Aesop Rock astutely diagnoses the Freudization of hip hop, now in it’s 15th 35th year of existential crisis:

Pick up any rap magazine, and half the magazine is articles about hip-hop, and it’s just about the actual existence of a genre called hip-hop, or what the genre is doing, and it’s like, “Man, just make a record. There wouldn’t be shit to complain about if you just made music.”

Ironically, it is this bit of anti-psychoanalysis hip hop psychoanalysis that is the most compelling section of the entire interview.

And here is Heidi Montag, vehemently denying her recent wedding was nothing more than a publicity stunt:

“I look forward to everyone seeing the footage of our time in Mexico on The Hills, so they can see for themselves what a joyous occasion it was.”

There’s something so remarkably sublime about a statement of naked publicity made as denial against accusations of naked publicity.

Heidi Montag is fascinating. Many people may violently disagree, and I certainly understand the nature of that disagreement. Because the Heidi Montag who appears on The Hills, who frolics dainty on a Mexican beach in a thin bikini with her dbag boyfriend, isn’t very interesting at all.

But that’s Heidi Montag the character, the Heidi Montag of the show. The real Heidi Montag, the one who courts fame so brazenly, who cooperates with MTV producers paid to manipulate her real-life familial relationships, who doesn’t just go to the beach in a bikini with her dbag boyfriend, but who does so in a purposefully choreographed dance of staged paparazzi “spy photos”; that’s a richly complex, eminently captivating person.

Unfortunately, The Hills itself completely misses out on this fascinating complexity, purposefully avoiding any mention of the fame or notoriety the show has brought upon its subjects.

When a sex-tape featuring Lauren Conrad was first shopped to internet high-bidders, it became a huge international story, dominating tabloid magazines, providing Billy Bush and Mark McGrath with something to talk about for weeks and weeks. And yet The Hills treated the incident as some sort of close-knit gossip gone bad; Conrad and friends spent an entire televised season discussing “rumors” on a “website,” as if the entirety of the story existed in Facbook status updates and a couple MySpace comments.

So much banality when what actually happened in the actual real life world, just beyond the periphery of the televised reality we all ended up seeing, was intensely more interesting.

What’s it like to have legitimate celebrity gossip magazines printing detailed descriptions of your vulva for broad popular consumption?

We’ll never know, because The Hills, like most Reality Television, ultimately fails to meet its mark, remaining naively devoted to the characters it has created, when the process of creating them is by far the most fascinating aspect of their actual real lives.

I)
I married a woman named Baberaham Lincoln and we grew
     the same mustache,

moved to Ann Arbor in a Wooden Station Wagon
     listening to Funk Rock and Joe Piscopo
Spoken Word.

Spinning wheels, ’round and ’round, cross
coordinated dusky streets, literally littered
     with skateboarding gas station attendants—
those who speak naked testimonials

into inexpensive camcorders; their
Eyeballs in debt,
     praying on Sundays for adjustable rate public relations.

Reality is roadtripping
     through two-thousand and eight American televisions
     affixed via Satellite to brawny Beijing,

Broadcasting from atop the astroturf
     at the Center of Sport.

II)
We’ve spent an extra night or two by the strip mall
     hotel swimming pool,

under the shadow of Tiger Woods barefoot
     on the Euphrates, orchestrating
a public Telethon between Rival Teams
within our own delegation.

J. Harvie Wilkinson and Sonia Sotomayor,
     Babe and Me, in the pool with knee-high holy socks,
     racing via Segway from Lake Itasca to Ancient Carchemish,

Grabbing roadside water bottles
     from an elderly Wall*Mart greeter
insisting “God Hates FAQs,”

propping 8 Shepards under XMas lighting
     behind a formerly segregated lunch counter;
a Phelpsian Feat.

One World, One Dream,
until the River ran dry and we found our missing boots
     and then beat each other up.

III)
My nose is broken, my diamond teeth are bloody
     and I can no longer afford my Asthma medication.

But there’s more in the River,
     water once again in the River…

Old Babe and the Young Hawaiian, racing via foot once more,
     naked and wheezing under proud flown American flags,
          eating Apple Pies and Doughnut Sticks, knowing

River HOPE is a spring internal,
spilling over the top of the Keban Damn,
     descending until the leveed mouth of New Orleans,
wiping any anti-freeze from the shiny pavement,

)

Clean whistles by the twentieth Sunrise of January.

Who (other than, apparently, The Fixx) knew the Toyota “Saved By Zero” commercials were based on an actual, true-to-existence pop song*?

As an aside; I never realized how annoying those Toyota ads were until a lot of other people started pointing out how annoying those Toyota ads were.

And herein lies the moral dilemma: who is higher on the stink list, the marketing folks who created the ads, or the nit-pickily culture-conscious types who first pointed out the obnoxiousness?

* Embedding of the video has been disabled for some mysterious reason. And not just embedding of that one solitary YouTube video, but of every YouTube version of The Fixx’s “Saved By Zero” music video, across multiple users. Which is weird. Because The Fixx is…who the eff is The Fixx? And why would they care to disable embedding of their kitschy music video? Obviously they’re ok with it being on YouTube, otherwise the video would just be yanked. So why the beef with frustrated bloggers made ranty by their irritating pop song chorus?

According to Politico, Sarah Palin remains super duper popular (STILL!), almost as popular as the President Elect, and isn’t that crazy??

“People are still searching for her in record numbers,” said Kathy O’Reilly, a spokeswoman for Lycos. “How bizarre is that? Obama is the president-elect after the most historic election of all time and you’d think he would be dominating search activity and he only now is going ahead of her.”

There’s no doubt Sarah Palin is an unnaturally engaging public figure, but so much of the attention she draws is of the car wreck rubbernecking variety; people aren’t tuning in to hear sober assessments of the delicate future of our resilient country, they’re hitting Lycos out of a morbid curiosity to see what sort of terrible things may happen to America’s number one most hilarious political circus.

And no need to go much further than the Politico article itself for evidence of the morbidity:

• Sarah Palin was the most popular Lycos search item from early Sept until this past week, when she was ultimately overthrown by…Paris Hilton (a woman known less for being an active mom of a mentally disabled kid than she is for being a mentally disabled kid who many millions have seen partaking in some mom-making activities).

 
Or, as Politico insists, observe Sarah Palin’s smash-success YouTube videos, consisting entirely of:

• Sarah Palin giving a humorously oblivious interview to a local news crew while a series of turkeys are brutally slaughtered behind her.
• Sarah Palin being ruthlessly mocked by Tina Fey in a hilariously vicious SNL sketch.
• Sarah Palin viciously mocking herself while being brutally slaughtered by Katie Couric’s relatively tame questioning.

 
Sarah Palin certainly has “a unique opportunity to build up something massive,” as one Republican operative puts it. But I have a hunch that massive something will be more along the lines of a popular daytime talk show on Fox News afternoons than anything else.