The 2019 Internet Is In America State of The Site Address

Celebrating EIGHT YEARS of whatever it is that we’ve been doing, I guess.

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CD Review - 'Reputation' by Taylor Swift (2017)

The year's most anticipated album just dropped, but does Tay Tay's latest live up to all of the heavily hyped hullabaloo? 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

A couple of months back I got an email from some broad that works for some shitty clickbait website nobody's ever heard of before asking for an interview about this Taylor Swift article I wrote. What she didn't know that I knew because I have a good eye for analytics is that she found out about the article by literally typing "Taylor Swift" in the Gab.Ai search box and clicking on the first link she encountered. The evidence of this is apparent in the screen shot below:

So naturally, I get a whole bunch of questions about why the alt-right thinks Taylor Swift is a Nazi and I responded by telling her ... well, you know what, I'm just going to publish our entire Internet communique for you, because it's that guldarn entertaining:

And if you can't read that, tough titties. I'm sure if you hit the zoom button up top enough you'll be able to, or even better, you can read this thing on an iPad and just stretch the thing out and read it in one fell swoop. The point is, there's a lot of people out there who have convinced themselves that Taylor Swift is some sort of undercover Republican and they'll do anything to smear her good name in the public eye.

I've already written about this once before. Long story short, a whole buncha' pissy liberal women are irked at Taylor for being a.) white, b.) prettier than them and c.) one of the few - if only - mainstream musical acts that ISN'T caught up in a vortex of endless virtue signalling on behalf of Democratic policy points. And since modern liberals are devoid of a sense of humor or the ability to pick up on even the slightest twinges of irony or sarcasm, when they hear people like Andrew Anglin celebrating Taylor Swift as some sort of subterfuge neo-Nazi princess, they think it's 100 percent legit. 

Let me tell you knuckleheads something. When alt-right trolls keep posting macros of Taylor Swift with Hitler quotes, what they're doing is satire. They're co-opting the most popular mainstream act of the day and branding their own message to her for the LOLZ. But somehow, a whole slew of dimwitted, inherently prejudiced people out there have made the cockamamie fantasy in their head pseudo-reality. Just take a look at this meandering screed from a shitty website made by trust fund communists that accuses Tay Tay of being an "anti-Marxist" and a proponent of eugenics and a Hitler wannabe just because in her newest video she stands in front of a podium in front of a large crowd - which, as we all know, is something ONLY white supremacists have done throughout human history. So asinine that character assassination attempt that Swift sent her lawyers after the website - which, naturally, drew the ire of the ACLU and even more demands from unemployed liberal arts grads that she publicly denounce white supremacy in all its forms.

Maybe it's never dawned on all of these dunderheads that maybe, the REASON Taylor Swift is so popular in the first place is because she's APOLITICAL. Her songs about falling in love and moving on after a relationship and getting into catfights with manipulative friends is something that resonates across the political spectrum, and get this - maybe Taylor's core audience of 14- and 15 year-old girls DON'T give a flying fuck about abortion or equal pay or "the patriarchy" or any of that other shit the mainstream media keeps shoving down their throats day in, day out, and since Tay-Tay is pretty much the only major act in show business that isn't using their stage as a political pulpit every night, perhaps that endears her even more to the masses? You see, that's something I could never figure out about liberals; for people who absolutely loathe religious types (as long as they're Christian, anyway) pushing their beliefs on others, they don't see a shred of hypocrisy in the fact they're actively shoving their beliefs on everybody else at every available opportunity - and in fact DEMAND even more dogmatic devotion to their convictions than even the most annoying-ass Jehovah's Witness.

But - asides. What we're really here to talk about today is, of course, the release of Tay Tay's new album Reputation, which already has four fuckin' singles released before the CD even hit store shelves. Now, before we get into this latest release, lemme talk about me and Taylor real quick. 

Back when she was doing that country shit, I didn't give a fuck. It wasn't until "Trouble" dropped that I started to take note of her work, and the inescapable wave of 1989 single after single pretty much turned me into a "Swifty" by default. Let's be objective for just a minute: with no less than seven singles from the album, 1989 is unquestionably one of the greatest pop albums in history. And all of the tracks are diverse - "Bad Blood" sounds totally different from "Wildest Dreams," "Shake it Off" sounds nothing like "Out of the Woods," and "Welcome to New York" doesn't even sound like the same artist who made "Style." Give it about 20 or 30 years, but we WILL look back on 1989 as being a watershed, pop cultural masterpiece on par with Tapestry and Purple Rain someday. And while her music is unquestionably overproduced, fuck, what isn't nowadays? Besides, unlike most of those hit songbirds out there today, Taylor not only writes her own music but plays her own instruments. At last check, Taylor can play the guitar, the piano, the banjo and the ukelele, which is about four times as many instruments that Beyonce and Rihanna can play, as far as I'm aware. For all the shit Swift receives, nobody wants to give her credit for being a hell of a musician, and more than anything - including her much derided "Aryan good looks" - is what I reckon has driven (and continues to drive) her popularity.

Alright, time to finally focus on Reputation. From the cover alone you know the mood is about to change. Tay-tay's abandoned her trademark tomato soup red lips for some dark and dangerous black lipstick, with the album title itself inked in a font that wouldn't be out of place on the latest Obituary or Gorgoroth release. Of course, the music itself is still light and frothy bubblegum electro-pop, but this time around we just know it's going to be a darker - and more cynical? - variety of light and frothy bubblegum electro-pop. So how about we pop this sumbitch in our CD player and give the album a fine track-by-track combing, why don't we?

Well, if she didn't have a red lipstick fetish before ...

Track 1

"Ready For It?"

Surely you've heard this one a time or two before. This is one of those songs that's a feature-length double entendre. Except it's in reverse. Canonically, she's explicitly singing about having sexual fantasies, maybe even the female equivalent of a wet dream thinking about some dude she desperately wants to bone, but it also doubles as a metaphor for the singer's quasi-radical thematic and genre shifts to follow on the album. Also, as you will soon see, about half the songs on this album are positively A-plus aural material to bump uglies to, so it's nice we have that motif established from the get-go here.

Track 2

"End Game"

"I want to be your A-Team, I want to be your end game, end game," Taylor begins this heavily hip-hop flavored track that features rapper Future and Ed Sheeran, because apparently, he's still trying to hit it. And yes, Sheeran does try to rap on the track, and it's goddamn hilarious. It's pretty much a thematic and compositional carryover from the opening track, with Tay Tay lamenting her negative media image and by the third stanza she's spitting rhymes herself and it's not that bad, surprisingly. Hell, she does that white girl trying to be black shtick better than Halsey, that's for sure. It's another cryptic "eff you" to whichever ex-boyfriend who screwed her over last with plenty of in-jokes about her "red lips," but on the whole, it's probably one of the weaker songs on Reputation. Not that it's filler or anything like that, just a track that's too similar to other - and better - tracks on the album.

Track 3

"I Did Something Bad"

Oh hell, Taylor Swift CURSES on this track! "Crimson red paint on my lips, if a man talks shit then I owe him nothing." I'm pretty sure this whole thing is a great big "fuck you" to Calvin Harris, as apparent by lyrics like "he says 'don't throw away a good thing,' but if he drops my name, then I owe him nothing, and if he spends my change, the he had it coming." You know, because she wrote that one Rihanna song for him and everything? Other publications say the song also gives the business to Tom Hiddleston and the Kardashians and yeah, they're probably right. As far as diss tracks go, it's pretty solid - I mean, it ain't "No Vaseline," but it's fairly decent musical revenge nonetheless.

Track 4

"Don't Blame Me"

"My drug is my baby, I'll be using him for the rest of my life," Tay Tay sulks in this downbeat, dare I say industrial sounding anti-ballad interspersed with brief piano interludes. After three fairly energetic tracks, this is the first truly dour, depressed-sounding song on the album and it's definitely successful at setting a pissy, pessimistic attitudinal shift. Also, this song has one of my all-time favorite Taylor one-liners ever - "I once was poison ivy, but now I'm your daisy." An aside, I know, but why not cast Tay Tay as P.I. in the upcoming Gotham City Sirens movie? I mean, judging from a couple of her red carpet ensembles, she DEFINITELY looks the part.

Track 5

"Delicate"

AUTOTUNE, YOU MOTHER FUCKERS. This one is a slower, quieter, and even more downbeat song than the last track. "Dark jeans and your Nikes look at you, oh damn, never seen that color blue," she remarks around the halfway point of the track. I have no idea who that's referencing, but if you're a hardcore enough Swifty you can probably figure it out. I'd compare the track to "Wildest Dreams," except a little more morose and reserved. And yes, this song is Taylor-made (har-har) for some bedtime sojourning, if you catch my drift. And by that I mean this is a good song to fuck to. Just as long as it's consensual.

Track 6

"Look What You Made Me Do"

I've already dissected this one a while back, so I ain't going to retrudge the same old ground here. All in all this is a TREMENDOUS song, probably one of the best pure pop releases of the 2010s. Yes, it's overproduced as fuck but it's still insanely catchy and one of the few modern day radio staples that doesn't get stale after ten hearings. And I STILL say Taylor didn't "borrow" the chorus from Right Said Fred - anybody with a working set of cochleas KNOWS this song's trademark refrain is indeed swiped from 2 Live Crew's immortal "Me So Horny."

Track 7

"So It Goes ..."

This one has a long, winding intro just like "Wildest Dreams" and it's definitely one of the better tracks on the album. Here, she recounts meeting some random dude and having instant guilt over her attraction to him. "You know I'm not a bad girl, but I do bad things with you," she laments, displaying an almost Catholic sense of sexual moral culpability. There's even some semi Fifty Shades shit going on towards the end, where she starts talking about wearing black and clawing her metaphorical lover's back (fuck, I can't wait to see that video!) The chorus is especially well structured, with even more lyrics about her lipstick (for which Tay Tay ruminates over the same way Sir Mix-A-Lot ruminates over large asses.) Shit, why this girl hasn't garnered a Kylie Jenner-like cosmetics contract by now, I just can't figure out. 

Track 8

"Gorgeous"

Now this track is just '80s as fuck and I love it. Somewhere between bubblegum pop and synth-laden power pop lies this track, which features perhaps Taylor's best overall vocal performance on the whole album. It's kinda like Pat Benatar singing a Matthew Sweet penned love song, or Paramore trying to wheel their way through a Raspberries track. It's probably the most 1989-like song on the CD, but that's far from being a negative. Hey - more of the same is never a bad thing when that "same" is already pretty fuckin' ace, is it?

Oh, what I wouldn't give to be her co-star in Nekromantik 3 ...

Track 9

"Getaway Car"

We have got to find a name for that really downbeat, wobbly, lite synth beat that underlies virtually every song on this album. Uh, Swiftwave, maybe? Anyhoo, this is another of those "doomed romance" odes, as evident by the oh so blunt title. "We were jet-set Bonnie and Clyde, oh oh, until I switched to the other side," she remarks, "it's no surprise I turned you in, oh oh, 'cause us traitors never win." It kinda' reminds me of "Into the Woods," but a little bit lighter and just slightly frothier. An alright song, I guess, but it's nothing transcendent or anything like that.

Track 10

"King of My Heart"

Fuck, I am loving that synth that's driving most of the tracks on this album. Well, if you're looking for vocal dynamism, this song offers a pretty good mixture of hushed singing, quick spurt shouts, deadpan dips and waves, quasi-serious white girl rap and - yep, you guessed it - an auto-tune assisted chorus. With lyrics like "so prove to me I'm your American queen and you move to me like I'm a Motown beat" and "up on the roof with a school girl crush, drinking beer out of plastic cups," it almost sounds like a Lorde track - if Lorde was a robot. By now, I think a bad break-up can be chalked up as the core theme of the album, not Taylor's one-woman war against the media (which, I believe is what most people were expecting, if not outright wanting.) Needless to say - there's going to be a lot of fat girls crying over this album in the near future, for a multitude of reasons.

Track 11

"Dancing With Our Hands Tied"

This is the best song Lana Del Rey could never make. It's fast, but downbeat, frenzied but whispy, anxious but emotionally subdued, and sentimental but not exactly optimistic. It almost reminds me of a combination of The Veronica's "Untouched" and "Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" - two really unlikely tastes that apparently taste way better together than expected. Take out the electronic snare drums over the chorus and some of the autotune and this song wouldn't sound out of place on the soundtrack of a 1980s John Hughes movie. That, and it has some of the best lyrics on the whole album. "I'm a mess, but I'm the mess that you wanted," Tay Tay croons, "oh, 'cause it's gravity keeping you with me." Hey, isn't "Gravity" also the name of a John Mayer song? I mean, not that the two are related or anything like that, assuredly ...

Track 12

"Dress"

I can already tell you this is Taylor's 25 - a more low-key, more depressed (or is that simply less emotional?) paean to the pains of growing up and growing past failed relationships. "I don't want you like a best friend," she lilts, "Only bought this dress so you take it off, take it off, carve your name into my bedpost." And there's even these two parts where she kinda sorta pantomimes having an orgasm, and it WILL give you a chubby wubby. Another nice, breathy song for you and your other of significant other to have melancholic sex to, which, I am sure we can all agree, is the absolute best kind of sex any of us will ever have.

Track 13

"This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things"

The track starts off with air raid sirens, which has to be a first for a Tay Tay song. And yes, I know the title is an allusion to The Simpsons, but Taylor never really struck me as much of a Simpsons fan, but she did write the song (and every other song on the album, for that matter) so who knows. This track is pretty much the bookend to "Look What You Made Me Do," complete with Taylor breaking the fourth wall and bursting out laughing while phoning in a syrupy non-apology to whoever pissed her off so much (Kanye, I'm looking at your crazy ass.)  After a deluge of downbeat pseudo-ballads, this almost antagonistically playful, semi-cryptic "diss" track is a welcome change of pace; and oddly enough, the chorus sounds a lot like the part in Avril Lavigne's "Complicated" at the end where she's saying like 20 lines of lyrics really fast, which is something I don't reckon any of us expected. 

Track 14

"Call It What You Want"

Another downbeat song that kinda' combines the album's two most prominent themes - redemption from bad romances and bad blood with other celebrities - into a singularity. "All the flowers grew back as thorns," she says, "but he built a fire just to keep me warm." So, uh, who is she talking about here? That Joe Alwyn guy? Regardless, this is one of the simpler songs on that album, with a beat that remains relatively staid throughout. And it's a great bridge to the album's concluding track, which is probably one of the most haunting CD enders since "Butterfly" on Weezer's Pinkerton. Hey, speaking of which ...

Track 15

"New Year's Day"

And we wrap up the album with a stripped-down, scaled-back, piano-driven ballad. I hesitate to call it Tay-Tay's "Piano Man," since it's a.) nowhere near as grandiloquently verbose and b.) nowhere near as needlessly overlong, but I guess they are compositionally (and thematically, I suppose) similar. In a career littered with syrupy and schmaltzy love songs, this might be Swift's most bittersweet to date. "I want your midnights," she lilts, " but I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day." It's a song about longing, I take it, but it's a more adult kind of longing she's talking about here - not that hyper-dramatic teenager shit we're used to hearing from her and her contemporaries. The singer is sad about the circumstances of her relationship, but it's even sadder because she's realized and accepted there's nothing she can do about it and just has to live with it because, well, that's life, and just like New Year's Day itself, life goes on regardless. On an album produced to the moon and back, I really couldn't think of a better way to close the record - one girl, one piano and one mature broken heart, turning in a testament to disappointment and taking it on the chin like a real woman. This, my friends, is the "new" Taylor she's been going on and on about for months now; a singer-songwriter with legitimate musical chops who's more James Taylor than Beyonce. And just like a great movie that leaves the door wide open for a sequel, this is the perfect way to segue to her next album, and her next reinvented self. And, I for one, am on the edge of my seat seeing where that leads us.

Don't worry, Tay Tay. Your album is WAY better than Katy Perry's latest.

Alright, time to sum it all up. On the first listen I can't declare it an objectively better album than 1989, which I thought had better songs overall and greater aural diversity. A lot of the tracks on this album seem to be trudging the same territory over and over again and to be frank, a lot of times the beats on the tracks feel like they are practically interchangeable. Another - well, maybe not a problem, per se, but an oddity, I guess - is how the overall flow of the CD dips and raises from track to track. Like, you'll have three or four kinda' downbeat songs in a row and then one really energetic, tongue-in-cheek one and it really muddles with the emotional flow of the album. Maybe it would've been better if Taylor front loaded the album with the more upbeat stuff and then hit us with about seven or eight sadder, slower songs in a row, but eh - I guess songs like this are supposed to be taken a'la carte, so I reckon that isn't too likely to bug anybody else.

As far as the thematic content, it's pretty much a two-trick pony; you've got the songs lamenting Taylor's impressively long streak of doomed romances (whose tones range from slightly bubbly and effervescent to downright maudlin) and tracks in which Taylor gives her detractors what-fer. That double-fisted approach doesn't exactly produce the smoothest synthesis, though, and you kinda have to wonder if the overall album would've been better had she stuck to just one of those overarching thematics (or maybe even split them into a double album.) That said, with the final four songs on Reputation you do get something of a thematic merger and conclusion with the lovelorn "Dress" melding into the payback's a bitch, motherfuckerness of "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things" to the optimistic recovery of "Call It What You Want" to the half happy, half devastated self-prediction of "New Year's Day." So yeah, like any other album, it's going to take a couple of listen-throughs before you can give it a fair assessment, but on that preliminary hearing, I'd say it's a MINOR step down from 1989. So if her last album was Purple Rain, this is probably going to be remembered as Taylor's Around the World in a Day. Which, considering the structure and thematic similarities of the two, might just be the single greatest comparison I've never really intended to make, so, uh, go me, I guess?

Still, Reputation is some good shit, and I'd feel confident giving it something like an 8 out of 10. It's probably not good enough to make my annual top ten best albums countdown (sorry Tay Tay, but as good as you are you ain't puttin' out better material than Matthew Sweet, Mark Lanegan, Round Eye or John motherfuckin' Carpenter) but it's certainly worthy of an honorable mention. In all you've got probably six or seven really, really good songs - including "New Year's Day," which might just be the best song Taylor's ever released - about four or five that or just kinda' alright and maybe two or three that are fairly unremarkable. But to her credit, there are no bad tracks on the CD, which is something you can't really say about MOST mainstream pop releases these days.

So that's that, kids. Taylor's heavily hyped album is out, and while it's not as great as all of the buildup would lead you to believe, it's still a very good, WAY above average for its genre (and especially timeframe) release. The only question now is which direction Tay Tay will take for album number seven. Hmm - is she on the verge of crafting her Darkness on the Edge of Town? Hold onto your hats, ladies and gents ... something tells me Swift's next CD is going to REALLY blow us out of the water.

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Fifth Anniversary BLOW-OUT EXTRAVAGANZA!

Proudly reminiscing and reflecting on half a decade of Internet Is In America tomfoolery ... and how YOU can play a big role in shaping the site moving forward.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

To do anything nonstop for five years, it takes a lot of commitment. You’ve got to remain dedicated and passionate about whatever you are doing, and in today’s ADHD-inducing electronic wonderland, things get old and boring faster than you can say Candy Crush.

In a way, it feels both surreal and totally natural that The Internet Is In America has been chugging along for half a decade now. It's surreal because when I first started posting articles, I had no earthly clue that I'd still be regularly adding content five years down the road. Conversely, it feels downright normal in the sense that I've gotten into such a routine, such a stern yet flexible self-scheduling process, that it makes sense that I'd have stuck to this damn thing for so long.

So, why do I keep running this venture, when there's virtually zero financial or even professional benefits to all of the work I put into it? Well, if I may get philosophical for a bit ...

You see, in life, we are desperately in pursuit of something called "continuity." This is the invisible (and sometimes, not so invisible) threads that makes all of the crazy bullshit that happens to us in life make sense (or, at the absolute least, feel a little less like totally random, isolated incidents.) Since starting this blog, there really haven't been a whole lot of "constants" in my life. Over the last five years, I've lived at four different residences, held four different jobs, owned two different cars, graduated college, watched my mother die and seen six different quarterbacks come under center for the Raiders. Consistency, needless to say, has most definitely not been the order of my day.

What The Internet Is In America represents for me is some semblance of stability and sameness in an always-changing (and oftentimes uncertain) world. No matter how crappy my week, no matter how many stupid edits my boss wants me to make to my paid work, no matter how much my car insurance premium goes up, at the end of the day, I've got my own virtual empire to tend to, something I rule over like a Roman tyrant, that I can call mine and mine alone. This isn't just a blog, it's a storage unit for the most undiluted, unfiltered and uncensored part of my psyche. All the stuff I want to scream at the top of my lungs in day-to-day life, that's what I publish here. In that, The Internet Is In America is probably more about providing a therapeutic outlet than it is an artistic one.

For those not in the loop, The Internet Is In America came about as a senior project when I was in college (no, for real.) My professor wanted me to start some sort of new media-centric blog, so I decided to put IIIA online the fall 2011 term. At the time, I was writing for about four or five different websites, and I was getting really tired of having to put up with my editors' idiosyncratic bullshit. So, already having a blog on the docket, I simply transformed IIIA into a catch-all for all the stuff I was writing about elsewhere - my thoughts on MMA, retro video games, junk food culture and whatever was pissing me off about U.S. society at the time. And I've been going full speed ahead with "the project" ever since.

There's never been a central point to the blog, I suppose. Really, I just write about whatever has my attention at the moment, whether it's something as grandiose as U.S. race relations or the latest and greatest Pop-Tarts variations. From the get-go, I've known that I've wanted IIIA to be a good combination of the serious and the pointless, of the high brow and the low brow, the intellectual and the idiotic. I wanted to tackle things that matter socially and things that have no bearings on modern culture with an equal amount of ardor and vigor. Ever a fan of the Hegelian dialectic, I suppose I've been subconsciously waiting for some sort of great synthesis to emerge from slamming together articles about the excesses of political correctness and consumer culture headlong into articles about old Captain Planet episodes, early '90s WWF pay-per-view events and odes to the monsters wandering the aisles on the first season of Supermarket Sweep.

The one thing I've never set out to do, however, is produce clickbait. I honestly don't give a shit if people read my stuff or not. I don't advertise the site, I don't have any mechanisms in place to generate revenue from the blog (although if the economy starts going down the shitter, I at least have that option) and I don't go around on forums and social media aggregators pimping my articles to inflate my hit count (well, anymore, at least.) I figure that if you find my stuff, there's something very specific you are looking for, anyway. The Internet Is In America has never been about "mainstream acceptance." I'm perfectly happy residing in this little niche, far removed from the vacuous hustle and bustle of the self-aggrandizing, personality-driven, "please donate to my Patreon" blogosphere turd tank. I'm simply going to keep creating solid content, and the magic that is Google will do the rest.

As of the publication of this article, I've uploaded well over 600 stories, which in turn, have generated well over 900,000 page views. Depending on the season, the blog is netting anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 unique hits a month. The sum's not particularly great (or bad), but it is consistent, and by golly, you know how much I adore me some consistency. I've made a conscious effort to produce more timely content (in some cases, even planning out articles a full year in advance), but everything is still more or less cobbled together on the fly. If I'm not feeling something, I will put it on the back burner, and if I get a bizarre itch to write something totally unplanned, I'll go with it as long as what's showing up on the screen isn't 100 percent incoherent rambling. You'll never see IIIA deteriorate into wishy-washy bullshit about my own life, however. If you come a knocking at my door, I know it's because you want a solid recap of a Raiders game or UFC show and some keen analysis of the newest Taco Bell produce, and not because you've bought into my cult of personality and want to hear me ramble on and on about my cats and how girls don't understand me. (By the way, I hate cats and unlike 90 percent of the dudes out there running low-culture-appreciation sites, I'm actually in a committed relationship with a human female. Whom I didn't order off the Internet, either.)

As far as stuff I've published, I don't play favorites. I'm the kind of guy who is always looking ahead, not behind. Some stories have been better than others, but by and large, I'm happy with just about everything I've posted on IIIA. I mean, there's probably a burrito review somewhere in there that I would've approached differently, but eh, it's already happened. Generally, I just try to write as much about a topic as I feel passionate about/interested in, and after that? It's a dead slab of meat I've sliced off my soul. You can eat it and find it nutritious or you can spit it out in disgust. Either way, I've already dedicated myself to working on the next slab, and I'll stop giving a shit about that one as soon as I hit the publish button, as well. That's not to say I consider my stuff disposable or anything. Rather, I just feel that something is no longer mine after I send it out into the Internet wild. Yeah, I wrote it and everything, but it's now a communal offering, not just some tangible representation of my innermost thoughts made (digital) flesh I keep to myself. All I do is strive to make the next article the best one I've ever written, and in keeping with the teachings of one of my elder gods George Carlin, over the last half decade, I do believe I've witnessed some signs of improvement.

Now, how long do I think I can keep The Internet Is In America going? Well, there's still a lot of stuff I want to write about (in fact, I have a notebook outlining detailed notes on at least 200 posts I haven't gotten around to penning yet.) Plus, random stuff out of nowhere inspires me everyday, so that list keeps getting bigger instead of shrinking. Alas, as I grow older, my greater concerns have steered away from the upkeep of my wannabe-media-empire and towards more important real-life shit, like buying a house, putting a ring on my girl's finger and actually injecting her with my seed so as to bring forth another human being on this planet, of which at least half of his or her genetic inheritance is my own. With heavy, heavy stuff like that resting on your shoulders, all of a sudden, spending ten hours on the greatest article ever about the Atari Lynx kinda becomes an afterthought. Still, although I expect to be writing and posting less material for the site beginning next year, I don't think I will ever completely discard it. I mean, there's too much stupid shit that rankles me, and I've got to externalize my wellspring of concern and outrage somewhere. That, and transcribing live MMA shows and football games gives me the illusion of doing something productive with my life. If I just eat a Halloween-themed burger, all I'm doing is getting fatter. But if I write a multimedia-heavy article about said Halloween-themed burger, now I'm being "artistic" and "counter-cultural" and "subversively anti-materialistic," turning the fleeting, ephemeral moments of my consumer existence into something with pseudo-collective worth. And that has a whole lot more appeal to it than you'd reasonably assume.

So what's my endgame now? Do I keep putting stuff out there until I hit 1,000 posts and then do three or four updates a month, Dino Drac style? Do I turn this thing into more or less a glorified Tumblr page with mamby-pamby 300 or 400 word mini-posts? Do I let the site lay dormant for weeks on end, periodically resurfacing for longer and more thorough pieces a'la The Best Page in the Universe? Do I sell out completely and just push out boring, analytics-driven listicles to appease the gods of Alphabet and their nigh-unquestionable search indexing algorithms? Eh, I don't know. All I know is that I've got a lot of stuff in the hopper, and as long a I can find the wherewithal and the motivation to keep churning stuff out, IIIA should be chugging along for quite some time to come.

In the past I've mulled the possibility of getting a proper domain, but since I've never really been one for vanity suffixes, I am more than content keeping the blogspot albatross in the URL. Like I said earlier, I might be into advertisements and monetizing some content, but I don't have any active plans in mind. As far as expanding the site with social media pages, YoutTube channels and even secondary websites? Dude, I barely have enough time to get all my shit posted here - I'm afraid we hit critical mass a long time ago, folks.

Alas, while I've never been one to lay prone before the ungodly hordes of populism, that doesn't mean I don't care about feedback - constructive or negative. I honestly want to know: what do you like about the site and what do you hate? Are there any kind of features you want to see more of? Do you think I ought to stick to reviewing old propaganda movies and crazy ass junk food, or would you prefer I focus on more sociopolitically relevant matters and subjects? Are you keen on the movie reviews and video game countdowns, or would you like to see more coverage of sporting events and photographic essays about all the wacky shit going on in Atlanta? Granted, I may not completely retool the kinds of things I cover at The Internet Is In America, but I'll at least take into consideration. Maybe.

And lastly, I wanted to throw down the proverbial gauntlet to any longtime readers or site newcomers with a budding interest in writing themselves. As a professional writer and editor in the real world, I'd love to publish some guest pieces on IIIA, pending your musings are entertaining, enlightening or informative enough to pass old Jimbo's smell test. I'm especially interested in hearing from readers whose area of expertise\interest lay outside of the stuff normally produced at IIIA. For example, I'd love to bring somebody on board who can provide an ideological counterweight to This Week In Social Justice Warrior-dom - somebody with liberal, progressive leanings who has the chops to produce a semi-regular This Week in Alt-Right Bullshit column or something along those lines. I don't know shit about modern console or PC gaming, so if you have a good idea for what's great and what's crap without defaulting to the usual IGN and Gamespot fanboy sectarian nonsense, I think you'd be another excellent candidate for IIIA. Hell, I'd love to have some folks with hardline feminist and #BlackLivesMatter perspectives earning bylines, too. As long as you are able to put out decent, thought-provoking articles covering uncommon things in a hilarious or educational way (or you have a really uncommon perspective you can both elucidate upon and rationally describe regarding more common societal matters) on a quasi-regular basis, I'll give you a shot. Think you have what it takes to run side-by-side with old Jimbo and proudly wave the flag of our dear mascot Flaily the Arrow-Penised Inflatable Tube Man? Send me what you got here and we'll see where we can go from there.

I'm no pie-in-the-sky wannabe tastemaker with illusions of grandeur. This site will never be as big as stuff like I-Mockery or Cracked, or even the super-duper-successful indies like The Surfing Pizza. I'm perfectly content being cloaked in obscurity, periodically having my work called out by multi-billionaire venture capitalists, the nation's largest and most prestigious daily newspaper and some guy on 4Chan who thinks I'm actually some GamerGate person from Minnesota who owes him money. I never started this thing to become rich or famous or even be celebrated by the nameless, faceless, Internet throng. I just write because I enjoy it, it makes me happy and it's a lot more cost effective and health-conscious pastime than shooting heroin and jumping on moving trains for cheap thrills.

So here's to the first five years of The Internet Is In America, and all the havoc and mayhem and hilarity that has been wrought. And here's to the next five years of IIIA ... in whatever undreamable, unfathomable shape it assumes ... even harder.

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500th Post Spectacular!

Celebrating an IIIA milestone with FAQs a plenty, a look back at our most popular (and controversial) articles and a glimpse into the blog’s future…

By: Jimbo X
Jimboxamerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

Well, here we are folks -- The Internet Is In America, article number 500. Who’d thunk this stupid little blog with no real purpose, intent or content specificity would’ve made it this long -- let alone get publicly pimped by the likes of Vinod Khosla and Lloyd Kaufman and be featured in media juggernauts like Cracked and the freaking New York Times?

I’m not going to get excessively glowy on you guys, so don’t worry. I’ve never really considered IIIA to be a rousing success as a multimedia enterprise, but that was never really my intent. I just wanted to write articles about stuff I liked, stuff I didn’t like and try to tell it in a manner that’s not just your usual, disjointed Tumblr circle-jerk format. A good four years down the road, this site is averaging about 25,000 unique views a month, which puts IIIA somewhere in the top 700,000 or so websites in the States. Considering there’s about 700 million active websites in the world right now, that’s a relatively impressive feat -- doubly considering the fact that I haven’t spent a single penny on advertising or promoting the blog, instead relying on 100 percent organic traffic (and the occasional spam forum post) to lure in readers.

It’s no doubt been a fun and worthwhile ride, faithful IIIA adherents, providing you with surprisingly academic dissertations on venerated texts, acerbic satirical pieces skewering the excesses of contemporary U.S. society and, of course, tons and tons of articles about Taco Bell products, Halloween candies and shitty movies that are awesome. To commemorate this historic moment, I’ve decided to get a little meta about the blog itself, answering a few questions people have e-mailed me about the origins and intent of The Internet Is In America, as well as give you a bit of a postscript on some of the site’s most famous (or perhaps, infamous) posts.

Hey, Jimbo X … uh, who the hell are you, exactly? 

This is far and away the most common question readers send me. Although you can probably piece together my civilian identity by combing through the archives, I try to stay anonymous for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, my day job is professional writing elsewhere, and god forbid somebody finds out I’ve been penning smart-alecky articles under an assumed name somewhere. Secondly, I kinda’ like to keep my personal life and my writing life separate. No offense to guys who want to hit me up on Facebook or Skype, but alike Spider-Man, I’m just trying to protect those closest to me from getting harassed by people who love the Beatles, Ron Paul and Alex Jones but hate my stinking guts. As far as the pen name, I’ve had more than a few people ask me if the namesake is a nod to Malcolm X. While I consider his autobiography one of the finest pieces of conservative agitprop ever written, the “Jimbo X” moniker is actually a reference to something much obscurer … long-time Electronic Gaming Monthly readers, you’ll know precisely what I’m talking about.

Is there or has there ever been a “point” to The Internet Is In America?

My senior year in college, I recall reading some new media text about what makes a blog successful. When it came time to start IIIA, I intentionally did the exact opposite of everything they said, and not to toot my own horn or anything, but I think I’ve proven those smarmy little know-it-alls wrong. From the very beginning, I wanted IIIA to cover a lot of ground, and I never wanted to get entrenched in any one topic. Fundamentally, I just write about whatever the hell I feel like writing about, no matter how serious, goofy, obscure or offensive. There’s no specific “beat” here at IIIA, and personally, that’s what I believe makes the entire thing work. The material is so diverse and unpredictable, in a blogsophere where everything is so formulaic and dreadfully constrained. Nor can I say I’m trying to make a singular political or social message with the blog, although there are definitely quite a few recurring themes I try to hit upon with my articles (more on that later, folks.)

Why did you start this blog, anyway? 

Long story short? It began life as a class assignment for one of my top-level communications courses. At the time, I was writing articles for about three or four different websites -- a video game site, an MMA site and a general pop culture site, plus commentary on some local blogs -- and I figured, “you know, I could easily consolidate all of the stuff I’m writing elsewhere into my OWN blog, and then I won’t have to worry about shitty edits and my stuff not going up in a timely manner.” And so … The Internet Is In America was born.

Why is it called "The Internet Is In America?" 

Way back in the early, Wild West days of YouTube, I noticed some U.S. users would take offense whenever someone posted comments in a non-English language. The general complaint there, of course, was that if you’re going to post something on the Web, you better post it in a goddamn language the American man can understand, because the Internet, apparently, actually resides in the United States. I figured that nativistic, brazenly jingoistic sentiment would make for a fine and dandy blog name … as well as a convenient, embarrassing mentality to routinely mock in random posts.

Why did you select the Inflatable, Waving-Arm Tube Man as the blog mascot?

What could possibly be more American than a giant, electricity-propelled anthropomorphic sock with a hilariously unsubtle marketing phallus? By the way, his official name is Flaily, if you weren’t aware of such.

How do you decide what to write about, and why do I pick that particular material?

First off, I absolutely abhor “personality” driven blogs. You know, the ones where the writers do nothing but talk about their own experiences, uploading stupid photos of themselves and maybe three or four sentences per posts. From the get-go, I wanted to focus on content outside of myself, even if a lot of my articles just so happen to revolve around my own personal experiences (so, when I write about eating at a new pizza joint or seeing a new movie, I make THAT the anchor of the post, and not my trivial bullshit musings.) Generally, I try to map out the posts a good month or so in advance, giving me ample time to conduct research, find visual aides, etc. I like to mix things up as much as I can -- a book review here followed by a food article, followed by a sociopolitical essay followed by a video game article, for example -- and I’m always striving for new and interesting things to tackle (preferably, material that other sites and blogs haven’t already covered.) I never, ever write for analytics or for click bait -- I write about what genuinely interests me and irks me, and I write about said topic until I feel as if I have nothing left to say about it. I wish I could give you a more intricate response, but I really am that floaty when it comes to content.

Are your serious about the stuff you write, or are you just being an asshole?

There’s always a granule of truth to what I write about, but a lot of times, I take it to the extreme just to make a point. I might be a little over-the-top sometimes, but I’m never 100 percent insincere about what I state, either.

Are there any articles you regret writing? 

Not really, although there are a couple of minor errors that still rub me the wrong way -- really simple stuff like erroneous measurements and grammatical miscues (I think I reviewed the “Secret of Arriety,” for example.) Alas, outside of a few questionable statistics and a few poorly cited links to corroborate my points, I can’t say I have any qualms about anything I’ve published on the blog.

What’s the most memorable article you’ve ever posted?

Anything that generated a lot of reader feedback. The “Faces of Death is Fake?” article is far and away my most popular entry, but the comments on "Five Reasons Why The Beatles Sucked" and "Why U.S. College Kids Are So Stupid" have been pretty damned entertaining, too. It’s also pretty nice when people really pick up on the gist of what I’m trying to convey in an article, like the one about my addiction to writing and my miscellaneous articles on the excesses of “nerd culture” and the negative impact of technological dependency. There’s not a whole lot of concrete “points” I try to make with the blog, but when people really connect with them when I do, it makes all of the HTML formatting worth it.

And lastly, are there any articles you wish you would have done?

Quite a few, but the past is in the past. There are a lot of events I never attended that could’ve made for some killer IIIA fare, but I don’t dwell upon the lost opportunities. I’m much more concerned about what’s ahead, and bringing you the freshest, most inspired material I can.

Sigh...look how young we all looked way back then!

As for the future of the blog, I’ve got a few new ideas that’ll be unfurling here in a few weeks. Ideally, I’d like to put out a lot more weekly content -- including regularly updated seasonal features -- without sacrificing quality. Time is certainly a constraint, but I think long-time readers will enjoy what’s coming up.

Content-wise, I’d love to do more real-time stuff. I’ll probably do a live play-by-play for the first Raiders game of the season, and I’ll likely use the same format for the next UFC PPV I cover … whenever that may be. As far as reader engagement, I’ve mulled starting a Facebook page, and maybe even a secondary blog, but I barely have enough time as it is to give you the stuff I’m already giving you. Alas, if there’s strong demand for it, I might shoot for it.

Which brings me to my two biggest points, which will help guide the shape and scope of the IIIA for the next 500 posts -- monetization and guest content.

I always said I’d vouch for a “real” domain once I crossed over a certain threshold, where I was making more than a few dollars a month. I’m not quite there yet, but in a year or so, I’m likely to make the transition to a full blown website sans the blogspot suffix. At that point, I’m certainly open to the idea of posting advertisements on the blog, so if any of you out there want to get on the ground floor, shoot me an e-mail.

In that same vein, I’m all about partnerships. If any of you have a blog or site of your own, feel free to send me a link and we can cross-promote. Content-wise, you have a pretty wide canvas to work with at IIIA -- if you’re a fledgling writer or content producer wanting to get his or her stuff out there in the open, I’m more than willing to give you an opportunity. As before, if this sounds like something you’d be interested in, by all means, shoot me an e-mail.

The rugged individualist I am, I’m going to do whatever the hell I want to anyway. That said, I am open to suggestions, so if there are any stories or article ideas you’d like to see at The Internet Is In America, please let me know. Do you want more content revolving around a specific subject? More multimedia content? More essays, less essays? I want to give you a hand in guiding the trajectory of the IIIA as we transition to article 501 and beyond … this is the people’s blog, after all. Well, some peoples' blog, I guess.

It’s been a rollicking good time thus far, kids, but with your help? We can make the next 500 IIIA articles even more kick-ass than the first 500. Here’s to one heck of a future, folks. One heck of a dang future…

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