Here is Katy Perry karaoke-rapping Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “N****s in Paris,” because, I don’t know, a search engine became sentient and demanded it, maybe? Anyway: It is, like this needs to be said, shit of the cray variety. The first time you watch it, it’s actually suspenseful — what is Katy Perry, a German/Portuguese/Irish person, going to say when she gets to the two points in the song where the word “n****” appears in the lyrics? Will she say “n****”? Will she say nothing? Did she think she’d get away with this because she did it in England? Or because five years ago she put out a song called “Ur So Gay” and barely anybody got mad? Why is she doing this? What’s Gucci, my killa? What’s the message, my sender? What’s that sweater-dress, Aunt Linda?
We have been over this: It’s weird when songs have that word in them, especially songs that are really fun to rap along to. When I interviewed Jay-Z last year, I asked him if he felt creeped out by how many white people seemed to like “N***** in Paris,” and if he’d ever had white people use the word to his face in the course of talking to him about the song, and if he thought maybe the reason white people liked it so much was that they liked having an excuse to say “n****.” This was one of several questions he answered by chuckling and suddenly seeming super-interested in the flavor profile of what he was eating — which in this case was fine, because I was just trying to orchestrate an amusing-post-racial-yuks moment I could use in a story and he could tell and wasn’t going to make it that easy for me. But then after a second he told me white people should just call it “Paris.” Then he ate some fish. (Original reporting! There is no substitute.)
Every week, Grantland's staff watches all 200 million videos on YouTube and picks their favorites.
Bill Simmons: I loved hockey as a kid because of hockey cards, street hockey, the Bruins and hockey fights. And not in that order. The late-1970s Bruins fought so much that my best friend, Reese, and I watched entire games while talking on the phone, just so we could enjoy the fisticuffs live over rehashing them at school the following day. The best three brawlers on those teams were Stan Jonathan (lefty, part-Indian, low center of gravity, the team's best puncher), Terry O'Reilly (a whirling dervish, also lefty, someone who threw as many haymakers as he took) and John Wensink (completely, totally, utterly insane). Wensink had a tussled afro and a bushy mustache, as well as crazy eyes that always reminded me of my Uncle Ricky's Great Dane, Jake. Whenever I played with Jake (we were the same size), Jake would occasionally get a deranged/happy/disassociated look that basically said, "I'm really enjoying this roughhousing, but part of me wants to see what would happen if I chewed off the side of your face." I never quite knew how far I could push Jake, and honestly, I didn't want to find out. That was Wensink. He wasn't the greatest fighter, but once he got riled up, all bets were off — it usually took two referees to pull him away.
Every week, Grantland's staff watches all 200 million videos on YouTube and picks their favorites.
Bill Simmons: On February 19, 1994, Saturday Night Live unleashed its single goofiest host/band pairing ever: Martin Lawrence and Crash Test Dummies. Neither would ever appear on the show again. Lawrence made his monologue so crude that SNL's producers edited it from every repeat and banned him for life. And the Crash Test Dummies were the ultimate one-hit wonder, an unassuming Canadian band whose creepy "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" song improbably became a smash hit. I remember enjoying lead singer Brad Roberts because of his extended mullet, his serial-killer wardrobe and a voice that sounded like Jame Gumb from Silence of the Lambs, but it wasn't until Roberts' SNL appearance that everything fell into place. Roberts may have been stoned out of his mind, nervous as hell, as amazed as anyone that this song had become a smash hit … we'll never know what happened. Just know that he unleashed so many crazy faces that the song inadvertently became the funniest four minutes of that SNL season.
