I Want My DVDs

Fighting Mad: XXX

Rise Above/Roadrunner

Sorry, Ventura Distribution, Vas DVD, ALL, and 4 Leaf. We only have so much room for credit after the name. How many corporations are in on these things? Everyone is so scared after Napster, they’re spending their entire budget on the only things kids can’t be bothered to duplicate. Geez.

Anyway, watching this video before you go out is fucking intense. Holy shit. From the ghetto black dude getting pounded by his fat sister (you have to hear how this guy says, “Ungh!” when he hits the ground) to the girl who gets her face smashed against the ground by another girl as their girlfriend goes, “Maybe if you had kept your fucking legs closed and your mouth shut this never would have happened!,” this is more than just the harshest fights you’ve ever seen in your life. It is the harshest fights anyone has ever seen in their lives. It’s fun, too. I guess because the people in it are kids, and they’re supposed to fight. Seeing Danny Bonaduce obliterate the old man from The Brady Bunch isn’t fun because it’s like seeing your dad get mugged, but seeing two twenty-year-olds attack each other like hyenas and then get up, bloodied but unbowed, to laugh about it—well, that’s what life is about.

Blind Date: Uncensored

Mantra/MMII

Blind Date has three tapes out right now: Uncensored, Dates From Hell, and Freaks & Weirdos. These are brutal to watch. I don’t know why I find them more excruciating than Fighting Mad. Seeing people pounded in a fight they agreed on pumps you up. Seeing lonely, awkward people fare really badly on dates is really, really hard to watch. There’s the guy getting a massage with a huge BMX track on his underwear, or how about the guy who tells his date about the time he was watching TV and could control it? “I would tell Letterman to touch his ear and he would. It was fucked up.” This tape is fucked up. Nobody can actually sit through an episode of the show because the fucking commercials are relentless, but I have to admit, these DVDs are worth it—if only to see the guy who gets laid in the restaurant.

50 Cent: The New Breed

Shady/Interscope

Rap fans will love this CD because it gives you everything you want from your favorite rapper. No glittery bitches and jet skis. Just an uneducated guy from Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and his ex-con friends talking about drug dealing and making videos. For everyone else, there’s something more.

I personally fucking hate rap. Thanks to the likes of Ja Rule (who, I think, stabbed 50 Cent) and Jermaine Dupri, all I can see when I turn on BET is a bunch of minstrels lying about how rich they are to entertain middle-class white kids. The amazing thing about The New Breed is, despite a life that meant four four-square blocks and regular prison sentences, 50 Cent knows what he’s talking about. “Success in the music industry is about who you know,” he says in the documentary section. “But what you know is what determines how long you can stretch that success out.” Maybe the Brooklyn public school system isn’t so shitty.

It’s not a matter of one or two catchy phrases. 50 Cent has a clear perspective of the rap game. He understands how temporary it is. He understands his role in it. I think he even understands how a big part of his popularity is due to how shitty rap has become. “I’ma put these niggaz out of business. That’s why they scared. If they don’t start putting out some real music, niggaz goin’ out of business.” Maybe if stupid assholes like Busta Rhymes hadn’t put out a pile of music that is totally indistinguishable from cola ads (how about that Common ad where he talks about corporate sell outs and how he needs to keep it real?), 50 Cent wouldn’t be so popular.

If you’re a typical rap consumer (12–18 years old, middle-class, white) you will love this DVD because it has that “street-level rap guy that’s real. He got shot a bunch of times!” If you ever had any interest in rap whatsoever, you will like this too, because I haven’t heard a rapper talk about “bubblegum rap” since The Devil Made Me Do It, and it’s been a long time coming.

American Misfits: Scandal, Skits, Debauchery and Skateboarding

Rise Above/Vas

This is another continuation of Jackass, which was a continuation of all those Big Brother movies. There’s plenty of skateboarding and plenty of bails and some tits and butt-spanking. It was really good to see Steve Caballero racing mini-bikes, and laughing at retards like Duane Peters and Beetlejuice is always fun, but dudes, easy on the comedy skits. I don’t need to see any more fake advertisements for breakfast cereals. I know cereal ads are corny. They’re for fucking kids. What are you making fun of? Why don’t you do a parody of the nuclear family while you’re at it, so we can laugh at how corny the 50s were. If this tape edited out about 50 percent of the funny skits and filled that up with skating, I wouldn’t have hit the FFWD thing so much.

CHRIS SPARX