Everybody get random

Waiting for the bus today, bench-sharer asks what my nationality is. I stall, genuinely nonplussed, "Uh..." He offers, "Bohemian?" and laughs so that I think it's some kind of dig at my clothes/age/general appearance. But no, he actually means Bohemia, as in the region of Germany. Dude is nice, so we breeze-shoot until the number 8 pulls up and I get on, and he guesses my age at "18 or 19." I realize I am officially over being offended by people thinking I look this young, seeing as how my footwear of choice have soles of about .001 in. and boost my full height to knee-high to a fire hydrant.

Turns out Lady Sovereign goes through this all the time, and shares my towering 5"1'-itude. Although how old is she, actually? Eighteen, offish, yeah, but who's to say she's not really 13...or 30? And why is it that, having broken stateside this year or whenevs, grime feels over already? All it needs is David La Chapelle and his "high octane" docsploitation and it'll be deep-sixed as a legitimate underground movement in no time! Which will suck, because one of the best things about grime as a genre was that it didn't have either "post-" or "neo-" in it.

I wish I could set up some kind of Lady Sov-M.I.A. compare-and-contrast action, even though M.I.A. is not true grime, because of the two of them, only M.I.A. is at all marketable as a booty-baring model/fashionista, and she's the one poised to tear up the U.S. media, not Sov, whose unwavering commitment to baggy tracksuits promises to keep her obscure, Jay-Z collaboration or no. Just look at the Galang and Bucky Done Gun videos. In terms of video-disseminated self-image she could go either way, planting her feet in the Wynne Greenwood/Le Tigre experimentalism of Galang or riding the chainlink fence humping of Bucky into jerk-off billboard diva superstardom.