Dealey Plaza will never be the same again

Dealey Plaza in Dallas, TX was already the scene of one great crime.

It's where, in November 1963 (when it felt like the world would freeze), John F. Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a quiet loner with a wife and two kids, from the sixth floor window of a nearby book depository building. Or was the real assassin a CIA agent on a grassy knoll? That's never been clear to me.

Part of the reason could be that I belong to that weird generation where pretty much everything I know about the JFK assassination comes from the Oliver Stone movie JFK. Having only been born during the Reagan administration, I'm not even sure if I knew who JFK was before I saw JFK. Of course, people who are older than I am, like Jay-Z, might actually remember that time. And I'm not sure if young kids today really fuck with JFK like they did back in the '90s. So who knows what they think about who killed JFK, or if they think about JFK period. As far as I'm concerned, it was the CIA, because they were concerned that JFK might have pulled out of Vietnam as early as 1965, and members of the CIA had a big stake in the arms industry, and hence stood to benefit from the Vietnam War going on as long as possible, regardless of whether or not there was a good reason. In fact, I'm not even sure what Lee Harvey Oswald's official motivation was supposed to be? Was he jealous of Jackie Kennedy's ass? I guess I could kinda see that.

Speaking of women with huge asses, Erykah Badu must be obsessed with the Kennedy assassination, either because she grew up in Dallas, TX, or because she's crazy. Possibly both. Her new video, for the song "Window Seat," is a sort of remake of Matt and Kim's brilliant video for the song "Lessons Learned," in which they strip naked and run through Times Square, but set against the backdrop of Dealey Plaza, the site of the Kennedy assassination. And lest you think this was because she just so happened to be in Dallas, and Dealey Plaza is their local equivalent of Times Square, at least in terms of interest to tourists (what else would you want to see in Dallas?), she gets shot in the neck right at the very end, just like JFK. (BACK AND TO THE LEFT!!!) Then she says something or other that sounds like it may have been lifted from "It's Just a Ride" by Bill Hicks, who, oddly enough, was also obsessed with the Kennedy assassination. I wonder if Erykah Badu listens to Bill Hicks. Maybe she picked up on both Hicks and that Matt and Kim video from following me on Twitter. Stranger things have happened.

Or maybe this is all part of her plan to inflict me with that Baduism. I'm not gonna lie - when she pulls off her pants, I can see how dudes like Common, Andre 3000, and seemingly about a third of the male hip-hop community of a certain age got caught up. The milk is obviously not as fresh as it was back in like 2000, but it hasn't gone completely bad either. It's a trip to watch her walk past so many unwitting tourists, including several children, with her junk hanging out like that. At first, it looks like she might be hesitant to take certain things off in certain places, but when the video gets to the end you realize she just had certain beats she was trying to hit. The video is timed so that the neck shot takes place right at the end of the song, and there's something written on the sidewalk where she lands. She didn't want to take everything off to soon, but she had to make sure she had everything off by the end of the relatively brief (by Erykah Badu standards) song, regardless of who happened to be standing around. It's not like they could have warned people beforehand, and it's not like they could have shot a second take.

She's lucky 5-0 didn't show up. They could have charged her with exposing herself to a minor, which would have caused her to have to register as a sex offender, at the very least. I know guys have been hit with that shit just for taking a piss on a sidewalk, or walking around naked at home, with the blinds open. You don't hear about that happening to women that much, but that's because more often than not, when a woman gets naked in public, it's the kind of woman pretty much everyone wants to see naked, even (admit it, ladies) other women. The best shit ever is when you're in a bar, and some woman just randomly decides to show everyone how well her boob job turned out. Anyone who would complain about that is just jealous. What Erykah Badu did was a little bit different, because she went full-on naked, and like Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl in '04, she's past that point where there's community-wide interest in what she might look like in the buff. If she had been arrested, she probably would have tried to claim that it had something to do with her being black. In that sense, I guess we're all kinda fortunate that she didn't.