bitches.

My point is, all you kids out there who are just entering college, you might want to consider a career in accounting.  New age media ain’t nothin’ to fuck with.

Money.  It’s what makes the world go round.  It’s the root of all evil.  It talks.

The reason there are so many clichés about money is because it’s one of the most talked-about topics on the planet.  Almost everyone needs money, almost everyone wants money, and absolutely everyone likes to discuss money.  Money is one of the foundations of society.

But you shouldn’t base your life around money.  Why?  Because if you do, you will eventually end up looking like these guys.  Yes, those guys in the picture above.  That picture was taken this morning on Wall Street, where the stock market made a record increase and might have just kicked off a comeback from one of the worst economic crises in history.

It’s a great thing for Wall Street and it’s a great thing for America.  But it’s not THAT great.  Check out the goofy smiles and the awkward thumbs ups.  They’re obviously screaming something too; I guarantee it involves the words “yeah” and “baby.”  Let’s cut to the chase:  They look like clowns.  Oh, that’s not a metaphor.  They actually look like circus clowns.

There are few situations in live where you’re allowed to be this over-the-top excited, and they are pretty much limited to:

-The birth of your first child
-Your son scores his first goal/touchdown/homerun/whatever to win the game
-Your daughter tells you she’s engaged to a doctor
-Your husband/wife awakes from a long coma, like in a Lifetime Movie
-You’re a Chicago Cubs fan and they finally win the World Series in 2037
-You attend a frat party and the hottest sorority on campus decides to have an impromptu wet t-shirt contest
-You get kicked in the face at a Slipknot concert and you need to let everyone know you’re alright
-Sarah Palin becomes President, your name is Todd Palin, and you just realized you’re about to have the greatest 4 years ever

That’s it.  And as you can see, none of those situations involve your portfolio having a tremendous day and slightly bouncing back from a massive previous downfall, thus leaving you still in the hole by a solid margin.

What you’re looking at are the smiles of two men who have based their entire life around money.  They’ve tied so much of their happiness to the accumulation of money that now they need money to experience even the slightest amount of joy.  I don’t care if I was living in a gutter somewhere, and out of nowhere some guy handed me a billion dollars, it still wouldn’t make me look like these guys.  Oh, I’d take his money, and I’d buy myself a yacht, and I’d hire a midget servant to pour Cristal over some naked strippers as a group of supermodels fanned me and fed me grapes.  But, and this I promise you, I would NEVER do the over-the-top smile combined with the awkward thumbs up while screaming “Yeah baby!”  Some things are more important than money, and not looking like a fucking clown is one of them.

[PS - Sorry the picture is so tiny.]

[PS 2 - What do you want to bet those guys in the picture are actually really great guys?]

I just found out Fall Out Boy has a new album coming out in a month.

Fall Out Boy sucks.

Fall Out Boy is the worst band on the planet right now.  They only appeal to 14-year old girls.  14-year old girls are idiots, so therefore Fall Out Boy is pretty much worthless.  The only good thing about Fall Out Boy is that we’ll eventually get to see them fail and then we’ll be able to laugh about what a worthless piece of shit band they were.  It’s fitting that Pete Wentz married Ashlee Simpson, because she was the only person on Earth whose lack of talent rivaled his own.  Patrick Stump is a terrible singer and looks like a huge dork.  I almost feel bad for the other two guys in the band, but then I realized that they actively chose to be part of Fall Out Boy, and then I just hate them instead.

Of course it’s not just Fall Out Boy.  They’re simply the poster children for an entire genre of shitty music, emo.  All emo bands are shit.  The only good thing about being an emo fan is that you’ll eventually cut your wrists too deep and die, thus sparing yourself from having to listen to emo music.  Unless of course there is emo music in heaven, but then again, that would pretty much make it hell, so there you go.

And it’s not just emo music, either.  All new music sucks.  You’ve got Nickelback and the 80,000 Nickelback clones growling about bar fights and pussy and other stupid shit.  If I paid 5 cents to hear Chad Kroeger sing, I’d ask for my nickel back and then stab whoever tricked me into that terrible deal in the first place.  Every band whose singer has a deep voice is terrible.  These bands like Creed and Theory of a Deadman just sound like terrible Pearl Jam rip-offs.  And Eddie Vedder was just a shitty version of Jim Morrison, so that should tell you how awful Scott Stapp is.  It’s funny that Scott Stapp always does Jesus poses, because even God hates Creed.  It’s in the Bible, look it up.

And what about rap?  All rap music is garbage.  It’s just a bunch of thugs talking about guns and cars and necklaces.  They have nothing to say.  Older rappers like Tupac and Biggie used to have something to say.  Of course they were just thugs who killed each other so they suck too.  Rap makes society dumber and it’s destroying music.  Anyone who listens to rap has an IQ of 40 and will probably shoot your children.

And how about pop music?  What a pile of dog shit that is.  Fergie sounds like she stole her lyrics from a third grader’s pop up book, making the Clumsy video incredibly appropriate.  Sean Kingston is the musical equivalent of having someone drill into your cranium and then pour rubbing alcohol through the hole.  Britney Spears is famous for being famous and Christina Aguilera used to sleep with lots of guys so she’s obviously terrible.  Pop music has always been terrible.  Madonna was a little progressive but time passed and she aged and didn’t die young or disappear so now you’re an idiot if you ever thought she was good in the first place.

Music hasn’t been relevant since 1969.  U2 sucks and Bono is an asshole.  Tom Petty, John Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen are all populist douchebags who sing anthems for retarded frat guys and stupid sorority girls.  Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones just stole all their ideas from black people.  The Beatles are the only halfway decent band that ever existed, but they once covered a Chuck Berry song, and Michael J. Fox played that one Chuck Berry song in “Back To The Future,” and the plot of that movie was absolutely ridiculous, and Ringo Starr was an average drummer at best, so the Beatles suck.

The only good music came from way before the Beatles.  Blues musicians were OK but most of them spent all their time telling stories about selling their souls to the devil or drowning in the Mississippi River rather than focusing on the craft.  Robert Johnson was all hype.  There were old folk musicians, but they all sang about the same topics.  1800s folk musicians had no range.  And of course you had the farmers who used to whistle while they ploughed their fields.  Those guys were OK when they first came out, but their later whistling was derivative and became a bad caricature of their early work.  They never grew as artists.  Before that, you had Native Americans and their rain dances.  From a music theory standpoint they were alright, but they were really just doing it to help grow crops and maybe get a few swigs of fire water in the process.  Fuckin’ sellouts.  Music is an art form, not a method for growing squash, dickbags!  And don’t get me started on the ancient Europeans and their “Greensleeves” style ballads.  Those jackasses were only in it for the pussy.

The only credible musician in history is Steven Wallace IV, who lived in Northern Ireland in the 8th Century.  He was fleeing the British Army when he stopped and started scraping a stick against a tree.  It was a hollow twig, and he was scraping a well-aged oak tree, so the acoustics were phenomenal.  The rest of his Northern Irish brethren kept telling him, “knock off that racket, the Brits are on their way!”  But Wallace kept scraping the stick against the tree, claiming, “I don’t care about the Brits, I like the way this sounds.”  Now that guy was in it for the right reasons.  He didn’t care about the public reaction or the money or even his life, he was all about the art, man.  He continued practicing his craft even as his group left him.  Eventually he was captured and beheaded by the British Army.  What a tragedy.  That guy had so much more greatness in him.

That guy who scraped a stick against a tree in the 8th Century was the only true musician to ever live.  Everyone since him has sucked.  Especially Fall Out Boy.

My fellow Americans,

I, Tom Z, am writing to announce my candidacy for the Presidency in the year 2016.  I feel it is my civic duty to campaign for President, and I am honored to have the opportunity to win your vote.

In these times of economic and social crisis, it is imperative that we elect a leader that represents the best interests of you, the American public.  That is why I’m running for President.  Like you, I am disgusted by these Washington insiders who work solely for the special interest groups.  Our country needs massive change, a change that can only come from the outside.  The “old boys club” on Capitol Hill needs to be eliminated, and we need a President who represents the views of the common man.

I am that candidate.

Like you, I understand the pressures of a failing economy and the toll that war has taken on our great country.  Like you, I care more about being able to pay for groceries than being able to pay the big oil companies.  Like you, I’m annoyed by the greed on Wall Street which affects all of us on Main Street.  Like you, I can’t stand to see the same old party politics while so many people struggle to pay their mortgages.  Like you, I despise our shallow values and celebrity-driven culture, and I believe that Britney’s comeback totally isn’t going to work cause she’s, like, still all crazy and obsessed with Justin Timberlake.  Like you, I struggle with contractions and don’t understand the difference between “your” and “you’re.”  And like you, I care deeply about our country and you’re children’s future.

You see, I’m just like you.  I’m a man of the people.  I’m not some Washington DC fatcat who has been entrenched on Capitol Hill for years and is out of touch with the rest of the country.  I’m no Washington insider.  In fact I’ve only been to Washington once in my life, and that was when I was 13 years old, when my mom took me to see to see the Washington Monument.  And you know what?  I thought it was overrated.  I know it has great symbolic value, but it’s just a pointy statue in the middle of some park.  You can’t climb up it and it doesn’t even have a gift shop.  What’s the big deal?  And don’t get me started on the Lincoln Memorial.  What a piece of shit.

Screw Washington DC and its fancy cars and shiny marble floors and phallic-shaped “monuments.”  I don’t care about Washington.  I care about you!  And that’s why I’m running for President.  We need a leader who shares the values of the average American, and who understands the struggles that we all go through on a daily basis.  I am that leader.  I don’t go to fancy yacht parties or fact-finding missions in Darfur.  I go to work every morning and bind and collate sales reports for a marketing team at a company that sells axle-rods to the riding lawnmower industry.  I don’t read the Wall Street Journal and trade stocks; I read US Weekly and trade sarcastic barbs about Paris Hilton’s vagina.  Actually, I don’t even know how to read.  I just look at the pictures and assume the worst.  I’m not some stuck up Washington elitist who believes in rainbows and butterflies and economic stimulus packages!

I won’t try to impress you with creative speeches or clever rhetoric.  I know you’re sick of all the political spin that has dominated our country for the past two decades, so I won’t try to make your head hurt by saying lots of sentences with tons of big words in them.  I care too much about you, the American public!  Plus, I’m borderline illiterate.  Some people have called me functionally retarded, but in reality my IQ is a solid 86.2, putting me right on par with the average Walmart shopper.

Did I mention I shop at Walmart?  Yep, I’m just like you.  Oh, those Washington DC fatcats have tried to take me to fancy stores like Crate & Barrel or Pier 1, but I looked them right in the eyes and told them, “what are you, a faggot?”  Because that’s how the average American would’ve handled the situation, and I’ll be damned if I let these party politics affect me from doing my job of serving the American people!  This has earned me quite the reputation around Washington as a “renegade.”  Just as Rage Against the Machine were renegades of funk, I’m the renegade of Washington.  But that’s OK, because I know that I don’t work for other politicians or Rage Against the Machine.  I work for you!  I shop at Walmart and I buy my pretzels in 20-gallon jars because we are in a recession!

I may be running for President, but I take offense to the word politician.  I’m no politician.  I’m just an ordinary guy.  I didn’t go to politician school or pass some magical politician test.  I can’t even spell the word politician without help from my computer’s spellcheck function.  I dropped out of school in eight grade to work in my family’s shipping and packaging business, bubble-wrapping dinette sets for average Americans just like you.  And as President, I promise to bubble-wrap our country and protect you from the ill effects of an economy that has been kicked around in the back of a UPS truck.  I promise to submerge terrorists into a refrigerator box filled with Styrofoam peanuts, until they have inhaled massive amounts of asbestos and are no longer able to plot attacks against America.  I promise to hand-deliver a better America by 8AM on a Saturday morning without requesting a signature, while speaking in vague metaphors that don’t really make sense but can be interpreted however you, the American people, choose!

By electing me as President, you’ll be scoring a touchdown for progress!  Because like you, I’m a huge sports fan, and believe that athletes deserve the type of admiration and respect that hypothetically should be reserved for teachers and law enforcement.  I’m not some Washington elitist who thinks that all laws need to be upheld!  I occasionally jaywalk, just like you!  Sometimes I fall behind on my credit card bills and write them angry letters saying I never got my statement that month, even though I did get it and just couldn’t afford to pay.  One time I got hammered and drove home from the bar and struck a small child with my SUV.  I didn’t stop to see what happened, but I found out the next day that the kid had died.  Mothers Against Drunk Driving went on the local news and demanded that the perpetrator turn himself in, but I never told anyone what I did, because I don’t cater to the special interest groups!

The old boys club in Washington thinks it’s so great!  They go out to $1000 dinners and discuss politics as usual.  I, on the other hand, don’t play that game.  I usually eat cut up hot dogs that I dump into a bowl of mac and cheese, and once in awhile I treat myself to some Arby’s.  I occasionally steal the sports section of my neighbor’s newspaper, and then when he asks me about it, I play dumb, like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jim.”  I don’t shower on Sundays and just hose myself down with Tag Body Spray if I need to go somewhere.  I’m often seen picking my nose in public and I have been known to cut in front of old ladies in line at the supermarkets.  It’s 3PM, I just woke up an hour ago, and in just a few more hours I’ll be blackout drunk on low-grade grain alcohol.  I go out to bars and hit on woman and it’s really creepy.  I don’t pay my taxes and I haven’t given my ex-wife her court-ordered alimony payments in 6 months.  I refuse to participate in such fiscal irresponsibility, and as your President, I would lower all your taxes by 50% while simultaneously investing billions of dollars into infrastructure and children.  Of course, I’ll need a calculator to figure all this economic stuff out, because like you, I fuckin’ hate math!  I think it’s boring and I never really got it.  I’m not huge on science or history, either!  This isn’t high school, it’s the school of America!

When I told a group of young parents at a diner the other day that I was running for President, one of the young mothers asked me, “Are you high?  Leave me alone!”  It’s sad that we live in a country where drug use is so prevalent that this mother just assumed I was high.  And I can’t stand the fact that our country has become so divided by party politics that this woman would sooner ask me to leave her alone than discuss the real issues facing America.  I’m running for President in order to make a change.  As President, I’ll take the lead from the American public and stop succumbing to pressure from the big drug companies.  In fact, I’ll take all medicine out of stores and lock all doctors into concentration camps.  We don’t need those fatcats charging us $75 then telling us to just rest up and take some Advil.  Not in this economy!

You might be asking, “Tom, why are you announcing your candidacy for President 8 years before the election?”  The answer is simple:  I don’t know anything about politics.  I don’t understand how the political process works or how to campaign or even how to fill out the necessary paperwork in order to officially enter the Presidential race.  That’s because I’m not some elitist Washington insider who participates in party politics or knows his own social security number.

I’m just an ordinary guy, like you.  In fact, I’m even less than you.  I’m a goddamn idiot.  And together, we can turn this country into the America we all want to see.  An America where the economy is stable, an America where everyone can afford gasoline and adequate healthcare, an America where we’re not engaged in a never-ending war, an America where pints are a dollar and everybody gets laid!

Vote Tom Z in 2016!  Together, we can make it happen!