Recently, I concluded the Top Five Terms Made Up By Yours Truly series with one of my favorite terms: Applecarters. In essence, Applecarters are people who love watching the when unplanned, unscripted, or unexpected happens. They love it when something “upsets the apple cart.”
Apparently, Grantland’s Hua Hsu is, in fact, an Applecarter. He did a great story on M.I.A. and the Impossibility of Selling Out, and described his expectations and excitement about watching pop star M.I.A. at the Super Bowl thusly:
As I watched M.I.A. at the Super Bowl, looking slightly awkward, I felt a sense of anticipation — or was it hope? Was she simply going to go through the motions? Was she going to look purposely stilted and bored, as though to lampoon this self-important event? Would she reach into the crowd and pull a scraggly 99 percenter onstage with her? There are those rare moments when you watch live television and you feel something is about to happen. You notice opportunities when things could go off-script — like when Mike Myers threw to Kanye West on the Katrina telethon, or any moment from a late-’90s Rage Against the Machine performance on MTV. At the end of her pro forma stint on a moribund new Madonna tune, M.I.A. looked in the camera and flipped the bird. Along the continuum of public controversies, a middle finger probably ranks somewhere between the S-word and the F-word, far below a cogent political statement or a bared breast.
Sounds like the yearnings of an Applecarter to me. Welcome to the club, Mr. Hsu.
