My Semester at The Onion

So this past semester I interned with The Onion, writing for the Chicago A.V. Club. I got to write some neat stuff, so here is my semester in review.

Here’s the first piece I wrote. Only one of my sentences was spared by supervisor’s editing. Guess which one and you’ll win a hug from me!

Only my second month into my internship, The A.V. Club knew where to find a writer with some street cred for this one.

2010 was apparently a big year for creative burlesque shows in Chicago. I wrote pieces on Burlesque shows inspired by Pink Floyd and Super Mario Brothers.

I got to write about some really cool things that I never would have heard about. A charity Rock Band tournament and a restaurant masquerading for Halloween.

My supervisor told me to “have fun with this one.” I knew that meant, “you better make this one funny.” Guess what? She liked it! Hooray! Easily my favorite piece.

And on my very last day, I had the pleasure of writing about a tribute screening of one of the silliest men of all time.

Their was some pretty boring stuff in there too, but all in all I had a good experience.

Number One with a Dull-et

So just about every “Best Albums of the Year” list has Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy at number one and I don’t like it.

The album’s first single, “Power,” is really groovy. Whoop-da-dee-do. One good song. “Runaway” is one of the worst Kanye songs I have ever heard. I want to puke every time I hear it. Kanye’s lyrics are ridiculous. Normally I can get past his self-important spewing of hot air because he has such a good ear for what sounds good, but not this time.

I can already hear the dissenters asking, “But isn’t ‘Monster’ a great song?” No! It’s not even the best song with that title.

And I’m sick of all the credit he’s getting for “working” with Bon Iver. He’s just taking an artist that all white people like (what ethnicity are music critics?) and including several minimal contributions by him. Name dropping. Shooting fish in a barrel. Call it what you want, either way it’s uninspired.

Do you know why “Lost in the World” sounds good? Because “Woods“ is a great song. Kanye just threw some drums and rapping (that don’t even sound that cool) over it. It’s like a school cafeteria serving In N’ Out burgers for lunch. “Mom, lunch was awesome today! On my list of top 20 school lunches of the year, it was number 1!” Of course it was. It was great when that lumberjack-looking cafeteria worker from Wisconsin did it last year. Now some hot shot from Chicago decides to wrap those same burgers in shiny rapping and he’s being hailed as the greatest chef in the world.

I’m almost tempted to wish that Kanye would just write another “Jesus Walks”, but I know that he would just negate it’s refreshing message with another public display of narcissism.

You want to hear something that was gradually released throughout the year without a nauseating culmination? Check out Robyn’s Body Talk. I may be biased but I have never found so many toe-tappers on one album before.