Fiona Apple Steals From Man’s Mistaken Memory Of Lyrics From Ratt Song From 1984, Man’s Sense Of Self Collapses

I have been having a crisis this morning. I’d like to say that this had something to do with the Supreme Court’s ruling on the health care bill. But it does not. (I’d resigned myself to tragedy in that aspect a couple weeks ago. And so now I am happily surprised. And hoping that CNN will take this opportunity to shut down operations forever.) My crisis has to do with the new Fiona Apple album, and my favorite song by the ’80s hair-metal band Ratt. So, more important that the health care bill.

Here’s what happened. I’ve been listening to the new Fiona Apple album over the past couple days and enjoying it. My favorite song so far, by far, is the second-to-last song on the album, “Anything We Want,” which starts off with the absolutely sublime opening lyric: “My Cheeks were/Reflecting/The longest wavelength…” Jesus, that song is just seething. (And did you see the picture that the Times ran of Apple playing the piano at last weekend’s Governors Ball concert? Wow! There is so much going on there — in the twist of her neck, the swing of her hair, the snarl of her lip. That is a performer on top of her game. Photographer Chad Batka took that picture, I should point out, because it’s so excellent.)

But anyway, the next song, the last song on the album, which a lot of people have been talking very excitedly about (sometimes when no one else is in the room) is called “Hot Knife,” which is a terrific name for a song, harkening as it does to Isaac Hayes and Peter Tosh and Bobby Darin. “Hot Knife” is an odd, certainly captivating song that’s maybe a little bit too a-capella-group sounding for me? But its opening lyric — and the phrase that dominates the song is “If I’m butter/Then he’s a hot knife.” Later, it switches to, “I’m a hot knife/He’s a pat of butter.” It’s a masterful, impressive song. I just don’t love the melody or the in-the-round harmonizing. Not yet, at least.

But anyway again, those lyrics, the image of a knife cutting through butter, remind me of Ratt, the great ’80s hair-metal band from L.A. Their most famous song is “Round and Round,” which I’m sure you’ve heard on the radio, or remember from when Mickey Rourke and Marissa Tomei sang it together in The Wrestler. “Round and Round” is awesome. But “Round and Round” has never been my favorite Ratt song. My favorite Ratt song is the second single that was released off the album that “Round and Round” is on, the band’s 1984 debut album, Out of the Celler. It’s called “Wanted Man.” (That’s the video for it, at the top of this post. The Wild-West Cowboy motif such a perfect fit for Hollywood hair-metal.) And my favorite part of that song — a part that I loved so, so much when I was 13-years-old, a part that really sort of captured and symbolized everything I wanted a heavy metal song to be when I was that age — was when Stephen Pearcy says, “You’re hot butter/I’m cold steel/You make a move/I’ll make you feel/Like a human target/In my eyes…” I mean, could there be a better image, cooler tough-guy talk, to match a scrawny little 13-year-old’s revenge fantasies of vanquishing schoolyard bullies like Tommy Bruno and Nicki Galderiese? (In hindsight, yes, I can probably think of a few. But back then, no, there could not be. And since I was more of an authority on 13-year-old emotions when I was 13 than I am now, at 41, I think the assessment stands.) A cold knife slicing through a liquifying pat of butter! “I HAVE THE POWER!!!” (I realize that this is a very different reading of the image than what Fiona Apple has in mind. I mean, without getting all Freudian about the connection between sex and violence.)

Because it was so important to me at such a formative time in my childhood. I have been singing that line, “I’m hot butter/You’re cold steel…” in my head for the past 28 years. Like, to embarrassing degree. It’s sort of always there, just below the top layer of my consciousness.

So when I heard Fiona Apple singing such similar words, I thought, Oh, this is a chance for me to post this awesome, cheesy hair-metal song that I love so much from the ’80s on The Awl. To share my love, a piece of me. I will make the connection between the new song and the older one. (This is how I spend a lot of my time, doing important work like this.) I figured I would make a little joke about how Fiona Apple had plagiarized her lyrics from Ratt. (I don’t think that’s actually the case, but that’s just how hilarious I am.)

I typed in “Wanted Man” on Youtube and found the video and clicked play and started rocking and remembering, transported back to the couch in the family room where I watched what was almost certainly an unhealthy amount of MTV when I was growing up. And then it came to the part, in the very first verse, where the low-dealing town sheriff with snake eyes is about to cross our awesome rock superheroes and Pearcy’s gonna set him straight. And then…

What? Oh my god. Oh no. This can’t be. The room starts spinning. My whole world starts to crumble around me as Warren DeMartini’s guitar continue to rip and crunch. A large piece of my identity falls away and dissolves into nothingness, leaving a dark and disorienting void. The words coming through the speakers connected to my computer are different from the ones that I expected to hear, the ones that I was about to sing along with, the ones that I have been singing to myself for so long. Different than the words that I heard so many times back in 1984. I used to play that album over and over again. A million times! How can this be? My god, the human brain is flawed and mysterious.

What Pearcy actually says is, “You’re hot leather…” not “butter.” And, “You’re cold steel…” not “I am…” Which, that doesn’t even make sense! Why would the bad guy be cold steel? Why not the awesome rocker first-person superhero? What is happening? How could this be?

I’m all fucked up over this. What else have been remembering wrong? Everything, perhaps, my whole life history. Where do I come from? Who even am I? I don’t have the faintest clue, apparently.

“A mayoress has been criticised by her constituents after she dressed up as a sausage to welcome the Olympic torch.” You bet there’s a photo!

by Jesse Singal

Diablo 3, a hack-and-slash role-playing game for the PC published by Blizzard (which also makes World of Warcraft), was released a month and a half ago. There was about a decade’s worth of anticipation from fans of the series who had profoundly nostalgic memories of late nights with Domino’s Pizza and cans of soda and Diablo 1 or 2 and a depressingly short AOL Instant Messenger buddy list.

Within 24 hours of Diablo 3’s May 15 release, about 3.5 million people had bought it, either that day or as a preorder. Many of them have been playing it obsessively since the release. But all is not well, because, alongside the enthusiasm, the game has unleashed a torrent of nerdrage. White-hot, screeching nerdrage. Nerdrage about how the game is balanced, about technical issues, about the nonresponsiveness of Blizzard’s customer service. And I propose that the nerdrage sparked by Diablo 3 can help us unravel a mystery that has long eluded scientist and sociologist alike (not really): What causes nerdrage? What are the factors that determine its intensity, its duration, and its contagiousness?

Here’s where I should probably mention that I am one of those aforementioned fans. Diablo is one of the most persistent relics of my nerdy, awkward past (now I am so cool and not awkward), and as the release date approached, even though I knew it was a very bad idea given the game’s potential to suck me in, I felt compelled to email Blizzard and say something like, Hey, I’d like to write about this for such-and-such website. Could you send me an e-copy? They did and I did and then it was hours of sitting hunched over at my computer, making my wizard, HugPatrol, kill hordes of zombies and skeletons and demons of every stripe and watching randomly generated items, or “loot,” pop out as they die. The game tracks your playtime, and I’ve logged about an hour and 20 minutes a day — some of that during the prime of spring! — since the game came out. This sounds like a lot until you ask around; in a brief, unscientific, poorly-responded-to Reddit poll I conducted, fans copped to playing six or seven hours a day, and if the habits of World of Warcraft fans are any indication, it wouldn’t shock me to find out that there are a lot of people playing 10 hours a day or more.

And this is part of the reason the nerdrage has gone supernova, as I’ll explain. But first, let’s define some terms:

nerd: someone who cares deeply and irrationally about something in a way that is very hard for someone who doesn’t care about that thing to understand.

nerdrage: the overwhelming feeling of anger engendered when a nerd is disappointed by that thing he or she cares so deeply and irrationally about — an anger that non-nerds, or different species of nerd, find very hard to take seriously or not scoff at, because of that whole opaque-to-outsiders thing.

I’m actually not a Diablo 3 nerd. A fan, but not a nerd. I am a nerd, however, about certain things, including the New England Patriots and the Boston Celtics. I devote far too much of my time to reading about and watching these teams, and when they lose in a painful manner (which both have managed to do a lot of in the last few years) it sticks to my gut in a way that something so frivolous shouldn’t. I can’t help it. I am a nerd for these teams.

I bet you’re a nerd, too, about something. Most of us are. Some of us are nerds about a lot of things (I can’t decide if these are the lucky or unlucky ones). Maybe you cried when Jim and Pam first kissed on “The Office.” Maybe you’re really into Dr. Phil (ew). Or maybe you’ve had multiple religious experiences on shrooms while listening to My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, and you just can’t stop thinking about that album, and every time you listen to it you notice some new semi-submerged thread of sonic perfection, and it fucks up every first date you go on because you start evangelizing about it in this weirdly persistent way that adds an unwelcome manic tension to the proceedings.

Of course, all but the most extreme sports fans and music fans and whatever fans aren’t viewed as nerds, while, until recently at least, anyone who played a game with even a single sword in it was generally swept into the nerd category (doubly so if there was a mace in the game — no one knows why, but maces are way nerdier than swords; Diablo 3 has both!).

But nerdiness is nerdiness, whether it has to do with gaming or otherwise; and the symptoms that run across its different forms are always quite similar, even when they vary in intensity. So while the object of nerdrage might be something very specific, the emotions that fuel it are pretty universal.

The Diablo 3 nerdrage started pretty much immediately with the game’s release, as Blizzard’s servers, crushed by the onslaught of nerds hoping for their first taste of sweet sweet demon blood, instead served up an error message. Once fans got in and had some time to poke around, a lot of them quickly began to feel that Blizzard had not delivered on its decade-plus promise (for one thing, Diablo 3 has many streamlined, console-like elements to it — the ultimate insult as far as PC gamers are concerned — sanding down the nerdiest strategic edges of its predecessors). Now, it’s difficult to take a strict measure of how this instance of gaming nerdrage compares to prior manifestations, except to observe that Diablo is at least no Daikatana. It’s not as though the game was poorly reviewed or is being abandoned en masse. But still, this is certainly one of the most notable outbreaks of nerdrage in recent history.

If you want to get a sense of the tenor of this nerdrage, one of the epicenters is in the Battle.net forums (Battle.net is the online service through which players play Diablo 3). There, some of the franchise’s most ardent fans express white-hot outrage at Diablo 3’s shortcomings. “What killed this game for you?” asks one post. “We demand a new game designer!” trumpets another. Then this (blanket sic):

Please do not let the same game designer work on another game !Make a ‘Game company Black-list’ like in the casino’s and write his name on nr. 1

We want fun games again,
And if your in-house testers/game designer’s do not understand what fun is,LISTEN TO YOUR FANBASE.

Uninstalled.

Um, yeah! So there’s a lot of anger, most of it orbiting around a few standard gripes:

• The Inferno difficulty mode (which Blizzard promised would be really, really hard) is really, really hard.

• Cool, powerful items don’t pop out of the bad guys with nearly enough frequency — conspiracy theorists see this as a ploy on Blizzard’s part to push people into using the Real Money Auction House, which lets people buy or sell in-game items for real-world cash. If players can’t find great items, some detractors insist insist, they’ll be forced to buy them in the auction house, from which Blizzard takes a cut of each purchase. (There is also an auction house using gold, the in-game money.) (Also, yes: Real-life human beings spend real-life money on not-real-life swords and armor and stuff.)

• The story and voice acting are unspeakable horrors, much like the game’s final boss, the Lord of Terror himself.

• There is far less customizability than in previous games — every new skill you acquire is acquired at a preset point, and unlike the previous two games in the series, you’re not forced to make any big, permanent choices about your character and where his or her strengths and weaknesses will lie.

• Et cetera, et cetera.

Don’t be judge-y; like I said, it’s universal. We, most of us nerds of one stripe or another, get irrationally mad about stupid things. But I contend that gamer nerdrage is a bit more focused and intense. It’s a speculative argument, of course, until scientists come up with a way to reduce subjective emotional states down to cold objective numbers (and seriously, scientists — get on that!). But if it’s true, it’s true for three main reasons:

1. The long development cycle. Now that gaming is on equal footing with Hollywood in terms of funding and fandom and news coverage, there’s arguably no form of entertainment that gets as heavily draped in hype and anticipation and controversy as the development of a new video game. A space of almost twelve years separated the release of Diablo 2 and that of the frequently delayed Diablo 3. That’s a lot of screenshots, developer interviews, and hyperbolic presentations at gaming conventions in the meanwhile, and a lot of time for fans to develop sky-high expectations, to internalize every rumor and scrap of journalism that gets squeezed out of the protracted development cycle, to come up with things to be disappointed about once reality arrives and can’t live up to a million nerdy fever-dreams.

Diablo 3 (and every major release) elicited significant nerdrage because a perfect version of it already existed in the heads of gamers years before it was released. Then the actual game had to come along and ruin everything.

2. The unparalleled intimacy between gamer and game. There are only so many hours of sports on a week, and most people don’t follow more than two or three teams closely anyway. Loveless is a discrete, bounded thing. You can play it over and over but it’s still just 48 minutes and 36 seconds long.

Games like Diablo 3, where so many of the levels and items and encounters are randomized, are different. You can play Diablo 3 forever, basically. This leads people to become very, very attached to it. They play it constantly, and when they’re not playing it they’re reading about it or complaining about it or, in the direst cases, writing torrid fan-fiction about it. The stakes seem higher, the slights more visceral, when you’re so tightly entwined with the object of your nerdlove — and it’s a thin line between nerdlove and nerdrage.

3. The endlessly seductive hope that Maybe Things Will Get Better. Most forms of nerdrage are starved of the oxygen they would need to burn for very long because what’s done is done. Wes Welker dropped that ball so he dropped that ball so he dropped that ball. That’s it and there’s no way to reverse it. George Lucas isn’t going to unmake the crappy new “Star Wars” trilogy he made; that trilogy is a thing that, barring a heroic time-traveler, exists now and will exist forever.

Gaming — or PC gaming at least — is different. Because a game like Diablo 3 gets patched regularly (meaning the designers release a set of tweaks, often geared at making the game more balanced), there’s always a chance — a chance! — that the game’s publishers will suddenly do a 180, prostrate themselves before the nerd-hordes, and cede to all their demands. Now, it’s a bit delusional to think this could actually happen, both because Blizzard obviously has their reasons for making this or that design decision, and because, given the nastiness of the nerdrage that has been unleashed so far, to fix the game to the nerds’ liking at this point would entail its developers saying, “You know, I think the 15-year old who just sent me a photoshopped picture of my head on Hitler’s body makes some really good points. And boy, do I admire him for not being shy with those punctuation marks! I’m going to give him what he asks for.”

But still. Because games can be improved, gaming nerdrage has a motivating fuel that is absent in nerdrage’s other manifestations.

***

Interestingly, but maybe not surprisingly, the vast majority of people spouting the hottest nerdrage over Diablo 3 seem to still be playing it. It’s a hellaciously addictive game, and they, like so many others, have been yoked at a very primal level to Diablo 3’s stimulus-reward schedules, which seem precisely attuned to elicit addiction.

It’s a weird disconnect, this idea of being hopelessly addicted to a game that pisses you off in so many ways. There’s something ominous there, a hint that the brutal logic of the slot machine has become fully entrenched in “higher” forms of entertainment. Because sure, at its core Diablo 3 is about killing monsters, but it’s also supposed to be about characters and plot and graphics. At least that’s the story fans tell themselves.

Here is where the rage over Diablo 3 becomes universal nerdiness writ large. Something essentially unimportant pleases us in a primal way we couldn’t ever fully put into words, and we conjure up a complicated tale to explain why we’ve become obsessed. So don’t make fun of the ranting obsessives of the Battle.net forums — they’re just being flamboyantly human.

Related: When Exactly Did It Get Cool To Be A Geek?

Jesse Singal is a reporter at Newsweek/The Daily Beast. You can vent your nerdrage at him via email or on Twitter.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

U-Haul & the Dream of Arrows

a little pink lemonade in the nick of
my thumb, a little radio
static ringing in my lungs & each lung works
like a cut-out since the body
can’t be everywhere, can’t be all things
to all mirrors & with my windows
down I’ll pretend this isn’t a U-Haul but
a huge-ass space bot bearing me
in its gaping mouth & the two of us
could throw around ideas for
miles, we could blow by a million
signs lit up, high in the sky with arrows
pointing down & I think maybe
that’s what sky is, just a whole mess
of extremely sharp ends
& the U-Haul has something he needs
to say, he nearly breaks down
from not saying it

Ben Purkert’s poems are forthcoming in The New Yorker and Denver Quarterly. He’s currently completing his first manuscript, One Good.

We keep the rest of the poems in the archives of The Poetry Section. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

Visualizing a downpour of rain on Colorado.

— Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson) June 28, 2012

Neat! Megalomaniacal New Age preacher-shill Marianne Williamson has been mounting a comeback and I didn’t even know it! She is a wingnut, and a former associate of the uber-wingnut Louise Hay, who — well, let her tell you her own parable of manifesting a sore throat because she wants to be pitied. You know, because we all make ourselves sick with our thoughts. HOW do you beat those thoughts? I’m glad you asked.

That’s right. Got it?

Anyway, chick was made for the Twitter era. Me, I’m visualizing an end to cultish spiritual vampires. Listen, you KNOW I am all about the light and the love, and the puppies and the flowers, and the appreciating the moments. And whatever gets you through this weird, messed-up world! If it works for you, go for it. And nobody loves a sunset like me! I will love the hell out of a sunset. But there is such a thing as turning the corner with that stuff and then next thing you know, boom, you are a money mill and a spiritual leader with a couple big bank accounts. And books that make LITTLE SENSE, when they are not actively harmful.

The reason so many of us are obsessed with becoming stars is because we’re not yet starring in our own lives.

— Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson) June 22, 2012

ENJOY. And please cure your HIV and/or cancer, it’s very off-putting, and I can tell that you don’t love yourself.

Man. I went through this the first time around in California and it was really terrible.

@marwilliamson can u give more details? 🙂

— Wakeelism! (@MohamedAlwakeel) June 25, 2012

by Awl Sponsors

Listen up, soft drink lovers: Pepsi has embarked on its first “World Tour.” This summer, the beloved beverage company that’s always aligned itself with the hottest pop superstars and an overall party vibe has begun a summer “Live for Now” campaign. And, you can stay on top of it all by visiting Pepsi Pulse — Pepsi’s interactive website — which brings up-to-the-minute news on all the fun things going on in your city, as well as great deals and prizes. If you’ve seen the commercial spot featuring pop star Nicki Minaj, you’ve already gotten a taste of the fun.

And that fun continues with the “Summer Beats Concert Series.” Pepsi is serving up three Twitter-enabled (twitter.com/pepsi) shows during the summer season featuring performances by Billboard chart-topping artists.

Next up, it’s all you — show off your “now” moments and share your photos with your Twitter peeps. Check out Pepsi’s partners — MTV, Vh1, CMT, Comedy Central, as well as the Pepsi Summer Concert Series — to win access to amazing events and other cool prizes. Be sure to use the unique hashtag related to the prize you’re eyeing (for instance, VH1’s is #playnow, MTV’s is #mtvnow, CMT is #countrynow, etc.). You just might end up in the spotlight on shows like “The Colbert Report” or be chosen as a MTV Video Music Awards correspondent.

As you sip your favorite Pepsi this summer, don’t forget to stay in the “now” at Pepsi Pulse. “Live for Now” will run all summer long through September 2012. Learn more by visiting www.pepsi.com.

This sponsored post is produced by Pepsi.

And in the stories-I-wish-I’d-never-posted-in-the-first-place department, it turns out that the man arrested after spewing anti-Semitic slurs while dressed in an Elmo costume in Central Park earlier this week used to run a pornographic website in Cambodia called “Welcome to the Rape Camp.”

Would you like to watch people tripping up a set of stairs at Brooklyn’s 36th Street Station? Of course you would. People tripping upwards is its own special brand of hilarity. Sadly, the MTA is now taking steps (haha, get it?) to fix the problem, so you won’t be able to watch it live, but we’ll always have this video to enjoy.

I guess we’ll all be here for the next 45 minutes or so, right? Hope you’re under air conditioning wherever you are.