Links & Bits for 1/14/11

The Ghost of Bigger Thomas Surfaces in Kanye West's "Monster" (Racialicious)

Monster also appears calculated – almost as if Kanye tore a page from the diary of Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son. The original articulation of self-destructive black rage, West is intentionally drinking deeply from the same brackish water that tainted Bigger Thomas – a vague feeling that something is wrong with him, and it may not be exactly his fault, but he will be perceived as a monster just the same.

Music and the Tuscon Shootings (Pop & Hiss)

The frenzy surrounding the Columbine shooters' alleged interest in industrial and goth rock eventually subsided; in his important book on the rampage, published a decade later, journalist Dave Cullen thoroughly disproved the link. And Lo himself denied that hard sound motivated him. In a prison letter to the rock critic Chuck Klosterman, he insisted that the T-shirt he wore that day -- emblazoned with the name of the hard-core band Sick of It All -- was an arbitrary choice, and wondered what conclusions observers might have drawn had he pulled one hawking Poison from his drawer.

Chely Wright, Country Music First Out Lesbian Star: The Autostraddle Interview (Autostraddle)

I’m proud of who I am as a person. I’ve put in nearly 20 years into a public capital. I have been known in country music as one of the most revered, philanthropic, nice, hardworking, All-American people that make records in Nashville — and that counts for something. I wanted to use my voice and the way to do that was to make a grand declaration. I am all of those things and I want to make it clear to the American public, I am a gay woman. Anyone who knows me going back to my childhood in Kansas knows that I was the president of my class all through high school, I started several governing clubs in my high school, I was the captain of my basketball team. I am a leader. When you are a natural leader and then you hide, it’s degrading and it does something to you and something snapped inside of me.