#i don't know why this accent is so difficult to fake correctly but it really is. i don't know if i could do it or not

[mrfunnyinthebank]

weeks ago i saw a post where someone made reference to john cena's "boston accent" and i've been thinking about it ever since

the way that john cena speaks when he's in the ring is not the way he naturally speaks. he puts on a "tough guy" voice that is likely influenced by the boston accent, but because faking a boston accent is so difficult to do (even when someone naturally has a boston accent, if they try to ham it up it usually sounds awful) it sounds much more similar to a new york accent (i know there are many variations of the new york accent - i'm from boston so i don't know which variation john cena is closest to emulating)

also elephant in the room: john cena's whole thuganomics gimmick - which was the foundation of his current gimmick - is more of a "blaccent" than anything else. he speaks like a white guy who is trying to sound like a black guy. he's doing an impression of someone from "the hood" but he's not from the hood, so i don't think he's even clear on what it is he's going for

so basically john cena is a white guy with a slight boston accent who is trying to emulate a black guy with a strong boston accent but it comes out more like an italian-american having an identity crisis

[wumblr]

the way house of leaves has been revived for a cult following is so funny. it's completely backwards! it was a music industry book. the singer poe, who made waves with her debut for having a few tracks produced by j dilla and then if i remember correctly doing a 500+ show tour, essentially tanked her career to promote the book (written by her brother)

not like on purpose but it was supposed to be a paired project and there was a remix with a book excerpt read by mark (the kyrie bmw sex scene) and like, i don't know, a tie-in website -- but then her label got sold or merged or acquired and the project was eventually cancelled after languishing in limbo for a few years. there's also an aspect of this where like, a texas oil executive posed as a friend of her late father (possibly true) in order to manipulate legal proceedings (?) to ultimately own her writing and recording copyrights post-acquisition (dubious allegation, which also relies on her having signed away both types of copyright to her label in the first place, arguably a larger problem spanning the whole industry, even today, still coming up in legal proceedings from kesha and taylor swift and so on)

anyway the album (haunted) and the book were both inspired by the same event (death of their father, tad danielewsky -- as an aside, a professor of theater at brigham young university). the album features samples from a box of cassette tape recordings of his voice. and also some fake samples from a couple of guys pretending to be tad danielewski with an obviously ridiculous accent and a couple of kids pretending to be her as a kid. and it takes place inside the house. the growl is there and everything i swear

it really was one of the top tier 90s concept albums (it was released in 2000 actually) but it is usually FAR too much to handle for casual listening and a lot of it comes across difficult for being so sincere and so unfocused (it is a love letter to her dead father where one of the songs is a list of places she's gotten fucked, because, uh, this is a conversation she wanted to have with him. shrug). and yet it's hard not to take it as it is because it's so consistently well produced

so i know nobody's computer comes with a cd player anymore but to read the book without listening to the paired album implicitly packed in the back of the book jacket is kind of like missing the whole point. there's a whole second act of rashomon you guys are missing. and a third act hello the etsy teleplays. ANYWAY the point i wanted to make is that there are a couple of things about the album sticking to the roof of my mouth as being somehow prescient. there's a distorted "why (are you) so serious" sample that would have come across VERY differently post-joker, but there's also "tell me something dangerous and true," a far more interesting variation on the theme currently circulating. and i'm speaking to an empty room here because it's only the celibate 60% of this website who is reading the book because it allows them a patina of literary validity and several nested unreliable narrators to distance themselves from the sex scenes, but haunted is very authentically, directly and exclusively written in first person and to be honest it fucks too hard for you guys. i'm sorry