The Ridiculous Realitiy of Identifying as a Yo! MTV Raps Rapper

How Having to Share My Formative Years With Wiggers Generated a Dubiety for the Coddling of Spurious Subcultures

With so many people giving ungovernable amounts of attention to ridiculing those who struggle to identify themselves through gender, sexuality or even species, a failure to acknowledge a realer problem goes unchecked: White people acting black.

Essentially, it's the same as a performance in a minstrel show. The white person adorns an exaggerated rendering of a black personality to draw attention to themselves. And they do it in stereotypical ways. For instance, the old-timey blackface wearer will open their eyes wide, paint bigger lips, wear kinky hair and jerk and jive to highlight the supposed characteristics of the ‘average black person’. Equally abysmal, the modern white person contriving a black affectation will throw grammar out the window, substituting a natural flow of communication with a permanent, trending neologism littered code switch. What need for this outdated, established honky talk?

“Shit, dawg. I might be hillbilly white on da outside but on da inside I’ze Eazy muthafuckin E, muthafucka.”

You cannot exaggerate these personality-less purloiners of identity. And more inexplicably, why is this condoned? Why are we as a society allowing white people who grew up three houses down from the average honky like myself to speak and parade around like this? As a child, I lived next door to a black family. There were three children, two boys and a girl, so I got a good look into the average black Kentuckian’s life. We talked the same, we listened to Michael Jackson (it was the 80s) and we ate similar food. The only real differences were the hair products, the use of certain condiments and the amount of weekend volleyball that my black neighbors indulged, while lawn darts dominated the white backyards. Other than that everything was reasonably the same. We were from Kentucky, so some shit like the regular overuse of the word ‘ain’t’ slipped into our vocabulary. And ‘y’all’. Yes, ‘y’all’ like a motherfucker. ‘Y’all’s’ all over the goddamned place. Occasionally I’d happen upon some unique shit, like when the black girl used the term ‘crowcat’ to describe her dinner. Or that’s what I thought I heard her say. What she really said was croquette. I was dumbfounded.

“Are y’all eatin’ cats?”

“No, it’s salmon. But like a burger.”

“Oh, you mean a salmon patty.”

“Yeah, croquette.”

Beyond that, similar cadences and vernacular prevailed. This continued until around 1994, upon entering high school. Suddenly Yo! MTV Raps was all the rage and all the kids in my class who’d struggled with identity found their niche. It seemed the most white trash of kids really gravitated toward this new world of ‘black speak’. (That the dialect and fashion of midwestern and southern black youth were farcically reconfigured by east and west coast hip hop culture is also undeniable but is not the target of my ire here.) They affected the dress, the walk, even the haircuts of their most cherished rappers. You’d be sitting in class one day and the chubby, trailer trash dude you’d seen all your life with the rattail haircut dangling over the back of his farmer-tanned neck suddenly had a dope fade, baggy white tee and even baggier denims. And for some reason a slice of hair missing from his left eyebrow. And now the dude you knew all your school life as Tom was ‘T’, ya know what I’m sayin’? And fuck did this shit spread like hot sauce over a ripped open bag of pork rinds. At first you could just laugh it off. You’d watch Snoop on MTV after school and then see the tall white kid in class the next day with his hair braided and think, “What a fucking poser.”

Rise of the Wigger

But, like with any silly fad, if the chicks give it the vaginal OK, then watch the fuck out. Because once these transracial dudes found out that being fake and acting like a gangsta dickhead got you unlimited amounts of teenage tramp affection, the doors of this trend blew the fuck off. After that, like a pandemic of personality and social heritage, it spread to the point where a name was given to this scourge: Wigger.

Which, in case you have not even the modicum of basic detective abilities (or are just an asshole and want me to have to fucking type this egregious shit out), is a portmanteau meaning white ni… whoa, ya almost got me there. Let me guide you to your own conclusion without getting too loose with the ol’ pejoratives. It's like TIGGER. But NOT. Emphasis on N.

Depending on your sensibilities, this denigrating designation is just as much of a slur as its root. But I’ve never seen it that way. The word Wigger was necessary in my high school days. Because you had to have something to call these guys. They were like the worst of the black kids, only they were white, which made them worse, and more dangerous. I think every kid I knew at school who decided to go wigger-rogue on everyone’s ass was, at heart, a ruthless bully. Most were impoverished kids from broken homes who bandied together and instead of seeing their surroundings for what they were – a relatively decent mid-southern burg with a low crime rate, boasting two movie theaters, a great roller rink and Wax Works, a video game and movie rental store that could have rivaled even the biggest city’s – these wiggery blokes saw Compton, California. The treacherous reality of that crime-ridden area is one that most pastoral Caucasian stomachs could hardly bear, offering vandalism, street takeovers and muggings. It’s predominantly low-income black because of blockbusting and no telling what other nefarious government shenanigans. And many of the inhabitants of a place like Compton would have welcomed the privileges furnished to the average white youth in small-town mid-90s Kentucky. But the wiggers didn’t see it this way. They saw the rural areas as potential fight spots. With pilfered spray paint, they tagged the local Dairy Queen, letting all the rival cracker lowlife youths know that they “better know better.”

Just walking around in high school in this raggedy illusion of reality was disheartening to a goth youth like myself to say the least. Some goths paired well with the wiggers, leaving these goths to be suspect to us real darklings. Impostors!

Polaroid evidence of author’s teenage goth status, circa five years before the turn of the century.

And it can be argued that all teens choose and create themselves. And while I agree with this, it’s not like I listened to The fucking Cure and then started talking like I was Robert Smith having a tea in my British hanging garden. I wasn’t walking around calling everyone guv-nuh and smoking ‘fags’. I wore black shirts, drank Surge and smoked cigarettes like a normal southern gothic youth.

More than just being another societal letdown, this trend of race-swapping really confused me. I just didn’t understand how Bobby (name changed, protect innocent, yadda yadda) a dorky, bespectacled, indigent kid who went on to be valedictorian – he said “Free” in the lunch line just like me – got ridiculed everyday on a monumental basis for fraternizing with the uncelebrated fat girls and being such a geek while the wiggers were lifted to untouchable status. You could be the ugliest kid in the school and have been a total outcast the year before but if you suddenly mixed and meshed your consonants and emphasized some vowels and wore a Wu-Tang shirt, shit, son, you’re in the In-Crowd now. Welcome aboard, you fake fuck.

Eventually this ethnic burlesque bled into the XX chromosomes demographic too, with the pasty girl seated in front of you turning around during science class and saying, “Hey, white boy,” to get your attention. “Lemme get a piece of paper, dawg.” I shudder to enumerate the many times I was called ‘white boy’ by a wigger girl when, not only were no other people of different ethnicities around, but no one other than myself was around. These wig-gerls’ intention was to condescend and demean, although I never understood how the insertion of the skin color modifier between two people of the same race was supposed to offend me. I just thought it was stupid.

And it only got worse, because in the middle of all this gangsta rap shit came a cracker from Detroit named M&M or Milky Way or something and this Zero Bar motherfucker was like the fucking messiah to these goddamned wigger bastards. After that, it was over. They were as accepted as sheets at a Klan rally, as common as horseshit at the Kentucky Derby.

And there was no point in trying to make a fuss about it. You could get your fucking ass kicked by a group of Timberlands for that because these bleached homeboys roamed in porcelain posses. If you closed your eyes while they stomped and cursed you, you could almost imagine that they were actually the black people whom they so longed to be.

And speaking of black people, fuck. You almost wanted them to come to the rescue and be like, “Nah, man. This shit is silly. Stop.”

But no. To witness the black kids condone this behavior could give a cracker apoplexy if he really spent a lot of thought on it. Discreetly, some black people were as incredulous as I was. Yet when I saw a few ebony honeys dating these white bread ass guys who deliberately talked like they were from the east side of Hell’s Kitchen when we all fucking well knew that not only had these motherfuckers never even been to

but had been born and raised in the surrounding bucolic counties of rural Kentucky – well shit, man. It was all too much. Did you hear what I typed? Most of these dudes were born out in the country. You know what that means? That means instead of traffic and the eclectic sounds of diversity, they heard cows mooing and birds chirping.

It means that the people who affect a way of talking, as in talking like a person of color who was raised in a place yet to be gentrified and is very hood and very crime-ridden and scary -BLACCENT - are fakes, phonies and thieves and should've been and/or be perceived as such. If I had shown up for school way back then and, Bruce Lee fanatic that I was, decided, at 14 years old, to talk like I was San Francisco born and China raised, everyone would’ve looked at me like I was fucking crazy. They would’ve laughed at me and chastised me until I reverted back to my whitey little hillbilly sounding self.

Jeet Cure Do

But because it was cool, all the teenage wiggers I attended school with got a racial hall pass to fakery, pretending to be just like their idols in broad daylight. Even as adults they still walk amongst us, spattered about here and there, faded and reluctant to release the deflating balloon of yesteryear into the skies of reality. White guys walking tough, talking in an ever evolving (or devolving, if you please) version of what psychologist Robert Williams coined as Ebonics in 1973. They've fused into the façade and if a person really dives into shit, some people will accept it. Or pretend to. It really does take two fakes to tango. It’s fucking mind-boggling. And while all the world is affronted by trans rights, gender neutral bathrooms, steampunk furries, obscure 90s anime cosplayers and neo-victorians with their cottagecore offspring and calling these people out for having histrionic personality disorders and being disingenuous, I am still pleading to be answered the epochal question:

What in the fuck-shit was and is with this wiggery fuckery?

I expect no answer. Like god, like freedom, like love – people need it fake. Maybe fakery is god. It sure has quite the following.

---

The Ballad of Michael Massee

A Career Defined by Tragedy

When the movie Seven came out, I was riding high on my teenage goth horse.

I had my dark music, my black clothes, my black hair and my fucking horror movies. And I saw them all. On VHS too, and that shit wasn’t easy back when you had to track down physical copies of shit in the desert landscape of smalltown pre-internet boom America. But it was fun. And occasionally you chanced upon some rad shit, like when I found The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on VHS in a little book and music store. I snapped that bitch up and me and my buddy watched the fuck out of that bad girl while getting high and rehearsing our stillborn punk band.

Gore and music was all I lived for.

So hearing the soundtrack for Seven, with the awesome Gravity Kills track ‘Guilty’ and the cavity worthy ear candy (Precursor) mix of NIN’s ‘Closer’ at the beginning of the film, I knew I needed to watch this movie. And with the disgusting imagery, mind-bending storyline and Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt supplying an awesome, alternate 1985 rendition of Lethal Weapon’s Murtaugh and Riggs, it thrilled me from start to credits. But one actor in particular stood out.

Michael Massee in 1995’s Seven.

“I know that dude,” I said to my teenage self, watching the film fresh off the New Release wall at Wax Works, the now defunct VHS rental mecca of my youth. My room was dark, lit only by the television (a little square Magnavox you wouldn’t be caught dead watching nowadays) and the cherry of my perennial cigarette. The dude in question was none other than Top Dollar’s main assassin, Funboy.

I was alone. And there was no one to share this tidbit with. It was l996 and back then when you were alone, you were fucking-a alone. No messaging a buddy about the neat movie trivia you’ve just happened upon. No post-bragging your newfound filmographic wisdom onto some social media platform page and waiting for the positive reacts to roll in. Back then you made your discovery and unless you felt like walking to the phone which hung on a nail in the wall in the hall, you just hoped you’d remember the info until the next time you happened upon another human.

But there was no doubt about it. That was him.

I’d just watched a scene where a dude is being interrogated after fucking some chick to death with a knife strap-on.

So that was weird. Then seeing the face of the other man in the adjacent interrogation room, being questioned by Pitt, connected this movie to my teenage favorite film, The Crow. There were already multiple links: the dark cinematography, the goth music, the violence. And now there was this dude. I decided to see what his name was when the credits rolled. I’d never bothered to look when watching The Crow. It seemed like he wasn’t a real person outside of film when watching The Crow, but more of an actual character who only existed in the movie. Until now, he was just Funboy. But actually –

The credits rolled. Backwards. In a weird ass font. To David Bowie’s ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’.

There it was.

Man in Booth at Massage Parlor - Michael Massee

He was a real person.

An actor. Someone who did this professionally to make a living. Funboy was just a character he played. A depiction of a comic book villain created by James O’barr and turned into an action film by director Alex Proyas. It was a portrayal that Massee himself would never watch. And as great as The Crow is, I understand why Massee wouldn’t want to see it. Who would want to sit and view any movie knowing that, because of this film, you now had to live with being forever known as the person who accidentally shot Bruce Lee’s son to death?

Three times was not the charm.

The Crow was Michael Massee’s third film credit and would haunt him until his death at age 64 from stomach cancer. I can’t help but wonder if the anxiety that such a traumatic event induced on the actor did not in some way manifest the disease.

Although he was born in Kansas City, Missouri, Massee had a very foreign look.

Being raised in France may have contributed to his Western European aura. His defined, taut build in The Crow is reminiscent of soccer stars from that region and also of Iggy Pop, who was initially given the role of Funboy. Iggy couldn’t do the film, however, because of the tour for his American Caesar album. Although not my favorite offering from Iggy, it’s a safe bet that it’s one of Iggy’s. Imagine an alternate world where Iggy did not write the album and was not touring and took the part. Then we’d have a scenario where Iggy Pop shot and killed Brandon Lee, which is even more unthinkable than the reality of the situation. And if you’re into that kind of What If? comic book shit, put River Phoenix or Christian Slater in the mix of possibilities, both of whom turned down the role of Eric Draven. Or add Johnny Depp, specifically requested to be Draven by the creator of The Crow himself.

envisage Iggy Pop shooting & killing one of these three...

So weird to imagine the different scenarios.

Painful regardless because Brandon Lee was on his way to becoming one of the biggest stars on the planet. Although his dad is listed as having been around 5’8” and his mother is 5’7”, Brandon Lee stood at 6’. He’d already starred in decent action flicks like Showdown in Little Tokyo and Rapid Fire holding his own alongside good actors like Drago-Dolph Lundgren and Jim Jones himself, Powers Boothe. Brandon had just turned 28 on the set of The Crow. He was still young, had a smile that stretched for days and looked at home in a suit and tie or eased back on a Harley. And his physique rivaled his father’s, none other than the legend Bruce Lee. That’s the other thing about Brandon and The Crow’s mystique. Here you have this California dude who is dashingly handsome with his half-Asian dark eyes and hair and perfectly hued skin tone who just happens to be the son of the world’s most renowned mixed martial artist. And then he’s starring in a goth masterpiece that all but allocates a part of him for the masses like a deck of cards. Pick any, you’ll get a different facet of Brandon, accepted by all. If only he’d lived, social media and the thriving UFC scene would’ve kowtowed to him with his diverse background and charisma. I bring all that up only to hammer home how devastating it was to be the guy on the other end of the gun that killed him. All because of a dummy bullet cap that somehow got stuck in the firearm during a previous discharge and just happened to break free on set on March 30, 1993 and strike Brandon, ending all that could have been, leaving poor Massee standing there holding the gun for the rest of his days.

Go into any mall and where there’s a Hot Topic, you’ll find Brandon.

Go anywhere where there’s martial arts, you’ll find his father. They’re everywhere, two legends who must have haunted Massee anytime he saw them. Even in interviews you could see it all over his face. The pain and guilt resulting from something that was not his fault. It was not Michael who fucked up the prop gun. It wasn’t him who changed the script that day from Eric Draven being stabbed to Eric being shot. James O’barr suffered tragedy and steeled himself against the pain as much as possible with art. That art got turned into a movie. Iggy Pop recorded an album and off on tour he went and couldn’t take a role (he’d later appear in The Crow: City of Angels as Curve). Michael took the role, took the gun, took direction from Alex Proyas, and accidentally took a life.

Even in the movie Seven you could still see it in his eyes.

Massee’s haunted face seems to wonder out loud, “Are they thinking it? Are they thinking about when I shot Brandon?” Even before that, as Newton the cop in Tales From the Hood, you can see the ghost of regret in his pores. Only in the movie Lost Highway does he almost look composed and normal. But then again, that’s a David Lynch film full of social anomalies such as Robert Blake (accused of murdering his wife) and Marilyn Manson (accused of everything Satanic), so he probably didn’t feel too out of place on the set.

Massee as Newton in Tales From the Hood & as Andy in Lost Highway, respectively.

When he died on October 20, 2016, the twenty-three years separating him from the day he shot Brandon Lee offered not even a sliver of buffer.

The articles and posts surrounding his death only mentioned that he accidentally killed Brandon Lee. That was his legacy. And he must have known that on the set, the instant that the cast and crew realized that Brandon was not acting. That Bruce Lee’s son, the next big actor to take over Hollywood, was really dead and the person who did it, through no negligence of his own, now carried the weight of being the killer. It’d be no picnic for Massee if he was still alive today. In the aftermath of the Rust shooting that ended director Halyna Hutchins’ life, you can only surmise that the media would have deluged Massee for comments, comparisons to Alec Baldwin erupting following the October 21st, 2021 mishap. Massee had a wife and two kids and there’s no telling the torment and scrutiny that besiege them anytime there is an accident on a film set.

Michael Massee was a respected actor with a unique enough look to find plenty of work. But it’s often not just the work people of ambition seek. Or even legacy. It’s wanting to be known in the moment for something that’s a little better than good. And nothing could be worse than being so close to that and having it all besmirched at no fault of your own in such horrific and public fashion. The weight to give up and leave his acting career behind must have been tremendous.

Let's say you're a musician.

Imagine you're given a guitar onstage. You do not know that it is a cursed instrument. You strum it and the lead singer falls over dead. Would you have the courage to play ever again? Would you still love music? Would you have the strength to get a new band together?

Michael Massee had and did. He played through the pain, searching for notes of self-forgiveness. There's a lot of people in his band. You may know some of the members or you may be one yourself. A supergroup strumming through the days, trying to live down these harsh ballads of mistakes in a world that prides itself on its precise aural recall.

A Distorted Reality With An Elliott Smith Soundtrack

Restaurant Work Liaisons, Depression in Your 20's & the Dissolution of Friendships

I know I’m in a weird place because I’ve been listening to A LOT of Elliott Smith.

And that is not a good sign. I guess I’ll come up out of it. Then I’ll slip right back. Everyone knows the routine. It’s a weird life. It’s as weird as it’s ever been. But I’m amazed at the consistency of my life at the moment. If I just don’t snap and fuck it up and keep going I think I can do something with this. It’s late, I understand that, but it’s always possible to start anew. And make something. But I’m just trying not to fuck it up. I reckon that’s what everyone I know thinks I’ll do. 

 

He’s acting dumb but that’s what you’ve come to expect.

— Needle in the Hay

You gotta love Elliott Smith.

Bad skin, addiction, a voice and lyrics so ethereal and unreal, like a Percy Bysshe Shelley with a guitar. He had that look in his eyes that you see in the mirror when you catch your reflection off guard and see how you really feel. It’s a rattling moment, to understand you’re just not happy. When you have everything you need and things are going well and you’re still not good – what a trepidatious sensation. Because you’re innately aware that when the edges of this unpredictable life fray – and they will sooner or later – it’s not going to take much to push you into that cavern of despair. You can’t claw your way out. Your nails break off when you try. You can’t scream for help, because no one’s listening. You can’t do anything but sit in your cavern and hope it passes. Sometimes it goes in a day or so. But sometimes it doesn’t. It smashes you for days and weeks. And then there are the Elliott Smith fans who understand that sometimes this feeling of being isolated at a table for one, served a freezing dish of nothingness with strong hints of despair, never goes away.

I traded a smoke for a food stamp dollar / Ridiculous marching band started playing / Got me singing along with some half-hearted victory song.

— Rose Parade

It never lessens, only temporarily worsens. Either way it’s constant, an unrelenting grip of blackbelt jiu jitsu proportions. Flavors go out the window. Calendars seem infinite. The next moment their pages have flipped past like those of an engaging novel. Sex, if it’s even worth seeking out in these times, is either perfunctory just to expel the need or it’s life-threateningly dangerous, unprotected and weird just to give life a smidge of spice, if only for a regrettable (or not, hey!) moment. In the midst of one of his many drug binges, a longtime friend of mine recommended a track that jumpstarted my revisiting of Smith. My friend had moved to Appalachia after a stint in a mental institution to get away from drugs. After a highspeed chase with the police and being pronounced mentally incompetent, he escaped a jail sentence and earned himself a monthly stipend of $1800 thanks to a ‘crazy check’.

I’m floating in a black balloon / O.D. on Easter afternoon.

— A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity to Be Free

Thus enriched, he rode out a lengthy stay at a halfway house filled with on the edge folks for six months and finally found a forever home in the backwoods nothingness of Eastern Kentucky. I went up there to visit him. I lost cell phone reception so completely that my phone had amnesia when I got back to civilization. I had to do a hard restart to get it working again. That place, though absurdly far away from cell towers and anything fun outside of bars and barns, was the ideal spot for my recovering friend to relapse like a fucking motherfucker and hunker down in his rural apartment doing nothing but ingesting the saddest of sad bastard music while watching muted MMA fights. That’s all he did. And not just sporadic, Spotify suggested shit but discographies at a time. Alphabetically. He kept me informed via FB messenger on his progress. When he got to E – his system evolved into using a solo artist’s first initial to determine their place in his listening queue – the moment arrived when he inevitably got to Elliott Smith. So somewhere between Death in June and The Flaming Lips, on the outskirts of the middle of absolutely nowhere, my pal sat on his couch in his apartment and pressed play.

I’m going out sleepwalking / Where mute memories start talking / The boss that couldn’t help but hurt you / And the pretty thing you made desert you.

— 2:45 AM

When we were teens, my friend had rad, long brown hair that I always admired compared to my Jew fro. Time had been an absolute motherfucker to my friend. He wasn’t so good to himself, either. All of his rad hair fell out, scalped by drugs and stress. He got fat, gorging on Denny’s pancakey-splattered-with-the-affiliated-color-of-whatever-holiday-lurked-around-the-corner carbs, sugar-water fountain drinks and processed garbage.

It’s okay. It’s all right. Nothing’s wrong.

— Waltz #2

He smoked like Blonde on Blonde era Bob Dylan, one after the other, until his two front teeth mirrored the cracker-lipped brown stained end of the cigarette butt he sucked on. Just a disgusting slobby blob my friend had rendered himself, but it was ideal shape for a guy dedicated to listening to music while watching mixed martial arts on a silent television. Why he got into that shit, I’ll never know. He never had a proclivity to violence. I’d never heard him express any interest in watching people fight. But he got a hankering for the sport out of nowhere and it helped him pass the melancholic, apocalyptic edge of nothingness nights.

Though the interest in combative sports came as a surprise, my friend’s intense depression didn’t.

He was always a half-sad fucker as far back as I can remember, a darkness stemming from his older brother being killed by a drunken driver. So he developed an intimate knowledge of music that leaned in the gloomy direction and Elliott Smith’s ballads of lost, complicated love were no exception. When he got to the Elliott Smith portion of his alphabetical listen-a-thon, a small light beamed through his messages. Sometimes, and it’s weird but it’s true, it’s nice to feel sad. Especially when a master can meld lyrics and melody like Elliott and provide your shit-feelings with an equally disquieting soundtrack.

His messages usually rolled in around 1:30 AM or so and I, the sporadic insomniac, typically responded to them promptly.

On the night that he rekindled my Smith interest, he sent a YouTube vid for the Beatles-esque track ‘A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity to Be Free’. It electrocuted me. Acid, weed and the free-range thinking and serrated realizations that follow were all encapsulated into a somehow self-affirming song. The guitars, the vocals – it’s a psychedelic trip through disenchanted despondency. Back then, I had never bothered listening to much of From a Basement On the Hill. I’d given it a cursory spin, nipping at tracks here and there. I stopped my Smith explorations around Either/Or, having really dug The Royal Tenenbaums-recommended ‘Needle in the Hay’ off his self-titled release. So having overlooked the gem that is ‘Distorted Reality’, I re-listened to the tracks that I knew I loved like ‘Independence Day’ and gave Elliott a new whirl to see what other wonders I’d neglected.

1994's Roman Candle, 1995's Self-Titled, 1997's Either/Or, late 1997's Good Will Hunting Soundtrack, 1998's XO, 2000's Figure 8, 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums Soundtrack, 2004's From a Basement on the Hill

Of course I wasn’t disappointed. But then again I was. But not in the music. But definitely disappointed in something. Because no one gravitates toward this music because they’re happy. Shit’s gotten weird, shit’s gotten sad, and shit’s getting shittier. Yet you persist.

I’ll fake it through the day with some help from Johnny Walker Red.

— Miss Misery

You put up the good fight, albeit by using drugs and alcohol as weapons. Another primary armament is the fucking of weird chicks – or dudes if that’s your penchant. And that’s the Elliott Smith fan. It’s that chick who seems sweet but her jeans are a little too distressed and her makeup a little too heavy and she keeps lighting cigarettes and her laughter never tapers off. It just stops and she resumes the hollowness. She schedules abortions and puts cigarettes out on herself. She fucks around with shit-dudes and does her shift at the chain dine-in restaurant and spends her tips on drinks, cigs and pills. And then there’re the dude fans who get DUI’s, fuck girls who aren’t that interesting or pretty but are willing to fuck. The dudes have court dates, have to move back in with their parents, and can usually be seen walking down the main drag in the rain when they can’t get a lift home after having a few pitchers of beer at the local pizzeria. Sometimes these dudes and chicks meet up and that shit’s fun for a while but it usually ends in tears or handcuffs or both. At the end of the day, as the song goes, it’s all a Ballad of Big Nothing.

All spit and spite / you’re up all night and down every day.

— Ballad of Big Nothing

In a track which he claimed he wrote while watching Xena: Warrior Princess on mute, Elliott says, “Drink up baby / Stay up all night / With the things you could do / You won’t but you might,” and it sums up the majority of underachieving and depressed people in their mid-twenties. I’m not lost on the similarities of my sad, fat friend in his late thirties sitting on a couch watching MMA warriors on mute while listening to music. But therein lies the difference between a genius songwriter and a drug addict music consumer. One’s self-constructing while the other’s self-destructing.

But ‘Between the Bars’ isn’t in any capacity relegated to chubby fight fans who’ve let their depression catch up with them.

Instead, it captures that moment in life, mid-twenties, stuck in this murky sadness where you keep a perpetual buzzed hungover and try to avoid lucidity at all costs because the reality of things turning out all wrong is just too goddamned prevalent in your every direction. I remember courting a waitress at a Steak n Shake in this phase of mine – hers as well. I remember her being so gorgeous and sad and lost. And you could tell as she stood in the breakroom smoking a menthol and rummaging through her purse for her anxiety meds that she’d never pull out of it. One day she’d have kids and her shit would drip all over them. On and on. I remember that time so well now because it was then that I first heard what I consider to be one of Elliott Smith’s finest songs, ‘Twilight’. I was drunk day and night, she was destroying herself, this track was in my mind constantly, and it was snowing. It’d been fitting to’ve heard ‘Angel in the Snow’ at that time, but I hadn’t. But ‘Twilight’ captured the scene well enough because I had an on and off again girl and the waitress had a guy who mistreated her.

She’s a pretty thing / And she knows everything / but I’m already somebody’s baby.

— Twilight

And as bleak as it all was she was pretty fucking gorgeous and those moments when the alcohol peaked and she leaned in and whispered something only for my ears in a crowded bar – damn it if that’s not a special kind of sadness. The kind you want to pull in close and hold, just like these sad songs.

The origin of this particular type of sadness can be traced back to rural places like Elliott’s birthplace of Nebraska.

You spring forth from these weird, little nothing landscapes and it just freezes your heart in a layer of granite-like ice. Very cold, very impenetrable. Nothing gets in, which is good, but the sadness can never break through the surface. It beats against your chest, suffocating day after day.

A love affair came and went in that dimly lit murkiness of twenty-something year-old inebriated lostness.

Part vacuum, part chrysalis, that era in a troubled addict’s life can can turn into a rabbit hole of mistakes or be a waystation for better days that are coming. That pretty chick lost her job and floated away on the wings of Counting Crows and abusive baby daddies. Fly away, sad waitress chick. Eventually I cleaned up myself. It was difficult, but hey, it only took a decade to emerge from my cocoon and hop a train out of that bullshit lifestyle.

My sad, fat friend’s fate worsened.

He stopped checking in with sanity. What was a distorted reality became a non-reality and that’s where he’s chosen to reside. On one of those sad-ass, middle of nowhere nights, some fissure of his mind cracked. He’s just gone. Just before that we finally got around to getting into the argument that severs friendships. That one where a line is crossed and that’s that. I kind of view him like I do the movie Good Will Hunting. It’s nothing I want anything to do with, but I appreciate it for allowing someone ethereal like Elliott Smith to metamorphose into this otherwise superficial and hollow reality.

Dead at 34.

Suicide, murder, who knows. Only Elliott and the woman he loved, I guess. But man, I killed myself every time I pressed play on one of his songs while I was drunk in the middle of the night. Or he murdered me out of nowhere when he’d come on a playlist I’d forgotten. It still happens now. Every time I hear Elliott I get sad. It’s a strange longing. It’s a sadness for a different type of sadness that you once had, but can never get back. A nostalgia for a solemn, lost pain. I can still feel those miserable days from the past. I can feel the mixed emotions of being so down on my luck with despair but stepping outside and feeling the first inkling of Spring ripple through my hair and clothes. Having that weird internal tug of war where you wouldn’t mind dying but also unable to fight the thought, “Goddamn, it’s a beautiful day.” Those long lost days and nights are made up of horror and beauty. I think of them when I hear these songs. I hear the songs and think of my friend when he was still a friend.

I see you’re leaving me / And taking up with the enemy / The cold comfort of the in-between / A little less than a human being / A little less than a happy high / A little less than a suicide.

— A Fond Farewell to a Friend

We’ll never speak again. Definitely not A Fond Farewell. But I can look back and appreciate him matching my appreciation for Elliott. No other friend I have now, few as they are, can understand that musical connection. They don’t even listen to Elliott. So, on nights like this, there’s no one to whom I can mention the part in an Elliott Smith song that sounds eerily like a George Harrison guitar construction. I used to be able to tell my pal about that sort of thing, but it just didn’t work out. Such a wasted luxury is a lost friendship. Nothing highlights that more than chancing upon a tidbit about a shared interest and watching it wither because the only person who would appreciate it is no longer there.

I’ve got a joke I’ve been dying to tell you.

— Pitseleh

             Not a lot you can do but say, “Oh well. Okay.”

Church bells and now I’m awake and I guess it must be some kind of holiday /
I can’t seem to join in the celebration.

— Last Call

Ode to Kirsty MacColl

Top of the Pops and Fairytales

“When I’m in a fix I pray like fuck.”

– Shane MacGowan

When I was young I fell in love with music.

And right after that I learned that the world was full of fucking shit. But I still loved music. So I turned to punk rock and that helped. And once you get into punk music you learn about the weirdos who peppered the 1970s London subculture.

Many of these people recur when perusing Brit punk footage but it's that bloke on the bottom right ...

And then you had that guy on the floor of the Roxy at a Damned show in 1977, one Shane O’Hooligan of The Nipple Erectors. They have a great Yardbirds-esque song called, ‘All the Time in the World’ and if you’re a punk enthusiast it’s a must-listen.

Little did the world know that this raucous Irish punker would later team up with Mandy Doubt (Kirsty MacColl’s punk name while working with the Drug Addix), the daughter of a communist folk singer, to create one of the most famous Christmas songs ever. Reality is some weird ass shit.

When the Nips disbanded, Shane O’Hooligan reunited with his surname, MacGowan, and formed The Pogues.

And this is where I first discovered Kirsty MacColl. I didn’t know it until later, but I’d heard her sing a wee bit as an even wee-er lad in the early 1980s, only she was doing backup vocals for a woman who'd be instrumental in the success of The Simpsons. Said song also featured a video with one of the Fab 4. This’ll all make sense a few paragraphs from now.

First we have to get to the Top of the Pops in December of 1987.

The scene starts off innocent enough. Twinkle and dash from a sad yuletide piano with a pretty redheaded lass leaning against it. She’s attired in a way that screams 1980s sophistication. Just a lovely lady admiring the pianist. But upon closer inspection, the guy at the piano seems weird as fuck. For one thing, he’s wearing sunglasses indoors. And he’s chewing gum. And has a large earring dangling from his ear. And has on a black leather jacket. And he sounds fucking drunk. And his teeth look like he’s been digging with his mouth from an Appalachian meth quarry. In fact he doesn’t appear to be enthused about being on the Top of the Pops at all, despite it being one of the most famous BBC (that abbreviation means British Broadcasting Corporation, you debauched scoundrel) shows of all time. And while this regal lady listens longingly to him you can’t help but wonder if the dude is just gonna go on the fucking nod and faceplant into the ivory.

Yet the way he sings the lyrics, “Happy Christmas, I love you, baby,” you feel that he sincerely means this, and that all the other bizarre things about him do not take away from his performance or the sentiment therein, but emphasize it like shadow on a painting.

Then the track kicks in and suddenly you have this Irish dirge that makes you want to hop up like Charlie Bucket’s grandpa and rip open the curtains to a gorgeous snowy Christmas morn. Shane’s shades come off and he looks to Kirsty MacColl while singing. His crucifix earring flashes in the lights and suddenly you see yourself in him. You’re that guy, all shitty and bedraggled, hungover in the holy light and perfume of your girl. And you look at Kirsty and see your girl in her, a British redhead of Scottish lineage, all sweet-smelling and glammed up and you just feel lucky to be alive.

The Pogues had covered Kirsty’s father’s song, ‘Dirty Old Town’ on their second album Rum Sodomy & the Lash.

Ewan MacColl, Kirsty’s father, who wrote ‘Dirty Old Town’ and ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’.

And their third album found them teaming up with Ewan’s daughter to sing, of all things, a holiday song.

This is the third album by The Pogues. Strange indeed that on this sucker is the best Xmas song ever penned.

To watch any of MacColl’s appearances on Top of the Pops, it’s hard to believe that this is the same woman whose career stagnated due to her depression and stage fright.

Her self-assuredness and stage presence glow like a dreamy hearth. Even harder to imagine is that, initially, Shane MacGowan was to sing ‘Fairytale’ with The Pogues bass player, Cait O’Riordan. However, by the time the song got up and going she’d left the band and become Elvis Costello’s main squeeze.

Shane MacGowan and Pogues bassist Cait O’Riordan

Kirsty’s showbiz life started off portentously when her popular debut single ‘They Don’t Know’ was released around the time of a distributors’ strike.

Back in 1979, when you had to go to the record store to actually purchase a physical album in order to listen to it, not having the latest vinyl in the shop meant customers leaving with no newly released 7 inch 45 RPM singles in tow. This killed Kirsty’s chances of getting the song on the UK Singles Chart.

MacColl’s 1979 single ‘They Don’t Know’.

However, in 1983 Tracey Ullman released her album You Broke My Heart in 17 Places and she hit #2 on the UK Singles Chart with the same song. Because Ullman couldn’t reach the note, she used MacColl’s vocals on the high-pitched ‘Baby!’ in the song, in a way redeeming Miss MacColl of her stolen opportunity. I remember shopping with my parents as a kid and hearing this song in the grocery store and in the car on the radio. This song was huge and the only thing that stopped it from going number one was Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’, which dominated the charts that year. I remember seeing the ‘They Don’t Know’ video on MTV constantly and in it Ullman daydreams about Paul McCartney who makes an appearance.

The lovely Tracey Ullman and Sir Paul McCartney in the music video for 'They Don't Know'.

This was such a big a hit back then that it left me feeling Tracey Ullman was one of those people who kids born around the start of the 80s can’t imagine life without, like Madonna and Michael Jackson.

That is how many British people view MacColl too.

And I, nostalgia lover that I am, view 80s pop culture in any country as a very beautiful time.

TOTP 1981

Kirsty had other hits like ‘A New England’, ‘There’s a Guy Who Works Down the Chip Shop, Swears He’s Elvis’ (she appeared on Top of the Pops for this and looks just as cute as you remember your first serious girlfriend looking) and did backing vocals for everyone from The Smiths to Simple Minds, but ‘Fairytale’ remains her most known work. The song can’t help but shake and shock you. Shake because it’s so beatifically magical in the old time way. Shock because Miss MacColl lands the only, as far as I know, F-bomb ever sung in a Christmas song. And I’m not talking about the word Fuck here. F-bomb as in the pejorative that the jocks, whom most of you pedestalized in high school, called guys like me - you know, the bookish and sheepish guys who tried their goddamnedest to avoid bullies’ crosshairs and failed miserably - day in and day out. I’m sure I’ve been called the word more times than most actual gay people. The lyric, though jarring and and a fucking mindbender by today’s standards, contributes to the track’s strange intrigue. Shane MacGowan claims to “hate the fuckin song” but he’s glad he wrote it because now it’s his tribute to Kirsty, who was killed in 2000.

In Cozumel, Mexico, a millionaire’s powerboat went into waters not permitted to watercraft.

MacColl, who was diving with her sons, saw the powerboat just in time to save her 15 year-old, pushing him away from its direct impact. Tragically, Kirsty was run over and killed instantly. One moment she and her children were deep sea diving. The next moment her children were awash in their mother’s blood, her body surfacing next to them in the water. In the 2004 documentary Who Killed Kirsty MacColl? there is a scene that will wrench the heart of even the coldest bastard. Kirsty’s mother, Jean, travels to Cozumel to learn details about how her daughter died and the cover up surrounding the powerboat’s owner, Mexican supermarket magnate Guillermo González Nova. She asks a witness if Kirsty was mutilated by the boat. The witness tells her yes and Jean breaks down. It’s horrifying and heartbreaking to watch an elderly mother imagining her daughter dying in such an appalling and bloody way. Kirsty had just turned 41 less than two months before her death.

So it goes that on December 18, just 7 days before Christmas, the woman who sang my and several million others’ favorite Christmas song died while saving her son. Beautiful person, amazing singer and brave mother.

To listen to ‘Fairytale of New York’ is not enough.

I have to pair it with that Top of the Pops footage, magically preserved from December 1987 for us now courtesy of YouTube. I watch it and I think of myself as a young drunk stumbling through life and love during the holidays. And I look at Kirsty and all that she encompasses in that span of 3 and a half minutes. Someone’s child. A talented artist. A lover. A mother. A very courageous person.

It’s a sledgehammer reminder: life goes by real fucking quick.

And goes on without you even quicker. We’re all forgotten eventually. But it’s art that keeps the faint hope alive that maybe it doesn’t have to end just yet. Maybe we can keep some things going just a little bit longer, even if it's only celluloid and pixels propping up the drowsy chin of memory. Re-watching a performance, lip synched and applause-tracked, can make you feel what is no more. Can bring back a time or someone that is gone. Many of us don’t have the people we want here with us this holiday. They’re in a grave or an urn. Or missing. Or just gone.

I watch Kirsty through the eyes of MacGowan and I celebrate my holidays like it’s that TV performance. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best I’ve got this year. Bedraggled and out of it, I hold hands with memories and lip-synch along to the beauty of previously recorded Christmases.

As the reductionist said:

Nothing lasts forever.

Nothing lasts.

Nothing.

.

Merry Christmas, Mom.

Ernie Hudson is the Best Ghostbuster

A Superstar in the Hearts of Fans

If you loved Ghostbusters as a kid, and I know you fucking did,

then your favorite of the foursome might have been Egon because he’s so quirky and nerd-cool. Or, as was my childhood favorite, Ray. There’s something endearing about Aykroyd’s portrayal of the heart of the Ghostbusters. Maybe you were a little Casanova and appreciated the fearless womanizing of Venkman. But to a present day working class adult Ghostbusters fan (Ghostbusters fans never age out of their zeal for the film), you can’t help but be fond of the everyman’s perspective within the Ghostbusters, Winston Zeddemore.

Shockingly, Winston’s character is as underappreciated as the actor who brought him to life.

Born on December 17th, 1945 in Benton Harbor Michigan, Hudson joined the Marines as a teen but was discharged due to complications from his asthma. He later graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit. Not long after he starred in his first film, 1976’s Leadbelly.

As a former childhood Ghostbusters fanatic and punk rock loving teen, I can’t explain how excited I was to see Hudson – fucking Winston! – in Leadbelly.

Even though it’s recognized as a traditional song, no one disputes that ‘In the Pines’ is 100% Huddie Ledbetter. He gave it the ghostly flavor that Cobain channeled so eerily and well.

Everyone who loved Nirvana knew who Huddie Ledbetter was thanks to the success of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged. Cobain’s blindsiding rendition of Lead Belly’s ‘In the Pines’, otherwise known as ‘Black Girl’, and even ‘My Girl’ but forever remembered as ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ made the blues singer a household name to little grunge rockers around the world.

Tectonic on all levels.

My friend and I were obsessed with delving into all the things that had inspired Kurt Cobain. So one day in 1996 we got really high and rented Leadbelly starring Roger E. Mosley to figure out what was up with this old bluesman. The movie was fucking crazy, even having John Henry Faulk from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as Governor Neff ask Lead Belly (Ledbetter always signed his stage name Lead Belly as opposed to the popular spelling of Leadbelly) to sing for him. I mention all this to demonstrate one thing: despite the abovementioned revered figures at hand, all were immediately superseded when Archie, Ernie Hudson’s character, appeared. “Whoa,” I said, stoned and suddenly reinvested in the film but not because of Ledbetter or Nirvana lore. Suddenly I was taken back in time to when I was a little Ghostbusters fanatic again. “That’s fuckin Winston.”

You never forget a Ghostbuster.

Not even Winston. Because, regardless of what the little shits from Stranger Things said, Winston was just as important as any of the other Ghostbusters. It irked the shit out of me to listen to those brats, EVEN LUCAS, denounce Winston as a character. It made no sense. It still makes no sense.

Lucas and the gang being little bitches and decrying Winston Zeddemore’s good name.

You’d think at least the black kid would want to be Winston. All you hear is how a certain demographic feels underrepresented and this other one feels left out and on and on. But here you have an example of a great movie character being the same race as, befittingly, the one black kid in the gang on the show and yet he still doesn’t want to be Winston for Halloween. Mind boggling. And none of the little cracker kids wanted to be Winston either. I get Lucas’s point. He didn’t have to be Winston just because he’s the same race. That’s fair. But why didn’t any of the other little shits want to be Winston? I don’t understand what the writers were aiming for with that scene in Stranger Things 2, or if it even had a point. It’s just stupid. And rather meanspirited, if experienced from Hudson’s perspective. After all, with the exception of Venkman’s insisting that Walter Peck has no genitalia in front of the mayor, Winston has the best lines in Ghostbusters. Hands down. That’s not me opining. It can be proven.

Hudson and Annie Potts, who is underrated as an actor herself and a smoke show of biblical proportions.

Winston first enters the fray when we see him staring up at the Hook & Ladder Company 8 fire station, somewhat nonplussed. When the Ghostbusters’ secretary, Janine Melnitz asks him, “Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis?” Winston replies,

“If there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you say.”

After Gozer the Gozerian, a dimension-shifting entity of evil, asks Ray if he’s a god and Ray says no, they’re nearly killed. Winston informs Ray,

“When someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!”

This line should also be applied to all aspects of life for self-esteem upkeep.

Still, there’s more:

“This job is definitely not worth 11-5 a year.”

“I love Jesus’s style.”

“That’s a big Twinkie.”

And this quote for anyone going into a laborious task undeterred:

“We have the tools, we have the talent!”

Lastly is my favorite line in Ghostbusters. Not only because it involves my two foremost proton pack-packing, free floating full torso vaporous apparition catching guys, but because it’s spoken during an actually eerie scene in what is ostensibly a movie about a subject monopolized by the horror genre.

Ray and Winston in the Ecto-1, smoking cigarettes on their way back to the firehouse to drink Budweiser. This is peak 1980’s children’s cinema.

While Ray looks over the “blueprints for the structural ironwork of Dana Barrett’s apartment building,” Winston, driving the Ecto-1 and smoking, asks:

“Hey, Ray. Do you remember something in the bible about the last days when the dead would rise from the grave?”

“I remember in Revelations 7:12, ‘And I looked as he opened the sixth seal and behold there was a great earthquake and the sun became as black as sackcloth and the moon became as blood.’”

“And the seas boiled and the skies fell,” Winston finishes.

To which both say, “Judgement Day.”

“Every ancient religion has its own myth about the end of the word,” Ray surmises.

“Myth? Ray … has it ever occurred to you that maybe the reason we’ve been so busy lately is because the dead have been rising from the grave?”

Ghostbusters didn’t come easy for Ernie Hudson.

Winston is easily the go-to Ghostbuster for most hardworking adults because that is just what he is. And it mirrors the struggle and effort Hudson himself had to put into his career before and after he landed the part. The man is a workhorse, having put down so many screen credits to pay the bills that it rivals most actors at his level. And Hudson’s is a high level. This is no B-Movie actor here, although he’s been relegated to B-Movie worthy roles and comic book and fan conventions. It’s a fucking shame, like watching Lugosi plunge from Tod Browning excellence to Ed Wood exploitation. Only with Hudson, you have no plunge, because he never peaked as he should have. You have no history of drug abuse, no scandal. It’s appalling how someone with such a screen presence, commanding voice and filmography has never been given a leading role. Is racism involved? I’ll let you be the judge of that … for now.

Whatever the case, Hudson’s work ethic can’t be used as an excuse for never being the main attraction on the marquee. His credentials speak for him, and this is just a few:

In 1979 he acted in episodes of The Incredible Hulk, Roots: The Next Generations and The White Shadow. 1981 found him landing parts on Diff’rent Strokes, The Little House on the Prairie, and the second season of Bosom Buddies in an episode as the character Rochelle.

Henry (Peter Scolari) regrets laughing after hearing his cellmate’s name, Rochelle (Ernie Hudson), in an episode of Bosom Buddies called ‘One for You, One for Me’ (1981).

And remember when you’re cancelling old shows like The Dukes of Hazzard that you’re also affecting a black man’s residuals, because Hudson appeared in an episode in 1982.

Before the Ecto-1 and Ray Parker Jr., Hudson starred with the General Lee and had Waylon Jennings providing the music.

1983 saw him in such hits as Webster and The A-Team. You may have seen him in a 1987 episode of Gimme a Break! along with Full House and doing voicework on the cartoon Pound Puppies. 1989 showed no signs of Hudson slowing down, as his Ghostbusters fame landed him a gig on The Super Mario Bros. Super Show as himself in an episode titled ‘Slime Busters’.

The only thing more important than a Ghostbuster is a plumber.

In 1993 he did a Tales From the Crypt called ‘Food for Thought’.

Hudson sporting some rad makeup in an episode of Tales From the Crypt.

1997 marked his first appearance as Warden Leo Glynn on HBO’s Oz. In 1999 he portrayed none other than James Jordan, his Airness’s father, in Michael Jordan: An American Hero. By 2001 he acted in a Touched by an Angel episode and in 20006 he was on ER. He became a Lynchian alumni in 2017 by appearing in Twin Peaks and 2022 has him acting in the reboot of Quantum Leap. Those are just some of his many television appearances.

His movie roles range wide and pile up just as high,

from the abovementioned 1976’s Leadbelly to 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife. In 1980, he supplied his talents to the movie Joni, about the diving accident that left Joni Eareckson Tada paralyzed at 17. Of course in 1984 he got Ghostbusters, which forced him to move out of his LA apartment due to unruly fans. He freely admits getting the job was no easy feat. Only after several auditions did he get hired, even though he acted in Space Hunter which was produced by Ghostbusters’ director Ivan Reitman. Hudson also notes that while visiting a friend of his at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, he bumped into Reitman on an elevator. Reitman informed him that he had an anomalous script (Ghostbusters) that he was casting but that there were no roles in it for Hudson.

Eventually, through diligence and despite Reitman’s initial reluctance, Hudson secured a role. And the rest is history.

But Hudson’s history is never so easy or cut and dry. In 1986, a cartoon version of Ghostbusters, The Real Ghostbusters, aired and kids like me loved it. But something about the voices was fucked up - not our Ghostbusters. For one thing, Venkman sounded a fucking hell of a lot like Garfield. Well, that’s because it was Garfield. Lorenzo Music had the most distinctive cartoon voice of all time. You just can’t beat the voice of Garfield and Peter Venkman.

Lorenzo Music’s voice was literally music to our childhood ears.

Winston’s voice, however, confused me. Hudson had wanted to reprise his role as Winston for the cartoon adaptation but lost out on the role of himself to Arsenio Hall of all fucking people. It boggles the brain how anyone could bypass the real Ghostbuster in a cartoon called The Real Ghostbusters for a prospective talk show host who had never, to my and Wikipedia’s knowledge, ever busted a single fucking ghost. I guess Hudson’s deeper drawl wasn’t kid-friendly enough whereas Arsenio’s trebly, ‘this is great, isn’t it?’ talk show way of speaking did it for The Real Ghostbusters casting scouts. It exemplifies the shit Hudson has encountered every step of the way.

Arsenio Hall as Winston Zeddemore and Ray Manzarek as Egon Spengler. (jk about Egon, however Manzarek does sound exactly like a fucking name out of the Ghostbusters universe.)

At least in 1989, they allowed Ernie to play Winston in Ghostbusters II instead of handing it off to Arsenio. What a fucking weird movie that would’ve been. Just replace all the Ghostbusters with talk show hosts. David Letterman could’ve been Egon. Jay Leno could’ve been Ray. Ghostbusters II already finds Peter Venkman as a talk show host, with him hosting The World of Psychics with Peter Venkman. So I guess you could just keep Murray for the job. But to cover all the bases for the era they could’ve brought in Sally Jessy Raphael to play Janine.

No one could replace the ridiculously gorgeous Annie Potts, not even Sally Jessy herself.

Irrefutably, the funniest scene in Ghostbusters II belongs to Hudson.

The scene finds Egon, Ray and Winston beneath the city of New York walking along dilapidated train tracks. They’ve descended into the subway/sewer system to trace the source of “a psychomagnotheric slime-flow that's been collecting under the city.”

The uncontestable apogee of cinematic teams.

Captivated by the dynamic echo within the tunnels, the gang commence yelling into the darkness to hear their voices pulsate into the void. “Hello!” Ray yells, enjoying his echo. “Hey!” Egon hollers, receiving the same. “Hello!” Winston  shouts, followed by a dead silence. A guttural and drawn out “Winston,” emanates from the black depths of the tunnels.

“Okay I’m out of here,” Winston says and the guys turn to flee with him. Suddenly, severed heads on pikes appear all around them. After terrorizing the guys, the heads disappear and the Ghostbusters agree that it’s a good time to go get their proton packs. That’s when a ghost train comes ripping down the discontinued tracks. Egon and Ray escape off the edges of the rails but Winston gets caught in the sights of the ghost train which passes through him while he shrieks in terror. His screams last until the specter locomotive passes on by, his voice cracking in a way that left me breathless with laughter as an eight year-old in the theater.

Once the tracks are clear of the train, Egon rushes to Winston’s side and says, “That was the old New York Central, City of Albany. Derailed in 1920. Killed hundreds of people. Did you catch the number on the locomotive?”

“Sorry,” Winston says, hair askew and still flummoxed. “I missed it.”

One thing that struck me about Ghostbusters II as a kid was the fact that Winston finally made it onto the poster.

It confused me why only three Ghostbusters were on the original poster without Winston.

I know it’s show business and that several factors play into what happens behind the scenes of these things, but if you tell me that nefarious reasons regarding race and Hollywood don’t exist, I’ll be like, “Yeah right. And my name is Vinz Clortho.”

aka The Keymaster.

The first actor you see in 1994’s The Crow is Ernie Hudson.

Officer Albrecht is standing at the window that Eric Draven has been thrown from on Devil's Night. It's hard to discern whether seeing Hudson in uniform makes you nostalgic for him as a Ghostbuster or if something about him as an actor immediately connects you with his character. I'm sure it's a combination of both. Seeing Officer Albrecht smoking a cigarette expeditiously wrests the viewer back in time to first beholding Winston Zeddemore.

Officer Albrecht drags on a cig on Devil’s Night in Detroit, irl Hudson’s old stomping grounds.

This has got to be the most gothic cult-classic since The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The main difference is that this movie is solid throughout, serious and sad as fuck on all levels.

Just as iconic as Eric Draven running across the rooftops or standing with arms outstretched in the rain is the equally poignant scene involving Albrecht and Sarah, played by Rochelle Davis.

After Sarah learns that her friend Shelly is going to die, Officer Albrecht comforts the young girl with a hug. Amid the flaming destruction of Devil’s Night, you see the girl holding her skateboard and being consoled by the policeman. Venerable imagery from director Alex Proyas sets this film apart.

The awesomeness of getting to see Bruce Lee's son act with Winston Zeddemore in a movie is almost impossible to describe to the layman who is not a Ghostbusters slash Bruce Lee junkie.

Yet this transcends Ghostbusters and Bruce Lee. Here we have two great actors who've gotten ahold of a great script and are giving some of their best work. Much like the scene with Dan Aykroyd where Hudson delivers his Dead Rising from the Grave monologue, here we have him hearing someone who has risen from the grave give the Trivial monologue. In this scene Lee and Hudson provide wide-ranging performances and bounce off one another with comedic, fearful and painful offerings.

Both actors never fulfilled the capacity of their talent. Brandon Lee didn’t because of his death. But as to why Ernie Hudson never did, it’s mystifying. He has all the makings of a superstar. In my mind he’ll always be one. But to continue his filmography, you’ll see that the reality of things doesn’t add up.

Around the time of The Crow, Hudson shared the screen with another actor renowned for his martial arts.

In Sugar Hill, Hudson plays Lolly Jonas. His screen time with Wesley Snipes as Romello Skuggs really makes you wish these two would’ve had a feature of their own.

Hear me out: Hudson & Snipes in a buddy cop movie. That shit would’ve been sick af. But no. What did we get? Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. For fuck’s sake...

1994 also had Hudson acting with another legend, Chris Farley, in Airheads. Once again, we have Hudson as a policeman, the practical Sergeant O’Malley, tasked with getting the erroneously pluralized Lone Rangers and their hostages out of a radio station alive.

While we’re discussing buddy cop movies, imagine this dynamic duo on the screen together for 90 minutes. That would’ve been a pretty fucking great movie.

In 1995, Hudson acted alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Basketball Diaries.

DiCaprio portrays poet Jim Carroll and Hudson is his friend, Reggie, who tries his best to get the teen off heroin. Hudson’s performance is brilliant and real as always. You get the feeling that this man who has nothing in common with this teenager truly cares for him and it never feels contrived. And that realness is what makes Hudson so compelling.

However, no matter how great you are, that alone doesn’t cause fate to shine the light of destiny upon you. After 1995, Hudson’s filmography nosedived into ‘pay the bills’ features and straight to video bullshit. Like Mr. Magoo. Clifford’s Really Big Movie. Pastor Brown. Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassins’ Ball. And holy fuck – Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2. Wait, it gets worse. Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3: Viva la Fiesta! Then more shit like Merry Ex-Mas and God’s Not Dead 2 right smack fucking A straight up to the universally condemned Ghostbusters 2016. Was he Winston at least? No, as a matter of fact he was not. Who was he, you ask? Uncle Bill Jenkins. Holy shit, man.

After that he did Nappily Ever After, a 2018 rom-com.

Which forces me to posit a question I’d rather not, but it can’t be overlooked: Why did Hudson never blow up?

I could bullshit around it for a few paragraphs but fuck it. It’s an issue of racism, be it clandestine or overt.

As a kid, I heard tales of other children not being allowed to have Winston action figures because of prejudiced parents which baffled the shit out of my little ass, coming from a non-racist household. You can bet your ass I had Winston in my collection.

Hollywood has never put out the type of African American cinema that it should, with the exception of inner city gangster flicks or rap biopics. And that’s not even me trying to be funny. It’s true and it’s a fucking shame considering the abundance of African Americana just waiting to be brought to life on film. But who’d make the movies? If you were to ask the average film buff to name five black directors, they’d probably start stuttering after Spike Lee, Tyler Perry and the Hughes brothers. But black directors abound, awaiting their chance to break through.

An argument to make as to the lack of blockbuster black cinema out there is that no one is writing black stories.

I mean, it did seem like the closest thing we got to a good slave revenge film since - well, ever - was Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. And it’s no secret that every time they make a comic book movie they have to change a white character to a black one to pull in a smidge of diversity. However, I refuse to believe that there are no black authors with stories worthy of being transformed into cinema. Contrary to popular belief and the scholastic system, African American literature runs much deeper than just Lorraine Hansberry, Alex Haley and Maya Angelou. One need look no further than Roxane Gay, Percival Everett and Wayétu Moore to realize that there is so much further to look as far as finding black stories to tell. But what’s the point? Clearly it’s not a lack of black actors, directors or writers. So what is it? I think we all know. If a black person isn’t going for the hoop or grabbing the mic or shooting up the projects or getting their proverbial groove back, Hollywood is indifferent to them. And that’s at the expense of the movie-goer, because these untold tales of regular black people doing atypical things are rich and singular in their ingredients.

It took Ivan Reitman’s son, Jason, to rectify things and get Hudson back to where he belonged.

Finally, Hudson appeared in 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife as the character he not only made famous, but made: Winston Zeddemore. I guess he should count his lucky stars. Young Reitman could’ve cast Arsenio.

In the grand scheme of it all, Ernie Hudson has been wildly successful.

He’s existed within a realm that very few ever achieve. And he’s done it not only with aplomb, but with no crises to show of in his career. He's a person who showed up for work when it was available and performed his best. And that’s another reason why we Grownup Ghostbusters fans love Zeddemore. He’s the epitome of us all, people who may not have the degrees, but instead have the doggedness to clock in and do the job. And Hudson as an actor appeals to us because, despite what we’ve accomplished, who hasn’t felt a touch of being overlooked or slighted here and there? Lots of people put their all into life and get the bare minimum while so many put forth the puniest of efforts and reap the world. But many’s the actor who has flashed brightly only to succumb to Hollywood’s hoary depths. But not Hudson. His steadfast flame is an example of class, giving the fans cogent portrayals and keeping his head together just about as goddamn good as a person can with all these fucking weirdos he probably has to deal with, day in and day out. The two biggest movies he has under his belt are serious cult-driven fanbase films, with the admirers ranging from the casual heavyset dude in the dad cap to the person living in their mom’s basement dressed in full jumpsuit, proton pack glory. Or decked out as the Crow and hanging out at comic conventions to get a pic with Officer Albrecht. I’m sure Hudson tolerates this fanbase because a part of his income necessitates it. But it’s also apparent that, despite all the wild shit Hollywood and being in the public eye has thrown his way, Hudson has maintained more humanity than the average star. And his stardom is not average. In the annals of cinema, I and millions of others respect Ernie Hudson not only for being the man who brought one of our favorite childhood movie characters to life, but also for being a guiding persona to remind us that you don’t have to be the biggest name on the marquee to break records in the box office of the fans’ heart.