Somehow, and I’m not quite sure how either, ILB hasn’t alienated every single person out there during our four-year reign of blogging supremacy.

Indeed, among the showbiz friends of the blog are the recently relaunched I Don’t Care If You Wouldn’t, I Would and Irish rap podcast sensation Them’s the Vagaries. So it makes little surprise that when Sean of TtV was over in the UK recently, he got me and IDCIYWIW’s Tuvshin “in the studio” (read: a 7/10 Sam Smith’s pub somewhere on the outskirts of Soho) to do a podcast. Indeed, ILB’s first step into the podcast game since the much-loved Scorched Earth podcast for the Stylus decade, a podcast so brand-friendly that at least two Stylus writers unfollowed me on Twitter directly after its release.

Anyway, Them’s the Vageries 20: The Barking Ghost is out here. Listen to it asap. I’ve not listened all the way through yet, so I’m not quite sure what Sean has edited out for legal purposes. My guess is the bit about Sady Doyle’s boyfriend. Controversial.

EDIT: Thanks to Leisure’s Robert Foster for reminding me that the guy who killed himself in a matter totally unrelated to rumours of him being the man Courtney Love hired to kill Kurt Cobain was The Mentors’ vocalist El Duce.

Some days, blogging is like cutting open a vein to let the poison out. Some days, this is all I, you, we have: an outlet where our thoughts get manifested as a desperate shout out to the world. Some days, all I can do is type until the words make no sense to me but hopefully to someone else. This is not one of those days. This is a day where we laugh at a Canadian sexcase who’s stalking some that chick from the Bahamas who got boyed up a few years back.

Basically, Kaven Marenger is about to be a meme and I want to get my flag planted firmly in this ground before  “R/IAmA Quebecois pervert” and “I was going to rape Rihanna… but then I took an arrow to the knee” becomes the default currency for the lamestreamers out there.

Who is Kaven Marenger? Kaven Marenger is either one of the most dedicated troll personae to have ever graced the internet, or alternatively he’s a man from Malartic, Quebec, who likes Rihanna and chess. And nothing else.

Kaven Marenger’s first Tweet was on May 11, 2011. Here it is in its entirety:

He then went on to repeat the same Tweet word-for-word a day later:

Overall, Kaven has made 612 Tweets. 478 of these are directed straight at Rihanna, usually as part of an appeal for a conversation. Some examples follow:

Sometimes our boy offers out good quality lifestyle advice:

Sometimes he offers constructive criticism:

And sometimes he’s as smooth as those weird-ass kinda bootleg Turkish delight chocolate bars you get in certain Bangladeshi-owned cornershops:

What really makes this account for me, though, is the 100 or so Tweets that aren’t about Rihanna. Great comedy is about timing, and if we were just watching a clearly deranged man repeatedly pester Rihanna for a conversation non-stop, it’d lose its appeal. But it’s the occasional interruptions that really turn this into pure comedy gold. Like when he decides to ask The Rock how strong Andre the Giant (a man who died four years before the Rock entered professional wrestling) was. Followed up by him discussing Magnus Carlsen’s GOAT credentials with Hikaru Nakamura:

But, at the end of the day, Constant Kaven’s real attraction is his fatal attraction. I’ve not enjoyed a Twitter feed as much as Bobby George’s. Just don’t follow him, it might let him know that we’re on to him.

Do let us know your favourite Kaven Marenger moments in the comments boxes. And when Kaven Marenger is up on fucking Tosh.0 or that column in the Metro that explains web memes for retards, remember where you saw his creepy, rapey face first.

Things I know/care about Gil Scott-Heron:

1. His dad played for Celtic
2. Literally nothing else

OK, deep down in the lowest recesses of my memory I know that he’s the guy that sang “Television, Drug of the Nation”. I think he was also the dude that did that one song about how he hates Engelbert Humperdinck that was later used to shift sweatshop-manufactured running shoes as well. But to me, he’s the son of a guy who played for Celtic. Like Scott Oakes’ dad being in Showaddywaddy, it’s all I need to know about every party involved.

And then I copped this quote from Gil a few days ago:

 “Personally, I support Rangers.”

Now, to me, there can only be three possible reasons for a man supporting a different sports team to his father:

1. Geographical relocation
2. Daddy issues
3. Ideological reasons

Option one would make sense: rather than growing up a stone’s throw from Sauciehall Street, Heron was raised in Chicago. However, Gil has never thrown his weight behind any Chicago-based football teams: not Chicago Fire, not the 1920 Peel Cup champions Bricklayers and Masons FC and not the curiously named FC Twente3 IL. So it can’t be that.

Daddy issues? Can heterosexual man have daddy issues? If not, it’s feasibly that Gil Scott-Heron could have been a homosexual: he did, after all, attend an independent school. However, he has been repeatedly shouted out by Chuck D, famously the world’s most homophobic man (do be sure to check the Simon Reynolds interview with Chuck D where Charlie’s on some proper “Women need to shut the fuck up and get back in the kitchen” ish, and gender studies 101 graduate Simey doesn’t pick him up on a single one of his quotes), so I doubt it’s that. If you listen to any of the 2000s Public Enemy albums you’ll hear tacit endorsement of 1/3 of David Copeland.

So it has to be option 3, then: Gil Scott-Heron was sexually aroused by the images of a government sending its military in to shoot Catholic schoolchildren through the head during a peaceful rally. Gil Scott-Heron was a man who stood idly by while the Birmingham Six and the Guilford Four rotted in prison. And, to be honest, I’m a little disappointed in Nike that they used a man who actively and passionately endorsed the crushing of peaceful rebellion by the state to sell their trainers.

I was wondering if any of your readers could name any other recording artistes who used the platform offered to them through their fame to endorse repression and institutional bigotry on such a grandiose level?

So yeah, we here at ILB were just working on our latest, sure to shock the nation project that launches this weekend. We were 3/4 of a way down a bottle of Amarone, alternating between Xhamster and TheHotelEnd.co.uk like we do for most of our lives in a never-ending spiral of self-fulfilling self-loathing. When we got a phone call. At 10pm.

Most people assume when the 10pm phone call comes in it’s either a drug dealer or your father’s dead, so I rushed to the phone. It was an American dialing code. Confusing. I answered it.

“Hello, Dom Passantino? This is Hermione Hoby. I’d like to let you know first off that this telephone conversation is being recorded.”

I think this illustrates my failure as a human being: when mans like Bol get people vexed enough to phone him up, they’re major label rappers whose buttmad will actually make him some money. When I get people vexed, they’re… journalists. Whose fame is like 5% predicated on the fact that I clowned them a few months ago.

Look, this is the thing: this Hoby thing continues because as long as someone gets raged about it, it’s still funny. Some journalists I’ve called a cunt before have taken it in the manner its intended and have gone on to boost me. Some have thought back with varying degrees of success. Hoby… didn’t. She just got mad buttshook and sent her homies to ride on me. With no effect.

Anyway, like your boy with the tache on Channel 4 in the mid-90s, ILB offers a right to reply. So the gist of the call was: her boyfriend’s mother was upset by my page, and her dad “risked his life fighting against apartheid in South Africa”. My grandfathers both risked their lives fighting for the Axis, so I guess she has that one up over me.

The weird thing about Hoby is that people just don’t like her. The first page of google results for her name has her being clowned by everyone from sassy feminists to white pride dudes to Robin Carmody-style chinstrokers. I can’t imagine her future mother-in-law was marking out for any of those either, but I doubt she was phoning the editor of Jezebel up at TEN IN THE FUCKING EVENING to sass mouth them out.

And nothing I said is actually incorrect. There’s worse things I can say about her which I just haven’t because, you know, it’s not interesting how she knows absolutely fuck all about rap music and has an unhealthy fixation with black guys talking about raping white women. But that’s the thing: none of you would care about me posting that so I don’t. ILB has always been for the readers. ILB isn’t for Dommy P, it isn’t for Hermione Hoby, it’s not for Theophilus London or Sadie Doyle or that finnoch motherfucker from Lucha Britannia. It’s about the fans, it’s about you motherfuckers. So yeah. This is being posted as a line-drawn underneath matters because, to be honest, I have enough ballaches in life without this one adding to matters.

Also, idk, if you’re going to battle that hard against apartheid, then send your child to a private school… that doesn’t actually make any sense does it? “Oh man, I hate it when a fluke of people’s birth decides the quality of the basic human rights they get. Welp, time to make sure the apple of my eye is learning Latin in a safe environment.”

I recently came to realize that I hate the Evening Standard. Not in the standard, “oh boy, these provocative journalists are sure saying some provocative stuff in their columns that makes me want to shake my fist in the air like Blakey in annoyance.” No, hate as in “I would like everyone and everything Dan Jones loves to die in his arms before he writes yet another smug, meandering, football-started-in-1992 piece of shit sports hackery.”

There’s a wave of irritation that infects the entire newspaper. Sebastian Shakespeare spending an entire column calling Lily Allen a “wigger” without pausing to think what the “igger” part of that might stand for. Their chief food writer not realizing that “pop-up restaurants” and “underground supper clubs” are just great ways to take money from the pockets of gullible trust fund wankers.

However, until now the music writing hadn’t really affected me. A lot of it has the same feel as those “glory” days of the London Lite/thelondonpaper when the culture pages were pretty much a free-for-all against the rest of the newspaper, leading to jarring shifts in tone when we’d go from “kick these dirty freeloading fucking immigrants out now” to “hey let’s all go and see Josie Long’s new show it’ll be well funny.”

However, today, it pierced my consciousness. In the letters page. I’ve got to write it out myself here as, for some reason, it’s not online. A big loss to the collective knowledge I feel.

How do we define lap-dancing Rihanna? It’s easy to position her as something of an incarnation of Josephine Baker or Grace Jones. Many feminists want to link her survivor narrative to her tough stage image. She can certainly be seen through a gay prism, given her look , flirtations with Katy Perry and substantial gay male fan base. What worries me: the double standard invoked by ethnically insensitive commentary that allows white stars like Lady Gaga to be sexual and reckless but cries foul when Rihanna or Nicki Minaj do similar. Alyx Vesey, feministmusicgeek.com

Hmmm.

Hmmm.

Hmmm.

I could be all “still referring to yourself as a “geek” in 2011? Why so beta?” Or maybe enquire as to why you’d spell the name “Alex” as “Alyx”. But let me go further.

This letter was presumably written as a result of “Rihanna gives lapdance on stage: is this a good thing or a bad thing?” talking point that has been created out of nowhere this past week. It’s an inane talking point: Bob Dylan reacted to being called a “Judas” during his Manchester Free Trade Hall gig by inviting one lucky crowd member up on stage for a little light daggering.

Let’s break this down sentence by sentence.

How do we define lap-dancing Rihanna?

Rihanna isn’t going to read your letter. Learn2grammar.

It’s easy to position her as something of an incarnation of Josephine Baker or Grace Jones.

Right… how? No, seriously, how? Josephine Baker was a woman marketed as a daring sex symbol who was notorious for her scandalous dancing and fights against racial oppression. Grace Jones is a woman from some 80s car adverts who kinda functions nowadays as a sub-Pete Burns/Steve Strange “I’m a mad person from the 80s, me” deal. Baker and Jones have nothing in common at all. Not in stage presence, in gimmick, in performance style, even in their fucking profession. Oh, but they are black so yeah, exactly like Rihanna. It’s easy to position Riri as something of an incarnation of Bernie Grant or Abedi Pele, isn’t it Alyx?

Many feminists want to link her survivor narrative to her tough stage image.

“Survivor narrative”: she got slapped about by an R&B singer and then proceeded to apologise for him repeatedly in interviews. Her tough stage image would be the one where she sings lots of songs about being sexually submissive and wanting to be slapped about during sex, right? Let’s not go on that “hey, maybe it’s strippers who have the real power during a lapdance” narrative, because most of the crying Ukrainian girls I spend my Saturday nights in the company of don’t look like they could put up much of a fight.

She can certainly be seen through a gay prism, given her look , flirtations with Katy Perry and substantial gay male fan base.

If your argument for someone being reflected “in a gay prism” revolves around a couple of lipstick lesbian bullshittery moments that wouldn’t even pass muster for the most desperate of Xhamster masturbator, then you have problems.

What worries me: the double standard invoked by ethnically insensitive commentary that allows white stars like Lady Gaga to be sexual and reckless but cries foul when Rihanna or Nicki Minaj do similar.

a)      Italians aren’t white

b)      Nicki Minaj gets a big pass when it comes to all this because she’s not attractive, so nobody really complains about her gender regressive bullshit

c)       You are a bad writer.

Because that’s all this piece is. “This might be bad, but it might be good: the important thing is that I am a lot more liberal and tolerant than you, so take that.” Alyx Vesey is a woman who feels the need to repeatedly remind you over and over and over again that she’s not a racist, like Father Ted showing that picture of the black guy who holidayed on Craggy Island once. I mean, some cynics would say that by reading this kind of racial-and-sexuality one-upmanship that Alyx Vesey is almost certainly some sort of pasty saltine breeder.

Oh, what a fucking surprise.

Look, this is the thing. SHE’S AMERICAN. She’s a fucking American who lives in America and has decided to email a British regional newspaper pumping out a bunch of whiteboy rhetoric because she wants more hits for a blog. That’s not only desperate it’s tragic. Here, Alyx, have some of mine. And then go home and think about what you’re doing, because what you’re doing is fundamentally wrong.

(interestingly enough: when visiting Alex (your name is Alex unless your parents hates you)’s blog, you have to go 10,395 words down before you find the first words she’s written about any music performed by a black person. Well done all involved.)

Admittedly, it’s weird. ILB is more popular than it has ever been, even though we’ve done maybe one post in two months. It’s thanks to the last post, the Dirty Bieber Secrets one. I did what I do in my day job and applied it to the world of internet bullshit. Just for giggles, really. And it gets 7,000 hits a day, even now, without me touching a thing. The kind of hits figures John Doran would finally get a haircut and hit a gym for, and I can get it without lifting a finger. God bless those Beliebers man.

But, that’s the thing, I’ve kinda abandoned you. I know, I know. Look, I still write. I still write fucking shitloads, it’s just that you people will never see it. My pen is, nowadays, trained on SEO’d summaries of Turkish golf courses and the like, so unless you fancy hitting the driving ranges of Izmir then I’m dead to you. But I feel guilty. People love Passantino, or “PLP” as the acronym goes. They want me back. They want me going “hey, I like this boom bap track from a New York mixtape rapper” or “I don’t like this woman writing in The Guardian, not because I’m a misogynist but for other, more complicated, reasons”. And, like, I gotta heed the streets. They want a return. So I’ll give to them like X. I’ll write the blog post you want. The blog post the internet wants. The blog post I was born to do. ILB proudly presents: top 10 Deviantart drawings of Franck Ribery.

In essence, this is what ILB has always been about since year dot, ever since I was shitting out fetish-of-the-month joints for Bizarre Magazine back in 2005: I shine lights on subcultures. I’m not interested in what everyone else is talking about. Fuck your restaurant review column, we wanna talk about the kebabulance on the market square at 2am on a November Saturday. Every group ILB has ever looked at, from the writers of Girls Aloud rape fanfiction through to the real paid feminist blogging cartel, is a group of people that never gets any shine. So that’s what we do, we crack out the flashlight and look down the back of the sofa. So the one group that’s made me go “Yeah, OK, that’s a thing I suppose” recently? Football fangirls.

I mean, we’re all aware of the concept of the fangirl, right? And how they operate in the modern day? They set up Twitter accounts with names like @[objectionofdesire]army. Hashtags, lots of hashtags. Tumblr accounts by the million. Tumblr accounts filled with screengrabs and gifs and shitty injokes and, yeah, OK, they’re giving themselves “identity” but it just makes me pause when it’s applied to football because of the incongruity of it, like turning up at a The Wanted gig and singing songs about Liverpool fans robbing the corpses of their own.

So what do football fangirls like? They’re plastics, obviously, but they’re a special type of plastic. They’re not your Malaysian reds, they seem to focus on certain teams. Bayern Munich. Arsenal. Non-threatening sides, really. Teams that tend to have a surfeit of players who look like boyish lesbians. And then they just find every picture of these guys not wearing a shirt, standing next to another player (gay tension!) or every gif where they stare at the camera and loop these over and over again, until they finally get laid in real life. Right now, a girl in the Home Counties is practicing writing her signature except with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’s surname. She may well commit suicide due to bullying within 18 months, but fair play to her for now.

This is the thing, I was always a fierce defender of Steve Lamacq back when he had his haters, and look who’s been proven right? Lammo is more powerful nowadays than he was when the Evening Session ran, he holds it down on Radio 2 and BBC 6 and he’s probably a top 10 Fighting Talk contestant these days. He’s no Buncie or Martin Kelner but he provides… wait what? This is Franck Ribery? Seriously? Fuck me.

You know when you go on holiday and you accidentally pick up a foreign language newspaper and you kinda idly leaf through it because you don’t really speak enough of the language to make any real use out of it and then you go “ah wait, Sudoku and wordsearches are the same in any language” so you try and find the puzzle page but then you find the “in-depth political cartoon”? Why do all foreign political cartoons like exactly like this? It’s a kind of cartoon style that, to my mind, was briefly used in UK comic books in 1967 and never after. Weird how you can actually draw Messi quite accurately in the style but not Ribery.

Do you wonder about the people who draw these images? I kinda don’t? I think it’s a personal thing, I can’t actually draw for shit so I view people who… OK, these people can’t draw, but at least people who can draw a circle without it having any straight lines, I view those people with suspicion. A lot of these have the air of the school project about them, the cool teacher letting the cool kids do something cool like draw a photo of a deformed quasi-Muslim jailbait aficionado. The kids then graduate art college £27k in debt and have to go work in a branch of Hobbycraft for the rest of their lives, spending their evenings scouring Elance in desperate hope that someone is offering £20k to draw shitty pictures of left-wingers that evening. They never do.

If we were some sort of internet cesspit like KnowYourMeme or Reddit we would now post “what is this I don’t even”. However, we’re not, so all we can really do is wonder if the teeth are a specific reference towards Alien or if that’s just coincidence. Also, this is meant to be a pixie rather than…. I have no idea what else it could be. Weird to see male pixies after the pixie mythology was appropriated for sexxxxy Halloween costumes. It’s like trying to picture Sidney Govou in a French maid outfit.

What?

Of course, a lot of this is about national boundaries being kinda rendered irrelevant on the internet. One of the weird things about Twitter is that it shows you that no matter whether you’re in Caloocan, Curitiba or Cheddar, you can still be on TEAMBREEZY and insist that TayTay is a PROPER ROLE MODEL. Especially for the kids of Deviantart who, one would assume, don’t have fantastic social circles in the real world, so they can make best buddies with people who share their love of disfigured letdowns on the international stage and the drawings thereof. The graph paper gives this one a nice retro feel, like something you’d find clearing out your locker at the end of term.

Furries will ruin everything in the end. Lot of comments beneath the page this is on talking about how sexy a horse this is. “Sexypop” is the word one person uses, which is probably a slang term I don’t want to discover the meaning of. Furries like sport, which is enough to make you pause before enjoying the antics of Gunnersaurus Rex ever again. Here’s some furries who have created their own fantasy basketball league, then instituted their own fantasy furry basketball draft, then made a Youtube video detailing the top picks for their fantasy furry basketball draft. Like I say, man: the internet. The fucking internet.

You gotta hand it to 15-year-old girls: they’ve got the Tumblr game on fucking lock. While American music writers use the platform to copy and paste pictures of A RAPPER standing next to AN INDIE MUSICIAN or sharing their fascinating opinions on patriarchal hegemony in the music of Brooks and Dunn, 15-year-old girls are out there dropping original content for days, sourcing the best memes and networking like motherfuckers.

How big is the forum ammo/gif folder on your PC? 300MB? 400MB? Like the old army adverts, don’t even apply. These girls have a gif for every single occasion, while you’re still holding your dick in your hand posting the same Citizen Kane clapping/Judge Judy pulling a funny face shit you’ve been doing for six months they’ve captured every single shrug, smile, tear and expression of shock from the past two seasons of “Glee” and “True Blood”. And they’re communicating in it.

Doesn’t it make you feel weak and emasculated to realize that everything a social media professional gets paid £30k a year for, some girl who probably still has to ask “so, wait, can I get pregnant if someone spooges in the hot tub?” does in her own free time? Without any concern? I gotta hand it to them

And you’ve gotta hand it to Dirty Bieber Secrets as well, the hit new Tumblr blog for said 15-year-old girls violent sexual fantasies about human meme and occasional pop star Justin “J-Biebs” Bieber. And we here at ILB are always happy to discuss and share content from the internet’s hottest resources, so without further ado, we here at ILB would like to present: Dirty Bieber Secrets greatest hits.

Of course, these could all be by gay paedophiles.

ILB’s Official Turquoise Jeep Power Rankings

1. Slick Mahony

2. Pretty Raheem

3. Flynt Flossy

4. Yung Humma

5. Whatchyamacallit

But, in a way, they’re all winners.

I was actually in email contact with Turquoise Jeep’s then press officer (presumably one of the gang using their government name) last December before they blew up outside of World Star, and was promised an interview. Instead they didn’t bother and just spoke to one of those regional US news publications that every American music writer seems to work for.

Anyway, what are they bringing to the table this time? PM Dawn hippy loverman vibes, Whatchyamacallit looking ever more like a low-end Muslim preacher, Tummiscratch standing in the middle of a wooden boat, a Flynt Flossy cartoon bear holding a set of balloons and Yung Humma revealing he has a foot fetish. I don’t know if the level of invention and attention to detail within Turqouise Jeep is more embarrassing to the staid world of rap music or the staid world of comedy.

There’s an old dictum of comedy from, I believe, animal loving racist Spike Milligan. If there’s no reason that a comedy sketch shouldn’t be done in Groucho glasses, then it should be done in Groucho glasses. I think the same applies, from this point on, to loverman R&B and rap music: if there’s no reason you shouldn’t have a duct tape moustache, ultra-relaxed hair, dyed chest wigs or a really sinister whiteboy hookman on your track, then you should get on. It’d encourage me to trot down the Soul Cafe more often, put it that way.

Do you know what I assume being an Arsenal fan must be like? There’s a vaguely famous shock video online called something like “When Cock and Ball Torture Goes Wrong.” It’s filmed from an awkward angle so it’s hard to make out exactly what’s happening, but what appears to be going down is: a man is naked beneath some floorboards which have a specially cut hole for his dick to poke through.

A dominatrix-y woman is pulling all those “I am so wicked I am” faces and starts kicking him in the groin. She progresses to start treading on his dick at full strength. Then blood starts gushing out of his urethra with a speed more often associated with Super Soakers. And that’s what I imagine being an Arsenal fan is like: you start of watching them and going “This is stupid, this will never work.” And then nothing goes wrong for 30 seconds and you think “OK, maybe this isn’t utterly doomed, but it still strikes me as fucking retarded, but hey this could be enjoyable.” And then it all collapses horrifically and with disastrous consequences for all involved.

Is bodily injury sustained through cock and ball torture a good idea for a rap song though? No. Is the trials and tribulations of the average Arsenal season one either? No, of course it fucking isn’t. I’m not 100% sure with the sample here but I think Danny Graft is comparing Wenger failing to sign a decent centre half to the murder of Catholic schoolchildren by the British Army in the early 1970s. Which, to this writer, seems a bit off. A bit of an over-statement.

Still, it could be worse. Red and White Kop could have its own freestyle battle section. The closest equivalent is some pinhead from Zoo Magazine rapping with a clearly disinterested Ryan Babel about how the 2008/09 Liverpool team is going places. Babel raps in Dutch but yet clearly says “niggaz.”

Anyway, why would you want to hear a song about a Sky 4+2 team anyway? Real men support teams of legbreakers that have that “Long Throws: 20” voodoo about them and a manager who refuses to swap his Brooklyn style for a snapback. Here is a song of praise to Stoke City from a fat American who likes to lock himself up in what appears to be a rabbit cage.