A recently published report by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 26 percent of “millennials,” or young people born after 1980, claim they have no religious affiliation, compared to 20 percent of Generation Xers (1965-1980) and 13 percent of baby boomers (1946-1964) when they were between the ages of 18 and 29.

There’s no need for religious organizations to panic, since 40 percent of millennials say religion is a major part of their lives, just as 39 percent of baby boomers said the same thing in their late teens and 20s. However, as a precautionary measure, God has become the latest celebrity to create a Twitter account, in the hopes of reaching young people in the ever-evolving world of social networking.

Besides, as author and pastor Robert J. Morgan pointed out on his Facebook page last summer, “Texting is very biblical; it has divine origin … For example the book of Proverbs is the original Twitter. In 140 characters or less, the Lord sent down His short bursts of insight and wisdom, which we call the Proverbs. Each of the individual verses of Proverbs is like a Tweet from the Lord — His divine Short Message Service.”

Here are some of the tweets God has posted in the past couple weeks:

Anybody know of a good, affordable beard trimmer? Tweet me back.

The Dark Ages — not my finest hour.

Just had a guy on Earth tell me, “You look like Morgan Freeman.” I get that a lot.

Thought I’d have more than 286 followers by now. Oh well.

If the Dems can’t pull off this health care bill, I’ll just GIVE everybody good health. Serious as a heart attack, y’all.

Listening to ‘Dear God’ by XTC. Melody? Awesome. Lyrics? A little whiny.

Good talk with my son today, feeling good about comeback special this April. Hope he doesn’t get cold feet just b/c it’s on NBC.

Republicans, I love U, but what’s w/ all the crazy talk?

Whenever anything bad happens in the world, just think of it as one of my “lost weekends.”

@johncmayer I think it’s time you and I had a talk.

Trouble sleeping? Read a little Nietzsche. Knocked me RIGHT OUT.

On the seventh day I “rested”? If that’s what you call overeating, fine. But I prefer not to sugarcoat it.

Is it all right if I don’t like Sarah Palin OR ‘Family Guy’? Kidding! Calm down…

Not to brag, but I always knew “You’re So Vain” was about David Geffen.

Truth be told, I’m a moral relativist.

Thanks, California beauty queens, but if I want to speak out against gay marriage, I’ll do it myself.

“Cleanliness is next to godliness”? Tell it to the tighty-whities I’ve been wearing the last three days.

For the last time, I LOVE EVERYBODY. Stop claiming I’m on your side, whatever side you’re on.

@obamarama Yes. “700 Club” is a guilty pleasure of mine. Why else do you think Pat Robertson is still alive?

It’s true – I’m always tempted to use my name at restaurants so I can get a better table.

Wow. Lot of Negative Nellys here on Twitter. Lighten up, everybody — I’m this/close to sending in the locusts.

No, I will not start using emoticons so everyone is 100% clear on my meaning. I never said this was going to be easy.

If you’d told me 5,000 years ago that the Bible would make it past the first printing, I wouldve laughed in your face.

Of course I watch Leno — I’M REALLY REALLY OLD!

To all you songwriters who claim I wrote your songs ‘thru’ you, where my royalty checks at?

Hey! Episcopalians! Ease up on the communion wine or I’ll have Jesus turn it back into water! LO*!

IT’S is not the same as ITS. YOU’RE is not the same as YOUR. THEY’RE, THEIR, and THERE are all different words. Evolve already!

Is the Bible open to interpretation? Did Me-hu’ja-el begat Me-thu’sha-el?

If I were an inventor, I’d probably invent something that destroys dust once and for all. That stuff gets everywhere.

Mickey Rooney’s still alive?! I thought I saw him up here the other day. Guess not. All the best, sir!

Angry God? Benevolent God? It all depends on my mood. But all-knowing? You bet.

Are you guys retweeting my stuff because you like it or because I’m God? Sometimes I’m not sure.

This guy cracks me up! http://tinyurl.com/1xln

If a stray lightning bolt hits my cloud and I’m not the one who threw it, is that still considered an act of me?

Get well, Charlie Sheen. You are truly one of my greatest creations.

Straight from the horse’s mouth: Judas was underrated.

Sometimes I watch Larry King and it’s spooky how much I sound like him.

@rwcass I’m not going to make a personal appearance just so you can win an argument with your girlfriend. Please stop asking.

WHAT?!?! NBC preempted Nickelback at the closing ceremony in Vancouver! Time to smite somebody…

* “LO” is an abbreviation for “laugh omnipotently,” commonly used in heavenly e-mails and tweets.

On the morning of January 11, numerous media outlets reported that former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich had proclaimed to Esquire magazine that he’s “blacker than Barack Obama” in its February issue, which arrives on newsstands tomorrow. And later that morning the ex-governor, who was impeached last year on corruption charges and is now awaiting trial, apologized for his bold statement, using the word “stupid” 17 times to explain himself to reporters.

Here’s the full quote from the Esquire interview: “It’s such a cynical business, and most of the people in the business are full of shit and phonies, but I was real, man — and am real. This guy, he was catapulted in on hope and change, what we hope the guy is. What the fuck? Everything he’s saying’s on the teleprompter. I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.”

And I sure hope you took it all in, Blago, because once you go to prison, you won’t be seeing much of anything for a long, long time. (Note to self: find out which brand of truth-serum-laced crazy pills Esquire reporters are dissolving in their interview subjects’ water. In the January 1998 issue, Daily Show host Craig Kilborn was quoted as saying, “If I wanted [executive producer Lizz Winstead] to blow me, she would,” and one month later the magazine published an interview with O.J. Simpson in which he stated, “Let’s say I committed this crime … Even if I did this, it would have to have been because I loved her very much, right?” Outstanding, Esquire!)

But I am happy that Blago came to the conclusion he’s not black, because it allows me to name someone who’s much blacker: Jay Leno.

You heard me! Even if he is merely “light-skinned” in the eyes of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the former and near-future host of The Tonight Show is waaaaaay blacker than Rod Blagojevich. Why? Because only people who live in Illinois care one way or another about Blago, but everybody seems to hate Jay.

See, whenever a black man gains some power in this world after working hard to achieve his goals, white people get nervous and try to knock him down a few pegs. You know what I’m talking about!

Martin and Malcolm.

R. Kelly and M. Jackson.

Willie Tyler and Lester.

Presidents Obama and Clinton.

And now Jay Leno.

Even black people hate Leno. His original bandleader on Tonight, jazz musician Branford Marsalis, described his on-air relationship with the talk-show host to Jet magazine in 1994: ”It will never be what Dave [Letterman] and Paul [Shaffer] have because I’m not the kind of person that’s gonna kiss Jay’s ass and say everything he does is right.”

And in the spring of ‘92, right before Leno took over for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, fellow talk-show host Arsenio Hall used another four-letter verb starting with the letter K when speaking to Entertainment Weekly about Leno: “No one put the late-night silver spoon in my mouth. I earned every drop of mine. And I’m gonna treat him like we treated the kid on the high school basketball team who was the coach’s son. He was there because he was anointed too. We tried to kick his ass, and that’s what I’m going to do — kick Jay’s ass.” (Having failed to kick said ass, Hall eventually made guest appearances on both The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and The Jay Leno Show.)

Leno’s been compared lately to Brett Favre, the longtime Green Bay Packers quarterback who retired in 2007 after 16 seasons with the team, then came out of retirement to play for the New York Jets in ‘08. Favre then retired again, only to sign with the Minnesota Vikings for the 2009 season, where he’s done pretty darn well for himself in his old age, thank you very much.

A better comparison, I think, is Paul McCartney, except for the fact that no matter what people think of McCartney’s solo work, they still remember what he did with the Beatles and continue to praise it to the high heavens. In Leno’s case, no one seems to remember that 25 years ago he was considered the top stand-up comic in the country.

In her biography American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story, author Cynthia True writes, ”Bill had been in Austin barely six months when he got a call from [Houston's Comedy Workshop] to open for Jay Leno there the second week in February 1983. Thirty-three-year-old Leno, who packed clubs three hundred days of the year and was becoming well known through his appearances on the new show Late Night with David Letterman, was considered the sharpest, best road act in the country. Leno was a hero to Bill….

“Leno brought his wife, Mavis, and [with Laurie Mango, Bill's girlfriend, they] hung out all week, having dinner at Steak & Ale before the shows. Bill and Laurie couldn’t get over how warm and genuine Jay and Mavis were. ‘Bill was thrilled to be with him,’ Laurie said, ‘and kept telling me what a great guy he was. There were very few people Bill would say were funny: Seinfeld, Jay, and maybe one or two more, but that was it.’ Leno seemed to have an affection for Bill, and he had lots of advice for him: if you want to get on television, he suggested, you should clean up your material and make it more palatable for general audiences. Leno said Bill didn’t need to swear or get graphic about sex; he was powerful enough without that stuff.”

Cut to one year later. “Jay Leno had promised to help Bill get on Letterman and he was true to his word. He’d told Late Night segment producer Robert Morton what a great act Hicks had, and on a Friday morning in early February 1984, Bill got the call.”

Then cut to nine years later. “Bill found it entirely revolting that a man who made ‘three million a year,’ a man who was once the most brilliant, caustic voice in the country, was using his name to sell snacks to ‘bovine America.’ In fact, Leno’s Tonight Show, like The PTL Club, was something of an obsession with Bill. He loved to watch while hanging out on the phone with one of the guys, [comedian Andy] Huggins, [comedian Jimmy] Pineapple, or [Chicago comedy-club owner Len] Austrevich, and just rail on how cloying Leno had become. ‘Both Bill and I absolutely adored Leno as a comic,’ Huggins explained. ‘And what he became on The Tonight Show made him absolutely fascinating to us. We would watch Arsenio Hall and that show was dreadful, but it was exactly what we expected. But Jay was so good at one time. It’s not like he moved just three degrees closer to becoming a hack because “I’m on TV now.” He did a complete one-eighty. Stunning.’”

In his stand-up act, Hicks pondered whether Leno would kill himself on the air while interviewing former Dallas star Patrick Duffy or Joey Lawrence of NBC’s Blossom. He called his former mentor a “company man to the bitter fucking end” and accused him of being a “whore” for advertising Doritos, declaring that he was “off the artistic roll call.”

According to American Scream, Leno phoned Bill one day to ask why he was being trashed onstage. “They had a long talk and Bill told Jay how much he hated The Tonight Show (as if the man were not aware) and how disappointed he was because Leno was one of his comedy heroes. Why was the show so stodgy? Why was he showcasing guys like Carrot Top? Why was he being so … unfunny?”

Of course, Hicks had it easy — he died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at the age of 32, just as his career was finally building some serious momentum in the U.S.

Dying is easy, comedy is hard. Or so they say. But if you die tragically young like Hicks — or Andy Kaufman, for that matter, who succumbed to a rare form of lung cancer at age 35 a decade earlier — you at least don’t have to make compromises later in life in order to maintain your career, like O’Brien cutting back on Late Night’s absurdist “Masturbating Bear” gag for the 11:30 hour or Leno loading his monologues with as many inoffensive one-liners as possible — he still “sells” every single one of them, though, which must endear him to his writers — in order to lure the greatest number of viewers. (Leno’s “Headlines” segment has always been hilarious, however. If you don’t like it, then the typos have won.)

One of David Letterman’s greatest assets on Late Night in the ’80s was Chris Elliott, a wickedly talented actor and writer whose various appearances on the show as “characters” like the Guy Under the Seats and the Fugitive Guy (and even once as Leno) added greatly to the conceptual fun. But by 2000 he was starring as “the wacky neighbor” on the NBC sitcom Cursed, a.k.a. The Weber Show. It was hard not to think that a similar fate would have been waiting for Kaufman had he lived (at least Taxi had some critical cachet because of James L. Brooks’s involvement), and no fan of Hicks would have wanted to see him outgrow his “angry young man” persona just so he could end up as occasional comic relief on a CSI spin-off in his 40s.

I’ve never seen Leno perform live — throughout his 17 years hosting The Tonight Show he was still performing an average of 160 stand-up gigs a year, and he swears he lives off his stand-up money, having never touched his TV earnings, apparently afraid that too much money will make him lazy – but when I was growing up in the ’80s and early ’90s I loved whatever scraps of Late Night my parents would allow me to watch, and Leno’s guest appearances were part of what made the show great. His jokes about Penthouse Forum letters and Playboy centerfolds’ turn-ons still make me laugh (and now I actually know what he was talking about).

“Doing [Letterman's] show in the ’80s, going on and zinging back and forth, that was the most fun for me of anything I ever did in show business,” Leno told Bill Carter in the New York Times in 2008.

Partly because of those appearances on Late Night, Leno caught the eye of The Tonight Show’s producers and started filling in for Johnny Carson in 1987, eventually taking over the show five years later when Carson retired after three decades as host. According to Bill Carter’s 1996 book The Late Shift and the HBO movie based on it, CBS began courting Leno in ‘90 for a new 11:30 show, but he wanted Tonight. The only problem was, so did Letterman. (But can you imagine him doing a show from Burbank? When he hosted the Oscars in ‘95, it seemed like a good indicator of where The Tonight Show might have gone under his watch.)

Helen Kushnick, Leno’s manager at the time, negotiated a top-secret contract with NBC for her client’s services before Carson had even retired. By the end of ‘92, however, a proposed deal by CBS to pay Letterman $16 million a year for an 11:30 show of his own had endangered Leno’s position, as Carter reported in the New York Times in December of that year:

“Mr. Leno said he would ‘obviously leave NBC immediately’ if the network decided to give the ‘Tonight’ show to Mr. Letterman. He said he would absolutely refuse to do a show in the 12:30 A.M. spot now occupied by Mr. Letterman’s show, ‘Late Night,’ and would indeed consider creating the same problem for NBC that Mr. Letterman’s proposed deal with CBS caused.”

Seventeen years later it’s Letterman’s Late Night successor and Leno’s Tonight Show successor, Conan O’Brien, who’s refusing to move further down the schedule, in this case to accommodate Leno at 11:35 once again: NBC announced last week that it wanted to move The Jay Leno Show, which failed to attract large audiences five nights a week in prime time over the past four months, into late night in a retooled 30-minute version, bumping O’Brien’s Tonight into tomorrow with a 12:05 start time.

I don’t blame O’Brien for standing his ground, and the fact that he’s only been given seven months to prove himself as host of The Tonight Show is unfair, especially given how long he had to wait to get the job. Then again, Leno was also forced to go on the defensive after only seven months back in 1992.

As Carter wrote in the Times in September of ‘04, after NBC reached a deal five years in advance to remove Leno as the host of Tonight and install O’Brien, “One of the main inspirations for concluding the deal this early was NBC’s conviction that it could not go through the painful and at times embarrassing process that attended the last decision to turn over the host job on ‘Tonight.’”

But back in the early ’90s NBC wasn’t stuck in fourth place, a ranking that makes the current late-night soap opera even more painful and embarrassing for them. The network was number one in late night for 14 straight years, however, mostly thanks to Leno’s popularity on Tonight, the most profitable show on NBC besides Today. Therefore they felt the need to screw it all up by doing whatever it took to keep both Leno and O’Brien on the schedule instead of allowing one of them to go to a competing network.

Now NBC executives want to correct their mistakes, but Reuters is reporting that it may cost them up to $40 million just to complete O’Brien’s severance package and put Leno back in place at Tonight.

And once Leno is in his old stomping grounds again, he’ll be hated even more by comedy nerds, especially O’Brien fans who feel that Leno gave their hero The Tonight Show only to demand it back once he felt abandoned in prime time. Leno told Rolling Stone’s Neil Strauss last year that his attitude about having Tonight taken away from him in ‘04 was “‘Guys, whatever you want to do.’ I’ve never been one of these guys that breaks up with a girl and goes, ‘But why? If I do this, will you go out with me?’ I’m more like, ‘Babe, if you don’t want to see me, I’m gone. It’s over. Thank you.’”

But Leno didn’t walk away from NBC last year, nor is he likely to walk away from a new assignment now. ”The network asked him to make a compromise. He’s being a good soldier, and he’s being trashed,” Jay Leno Show producer Jack Coen told the Associated Press. Coproducer Tracie Fiss, who’s worked with Leno for the past 18 years, added, ”Jay doesn’t have the power to make these decisions. The decisions are made by NBC.” And they appear more than willing to let him look like the bad guy in this whole debacle.

As Strauss wrote in the introduction to his Rolling Stone interview, “Beneath his upbeat, regular-guy demeanor there lurks a streak of disappointment, an immigrant fatalism — that sense that once you stop striving and achieving, the world will grind you up.” Leno’s lifestyle, he observed, is “a routine designed to keep him safely insulated, his attitude predicated on the fact that at any moment everything he’s worked for could disappear and never return.”

The bottom line is that, much like Paul McCartney, Jay Leno loves to work. It appears to be his only vice. But he’s good at what he does, and his Tonight Show fans love him for it, even if none of them use Twitter or Facebook to voice their opinion. Leno also knows how to survive in a cutthroat business, though he’s only a shark in the sense that he apparently thinks he’ll die if he stops moving.

His attempt in his recent Jay Leno Show monologues to portray himself as a victim at the hands of NBC programmers was strained — he’s only an underdog in terms of what critics and knee-jerk tastemakers think of him — but how would you feel if your boss came to you one day and said, “Jay, thanks for all your hard work these past 12 years. We really appreciate you keeping Tonight at number one in the ratings for nine years now, and never missing a show or demanding huge raises.

“But here’s the thing — Conan’s been hosting Late Night for 11 years now, just like your old buddy Dave hosted Late Night for 11 years, and … well … he wants The Tonight Show. You know how it is — fulfillment of a lifelong dream, ‘when I was a boy,’ et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, Conan’s managers and agents and lawyers say he’ll leave for another network if he doesn’t get it. And we can’t have another Letterman situation on our hands. We just can’t. It’s bad for business.

“Besides, even though you’re at number one, your audience is older than Conan’s, and we’re pretty much at the mercy of these advertisers who kiss the ground 18- to 49-year-olds walk on.” (Ironically, O’Brien’s ratings in the key 18-to-34 demographic at Tonight have been lower than Leno’s were when he was host.)

No matter how much of a grumpy old man he becomes, I’ll take Letterman’s timing and delivery any day over Leno’s or O’Brien’s. But as New York magazine’s Sam Anderson wrote in January of ‘08 after Letterman and Leno brought their shows back during the writers’ strike, the latter’s “not trying to be the funniest guy in the world; he’s trying to be the most dependably serviceable at monologuing — an equally difficult task that carries almost none of the turkey-cocking street cred of revolutionary art comedy. Like many Americans, Jay Leno works as hard as he can under impossible conditions (he even knows he’s losing his job next year), and he refuses to beat himself up for it — a position that is, in the end, riskier, more vulnerable, and easier to identify with than that of his nearest rival. And, if you can manage to think about it without irony, very nearly heroic.”

That’s not how anyone would describe the ignorant white guy who used to be governor of Illinois, except maybe the man himself, but Rod Blagojevich will soon be joining Leno on NBC: come March 14, he’ll be part of the new season of Celebrity Apprentice. I’m sure he’ll have lots to talk about with fellow black contestants Darryl Strawberry, Holly Robinson Peete, Michael Johnson, and Sinbad.

By the way, this marks my final Sugar Water essay for Popdose. As Jeff Giles keeps reminding me, it was my decision, and I stand behind him standing behind it 110 percent. Join me next week, won’t you, for my new series: Hey, Who Else Hates [Artist or Title]? Seriously, Right? I Mean, C’mon!!!!

It’ll be super.

Billy Paul, “Am I Black Enough for You?” (from 1972’s 360 Degrees of Billy Paul)
Todd Rundgren, “Some Folks Is Even Whiter Than Me” [Edit] (from 1972’s Something/Anything?)
Radiohead, “Talk Show Host” (from the 2009 collector’s edition of The Bends)
Paul McCartney, “Tug of War” (from 1982’s Tug of War)

Per Second, Per Second, Per Second … Every Second (Aware/Columbia), the 2003 album by Boston-area band Wheat, is the best album of the decade.

Now you know!

This is a totally subjective opinion, of course. I haven’t listened to every album that was released between January 1, 2000, and today. I’m not a professional music writer or critic. I’m not even one of those audio omnivores whose ears devour everything they come across, though in the past ten years — the vaguely named decade that some call “the aughts” — it’s become easy for anyone with access to the Internet to consume more music than ever before.

“File sharing” via programs like Napster was still in its infancy in January 2000. The record industry had no need to panic yet. But one year later Apple’s iTunes software had arrived, and soon the company’s iPods were changing listening habits completely, and then CD sales plummeted, and blogs featuring free music (entire albums — even entire discographies!) multiplied, and record stores disappeared at an alarming rate, and now, ten years later, the industry has many reasons to be worried.

Yet there’s still great music being made. And there always will be. Despite the fact that I’m not an obsessive listener, I am always on the lookout for the Next Great Song, because, like any other music fan, I want the sky to be split open — I want a melody and lyric to enter my brain and refuse to leave for the next several months. And then I want my brain to ask, “Is there more where this came from?”

In the case of Wheat, the Next Great Song was “Closer to Mercury,” which I first heard in 2006 on Jefitoblog. It opens with a staccato piano rhythm and the lyrics “And I would’ve walked behind / And I would’ve walked beside you / And I would’ve told you every lie / And I would’ve done that for you.” Then a couple of goosebump-foreshadowing drum fills and a gently throbbing bass line join the song underneath the lines “Open your eyes sometimes / It’s funny how I adore you / I’m gonna get every line just fine / I’ll even sing it for you now.” Of all things, a cat’s meow comes next, and with that “Closer to Mercury” takes off at a steady gallop, incorporating along the way a T. Rex-style guitar solo, gorgeous group harmonies, plainspoken, touchingly funny sentiments like “I would make coffee for you,” and this stunning verse:

Summer love moves fast
You get a little slow and the fall moves past
But you’ll never find another love like my love
Winter slows the pace
Spring brings the summer back to your face
But you’ll never find another love like my love

After one listen, it was my new favorite song. Who needs “growers”? Give me more of this!

Luckily, the album that contains “Closer to Mercury” didn’t disappoint. As Michael Azerrad, the author of Our Band Could Be Your Life, wrote in 2003, “If Medeiros [1998] was like a grainy black-and-white photograph and Hope and Adams [1999] was a subtle but momentous shift to muted hues, Wheat’s glorious major-label debut, Per Second, Per Second, Per Second … Every Second, is a giant leap into Technicolor.”

It’s one of those discs that makes you wonder how it managed to not spin off one hit single after another. Right off the bat there are six tracks that offer pop-radio perfection: “Closer to Mercury,” album opener “I Met a Girl” (how many songs are honest enough to admit “I met a girl I’d like to know better / But I’m already with someone”?), “These Are Things,” “Some Days,” “Can’t Wash It Off,” and the hidden track “Don’t I Hold You,” a reworked version of a fan favorite from Wheat’s previous album, Hope and Adams (1999). (Under the section of “Radio One” on Wheat’s website there’s a song called “Focus” that didn’t make the cut for Per Second, but if a deluxe edition of the album is ever produced, it deserves a bump up to bonus-track status; “Focus” is another catchy-as-hell alternate-universe radio smash from the band.)

Unfortunately, Per Second never took off with the general public, selling less than 30,000 copies. It also alienated some fans who may have felt betrayed by the band’s move toward mainstream acceptance and away from the intimate “bedroom recordings” vibe of their first two albums.

No matter — Per Second is still this decade’s indie-pop Thriller, with each minutely crafted wall-of-sound wonder adding up to a full-length masterpiece about time, love, and memory, and how each one influences the others. (Great albums have to have great songs, first and foremost. Otherwise, who cares about overarching themes?) By the time lead singer and guitarist Scott Levesque takes listeners through the four seasons in “Closer to Mercury,” Per Second has already provided soundtracks for each quarter of the year: the chill of a domestic squabble in “Go Get the Cops” and a failed relationship in “Breathe” (winter), the resolve of a new day in “The Beginner,” “These Are Things,” and “World United Already” (spring), the electrifying confusion of romance in “I Met a Girl,” “Some Days,” and “Can’t Wash It Off” (summer), and the strengthening of convictions as the days get shorter in “Life Still Applies,” “Hey, So Long (Ohio),” and “This Rough Magic” (fall).

Per Second is loaded with stream-of-consciousness pop-rock anthems — never calculated, but full of details that reward repeated listens, like the way “It’s never what you want to be somehow” in “Breathe” is answered by “Everyone gets what they want / Even me” in “The Beginner,” the guitar in “I Met a Girl” that sounds like it’s shorted out and can now do a terrific imitation of the Road Runner, and all those lovely falsetto oohs and woos and hoo-hoo-hoooooos sung by Levesque, drummer Brendan Harney, and guitarist Ricky Brennan. (Great albums also have to have a great sing-along factor, if you ask me.) Per Second even ends with a reference, possibly an unconscious one, to the end of the Beatles’ best album, Abbey Road: in “This Rough Magic” Levesque sings, “I hope God will mend / The little things I break and bend / And equal it to the love I made.”

Because there’s such an abundance of new music these days in the average listener’s life, as well as older music that can be instantly downloaded from blogs and file-sharing sites and heard for the first time, it’s easier than ever for albums to go in one ear and out the other. But for the past three years I’ve listened to Per Second over and over again from beginning to end (the sequencing is flawless, especially the way the one-two rev-up climax of “Can’t Wash It Off” and “Closer to Mercury” leads into the quiet optimism of “This Rough Magic”), and that’s saying something in the era of iPod “shuffle mode” dominance.

As I get older and my tastes in music shift back and forth, I try to resist the temptation to think, They don’t make ‘em like they used to. My five-year-old niece loves Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus’s CDs, and you know what — she’s right. When I was five I loved Joey Scarbury’s theme song to The Greatest American Hero, and you know what else — I was right. I’m still right! The truth is that as we get older we idealize pop music all out of whack, forgetting that the good old days weren’t always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems. Somehow, though, Per Second, Per Second, Per Second … Every Second lives up to that graying ideal. To paraphrase Neko Case, I held out for that teenage feeling, and it paid off in ways I never expected.

Or, to put it another way, when author and screenwriter William Goldman speculated about the 1994 Oscar race in Premiere magazine in March of ‘95, he wrote, “I am voting for The Shawshank Redemption [for Best Picture] because — and I am speaking here as an intellectual writing for an intellectual magazine — it moved the shit out of me.” A gazillion albums were released in this decade, but for me, only one gets a nod of approval like that.

Per Second took an unusual path on its way to CD racks. Originally recorded for London-based Nude Records, it was rerecorded for Aware Records two years later; producer Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev, MGMT), who also manned the boards for Hope and Adams, headed up both versions, though John Fields (Rooney, Jimmy Eat World, Jonas Brothers) is credited with production on “Closer to Mercury” and “Breathe” on the final product. The bootlegged Nude versions of the songs do sound rawer and are therefore more “indie,” you could argue, but most of the hooks are already in place and ready to explode. (Think of the Nude Per Second as Kinemacolor to the Aware Per Second’s Technicolor.)

Levesque and Harney distanced themselves from the album (Brennan left in 2004 to pursue other projects) in the press release for their follow-up, 2007’s Everyday I Said a Prayer for Kathy and Made a One Inch Square — “It had been remixed and in places re-recorded, largely at the label’s behest, and was consequently rendered lifeless” — but since then they’ve changed their tune. The push-pull between those who create music and those who bankroll that creativity can often create headaches — for instance, Aware rejected Wheat’s choice for the cover art of Per Second — but it can also produce incredible results, and as Wheat knows full well, time affects memories, sometimes even healing the bad ones. As Levesque says in “Life Still Applies,” “You can part with your discontent / You can turn it around.”

Recently, Levesque (left) and Harney (right) agreed to an e-mail interview about their experiences making Per Second at the beginning of the decade.

When did you begin writing the songs for Per Second?

Scott Levesque: Pretty soon after Hope and Adams. It’s always a continuous collecting of things.

Brendan Harney: Yeah. You know, like Scott said, we’re pretty much always writing and such. In fact, I remember playing an early version of “Can’t Wash It Off” at our first-ever show in London. And that was like in 1998!

When was the original version of Per Second recorded, and how long after that did Wheat sign with Nude Records?

SL: The record was finished before we met with Saul Galpern [owner of Nude] in Boston. Dave Fridmann’s manager actually worked for Nude in some fashion, so it was done when we actually signed. We did like half with Dave and half with Brian Deck, recorded mostly all with [engineer] Dave Auchenbach.

BH: Because our manager, Scott Booker, was in so tight with Dave Fridmann — he also records all of the Flaming Lips’ stuff — we were able to kinda go in there without money or a label and record (knowing of course that we’d get back to him with the bread when we signed with someone). We started working on what was to become Per Second while we were still touring for Hope and Adams. With Dave Auchenbach, who did all of the basic tracks for the original version, we’d kinda just go into his studio whenever we had time in 2000 and hang out, record, drink coffee. Yeah, and then the Nude thing came along, and at the time it was the best route for us. Good guy.

I read in Magnet magazine a couple years ago that the band purposely wanted a bigger sound for Per Second compared to the first two albums. I can definitely hear a difference — how did you go about achieving that?

SL: We always try to expand or add, track new things each record. I guess we just continued to deconstruct what people, including ourselves, expected from Wheat. [By that] I mean getting lost, slightly uncomfortable, like asking “Can we go there?” etc.

BH: Right. The “bigger” sound was more about wanting to see how far we could take the thing that we did and still have it feel like Wheat, still have charm. Also, because we had the budget, we could really spend time spit-shining pretty much everything we wanted to.

What was Nude’s response to the original version of Per Second?

SL: Loved it. They, at every point, seemed way psyched. City Slang [a label in Berlin] also was into releasing it.

BH: They loved it, which is why they wanted to sign us up, but I do remember Saul wondering if the album title was too long. And of course we were like, “No way, man, it’s perfect — can’t touch it!”

Was “I Met a Girl” finished before you signed with Aware Records in the spring of ‘02?

SL: Yeah, it was right after we finished the original Per Second, [while] we were caught in our two-year legal limbo when Nude folded.

BH: That was the song that got us signed to Aware, in fact. Gregg [Latterman], the president of Aware, heard that song and pretty much decided to sign us based on that. Never saw us live, never heard the other material until it was done!

Was it ever intended as a stand-alone single until you could get the Nude version of Per Second out of legal limbo?

BH: No, it was just kinda the first song in a new batch of music that we were really enthused about recording. So when we had a few days at Dave Fridmann’s, we just went for it.

How much input did Sugar Free Records have on Medeiros and Hope and Adams?

SL: Nothing, songwise, though I recall a screaming match betwixt [Sugar Free cofounder] David Simkins and I over the song sequence. What a great, passionate guy he is. Top shelf all the way.

BH: Right. No input whatsoever. So we kinda got used to operating that way, and definitely felt wrangled when suggestions from label folk came along.

I read a quote from Scott from 2003 on Canadian music magazine Exclaim!’s website: “Sometimes [Fridmann would] say, ‘This vocal is too high, it’s Britney Spears territory,’ or wonder what the hell we were doing, but that sort of conflict is what forms the final product.” How would you describe your relationship with Fridmann on Hope and Adams and Per Second, the two albums he produced?

SL: Another top-shelf guy. Totally grounded with his head in the clouds, but in secret! Really chill. He’s a total kooky-head. Everyone you work with seems to influence the music. I think he liked the challenge — he really invested. Sang a bit on [Hope and Adams's] “Raised Ranch Revolution,” played bass on “I Met a Girl.” Love and truly respect him.

BH: You know, we only ever worked with people we respected in terms of their work and [who we] like personally. Those kinds of funny things came up with everyone we worked with, but probably more so with Dave Fridmann, ’cause when we worked with him we were usually at the point of really getting it all pulled together. Final-decision time.

What do you feel are the ideal roles of a producer and a record label?

SL: A producer joins the band for a bit, I think. In all aspects — he can arrange, play, sing, record, mix. A record label moves units, hires press, [coordinates] radio — kind of a general contractor.

BH: Exactly that. Some producers in music kinda “take over” the project, lay down the law, etc., but we’ve never gone for that shit. And fortunately, everyone that we’ve worked with has respected what we do, and even when they didn’t get it, understood that we at least didn’t just pull it out of our asses.

Was part of the appeal of signing with Aware/Columbia that they could get your music to listeners in “real time,” as Scott said in the interview last summer with Pedro Esteves on the Portuguese radio show Lado B? In other words, you wouldn’t have to wait for your new album to be discovered a year or two later through word of mouth?

SL: I think it was a cool challenge for us. I mean, totally weird and out of context from where we would have imagined ourselves. “Just crazy enough to work, maybe,” but sure, Columbia is a big label. The Aware guys are great guys. Steve Smith, our A&R at that point, really sold us to everyone. He’s a good guy. It was like my ten-year-old boyhood rock ‘n’ roll fantasy to see a Columbia logo on my record, like all the Bob Dylan and Miles records I grew up listening to.

BH: We thought, “Hell, if we can keep doing things our way, and they throw some money and effort around, why not?!” And it certainly was awesome to have a literal team of people working on our behalf — pushing songs, setting up opportunities, etc.

There’s been a lot written about the rerecording of Per Second once the group signed with Aware: they requested it, you wanted to do it, you didn’t want to do it, and so on. How did it transpire in the first place? What did you think of the process?

SL: It’s fine. It was a challenging record for us to make in terms of the playing, the sounds, and the company. It was the first record with outside influence, meaning A&R around during tracking, talking a bit about lyrics, etc. It was weird and stressful for me, sure, but I like work and challenge. I go crazy with the same thing over and over again.

BH: It was the first record where “the pressure was on,” meaning it was understood that it had to be the absolute best it could be. But we wanted that, anyway — we wanted to push it. We wanted to blow up any notions of what Wheat could or couldn’t be. Like Scott said, the A&R guy, Steve, was around a lot during the recording and mixing, but we grew to like him, and trust him also. He was a great sounding board in a way. And also, we could blame anything we didn’t like on him [laughs]. All in all, the process of recording was like we always did it — just building, tearing down, building again until we felt it was a good listen.

Was the two-year layoff between recording sessions a major factor for you in wanting to rerecord songs?

BH: Totally. You change so much as musicians and people in two years. The original versions felt, well, old. You can’t let writers just get a chance to rewrite or they will in fact rewrite, rerecord, etc. [laughs].

Brendan, when I talked to you in June in Chicago, you said that Per Second was “crafted like a motherfucker.” Do you consider that to be a good thing?

BH: In retrospect it was a good thing. Like I said earlier, everything — every track — was played to perfection (at least for us), and then cleaned up or edited if it wasn’t absolutely right. But mainly, from our end, we just worked and worked and worked on the arrangements, and on every little detail, so that there literally wasn’t a moment that would be just sorta there. No second of music was left that didn’t have a purpose. Even if we had a good song, we always would say, “Okay, where can this go from here? What can make this really come alive? What can we do that would be unexpected?”

How did John Fields become involved with the album?

SL: He was brought in by Steve from Aware to do a few things, “major [label]” it up a bit. Nothing bad intended by that, by the way — he’s a great, kooky, talented player. Played bass on “Closer to Mercury” and “Some Days.” It was a blast working with him — the opposite of Fridmann, really. Breakneck-speed tracking/mixing, whereas Fridmann is a bit more reserved and Zen at the board.

BH: Yeah, there were a few songs that just didn’t seem to jump in the right way, and so he came along and we busted ass together and made them great. Cool dude.

How did Glen Phillips and Andy Sturmer end up singing backing vocals on the album?

SL: Steve managed Glen, Andy was a friend of John’s. Plus, I liked me a Jellyfish song or two.

I noticed that on the Nude version of “Hey, So Long (Ohio),” Brendan is singing lead, but on the Aware version it’s Scott. What brought about that change?

SL: Bren getting scared [laughs]. Actually, just a decision — don’t really know who to blame or thank, really.

BH: I can’t remember, really. I like both versions equally, although the Aware version just sounds so rad!

Brendan, you said in June that it was the “presentation” of Per Second that left a bitter taste in your mouth. One of the things I like about Wheat is that you guys don’t come across as careerists. (You’re “el sincero.”) Once Per Second came out, what was it about the presentation of the album and the band to the public that you guys didn’t like?

SL: I think “career” was suddenly weird. I remember a Terry Gross interview with the Beastie Boys saying how they actually became the drunk-jock fucks that they had contempt for. We sort of felt like we were becoming “the bumper sticker kids.” I don’t know — there is so much bullshit and bulls around at that level. It’s hard to know what to think.

BH: The presentation of the band seemed uncomfortable to us. We didn’t like “dressing up” to play shows or shopping for “cool” clothes or any of that. The music was rad — we were rad — and you can’t fuck with that, really. It got fucked with a bit, and the soup had a strange taste. And as a band, once you don’t believe in who you are 100 percent, you’re fucked, really.

How did your original plan for the album’s cover — a girl holding a match — tie in with your concept of Per Second’s themes?

SL: I loved the “in the moment”-ness of her, like “Fuck all!” Here is now and that’s all that matters.

BH: The original cover had that and some other imagery, and, as with all of our art, kinda doesn’t address the material directly, really. It kinda has a conversation with it. A parallel line, if you will.

You opened for Liz Phair on a leg of the Per Second tour. She was getting a fair amount of grief at that time for her self-titled album, on which she was accused of selling out to get some radio hits. When you recorded the holiday single “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” with her in ‘03, did you talk at all about fans’ and critics’ expectations and how to deal with them?

SL: I did at one point and she just sort of missed it, I think. I too thought she might have had such feelings, but it might have been the wrong night [to ask]. I’m glad we did that song and I asked her to sing — it’s a truly kicking version. John Fields kicked its ass.

Artists often talk about how difficult it is to separate a bad creative experience from the end product of that creativity, but in your songs, love and memory — and the way both can change over time — are major themes. Based on the interviews and articles I’ve read and heard, you seem more at peace with the album now than you did just two years ago. Is that true?

SL: Absolutely. It’s all a process. It was a strangely unique experience. There are always things that you would change about decisions you’ve made, but that goes for everything in your life. All of our records have issues, but I’m glad to keep moving and leave them behind.

BH: Everything seemed so big and absolute then, you know? Like, “Oh my god, this is everything!” And then you just get crazy and run for the hills — which is what we did, really. Left the whole thing. But now it’s just another record, where you’re trying to get the communication right, hit the sweet spot, touch a heart or two.

So you don’t still feel like the songs were “rendered lifeless,” per the press release for 2007’s Everyday I Said a Prayer for Kathy and Made a One Inch Square?

BH: Not at all. That was kind of a wounded animal lashing out ’cause it knows it’s hurt. I actually really dig the new versions of those songs. What I think we mostly feel about that time is our own sense of not being sure who we were. Those songs are pretty massive and fun, and yet still very Wheat. Some supersweet moments and interesting Wheat arrangements.

Are there any albums you’ve liked that you think succeeded both artistically and commercially? Were they in the back of your mind when you were writing and recording — and rerecording — Per Second?

BH: A shitload! I mean, so many have gotten that really right, from Springsteen to Modest Mouse to Stevie Wonder. And they’re all there in our minds when we work. We make our own little world happen when we’re recording, but still, you can’t dismiss the stuff that works, the stuff that’s lasted. That’s an oil field chock-full of oil!

How did the rerecorded, Per Second version of “Don’t I Hold You” end up on the soundtrack of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown?

BH: They just came to us and were like, “We’d like to use this song, it fits perfect.” And we were like, “Well, hell yeah.” We had respect for the man’s work already, so it was a no-brainer.

On “Some Days” Scott sings, “And most days we don’t regret / And most words we say are true / It’s when we force each little step / When something, anything would do.” When I listened to this song again recently, I thought about the rerecording process for Aware. Too much of a stretch?

SL: Well, I’m always writing from life and not life. Art takes detours and goes off on tangents. It’s being able to get back on track, with all that being said, and still proving the point seamlessly that’s the magic. Relations are relations. There are only so many scenarios.

Are you Todd Rundgren fans? Something/Anything? is another album that blew me away when I first heard it. Seems like you share a similar artistic sensibility with Rundgren — musically speaking, he didn’t like to stay in the same place for very long.

SL: Yeah, we talked about TR more than once. Bren used that phrase a bunch. It was around, and really nailed our situation perfectly.

BH: He’s one of the greats in our book (for the reasons you say). And words, titles, phrases that we say and talk about are used in how we talk about what we talk about. To borrow another, it’s what we talk about when we talk about love.

Hey, So Long (Ohio)
the 2003 Aware version
the 2001 Nude version

Closer to Mercury
the 2003 Aware version
the 2001 Nude version

Per Second, Per Second, Per Second … Every Second is available at Amazon.com.

Now that I’ve got your attention, I’d like to remind you that in late September—

Wow. You’re already not paying attention. You really do think about sex every seven seconds. I thought I was bad, but—

Okay, seriously — stop.

Are you done? May I continue? Good.

As I was saying, in late September the UK website OnePoll.com, which bills itself as “the worlds fastest growing online market research company” (proper punctuation apparently just gets in the way of said growth), released the results of a survey about the world’s best and worst male lovers, which were then published in various newspapers like London’s Telegraph. The results may actually be posted on OnePoll, but it appears you have to log in to see them, which would then require logging out, and all that logging in and logging out, in and out, in and out, in, out, in, out, IN OUT IN OUT YES YES OH GOD YES OH GOD YES YES YEEEEEESSSSSSSS … well, quite frankly, it makes me sleepy.

At number one on the best lovers list was Spain, where the rain stays mainly in the plain and it appears the men stay mainly in bed pleasing the women who respond to these kinds of surveys. Brazil was second and Italy was third, so clearly “tall, dark, and handsome and not ruining the moment with English” has its advantages.

Speaking of English, Old Blighty came in second on the list of the world’s worst lovers, with Englishmen described by female respondents as “too lazy.” But London’s Daily Mail reported in August that a survey conducted by Nuffield Health found that three-quarters of the Brits who were polled were too tired by the end of the day to have sex with their partners. By answering the health-care charity’s questions, it’s true that the respondents were getting polled, but it wasn’t the kind of regular polling that relieves tension, burns calories, gives your skin a youthful glow, and keeps women from checking Orbitz.com every 20 minutes for cheap flights to South America.

Then again, having sex in England presents its fair share of obstacles, like being served with an “Anti-Social Behavior Order” for high-decibel intercourse. That’s what happened to 48-year-old housewife Caroline Cartwright, who in April was forbidden from making “excessive noise during sex” anywhere in the country, then was arrested three days later for violating the order. Brendan O’Neill wrote on Reason.com in May that ASBOs are issued by magistrates’ courts, “sometimes on the basis of hearsay evidence,” and the “relative ease with which one can apply to the authorities for an ASBO positively invites people to use the system to punish their foes or the irritants who live in their neighborhoods.”

O’Neill compared England in 2009 to the dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984, but I say a society in which I can get an obnoxious neighbor arrested for bad taste in music is heaven. Make your way across the pond ASAP, ASBOs.

Those who were surveyed by OnePoll (my sources tell me some of the women were polled twice in one night, but, sadly, the pollers never called again) say the worst lovers in the world are in Germany. They’re allegedly “too smelly,” but we need to give German men a break — the recession has hit them hard.

Back in the summer the Associated Press reported that a brothel in Berlin was so desperate for customers that it was offering discounts to senior citizens, and the Times in London said that German bordellos, which had seen a 30 percent drop in business since the start of the global recession, were beginning to promote “flat-rate services, based on all-you-can-eat evenings run by restaurants.” The nighttime rate is $150 for all the sex, food, and drinks customers can handle; during the day it’s $50 cheaper. Prostitution is legal in Germany and sex workers receive health and unemployment insurance, which means that even if they can’t get anyone laid in this economic climate, they’ll still be taken care of once they’re laid off.

Ranking third and fourth on OnePoll’s worst lovers list were Sweden and Holland, respectively. The latter country’s men were criticized for being “too rough,” and Swedish men were accused of being “too quick to finish,” but that’s an unfair assessment when you consider there are only six hours of daylight in the Scandinavian nation during the winter months — sex is rarely depressing, but sunlight never is, so don’t be so quick to judge quick-finish Swedish men and their seasonal priorities.

Before I get to number five on the list, here’s a rundown of the bottom half of the top ten, per the Telegraph:

6. Greece (too lovey-dovey)
7. Wales (too selfish)
8. Scotland (too loud)
9. Turkey (too sweaty)
10. Russia (too hairy)

Wait a second — excess body hair is a detriment to good lovemaking? Ladies, you should hope that your man will have good “swimmers,” not have a body that’s completely shaved like a good swimmer’s. Besides, guys like Greg Louganis aren’t interested in your kind. Move on.

Now, number five on the worst lovers list, in case you hadn’t already guessed, is the United States, whose males were deemed — get this — “too dominating.”

Excuse me?

Yeah, we dominate — that’s why we’re the greatest country in the history of forevah! Women of the world, if you can’t respect that, move to Russia. Except you don’t want all that extra body hair keeping you warm at night in Siberia, so guess what – you’re stuck with us!

It’s in our blood, you dig? If American men see something we like, we have to have it, whether it’s beautiful women, fast cars, or Middle Eastern countries neck-deep in oil reserves. We’re competitive by nature, and once we begin dominating in one area of our lives, it’s hard to stop.

Tiger Woods is a good example of this phenomenon. He’s already proven himself to be the best golfer of all time, so naturally he had to extend his domination to another competitive sport, albeit one that’s played indoors. His three dozen  mistresses certainly don’t look like trophies that were worth winning, but his stats are still impressive. Arnold Palmer may have his own eponymous nonalcoholic beverage, but only Tiger stands a chance of having a venereal disease named in his honor.

(In Asheville, North Carolina, where my love-you-long-time-and-put-up-with-you-even-longer girlfriend, Aimiee, and I are currently visiting her parents — and staying in separate bedrooms, which doesn’t seem to bother Aimiee at all — there are billboards for the Cliffs at High Carolina, a new gated community with a Tiger-designed golf course. The billboards show Tiger after a mighty swing, presumably on his way to sticking something in a hole, next to the words “See what inspired me.” I’ll give you three guesses.)

Because of Woods’s sex scandal, Congressman Joe Baca (D-Calif.) recently decided not to move forward with legislative plans to award him with a Congressional Gold Medal for good sportsmanship and eliminating racial barriers in golf. Woods has called himself black — not to mention Caucasian, Asian, and American Indian — but once politicians start pointing the finger at people who’ve committed adultery, that’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Woods, after all, didn’t conduct his affairs with the use of taxpayers’ money. Sure, we want talented, highly paid athletes and entertainers like David Letterman to be role models, but they weren’t elected to their positions on a platform of honesty, integrity, and family values. (Nevertheless, they don’t deserve endless applause, a la Letterman, once they confess their sins, which they wouldn’t be doing if they hadn’t gotten caught in the first place.)

Maybe self-destruction, like dominance, is second nature to Americans — which makes us a lot like those fanatical suicide bombers who we claim to not understand. Is it simply because we find their literal-minded self-destruction to be intellectually inferior to our own variety, which tends to wipe out all marriages and careers in its immediate blast zone rather than innocent bystanders?

Even if you’re not the dominating sex machine you used to be, you can’t give up the fight. As once-popular movie star Ryan O’Neal told Vanity Fair in August after ex-girlfriend Farrah Fawcett’s funeral, “I had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me. I said to her, ‘You have a drink on you? You have a car?’ She said, ‘Daddy, it’s me — Tatum!’ I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman, and it’s my daughter. It’s so sick.” (My favorite headline of 2009: “Movies present false images of romance.” Ya don’t say!)

You’re correct in assuming that I’m fully erect right now as I scribble my thoughts on American pride, but I’ll bravely admit that my country isn’t what it used to be. We’ve gotten gun-shy.

Take Levi Johnston, the almost son-in-law of almost vice president Sarah Palin who posed for Playgirl’s December issue and almost showed off Li’l Johnston — but ultimately didn’t. When you heard the tragic news, I bet you thought the same thing I did: Playgirl still exists? (Yes, though it’s only been online as of February.)

Playboy, on the other hand, is still in circulation, but it’s been struggling the past few years to keep its subscribers and find new investors. It landed flavor-of-the-month reality TV star Heidi Montag (MTV’s The Hills) for a photo spread in its September issue, but there wasn’t any actual nudity.

Look, Playboy, I’m not one of those people who “reads,” so I don’t pick up the latest issue for posthumous Norman Mailer fiction. Stop being Maxim and start paying former Miss USA Carrie Prejean whatever it takes to appear in your pages! As she told Christianity Today, “I don’t see anywhere in the Bible where it says you shouldn’t get breast implants,” just as I don’t see anywhere in the Bible where it says Playboy should be demure. (Believe me, I checked.)

Similarly, when the magazine put Marge Simpson on its November cover in an attempt to be “hip, cool and unusual” and lure younger readers, as CEO Scott Flanders told the Chicago Sun-Times, it was hard not to think, You mean the college freshmen who were born in 1990 during The Simpsons‘ second season? Aren’t they watching Family Guy or Adult Swim these days? Or do you mean even younger readers, and if so, (1) have you no sense of decency, sir, and (2) that’s how you dominate! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Still, the national malaise lingers, which is why President Obama decided in November to take out our collective pent-up sexual frustration on Afghanistan. Someone’s got to take the blame, right? And even though it’s perfectly natural and biblically sanctioned to blame women for everything — tell me I’m wrong, Ms. Prejean! — sometimes you have to blame an entire nation before your manhood is fully restored to its upright and locked position.

There are certain things we men can do to make ourselves more attractive, however. After all, we don’t want our female partners having sex with us just so they can “relieve the boredom because it’s easier than fighting,” as one female interviewee says in the book Why Women Have Sex. “Plus it gives me something to do.”

Coauthors Cindy Meston and David Buss told London’s Daily Telegraph in September that research “has shown most men find most women at least somewhat sexually attractive, whereas most women do not find most men sexually attractive at all.” Oh, for God’s sake, are we back to the five pounds of body hair again? Get over it!

One thing men can do to bring the sexy back is to buy new underwear, because during a recession, sales of men’s underwear generally decline. And if you’re a Saudi Arabian man, one thing you can do to make yourself more attractive to women is to stop selling women’s lingerie to women.

In June the AP reported that 26 Saudi women had completed a course in how to fit, stock, and sell underwear — the first of its kind offered there — after they boycotted local lingerie shops until the shops agreed to hire women. “The most shocking thing for me was the bra sizes,” said Faten Abdo. “We didn’t know how to get proper measurements before.”

The AP also reported in October that Elena Brodnar of Ukraine was the cowinner of an “Ig Nobel Prize” from the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research for creating a bra that turns into two gas masks. The article noted that, according to Brodnar, “a bra cup, no matter what size, is the perfect shape to fit over the human mouth and nose.” That’s delightfully Freudian, but it also goes to show that in chemical warfare, mother still knows best.

Also in the world of brassieres, or the lack thereof, Disney officials in California told the AP in May that the operators for four of its theme-park attractions would no longer scan riders who go topless for the sake of souvenir photos. “Disney confirmed … that it has reassigned employees at Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure who watched for breast-baring riders because ‘actual inappropriate behaviors by guests are rare.’” Though I applaud Disney for taking a step away from England’s puritanical, ASBO-issuing, Big Brother-ish ways, I shed a tear for the reassigned 16-year-old who no longer looks forward to going to work each day.

Of course, Mark Sanford probably doesn’t like his job that much anymore, either. His wife, Jenny, filed for divorce December 11, two days after South Carolina lawmakers decided to formally rebuke rather than impeach Governor Sanford for going AWOL in June to visit his mistress in Argentina.

Yes, it was irresponsible of the governor to leave his state without any official leadership for five days, but has anyone stopped to think that maybe he was on a fact-finding mission? That perhaps he was looking for sex tips from Argentina’s male population, not just taking a trip south of the equator in the hopes that his mistress would do the same for him? The glass is always half empty for you Republican-hating libs, and I think that’s just sad.

But I’ll tell you what’s really been sad in 2009 — economic news. However, if you obsessively read stories about the recession, people accuse you of liking “economy porn,” and if you’re a fan of the critically acclaimed movie Precious, a fictional account of financial horrors you’ll probably never have to live through, you’re accused of indulging in “poverty porn.” You can also indulge in the “food porn” that’s on display in Julie & Julia and It’s Complicated, two Meryl Streep “chick flicks” that some men classify as torture, but that doesn’t make them “torture porn” like the never-ending sequels of the Saw horror franchise.

If you just want to find out about the best in good old-fashioned sexual porn, however, take your computer on a trip to Mormon-engorged Utah, which has the highest online subscription rates for porn per thousand home broadband users, according to a study by Harvard Business School professor Benjamin Edelman. Scripps Howard News Service noted back in March that “Utah’s No. 1 score may have to do with its large population of young people and the scarcity of adult entertainment outside the home.” Neighboring states Idaho and Montana have the lowest porn subscription rates, so it seems their residents are more mature, more sexually satisfied, or more God-fearing — or they’re just getting their porn for free. (Yes, even the porn industry has endured hard, hard times this year thanks to diminished DVD sales and Internet piracy.)

But look on the bright side, everybody — Utah’s #1! And I truly believe America can rise to the top and dominate– I mean, peacefully rule over that “world’s best lovers” list next year and in the years to come, but here are three excuses– I mean, reasons why we’re currently not the best:

1. Through June of this year, American men had lost 74 percent of the 6.4 million jobs eliminated since the recession began in December of ‘07. (Chicago Sun-Times, Gannett News Service)

Translation: We’re depressed. We’re not dominating at work anymore. And to add insult to injury, we’re now being told we’re not supposed to dominate in the bedroom.

2. Roughly one out of every six Americans has had swine flu this year, and 10,000 have died from it, says Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (AP)

Translation: Not tonight — we might be coming down with something. (Doesn’t feel so good to be on the receiving end of that one, does it, girls?)

3. Murder and manslaughter were down 10 percent in the U.S. through June, despite crime usually going up during recessions. The two-part theory is that the American population is getting older and older people commit fewer crimes, and laid-off workers are at home now during the day, discouraging thieves from breaking in. (AP)

Translation: Do you want us to be better lovers, or do you want us to make sure the device you own that is a better lover isn’t stolen? You can’t have both, ladies. Besides, a recent study by the MacArthur Research Network on an Aging Society said that by 2050 the average life expectancy will be 83.2 to 85.9 years old for men and 89.2 to 93.3 for women. The Ashley Madison Agency, an online dating service for married men and women who are interested in cheating, has the motto “Life is short, have an affair,” but Americans are obviously living longer than they used to. So relax, better halves — the other half has plenty of time to become better in bed.

Thankfully, there’s still one area of life in which this nation totally dominates: obesity.

The CDC says that 30 percent of U.S. adults today are obese compared to 1979, when the figure was half that amount. We’ve cut down on smoking — 21 percent compared to 37 percent in 1970 — but we’re “getting fat just as fast as we are improving other factors,” Kami Banks, a cardiology research fellow at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, told Bloomberg News in November.

That’s because of our competitive nature — we can’t let Mexico take away our crown, especially not in some sort of athletic event that requires physical exertion. In October nutrition expert Barry Popkin, who advises the Mexican government, told the Christian Science Monitor, “The rate of increase in obesity in adults in [Mexico] over the past 15 years is probably the fastest we’ve seen in any country around the globe.” Six months earlier, researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a study saying that thin people produce fewer greenhouse gases, thereby doing less harm to the environment, but obviously a large chunk of North America — a really large chunk — wasn’t listening.

And so the battle rages on, with American men willing to go to any lengths, no matter how unhealthy, to prove their dominance. As Aimiee stands before me at this moment in a revealing negligee, I choose to ignore her so I can concentrate on finishing this assignment as well as this bag of Oreo Double Stuf cookies in front of me. (The missing F in “Stuf” must stand for “fat,” because that fat won’t be missing for long if I keep up my competitive drive.)

Stay hard and soft, American men, and thank you for staying with me through this long, well-endowed essay. No Swedish-style quick finish here — I’m an American, dammit.

Right Said Fred, “I’m Too Sexy [Spanish Version]“ (from 1991’s I’m Too Sexy maxi-single)

So, are you done with all your Thanksgiving leftovers? Already looking forward to that Christmas ham? Then listen up, all you attendees of Jesus’s annual baby shower, and take a page from your Hanukkah-celebrating friends’ Torah this holiday season. You’re going to have to cancel those pig-eating plans of yours, because I have some shocking news for you: animals are striking back!

(Please put that page from the Torah back once you’re done with it. The Jewish people have been through enough already without you vandalizing their sacred texts.)

President Obama had the right idea last Wednesday when he pardoned Courage, a North Carolina turkey, in a White House ceremony, even though this futile gesture of goodwill was too little, too late in the war between man and animal — by the following day, millions of turkeys’ lives had been tragically lost. (Good luck with Afghanistan, sir!)

Well, technically, those turkeys’ lives were lost once they were slaughtered, defeathered, and disemboweled, not when they were eaten. But every time somebody’s great-aunt or nine-year-old nephew complains “It’s a little dry” on Thanksgiving Day, another turkey loses a little piece of its soul in turkey heaven.

Chickens have it even worse. According to Elizabeth Kolbert in a recent issue of The New Yorker, the ones on factory farms that are bred to produce the maximum amount of meat — broiler chickens — “spend their lives in windowless sheds, packed in with upward of thirty thousand other birds and generations of accumulated waste. The ammonia fumes thrown off by their rotting excrement lead to breast blisters, leg sores, and respiratory disease.”

In order to decrease the chances of infection among the chickens, they’re fed heapin’ helpings of antibiotics, which lead to diseases that aren’t impressed by those antibiotics, which lead to “superbugs” that are harmful to humans who like to eat those chickens.

The broiler chickens’ waste is then tossed into holding ponds, eventually polluting our rivers and lakes. Kolbert’s New Yorker article notes that Smithfield Foods, a pig processing company, produces as much pig excrement in one day as the entire human population of Texas and California combined.

Bottom line: this shit is getting out of control.

The animal world is giving us some pretty big hints that it’s time to go vegetarian, and if you’ve ever seen Jaws, you know they’re not too keen on “pescetarian” diets, either.

They definitely don’t like being bartered for drugs. Back in June the Associated Press reported that a man in Syracuse, New York, “paid half a pig and $10 for a $50 bag of crack. [The dealer] told police the pig was for a celebration for a relative being released from jail.” Tragically, as “officers were arresting the suspects, someone took the pig.”

Did that someone happen to be the on-again, off-again girlfriend of a singing frog? If anthropomorphic history has taught us anything, it’s that pigs who wear makeup and date amphibians tend to have very short tempers. The suspects are lucky Miss Piggy didn’t give them a karate chop before running off with her dearly departed cousin.

But can you really blame the drug dealer who wanted that pig? As Pamela Johnson of the National Pork Board told Kara Spak of the Chicago Sun-Times back in January, “Bacon is like the candy of the meats that the pig offers.”

Spak’s article also described the “Bacon Explosion,” an “edible log of 2 pounds of sausage encased in a 2-pound ‘bacon weave’ created by blogging barbeque enthusiasts in Kansas City.” (You can find the recipe/weaving instructions at bbqaddicts.com.) Some say New York is the city that never sleeps, but Kansas City is the same way, except for the fact that no one can get to sleep in the first place because they’re too busy having bacon explosions of their own in the bathroom.

That’s how the pigs get their revenge, you see, and a September headline in the Sun-Times — “Man goes berserk after theft of beef jerky, police say” — lends even more credence to my science-free theory that animals now have the psychological upper hand.

Even animals we don’t eat on a regular basis are out to get us. Last month a kangaroo in Melbourne, Australia, attacked a man and his dog after the dog chased it into a pond. If kangaroos could talk, this one would probably say, “Look, mate, he started it,” and besides, who travels halfway around the world to see Australia’s canine population? The country-continent’s tourism industry depends on kangaroos, koalas, Kylie Minogues, and other exotic creatures to entice visitors Down Under. Expect a slap on the wrist from Oz’s kangaroo court and nothing more.

Also in the southern hemisphere, baboons have been breaking into cars in Cape Town, South Africa. The AP reported that on November 24 “a group of 29 baboons raided four cars … Then they broke into the cars of those who stopped to watch.” (You know, it really doesn’t seem that hard to get the psychological upper hand on our species.)

The simians were supposedly looking for food, and I see this incident as a terrific marketing opportunity for General Motors. Their new slogan can be “You may not like our cars, America, but we promise no baboons will ever hop in through the window looking for french fries, which always seem to be in abundant supply on the floor of your vehicle, you disgusting pig. (Oh — sorry, real pigs. It’s just a figure of speech. Please don’t brainwash us into eating another Bacon Explosion.)”

Plenty of humans love and respect animals, of course. For example, in November of last year, a mother in Lincoln, Nebraska, abandoned her 18-year-old daughter at a local hospital, because at the time such acts of unspeakable common sense were legally acceptable under the state’s safe-haven law. The AP published a photo of the anonymous mother in her daughter’s bedroom as she held Patches, her daughter’s cat, and smiled warmly at the pet.

Okay, so abandoning your daughter so you can get closer to her cat is extreme, but like the president’s turkey pardon, it’s a step in the right direction. We must start kissing our four-legged superiors’ asses before it’s too late.

And that’s why a headline like “Indiana horse injured in drive-by shooting” was such a heartbreaker last June, as was “Cougars, hot in Hollywood, endangered in real world.” This Christmas, no man under 35 has any excuse for not bringing a cougar into his home, at least for one night.

However, if you live near Orlando, Florida, please consider giving a new home to Elin Nordegren, a fox who’s married to Tiger Woods. After the golf champion ran over a fire hydrant and hit a tree right outside his mansion at 2:30 in the morning on Friday, Nordegren reportedly used a golf club to smash the back window of his SUV in order to free him from the vehicle. Woods may wear the golf pants in his family, but Nordegren obviously wears the real ones.

The accident took place just two days after The National Enquirer reported that Woods was having an affair with a New York nightclub hostess, and now Us Weekly has published a cover story alleging another affair with a Los Angeles cocktail waitress. Catching a Tiger chasing tail is exactly what the tabloids did, and now Woods has responded to the allegations in a statement to the press: “I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart.”

Nordegren isn’t the only fox having a bad holiday season — Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox hasn’t been selling a lot of tickets at movie theaters, either. Instead, moviegoers have been flocking to the new Twilight movie, The Blind Side, and 2012, in which John Cusack confronts the end of the world with his hair held high.

2012 centers on the ancient Mayan prophecy that December 21, 2012, will be the end of a 5,126-year era. But instead of environmental and spiritual renewal, Roland Emmerich’s film posits that the world will blow up good, real good, on that date, just like it did on July 4, 1996, in his film Independence Day and just like it did on the day after tomorrow in 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow. Emmerich blew up the White House especially good in Independence Day, but in the latter film he made some Important Statements about the effects of global warming, like the fact that if we continue to harm the environment, we’ll be forced to sit through even more mediocre Dennis Quaid performances.

I don’t think the world will end on 12/21/12, but I do think the animal kingdom has something big planned for that date. In 2012, Danny Glover plays the president of the United States, but who’s to say President Obama will still be in charge in real life on that date? If Rush Limbaugh has anything to say about it, Sarah Palin may be president-elect by then. Sure, she’s a good-looking elephant, but it’s those sly foxes at Fox News — and snakes like Limbaugh — that we really need to keep an eye on.

And kangaroos, of course. Especially if they have access to Tiger Woods’s nine-iron.

Rufus Thomas, “Do the Funky Chicken” (from 1970’s Stax Greatest Hits)
Michael Franks, “Tiger in the Rain” (from 1979’s Tiger in the Rain)
Sly Fox, “Let’s Go All the Way” (from 1996’s The Party Zone)

A nation mourned Wednesday night, as CNN’s Lou Dobbs, an outspoken critic of illegal immigration, announced his retirement from the network. Though it’s still unclear which nation is in mourning, experts have conclusively ruled out Mexico.

According to the Associated Press, the controversial newsman “angered CNN management this summer by pressing questions about President Obama’s birth site after CNN reporters determined there was no issue.”

I myself was skeptical of the president’s birthplace until he drank a domestic beer — Bud Light — at the July 30 “beer summit.” Then I remembered that Anheuser-Busch, the makers of Bud Light, sold their company last year to InBev, a Belgian company. Thanks to CNN’s shortsightedness, we may never find out if InBev is secretly run by Kenyan expatriates.

This isn’t the first time Dobbs has left CNN. He was one of its original anchors back in 1980 when it debuted, overseeing financial news and hosting Moneyline. But in April of ‘99, after being reprimanded by the network’s then-president, Rick Kaplan, for cutting away from a speech by President Bill Clinton on the Columbine shootings, Dobbs announced that he was departing CNN, saying he wanted to focus on a new website he’d founded, Space.com, because in space no one can hear you call your boss an idiot.

(I was working at CNN in a bottom-rung position back in 1999, and I would bet money that Kaplan’s voice, which combined the omnipotence of God with the volume of a T. Rex, can be heard in space. If I remember correctly, he was also nine feet tall.)

Kaplan left CNN the following year, clearing the way for Dobbs to return in 2001. Moneyline was renamed Lou Dobbs Moneyline, which became Lou Dobbs Tonight in 2003, which almost became Lou Dobbs’s America Is for Lou Dobbs and Lou Dobbs’s Friends Only, So If Your Name Isn’t Lou Dobbs or You’re Not One of His Friends, Stay the Hell Out in 2007.

The exit of Dobbs — whose book Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas can be purchased at Borders, naturally — is a big blow for CNN. Earlier this year its sister network, Headline News, lost Glenn Beck to Fox News Channel, leaving CNN without any middle-aged conservatives who dye their hair a color I like to call “faded doorknob.” The dye jobs gave the ultra-right-wing anchors a youthful look, which some might amend to “a Hitler Youth-ful look,” but not me. I think these guys are just acting.

Remember when Bill O’Reilly was a guest on The Colbert Report in 2007 and said, “I’m not a tough guy … This is all an act”? He was admitting that on TV he plays a “version” of himself. (Colbert’s reply: “If you’re an act, then what am I?”)

Similarly, when President Obama says he was born in Hawaii, he’s speaking as a version of the man who was actually born in the deepest, darkest, and therefore most foreign part of Kenya. And when Glenn Beck portrays himself as an unfunny, emotionally unstable bigot on TV and radio five days a week, that’s merely a smokescreen for the gentle, mild-mannered teddy bear that lies beneath.

Or the devil. I haven’t decided yet. But either way, he’s making it work for him.

Besides, as the New York Times reported last week, he’s a big supporter of fiction, especially political thrillers. Everyone enjoys make-believe, particularly claims that the president has a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” as Beck said on the July 28 edition of Fox and Friends. It cost him a bunch of advertisers, but what a great racially charged premise for a beach read!

The trend of actors playing versions of themselves in comedic films has become very popular in the last decade, including John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich (1999), Elisabeth Shue in Hamlet 2 (2008), Neil Patrick Harris in the two Harold and Kumar movies, and Topher Grace, Bruce Willis, and Julia Roberts as Tess Ocean as Julia Roberts in Ocean’s Twelve (2004). Plus, on TV you’ve got Chris Kattan in this year’s IFC miniseries Bollywood Hero, Larry David and his various real-life celebrity friends on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Matt LeBlanc and musician Rick Springfield, who are set to play “themselves” on Showtime’s upcoming series Episodes and Californication, respectively.

There’s also Comedy Central’s Michael & Michael Have Issues. One of its creators and stars, Michael Ian Black, recently described the show-within-a-show concept to the Onion AV Club: “Although we’re playing ourselves, I still very much feel like I’m playing a character, and it’s the character of myself. What that means is, I have to understand who I am — and you can substitute ‘my character’ for ‘I’ — in the context of this television show, and in the context of this television relationship. So the conversation that [costar and cocreator Michael] Showalter and I are always having is, ‘Would I do this here?’ That character is still evolving. Any project has its own voice, and you have to find that voice.”

Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs found their voices a while ago. Now it’s time for CNN to find a new one. (Forget placeholder John King. With that square jaw of his, he should be protecting the world from supervillains, not interviewing pundits.)

May I suggest myself? Yes, I may, because I’m pretty sure the Cable News Network still owes me some backpay from ten years ago. I may not have hair the color of a faded doorknob — in fact I have no hair whatsoever these days — but what I lack in locks, I make up for with a surplus of “version”-al technique. Here are a few of the questions I get asked by readers on a regular basis:

Q: Is Aimiee really your girlfriend?
A: Yes.

Q: But why would any woman with even a shred of self-respect put up with a guy like you?
A: I don’t know. Maybe you should ask her yourself.

Q: Okay. Where is she?
A: Sorry, she can’t come to the computer right now.

Q: I think you’re making all of this up.
A: No. I swear I’m not. Except for these “questions,” of course.

Q: Wait. You’re saying I’m not really the one asking these questions? That I’m not in control of what I’m saying?
A: Exactly.

Q: My head just exploded.
A: Good, because I really need to get back to this column.

So, as I was saying before I rudely interrupted myself, I enjoy all the mirrors in the funhouse. But I promise I won’t be hurt, CNN, if you decide I’m not a big enough “name.” May I suggest an alternate option to replace Lou Dobbs?

He’s a conservative. (Yay!) He’s also a foreigner. (Boo!)

He loved President Bush. (Yay!) He called President Obama “some tanned guy.” (Uh …)

He’s a billionaire. (Yay!) In 2006 he said, “I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I am a patient victim, I put up with everyone, I sacrifice myself for everyone.” (Hold on a second …)

He produced the 1992 film Folks!, starring beloved Oscar winner Don Ameche. (Never seen it — but yay! Old people good, death panels bad!) It was a slapstick comedy that derived most of its laughs from Ameche’s character having Alzheimer’s. (What the…?)

After 9/11 he said, “The West will continue to conquer peoples, even if it means a confrontation with another civilization, Islam, firmly entrenched where it was 1,400 years ago.” (Wow. Well, at least he didn’t compare himself to Jesus that time.)

Earlier this year he said he would deploy 300,000 soldiers in the streets of his country to combat crime, but when asked by a reporter if that number would be enough to prevent women from being raped, he replied, ”You can’t consider deploying a force that would be [large enough] to prevent the risk … We would have to have so many soldiers because our women are so beautiful.” (Aww, that’s kinda sweet– wait, no it’s not!)

And he once told the following joke in front of an audience: “An AIDS patient asks his doctor whether the sand treatment prescribed him will do any good. ‘No’, the doctor replies, ‘but you will get accustomed to living under the earth.’” (Who is this monster?!)

He’s Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi! Who knows what’s really going through the man’s mind at any given moment, but you certainly can’t say any of his various versions are boring.

Right now the 72-year-old politician and business tycoon is a little busy dealing with criminal charges of corruption and tax fraud back home, not to mention a sex scandal involving prostitutes and young women. But once his dance card is empty again, I’m sure he’d love a crack at his own op-ed show here in the States, where he’ll find a whole rainbow of people to offend.

Berlusconi started out as a cruise ship entertainer, and although Dobbs says he wants to concentrate on “advocacy journalism” in the next phase of his career, he could easily end up adrift if he doesn’t work on his people skills.

What’s that saying? “Immigrants take the jobs no one else wants”? Dobbs may find himself in rough waters when suddenly even the immigrants decide nothing’s better than something.

The following piece originally appeared as an entry in Popdose’s Most Disturbing Halloween EVER! series.

“Everyday People” entered the Billboard Top 40 on January 4, 1969. Six weeks later it was the number-one song in the country, holding onto the top spot for an entire month. The lead single from Sly & the Family Stone’s upcoming album Stand!, it espoused “different strokes for different folks,” with the group’s leader, Sly Stone, assuring listeners that “I am no better and neither are you / We are the same whatever we do.”

Later that year the “psychedelic soul” band from San Francisco — featuring black, white, male, and female members — played the Woodstock festival, taking the stage at three in the morning on August 17 with inspirational anthems like “You Can Make It If You Try” and “I Want to Take You Higher,” which quickly moved the predawn crowd out of their sleeping bags and onto their feet.

In hindsight, it was as high as Sly & the Family Stone would go.

On January 10, 1970, their first single of the new decade, the double-A-sided “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and “Everybody Is a Star,” landed in the Top 40, and within a few weeks had become the band’s second chart topper.

Ushering in the era of bottom-heavy ’70s funk dominated by bands like Kool & the Gang, Ohio Players, and Earth, Wind & Fire, “Thank You” featured a harder sound than the Family Stone’s previous hits, with Larry Graham’s percussive thump-and-pluck bass dominating the track alongside Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini’s trumpet-and-sax combo. Sly’s lyrics weren’t exactly relegated to the background, but expectations of good-time vibes from the group that recorded “Dance to the Music” tended to obscure lines like “Flamin’ eyes of people fear burnin’ into you” and “Dyin’ young is hard to take / Sellin’ out is harder.”

The lyrics that typically stand out on first listen are the titles of previous Family Stone hits incorporated into the third verse: “Dance to the music all night long / Everyday people sing a simple song.” It comes across as playful — a clever summation of the Family Stone’s triumphs in the decade just ended.

After “Thank You” and the more conventionally arranged “Everybody Is a Star,” no new material was heard from Sly & the Family Stone for almost two years. During that time Sly did produce two singles for his little sister Vet’s vocal trio — appropriately named Little Sister — the second one a cover of “Somebody’s Watching You,” originally heard on Stand!

The Family Stone’s midtempo pop-soul version is sung with sweetness and warmth, pushing the melody into nursery-rhyme territory, a la “Everyday People.” Little Sister’s take, from 1971, is much more spare, the hushed vocals placed higher in the mix so as to foreground the paranoid lyrics:

Ever stop to think about a downfall
Happens at the end of every line
Just when you think you pulled a fast one
Happens to the foolish all the time.

The final verse is even more ominous:

The nicer the nice, the higher the price
And that’s what you pay for what you need
The higher the price, the nicer the nice
Jealous people like to see you bleed.

Little Sister’s cover of “Somebody’s Watching You” was reportedly the first instance of a drum machine being used in place of a human drummer on a mainstream record. The device’s unwavering rhythm makes the downfall mentioned in the lyrics seem like a foregone conclusion.

In November of ‘71, Sly & the Family Stone finally broke their silence of almost two years when “Family Affair,” the lead single off their fifth album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, hit the airwaves. But if “Thank You” was a bit more forceful than what fans were used to, “Family Affair” was a complete 180. The accompanying album caused confusion as well, especially from fans expecting some new rays of sunshine soul. (In contemporary terms, imagine if Radiohead had skipped OK Computer and followed up 1995’s The Bends with 2000’s Kid A.)

One of the most unsettling number-one hits of all time, “Family Affair” speaks of dysfunction — “You can’t leave, ’cause your heart is there / But you can’t stay, ’cause you been somewhere else!” — while behind the scenes there was already plenty of that to go around: singer and keyboardist Rose Stone, Sly’s sister, was the only member of the Family Stone who appeared on the track aside from Sly, singing the chorus through cupped hands. The distinctive Rhodes piano was played by Sly’s old friend Billy Preston, the guitar was provided by Bobby Womack, and the beat was programmed into a Rhythm King drum machine by Sly.

The Family Stone may have gotten the sleepy Woodstock crowd to dance to the music at 3 AM, but on “Family Affair” Sly sounds like most people feel if they happen to be awake at that time of night. It’s a mesmerizing performance — bone-tired yet brutally honest — that’s mostly confined to Sly’s lower register, but he lets loose two phlegmy falsetto screams in the final stretch that ring in your ears long after the song has ended. (His elastic voice was presumably a major influence on Prince’s style.)

Riot includes this peculiar credit: “All songs written, arranged and produced by Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone.” (Previous albums had credited Sylvester with the songs, Sly with the production.) Sylvester was the sensitive churchgoing boy who’d grown up singing in a gospel group, the Stewart Four, with his younger siblings — Rose, Freddie, and Vet (née Vaetta) — but as he told talk-show host Mike Douglas in 1974, a fifth-grade teacher misspelled the first syllable of his name on a blackboard. The nickname “Sly” stayed with him. “I think I started even acting like it after that,” he said.

Sly Stewart begat Sly Stone when he was hired to spin R&B records at San Francisco’s KSOL in October of ‘64. The 21-year-old DJ stayed at the R&B station through June of ‘67, then did a short stint at KDIA in Oakland that fall, after which the Family Stone became his top priority.

Sylvester was the student who absorbed not only the new psychedelic sounds he was hearing in the Bay Area — including the Great Society, Grace Slick’s first band — but also the sounds he was broadcasting on the radio: Bob Dylan, Motown, the Beatles, and Stax-Volt soul. (“I’d play Dylan, Hendrix, James Brown back to back, so I didn’t get stuck in any one groove,” he once said.) Sly, however, was the showman, whose outsized personality could sell the songs Sylvester was composing in his head by combining them with the visual hook of an integrated band for integrated times.

But as drugs like cocaine and PCP (and fame, as hoary as that cliche may be) entered Sly’s world in 1970, his identity, much like the sonic quality of Riot, began to muddy. The student was still there, but the showman felt the need to bring him onstage for a bow, hence Riot’s third cut, “Poet,” a precursor of hip-hop braggin’ and boastin’ (“My only weapon is my pen / And the frame of mind I’m in”). Sylvester and Sly were the Jekyll and Hyde of R&B in the ’70s, and the struggle between the two sides is documented on “Family Affair.”

“One child grows up to be somebody that just loves to learn / And another child grows up to be somebody you’d just love to burn,” sings Sly, putting extra emphasis on the last six words. (He said in an interview on KCRW in May that the song came from “a daydream,” and with songwriting in general, “I don’t necessarily have to have experienced it, but I can see it. I can feel it.”) On the subject of Sylvester and Sly’s uneasy marriage, he croaks, “Newlywed a year ago / But you’re still checking each other out / Nobody wants to blow, nobody wants to be left out.” Each side needed the other to succeed. Both sides were stuck.

Sly was in and out of drug rehab facilities in the ’80s, one of which was the Lee Mental Health Clinic in Fort Myers, Florida. In 1985 Dr. Richard Sapp told Spin magazine, “We didn’t accept ‘Sly’ in our therapy sessions. Sylvester can control Sly … Once he realized that we were serious, he became Sylvester.” Years later his father, K.C. Stewart, was quoted in Mojo magazine as saying, “You can usually tell what he’s been doing from the way he is on the phone. Mama knows the moment he says ‘Hello’ if she’s talking to Sly or Sylvester. If he tries to tell a ten-minute story in ten seconds, then it’s been a Sly Stone kinda day.”

In addition to his own internal pressure at the turn of the decade, the Oakland-based Black Panthers were applying external pressure to Sly, hoping for a militant musical endorsement, while white hippies thought they’d found their crossover superstar at Woodstock. Sly seemed to answer both suitors at once in “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” with the lyric “Thank you for the party / But I could never stay.”

Universal acceptance can be a scary thing. Sly sang about being the “Underdog” on the very first track of the Family Stone’s very first album, 1967’s A Whole New Thing, but just two years later his status had changed completely. If everyone suddenly embraces you, there can be a creeping suspicion that everyone thinks they suddenly own a piece of you, that they can control you. Sly was being polite in the lyrics of “Thank You,” but with There’s a Riot Goin’ On, he got right to the point: You know nothing about me or my music, and here’s the proof.

“Sly filled an important social void, bridging blacks and whites,” said the Family Stone’s original manager, David Kapralik, in People magazine in 1996. Sly, the radio broadcaster who wanted to reach the widest audience possible, put it more simply years earlier: “What I write is people’s music. I want everybody, even the dummies, to understand what I’m saying. That way they won’t be dummies anymore.”

He addressed the ugly reality of racism in his music only occasionally, notably in songs like 1969’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey,” whose title is answered by the next line in the chorus: “Don’t call me whitey, nigger.” “The sense here is one of impasse,” wrote music journalist Barney Hoskyns in an essay for the 2007 reissue of Stand! “Following the race riots of 1967 and 1968, and then … the shocking assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968, the races in America began to move apart, increasingly distrustful of each other.”

In the documentary Jimi & Sly: The Skin I’m In, which aired on Showtime in 2000, Rose Stone says of her big brother, “When we were little kids and we would go from church to church and sing, if people didn’t stand and applaud and really feel the spirit of what he was singing, he’d cry afterward.” Much has been written about There’s a Riot Goin’ On being Sly’s declaration of political disillusionment, but he never addressed Vietnam in his songs, or Kent State, or MLK or RFK or LBJ. In fact, when asked by Vanity Fair writer David Kamp in 2007 whether or not Riot was a political statement, he answered, “Well, yeah, probably. But I didn’t mean it to be.”

Sly is sly, after all. And good music is good music, regardless of its “message” or whoever made it. To Sly, what mattered was the product of people’s talent and creativity, not the color of their skin.

His disillusionment may have come from witnessing free-form radio, which he’d helped popularize in the Bay Area in the mid-’60s, fading away on the FM dial. The freedom he’d enjoyed in others’ music and expressed through his own, beginning with the uplifting gospel numbers he performed as a child, was no longer being celebrated. By the end of 1970 the Beatles had broken up, and Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, and Hendrix were all dead. The colors on the musical spectrum were separating once again. On Riot Sly responded in kind by delving deeper into funk and the roots of African-American music.

As pressure mounted, he showed symptoms of a bleeding ulcer, though the ulcer itself never developed. However, “one of the clinical ways to ease the pain is cocaine,” Kapralik told Rolling Stone in 1971. Perhaps he felt that if he’d failed to take his listeners higher, the only way to numb himself from bitter disappointment was to get higher.

“Life was drugs, and it was music,” said Sly’s former personal assistant, Stephani Swanigan Owens, in Joel Selvin’s 1998 book Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History. “They would spend so many hours — thirty-six to forty-eight hours — in a stretch at the Record Plant, wearing out the engineers. But they were doing drugs, too.”

Uppers like cocaine and amphetamines gave Sly and company the stamina they needed, but on Riot the core performers weren’t the members of the Family Stone. Friends and colleagues like Preston, Womack, and Jim Ford (who wrote “Harry Hippie” for Womack) were the ones recording with Sly well into the night and the next day and the day after that.

Ike Turner, Herbie Hancock, and Miles Davis also dropped in to jam and see what this character named Sly Stone was all about. The third track on Hancock’s landmark jazz fusion album Head Hunters (1973) is titled “Sly,” and the influence of Riot’s winding groove can be heard on Davis’s divisive On the Corner (1972). The late jazz legend’s memories of Riot’s recording sessions, as chronicled in his autobiography, Miles, boiled down to “nothing but girls everywhere and coke, bodyguards with guns, looking all evil. I told him I couldn’t do nothing with him — told Columbia I couldn’t make him record any quicker. We snorted some coke together and that was it.”

Sly was eating up lots of studio time and label money at the Record Plant, as noted by Owens, and he had a Winnebago outfitted with recording equipment in case he felt like recording there as well. But mainly he was recording at his new home in southern California.

In the fall of 1970 Sly moved into a mansion in Bel Air owned by John and Michelle Phillips — the head of the Family Stone was now in the home of the Mamas and the Papas. (The Phillipses had their own share of dysfunction: John’s oldest daughter, actress Mackenzie Phillips, revealed in her 2009 memoir, High on Arrival, that she used cocaine with her father and had a ten-year incestuous relationship with him, starting when she was 19.)

Sly first learned about the house from his friend Terry Melcher, a record producer and A&R man at Columbia Records (the sister label of Epic, which put out Sly’s albums). At the time Melcher wasn’t showing his face much in public: After declining to sign a musician named Charles Manson to a recording contract, Manson came looking for him at the house he was renting in Los Angeles. Melcher and his girlriend, Candice Bergen, had already moved out, though; another successful young couple, film director Roman Polanski and actress Sharon Tate, were now living in the house. Tate was eight and a half months pregnant when Manson and his “family” murdered her and three of her friends on August 9, 1969.

“When we first moved into that house, there were rooms that had some things in them that made us think the house was haunted,” said Owens. “We found a Ouija board in there. We found different pieces of paperwork that made us believe they were into witchcraft.” Sly increased the general level of discomfort by bringing his dog, a violent pit bull terrier named Gun. According to Joel Selvin’s article about Riot in the August 2001 issue of Mojo magazine, Sly also owned a baboon, “but Gun killed the baboon and then fucked it.”

John Phillips had installed a recording studio in the attic, which held great appeal for his new renter. Sly could now record whenever he wanted. And he could keep people waiting as long as he wanted while he waited to be “inspired.” In 1970 he missed 26 out of 80 scheduled concerts, in some cases leaving the rest of the Family Stone in limbo backstage while he got high. Fans grew frustrated, occasionally rioting in the wake of cancellations.

As Errico told Selvin, “On one hand, [Sly] had the capabilities of handling all that attention, fame, big audiences. But on the other hand, there was another part of him that didn’t want it, couldn’t handle it, and wanted to be away from it. This fight always went on, where he wanted to be the biggest, the baddest, best, and then, when he got it, he didn’t want to be it; he was scared of it.”

Sly himself described for KCRW a performance of the Stewart Four’s at the Oakland Civic Auditorium: “Towards the end of the song, people started running down the aisle … I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know that they were just happy, [that] they weren’t just gonna come up and grab me. So I turned around and started running … and I’ve been running ever since.” The next-to-last cut on Riot is “Runnin’ Away,” in which Sly sings, “Running away to get away / Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! / You’re wearing out your shoes / Look at you fooling you!” And just as he sang “Thank you for the party / But I could never stay” a year before Riot’s release, he’d continue giving hints about his early retirement on future albums, particularly 1973’s Fresh and the single “If You Want Me to Stay” (“Count the days I’m gone … / Because I promise / I’ll be gone for a while”).

As his band became more and more popular, Sly withdrew further into the Sly Stone persona he’d created, though the showman was aggressively transforming into a wannabe pimp, with lots of money, women, drugs, and guns at his disposal. The nicer the nice, the higher the price.

There’s a Riot Goin’ On was the first Family Stone album not to feature the band on the cover, but it’s also the only one that doesn’t feature Sly, either. The flag that’s pictured is red, white, and black, representing “people of all colors,” blood red being the color we all share on the inside. But the symbolism of Sly’s American flag is as inclusive as the album ever gets. Without question it’s his most introspective effort, with the focus in his songwriting shifting from “we” to “me,” and after Riot he was the only band member to get any face time on the cover, which was somewhat appropriate since the band had stopped recording together in the studio by the time of the Riot sessions. The cover of 1976’s Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I’m Back (the title was wishful thinking), a Family Stone album in name only, pictured Sly as a one-man band, but he’d already been operating with that attitude in the studio for years.

For Riot, Sly began overdubbing band members’ contributions onto existing tracks, sometimes replacing them with his own instrumentation if he thought he could do a better job matching the sound he heard in his mind. All the late-night overdubbing and erasing on the master tape is what gives Riot its murky fidelity, a stark contrast to the bright, shiny sound of previous Family Stone albums.

But whether or not the eventual aural atmosphere of the album was completely intentional, there’s no denying that the lo-fi audio adds to the listener’s feeling of being in a drug haze, coming down from the 1969 highs of Stand! and “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and being submerged in the dark waters of “Family Affair,” the bluesy, menacing “Just Like a Baby,” and the hypnotically overpowering “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa.” The bass is so prominent throughout the album, and the drum-machine beats so relentless, that the keyboards on “Africa Talks to You ‘The Asphalt Jungle’” and the guitar on “Thank You” feel like needles pricking the skin whenever they make an appearance. We may all share the same blood, but on Riot there’s ice in Sly’s veins.

The album kicks off, in fact, with the sound of a throbbing bass guitar, and as music journalist Touré says in the liner notes for Sony’s reissue of the Family Stone’s 1973 album Fresh, “If you hear a nasty bass line, you know funk is coming.” The funk never lets up on Riot, but it’s not dance funk or party funk or even P-Funk. It’s lonely, claustrophobic, 3 AM funk. The album’s opener, “Luv n’ Haight,” like “Family Affair,” is an expression of the internal and external pressure being exerted on Sly. The chorus switches from Sly singing “Feel so good / Don’t want to move / Feel so good inside myself / Don’t need to move” to Little Sister chanting “Feel so good / Feel so good / I want to move / I want to move” over and over again in the last half of the song, with their vocals switching from the left channel to the right on each line, boxing in Sly (and any listener using headphones), who’s seemingly paralyzed by drugs, his two “sides,” or other forces.

Depending on how you feel about There’s a Riot Goin’ On, the midtempo inertia that takes hold over the rest of the album is either monotonous and enervating or a case of Sly brilliantly pushing the boundaries of popular music as if it were a rubber band that could snap at any second. Stephen Paley, a former Epic A&R executive and friend of Sly’s, said Riot “was almost like brinksmanship. He wanted to see how far from commercial he could go and still be commercial.”

“Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa,” a dramatic reworking of “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” is cut from the same cloth as Little Sister’s cover of “Somebody’s Watching You.” On the new version Sly replaces Larry Graham’s signature slap bass with a thudding “bottom” of his own and slows the tempo to a crawl. Though the echoed vocals sound like they’re coming from a part of your brain you’d rather not know about, the lyrics are no longer hiding behind a bouncy dance groove:

Lookin’ at the devil, grinnin’ at his gun
Fingers start shakin’, I begin to run
Bullets start chasin’, I begin to stop
We begin to wrestle, I was on the top

Is Sly the devil, and African rhythms the source of Sylvester’s strength if he hopes to eventually conquer his other self? There’s a Riot Goin’ On features some gospel-derived “call and response,” but not in the way one might expect. The title of the album is a response to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, released six months earlier in 1971, and side one’s “Africa Talks to You” receives a grateful “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa” on side two. But whereas the name-checking of previous Family Stone hits on the original “Thank You” seemed like clever wordplay, in this context it’s a rejection of all that came before, as if Sly’s mocking anyone who was dumb enough to believe his previous messages of hope, truth, and togetherness:

Dance to the music all night long
Everyday people, sing a simple song
Mama’s so happy, mama starts to cry
Papa’s still singin’, you can make it if you try

If Sly’s intention on Riot was to tear down his music and everything it once represented in order to build it back up again as a new, different beast, then he accomplished what he set out to do. Riot is a hard album to love — its bookends, Stand! and Fresh, are much more accessible — but it’s impossible to forget.

Greil Marcus, who reviewed Riot three times for Creem magazine, wrote in his 1974 book Mystery Train, “With this album, Sly is giving his audience — particularly his white audience — precisely what they don’t want. What they want from Sly is an upper, not a portrait of what lies behind his big freaky black superstar grin. One gets the feeling, listening to this album, that Sly’s disastrous concerts of the past year have not been so much a matter of insulting his audience as attacking it, with real bitterness and hate, because of what its demands on him have forced him to produce. It is an attack on himself as well, for having gone along with those demands.”

Indeed, after the commercial failure of the Family Stone’s debut album, the rhythmically expansive A Whole New Thing (1967), Sly was told he needed to simplify his sound in order to get his songs played on the radio (by DJs who were possibly less open-minded than he was during his broadcasting days). His response was “Dance to the Music,” which became one of the band’s signature songs. He even repeated its chord progression on several songs from the accompanying album of the same name.

“He hated it. He just did it to sell records,” Martini told Selvin. “The whole album was called Dance to the Music, dance to the medley, dance to the shmedley. It was so unhip to us. The beats were glorified Motown beats. We had been doing something different, but these beats weren’t going over. So we did the formula thing. The rest is history and he continued his formula style.” But as Miles Marshall Lewis wrote in his book about Riot for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, “By the introspective, mournful There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Sly didn’t give a fuck about people pleasing, which is also largely the album’s tale in a nutshell.”

Ironically, “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa” is the only real band performance by the Family Stone that appears on Riot. (Errico said it’s the one track on the album where he can hear his drumming.) It was supposedly recorded in ‘69 around the same time as the original “Thank You,” after Sly moved from San Francisco to L.A. That’s when the band began to splinter.

Robinson and Martini moved into the Phillips mansion in the fall of 1970, but the rest of the band kept their homes in the Bay Area. They’d travel to Bel Air to record their parts when requested, but as Sly became more isolated and arrogant, he’d keep them waiting around in the house until he was ready to see them. Errico quit sometime during the Riot sessions, fed up with the drugs and the canceled concerts and the endless waiting, leading Sly, the musical innovator, to employ the Rhythm King drum machine on tracks like “Family Affair,” “Poet,” and “Time.”

Time — which “needs another minute (at least),” according to the song — was another source of pressure for Sly. Epic Records, realizing a new album wasn’t coming anytime soon, released Greatest Hits in time for the Christmas shopping season in 1970, adding “Thank You,” “Everybody Is a Star,” and the band’s other post-Stand! single, “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” to the track listing. (They had hoped those songs would be part of a new album ready for release in early 1970. Sly had other plans.) The quickie compilation was a smash success, putting further pressure on Sly to come up with a new album that could rival or even top it.

In the meantime, everyone would have to wait. He didn’t allow clocks in the Phillipses’ mansion, and when Sly, clearly stoned, ignored Dick Cavett’s attempts to sign off at the end of his own show on June 8, 1971, by imploring him to “Wait a minute, man,” the talk-show host finally had to say “Time marches on!” over the exit music. Sly had already shown up late for the live broadcast, forcing Cavett to kill time on air. (He wasn’t asked back.)

“Take your time / But you’ve got a limit,” Sly sings, the second line possibly a veiled apology to everyone who was fed up with him. The man hadn’t lost his sense of humor — his yodeling on “Spaced Cowboy” offers some comic relief even if the growls he interjects remind you of the somewhat frightening company you’ve chosen to keep — but his jokes were bleaker this time around. Side one of Riot closes with the title track, whose running time on the LP is listed as “0:00.” Time, it appears, has run out. Or did the stopwatch never start? “I did it because I felt there should be no riots,” Sly once said of the nonexistent track. Or maybe the riot in question was always meant as a laugh riot and nothing more, with Sly’s growing audience the butt of the joke — Riot was the band’s only album to reach #1, after all.

However, it’s hard not to wonder if Sly was inspired by the Last Poets, the hip-hop forebears whose spoken-word number “Run, Nigger” was featured on their 1970 self-titled album:

Time is running out on our natural habits
Time is running out on lifeless serpents reigning over a living kingdom
Time is running out of talks, marches, tunes, chants, and all kinds of prayers
Time is running out of time

Sly also indicates that time has run out (on the ideals of the ’60s? on the Family Stone? on music?) when he sings “Timber … all fall down!” in “Africa Talks to You,” a fairly explicit rejection of Stand! Those who still believe in the Summer of Love get a reprimand as well: “Watch out, ’cause the summer gets cold / When today gets too old!” Only the “Brave & Strong” survive.

In Jeff Kaliss’s 2008 book I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone, Sly himself says that record executives weren’t just pressuring him to manage his time properly: “People were coming from all different kinds of record companies. People were talking to different people in the group, and telling me that I didn’t need this person or that person, or telling [the group's members] how they didn’t need this or that person. They break you up so they can have different concerts every night, and make everybody different stars, with different record sales.” Even so, it’s hard to deny that the main force behind the gradual breakup of Sly & the Family Stone was none other than Sly himself.

On January 9, 1980, a full decade after “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” entered the Top 40, Sly was a guest once again on The Mike Douglas Show. A clip of his appearance, which pops up near the end of The Skin I’m In, shows actress Valerie Harper, Douglas’s cohost for the week, staring slack-jawed at an almost incomprehensible, drugged-out Sly, who sounds like he’s imitating a vocoder as he says, “I’m gonna do one more album real quick, and if it’s not instantly platinum …” He pauses, shakes his head, then sings the words “Bye, y’all, bye, y’all.”

True to his word, Sly recorded only one more album, 1983’s underwhelming Ain’t But the One Way, which was completed by producer Stewart Levine without Sly’s input — he’d gone AWOL after the initial sessions in ‘81 and couldn’t be found (or maybe Warner Bros., his label at the time, decided it would cost less to finish the album without his increasingly unreliable talents). He surfaced in time to promote One Way on Late Night With David Letterman, but even the album’s cover had to be created without him: the camouflage hat he’s wearing appears to be the same one from his 1980 Mike Douglas Show appearance.

The most striking song on One Way is “Ha Ha, Hee Hee,” which includes one of the most directly reflective verses in Sly’s discography:

Ha ha, hee hee
Nothing to do
You beat the genius in you
But who cares if you are through
Or do
You’ll never miss it

Too bad the person doing the reflecting isn’t Sly — “Ha Ha, Hee Hee” was written by longtime musical associate Pat Rizzo. Sly had already checked out.

“Time is here to stay,” he sang in 1971, on “Runnin’ Away.” But he obviously couldn’t make that promise himself.

Just Like a Baby
Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa

President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a decision that instantly created controversy. For one thing, Tina Fey wasn’t even nominated. For another, Obama’s been president less than nine months, and had only been in office for 12 days when his nomination was submitted.

In case you’re wondering who nominated him, NobelPrize.org states, “The names of the nominees and other information about the nominations cannot be revealed until 50 years later.” So if you’re an anti-birther or anti-taxer or anti-tolerater, the answer is: the Forces of Evil. (And if you’re wondering how I know about Tina Fey, sorry, but I’m not sharing my peyote with you.)

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which chooses the winner each year, explained that “Obama has as a president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.” According to the Associated Press, committee member and Norwegian politician Aagot Valle added that this year’s prize should be seen as “support and a commitment for Obama.”

The president, for his part, was humble about his victory. “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many transformative figures that have been honored by this prize,” he said. “I will accept this award as a call to action.”

But just a few hours before Obama’s victory was announced, he stood idly by as NASA tried to blow up the moon! From what I can gather, the U.S. space agency’s $79 million rocket was supposed to poke a giant hole in the Alan Shepard Memorial Golf Course, at which point all the water inside the moon would rain down on Earth — because the moon is up above and we’re down below and that’s how gravity works — thereby solving our planet’s impending water crisis.

Unfortunately, the expected Michael Bay-style cloud of ice and dust never materialized, leaving terrestrial blow-’em-up enthusiasts with only a small white flash on the moon’s surface to ogle through their telescopes. Kaboom-o-philes immediately voiced their dissatisfaction on Twitter — where intelligent discourse occasionally rises above the level of which soup users are eating to ward off swine flu — while the Man in the Moon posted his own message seconds later: “something just hit me n the ass & it stings like hell. omg, i am so not n the mood, ya’ll! WTF???”

Though the president hasn’t officially declared war on the moon yet, the U.S. is still trying to finish off the previous administration’s leftovers in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention discouraging Johnny Depp and Disney from filming the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie anywhere near Somalia.

Giving Obama the Peace Prize for the peace he might help bring about in the next three years sounds suspiciously like when parents give a teenager a new car as a bribe for good grades. “Barry, do you promise to achieve peace in the Middle East if we give you this prize?” In lieu of results, the Nobel committee accepts IOUs. (In case anyone from the Pulitzer committee is reading this, I promise my writing will improve if you give me a prize.)

I don’t mean to rain on the president’s parade, but I have a feeling that the Nobel outsiders are still trying to get the attention of that sexy bad boy George W. Bush. Sure, he’s a bully and not that smart, but boy howdy, what a smirk!

Two years ago they gave the Peace Prize to Al Gore, Bush’s Democratic opponent in the 2000 presidential election, and now Obama gets it. I mean, it ain’t like that mention of “the role that the United Nations … can play” was subtle by any means. Just let it go, Norway. I’m sure other democracy-hating democracy promoters (President Bush was nothing if not cleverly ironic) will come along eventually.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the entire Scandinavian subcontinent just felt bad for Obama because he couldn’t help his adopted hometown of Chicago win bragging rights to the 2016 Summer Olympics on October 2. I guess he didn’t trash his hotel room in Copenhagen last week or yell at any pastry chefs for getting his Danish order wrong, ensuring that Scandinavia would give him another prize a week later just so he’d make a return visit. Obama doesn’t court celebrity, but if those Scandinavians need a charismatic famous person to brighten their sunshine-free days, I don’t see any reason why we should stand in their way.

And speaking of celebrities, Obama needs to be careful that he doesn’t turn into the Jennifer Hudson or Affleck-and-Damon of Nobel Peace Prize recipients. Hudson won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her first film, 2006’s Dreamgirls, but her backstory — an American Idol reject who was expected to become a footnote to pop-culture history — was much more interesting than her performance.

Similarly, Good Will Hunting (1997) is an entertaining, feel-good drama, but Ben Affleck and Matt Damon most likely won the Best Original Screenplay award because of their off-screen trajectory: best friends since childhood (and tenth cousins, once removed, according to the New England Historic Genealogical Society), they wrote a movie for themselves to star in that quickly turned the duo into A-list leading men. Hooray for Hollywood! (Affleck’s first film after winning the Oscar in ‘98 was Michael Bay’s Armageddon, in which NASA sends oil riggers, i.e. real men like George W. Bush, into space to blow up an asteroid.)

And hooray for our president, but most importantly, hooray for the United States, because for the majority of this decade our international reputation hasn’t been so hot. Jennifer Hudson’s life as an actor may take a backseat to her singing career, and Affleck and Damon will probably never write another screenplay together, so all President Obama has to do is make good on at least some of his promises for peace and he’ll be ahead of the game — at least the kind of game played by real celebrities, who have nothing to do with the fate of the nation, no matter what E! News tells us.

Before I go, I do have one complaint: The Nobel committee said that it “attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” Good for him, but 22 years ago Superman gave his all to rid the world of nuclear weapons, only to be completely shut out during awards season!

Instead the 1987 Peace Prize was given to Oscar Arias Sánchez, who as president of Costa Rica signed peace accords to promote democracy in Central America. That’s great and all, but Superman gathered all the world’s nuclear weapons into a big net and threw them into the sun. Why wasn’t that noteworthy enough for a Nobel prize?

Of course, the resulting shock waves from the explosion of thousands of nuclear weapons in the heart of the sun should’ve been large enough and violent enough to incinerate everything and everyone on Earth and beyond. Luckily for us, Superman was stuck with low-budget special effects in 1987, much like NASA in 2009.

In fact, most Americans are having to make do with low budgets these days. The international community may be expecting President Obama to address the problems of peace around the world, but first he’ll be expected to address the peace of mind of frustrated constituents here at home.

Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi TV reporter who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad last December, was released from prison on September 15 after serving nine months of a one-year sentence. (Throwing a shoe at a person is considered highly disrespectful in Islamic culture.) Immediately hailed as a hero in the Arab, Muslim, and NPR-listening worlds last winter for his act of defiance — he yelled “This is your farewell kiss, you dog!” and “This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!” as he hurled each shoe at Bush — al-Zeidi emerged from prison into a world with a new American president and a decreased U.S. military presence in his home country. Now, in a loosely translated Popdose exclusive, he speaks out about his experience.

When I went into prison last year, I was 29 years old. Now I am 30 years old. I am a man now, and in prison I was the man, as you Americans say. People made T-shirts. A game on the Internet called Sock and Awe was created by people with much time on their hands. (It is fun. Play it. You could waste your life in worse ways.) And the video of me throwing my shoes at President George Bush “went viral,” I was told. My prison guards even threw me a birthday party in January. They gave me bright green shoes with holes on the top side that are called Crocs. It was amusing at first.

Many things can change in a short amount of time, however. The zeitgeist — it has shifted. The world has moved on. My people say to me, “The sectarian violence is not like it was, Muntadhar, and this new American president, unlike the previous one, he has a brain.”

Now there is a very bad crime wave, however, and it is led by the same people who almost pushed Iraq into a civil war. They cannot find jobs, so they kidnap and demand ransoms instead. Learn new skills, gentlemen. Take computer classes. Oh, that is right, I have forgotten — there is no electricity to run the computers! Carry on then, sectarian thugs.

Let me make a thing clear right here and now — I do not regret throwing my shoes at Little Bush. If I am given another opportunity to throw shoes at him, I shall bring clown shoes so big they cannot possibly miss his thick head! If I were to be granted access to Imelda Marcos’s bottomless pit of footwear, I would throw all 3,000 pairs at the man who tried to take over my country just so his presidential limousine never runs out of gas! Spiked heels facing forward, but of course.

I would like to address a particular thing, if I may. People said I was a hero around the whole wide world for what I did that day in 2008, but I do not think I am a hero, and I was not looking for attention, I promise you of that.

Some of my fellow journalist reporters think I was trying to make myself the story. That is not true. They say, “He is a TV reporter. He likes to shock people. Sensationalism is his game, and that is also its name. It keeps people watching. Now watch me as I roll my eyes at him.” Hey there, fellow journalists, let me ask you this, however — if you wanted to be neutral and without bias, why did you pull me to the ground after I threw the shoes? When you did that, you became part of the story. Think about that and take two and then you call me in the morning, okay? Yes, thank you.

My anger was allowed by me to get the better part of me. I do not disagree with those who think that opinion. I do disagree with those who think I was trying to make “Muntadhar al-Zeidi” a name in households around the world. If “Muntadhar al-Zeidi” is now a name that trips off the tongue the way I hope that Little Bush and Dark Lord Cheney trip off a cliff on K2 in Pakistan, I do not mind. If Bush and Cheney fall on Osama bin Laden, that will be good too. Two birds or more with one stone, as you Americans say it.

Of course, however, if you kill bin Laden, the poster boy for Little Bush’s “war on terror” is gone. Little Bush is gone now, yes, but the Dark Lord Cheney will never go away. After he dies, his ghost spirit will possess a new politician or overmedicated chat-show host. Evil never dies — it just changes its name to patriotism and starts over again. President Obama, watch out for yourself. The Cheney specter haunts your house! (Do not be afraid of the Arlen Specter, however, unless he switches parties again.)

In prison we watched W., the movie about Little Bush. Movie director Oliver Stone, was I meant to laugh or cry? Take the S off your surname and you have my main problem with your movie. You are like American military forces in the Middle East — all over the map!

I kid, I kid. But seriously, W. has major tonal inconsistencies. (Four stars, film critic Roger Ebert? I shall lightly brush you with baby shoes if we ever meet.)

However, I was unprepared for Little Bush’s relationship with Big Bush. Little Bush never felt the feeling of encouragement or acceptance from his father, the president who first raped my homeland in 1991, even after Little Bush became the governor of Texas, which is not a worthless little state like New Jersey, yes?

I too know the feeling of not feeling these things. My father hated Big Bush, who never liberated us from Saddam (another evil “patriot”) like he promised. My father hoped to one day throw a pair of metal cleats at Big Bush. However, that opportunity never knocked.

When I threw my shoes at Little Bush, I did it for my people, but I cannot lie — I also did it to impress my father. When he wrote to me in prison on my 30th birthday, do you know what he said? “You missed.” When Little Bush and Big Bush talk about both being president, do you think Big Bush reminds Little Bush that he did not really win his 2000 election?

No matter where you live, you cannot please some people any of the time. I will never apologize for throwing my shoes at you, Little Bush, but maybe now perhaps, with time and reflection on my side, I can understand you a little better.

After I left prison, I read about the American politician whose name is Joe Wilson. He is lucky he is not a reporter in Iraq, do you not agree? Of course, however, if he had thrown shoes at President Obama after yelling at him, it might be a different story in your country. Freedom of speech, freedom of throwing arm — “toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe,” yes?

You have much freedom in America. Good for you, Americans. However, do not pretend everyone else in the world wants the same freedom in the same way. Do you remember the old advertisements for Nike shoes? The slogan was “Just do it.” When it comes to spreading your democracy seeds in the Middle East, ignore this advice, please. Shoes can send a strong message, but shoe slogans should never dictate foreign policy.

When things are said off the record in the world of politics, they should stay off the record. Unless I need something to write about, of course.

Last week I brought you an exclusive report on the scripted outbursts Rep. Joe Wilson almost said in place of “You lie!” when responding to President Obama’s position on illegal immigrants receiving universal health care. I obtained the list of outbursts from a congressional aide named Mark Cloth, who asked not to be identified, but I’m not a real journalist with “ethics” or “common decency” — either slip me a Benjamin or suffer the consequences.

I went ahead and used Cloth’s name, but it turns out he was using an alias inspired by Deep Throat, from All the President’s Men. He duped me, but I’m not mad. The way I see it, we both got what we wanted, and neither of us had to look at the other one naked.

On Monday the president was about to be interviewed by John Harwood when the CNBC reporter casually asked him what he thought of Kanye West’s outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night, comparing the hip-hop artist to Wilson. West had interrupted Best Female Video winner Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech by grabbing the microphone from her and complaining that Beyoncé deserved the award instead. Obama’s opinion was “He’s a jackass,” which got some laughs from people in the room, but the president quickly tried to make sure his off-the-cuff comment would stay off the record.

Yeah, right. The tape was already rolling, and Terry Moran, co-anchor of ABC’s Nightline, apparently overheard the pre-interview conversation, because he soon jumped on his Twitter account and wrote, “Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a ‘jackass’ for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT’S presidential.” And that’s unprofessional, Moron — unless you somehow got a Benjamin out of it, that is. (I wonder if he had to look at Vice President Biden naked.)

Thanks to my good friends at TMZ, who must’ve skipped journalism class the day ethics were discussed, the audio is available to anyone with an Internet connection. According to FoxNews.com, only a president who “lashes out” would make such a “stunning remark,” but if you listen to the pre-interview conversation, the president is simply reacting honestly yet lightheartedly to West’s latest attempt to grab the spotlight. Then again, if you get your news from Fox News, you may have an honest reaction of your own to what I just said: “You lie!”

Fair enough. But as my friend Beau Johnson pointed out to me this morning, “There have to be a billion Republicans who think the same thing [about what West did to red-state sweetheart Swift]. And now Obama and Rush Limbaugh have something in common!” Beau lives in South Carolina and is proud that Joe Wilson has his state’s best interests at heart, not to mention Governor Mark Sanford, whose efforts this past summer to build a bridge between Argentina and his pants were highly commendable. And now that Kanye has built a bridge between Democrats and Republicans, who can’t agree on anything else lately, this country has a real shot at progress.

That’s why we as a nation shouldn’t come down too hard on Mr. West. After all, he did apologize to Taylor Swift two days after upstaging her victory at the VMAs — first he had to talk it out with his therapist, Jay Leno — just as Wilson quickly apologized to the president for calling him a liar on September 9. And much like the illegal immigrants Wilson wants to prevent from hogging all the complimentary lollipops at the doctor’s office, West takes the thankless jobs the rest of America doesn’t want.

C’mon, don’t you wish Kanye could pop into your life every now and then to speak up on your behalf? For instance, let’s say you’ve been called into your boss’s office at work. He has some bad news — you’re being laid off. Have no fear, Kanye’s here: “Yo, mister boss man, I really like your office’s tasteful artwork, and I’m-a let you finish your severance-package talk, but [your name here] is one of the best employees of all time. One of the best employees of all time!”

Here’s another example. Your boyfriend takes you to a crowded restaurant, and right after the main course arrives, you suddenly realize he’s about to break up with you. Soon-to-be-single ladies, you could use some help from Kanye: “Yo, dude, I really like that you’re willing to shell out for Olive Garden on a Friday night, and I’m-a let you finish your fancy meal, but [your name here] is one of the best significant others of all time!” (Aimiee, if you’re reading this right now, stop. You know how you get.)

Today is the two-month anniversary of black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. being arrested by white police officer James Crowley in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Do you remember where you were on 7/16? Do you think you’ll ever be able to forget the events of that day? If your answer is no, drink a beer. Then drink another. Then drink a third one for Joe Biden, since he drank a nonalcoholic Buckler at the July 30 “beer summit” at the White House, probably so he wouldn’t end up naked in front of Terry Moran.

Gates’s arrest never should’ve happened, nor should the president’s July 22 comment that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in arresting him. Why, you ask? Because I slapped the handcuffs on racism and put it away for life back in June. Didn’t America learn anything from me?! What’s with you people?

Yes, the 2008 presidential election made us a postracial society, but my June 30 column made us a postpostracial society, which should’ve turned things kind of self-referential and meta, which in turn should’ve led to Kanye West interrupting Lucia Whalen’s phone call to the Cambridge Police Department on July 16: “Yo, 40-year-old white lady, I’m really happy that you’re doing something nice for an old white lady who thinks a middle-aged black man who walks with a cane is breaking into a house through the front door in broad daylight — and I’m-a let you finish your call — but Henry Louis Gates is one of the most respected scholars of all time! And Sergeant Jim Crowley, who I’m predicting will be on the scene in a few minutes, is one of the most colorblind cops of all time, though I mean that in a metaphorical sense because he’s taught classes on racial profiling, not a literal one!”

See, Kanye could’ve identified the real enemy in the Gates-Crowley incident: old people. The events of 7/16 never would’ve happened if that little old lady who remains anonymous to this day (Who wants to bet it was Mark Cloth’s grandma?) hadn’t stopped Whalen on the street. She claimed she didn’t have her own cell phone. A likely story!

The bottom line is that old people are living longer and longer — life expectancy in the U.S. as of 2005 was an average of 77.8 years, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, up from 75.8 in 1995 — which means they’re going to be setting up more and more of us to make “emergency” phone calls, which will lead to more and more of us having to explain to the media and the nation that no, we don’t believe in racial profiling, but yes, we do believe it’s a serious issue. (Don’t look now, but you’re getting older every second!) Besides, the need for weekly beer summits — Wilson and Obama, Kanye and Taylor, Obama and Kanye, Wilson and Mexico — is already becoming a problem.

However, the July 30 beer summit did make me wonder if a fun drinking game can be created to ease some tension: every time you’re in your car and you pass by a driver who’s been stopped for a DWB, or Driving While Black, take a drink! (Okay, so it’s a work in progress. Lemme get back to you on that one.)

Speaking of cell phones, you may remember that on July 17, one day after 7/16, I published a guest column by Murray, my lawyer/friend Dave-o’s dog, about how he wishes Dave-o would spend less time on the phone and more time with Murray. I thought it might be a good, gentle wake-up call for Dave-o, but I didn’t let him see the column before it was published. He went nuts.

He felt that Murray’s thoughts — or he thought that Murray’s feelings (whatever) — should’ve stayed off the record, and that I should’ve let him “vet” (hell yeah, pun intended!) the story first. It seems Dave-o’s been receiving some pretty nasty e-mails and phone calls from SICEM, the Society of International Canine Enthusiasts and Mercenaries, and they’re not too happy about the so-called “psychological torture” he’s been inflicting on Murray by ignoring him on their walks.

Dave-o was threatening to sue me, so my girlfriend, the aforementioned Aimiee, convened a beer summit — Murray was the designated driver, so he only had a Buckler, for PETA’s sake — and I agreed to not publish another Sugar Water about my personal life until September. So, to all of you who’ve been writing me e-mails and accusing me of procrastinating the past two months, all I have to say is that you didn’t know the whole story. Or, as Joe Wilson might say: “You lie!”

In August 1’s New York Times, Bob Herbert wrote an op-ed piece about Gates’s arrest. “The very first lesson that should be drawn from the encounter between Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is that Professor Gates did absolutely nothing wrong,” he wrote. “You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don’t like what you’re saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.”

You can also yell at the president of the United States, as Rep. Joe Wilson did, but just like in any other situation, whether you’re on the record or off, it’s important to watch what you say — or publish, as I learned with Dave-o and Murray.

As for Kanye West, judging by the crop-circle-type markings he’s shaved into his head, I can only assume that his many public outbursts are some sort of signal to an interstellar race, one he hopes will beam him up and take him to a place where he’ll no longer be misunderstood or accused of putting on an act.

Wait a second — Kanye … Kenya … Obama … the latest Dan Brown novel …

Ah, never mind. The latest anti-birther conspiracy theory can wait until next time.

I said last Friday I’d keep these columns short and simple from now on, didn’t I? Yeah, well … I lied.

Beau Johnson, “Walking” (from 2009’s Chill Out: Atlantic Edition, Vol. 2)
Common featuring Kanye West, “Southside” (from 2007’s Finding Forever)
Pretenders, “Thin Line Between Love and Hate” (from 1987’s The Singles)
Bunny Sigler, “I Lied” (from 1996’s The Best of Bunny Sigler: Sweeter Than the Berry)