Porocrom’s Crappaper

As many of you know, I am a huge music fan. That doesn’t mean that I myself am huge and that I am a fan of music… nor is it to say that I am a fan of huge music… although I am pretty big, and huge music rocks pretty hard…

ANYWAYS

I am a huge music fan. What you may not know is that I am secretly a fan of hip-hop. Now when I say hip-hop I’m not really referring to the crap that you hear on the radio or in the clubs with some idiot who broke into the studio and figured out how to turn on the microphone and raps about how much he enjoys bling and shooting people. That’s not hip-hop to me, that’s pop music. I’m talking about real hip-hop. It’s a style of music that originated as a voice of repressed and alienated urban youth in the 1980s. There exists currently a huge schism between “Old School” sometimes called True School) and “New School” hip-hop, with many artists caught in the middle. Suffice it to say, the stuff out there that is good is AMAZING.

Anyways, having been listening to a lot of hip-hop (both good and bad) and I have deciphered what you (yes YOU) need to become an overnight success in the rap industry. Hang on to your Los Angeles basketball jerseys and Starter caps, and follow me down the road to…

RAP IMMORTALITY

Step 1: Name

Your rapper alias should be a reflection of the image you wish to project as a rapper. Biggie Smalls apparently wanted to confuse everyone with a paradox, which would keep them distracted as he quickly stole their money. Snoop Dogg is Charles Schultz’ bastard son. Puff Daddy, as everyone knows, is a marshmallow addict. Dr. Dre spent 10 years in private practice as a plastic surgeon before a major celebrity screw-up forced him into the music business (I’m not at liberty to divulge who, but think “Jack Michaelson” and you’ll be on the right track).

Your name could be something dangerous like “Mack the Knife” or “Dangerous Person” or “Guy Who May or May Not Have a Gun”. The name could also be something subtly clever, like “MC Square” or “Mike Rho Phone”. If you are really stuck for a name, take the first letter of your name and pair it with an animal. So “Jared” becomes “J-Dogg”, Tiffany becomes “T-Kitty” and Arthur becomes “A-Galapagos Tortoise”.

Step 2: Image

There are three main rapper images, which are blended like primary colours to make various shades of rapper.

- The first theme is “Homeless Person”, where you dress in clothes that do not fit you properly. The appeal to the homeless person persona is that you appear to be close to the streets, since you sleep with your face against them every night. The downside is the obvious odour problem and that pesky crack habit.

- The second type is “Wealthy Merchant”. This is a person who has far more money than they can possibly spend wisely, and so they purchase luxury cars and diamond necklaces. They drink overpriced alcohol and throw lavish parties. The best part of this image is that it makes your fans feel bad about being poor and having little-to-no opportunity to improve their lifestyle.

- The third and final type is “Thoughtless Hurtful Ugly Guttersnipe” or, known better by its acronym, THUG. The THUG style is espoused by several rappers, and is characterized by thoughtless lack of regard for human life and the authorities, coupled with antisocial behaviour. The key to pulling this image off is to confess to killing a lot of people. We are still puzzled as to why Tim McVeigh’s rap carreer never got off the ground.

NOTE: This is also an excellent time to acquire “bling”

Step 3: The Video

No hip-hop artist can be successful without a video. This is a chance to exhibit your newfound name and image. Most of the videos I have seen feature a few essential items:

• Women with self-esteem only slightly lower than their body fat percentage
• Excessive pointing of fingers or sometimes gestures with the entire hand
• Unrealistic dance routines that would get you beat horribly if you tried to perform them
• Infidelity and polygamy, especially with really ugly men getting ridiculously attractive women. This gives fat guys hope so that instead of going to the gym and getting a job, they will just buy more records.

Remember, the magic formula to sales is

Phase 1 – lower fan self esteem
Phase 2 – ???
Phase 3 – Profit

Step 4: The Music

This is probably the least important step, but we’ll include it anyway because I like things that have 4 parts. You can rap about anything you like. Here are some helpful tips:

• Make unrealistic (or better yet, impossible) boasts about your skills. For example, “I rap so well that I arm-wrestled God and won” or “I traveled back in time and single-handedly defeated the armies of Gaul” or “There are 4 fundamental physical particles, protons, electrons, neutrons, and my rap.” Keep in mind that most people won’t understand these references, but they sound cool.
• Use the lingo. You don’t “sing”, you “spit”. You don’t have a “gun” you have a “glock”. You don’t have “female friends” you have “bitches”. This will help increase your “street cred”, which our team of scientists believe is either a small, squirrel-like creature native to Sumatra, or a type of submersible conveyance used in the slavery era.
• Use racial slurs as much as you can, unless you are white. If you are white, pick a different genre. We let Eminem in and now look what happened.

Using these tips you should have no problem becoming an overnight success. In a related note, look for my new album “Stronger than Strong Nuclear Force” coming out under the name “MC Having-Sex-with-your-Mother” in stores soon.

Today, Poromenos turns an astoundingly ancient 22 years old.

There are many reasons why 22 is a remarkable milestone. Let’s run down a few of them.

1. It is a multiple of 11, and multiples of 11 make the ladies hot
2. In certain sub-Saharan countries, 22 is the age at which men must wrestle large alligators for tribal supremacy. Whoever gets eaten the least becomes leader of the tribe. Those who fail to not get eaten… well they get eaten and nobody really cares.
3. 22 is the exact age at which Mozart wrote his 187th opera entitled “Does anyone even listen to these anymore?” starring Tom Cruise and Barry Manilow. Incidentally, 187 is also a multiple of 11.
4. $22 gets you a bucket of chicken and a 40 oz. bottle of malt liquor in Detroit. 22 euros buys you a house and 11 Swiss manservants.

For all these reasons and more, happy birthday Poro. Please leave your love in the form of comments and T-shirt orders.

Yes folks, it is time for yet another edition of…

This month we’ll be looking at an artist (not a band, sorry) that was brought to my attention by my buddy Ken when he was introducing me to a lot of hip-hop music. He cautioned me that Sage is not strictly hip-hop, but I decided to give it a try anyways. I’m really glad I did.

Sage Francis (or Paul Francis as he is otherwise known) pioneers a really effective fusion of spoken-word poetry and hip-hop. He is the front man for his group Art Official Intelligence (AOI). Anyone who read the BIL about The Weakerthans and liked the lyrical depth will NOT be disappointed by Sage:

… is she buying it? I tilt my glass and drink the phlegm, she’s still scoping in fact this chick’s a 10
At least in my book, which isn’t all that well read, but it’s been said
That when she gets her grip on men they simply bend backwards
She attracts nerds, jocks, substitutes and student teachers,
Who all profess their love for all of her protruding features…

It’s difficult for me to pick one good quote from Sage, so I have posted this exerpt from the middle of Cafe Girl and instead ask you guys to download some of the titles I’ve indicated below, because it wouldn’t do the music justice to judge it by a couple lines.

Sage’s sardonic sense of humour, coupled with his incredible skills as a lyricist make his stuff really interesting to listen to. This is boosted by the fact that he’s not another carbon-copy rapper talking about bitches, booze and blunts. One of my favourites is a song about blind fealty to brand power called Narcissist: “I don’t look at myself in the mirror because I’m a narcissist, I simply like to watch myself exist“. Other songs like “Makeshift Patriot” and “Sage Kills” are reactions to Sept 11 and the resulting war in the gulf. Many others are drawn from personal experience.

Sage is also very outspoken in his criticism of the state of rap music, which he is justified in doing, since he is great and gets very little recognition, while rappers with no talent are making money in fistfuls. For example, at an outdoor festival in England, Sage performed a song in which the chorus was “I’ve seen 99 rappers, but Jay-Z ain’t one”.

Sage once again fulfills my requirements for an ideal artist. He’s obscure enough that I can still feel cool talking about him, but not so esoteric that nobody’s heard of him. He’s incredibly lyrically strong, and in terms of production and the back beat he’s more than acceptable. His live stuff is a lot of fun to listen to as well.

If you’re interested in Sage, check out some of these titles

• Hopeless (this one is just a poem, but it is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard)
• Narcissist
• Andy Kauffman
• Makeshift Patriot
• The Write/The Rewrite/The Threewrite
• Cafe Girl
• Her Schlag

I just returned from the Iron Maiden concert here in Athens, soaked in sweat, most of which wasn’t even mine. I shall now recount to thee the details of my aforementioned journey to

THE IRON MAIDEN CONCERT

First of all, I would like to tell you of the terms of the concert, which were written in the back of the ticket. They were these:

• If you take any pictures or videos of the concert, they belong to Iron Maiden.
• Pictures or videos of the concert are not allowed.
• If Iron Maiden takes pictures or videos of you, they belong to Iron Maiden.
• If you step in the concert area, or in a radius of 15 km thereof, or within earshot, you and your firstborn belong to Iron Maiden.

Consequently, the following pictures were not taken at the aforementioned concert. Which is sad, because the exquisite pictures range from “Random people standing at random places” to “Generic lighted stage picture #943”. I decided not to take my digital camera with me, because I paid like, a gazillion bucks for it, and like hell was I going to risk breaking it for you guys.

Also, a few tips before you go to any rock concert:

• Take as little with you as you can, but OMG DON’T OMIT CLOTHING. Unless you are a woman. But not ugly.
• Always keep your t-shirt on. Unless you are a woman. But not with saggy boobs. Guys, WTF was up with removing your shirts, you are sweaty and smelly and filthy and you stink, fucking pigs. Also, when you touch other people without your shirt on, that shit sticks to the other person’s skin and I got half my skin flayed off me in this manner.
• For god’s sake, wear your old shoes.
• Men go in the front, hot women go with me.
• Chicks with big boobs should bounce more.
• That’s it.

So, we went there, and after a lot of waiting and “One two three, one two three, hey hey hey testing”, Dragonforce came on the scene and started singing. Sadly, they were not able to stir up a lot of enthusiasm among the crowd, but that was mostly because they weren’t who we went there to see. They did rock though. After a while, they finished their gig and it was IRON MAIDEN time.

We had to wait a bit more for it to get dark, to MAXIMIZE THE EFFECT. They started with Remember Tomorrow or something like that, which I hadn’t heard of before. Apparently though, everyone else knew it, but they were all virgins anyway. Hell, I didn’t know half the songs, but they were from the first four albums they released and I doubt I had been born back then, so I am excused.

After a few more unknown songs, we started DEMANDING Alexander the Great, the greatest great historical song ever, and Bruce was like “Every time I come to Greece, you ask me to sing that song”. Well duh, genius. Didn’t you learn from the previous 12 times that we were probably going to ask for it again, and that you should probably have practiced it? Anyway, he made a deal with us, we were going to sing a couple of verses and next time they came they would play it themselves. We concurred, and he began singing a cappella:

Alexander the Great,
His name struck fear into hearts of men.
Alexander the Great,
Blar glar glar meeen.

This verifies the theory of the ingrate and the dimwit, who said that they don’t know the lyrics to that song. Damnit. Anyway, better luck with that next time. But seriously, he could have told me to go up on the stage and I would tell him the fucking lyrics, it’s not that hard, everyone knows them.

They played a few more songs, including “The Number of the Beast”, “Hallowed Be Thy Name” and “Run to the Hills”. They told us from the beginning that they were going to play songs from their first four albums, but everyone knew this meant “our first four albums and Fear of the Dark”, so naturally we were waiting for it.

Alas, it never came. They played and played and played, but no “Fear of the Dark” in sight. After a while, and when Bruce had introduced the band members, we began chanting “FEAR! OF! THE! DARK!”, but our cries went unanswered. They said their goodbyes and left, and we were all like “OMFG WTF”!

Seriously, I know that you played all those other cool songs which you probably had never played before, since I have all your live albums and they are nowhere to be found, but going to an Iron Maiden concert and not hearing Fear of the Dark is like having sex and the phone ringing when you are about to come. Only instead of sex it’s a concert. And instead of coming it’s Fear of the Dark. And instead of a telephone it is your momma.

I can’t help but feel cheated. It was the first concert I went to, and damnit, I wanted to hear Fear of the Dark. Still though, it was worth every cent (Eurocent, which is like 1.3 dollar cents, so it was worth like 1.3 cents more than your American ones, muhaha). Overall, it was a great show, and we had lots of fun. BUT SERIOUSLY, YOU MADE LIKE $1M TODAY, WOULD IT FUCKING KILL YOU TO PLAY FEAR OF THE DARK? Jeez…

Also, as a side note, there was this hot chick next to me that had this boyfriend, who also looked like a chick, but not that hot. Wtf was up with that couple? I do have reason to hope though, because she spent the largest part of the concert behind me, and I was wearing my Poromenos t-shirt, so all she has to do now is google me and find this site, where she will promptly notice the email address she must use to email me. Hot chick, EMAIL ME HERE: HotChickFromIronMaidenConcert@poromenos.org.

Update: Alas, tonight I was unable to sleep. Bruce Dickinson’s treachery kept echoing in my mind and all I could hear in my head was a voice saying “Revenge! Revenge!”. I pondered long and hard, and I finally came with a foolproof plan that will lead to Iron Maiden’s undoing. It is a plan of utter magnificence and unspeakable horror, the likes of which only a criminal mastermind such as myself could spawn. I will exact my revenge upon Iron Maiden, starting now. You have undoubtedly heard that whenever someone downloads a song, that artist loses millions of dollars. I will, therefore, as of now, download all of Iron Maiden’s albums again and again, costing them trillions of dollars in lost revenues! This will perforce cause the band to disband, as they will be unable to pay all that money. Goodbye, Iron Maiden! Mwahahahahaha!

It is time for another Porocrom update, and this time it is something hot. We bring you the inside scoop (god I hate that phrase) on your favorite celebrities’ lives. Read on for all the tantalizing details of wealth, fame and fortune.

Angelina Jolie

Ah, Angelina. Angelina is a dog, but many of you might be attracted to her. You are wrong and stupid. Anyway, Angelina’s defining characteristic (which you may have noticed) are her lips. They are so big that she can easily use them as a small dinghy when at sea. Noone knows how they were created, but rumor has it that she tried to lick a frozen signpost when she was young, and because of her attempts to free herself from the guile post her lips got stretched to the size of New Zealand and remain like that to this day.

Another distinguishing feature of Angelina is her skin. It is riddled with many tattoos (1523 at the moment). These include a dragon, a cross, a tiger, phrases in various languages and a small map of her skin so that the occasional visitor may know where each tatoo is situated and its history. She has also gotten 192 tattoos removed or covered, most of which were about her former husband, Billy Bob Thornton, and detailed his everyday activities, much like a diary of sorts.

She is a bisexual, which is very hot, (but has stated “I don’t do dogs”) and she was said to have been in a relationship with her brother, which is lies, damn lies! She is a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations and frequently travels to various countries to make movies and help people. She has adopted a child named Maddox, and she wanted to be a funeral director when she was little. That is, unfortunately, an unfulfilled dream for her, but she hopes to become one some day. But enough about her.

Pamela Anderson

There is not much to be said about Pamela. Everyone knows her. Former Baywatch star and sex symbol, Pamela is now pretty much gone. She has “accidentally” released two pr0n video tapes, one with her former husband (or maybe they weren’t married or something, who knows with these Hollywood-types) Tommy Lee Jones (or maybe not Jones, one is an actor, the other one has a huge cock, I forget which is which) and one with some drummer dude. The second tape was mostly oral sex, nothing too fancy, but on the first tape they did it everywhere man, in the bathtub, on the boat, in the car, on the international space station, EVERYWHERE. That’s some crazy shit right there. Her life pretty much went downhill from there. Not having much talent and unable to live off the desire of men to see her naked (because now we all have) she began to decline. Maybe she had a child while declining, I’m not sure.

Pamela currently holds the Guinness World Record for Biggest Fake Boobs Breasts, and rightfully so, as you can see in the picture to the right. She has said that she had contracted the Hepatitis C virus from her former husband (the one with the huge cock), by allegedly sharing tattoo needles (*coughdrugscough*). She has starred in various movies, such as “Baywatch: The Movie”, “Baywatch: People Drowning”, “Baywatch: Bodyguards? Policemen? PIs? Who Knows Any More” and “Barb Wire”.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnie rocks. Formerly a body builder, Arnold became a Hollywood star from the movie Terminator 3 where he plays a robot that kicks ass and kicks ass, and he’s all out of ass to kick. Hmm, bummer. Anyway, he popularized such lines as “Asta la vista, baby”, “I’ll be back” and “My CPU is a neural net processah, a leahning computor”. Generations have been raised with Arnold’s movies and everyone adores him.

He is so revered, in fact, that he has recently become the Governator of California. His arduous tasks as such involve going to places and trying to talk to people. People nod as if they understand what “I am vehy appy to visit yoah town” means, and then he shakes their hands. They are very pleased by this gesture and give him votes. If you have seen the prophetic movie “Demolition Man”, you know that, among other things, the writers of the movie predicted that Ahnold will become President of the United States of America. The first step towards Ahnold’s world domination has been made.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson is everyone’s favourite black-turned-white-turned-leper-turned-pedophile-turned-not-guilty singer. How can anyone not be moved by a young African-American boy’s plight to become white? Isn’t that what being black is all about? After fighting for the better part of his life, he eventually managed to become white, but then discovered it was not so great, so he decided he didn’t like it. He then started shedding various parts of his body, beginning with his nose. Luckily(?), his plastic surgeon convinced him not to drop everything at the last moment, and today he is the man-in-the-mask we all know and love.

Michael Jackson sang great songs, such as “They Don’t Care About Us” to protest the racism of the white man against the other races. He is certainly the most qualified to sing such a song, because he is one of the few people who have been both black and white. Sort of checkerboard patterned, really. His favorite pastimes include singing, long walks on the beach and molesting children dangling babies off window ledges.