Sasha Is a Monster

The things that are said between 2:00 and 2:30 in this song are, like, sorta ironically, why this chick is the best thing to happen to women on the rap scene in, like, forever. Can’t stop replaying. Hardcore awesomeness.

Having run a celebrity gossip blog for the past four years, I could have predicted these findings from ScienceDaily easily.

Actually, I couldn’t have, and they’re fascinating (emphases mine):

The research, conducted by Dr Ewa Dabrowska, showed that basic elements of core English grammar had not been mastered by some native speakers.

The project assumed that every adult native speaker of English would be able to understand the meaning of the sentence:

“The soldier was hit by the sailor.”

Dr Dabrowska and research student James Street then tested a range of adults, some of whom were postgraduate students, and others who had left school at the age of 16. All participants were asked to identify the meaning of a number of simple active and passive sentences, as well as sentences which contained the universal qualifier “every.”

As the test progressed, the two groups performed very differently. A high proportion of those who had left school at 16 began to make mistakes. Some speakers were not able to perform any better than chance, scoring no better than if they had been guessing.

Continued:

She also stressed that the findings have nothing to do with intelligence. Participants with low levels of educational attainment were given instruction following the tests, and they were able to learn the constructions very quickly. She speculates that this could be because their attention was not drawn to sentence construction by parents or teachers when they were children.

She adds: “Our results show that a proportion of people with low educational attainment make errors with understanding the passive, and it appears that this and other important areas of core grammar may not be fully mastered by some speakers, even by adulthood. ..

“What’s more, the existence of substantial individual differences in native language attainment is highly problematic for one of the most widely accepted arguments for an innate universal grammar: the assumed ‘fact’ that all native speakers of a language converge on essentially the same grammar. Our research shows that they don’t.”

Absolutely fascinating. Not only do we have to actively teach our children the underlying grammar of their primary language, but we are not doing so consistently. Not only that, but we have somehow created a national underclass with such a goddamn self-esteem problem that they have never, in their adult lives, been willing to ask someone to explain to them how to process an integral part of the English grammar. Which, I mean, I guess I’m not expecting these people to be like, “Pardon me, but I’m not really able to create an internal sentence diagram for passive voice,” but, like, how do you go your whole adult life without asking, “Hey, wait, so does that mean the soldier hit the sailor? Or did the sailor hit the soldier? Or did they fuck or something? Seriously, though, dude, I never get it when people say things like ‘was hit by’. What the hell does that mean?”

What do we have to do to raise children who are able to identify a problem like that and then ask someone for help with it? Because that’s how you solve a much larger problem.

Also: when we’re rebuilding the elementary school curriculum to make sure that native English speakers understand things like the passive fucking voice, could we toss in a section about how Lindsay Lohan spells her first name with an “a” and not an “e” and you really ought to know this because you just finished reading an article that spelled her name correctly seven times?

Lastly: The redesign of Evil Beet launched today. I am pretty pumped on this.

It took all of an hour for someone to tell me that the Kate Bush cover of “Running of That Hill” was Placebo from Daybreakers. Thanks dude!

But then I started searching around a bit more, lost in the softness of the memories of one of my favorite artists from my early teen years, and I came upon this Charlotte Martin cover of Kate Bush’s “Cloud Busters.” (Fun fact: It’s based on Wilhelm Reich’s arrest, told from the perspective of his young son.) And I’m watching this Charlotte Martin clip and it’s, like, Jesus Christ, listening to this woman sing and play piano produces a physical response in me, something near-Pavlovian. It just extracts emotion, like the notes cut right through to your tear ducts and pry them open. And I’ve always thought Tori Amos’s “Here in My Head” was based at least loosely on this Kate Bush track, and so I looked it up, and found this clip of her doing it live:

And it makes Charlotte Martin look like a fucking amateur. She is channeling something so pure and so strong and she channels it with such purity and strength.

And I have long felt that that old-school YouTube clip of Terra Naomi singing “The Vicodin Song” was the most soul-scraping collection of kilobytes to ever hit the Internet, like once I hear it it’s a force field, and I can’t stop hitting replay and I can’t stop crying and I am right fucking there with her and I can’t leave and I can’t quit just like she can’t leave and she can’t quit.

And I guess it’s, like, I love Britney Spears with my whole heart, I do, really, and a post-9/11 America needed all the Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohans and *NSYNCs and Backstreet Boys it could get its hands on, but when is it going to be okay again to adore and nurture powerful female vocalists like this? These women are certainly getting no deeper or more true than most of what’s hit big in the hip-hop/rap world the past couple years.

And you know who can do this shit every bit as well as any of them but really, most of the time, isn’t?

This chick named Stefani Germanotta, but you might know her as Lady Gaga.

So when I was in Arizona last weekend, my dad and I were watching some godawful John Travolta/Jonathan Rhys Meyers movie we’d misguidedly rented (in fairness, we should have guessed), and in the DVD previews there was some movie that had some kickass Kate Bush cover in it (a male voice, rock-style) and I made a mental note to look it up and then forgot.

And then today I was reading this post on Emily Gould’s blog and I was all like “OMG! That Kate Bush cover!” and now I can’t remember the movie it was in or even really the song, but I thought it was “Running Up That Hill” so I was Googling the shit out of it and I found the clip above by some chick named Little Boots who seems to have quite the YouTube following and also does a mean Kate Bush cover.

For the love of Jesus, does anyone know the Kate Bush cover I’m thinking of? I think the movie it’s in was kind of an action/thriller type of thing, and it came out in the past year or so. Please God please someone has to know what I’m talking about. I might die otherwise.

Okay, so, I announced this afternoon on Evil Beet that we were building a mailing list, because, like, people who kind of matter have lately been like “Why don’t you have a mailing list? You should have one.” And so I was like “Fuck, this is so 1998,” but I did it anyway. (It’s here if you want to sign up.)

And, like, not only have people signed up, but a lot of them have signed up. And not only that, but they have said really, really, really fucking nice things in their comments when they signed up, things like “I don’t care what it is as long as Sasha writes it” and “anything as long as it’s Beet” or “Beet we love you!!”

And, like, lately, I’ve felt like everyone on the Internet fucking hates me and wants me dead. Because some shit has gone down recently, and, again, I’m not talking about it here or anywhere because it’s some crazy legal bullshit and I’m not Perez Hilton and I don’t need to publicize this shit, but this stupid experience with this stupid mailing list has been beyond heartwarming and wonderful, and it’s been just what I needed.

The people who are fans aren’t leaving comments every day like “WE LOVE YOU BEET!” The people leaving mean comments every day (and sending emails, threats, etc) are the tiny handful of pathetic psychopaths who need to be locked up forever. But because they’re so loud, it’s easy to think that they’re in the majority. It fucks with your head.

I’m not famous. I’m not even really Internet famous. But, from the few years of experience I’ve had with a shitload of strangers knowing my name and my life, I would not wish something like actual fame on my worst enemy. What a fucking shitstorm.

Thank you to those of you who are awesome and support me. And ya know what? Thank you, also, to the thousands of people who decided, at some point, that they didn’t like me or my blog or something I said and then decided, like normal fucking adults, to just stop reading, all without having to leave bitchy comments or email death threats or whatever. You guys are awesome too. I mean that. Thank you for being adults on this planet.

Oh and you know what I just remembered today? I have a fan page on Facebook. That’s so fucking killer.

And I’m an iPhone user. And I like the iPhone. Quite a bit. AT&T? Is a different story.

Thanks Andrew!