Superman versus The Hulk, the greatest guitarist EVAAAR, and Supreme Court nominations

 There is no need for any reasonable person to debate Superman versus Batman.  Superman is stupid, and Batman is rich.  Batman can afford kryptonite.  When the writers make Superman so powerful that he can only be defeated by a thing that he cannot possibly defeat, Bruce Wayne simply needs to buy it, and that's the fight, that's the game.  If Superman were smarter, he could avoid it, but he isn't.  He's a moron, and Bruce Wayne is a genius.  Batman wins.  Now, I'm not saying I have ever engaged in the more reasonable question of Superman versus The Hulk, but yes, Superman is strong, but the madder Hulk get, the stronger Hulk get.  I'm not saying I have engaged in this kind of triviality, but I'm not saying I haven't.

Once upon a time, as a mere pup, I may also have wasted time ranking guitarists.  So here's a question.  Were I to ask you to name the "greatest guitarist EVAAAR," would your answer change if I added a condition limiting your answer to African-Americans?  In your case, no.  You would give the same name, because the unwashed masses are conditioned to give a particular name, which tops every poll of greatest guitarists EVAAAR.  And he was African-American.  If I asked you to list the ten greatest African-American guitarists, that list will certainly be different than if I asked you to list the ten greatest guitarists unconditioned by race.  In the first case, you'll probably default to the famous blues guitarists-- as many Kings as you can name-- maybe Prince, but there's a good chance you'll stumble.  In the second case, depending on your tastes, you'll name either some Yardbirds guitarists, maybe some metal speedsters, and I seriously doubt you'll name anyone who isn't/wasn't American or British.  That guy I posted yesterday?  Geoff Achison?  Aussie.  Australia punches way above its population size in guitar virtuosos, and part of where I'm going here is that while it would be silly to argue that Acho is "greater" than Djelimady Tounkara or Debashish Bhattacharya or Miroslav Tadic or Yuri Naumov or... or... or..., one could argue that there are things like tiers, and while I seriously dig Freddie King, and while Acho is standing on shoulders of giants like Freddie and Albert and B.B., he is out-playing them, flat-out.  He is out-playing Clapton by a longshot.

So if you asked me to name the greatest African-American guitarist, even within Jimi's general style, would I even name Jimi?  Look, Band of Gypsies is one of my favorite albums.  Period, but as a guitarist, I could make a strong case that Vernon Reid does Jimi better than Jimi.  Yeah, we're not supposed to say that, and Vernon himself would never say that, but take away cultural expectations, and just fucking listen.  Vernon had the ability to absorb everything Jimi played, everything Eddie Hazel and Gary Shider played, every bit of jazz-fusion, hard rock, metal and funk that came after, and what he plays is nuts.  If we are expanding beyond the general realm of blues-based playing, and you ask me, who is the greatest guitarist at a technical level, I may give the same answer, conditioned by "African-American" or not.  My willingness to listen to actual, straight-up metal is limited, but... Tosin Abasi.  Is he even human?  There's a level at which I can't even comprehend what the instrumentalist is doing.  There are other guitarists in this realm.  Scotty Anderson.  Lenny Breau was there.  Bhattacharya is definitely there, but with slide, it's a different thing, and that brings in people like Jerry Douglas, Kelly Joe Phelps, Jeff Lang (another Aussie), and now this just gets stupid, and that's really the point.  At what point do I mention Vlatko Stefanovski, can I even think about his relationship to Charlie Hunter when there is none?  This is just stupid.

Sure, if you tell me to pick a list-topper, and condition it with "African-American," I'll have an easy time of it.  I might have picked an African-American anyway, depending on my mood, but this is kind of a stupid exercise.  Why?  The point is there's just this tier of people who are beyond comprehension.  I cannot wrap my brain around Debashish Bhattacharya, nor Lenny Breau, nor Scotty Anderson, nor Tosin Abasi, nor Eric McFadden (another African-American), nor plenty of others.  That's what I'll call a "greatest" tier.  Anything like a ranking among that tier is silly.  Tell me you call Abasi the greatest-ever?  OK.  Can't argue.  Tell me you call Anderson the greatest-ever?  Sound choice, to the degree that any such choices are.  Force a choice, and if you're choosing from that tier, you're fine.  It's a stupid exercise, but at least you aren't making an objectively stupid choice, given the stupidity of the exercise.  You aren't picking Kurt Cobain, or whoever the fuck is famous right now.

What if I am constrained to choose a woman?  I just named a bunch of men.  The first name to pop into my head is Badi Assad, a Brazilian jazz/classical guitarist.  Played in a trio with Coryell and Abercrombie and kind of put them in their places.  Thinking about Russia right now, there's a kid named Marina Krupkina who plays this batshit 10-string classical guitar with a fretboard bigger'n she is.  I'd love to watch Abasi watch her play and shit a few bricks before hittin' the woodshed.

You may notice, though, that I struggle more to list female guitarists.  For whatever cultural reason, there aren't as many women who focus on guitar.  Classical draws more women into instrumental work, but if you look at my preferred genres, and the genres in which the guitar is a prominent instrument, they are genres in which women, when they are there, tend to sing.  Can I list a bunch of badass women guitarists?  Yup.  Carolyn Wonderland, Cindy Cashdollar, Sally Van Meter, Susan Tedeschi can hold her own, even if her husband is just such a virtuoso that nobody can really shine in his presence, but... let's add Ani DiFranco, Mary Halvorson, and sure, yeah, we can name some badass guitarists.  But despite the numerical difference-- women are a hair over 50% of the population, and African-Americans are about 13%-- it is easier to list African-American men who are guitar virtuosos than women because the instrument draws men.  Why?

I keep meaning to read some actual social science on this.  I have my own speculation, but I'd be typin' out of my ass.  For whatever reason(s), guitar skews male.

On the other hand, what if I asked about the greatest singers?

You're gonna list a bunch of women.  Aretha.  Etta James.  I'll push you towards jazz, and we get to Ella Fitzgerald, and with my weird taste in voices, I go Nina Simone, and let's shift to modern blues because holy shit, Susan Tedeschi really is amazing.  Carolyn Wonderland, and plenty of others.  Regardless, when we are talking about singers, lists are female-dominated, so if I ask for the greatest female singers, I'm not constraining your choices in an important way.  Why?  Some combination of culture and biology, and sure, there are plenty of great male singers, but statistically, lists of great singers will be more skewed towards women, and that's the point.

Now let's narrow.  What if I asked you to list the greatest African-American female singers?  How different is that from greatest singers, period?

If your list started with Aretha, Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone anyway... you see my point?  Yeah, we're losing Susan Tedeschi and Bonnie Raitt, and we lose Dhafer Youssef two ways as a North African, non-American male, but he's not American, so you've never heard of him anyway, but regardless, if your top pick was Aretha anyway, then the constraint does nothing to your top pick.

But, what if you asked me to list the greatest female African-American guitarists?  And what if you tasked me with finding a list that's in the Tosin Abasi/Scotty Anderson/Lenny Breau/Debashish Bhattacharya/Badi Assad tier?  The I don't even fucking know what you're doing tier?  Not the, wow, that's fast tier.  The huh, what the fuck?!! tier.

It's pretty easy to list some very good guitarists.  First name on the list?  Memphis Minnie, most important for having been ripped off by Led Zeppelin, for "When The Levee Breaks."  She was the supreme badass of her scene, and she put the men on the blues scene at the time to shame.  There are stories of guys like Tampa Red just leaving with their tails between their legs when Memphis Minnie got on stage.  Elizabeth Cotten comes to mind.  "Freight Train" is one of those classics that every acoustic guitarist has to learn.  The thing about instrumental work, though, is that instrumentalists push each other, year after year, and what Memphis Minnie was doing at the time, while at the cutting edge, is no longer the cutting edge.  Keep an eye on Melanie Faye.  She can play.  She can still use some experience and seasoning, but this kid has a ton of skill and talent.

OK, now have you heard of Ilya Shapiro?  I'm meandering my way to SCOTUS nominations, but let's get Shapiro's name in here now, for a particular reason.  Shapiro objected to Biden's promise to nominate an African-American woman, regardless of anything else, by asserting that Sri Srinavasan was objectively the best pick, and Shapiro wrote that claim in a slightly icky way.  He wrote it in a way that sounded like he was not just saying that Srinivasan was awesome, but that sounded like he was kinda disparaging African-American women.  Georgetown Law suspended him.

The Ilya Shapiro version would be to say that Tosin Abasi is objectively the best, and any African-American woman selected would necessarily be lesser.  Here's how music obsessives do this.  Gimme what'cha got!  There's nothing we love more than discovery.  Are there African-American women in that tier?  My knowledge is not complete, and if someone went on a search, that person might find guitarists who are in that tier, whom I do not know.  You've never heard of Melanie Faye, have you?  You're welcome.  And honestly, I have vague mental images of absolutely astonishing African-American women, playing in styles that just didn't appeal to me, and hence, whose names I do not recall.  They come up in my youtube feed, I watch and listen, and I say, wow, that's kinda cool, but the style just doesn't do it for me.  I can list tons of guitarists who are amazingly skilled, who do not appeal to me.  Remember that comment about metal?  I'll say Abasi because I actually like him.  Metal is filled with mind-boggling guitarists whose music is what I would categorize as "intolerable."  So I don't know their fucking names.  Some, I do.  Many, I do not.  Same principle.  My knowledge is incomplete, and I observe its failure, as I watch youtube videos, discard artists who have technique but not styles that appeal to me, and the result is that I can make several observations.  One:  there is a male skew in guitar, which is very pronounced.  Despite the fact that African-Americans are 13% of the population, the male skew of guitar interest means that at the top tier, there is more racial diversity than gender diversity.  My knowledge is very incomplete, and skewed by my own weird tastes, which are very weird.

I am reasonably confident, though, that there is more racial diversity than gender diversity in guitar.  Make Melanie Faye the fucking star that she deserves to be, and we'll see what kind of an effect that has when you give African-American girls a role model, and so forth, but for right now, this is the landscape.

OK, pick an African-American woman for the top spot.

Which top spot?  Singer, or guitarist?  The effect of the constraint depends, because for whatever stupid reason-- probably lack of role models-- guitar isn't as appealing to African-American girls as other artistic/musical endeavors as they grow up.  (How many African-American women poets and novelists can you name?  Plenty.  See my point?)  If we're picking a singer, the constraint is irrelevant because if you just pick the best, on merit alone, you're gonna wind up with an African-American woman.  You just are.  Aretha.  Done.  What, you're going to argue?  Unless you're picking Etta James, we're done here.  If you add the constraint to a search for best guitarist, the constraint is more constraining.  Make Melanie Faye and a few others stars, give African-American girls some role models, and we'll see how that plays out over time.  Where the hell is Toshi Reagon right now?  Anyone paying attention to Sydney Ward?  But right now, one constraint has more impact than another.

Pick the best singer.  Your constraint is that it has to be a jewish guy.

What, no?  Antisemite!  If you don't say "Robert Zimmerman is the best singer ever" you're an antisemite!

Don't try this at home without converting, kids.

Anyway, let's deal with SCOTUS.  Biden announced in advance that he was going to nominate an African-American woman.  A little while ago, IPSOS released a poll showing that even among Democrats, a majority favored considering all potential nominees rather than limiting the search to African-American women.  It was entirely possible that a search without bias would result in an African-American woman.  It was entirely possible that a search for "the best," whatever that means, would result in an African-American woman.  What surveys showed is that even Democrats preferred such a search.  It may have led to Ketanji Brown Jackson anyway.

What does it mean to be the best, in this context?  It's a stupid classification in the context of guitar.  And guitarists at least do something useful.  Art enriches our lives, whereas lawyers detract from anything joyful, and make everything suck.  What does it mean to be an outstanding scholar of constitutional law?  Nothing.  Constitutional law isn't a real field.  Yeah, I said it.

Here's a thing.  "Does 'no law' mean 'no law?'"  What kind of stupid, useless person asks that?  Do you know the context of this stupid question?  This is what they were actually debating in NY Times v. United States, which was kind of an important case.

Lemme see if I can explain this to you.  X = X.  In math, we call this "the reflexive property."  Now, some of us joke that if you don't know what you want to do, you go to med school if you can handle math and science, and law school if you can't, but seriously.  X = X.  This is not actually supposed to be hard.  "No law" = "no law."  The only change there was the de-capitalization of an n-word which wasn't the n-word on the right-hand side of the equation based on the rules of grammar.  If you can't handle the reflexive property, go back to elementary school.  Not law school, elementary school.  No law means no law.  Period.  Words need to have meaning, and people who cannot grasp that need to shut the fuck up and get out of my way.

Constitutional law is an easy field made hard by stupid people and assholes trying to justify their own bullshit.

Here's the real test.  When was the last time you read a Supreme Court decision, and were blown away by the insight?  Like, you read it and you thought to yourself, wow, I'd never thought of it like that, this totally changes how I see the world, this is brilliant and innovative, and whoever wrote this is a genius and I must meditate of this, teach me, oh great one!  Let's be clear.  This is different from a cogently written piece with which you already agreed.  This is different from a right-on-preach-it smack-down to the other side.  I am asking about true innovation.  Original and unique thought which changes how you think.

However much you damned lefties worship at the alter of that narcissistic moron, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, all you ever really loved about her were to supposed smack-downs.  The stuff with which you already agreed.  She never did anything original or insightful, and neither has anyone else on the Supreme Court for a very long time.

I read Supreme Court rulings.  I assign and teach them.  They never have anything even remotely resembling insight.

I read novels, and essays and shit, and a couple of times a year, I read something that just blows me the fuck away.  It's never a Supreme Court ruling.  I listen to shitloads of music.  A couple of times a year, someone releases something so brilliant and innovative that it knocks me flat on my back.  That never happens with a Supreme Court ruling.  I've been reading these things for decades.  Not in my lifetime...

Why not?  Because these people are nothing more than ideologically motivated politicians in stupid costumes, dressing up their ideologies in phony "philosophies of constitutional interpretation," and it's all bullshit.  In political science, we call this "the attitudinal model," and the fact that presidents and the Senate approach confirmations the way they do is a manifestation of their own belief in the attitudinal model.  The thing is, even if the attitudinal model's predictive power is imperfect because all politicians are idiosyncratic-- and they are-- I still don't see any real insight from any judge or Justice.

So who the fuck cares about "the best?"  This is all bullshit.

That doesn't mean I don't want smart people in the job.  Not everything judges and Justices do is basic con-law.  There are technical points which require absorbing and processing a lot of information, and I'd kind of like Justices who can think through unintended consequences because the law of unintended consequences is a thing.  But mostly, this is all theater, and theater is not my preferred art.

Would it be nice to have someone who is an incisive writer?  Yeah.

And the first thing I read about Jackson was a "presidents are not kings" thing, which had me thinking, is she the one who wrote "presidents are not kings, and plaintiff is not president?"  If so, sold!  Wrap it up, I'll take it!  Here's my credit card.  Is this thing a chip or swipe?  Nope, that was Tanya Chutkan.  Oh, well.  Can I have her?  She's awesome.

Not that it really matters.  But I return to something like a concept of tiers.  How do we distinguish?  I cannot distinguish meaningfully between Tosin Abasi and Debashish Bhattacharya.  I also cannot distinguish meaningfully between Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sri Srinivasan, whom Ilya Shapiro got suspended from Georgetown for saying was intrinsically, objectively better than every African-American woman.  I have no clue how one would make such an assertion.

Can I say that she is objectively better for the job than me?  Yeah, because while it's a stupid job that doesn't actually require true genius or insight, it does require more knowledge of the law than I have, and more knowledge of the law than most people have, but as long as the choice is being made from the right tier, the point is that distinctions become meaningless.  As far as I can tell at this point, Jackson is a reasonable choice.  She is neither a plagiarist, nor a rapist, nor a member of a creepy cult, and even if she didn't write the absolute best Trump-smackdown line, she appears to not like him very much, so all things considered, when we have concerns like a Russian invasion of Ukraine, the climate burning, and lots of other scary stuff, it's easy for a sane person to look at Jackson and say, OK, yeah, fine.

The process?  Here's a little tip, if any reader is ever in a hiring position.  If you ever have a job, and you announce that you will throw away the applications of anyone whose demographics don't meet certain conditions?  You're inviting a lawsuit.  In legal terms, nominations get treated differently, for various reasons, and it doesn't mean that Jackson is unqualified, but you might not wanna do what Biden did.

Even most Democrats disapproved of the process, and you'll get sued.  That said, distinctions here are kinda silly.  After all, "Supreme Court Justice" is a bullshit job.

Anyway, here's Melanie Faye.  Make this kid famous.  She has more talent and a better work ethic than anyone else out there.  And seriously.  Just listen.