BENLADEN: A RETROSPECTIVE

(since everyone seems to be talking about how I've died)
((nb: incomplete and probably incorrect in many places))


2003 (or 2004?)

• Spencer Vanderheyden makes the name up in a series of puns.

2005

• The market popularity of Halo 2 makes it the videogame of choice for LAN parties I host, and Benladen becomes my handle on the strength of my devotion to bad puns.

2006

• I register the name on last.fm
• I try to register the name on AIM, but cannot; Uninterpretative is born.
• I begin to write journals (the blogging feature) on last.fm, titled "Fuck [musician/band name];" targets include Jack Johnson and Pink Floyd. This leads to me joining such groups (the forum feature) as Pretentious, Self-Deprecating Assholes and It's All About Shit Music
• I meet AxemRangers, and we begin talking on AIM

2007

• last.fm user Dynamik creates #spamfm on irc.wyldryde.net
• I register Benladen on twitter and forget about it
• I take a class called Classic Russian Novel, with a TA named Evan Calder Williams. I find his blog, Socialism and/or Barbarism, and through it the leftist blogger philosophy/theory/political community
• I take a class called Asian American Literature with Karen Tei Yamashita, with whom I become friends and we begin to talk about Hello Kitty quite frequently
• I create my first musical alias, "The pl. n.," with which I record myself playing my roommates guitar in a really self-pitying sort of way
• I create the group "Anti-Closedmouth" as a campaign against a certain group of last.fm users who involve themselves in a very intimate community of incredible activity towards insignificant communications
• I create the musical alias "Uninterpretative: no!" after AxemRangers jokes with me that I should use that as my electro alias, when I produce a song which samples a Patrick Lawler song as well as bits of Kanye West's Stronger (which theme I then continue to milk on my album "Bootlegs")

2008

• Wingus and DDL discover a BBCode exploit in last.fm's code which allows them to create text so large that it renders pages unusable, and terrorize the website briefly
• Benladen gets banned from last.fm, and I come back as Benladen2
• Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip gets signed to Sage Francis' label Strange Famous Records, and they have a remix contest for their lead single "First Time We Met Musik." TheJunner leads the charge as we create over a hundred remixes of the song
• I register Benladen on the soleone.org forum
• I create a last.fm account called extenZe, in order to see how much spamming I can get away with before I get banned; I download the song Lollipop by Lil Wayne after a full day of spamming to continue this joke, but extenZe gets banned while I sleep. I continue this project by creating the IiIwayne account on last.fm, for which I have since created a blog and done two performances (one in 2009, one in 2010) with this project
• Wingus and myself orchestrate a performance on last.fm in which we get into a vocal disagreement and begin egregiously bashing each other all over the site.

2009

• The occupation of the Graduate Student Commons at UC Santa Cruz invigorates my sense of political possibilities, and my cowardice leads me to spend a lot of time hanging out just outside the occupation, which leads to me rediscovering and finally utilizing the twitter account Benladen
• I record the first of the Valentine's Day EPs
• I record material for and release two split EPs, one with last.fm user Quendus and another with last.fm user RedSK
• I record myself reading an essay for AxemRangers' "Acen EP 2009" about Sanrio character My Melody
• Wingus and I begin talking about collaborating musically, and come up with the idea for an album, which still has yet to be finished. We cannot find a name for ourselves, but seem to have settled (for now at least) on The Uninterpretatives

2010

• Hello Kitty Everything begins to crystallize into a concrete project, and I win a Humanities Undergraduate Research Award to pursue it
• uninterpretative.blogspot.com is born
• I am briefly banned from twitter (in April) at the request of @mark_yudof, but get my account reinstated after about a month
• #spamfm bands together to create a New Year's Eve compilation album, but doesn't really manage, and so we move it to be a Chinese New Year album.
• My second Valentine's Day EP is released, and Zan-Zan-Zawa-Veia releases a Mother's Day EP (under the alias Liminique) and Wingus releases a Halloween album (as Chinese Church)

2011

• #spamfm releases a second Chinese New Year album, with an even better lineup, and my song is god awful
• A third Valentine's Day EP by me.
• I begin to take the idea that my twitter feed somehow constitutes poetry a little too seriously, and "publishing" "poems" on my blog
• I write an article entitled "Rap's Coming Insurrection" on my blog investigating the idea of Lil B's term "Based" as well as Sole's album mansbestfriend vol. 5, which Sole likes, and he taps me to write the bio for their upcoming album "Hello Cruel World"
• I move to Wisconsin to work on a Democratic political campaign opposing Governor Walker's budget
• Bin Laden dies

AxemRangers, Wingus, DDL, Aurist, Zan-Zan-Zawa-Veia, TheJunner, Pauline, jimmy-jimmy, Jonno123, Katy, worsement, chinchowdoll, Keishi, Ryan, theHapacalypse, neely, Jessica, Ally, Katie, Tanya, Gwen, Ali, Olivia, Lily, Toxxi, Quendus, Ahsluh, Goofid, Poncho Peligroso, Steve Roggenbuck, FromTheMorning, Dynamik, advil0, thehoopoe, leducviolet, avulpineheart, mbatterham, tehemophag123, Giovanni Tiso, Evan Calder Williams, Benjamin Noys, Kirby, Eduardo, Nico, Carrie/Jodi, Karen Tei Yamashita, Tom Dissonance, Eric, Daniel MacDougall, Sole, BigSexyShaq, rudyg, heliocentricme, CarsCat, releaseyet, Gwendolyn, Will, redjives, David Lau, Laura Martin, Wlad Godzich, Jannon, Angad, deathkitty, ohyesbyallmeans, antoin, Aliaena