GarbageShoot

He also attacked it on flimsy theoretical grounds for "not having" melody and harmony despite, you know, the vast majority of rap having those in the instrumental

You definitely have the main idea with the panopticon. I think someone more well-read than I could probably make really interesting points about how, in the original form one has an imagined cop in their head constantly enforcing externally-established rules, and this new version has an imagined cop constantly enforcing imagined rules of imagined scope. The notice for what is banned is replaced by a rumor-mill and the occasional high-profile case where "what tripped the censor?" still remains unclear and manual flagging sullies even this very messy sampling method.

I don't really know that much about the STASI, but it's not like West Berlin wasn't also heavily surveilling its denizens, and deaths in East Berlin get wildly overstated to the point of being a farce. That's probably something gone over in "STASI State or Socialist Paradise?" but I haven't gotten to it yet.

MSM makes money directly on corporate advertising and indirectly on high-profile establishment figures being regularly willing to do interviews and such. Being inhospitable to the status quo would imperil both of those things. There's the last part done for you.

That one is just longstanding AAVE, "do be" is a present progressive meaning something like "has been frequently known to be". "He do be working" therefore is like "He has been working a lot lately".

It's funny how it resembles a heightened version of what people accuse the USSR, PRC, and DPRK of. In gommunist chyna, citizens don't know what they aren't allowed to discuss or what words they aren't allowed to use, so they speak in a contorted code to get past censors [who might not even care] when there is a rumor of a topic or word being forbidden. It's like a panopticon where you don't only not know when you are being watched, but you also don't know what is being watched for.

Who refers to their uncle/aunt by their surname?

That one Bond movie has a really iconic action sequence with it and it was used to good effect for gags in Loony Toons, so I think it's mainly imitating those though idk

Admittedly I've never snowboarded, but it was my understanding that steering was only a little bit harder, and even then failing to steer you'll probably just wipe out (because the added difficulty is how it impacts balance, along with the asymmetry) whereas failing to steer on skis might leave you accelerating forward.

You clearly don't have an adequate appreciation for how bad golf is if you think this is an appropriate comparison

I meant it in the sense of "Gamefreak just made a second Pokemon game with Legends: Arceus" in that there is very little distinction between songs except that they fall into around four categories. Any from within a category are interchangeable and may as well be AI-generated.

Though there is a long-standing rumor that his girlfriend, Nova, does a ton of ghostwriting for him. Some evidence for this: She has long been a much stronger and more original writer than him (he had a whole album of aping Wayne), and can even do basic things like freestyling that you can't even imagine Tom doing. She herself never touches the right-wing edgelord stuff in terms of raps she delivers, even though she directs all the videos. Tom himself is defensive toward these rumors and has mentioned them in a song. Also Mac Lethal claimed to have dirt toward this effect.

Some stuff if definitely Tom, like his obsession with coining cute little catchphrases and other weird motifs, but generally we are expected to believe that he reinvented his style in a way that is way more like Nova right around the time he broke right.

Yeah, he's written a total of about 4 songs, and that's including the mostly-album-filler two of "You don't want the smoke" and "Started from the bottom".

Look, all I'm saying is these bourgeois fucks would get their social credit dinged to hell for doing this in China