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If We Can’t Believe In The Idea Of Miley Cyrus Being In A Taxicab While A Jay-Z Song Was On, What Can We Believe In?

2009-11-06T17:00:50Z

Not really understanding the lyrics you’re singing is apparently another thing that falls under the rubric of “just bein’ Miley.” An interview with Billy Ray Cyrus’ spawn reveals that the lyric in her Velveeta-and-Miracle-Whip single “Party In The USA” about hearing a Jay-Z song while in a taxicab is, shockingly, not based on real events. Someone else wrote that lyric, and she just did her job and warbled it through eighty layers of post-production. In fact, she’s never heard a Jay-Z song! Because she doesn’t listen to pop music! At all! Wait, what?

When asked about what Jay-Z song was on the mythical radio that the taxi driver turned on in “Party” (even paraphrasing the lyrics puts the song right in my head), she pleaded ignorance:

“I didn’t write the song, so I have no idea,” she said. “Honestly, I picked that song because I needed something to go with my clothing line. I didn’t write it [and] I didn’t expect it to be popular, originally. It was just something that I wanted to do and I needed some songs and it turned out for the best.”

So cold! So businesslike! (So possibly written by a publicist?) So… non-partyish! Especially when followed by the revelation that she doesn’t listen to pop at all, and that “Party” is, quote, “not even my style of music.” Because this:

Is so different from this:

(BTW, that song is such a rewrite of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent” it’s not funny.)

Jay-Z is too busy hamming it up with Bono and A-Rod to respond at the moment. Perhaps since she’s such an anti-pop type they can hash things out at a Grizzly Bear show?

[MTV; HT Jeff Rosenthal]
Miley Cyrus PARTY IN THE USA Video [Dailymotion]
Miley Cyrus - See you again DCG [Dailymotion]

XXLmag.com - » Songs in the Key of G

2009-11-06T14:20:11Z

No Good Advice

2009-11-06T14:19:38Z

Shared by wayneandwax
fascinating! gangsta singing = limited range + unpracticed inaccuracy

Man, 50 Cent is funny. If he didn't exist, someone would have to invent him. He's literally like some sort of rap supervillain; he acts like he's utterly determined to embody all of the worst impulses in hip-hop. Even the worst impulses that contradict the other worst impulses.

The reason I bring this up is because 50 recently said some stuff on the radio (he drops interviews the way other MCs drop freestyles) that tallies with some of the stuff I started tangentially rambling about in my recent post on Chipmunk. Specifically, the equation of melody with weakness.

Ron Mexico over at XXL has blogged about this here. 50 starts out by identifying the equation of melody with weakness as an unfair prejudice held by hip-hop fans:

“They want the hard music from me. They want what I fell in love with from KRS-One and Criminal Minded… And, I understand it because what they would say is wrong with a 50 Cent record is what they enjoy from Drake... When he’s singing on his choruses nobody has an issue because he doesn’t come from a tough background.”

When it's pointed out to 50 that, many moons ago, he attacked Ja Rule for making melodic songs, he clarifies:

“[Ja Rule] was actually trying to hit notes. Like, going away from just using the monotone singing bass in your speaking voice.”

Ron Mexico offers the following commentary:

"50 Cent issues a formal excuse for why his girly gangsta sing-alongs are more acceptable than Ja Rule’s. Apparently Rule tried a little too hard to be a real singer, which, as you remember, wasn’t gangsta enough. In 50’s mind, Ja Rule’s attempts to hit notes made his music fraudulent and unworthy for public consumption. 50 believes that he never left the confines of what he calls 'monotone singing'. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but I am assuming he’s implying that he stays within a certain gangsta-safe octave."

So, yeah, pretty funny. This prompted a couple of thoughts. First of all, I think singing is connected with emotional disinhibition. Emotional disinhibition is problematic for hip-hop's tough-guy masculinity because it makes one vulnerable. (Jay Smooth is brilliant on this.) It's more acceptable for rappers to display emotions like anger than it is for them to display 'softer' emotions which might betray emotional weakness, and it's these latter sort of emotions which singing is generally held to express. Hence Chuck D, in 1988, raging "you singers are spineless/as you sing your senseless songs to the mindless/your general subject, love, is minimal". Hence Eminem, in 2002, opting to sing, rather than rap, the first genuinely happy he song he'd ever recorded since becoming Slim Shady - 'Hailie's Song', about how much he loves his daughter. (He even introduces the song by saying, "I can't sing, but I feel like singing; I want to fuckin' sing, 'cause I'm happy".) Hence 50 Cent's contrast between himself and Drake; it's okay for Drake to sing (the thought goes) because he doesn't come from a tough background, and if you genuinely come from a tough background, you have your guard up all the time, and don't - as a matter of survival - go around displaying weakness. You're supposed to be emotionally inhibited. (Remember Mobb Deep's chilling, straightfaced dedication of their greatest moment, 1995's 'Shook Ones Part II', to "real niggas who ain't got no feelings"? 50 Cent loves Mobb Deep. He signed them to G-Unit.) Hence, even, 50's apparently ridiculous contrast between himself and Ja Rule; 50 sings in the acceptable 'gangsta-safe octave' because his singing, so he claims, never wavers from the 'bass' of his speaking voice: i.e., he sings like he's still got his emotional guard up.

...all of which puts a slightly different spin on the stuff I was going on about in that Chipmunk post. Singing, maybe, comes across as evidence that someone hasn't really internalised all the proper stifling, inhibiting codes of working class masculinity; and so it might seem like a flag denoting a lack of authenticity in someone who claims to come from what 50 Cent calls a 'tough background'. Which is, maybe, why it's okay for Jay-Z to get hooks from Rihanna and Alicia Keys, while boasting "my raps don't have melodies" on 'D.O.A. (Death Of Autotune)'. It's okay for them to have melodies. Maybe Drake is allowed to sing, too. Not Jay-Z, though.

(I feel like maybe I haven't made clear enough that I think all of the above is absolutely ridiculous, fucked up, and wrong. Obviously I do. I'm just interested in teasing out the structure of these ways of thinking.)

.....

Secondly.... 50 Cent, generally. His plight comes from the fact that, as I say, he's trying to navigate two different sets of values that have come into conflict with each other. On the one hand, he's internalised the stereotype of the rapper-as-hustler pursuing wealth - and power - at all costs. This is the guy who released two albums called Get Rich Or Die Tryin', not to mention one called Power Of The Dollar. Oh, and there was 'I Get Money'. Now, this means being a pop rapper, who makes catchy, radio friendly songs with R&B singers on the hooks. On the other hand, he's equally supposed to embody the equally powerful stereotype of the rapper as a hard man, a 'gangster' from the 'streets', who identifies himself with 'street' values. This means, a la MC Ren on 'Final Frontier', pouring scorn upon pop rappers who make catchy, radio-friendly songs with R&B singers on the hook - those guys are inauthentic, fakers. That's why 50 was both making pop songs and having a go at Ja Rule for making pop songs.

When 50 first shot to prominence in 2003, it was in part because he managed to pull off the almost-impossible trick of appearing to do both of these things. You can have your pop songs, and you can have your 'authentic' street/thug credibility too. This have-your-cake-and-eat-it model had been lived out already by rap's great twin martyrs, 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G. But both of those men had portrayed themselves as self-destructive and self-hating; each was obviously and explicitly a walking nest of contradictions. Listening to the work of either, you sense that a violent, untimely demise seems like the only possible outcome.

50's not like that; he's too smooth, too calculated, and has nothing of the rough, intuitive unpredictability of his doomed predecessors. He's also still alive. So the contradictions that he embodied from the start have long since caught up with him, to the point that he looks increasingly ridiculous, a walking joke driven to absurdities like the ones quoted above to try to make sense of his own behaviour.

Beanie Sigel's Balancing Act: "What You Talkin' About (Average Cat)"

2009-11-06T02:01:00Z

What's been forgotten since Beanie Sigel released "What You Talkin' About (Average Cat)", earlier this week is just how well-rapped the thing is. Just how good Beans is on the song though, is pretty easy to forget, when such a delicate balancing act of a diss song is followed-up by an almost twenty-minute bitch-rant...in video form. That's the tit-for-tat internet for you though, right?

But really, this is the most solid, determined chunk of rapping from Sigel since The B.Coming. Every word and idea is wisely placed, there's a concern for meter and syllables, the way he stretches the word "mere" in one line to rhyme with "hairs" in the next--"The mere sight of fiends/Raise the hairs on your back"--or the weird, flurry of Michael Jackson references and something as vicious and nebulous "I can say shit that make 'B look at you different"--all too a plodding, piano beat and Mobb Deep hook that's obviously constructed to be the complete opposite of the Euro-house synth party that is the Jay song Beans "answers" here.

Beanie's also kinda mimicking Jay-Z's voice--that awkward, scrunched-up nasally accent--which is just funny, but is a subtler way of reminding you just how much Jay really does owe Sigel. Fuck "street cred" and all the dopey stuff Beans still cares about at age 35--that's no less pathetic than Jay talking "business" in response, just two guys leaning on their proverbial crutches--Sigel is pretty much responsible for making Jay-Z the more complex, introspective rapper he became around the time of Blueprint.

Ever notice how every early “reflective” Jay-Z song, if you thought hard about the lyrics, it was Jay who was the asshole? Beanie brought a sense of self and morality that Jay picked up on. Beans moved Jay away from “thug em’, fuck em’, love em’, leave em” and into a functional, knuckle-head with real feelings. There's even plenty of examples of Jay swiping Sigel's flow pretty much wholesale: Compare The Truth’s "Mac Man" and Jay’s "Girls, Girls, Girls". The joke here is, Jay doesn't have it in him to get this (publicly) upset about anything and so, on the sincerity tip, and only on the sincerity tip, Beanie Sigle's victorious.

The point is, this really isn't just a "diss song". Yeah, it's a little too insider-y and all that, but it's genuine response, with Beans recontextualizing Jay's song in nearly every way, inhabiting his voice and opinions, and then sitting down and writing an artful rap, that moves between anger and disappointment, violence and distress, and never loses sight of its target. But there's something unfortunate about the fact that Beans' rediscovered focus is rooted in being upset and the reality that a shit-load of people'll actually hear this song, so he better rap cogently.

But what all the zShare hawks get when they put on the "Beanie Sigel Jay-Z Diss" though, is sure, filled with the fruity gossip junk that a diss record requires in 2009, but it's also downright horrifying. The aforementioned scary-movie beat and the fact that it just sounds like a dude really trying to keep his shit together and then, just kinda exploding at the end, no longer even rapping just ranting. There's no "oh shit, no he didn't!" moment to the thing. This song does not make you excited for a follow-up.

Princess Leia and stunt double sunbathing on Tatooine

2009-11-05T17:58:21Z

This did unsurprisingly well when I posted it to Twitter, so I've archived it here for posterity. This is Carrie Fischer and her stunt double taking a nap under the Tatooine suns during the filming of Jedi.

Tags: photography Star Wars

Charges Dropped Against G-20 "Twitterists," NYC Probe Continues

2009-11-04T10:06:22Z

On Monday, the Allegheny County District Attorney dropped all charges against two Jackson Heights-based anarchists accused of listening to police scanners and sharing riot cops' movements with demonstrators on Twitter during the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. Elliot Madison and Michael Wallschlaeger were arrested on September 24th in a Pittsburgh hotel room, where they were found sitting in front of personal computers listening to both police and EMS scanners. On Monday, lawyers for the men were poised to argue for the unsealing of a secret 18-page affidavit authorizing the raid, but then the prosecution unexpectedly withdrew all charges. A spokesman for the district attorney offered this explanation:

After an extensive review of the facts and circumstances underlying those two arrests... there appears to be sufficient evidence to suggest that certain acts that occurred during the G-20 summit were not isolated incidents confined to Allegheny County but instead may have been related to more expansive activities that went beyond the Pittsburgh G-20 in both time and substance. That being the case, a determination was made that until further investigative activities by law enforcement agencies can be completed, it would be more prudent to have the current charges withdrawn rather than prosecuted at this time.

The affidavit is set to become public on November 23rd, and in the meantime Madison had more problems in New York. He pays most of the mortgage on an anarchist group home in Jackson Heights called Tortuga House, which the FBI raided and searched for 16 hours on October 1st. Investigators seized a pound of liquid mercury, metal triangles used to puncture tires, two boxes of ammunition, a book called "Manifesto of Rioting," and a picture of Vladimir Lenin. After the raid, Madison's lawyer argued that the search violated the First Amendment, and a Brooklyn federal judge issued a temporary order of protection stopping the feds from going through the material.

That restraining order was lifted yesterday, and the NYC investigation continues. In a terrific interview with the Queens Tribune inside Tortuga House, Madison said, "I was much happier a month ago. Now I don’t like my life. It’s frightening and expensive. They took all my writing and do I want to just wait three years to get my computer back? Or do I go out and spend money replacing my stuff?...It’s all smoke and mirrors at this point. As an anarchist, I don’t trust the State and you can see the reasons."

Liberals and racism

2009-11-06T02:05:13Z

Shared by zunguzungu
key lines: "We are chosen, we are smarter, we are irrigating the desert and building computers that will bring a drop of water to every root of every artichoke bush, we have more Nobel prizes than all the Arab world combined. I’ve struggled with this idea of Jewish superiority all my life...Israel is a developed country while the Arab world is ignorant, that the Palestinians are peasants and Jews are urban people of the book, that the Arab world lacks basic freedoms. And so it would be a tragedy if the smart Jews of Israel had to share the government of their country, in one state, with the Palestinians. In a word, We don’t want to be governed by Arabs.

I spent much of the J Street policy conference last week struggling with the issue of racism in liberal Jewish life, including in my own thinking.

J Street set off this struggle because it dispensed with two easily-dismissed rationales for the Jewish state that you see everywhere at AIPAC: Israel is necessary because the antisemites are going to turn on us in the U.S. or it’s necessary because the bible gave us the land. J Street avoids both tropes. And yet it routinely invokes the necessity and goodness of Jewish democracy. I must have heard the words Jewish democracy a million times there. I’ve never seen a purple cow either.

But why is a Jewish democracy necessary?

The feeling that flowed through the J Street conference was: Two states is a lot better than one state because we’re Jews and we can’t trust what Palestinians would do if they were in charge. This theme was expressed in benevolent terms, as when Bernard Avishai spoke of the economic progress that Israel as a democracy "with a Jewish character" could make teaming up with Palestine and Jordan—and it was expressed in frankly racist terms. Just read Sydney Levey’s post here, in which a J Street speaker crowed that four Palestinian children per family was a lot better than nine (which it used to be). If they said that in California, the guy would be out of a job.

And so liberal Jews routinely invoke a racist idea to justify the Jewish democracy.

I can’t say these ideas are unfamiliar. They are what I was raised with, and am still engaged by. They surround Jewish feelings of superiority. We are chosen, we are smarter, we are irrigating the desert and building computers that will bring a drop of water to every root of every artichoke bush, we have more Nobel prizes than all the Arab world combined. I’ve struggled with this idea of Jewish superiority all my life. It was in the warp and woof of my upbringing in an academic milieu, and I run into it in almost every argument I have with Zionists. It goes back to schwarzer talk in the 1970s.

The elaboration of this attitude—which J Streeters seem to believe but don’t pound the table about, as the neocons do– is that Israel is a developed country while the Arab world is ignorant, that the Palestinians are peasants and Jews are urban people of the book, that the Arab world lacks basic freedoms. And so it would be a tragedy if the smart Jews of Israel had to share the government of their country, in one state, with the Palestinians. In a word, We don’t want to be governed by Arabs.

In fact, Ali Abunimah has observed that the two-state solution is the same deal the Afrikaaners tried to get under apartheid: they wanted to put the blacks in Bantustans and keep a majority of whites in the South African state, so that the whites wouldn’t have to be ruled by blacks. I bet they said the same things about black Africa that Zionists say about the Arab world: Brutes.

I have to admit that I too worry about what will happen to the Jews if Israel becomes one state. My feelings come out of class/religious identification; I look at, for instance, this signature photograph of an Israeli Jew’s secluded/unruly garden (at Gershom Gorenberg and Haim Waitzman’s ethnocentric blog South Jerusalem) and it captures a whole lifestyle, and I identify. I think: That’s the way I would live in Israel/those people are having a good life/I have a life like those people here.

I went for a walk with my wife yesterday and told her about my confusion. We live in a beautiful part of New York. I said, “I’m going to test you. It’s 1987. We’re walking through the woods in the place we live, South Africa. We have a really good life. Yet we’ve been pushing against apartheid all our lives.

“But what is going to happen to our lives? Do we really want to be ruled by blacks? What would we have done?”

My wife didn’t have to think about it. “We would have fought apartheid."

"What about our lives?”

"It was inevitable. There was only one way that situation could go. There had to be freedom."

“But what’s happened to South Africa and those white people’s lives?”

“It hasn’t been great. Maybe it will take 50 years. But this is the way the world is going. I don’t see what the point is in fighting it.”

The conversation was helpful to me. I’m reminded that this is a simple story. The conflict won’t go away until the ideology of the white master, which permeates the Zionist story, is interrogated openly in the United States, and we begin to see this as a story of dispossession and disfranchisement.

You can say anything you like about Palestinian peasantry, or women being covered in Gaza, or authoritarianism in Egypt, or Israeli technology. I share some of the apprehension. But none of these points is an argument for human bondage, let alone burning up children with white phosphorus and relying on powerful Jews in the U.S. to shut down the debate.

They are arguments that if Jews really want to be a light unto the nations, they must recognize that Israelis share a land with others, and they must work together to come up with a democratic ethos.

This idea goes before any political structure (one state, two states). Jerry Haber has said that if there is one thing American Jews can do it is "helping to transform the 1948 ethnocracy into a liberal democracy of all its citizens"–to work with organizations like Taayush to try and imagine a conjoint future with Palestinians. I speak for myself when I say that a basic respect for the Other, which was lacking in my own background, is key to going forward.

Poisonous Paragraphs: Dart's Rant Of The Day: The Blogger Civil War Rages On...

2009-11-05T16:36:41Z

Non-Rapper Dude Series – eskay, part 2

2009-11-04T13:04:40Z

Photo: Alexander Richter

Concluding my talk with eskay, we cover his time at XXL, the Nah Right comment crew, why his detractors just don’t get it and future plans for the site.

Robbie: So how was your time XXL? Was it a 9-5 kinda role?

eskay: I was gonna run the content on the Scratch website, because the XXL website was already up-and-running but the Scratch website didn’t really have any content, so they wanted me to come in and handle that. But then Jerry Barrow – who was the Editor-In-Chief at Scratch at the time – left, and they appointed Brendan Frederick in his place. Brendan of course had launched the XXL site and he had been running it since it’s inception. I had already accepted the job at Scratch, so when I got there Elliott was like, ‘OK, there’s gonna be a change of plan. Brendan is doing Scratch so I want you to do the XXL site’. I felt more comfortable working at the XXL site ‘cos it was more general hip-hop than the sorta niche site that Scratch was. I was amped that Elliott gave me that job – I got to work with a lot of talented writers and editors. I didn’t learn as much as I would’ve liked to learn when I was there, but I definitely learned a lot.

Why do you think that was?

For one thing, I was an inexperienced editor. I was a blogger, basically, that was now in a position that they’re editing a website of a major magazine. Obviously I have no journalism degree, I’m not an accomplished writer or editor, so it was really a learning on the job type of thing. On top of that, it’s a web property. With a magazine you have a month or so to sit there and work on content and edit and go back and forth and do rewrites and this and that, but with the web you need content immediately. So the work-flow is just so crazy that it’s really hard to sit down with people and absorb what you want to observe. It is what it is. It definitely helped me a lot.

What prompted you to move on after a year?

At the beginning of 2008 they let Elliott go and they brought in Datwon – who is a great dude – but the publishers wanted to change the direction of the magazine. If you look at XXL now, they cover R&B artists and stuff like that, which is really not my thing. I could give a fuck about The Dream’s new album or who Ne-Yo is collaborating with. Those guys are talented but that’s just not my forte. I dreaded having to write a fuckin’ article about Lloyd or whatever. [laughs] The other thing was that Elliott had brought me in, and [with] him leaving, I was like, ‘I didn’t sign up for this’. Scratch had folded, and Brendan came back to XXL, so it was me and him doing the site. Then Elliott left, and about a month and a half later Brendan left to go to Complex, so it was now just me alone doing the site. I was like, ‘Fuck this. Do I want to kill myself trying to maintain this website by myself and let Nah Right fall by the wayside, or do I want to leave and focus all my energy on the site that I own?’ I had to make that decision, and obviously I’m gonna go with my site, so that’s when I left.

During those 12 months at XXL, did you feel like you were neglecting Nah?

Yeah, definitely, because at my old job nobody knew that I was a blogger. Nobody knew that I was blogging instead of working – they had no idea! [laughs] Then I go to XXL, and the whole reason that I’m there is because I’m blogger. They know about Nah Right, they know that I’m doing that at the same time that I’m doing XXL, and I’m also doing it on their dime! It was hard to put time into Nah Right but not put too much into it, where it was keeping me from doing my actual job. The site I think definitely suffered. That was really when I stopped writing as much and just started throwing-up songs and throwing-up videos and stuff like that, because I just didn’t have time to sit there and write for half-an-hour about whatever. I would say that it suffered, but at the same time a lot of what I do at Nah Right is aggregating content. There’s something to be said for just giving people music and letting them form their own opinion about it. I may download an mp3 and listen to it, but I don’t really have anything to say about it. Like, ‘OK, this is the new Blaq Poet joint produced by Premier’. OK, it’s a nice beat, but I may not have anything in-depth to write about it, so I may just throw the song up and let you listen to it and let you remark on it in the comments, or take it and upload on your website and write whatever you have to say about it. During that point where I was at XXL the site kinda turned more into an aggregation site than a traditional blog, but when I left XXL and I started doing it full-time, I kinda kept the aggregation part of it, because I still feel like there’s something to be said for that type of site. Plus I was one of the first sites doing that type of thing – now you have a thousand blogs that do the same thing – but just remember who was first.

And streamlining it allows you cover a lot more content.

Right. Would you rather I fuckin’ spend three hours writing about songs or post ten new songs for you?

Would you ever take a job at a record label if the deal was right?

That’s not really something I would want to do. I’ve always said, ‘I don’t want a job that depends on somebody else selling records’. [laughs] If this guy doesn’t sell records then I’m out of a job? Nah…I’m a fan of music. Not saying I wouldn’t like to at some point put out an artist or start some kind of company that would facilitate releasing artist’s music – maybe some underground artists that don’t get the attention paid to them – but that’s definitely not high on the list of things I want do.

Is it worthwhile doing more original content like Nah Right interviews in the future, or is that a waste of time?

For the most part, I don’t think it’s really worth it for me to sit there and do interviews because I feel like that shit is so saturated right now. It’s just so wack. It’s like – artist has an album, artist is doing a press run, artist talks to 20 bloggers. All 20 bloggers ask him the same questions, artist gives the same answer. Then the interviews go up – one goes up today, one goes up tomorrow, one goes up the next day, and it’s all the same shit. It’s just really not worth it to me, there are very few artists that I feel that I could speak to. First of all, if I’m gonna speak to you I’m not gonna ask you the same questions about your new album and why it’s your best album ever and this and that. I’m gonna want to talk about something interesting, something a little bit left-field, and there are very few artists who I feel are worth talking to at this point. I feel like there are a couple of good bloggers – yourself included – who do those good interviews, who get a hold of these artists and ask them good questions and do really worthwhile articles, and there are a couple of hip-hop websites that do that and a couple of magazines that do that. I just feel like it’s such a crowded space. I’m not trying to stick my flip-cam in your face and ask you questions – there’s too much of that shit as there is. I don’t need to add to that noise. That being said, I’m definitely gonna start to ‘blog’ more, like when I first started the site, and do a little bit more opinion pieces and commentary. It’s really been kinda crazy for me, the last few months. I’ve got a couple of other things – nothing I really wanna announce yet – but I’ve got a couple of other things in the works that I wanna do that I’ve been putting time and energy into. Now that Nah Right has become a business for me there’s a lot of shit behind the scenes that I have to take care of, which is why I brought in dre and nation to do blogging for me. And then I’ve just got shit going on in my personal life which doesn’t allow me to blog like I would really like to. I was actually thinking I’d like to do a separate blog on Nah Right – like ‘eskays blog’ type of thing – where I would talk about stuff. Not just music, but a little bit of everything. So I might do that, but I’m definitely gonna start doing a little bit more commentary on the site.

The other thing that makes Nah Right unique is the commentator community that you have. It’s funny seeing artists catch feelings from the comments section.

Shout-out to the Nah Right comments – we have the best comment section on the internet, hands down. Whenever my comments section comes up, all I hear is that, ‘The comments are not about the post, it doesn’t make sense!’ But people gotta understand that it’s a community. A lot of those people you see in the comments have been commenting there since 2005 when I started the site, and we’ve been meeting on Nah Right for the last four years. We know shit about each other in real life…we actually have relationships with these people that we’ve never even met before. So it’s a running conversation through the comments, and they’ll tell you, ‘We don’t give a fuck about what you posted, eskay! We’re having a conversation here and if you don’t like it, too bad’. [laughs] I learnt that, early on, that you can’t moderate them. You can’t tell them, ‘Don’t talk about this, talk about that!’ So it’s not even worth trying, so just let it go. A long time ago I realized that was the way to go. Definitely the gulliest comment sections on the internet.

I notice you’re also experiencing the ‘crabs in the barrel’ mentality, with some other bloggers taking little shots at you recently.

What can you do? When you reach a certain point or level of success I think that just comes with the territory. I think a lot of that shit is misguided though. I think that they don’t really follow my site, they probably just heard about my site in the last year or so. I don’t think they really read it everyday or go into the archives or read the commentary that I leave on the site. I think they have this limited picture of what they think Nah Right is and what they think my opinions are, so I think if they spoke to me on a real level – man-to-man shit – they would understand that everything I do is for the music. You may think that eskay feels one way about something when that’s actually not the case. Just because I make a smart-ass remark about something, you can’t take that and make assumptions about what my opinions are or how I feel about this or that. I’m definitely not one of these bloggers who feels he needs to talk shit – miscellaneous shit – and call people out for no reason to get attention or get traffic. I’m not with that ’shock blogging’ shit. I may say something crazy that you may take as a ’shock blogging’ tactic, but it’s really not. I really mean it. I mean everything I write. I say a lotta shit in jest, but that’s the voice of Nah Right. What can I tell them?

How many of the newer artists that you post on Nah Right are you a fan off, and how many are you just putting-up to let people decide for themselves? About half and half?

Am I real fan of all of them? No, but I respect of all of ‘em to a certain extent. If I thought they were utter garbage then I wouldn’t even post them. I may respect their talent, I may think they’re a good lyricist but I may not listen to their music on a regular basis. I’m probably an actual fan – as in I actually listen to their shit – of probably about half of them, and I respect all of them. I respect what they’re doing.

When’s the Nah Right BBQ popping off?

The comments have been asking for that for the last three years, so I have every intention of doing it somewhere around next Memorial Day weekend, which will be May of 2010. That’ll be the fifth year anniversary of Nah Right, so I’m trying to put it together and make sure we do it sometime in May 2010 – The First Annual Nah Right BBQ. Free beer, free food.

A Corona-free zone I hope!

No fuckin’ Coronas! If you come with a Corona, I’m throwing that shit at you! [laughs]

Previously: eskay, part 1

Life or Something Like It: Homeownership and Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception « Generation Bubble

2009-11-03T15:12:43Z

The Problem with These Kids Rap Critics Today, Part 2

2009-11-03T12:11:00Z

The central claim in Part 1 was that mainstream rap critics fail to take seriously the gripes that disenchanted golden era fans have with the current rap landscape. Instead, these fans are reduced to bitter old grouch stereotypes, while their legitimate concerns about the overall quality of today’s rap, especially in comparison to 80s and 90s rap, are dismissed or ignored.

I’m working from the premise that today’s rap landscape is better in some ways (inclusiveness, access), but worse in more ways (everything else). And in my view, the ways in which the landscape is better don’t lead to better music. As I wrote in Part 1, there is no shortage of critics who scoff at the idea that the music is in decline; I haven’t found any credible critic, though, who can say with a straight face that the quality of albums hasn’t dropped off (at least at the top).^[6]

Disenchanted golden age fans who try to pinpoint why the music has fallen off often cite commercial pressures, the broadening of the fanbase^[7], the decline of sampling, the consolidation of corporate media, and the internet-fueled democratization of the means of music production and consumption. Yet there’s no inherent reason why these things, even when taken together, had to diminish the quality of the music.

When we set aside the changing cast of characters, the expansion of audiences and styles, and the (d)evolution of the sound, what distinguishes today’s rap landscape from that of the golden era are the norms by which fans police the quality of the music. I will argue that these norms have been weakened substantially since the mid ‘90s. The resulting social anomie that characterizes the current rap landscape has fueled the personal anomie of the average disenchanted golden era fan.

What defined these golden era norms?

Golden era norms of rap criticism^[8] were shaped by four main principles:

Principle 1: Reward originality and creativity; punish biting.

Principle 2: Treat technical skill as necessary, but not sufficient.

Principle 3: Shun crossover acts that bypassed the normal channels (i.e. did not receive widespread sanctioning/vetting from rap heads)

Principle 4: Regard it as a duty to criticize substandard music, even when it comes from favored artists.

These principles are hardly unique to rap, but the ways in which they played out in practice and the ways they played off of black critical traditions gave rap’s critical norms a character all their own. Though image and symbolism certainly played a role (Principle 3 is a prime example), these norms were mostly about aesthetics.

Because these four principles are often misunderstood, I’d like to say a little more about each one.

Let’s get this out of the way: there is original rap being produced now, and there was an endless parade of biters during the golden era. What Principle 1 meant in practice was that blatantly jacking styles was generally frowned upon and was seen as beneath any rapper who wanted respect. The anti- biting represented a recurring thread in black music criticism only more intense.

The golden era emphasis on technique has been caricatured as some sort of preference for clinical, Joe Satriani-style masturbatory excess (either in a vocal sense, or a “conceptual" sense). In reality, the point of Principle 2 was to establish that all things being equal, skilled vocalism and lyricism matter and should be encouraged and that greatness is impossible without a baseline level of technical ability.

Principle 3 concerned how rap fans wanted the genre to be represented in the mainstream. If a wack or manufactured-for-pop rapper blew up, there was a collective effort among rap fans to actively spurn this rapper. This effort was dependent on the fact that black youth tastes determine what rap is considered cool—not only to rap fans, but to sympathetic outsiders as well.^[9] Rap fans, then, had the temerity to say, “Enough. Let's shun this wack shit" and the sway to actually do it.

Principle 4 was the defining principle of the golden era. It fostered a willingness to call out wackness, wherever it surfaced. Even respected artists LL, Kane, Tribe, Dre, Jay Z and Nas felt the sting of Principle 4 in action. At its best, Principle 4 cultivated neither blanket negativity nor an inclination to hate anything “different.” Most golden era fans understood that the habit of crying wolf about how rap sucks now and the fixation on “sucka MCs,” “wack DJs,” and “biters” were tropes that reflected rap’s competitive spirit and inclination toward improvement.

Why were these norms so effective?

These four principles combined to foster a ruthlessly competitive creative environment that simultaneously promoted quality and actively sought to expose and shun wackness. If your records sucked, they weren’t going to be played for that long. If you couldn’t rap live, you got booed (and in rare instances, you got your monkey ass whooped). To varying degrees, vaudeville, metal, punk, and country audiences were known for their rowdy audiences and rigid norms. In rap, though, the critical norms typical of male-dominated, aggressive youth music and the critical norms of black music^[10] coalesced. The pervasive air of critical (and sometimes physical) menace surrounding the reception of the music distinguished rap’s critical norms from those of jazz, blues, and rock, or any previous form of black music. Part of the appeal of golden era rap was the edge that this critical menace gave the music.

I feel obligated to state that these norms were problematic in a number of ways. Chauncey teaches classes on hip hop and pop culture. His students are often dumbfounded and even angry that hip hop’s critical norms were so harsh. Although I grew up in this critical environment, I can appreciate these students’ perspective. While effective in certain contexts, fear is not exactly an ideal motivation for creating art. Golden era critical norms were not very welcoming to many groups and certain forms of expression (though this point has been overstated).

Worse, however, was that the merciless nature of golden era rap norms cultivated an uncritical element among some fans. These fans, emboldened by the norms’ harshness and spoiled by the abundance of quality mainstream rap, dismissed good music for superficial, nitpicky reasons (e.g. the artists’ image/production changed from rugged and grimy to glossy; the lead singles were blatant crossover attempts, the music appeals to women).

What happened to these norms?

In hindsight, it should have been obvious that golden era norms were unsustainable—they were based on historically contingent factors and a whole lot of luck. These norms were ultimately gutted by a series of overlapping trends in rap fandom, black culture, and the broader culture.

Golden era rap norms operated alongside (and occasionally within) the contentious debates black folks have always had about the roles and implications of their art and culture. These debates have always revolved around a series of tensions (e.g. between masses vs. elites, folk culture vs. high culture, black folks vs. outsiders, authenticity/artistic freedom vs. political art).^[11] Though always heated, these debates have ultimately been a healthy example of the black public sphere’s depth and vitality. However, these debates and all four of the golden era critical principles have been crippled by the overwhelming influence of two (quasi)arguments: the hustler ethic and the hater defense.

The hustler ethic, summarized brilliantly by Rafi Kam, leads its proponents to counter any criticism with the inane response “I’m tryin to get my paper.” An earlier version of the hustler ethic used to be offered reluctantly against the backdrop of widespread racial discrimination in the entertainment industry (“There isn’t much space for complex black expression, but I’m an entertainer and I want to work;” “I’m employing black people; doesn’t that count for something?”). In the hustler ethic’s current expression, the fact that craft is an afterthought compared to the naked profit motive is no longer shameful; amazingly, it’s become a source of pride.

Unlike the hustler ethic, the hater defense doesn’t even require those who use it to offer up any justification. When artists use the hater defense, they don’t need to defend their creative output or acknowledge potential areas for improvement; the hater defense serves as a blanket condemnation of any and all criticism.

The increasing shamelessness of the hustler ethic and the triumph of the hater defense are both general cultural trends, of course, but they have hit black culture especially hard.The ultimate goal of both the hustler ethic and the hater defense is to silence substantive criticism and marginalize aesthetic judgment. That’s precisely what they’ve done to black cultural criticism in general, and rap criticism specifically.

The splintering of the rap audience has also weakened golden era critical norms by intensifying the polarization and politicization of taste. Fans now ride for their preferred faction over everything else, severely hampering Principles 1, 2, and especially 4 in the process. Because of perceived threats from “the other side” (think again of the NYstalgist-revanchist feud), factions of fans heap ridiculous superlatives on their favorite artists until the praise becomes something like consensus.

For a perfect example of how this polarization has diminished aesthetic standards, consider the increasingly political and unwarranted late-era 5 Mic album ratings of the now defunct(?) Source Magazine. The external political pressures on this one limited yet influential publication typifies the deterioration of the overall critical landscape of the last decade or so.^[12]
Five of the last six albums to which The Source issued its perfect 5-Mic album rating are listed below:

Life After Death (1997)—This album contained some incredible songs by a rapper who died at the top of his game, but there’s never been a classic hip hop double album. Life After Death is no exception. Because BIG had just died, there was significant pressure. The 5 Mic rating was questionable, but The Source should get a pass for this one given the circumstances.

Blueprint (2001)—More cohesive than several of Jay Z’s previous albums, but not classic. Jay started getting a bit lazy with his lyrics here, and he coasted largely on personality. This one was problematic because The Source seemed to be swayed more by the album’s event-like hype, by Jay’s s feud with Nas, and by the album’s manufactured gravitas and self-conscious classic status-seeking than by the music itself.

Stillmatic (2001)—This review, not the reviews for The Minstrel Show and The Naked Truth, put the final nail in the coffin of The Source's critical relevance. The Source had long been criticized (justly) for its heavy NY bias, but once the magazine lost the ability to credibly assess NY rap (pretty much the only music it knew how to assess), it served no purpose at all. The classic status bestowed upon this Nas album was indefensible from an aesthetic standpoint—the album contained a handful of stellar tracks surrounded by overrated garbage. The only way to explain it was that there was immense pressure to 1) avoid the appearance of siding with Nas’ then-nemesis Jay Z and 2) herald Nas’ return to form, especially given all of the hype surrounding the album. It’s no coincidence that albums by Biggie, Jay Z, and Nas, NY’s biggest and most respected solo acts, received classic ratings because The Source was, in essence, an exercise in NY rap mythmaking. But the pressure to bend the rules of criticism for reasons outside of the music extended beyond the borders of New York.

The Fix (2002)—This was a nice album, to be sure, but it didn’t even come close to Face’s best albums. What happened here was likely The Source realizing that, after heaping classic status on the albums of three New York rap giants, the magazine had to bestow the same honor on an album of a Southern rap giant.

The Naked Truth (2005)— The less said about this Lil Kim “classic” the better, but aside from the conflict of interest shadiness, I think there was a gender quota thing going on.
The Source wasn’t alone in lowering critical standards. This general relaxing of aesthetic standards has benefited older favorites and younger favorites alike.

What does this mean for mainstream rap criticism?

The point of all of this isn’t to blame the mainstream rap critics I referenced in Part 1 for the decline of golden era critical norms—they aren’t responsible for this decline; these critics are merely responding to the new climate in a way that makes sense to them and their audiences. This is also not about challenging critics to “take rap [norms] back” to ‘88 or ‘94 or any other year. It’s neither possible nor desirable to try to recreate the critical environment of the golden era. What critics can and should do, however, is learn from past critical environments to improve upon the current one. Critics are actually doing this in some respects. For example, they have looked back to rap’s pre-album era to help flesh out what a rap landscape divorced from the album as the primary artistic vehicle could look like given today’s technology (how critics have responded to the deluge of mixtape releases and the lack of quality control is an entirely different matter).

Moreover, critics have a duty provide context and history, not only for the music they critique but also for the history of music criticism on the ground and in print. This is especially important given that history-challenged rap outsiders are and will continue to be the primary consumers of rap criticism.

Critics can render the landscape in nuanced ways—ways that don’t reflect tired frames (NYstalgist vs. revanchist, NY vs. everywhere else). Specifically, they can address the legitimate concerns that many disenchanted golden era fans have with current musical and critical environment; they can consider the negative effects cultural and ideological pressures have had on aesthetic norms.

It’s not only in critics’ interests to do these things; it’s in the interest of the music.

------------
Notes:

[6]Ironically, my attachment to the album form can be critiqued as informed by a rockist bias.

[7] This is, I think, supposed to refer to the growing influence of women, white folks, non-Americans, and non-rap heads.

[8] I’m talking about a combination of norms on the ground, as experienced by the average rap head, and those held by tastemakers and rap critics.

[9]Which is why it’s so strange to hear academic types, hip hop feminists, and other hip hop “activists” talk in conspiratorial terms about white audiences driving the direction of the music.

[10] My dad fronted a few bands in the South and in L.A.in the 60s and 70s. According to him and his former bandmates, the climate of some of the surviving chitlin circuit venues (even with the South’s renowned cordiality) made the Apollo Theatre seem like a tea party.

[11] Those interested in black music and black politics should check out studies on the racial uplift ideology literature of the late 19th Century through 1950s, which reveals, among other things, “New Negro” discomfort with black folk culture (demonstrative church music, blues, jazz, narratives depicting uneducated black folk.). This literature features recurring questions such as “How does popular black art affect the moral training of black children?” and “How will this art make us look to white people?” If you replace all of the “negro”s with “black”s or “African American”s,” you’d swear that these things were written today.

[12] There was also a palpable pressure on the magazine to award Illmatic (1994), and Aquemeni (1998) high scores. The former album because Nas was hailed as the 2nd coming of Rakim, the latter album because The Source’s credibility had been pushed to the limit by its extreme bias toward NY artists when it came to granting albums classic status. But because these two albums actually deserved their 5 Mic ratings, the pressure was overshadowed by the music.

Non-Rapper Dudes Series – eskay, part 1 | unkut.com - A Tribute To Ignorance (Remix)

2009-11-03T11:49:50Z

If you want to check the newest/latest in the rap world, you're first stop on the intehnets is probably gonna be Nah Right. As the originator of

It Was All Good Just 7/8 Years Ago

2009-11-03T04:53:34Z

The Jay-Z/Roc-A-Fella/State Prop Hot 97 Freestyles.

Put This On Episode One is here!

2009-11-02T19:14:25Z

Put This On, Episode 1: Denim from Put This On on Vimeo.

Thanks to the brilliance of Lonely Sandwich, we've got a pilot for Put This On. Lots of MaxFun donors also donated to support this project, to thanks to all of those folks. Be sure to subscribe to the blog, and if you know anybody in the apparel industry (or related) who wants to sponsor further episodes, be sure to let me know :).

Football, dogfighting, and brain damage : The New Yorker

2009-11-02T18:48:10Z

ANNALS OF MEDICINE about the similarities between football and dogfighting…

The Ax

2009-11-02T12:08:48Z

On November 30th, 1954, a character by the name of Charlotte Braun made her debut in much-loved comic strip, Peanuts. Loud, brash and opinionated, 'Good Ol' Charlotte Braun' quickly annoyed the strip's readers and on February 1st, 1955 - after just 10 sightings - she appeared in a storyline for the last time. 45 years later, following the death of Charles Schulz, Elizabeth Swaim donated to the United States Library of Congress the following letter, written to her by Schulz in response to a complaint she had made about Braun just a month before the character's demise. In the letter, Schulz agrees to kill her off, reminds Swaim that she will be responsible for the character's death, and then signs off with a picture of Braun, complete with an axe to the head.

Source

Transcript

Jan. 5, 1955

Dear Miss Swaim,

I am taking your suggestion regarding Charlotte Braun and will eventually discard her. If she appears anymore it will be in strips that were already completed before I got your letter or because someone writes in saying that they like her. Remember, however, that you and your friends will have the death of an innocent child on your conscience. Are you prepared to accept such responsibility?

Thanks for writing, and I hope that future releases will please you.

Sincerely,

Charles M. Schulz

(Drawing)

The Ax

If this letter doesn't do it - nothing will

2009-11-02T12:04:02Z

Shared by Rafi
A letter from Hugh Hefner to Playboy photographers for a shoot that never happened. I wonder how often Hef sent out dispatches like this - the insights offered don't seem like they'd need to be stated.

In 1962, Marilyn Monroe was shooting what was to be her last movie. Photographers Billy Woodfield and Lawrence Schiller received the assignment to cover the shoot and had obtained Monroe's confidence, at least enough to allow them to photograph Monroe nude and semi-nude during a swimming pool scene. Playboy Magazine - which was launched with a photo of Marilyn Monroe on the cover - would be celebrating its 10th anniversary in 1963. Schiller, who shot his first playmate centerfold in 1958, approached Monroe about posing for the cover of the Anniversary Edition of the magazine and she was receptive to the idea. The following (previously unreleased) letter was written by Hugh Hefner to the photographers describing his vision for the cover.

Marilyn Monroe died less than a month later; the Playboy shoot never happened.

Transcript

HUGH M. HEFNER editor-publisher

7/10/62

Larry and Bill --

If this letter doesn't do it - nothing will.

When I got to thinking about the whole idea, after we finished talking on the phone, it occurred to me that getting Marilyn actually interested in posing for this cover was the greatest gimmick in the world, and would tremendously enhance everything else that we are doing. Nor does the back-view shot have to be nude, as we originally planned. All we need is nudity under a very transparent nightie, or else perhaps a shortie nightgown, with little ruffled panties that are sufficiently pulled up around the rear to make it enticing. Let's try for the pure nudity under the negligee, of course, but if that can't be swung, then the shortie nightie - it if is properly posed - can do the trick. The important gimmick is that the cover must have a peekaboo bareness and provocativeness about it, when we see it from behind - otherwise it has lost its point. But we can achieve this either with a quite transparent nightie, or else with a shortie nightgown that breaks just above the cheeks of the derriere, and tightly pulled-up ruffled panties that break high on the cheeks, like a ballerina's (or one of our Bunny's) costumes, if Marilyn will then give us the slightest little bend at the hips, so that the derriere is thrust back ever so slightly, and provocatively.

I wasn't kidding when I said that this cover can really be sensational and the talk of all industries - magazine, movie, and all the rest. Let's see how they react to it.

H

The Beastie Boys on UHF U68 (1985)

2009-10-30T15:15:52Z

Shared by Rafi
We didn't get cable until about 1989. U68 was my MTV too.

Beastie Boys - Promos for U68

Way back in the day, when MtV was almost exclusively devoted to rock and their lineup of artists was just as white as a 20-watt light bulb, there weren't a whole lot of outlets for hip hop videos. TBS, a station that these days is primarily of note for keeping spectacularly unfunny sitcoms in perpetual syndication, was one of the very first channels to play any sort of hip hop during their weekly show Night Tracks. For those of us in New Jersey who didn't have cable, though, there were only two options for televised rap: Ralph McDaniel's show Video Music Box, which aired on Channel 31, and UHF's U68, a channel devoted entirely to playing videos.

U68's lineup consisted of 30 minute blocks of videos that were decidedly outside of the mainstream, and, at the time, hip hop fell well within that category. The video above features the Beastie Boys recording a series of promos for the station and their video She's On It, with a very young-looking Rick Rubin making a cameo around the :25 mark. This is from 1985, before License To Ill came out, when the group was still transitioning from punk rock to rap. It's easy to forget that the Beasties were, at one point, considered an "edgy" group, far more controversial than whatever it is they've become in 2009. I don't think the "Don't Be a Faggot" line or the multiple references to using Dust would play well with their current image as political activists, though with twenty years passed I suppose it can be dismissed as youthful indiscretion.

And here's the video they were promoting:

Beastie Boys - She's On It

Shoutout to Mike for passing along the video.

Click here to read the comments and add your own feedback on this post.

Comic Book Character Costume

2009-10-28T13:20:40Z

Image: Tasha Marie

An artist from MAC Cosmetics painted a woman as a comic book character for Halloween — right down to the dot printing style of old comics books. Or, alternatively, as a figure from a Roy Lichtenstein painting.

The pictures were taken by publicist and photographer Tasha Marie. You can view more at the link.

Link via Geekologie | Artist’s/Company Website

Nah Right » Beanie Sigel - What You Talkin Bout (I Ain’t Ya Average Cat) [Jay-Z Diss]

2009-10-30T11:48:57Z