rigorousintuition.ca

4 Reasons Blink-182's Singer Was Clearly Abducted by Aliens
By Tom Reimann July 13, 2013 421,818 views

The sudden and dramatic personality shift of Blink-182's Tom DeLonge is one of the greatest mysteries in modern music, second only to the truth about Kurt Cobain's suicide and the identity of the blind goblin responsible for dressing Miley Cyrus.


DeLonge went from a goofy rock star famous for catchy songs and juvenile antics to an aloof world musician obsessed with space and global unity in less than a year. Suspiciously, this change came right after DeLonge quit Blink-182 in the middle of a tour and subsequently dropped off the face of the Earth for about 10 months. I submit the only possible explanation is that he was stolen by aliens, and they either expanded his consciousness with celestial technology or replaced him with a stardust clone to try to prepare the world for their arrival, like Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still. I'll go one step further and say that Tom DeLonge is Klaatu, albeit the charming and likeable one from the 1951 original and not the Keanu Reeves corpse-eyed mandroid from the 2008 remake.

Far-fetched, you say? Stand back while I connect these dots and prepare to have your mind blown.

#4. Tom DeLonge Wrote Songs About Being Abducted by Aliens and Has a Legitimate Belief in Vast UFO Conspiracies

Photos.com

DeLonge began his career in Blink-182, singing songs about masturbating in trees, getting sodomized by a hillbilly, and trying to fuck a pirate in the ass. The song most directly responsible for the band's huge success is a glossy pop robot with about 50 words, the video for which features Tom DeLonge taking a dump inside a spatial reasoning puzzle while dressed like Nick Lachey's life coach:



The second most pervasive image of DeLonge at this point in the late '90s was him running naked through the streets of Los Angeles with a cataract blur hovering over his crotch, as if his penis were a suspect on COPS that refused to sign the release form.


However, when asked about the subject of extraterrestrials, DeLonge would immediately launch into rambling squirrel-eyed diatribes like Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory, emphatically spitting out his totally non-ironic belief in vast UFO coverups masterminded by the top levels of American government as rapidly as possible, lest the clock should strike midnight and turn his words back into pumpkins before they'd completely escaped his mouth. Here is a clip of him demonstrating his expertise back in 2002, on the Blink-182 DVD The Urethra Chronicles II, because nothing says you're serious about UFO research quite like a joke about dickhole invasion:



Since I am fairly certain none of you are going to sit through five minutes of a 27-year-old man flapping his lips about Martians while wearing two different articles of his own merchandise, I will convert the important points of the video into written words. He spends the majority of the clip making the unique type of vaguely specific points generally reserved for people who either cannot remember the entirety of the story they are trying to tell or are deliberately withholding information to protect the identities of those involved (in DeLonge's case, it seems to be a little of both). He does this by referring constantly to unverifiable information he's received from a vast network of unnamed "friends," one of whom is supposedly so deeply mired in the global UFO conspiracy that he's had a mental conversation with an alien visitor as it sat nonchalantly on top of a desk in a government installation like a psychic bobblehead. DeLonge is also clearly uncomfortable in the video, shifting constantly in his seat and speaking quietly to the floor as if he expects Tommy Lee Jones to burst into the room at any second and erase his memory. And this isn't the only clip -- search "Tom DeLonge aliens" on YouTube and you'll find dozens of videos of him jackjawing about saucer people that span his entire career.

The point is, this motherfucker believes in aliens as hard as he possibly can. He even wrote a song about it called "Aliens Exist," in which he is abducted by dimension-shambling star lords. A few years later, he wrote a song called "Asthenia" about being trapped in space and not wanting to come back to Earth, which in fairness is a situation many musicians find themselves in.


He was apparently put into orbit by an alien in a bathrobe.

#3. Then He Mysteriously Disappeared and Returned as a Completely Different Person

Photos.com

At the height of Blink-182's popularity and marketability, Tom DeLonge abruptly quit the band, dissolved all contact with his bandmates, and vanished from the public eye for the better part of a year. Seriously, he blinked out of existence like Bruce Willis in Looper. The official line from Blink-182's representatives was that the band was on "indefinite hiatus," which is a tactful way of saying, "We don't know what the hell happened to Tom or when he'll be coming back. For real, that dude phased out of here like an angry wizard and changed his phone number." It looked like he was pulling a Joaquin Phoenix and sabotaging his own career for the purposes of a joke that nobody else understood.

However, that wasn't the case. The reason Tom DeLonge made no statements and no public appearances in the 10 months following the breakup of his band was because he wasn't on Earth to make them. You see, this is when the Wardens of the Stellarverse snatched him right out of California and tossed him into space like Lance Guest in The Last Starfighter. Much like Mr. Guest's righteous video game skills in that classic film, DeLonge's years of UFO proselytizing had finally gotten the attention of an extraterrestrial empire. What the rest of the world mistook for rock star big-headedness was actually the beginning of one man's journey beyond the cosmos. Tom DeLonge couldn't be bothered with Blink-182 because he was busy holding court with the princess of the Crab Nebula.

He finally reappeared to the Earth news media sporting a bizarre haircut that is presumably commonplace in some distant star cluster:


Bryan Bedder/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

Hereafter referred to as his "space hair."


His re-emergence segued into a bombastic campaign of babbling about the future, making enigmatic declarations about changing the world, and wearing a jacket with the word "love" written across it to sing songs about the end of war and the advocacy of peace and unity. Essentially, he was beamed into the spiral arm of whatever galaxy Sting was born in and came back a few months later as Starman.



To be fair, he tried to tell us.

As if that wasn't enough to convince people Tom DeLonge had been taken by alien visitors on a transcendental voyage across the fourth dimension, he called his new band Angels & Airwaves -- "angels" being celestial beings, and "airwaves" being the medium through which mortal Earthlings communicate with them. It's the sort of failed attempt at subtlety that an alien would make, and is perhaps one step away from simply releasing an album called Spacemaster Tom and the Spaceships from Space.

#2. Every Song He Writes Now Is About Space

Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images

Speaking of failed subtlety, all four albums Tom DeLonge has released with Angels & Airwaves have a picture of space on the cover, replete with lyrics that center on a joyous fascination with human emotions, seemingly written from the point of view of a comet-hopping moonman who is just now discovering the concept. It's like if Data wrote a book of poetry immediately after activating his emotion chip for the first time and then read it aloud over a bunch of mid-career Pink Floyd instrumentals. DeLonge went from writing pop-punk songs about pirate sex and masturbation (see "pooping nudity music videos," above) to penning an entire catalog of sweeping, atmospheric prog-rock songs about the intangible facets of being. In less than a year.

Some of the song titles seem to document DeLonge's Klaatu-esque journey ("The Adventure") to bring a message to the Earth ("The Gift") and save us from mutually assured destruction ("The War," "Behold a Pale Horse") before he is forced to eradicate us for the greater good of the universe with his robot friend Gort ("Start the Machine"). Others reference the beginning of the space age ("The Flight of Apollo") and an otherworldly fascination with confoundingly specific celestial bodies ("The Moon Atomic," "Moon as My Witness"). The bottom line is, Tom DeLonge is now all about space, and he wants you to know that shit.


Even the "O" in "love" is a moon. Spaaaaaaaaace!

#1. He Made a Movie About Space to Document His Experience


DeLonge then went on to make a goddamned movie about space. It's called Love and is about an astronaut trapped inside a space station, watching as the Earth blinks out of existence below him, who winds up transcending existence as we know it. If that sounds familiar, it's because it is the exact subject of the song "Asthenia," which I mentioned earlier. It stars Gunner Wright as the astronaut, which is interesting because Wright also plays the main character in the Dead Space series of video games, who is also an astronaut.


New Dog Media


"I want there to be so much fucking space in this movie, you have to wear a helmet to watch it." -Tom DeLonge

The end of the film is ambiguous, but it seems to indicate that Wright downloads his consciousness into a collective mainframe containing the thoughts and memories of the entire human race. This is what happened to Tom DeLonge -- he was taken to the edge of the universe and absorbed by an ethereal alien collective. Now he's returned to share his experience and try to convince us to lay down our arms and join the United Federation of Planets. It's actually genius -- in The Day the Earth Stood Still, Klaatu's biggest conundrum was how to deliver his message to the entire world simultaneously, instead of talking to various government leaders one at a time and letting them disseminate his words to their respective peoples. Tom DeLonge has that problem figured out -- he and his alien handlers are using music and movies to deliver their message, which are two things with immediate worldwide distribution (judging by the Internet, they are also the only two things anybody cares about). He doesn't have to waste time fumbling around with stuffed-shirt presidents and prime ministers when he can instantly beam his galaxian moonlove doctrine to anyone in the world who wants to listen.

One final piece of evidence to silence any doubting Thomases (because my name is Tom, as is the subject of this column, so to doubt any part of it is to both "doubt Thomas" and be a "doubting Thomas." Hold your applause) is an interview DeLonge gave back in December 2012 for the UFO enthusiast Web series Spacing Out:



Now, compare that video to the earlier one taken from the Penishole Chronicles. It's like watching two different people. He's talking about the exact same things, and he even tells one of the same stories, but he's doing so in a charming and mildly self-deprecating manner that totally disarms us, like he's reciting an anecdote about the time he shit his pants at a taco stand instead of casually informing us that flying saucers are currently orbiting the Earth's sun. Whereas 2002 Tom DeLonge was half-mumbling and fidgety, 2012 Tom DeLonge speaks clearly and authoritatively, with more charisma than Jon Hamm in a house of mirrors.

Like Klaatu, he is attempting to deliver a crucial message to our planet by behaving like the most affable guy in the universe. See, DeLonge is trying to brace humanity by calmly assuring us that aliens have always been here, building pyramids and sending telepathic messages to Indiana Jones. So we'd better get with the program and stop being a bunch of nuke-happy assholes or else intergalactic nuclear defense robots are going to zoom in through a wormhole and destroy us.

jakell » Thu Mar 06, 2014 7:17 am wrote:Well, at least Obi Wan understood about E-prime, which is useful for covering one's ass.

You refer to an empty placeholder for an unknown variable. In the interest of constructing usable language, it might be userful to signify that with a cipher. Algebraic terms like x and y aren't particularly aesthetic, so I would suggest maybe a four letter word of one syllable might fulfil the role, possibly something like the one used above.

It seems what you are saying is that there is no such thing as random chance. This may be so, but unless you are suggesting a ghost in the machine, I can't really see a naturalistic factor (unless we call it x, y or luck)

Janelle Monáe: sister from another planet
Inspired by sci-fi novels and Afro-futurists, Janelle Monáe is a cyber diva taking R&B into far-out places. Dorian Lynskey meets the most compelling new character in pop
Dorian Lynskey
The Guardian, Thursday 26 August 2010 16.36 EDT

'I feel very centred when I wear black and white' ... Janelle Monáe. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
Over the last four years, Prince, Sean "Diddy" Combs and Big Boi from Outkast have all taken Janelle Monáe under their wing. I wonder what each one thought when he first met her, because the 24-year-old singer is possibly the most focused, self-contained person I have ever encountered. Her choice of words is as meticulous as her choice of outfit, which is to say extremely. Perched on an armchair in a central London hotel, she wears skintight black trousers and a high-necked white blouse, and her hair is styled in her trademark quiff, which resembles a head of broccoli. Her physical flawlessness has an unreal quality that makes even her luxurious surroundings seem unforgivably slapdash. Sitting opposite her, I feel as if I've just crawled out of a skip.

"Black and white keeps me very centred rather than in a grey area," she explains in a mellifluously precise southern accent. "I feel very centred when I wear black and white and I do this when nobody's watching. I create best like that."

Whatever rules Monáe imposes on herself seem to be working. Only a singularly self-possessed individual could have pulled off the artistic high-wire act of her hugely acclaimed album, The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III). This 18-song opus, the most praised album of the year according to the review-aggregating website Metacritic, by turns recalls Prince, OutKast, Erykah Badu, James Brown, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Bernard Herrmann, Funkadelic and the Incredible String Band, and establishes its creator as the most compelling new character in pop.

As vivid and varied as the music are the ideas behind it. The tracklisting cites such influences as "the blue of Luke's lightsaber" and "the atomic bombs in Muhammad Ali's fists". The sleevenotes, allegedly written by the vice chancellor of the Palace of the Dogs Art Asylum, explain that Monáe is an inmate who claims to be a time-traveller from 2719, and whose stolen DNA has been used to clone an android freedom fighter called Cindi Mayweather. "Most of the story does not bear logical sense," the writer drily notes.

The rhetoric is somewhat tongue-in-cheek but Monáe delivers it with a straight bat. She was introduced to the android concept by Chuck Lightning, one of her colleagues in the Wondaland Arts Collective, an Atlanta-based alliance of musicians, writers, actors and visual artists. She then began filling her head with it via Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the novels of Isaac Asimov and Octavia E Butler, and the ideas of the future theorist Ray Kurtzweil. Like Afro-futurists such as George Clinton and Sun Ra, she uses sci-fi as an allegory for the African-American experience. "The android represents a new form of the Other," she explains. "And I believe we're going to be living in a world of androids by 2029. How will we all get along? Will we treat the android humanely? What type of society will it be when we're integrated? I've felt like the Other at certain points in my life. I felt like it was a universal language that we could all understand."

As she talks, I get the distinct impression that she's given this speech before. Her words move with the well-oiled oratory of a practised campaigner. Clearly, she takes her political mission seriously – tracks such as Locked Inside and 2007's Sincerely Jane are basically protest songs, and she recorded an articulate public service announcement about healthcare and education during the 2008 presidential election. "I feel like I do have a responsibility to the community," she says. "The music that we create is to help free their minds and, whenever they feel oppressed, to keep them uplifted. We want the music and the vision that we have to be their choice of drug, if you will. So we need a manifesto. If we want to stay on message, we have to believe in what we're fighting for, and we do."

Janelle Monáe Robinson was born in Kansas City in 1985. Her father drove a garbage truck, her mother was a janitor and her stepfather worked at the post office. "I come from a very hard working-class family who make nothing into something," she says, explaining that her own "uniform" is a homage to them. Even as a child, she knew exactly what she wanted to do. At an early age she joined the local Coterie Theatre's Young Playwrights' Round Table and began writing musicals. When she was 11 or 12 she wrote one about a boy and a girl falling in love with a plant, inspired by Stevie Wonder's peculiar 1979 album Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. "I was infatuated with photosynthesis," she explains.

She moved to New York to attend the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, where she was the only black woman in her classes. "I felt like that was a home but I wanted to write my own musicals. I didn't want to have to live vicariously through a character that had been played thousands of times – in a line with everybody wanting to play the same person."

So she dropped out and moved to Atlanta, where she lived in a boarding house with five other women and worked at Office Depot. It was while selling her self-funded debut CD The Audition and touring black colleges that she met songwriters and producers Chuck Lightning and Nate Wonder, with whom she formed Wondaland. "It was a Matrix moment where we all locked eyes and it was almost like we were meant to be on the same team. We wanted to create a different blueprint." Lettin' Go, a song about being fired from Office Depot for going online to answer emails from fans, attracted the attention of OutKast, who invited her to sing on their 2006 album, Idlewild.

Apart from sci-fi, Monáe's main reading seems to be business manuals; she enthusiastically endorses Seth Godin's Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable. Hence, perhaps, her willingness to conduct her own business – after several potential record labels suggested changes to her debut mini-album, 2007's Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase), Wondaland decided to sell it themselves online. "The record execs were not connected to the people," she says sternly. "They didn't know, they still don't know, what the people want." For this new album, Sean Combs provided clout and contacts and left everything else to Wondaland, whose online manifesto declares: "We believe songs are spaceships. We believe music is the weapon of the future. We believe books are stars."

The collective is currently working on a video for each song, a tie-in graphic novel, and a Broadway musical. Meanwhile, Monáe and her three-man band have been touring like Trojans, supporting acts as diverse as Erykah Badu, No Doubt and Of Montreal and playing festivals as far afield as Moscow. If she does not become a major star, it will not be for want of hard work or ambition. "You have your moments of doubt, of course," she says. "But I think I've been able to use my fear. Whenever I have a slight fear then the reason I have to do this is because I'm afraid, and I don't like feeling afraid."

When she's not talking like a politician or a businesswoman, Monáe has a vaguely mystical bent. When she's working with Lightning and Wonder, "we communicate through colours. I can understand when someone's saying we need a softer blue or a lime green." She says many of the songs on The ArchAndroid came to her in dreams. "There's a lot of mystery on there to me. It feels as if I didn't have anything to do with it. It's as though I was just being spoken through. I don't remember how I recorded each song. You've been chosen to do certain things and even if you don't understand everything it doesn't mean someone else won't. Later you might understand it."

As our interview ends, Monáe unexpectedly leans in for a hug and says earnestly, "I'm so happy you enjoyed the music. I don't take that for granted." I can't tell whether it's an outburst of sincerity or a politician's coup de grace and I can't decide if the distinction is meaningful.

The following night, she performs at east London's tiny, humid Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen. During the spectacularly energetic, tightly drilled show, she becomes so animated that her flawless coiffure comes undone and sprays forth, covering most of her face. It clearly embarrasses her – she restores the broccoli look between songs – but it's a refreshingly unguarded moment. Her hair, at least, sometimes goes off message.

semper occultus » 16 Nov 2014 23:26 wrote:Sinead O'Connor on fame, Pope Francis and punching Prince

By ADRIAN DEEVOY FOR EVENT MAGAZINE
PUBLISHED: 22:01, 15 November 2014 | UPDATED: 22:01, 15 November 2014

www.dailymail.co.uk