trying to handle a hot grounder at third.

He's barely crossed my mind for twenty years. Nor has baseball.

Couldn't imagine it at first, second, or third.

The comedian who used to be funny . He always made obscure references in his jokes. I like Ari too, but I rarely know who he is talking about with his music references.

with all the rap and hip/hop references.

First, I could enjoy rap/hip/hop if you could eliminate the vocals. But the vocals ARE the genre, you say! EXACTLY.

ANYONE can recite bad poetry in monotone. But the music behind can be quite good. Easy to dance to. For the MUSIC I give it an 8 out of 10, Dick. (You younguns won't get that...)

However, I am old enough to remember the origin of rap. Which later became hip/hop in an effort to upscale the product...

Rap was based on hate, violence, vulgarity, obscenity, misogyny, homophobia. With a HEAVY emphasis on guns.

Every woman was a bitch, motherfucker was every third word. Women were nothing but things to fuck.

In other words, street trash talk out of the gutter. And their particular audience LOVED it, because it was IN YOUR FACE, WHITEY, and most whites found it offensive! It accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish.

Now it is all really cool, and acceptable. They've cleaned it up a little, and you can now find some nice, positive, even gay accepting, lyrics.

Putting the lipstick on the pig, worked.

I think of it like this...

Imagine if you wanted the finest sheets for your bed, soft, 600 threads per square inch, beautiful colors, fit for royalty.

You found a really good brand of sheets, and got them. You were so satisfied with your purchase. Only to find out later that almost 100 years ago, the origin of the brand you just bought was a linen manufacturer that exclusively supplied the KKK with their hooded robes.

Would you still be so excited about your purchase? Would they STILL be the bee's knees? Would you still think of them as "Top Drawer"?

Well, Ari shouldn't be so enamored with his music choice, based on its history. Since he is SOOO knowledgeable about the genre he should KNOW its origin story.

But he DOES know it. And he is ok with it.

BIGLY sad.

"Rap was based on hate, violence, vulgarity, obscenity, misogyny, homophobia. With a HEAVY emphasis on guns." Wrong. When rap first went mainstream there wasn't a bitch, a hoe, or anything else negative in the lyrics so to say it was based on hate and violence and vulgarity is just wrong. Listen to the Sugarhill Gang, Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, or any of the old school rappers. There was no hate, violence, misogyny, or gunplay in any of their lyrics. Now did it morph into all that you say? Yes. I wouldn't listen to rap today if you paid me, but all that negativity that you speak of wasn't its original foundation. When I was in the Air Force back in the late 70's early 80's and clubbing was my thing, rap was just music with a good beat that you could dance to. It really was poetry put to music. People talking about their lives both the good and the bad or their day to day reality just trying to survive. Then gangster rap came along, and when it did, it pushed all the old schoolers out the way. They either had to adapt or die and because the genre no longer fit them most of them died. Today's rap music is so bad that old school rappers are going out on tours. I suppose that's a good thing for them, but I have no interest in rap anymore. These days my musical taste leans more towards classical and mainly towards Vivaldi.

but I have to admit the music references are getting really old. They just seem odd and out of place, especially when so many of the topics are very serious.

Some play along, but some seem downright bewildered and even uncomfortable. So they fake that laugh we all do in uncomfortable situations when we just want to move things along.

I've noticed that as well. He really needs to dial it back if he wants to be taken seriously. Maybe he's trying to attract very young viewers, but most of them don't watch cable news.

Miles "birth of the cool" Davis died aged 65 in 1991.

No big deal - don't watch any of the shows, just some clips here and there. 9 minutes is the maximum I can endure, no matter the host.

They are all irritating when they interject their own personal thing.

a lot of rap musicians and frequently has current musicians as guests on his show. It is an annoying contrast to gravity of the issues he is covering. Once and awhile might not be too bad, but he does it excessively.

who appreciate his pop culture references. I don't really care for sports references either but it doesn't bother me. However, I appreciate an anchor's individuality/ unique style. It would be quite boring otherwise. He can't please "every I".

Those of us who don't watch television 'noise' programs are sometimes out of the loop.

that the reason his show is named the Beat is because he wanted to use hip/hop/rap/music references. He loves to use music or culture to explain political topics. He also has several musical guests on his show. His ratings are the best the network has ever had on that time slot, btw.

I wasn't sure if it was about Ari Shapiro, who is the NPR journalist who occasionally sings with Pink Martini.

The music references made me think that. But Shapiro is more of a "Great American Songbook" type.

I like when he invites musicians on to fall back fridays, and they show that their intelligent lyrics are also a sign that they have intelligent political insights.

I don't know the music, but that music is Ari's passion, so fair enough.

He occasionally has a guest problem, when the money people at MSNBC foist some creep guest off on him. He usually keeps them in line and gets something out of them.

Hope the holidays are good for you, UT.

But backtracking, "sharp, on our side" - yea, and I said I like him while several DUers have posted negatively about him, a mystery to me. My complaint here was just about the fly-in-the-soup references during political discussions, which is a general complaint applicable to many yakkers, not a big personal/ideological complaint in his case .

Usually, with others, its a sports thing, how they yuk-yuk like they are enveloping their poison pill politics inside friendly competition . With politics it's silo-thinking for me, not multi-thinking?

don't imagine I have the right, and always respect your posts' views.

My reading of the op and subthreads was that you said decent things about Ari, didn't care about him putting his references in, and liked his political take. A number of other post-ers jumped in and ran him down, they're entitled to their views, but I disagreed with them.

I see that you were expressing the idea that his style is a bit of a jarring dissonance, getting in the way of his clear political coverage. I didn't understand that from my original read of the op, I had thought you were picking up on others' having previously complained about it, and were dismissing those complaints.

For me, there are several good MSNBC hosts. O'Donnell comes in with a working knowledge of governmental work, Hayes with progressive journalism, Maddow with progressive activist history, Melber with legal expertise. Joy is different because her broadcast blocks aren't daily in the multi-hour lineup.

I think Ari felt he needed to set himself apart from the other hours of similar progressive news coverage, one way to be different so all the coverage isn't blurred together and about the same stories. And he has a passion for modern music, and is using his lawyer brain to compile categoric knowledge of profound lyrics. Also, I think he is reaching out to young people who are into that music, engaging them in more sophisticated politics, and trying to engage the people who are in their 50's like me, who have been into rap and hip hop for decades, but were never political.

To me, as a blue collar white guy that backs Warren, my observation is that Biden's popularity among a lot of Black men voters is down to them seeing there's so much to keep track of, and it's simple to just see that Biden was Obama's loyal lieutenant, and things were going good under Obama. I say that not as a dis of Joe or his many black men supporters, but just because I never saw any high profile effort by Joe to outreach specifically to Black men on any issue that would sway a large bloc of them, but he has notable support from them.

I'm stodgy, stopped looking at new music styles pre-grunge. I knew the older rap artists like Grandmaster Flash, NWA, Public Enemy, but was sticking with the older artists that I liked, musicians from the '60's - '80's. I was never in to keeping up with the latest freshest hottest music, but don't oppose other people keeping up with the latest. I felt it was not grown up, unserious, to always be into whatever the latest craze was, an effort to 'keep young'. But that's a personal decision, I don't judge everyone by what my feeling is on that.

My only critique of Ari, though I don't know the music he's referencing, is that he sometimes bats his eyelashes too much, too cute, but he may not even be aware he's doing it. He has a dry sense of humor, and is trying to get the idea across that he's just joshing when he's doing the eye-bat thing. I don't care for it, because it reminds me of Nixon. But Ari is a decent person, and nixon was always a swine.

****ON EDIT: Who you calling "blue collar" - yourself?!
*I'm* Blue Collar, Spartacus!

I'm Blue Collar Spartacus, and so is my wife.

Ari Melber not so much. He is quite intelligent, considers himself hip,
(The Beat), but he can be abrasive and rude on occasion.