Morning, kids, welcome to the Phile for a Monday. How are you? Let's start off with a difficult story to tell, because I don't want to approach the subject matter in a flip or irreverent way. That would be disrespectful... y'all hear about these school shootings? How do the schools even SHOOT? Can buildings carry firearms in the United States? Because given how lax our gun control laws are, they might as well be able to. Okay, that wasn't the right approach. Let's try this again: a Tumblr post is going viral for its heartbreakingly honest conveyance of surviving a school shooting. If you've experienced the same or similar gun violence, you might want to skip this one. Otherwise, it's absolutely worth reading.
Let's take a second to decompress after that. Across the Internet, people were taken aback by its revealing nature and portrayal of life after a mass shooting. Fellow survivors could, sadly, relate. Meanwhile, over in NRA Land, things remain trash...
Happy Monday! The 9-5 work seek is here again but soon you will be able to relax and call the shots on your own terms. But first, you must know that Fox News is getting massively trolled.The most recent wave of backlash comes in response to a tweet and photo posted by Fox News contributor Lawrence Jones III, wherein it looks like he's preparing to enter a war zone.
The picture was taken near the border, and was undoubtedly posted to create fear mongering around immigration. It wasn't long before the MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff chimed in to point out the obvious: you don't need a bulletproof vest at the border. While many asserted he's not wearing a real one, the appearance of the photo feels very intentionally staged as propaganda, and there will undoubtedly be people who believe it's real. There's even photo documentation suggesting Jonest didn't wear the tactical vest after the photo was taken, which just confirms it was all for appearance. Other reporters also chimed in to share the times they covered the border without need of protective clothing.Whatever you do this week, it's safe to assume you'll be getting roasted less than Jones. Speaking of Fox News...
The world is full of unpredictable factors, but Fox News' Tucker Carlson is not one of them. Without fail, he manages to churn out wild soundbites week after week, and one of his most consistent touch points is his deep distate for feminists. In fact, just last week Carlson made waves on the Twittersphere after he used the concept of feminist power to attack The Nation editor Chris Hayes. "Chris Hayes is what every man would be if feminists ever achieved absolute power in this country: apologetic, bespectacled, and deeply, deeply concerned about global warming and the patriarchal systems that cause it." As with a lot of Carlson's attacks, it ended up boosting Hayes' appearance to a large portion of the Internet. Well now, less than a week later, Carlson is back in the backlash seat, with a new soundbite making the rounds. This time, the Fox News host bemoaned the fact that feminists can do science, which further proves that he's a low-hanging Onion headline come to life. During the segment, Carlson showed a video highlighting a study exploring the effects of toxic masculinity on our climate change crisis. "When men’s gender identity was threatened, they tried to reassert their masculinity through environmentally damaging choices," he mockingly read from the study. He then summarized, "If we want to save the environment we have to suppress men." In true form, this assertion (that he worded himself), hit a nerve with Carlson, so her turned to the Conservative author Mark Steyn to ask the question that launched a thousand tweets, "How did we wind up with a country in which feminists do science?" Needless to say, Carlson's distress at women being allowed to "do science" has garnered a flood of responses. Many are worried about the fall out that will inevitably occur when Carlson realizes women are allowed into tech and the arts as well. Others decided to remind Carlson of a few of the many groundbreaking female scientists throughout history. At his current rate, it'll only be a few more days before Carlson finds a new absurd bone to pick with women's rights.
There's a new panties trend in town and you're going to want to just stay right home and not run out to the store to get a pair. Janties are denim (short shorts? underwear? ballet costumes?) nightmares and the Internet is not happy at all that they exist. A part of me thinks this is one of those fake "trends" that nobody is actually wearing, but it's still fun to criticize like bow brows. The level of rage that came from bow brows versus the amount of people (1 woman) wearing them was pretty dramatic. However, someone made this underwear and plans to sell them so let's attempt to break down their fashion plan here. Janties are high-waisted denim underwear/shorts with pockets. The model in this photo is wearing a white button-down shirt which leads us to the next question: why?
What event would be appropriate to wear a dress shirt with underwear unless you're a twenty-something woman in a rom-com waking up from a hookup. Definitely can't wear this outfit to work. Maybe the beach? Help. The company who makes them (Y/Project) is selling them for $315 per pair and categorizes them as "brief-style shorts." Does that seem crazy yet? Here's more: they're completely sold out.
Aunt Becky's daughter, influencer, and USC crew recruit Olivia Jade didn't need an education to get ahead in life because she already had money her makeup empire, but she might not even have that either. Women's Wear Daily reported that the would-be coxswain's trademark applications for Olivia Jade and Olivia Jade Beauty were rejected by the United States Patent and Trademark Office because of "vague language and improper punctuation." Punctuation matters. "Proper punctuation in identification is necessary to delineate explicitly each product or service within a list and to avoid ambiguity," officials stated. Olivia Jade must now reapply, but who knows if she's still pursuing public life after such a public humiliation. She reportedly isn't responding to any of her felon parents' texts. She must have been shocked to have had an application rejected. Maybe next time she'll include $500,000... or proper comma usage.
I was thinking, instead of doing this blog thing I should be listening to this record...
Ummm... maybe not. If I had a TARDIS I would go to the National Space Invaders Championship in 1980.
It was the first ever electronic gaming competition and they accumulated over 10,000 participants. I'll doubt I would win though. I don't know much about manscaping but if it's anything like this then I'm not interested...
They tell me if I go to Walmart I'm gonna see some weird sights. I didn't believe this until I saw this...
A few weeks ago Trump whipped out maps to tell the press that ISIS has been defeated. That wasn't the only thing he whipped out...
Hahahaha. Can't have enough paper towels. This just in... Fox News' Lawrence Jones III is back at the border but wearing another vest...
Hahaha. Ever see those homeless people on the side of the road holding up signs? Well, some of them are really creative...
So, one of the best things about the Internet is you can see porn for free and so easy. But of you're at work or school you can get in trouble, and I would rather you stay on the Phile and not go to a porn site. So I came up with a solution...
You're welcome. Alright, so yesterday my son and I were talking about how we used to watch "Sesame Street" together when he was little. That show sure has changed over the years... unless I was a bad parent.
If you spot the Mindphuck let me know. Okay, so there's some common expressions you had no idea were homophobic AF. Well, a friend of the Phile wants to explain one to you. Please welcome back to the Phile...
Hello, everybody. Today's word is "gay." Even though it’s pretty clear using the term “gay” to describe something lame is totally homophobic, you still hear it everywhere. Actually, “lame” is ablest, so that’s pretty bad, too. So how about next time you hear someone call something “gay” you reply, “Oh, so it’s fabulous?”
On the right we see the ruins of Pompeii, on the left we see the ruins of his carefree, child-free life. Let's laugh...
A man walks into a doctor's office. He has a cucumber up his nose, a carrot in his left ear and a banana in his right ear. "What's the matter with me?" he asks the doctor. The doctor replies, "You're not eating properly."
The 96th book to be pheatured in the Phile's Book Club is...
Brian will be on the Phile in a few weeks. And now for some...
Phact 1. Abraham Lincoln suffered from depression. He was scared to carry knives because he was afraid he’d kill himself.
Phact 2. The streets in Northeast Minneapolis were named after the U.S. presidents in order of their election to help new residents from Poland, Ukraine, Lebanon and Germany prepare for citizenship exams.
Phact 3. NFL quarterback Russell Wilson can trace his family lineage back to 524 A.D. to Arnulf of Metz, the patron saint of beer.
Phact 4. Tesla cars have only one gear. The electric powertrain (Nikola Tesla’s AC induction motor) is only the size of a watermelon and directly spins the back wheels without any driveshaft or transmission. You can brake by releasing the gas pedal and that also recharges the battery.
Phact 5. Australia straight-up lost Harold Holt, its Prime-minister in 1967. He still hasn’t been found.
Today's guest is an American record producer, songwriter, musician, composer, arranger and guitarist. The co-founder of Chic, he has written, produced, and performed on records that have cumulatively sold more than 500 million albums and 75 million singles worldwide. Chic's latest album "It's About Time" is available on iTunes, Spotify and Amazon. Please welcome to the Phile... Nile Rodgers.
Me: Hey, Nile, welcome to the Phile. How are you?
Nile: I'm great, bro. Great to be here on the Peverett Phile.
Me: Man, you're such a great guitar player, sir. What is our first song you learnt to play on guitar?
Nile: "A Day in the Life" by the Beatles.
Me: Why did you start to play guitar?
Nile: Well, I was a clarinetist and I grew up during the hippy movement. Can you imagine playing the clarinet? "Hey, let's drop some acid and play the clarinet, man. Play 'Hava Nagila', man. Two flats." That's not happening. "Let's really put it through the test. Four sharps, man." That was the sexy rock and roll thing to play. I was sharing an apartment with this girl who had a band and she needed a guitar player. Well, because I already could read music well I thought how hard could this be. Everybody in the world could play guitar. I picked up the guitar, I tuned it improperly and she fired me right on the spot. Then I learned to tune the guitar properly and I had a Beatles song book. That was the first song I worked my way through.
Me: That's so cool. So, when you were about sixteen you were thinking about music as a career as well as being a politician and activism. Is that right?
Nile: No, I never thought about a career. No, I was just being politically active in America. At that time it was just normal, just part of growing up.
Me: Weren't you part of the Black Panther Party at one time?
Nile: Certainly. I was the sub-section leader of a section called the Lower Manhattan Black Panthers. We were part of what they called the Harlem Branch. People don't have a very accurate picture of the way the Black Panther Party was organized at all. It's all wacky hearsay and stuff. Truth is it was actually quite organized and it was organized by what they called the 10-10-10 system. So the way it was supposed to work was each state would have ten branches. Each branch would have ten sections, each section would have ten subsections. I was the subsection leader of the Lower Manhattan branch.
Me: Do you think that experience stayed with you?
Nile: Yeah, because the Panthers were great. We were basically just bigger, more grown up version of the Boy Scouts. We grew up in a time where it was the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. It had started to really develop. So it was time of the Black Power movement, but what was really important at the beginning of other movements like the Gay Pride Movement, the Women's Movement, all of that stuff was happening. So the Panthers were scene as the "vanguard" of the revolution so to speak.
Me: Okay, so, I want to talk about one of my favorite singers... David Bowie. Is it true you didn't get along with him?
Nile: No, no, no. Man, once again people get things wrong. What happened was David and I, we met one morning at an after-hours club. I walked in with Billy Idol who was one of my best friends at the time. We partied almost every night together. We were both a little bit... how do I say it? Lively, a couple of sheets to the wind. And Billy went, "Oh, no, bloody 'ell, it's David fucking Bowie!" When he said "Bowie" he actually barfed. He pulled this move which I thought was awesome. He went, "'Ello, mate." He went and shook David's hand. At that point I was already over to David because I didn't lose my stride because I didn't barf. I still had forward momentum. In the course of our lengthy conversation which lasted maybe four of five hours all we talked about was jazz. And I didn't understand that this David Bowie, this God rock and roll icon, was so into jazz. I was fascinated by his knowledge, so I started talking about arrangements, and that I could do very sophisticated arrangements because I grew up with bebop. And I said, "You know, I can orchestrate for big bands and symphony orchestras... I could do a symphony for 300 people if you wanted," and he couldn't believe it. He was like, "Wow, you know everybody thinks of you as the Disco King." His impression of me was completely different after that four of five hour conversation.
Me: I love David Bowie. What was he like as a musician?
Nile: So, that's an interesting question because I look at him as a musician as not necessarily a player, though he played the sax a bit. And he played the guitar a bit. Not on the level that I consider a serious musician. It's an accompaniment which is okay, which is cool. Just to give you an idea, when you hear Paul Simon play guitar to accompany himself, or you hear James Taylor play guitar, it's serious guitar playing. It's no joke. David didn't play guitar like that. He played basic guitar, just strumming and stuff. But as a musician he was a genius because he could conceive and could transmit that information to me. When I get that information and I can interpret it David was able to do such phenomenal music. That's why he ran the gamut of styles when you look at his body of work it's pretty impressive.
Me: At that time David Bowie was on MTV and said that they didn't run a lot of black artists. Do you remember him saying that? If so, what did you think?
Nile: Hey, man, so David, and I mean this with 100% sincerity, was maybe the most open person and least conscious of race as a defining thing. Let me just give you an example... so when I met David we met each other at an after-hours club I was in my kinda clothing, I've always been a weird guy, so I was sort of club kitted out. It was the early 80s and this was the time of b-boys and fox tails and stuff. I've always had weird jeans and weird hair. And David on the other hand was dressed up in a business suit. So he and I after our great conversation we agreed to meet later on, like a week later or a few days later at a very exclusive bar. When I went to the bar I knew what the dress code was like, so the Nile Rodgers that walked into that bar didn't look like the Nile Rodgers that he met at the after-hours club. So my girlfriend and her friends at the time had gone there because they wanted to see David Bowie. And I didn't recognize him and he didn't recognize me. But at the bar that we were in there would not be a black person in that bar. Because I didn't look like the Nile Rodgers that he knew he didn't assume I was the Nile Rodgers that he knew. So we sat there for about twenty minutes not talking to each other. So I went outside and called his office and said, "When the hell is David Bowie gonna get here?!" They said, "He's been there for about a half hour." So I walked over to the only Bowie looking guy in the joint and I said, "David, is that you?" He said, "Yeah, Niles, is that you? Sorry, man, I didn't recognize you." I thought to myself not only would it not be racist for David to assume the only black man in Bemelmans Bar in the afternoon would be Nile Rodgers because I didn't look like me and he didn't assume that was weird at all.
Me: Do you think it's better now with what Bowie was talking about?
Nile: Now it's actually worse. What happened is that it feels to me that I grew up in this really optimistic environment. I grew up in the hippy era where it was free love, free this, free that, everything is free, free, free, free, free. I knew people of all sorts of different political persuasions. And everybody was cool. I actually used to love pretty hardcore right wing intellectuals. As long as people were intellectual and had really good points to make. But when It came to sort of dumb down hatred I was like that's not ineffectual. I don't see your point of view now. Now it's just hatred and I wonder what they base it on. I remember watching this television show and there was this woman in the Klu Klux Klan and the journalist was asking her why she was in the Klu Klux Klan. And she said, "Well... because... when I was in high school these black boys... threatened to rape me." The journalist said, "Well, have you ever been raped by a black man?" And she says no. He said, "Have you ever been raped?" She said, "Yes." "By who?" "These three white guys." So, you joined the Klu Klux Klan because black kids threatened to rape you but white guys did rape you and you're in the Klu Klux Klan? Hmmm.
Me: Okay, let's talk about Madonna. Were you into the song "Like a Virgin" when you first heard it?
Nile: It's not that I wasn't "into the song" I wasn't into the song as the first single. I was thinking to myself, wow, we've got this great song by Peter Brown, "Material Girl," why would we not wanna go with "we are living in a material world" and not the tune of "Like a Virgin"? Why would you not to fill up the dance floor, Madonna, because she was a dance artist. If you listen to her first record everything was about dancing. Her first album the style of music was called electro of Latin hip-hop. It went by three different names. It was sorta like Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam. And that's where she was coming from and so to me if she's doing a dance record, she's a dance artist, why would she not wanna go with "Material Girl" which was clearly an uptempo dance song. But she then told me how important the lyrics were to "Like a Virgin." And how important to losing virginity was to a girl or a young woman. And I just had to say to myself, this is an artist who intrinsically knows who she is and knows the message she's trying to get to the people she's trying to get to the people she's trying to get it to. All I could at this point now is support her. And the other thing I played it for a friend of mine who I really respect a lot and she said, "Nile, I swear to you, that song is going to be Number 1 for six weeks at least." She was right. It was Number 1 for six weeks.
Me: So, I read you played guitar on a song called "Get Lucky" with Pharrell Williams. You can tell me what you want to tell me but this came around at a scary time for you, am I right?
Nile: Yeah, I was recovering from extremely progressive prostate cancer. The doctors were not certain of my outcome. I was just doing what I was supposed to do. What I was supposed to do, walk five miles a day after I had my prostate surgically removed. Of course they monitored me to see if they got all the that's the problem with cancer because they could still be microscopic parts that haven't shown themselves and they think I'm fine and the next thing they go is my God, it came back. But in fact they really hadn't left, they just hadn't gotten it or sometimes it does come back. So in my case I was in the initial recovery period when I got the phone called which is how we sort of wound up hooking up together. We've been trying to hook up together for years and every time I would go to France they'd be some kind of strike and I could never get to where they were or they could never get to where I was. I used to think that was cool because when I was a kid we had strikes all the time. Now in America no one ever strikes over anything, it's like they say whatever.
Me: Do you feel different since that scare?
Nile: No. Not really because I had a second bout of cancer since the first big one. I've lost so many really close friends like I think about people in the original Chic organization, when I look at that original picture of us with... five people in that photo, every male except for myself and Rob Sabino have passed away. It's so weird because I was the most reckless because I grew up with the most sort of bohemian type parents. I tell people that I've never been given a curfew in my entire life. My parents never said to me, "Now come home when the lights come on." Or anything like that because they knew instinctively I knew to come home when there was nothing else to do.
Me: Okay, I have a feeling I am gonna watch the Nile Rodgers story on film. So, here's a crazy question... the movie ends, the credits are rolling, what song is playing?
Nile: Wow! That's a cool question. I have never heard it put to me like that before. I would imagine it would be "Good Times."
Me: Why is that?
Nile: I think the reason it would be "Good Times" or "We Are Family" is because those two songs for us was really life changing. "We are Family" was really important because we knew that we had created a phenomenon which is Sister Sledge. We really proved to ourselves to ourselves that we could do what we did with ourselves for someone else and maybe even better. And "Good Times" what happened after "Good Times" with hip-hop. I remember watching an interview with LL Cool J and they asked him, "What do you think is the single most important thing that ever happened in hip-hop?" He didn't even waste a minute, he said, "Oh, he release of 'Good Times.'" He said, "He said with 'Good Times' everyone MC would go home and write.'"
Me: Why was "Good Times" so important? I am not sure I know that song.
Nile: Because "Good Times" had the break, had the long break down. Every time you went to a Hip-Hops, which a lot of people weren't of a certain age, they don't remember that at the beginning they would call those events Hip-Hops. They were going to a Hip-Hop. I remember when I first asked somebody about what does that mean they said, "If there's something hip you hop on it." I was like, "Oh, really?" They said yes, and "Good Times" was really hipping so we hopped on it and we came up with our own lyrics for the break down. And "Good Times" had this incredibly long break down which eventually became "Rapper's Delight" and a lot of other people were inspired. In fact most people don't realize that when I wrote "Good Times" John Deacon from Queen was actually in the studio with us. And he came one year to the day with "Another One Bites the Dust" with Queen.
Me: Do you remember your first Hip-Hop?
Nile: Yeah, Debbie Harry took me to the first one, it was out in Queens and she said, "I want to take you to your first Hip-Hop."
Me: How did you feel when you go there?
Nile: I couldn't believe it because the only song that was played was "Good Times." It was just over, and over, and over and over again for maybe about four hours. And I was going aren't they sick of this song by now? They were not sick of it and every MC was lined up and they had their rhyme ready for "Good Times." It was incredible.
Me: That's cool. Thanks, Nile, for being on the Phile. I know you have to go but I hope you'll come back on the Phile again soon.
Nile: You got it.
That about does it for this entry of the Phile. Thanks to Nile Rodgers for a great interview. The Phile will be back tomorrow with Nancy Wilson From Roadcase Royale. Spread the word, not the turd. Don't let snakes and alligators bite you. Bye, love you, bye.
I don't want you, cook my bread, I don't want you, make my bed, I don't want your money too, I just want to make love to you. - Willie Dixon
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