Monday, June 15

Kicking off your week with a new waste of time:
The Monday Morning Cage Match.

As you may have noticed recently, I have trouble coming up with material on a Monday morning. Actually, I have trouble doing much of anything on a Monday morning other than despairing over having to return to work for another week and wondering what happened to my professional hopes and dreams, but that's neither here nor there. But I think I've found a solution to the first problem, inspired partly by the fiendish binary simplicity of Flickchart and the fact that I recently took an HTML class where I learned how to make tables: The Monday Morning Cage Match.

There's nothing complicated about the Cage Match. Basically we match up two people, places, or things that have some superficial, barely-worth-even-talking-about similarity and compare them in seven categories. Whichever one is superior in the most categories wins. If you believe in the infinite-monkeys-with-an-infinite-number-of-typewriters theorem ("Infinite Monkeys" is totally going to be the title of my movie-production company, by the way, whenever I get that started), then if we do this long enough theoretically we should be able to rank every last thing on the planet from best to worst, a la Flickchart, but I'm keeping the goals manageable for the time being (i.e. making it remotely tolerable to read on a weekly basis).

So here's the first Cage Match: "99 Problems" vs. "99 Luftballons." Do your worst; I know I did.


 
"99 Problems" (Jay-Z)

"99 Luftballons" (Nena)
Subject matterMercenary media outlets,
corrupt cops,
annoying hangers-on
Nuclear armageddon
WINNER: Nena
Proof of
artist's cleverness
Surprises policeman by
invoking 4th-amendment
rights against unreasonable
search and seizure
Releases balloons to
confuse Cold War-era
strategic-defense systems
WINNER: Jay-Z
Outcome of this
brilliant plan
Vehicle searched by
police dogs
Nuclear armageddon
WINNER: Nena
Sample lyric"I got the rap patrol on the
gat patrol/ Foes that wanna
make sure my casket's
closed/ Rap critics, they
say he's 'Money-cash-
hoes'/ I'm from the hood,
stupid, what type of
facts are those?..."
"99 knights of the air/
ride super-high-tech
jet fighters/ Everyone's
a superhero/ Everyone's
a Captain Kirk..."
WINNER: Jay-Z
Primary negative
of song
Casual use of
the word "bitch"
Original version
sung in German
WINNER: Jay-Z
Other hits
by same artist
"Can't Knock the Hustle,"
"Can I Get A...",
"Big Pimpin'"
None that
I'm aware of
WINNER: Jay-Z
Questionable pop-
cultural usage
Cookie Monster remixAlly Sheedy dancing to it
like a fucking loon in
"The Breakfast Club"
WINNER: Nena


FINAL SCORE: Problems 4, Luftballons 3. Jay-Z gets additional style points by virtue of being married to Beyoncé and managing not to have started a nuclear war.

3 comments:

Universal Remonster said...

Damn you Jay-Z... you've won the battle, but the war has just begun.

Zen Bubba said...

"Ally Sheedy dancing to it like a fucking loon" should be some sort of trump card.

Anonymous said...

This song wasn't in the breakfast club. Ally Sheedy danced to "We are not Alone" by Karla Devito.