Snob reader Peggy Sue hipped me to some Obama for Obama coverage. I’d heard a few things about the city of Obama, Japan rooting for Barack Obama for president, but I hadn’t blogged anything on it. The video above is a shorter flick I found on YouTube. Peggy sent me a link to a series of Obama videos made by an Obama supporter who actually went to Japan to do a four-part series on her visit there. Here’s Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.

I, personally, think it’s hilarious. Mostly because I’m guessing that the town of Obama has figured out that if Obama gets the nomination, then the presidency their town will get lots of publicity and ideally, some tourists. Which leads to lots and lots of yen.

It’s natural to be all “Go Obama!” Hope, Arkansas loved to brag about Bill Clinton as their first native son and fellow Arkansan to gain the presidency. And when I lived in Midland, TX, the hometown of Laura Bush and where George W. went to secondary school, the city of Midland wanted to turn the two houses the Bushes lived in into museums. They even contacted Poppy Bush and Barbara to find out how they decorated the house so they could recreate it, but the Bushes wrote back that they lived in so many houses back when Poppy was hopping around in the oil industry that they didn’t even remember what it looked like in either house.

In other random news. Did you know that LL Cool J has a clothing line?

It looks exactly like a less colorful version of Ed Hardy’s. Fancy that. I guess everyone’s going with the tattoo-styled clothing nowadays.

And seriously, isn’t there a point when you stop dressing “young.” I’m not saying LL is old. But, um, he’s not exactly Jack the Ripper, King Hercules anymore. He’s been in the game since he was a teenager in the early 1980s. He as to be in his forties now.

And who doesn’t have a clothing line or cologne in hip hop? Rap has turned into one giant consumer-driven in-joke. I like the entrepreneurship angle, but the more mainstream and commercial it gets the farther it gets from any artistic creativity. It seems so stagnant in the mainstream. There are still some great, talented artists out there, but in St. Louis all the radio plays is the most ignorant southern-based rap they can find. All the songs are about dancing and fucking or fucking while dancing. Or claiming to be some thug of some sort in love in some kind of sexual way. And everyone is usually high or drunk. Mostly drunk since most rap stations fade out illegal drug references now with all the n-words and mentions of gun violence.

And they all have Akon singing on it and I loathe Akon. When did Akon become the new, annoying version of one-note singer Nate Dogg. At least Nate Dogg was kind of cool. He couldn’t carry a song by himself, mind you, but he could take a song to the next level.