Senator and 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio is a “hiphop connoisseur,” or so the National Journal’s social media person would have us believe. The last time Rubio cashed in some rap cred was in a November interview with GQ, and that interview appears to have a decent shelf life with the DC media. It’s the sole source for the lead section of the National Journal listicle that argues the Florida senator’s “eclectic taste in music” is a key to his appeal as the next face of a political party that’s not so much reinventing itself as taking sandpaper to its rough edges. Rubio’s hip. He’s with it. He knows the name of hiphop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa. He knows Tupac was from New York. He knows Eminem is “the only guy that speaks at any sort of depth.” He– wait, what?

GQ: Your three favorite rap songs?
Marco Rubio: “Straight Outta Compton” by N.W.A. “Killuminati” by Tupac. Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.”…I’m not like an athlete. The only guy that speaks at any sort of depth is, in my mind, Eminem. He’s a guy that does music that talks about the struggles of addiction and before that violence, with growing up in a broken family, not being a good enough father. So, you know that’s what I enjoy about it. It’s harder to listen to than ever before because I have a bunch of kids and you just can’t put it on.

If you think “the only guy that speaks at any sort of depth” is Eminem, you do not listen to enough hiphop. If “Lose Yourself” is your favorite Eminem song, you don’t listen to enough Eminem. And if you’re milking hiphop for credibility while marginalizing its challenges to the kinds of policies and narratives that Republicans run on, you might need to test your listening comprehension, period.

But there’s something worse than poseur bombast afoot if you tell a national men’s magazine that Em’s the only deep or even sort of deep emcee, during a conversation predicated on how cool and rooted and atypical-Republican you are as a person. You’re counting on that magazine being so enthralled by the notion of a Republican who has a passing knowledge of rap that they don’t notice how ignorant and shallow a statement you just made. You’re trusting that your interviewer won’t come back with a question about the potential subtexts of claiming that the only current rapper with rich and abiding lyrical value is the white one. Most of all, you’re manufacturing an image of a conservative capable of communing with the youths, giving future profile writers a ready-made clickbait depiction of you as “Not Your Grandfather’s Republican.” (Those reporters will even give you credit for understanding “how early ’90s rappers in California were like journalists who reported on the conditions in their communities,” as the Journal’s Elahe Izadi did, despite the fact that Rubio doesn’t express that (accurate) notion in the GQ interview she linked.)
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My guest blogger is Alan Pyke, a writer and commentator on film, television, fiction, music, and politics, with a particular fascination for hiphop. He reviews movies and concerts for BrightestYoungThings.

This post discusses events from the February 6 episode of The Americans.

When The Americans debuted last week, it did something that distinguished it from your average spy story: it spent a lot of time making clear that you don’t go into the espionage business for the suits and the babes. Rather, the decision to give up your life, particularly to an institution that abused you, is a particularly self-abnegating one. This week as Phillip and Elizabeth commenced a new, and exceedingly difficult operation, bugging a clock in Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s office, and Phillip manipulated a source, a bored housewife who believes he’s a Swedish diplomatic attache, the show made a different, but complimentary point. Most spy work doesn’t involve going mano a mano with a baddie on top of a moving train with the whole world at stake. It’s about hurting people low down on the food chain to get crumbs of information from people higher up.

There was something precise, both to that point, and to the racial dynamics of Washington, DC, about the way Elizabeth and Phillip decided to go about getting that bug into Weinberger’s house: they poisoned the son of his maid, a young man who’s in college and on an upwardly mobile trajectory, and told the woman that they would trade an antidote for her taking and then replacing the clock. There’s an exceptional ugliness to preying on the woman’s love for her child—”He’s my life. He’s my life. I did everything you asked me to do.”—and forcing her to weigh it against the job that she presumably needs to keep him in school, and that may have provided the kind of social contacts that helped her get him there in the first place. His life is so valuable to her that she’ll even abandon her faith in God when Phillip begins to smother the boy in front of her. But even as Phillip and Elizabeth are doing awful things to this family, they also have a certain level of sympathy for and understanding of their victims.

“Don’t you worry about God?” the woman asks Phillip at one point. “No,” he tells her. “I worry about you. I worry about your son.” It’s a sentiment that would be utterly grotesque if the risks of the mission hadn’t gotten Phillip and Elizabeth talking about the possible consequences for their own children. “Henry. Henry would adjust to anything if he had to, don’t you think so?” Elizabeth asks Phillip. “If something happened to us, he’d find his way. But Paige. I worry about her.” The cruelty the KGB has subjected them to—and that they’ve constantly reupped for—is almost overwhelming. Expected to have children to maintain their cover, they’re now expected to put those children at risk of becoming parentless. But the organization understands that it provides a narcotic-like sense of accomplishment, an antidote to that pain and frustration that’s just as strong as the injection Elizabeth gives the maid’s son. “They shouldn’t ask us to do impossible things,” Elizabeth reflects after they’ve come through the mission safely. “But we did it,” said Phillip, who was initially angrier and more skeptical of the assignment than Elizabeth was. “And tonight we’re in the house of the secretary of defense.”

The damage the myth of espionage’s glamour does is clear in the second storyline of the night, as Phillip convinces Annalise, the bored Washington wife he’s seduced, to take pictures of Weinberger’s office, only to find her threatening him with exposure. She’s become convinced that life with Phillip would be a grand romantic fantasy, full of reindeer, hot cocoa, and sex on bearskin rugs—or better, at least, than a marriage that’s grown dull to her. “I’m stuck in a house, alone with him, and you’re out here doing whatever it is you do,” she pouts. But Annalise’s believe that spying is all camera harnesses that feel like bondage gear and pulling open your wrap-around top to snap pictures that you shouldn’t is a delusion that marks her not just as the kind of pretentious, silly person that Elizabeth seduced in the pilot, but a hopelessly naive sap. And her fantasies indict us, too. We’ve thrilled to James Bond, when in real life, he’d probably be off bullying a poor, African-American woman.

The bridge is yours.

-The next stop in the Year Of Margo Martindale Tour is apparently New Girl.

-How Americans got obsessed with ninjas.

-Living in a Star Wars universe.

-Go work for io9, at least part time! These jobs sound awesome.

-Ellie Kemper will return to our televisions!

American Crossroads, a conservative Super PAC run by Karl Rove, made a serious of hilariously bad investments in 2012 Congressional elections. Their dismal success rate, and Rove’s total and utter clowning of himself on Fox News on election night, hasn’t kept them from spending rich people’s money. And the next person they’re going after? Ashley Judd, who is considering a run for Senate in her home state of Kentucky:

Conservatives complain about Hollywood liberalism, as if that’s a coherent thing, but it’s an utterly meaningless phrase, associated with no movement, school of thought, or even mode of engagement. It’s not as if preventing HIV transmission, particularly among young people in third-world countries—one of Judd’s priorities as an activist—is something that’s a fringe, costal belief, or as if only folks who live in the 90210 zip code are anti-genocide. As far as “Hollywood” goes, Judd actually lives in Tennessee, which is a residency problem, but of a different variety. Culturally, she has opinions about solidly middle-American things like University of Kentucky basketball and hockey, as well as car racing. Judd may have a way to go to remake herself in the public eye as a policy wonk the way now-Sen. Al Franken has—though she has a public policy degree from Harvard. But as candidates for that transformation go, Judd’s a pretty good one. And if her candidacy emerges and helps put paid to the idiocy of that phrase, that alone would be a useful contribution to our national political discourse.