No Trivia

No Trivia has moved!

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:45:00 +0000

Hey, if you didn't know, the blog is now at www.No-Trivia.com. Subscribe to this feed: http://no-trivia.com/feed.

It's All In the Details: Comments on Specific Parts of Rap Hits

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:48:00 +0000

One of the byproducts of radio's refusal to play more than say, the same eight songs all day, every day, is that you get to really think about and focus on those few they do play a whole bunch of times. It makes the bad ones suddenly interesting and the already good ones really interesting.

-The bassline of "Lemonade"
Gucci Mane, produced by Bangladesh
Like a lot of his Southern synth-rap producer peers, Bangladesh loves some bass, but until "Lemonade", it was used more as an aggressor, a big booming thing in the background, than a sorta lovely, musical detail. "Lemonade" has got the best bassline in a rap song since the one that tears through the middle of Kanye's "The Glory" a few years back. Is this sampled from somewhere? Is this a session dude? Was this created on a keyboard or MPC or something? Who knows. Listen to the way it wriggles all around the rest of the beat and Gucci's flow, a series of patient, pulsing plucks at the start of the song and getting more focused and squirmy as it goes on, kinda chasing the little kid chorus, and then just doing this like focused, Peter Hook rock-out thing and then, back to patient plucking. Note: the bass is the last sound you hear as "Lemonade" ends.

-The way "Say Something" could be looped forever
Timbaland ft. Drake, produced by Timbaland
Yeah yeah yeah, Timbaland's mostly coasting these days--though he's improved as rapper, sorta channelling Bun B, late Bun B at least, on his verse here--but there's a cool, like, chintzy glory to recent Timbo. He isn't filling his beats with tempo change-ups and batshit production tweaks anymore, he's dropping an Atari melody, one or two flanger-ed out guitars, making it passably dancey, and that's a wrap. The byproduct of this relative half-assness though, is that the beats feel like they're going on forever, like it's this eternal loop of synths and computer squawks that's been looping for hours or maybe just a few minutes. This was true of "Venus vs. Mars" on Blueprint 3 as well. This fucks with your circadian rhythms!

-The weird, flat, Go-Go drums on "Exhibit C"
Jay Electronica, produced by Just Blaze
When Jay-Z's "Show Me What You Got" dropped--was that the last single to show up on the radio and mean something?--there was a Vegas sound to it that just didn't make a lot of sense for something produced by Just Blaze. The live or live-sounding drums, almost on some Go-Go, bucket-drumming shit, just didn't you know, knock. Weird how the same type of drums show up on "Exhibit C" and it's one of the best things about the song. This is some of Jay Electronica's best and most traditionalist rapping and along with the soul sample, the whole thing would be kinda "backpacker" if it weren't for the drums. They make it way more interesting and I think it's part of why the song's made its way onto regular radio. It rings real for the old heads but it doesn't thump or plod along to youngsters' ears.

-The open space on "O Let's Do It"
Waka Flocka Flame, produced by L-Don Beatz
A producer's got confidence when he doesn't fill each and every second of a beat with some kind of sound or sample or something. Plenty of beats drop-out for a moment or two, but "O Let's Do It" starts and stops, starts and stops...it gives rappers an infinite number of places to hang their cadences. This is why someone like Wacka Flocka Flame made it a hit (his confessional asides, like "Ever since they killed my nigga Trav, start poppin pills and actin crazy" help too) and why every remix of it sounds awesome. As "dumb" as this beat probably sounds to a lot of people, it's pretty traditionalist, Marley Marl minus the samples. if you listen close, there's even this weird, almost simple record scratching sound that wobbles under the whole thing.

further reading/viewing:
-"Producer Series Mix #1: Shondrae "Bangladesh" Crawford" by Al Shipley
-"Dilla Donuts Month: "Time: Donut of the Heart" by Me & Thaddeus Clark
-Rare Essence "Hey Young World" 8/12/89
-MySpace Page for L-Don Beatz

Boutique Poptimism: Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, & the Taylor Swift Backlash

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:43:00 +0000

The sequence of events that moved Taylor Swift from wildly successful, really interesting pop star, to the kind of pop star that the supposedly more discerning, with-it crowd gets to ponder and write thinkpieces about is pretty strange: She gained everybody's sympathies because Kanye was a dick, only to lose those sympathies when she was given awards by the kind of people that would've given her awards whether Kanye grabbed the mic from her or not.

This response is perhaps best represented in this bizarre kinda insane piece, which Rob Harvilla already zinged properly, but there's still a lot to unpack here. Apparently, Swift's "average"-ness causes a lot of controversy.

Probably because in 2009/2010, being some kind of meta-commenting, bicurious, genre-bouncing, in-quotes superstar, is way more played-out than being a regular-ass person. And that, simply by doing what she does and doing it very well, Swift and the response she elicits, make clear an unfortunate trend that's been floating around for a while now--what I call "Boutique Poptimism".

Namely, that we're past the point where the idea that "hey maybe unabashed pop music kinda rules" is controversial and what's happening is a backwards bending, a regression, where a new bunch of new implicit rules are being laid-out for what constitutes "good" pop from "bad" pop. No surprise, they're ideological. They have a lot to do with what the music "represents" and very little to do with how the music sounds.

Because everyone's aware that dismissing Pop is closed-minded, the response is not to wholly embrace it, to step out of one's comfort zone (one of the many values behind Poptimism), but to find the Pop that already suits ones values and co-sign that. This is particularly apparent in the "Indie" embrace of Lady Gaga and to a lesser extent, someone like Ke$ha. You will hear both of them on your town's hit stations...and at liberals arts school dance parties...and in Urban Outfitters.

These pop musicians are acceptable because of their inauthenticity, because they comment on pop, they aren't just making pop like Swift. Gaga, who clearly took some classes in Postmodern theory but only kinda paid attention, has made herself critic-proof: If you don't like her, you don't "get" her. And with that, a more rarified audience is hooked, beyond such negligible things as monster choruses (but little else, Gaga's songs are like hair metal in that sense) but "big" ideas.

And Ke$ha--well it's mind-blowing that anybody but newly-divorced Moms would like her but the cool kids like her too, because it sorta sounds like Peaches or Uffie or that last Yeah Yeah Yeahs record. She provides the illusion of being open to new sounds, with dashes of electro, an almost rapping style, and edgy topics like drinking too much. Again--these aren't songs about "square" stuff like boys and getting married.

That she has a dollar-sign in her name to be "ironic" and that she swipes from the debauchery of Keith Richards for style points, while using the very similar debauchery of Diddy for a punchline, makes her deeply square and rockist is besides the point. If it's couched in something, anything that appears trangressive, like irony or feminist or postmodern theory, no matter how bastardized, it's acceptable.

This is really fascinating because it's both a rejection of Rockism's absurd demands for authenticity and an embrace of an equally complacent set of values. Ones that don't open up the world of music (and through that, the world at-large) but open them up on one's own terms, providing the illusion of porous borders and expansive taste, without any of the hard stuff involved, like stepping out of one's comfort zone or putting one's self out there.

It takes a Strong Poptimist to enjoy Taylor Swift. One that sees the inherent value of worker-bee skill and talent bouncing up against simple, but sincere expression, who can also see/hear some of the same stuff in Gaga or Ke$ha and appreciate the differences too--Poptimism is not supposed to be the one or the other game Boutique Poptimists like to play.

further reading/viewing:
-"Boutique multiculturalism, or why liberals are incapable of thinking about hate speech" by Stanley Fish
-"Why Taylor Swift Offends Little Monsters, Feminists, and Weirdos" by Riese for AutoStraddle
-"So Let's Deal With This "Taylor Swift Is a Feminist's Nightmare" Thing" by Rob Harvilla for Sound of the City
-Lady Gaga & Rob Fusari (thanks to MFastow for the link)
-Review of Music from the O.C: Mix 4 by Rob Mitchum for Pitchfork

Goines Book Club: Dopefiend

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 04:31:00 +0000

Holloway House's decision to delay publication of Donald Goines' first manuscript Whoreson until after Dopefiend frustrated the just-out-of-prison writer then, but viewing Dopefiend as Goines' debut is ideal when looking at his oeuvre. Whoreson is best viewed like a popular writer's early, usually unpublished works: It's soaked in its influences (Iceberg Slim and presumably, confessional works like Soul on Ice) and is really only of interest for the half-formed ideas that would later come out whole.

The strange thing is, Goines wrote them within a year or so of one another--Whoreson was written in prison, Dopefiend was already outlined by the time of his release—and they were published only a year apart, Dopefiend in 1971, Whoreson (as well as Black Gangster ) in 1972. It's conceivable that Whoreson got caught up in edits and revisions over at Holloway House. Though it was accepted for publication before Goines was even out of jail—the contract is dated October 19,1970—it was probably in no condition to be sent out to the masses.

Dopefiend was typed-up by Goines' sister and as Eddie Allen notes, Goines' sister found “her brother's spelling and sentence structure [to be] quite the horror” (115). And so, early on Goines essentially had two people drastically reworking his books. One book is really good, one book isn't that good. The not-so-good one was edited by Holloway House, the good one was edited by sister first and then, Holloway House. You figure it out.

Authorship is a non-issue when it comes to Goines. Primarily because there's just no specifics out there, no manuscripts, or existing correspondence between Goines and Holloway House. But also because Goines is a means-to-an-end writer, hardly a prose stylist, and the best aspects of his books are apparent in how things occur, in narrative structure and character arcs (or lack thereof) and so, mulling over his syntax—which early on, may not have been his syntax at all—is essentially a waste of time.

Still, there's something fascinating about the discrepancies in quality between Goines' first manuscript and second, and it's an excellent aid in investigating what makes Goines so great. When you take a writer that's not taken seriously very seriously, it's an uphill critical battle, and being able to point out their lesser work helps a lot. Whoreson is basically the kind of reckless pulp many associate with Goines, while Dopefiend is something much more.

In terms of publishing order, it's very possible Holloway House was aware that one book was better than the other and it could explain why Dopefiend came out before Whoreson. Interestingly, a noted author following up a telling, defining debut with an underwhelming sophomore effort puts Goines in the company of many great authors.

It's also worth pointing out that the differences in quality between his first two books hardly mattered to the buying public: The sales figures for Dopefiend were 88,276 books sold and Whoreson, 80,753 books sold, if a letter circa 1972 quoted in Allen's book is to be believed (142).

Dopefiend hits the ground running. There isn't a better introduction to the gritty world of Goines than the first chapter of Dopefiend. It's all right there, starting with drug-dealer Porky and his dogs and quickly moving to the sensory details of a his apartment—the smell of blood, the mix of garbage and bodily fluids on the floor, Jean's pus-filled abscess. It's a gleefully sensationalistic introduction but it also leaves the book nowhere to go, which is a good thing.

Goines will pay-off our more lurid expectations--to paraphrase Chekhov, if you promise dogs that fuck women in the beginning, it better happen by the end of the book—but the ugly details of the next nearly three-hundred pages is essentially more of the same. What'll change is the context, he'll introduce us to these characters, they're all given some kind of backstory and page-by-page their addictions will become both singular and one big lump of dependence.

That the book begins at the bottom introduces the palpable sense of inevitability in every Goines book, but one that's especially notable in Dopefiend because it defies so many of the “story of addiction” narrative conventions. This is perhaps, Dopefiend's most impressive feat: That it takes the same trajectory every drug addict novel and memoir takes (because addiction is predictable) but doesn't feel that way. It doesn't feel that way because Goines focuses on a group of characters, who are of varying degrees of addiction. There's Smokey and the many inhabitants of Porky's heroin house, then there's Teddy, an addict well on his way to the bottom, and there's his girlfriend, Terry, an innocent. And there's also all the regular-ass friends and family that suffer from their loved ones' addictions.

The structural brilliance of Dopefiend comes in the way these these differing trajectories all interact. There's no conventional “fall”, there's no inescapable plunge because that's where the book begins. Even Teddy and Terry aren't pure, Teddy's a full-fledged addict at the book's beginning and Terry's imminent addiction will not bring them together, but separate them. Heroin is not fun or cool in Dopefiend.

This point can't be overstated. Joy doesn't exist in Dopefiend and Goines, perhaps because he was so close to the drug he was writing about, hardly even dwells on the awesome euphoria of the drug. Nearly everyone in the book is just trying to not get sick. Nearly every interaction is financial: How much money is needed to stave off sickness, how much something can be sold for once its stolen etc. It adds a strange, in-quotes reality even to every “friendly” relationship in the book.

We understand and accept Porky's motivations for getting Terry strung-out, but every interaction is that cynical. The night after yelling at Terry, Teddy's regret is phrased this way: “He silently cursed the night he had been so high he'd forgotten how nice it was to have the use of Terry's car.” (93). One hundred pages later, Terry is finally brought to hooking and the pregnant Minnie can barely “hide the pleasure she felt”--Terry's good looks would bring in enough money to support both habits (193).

Though it's doubtful that it was Goines' intention, Terry's absurd psychological regression (really, the only problematic thing in the book) at the book's end is especially silly given the insincerity of everybody in the book. The doctor describes Terry's “guilt” for playing a part in the suicide of “a friend” (279), but Goines has spent hundreds of pages calling attention to the double and triple talk and backwards bending motivations behind nearly every interaction. One could stretch it into an example of Terry's innocence, but it seems more like a thread Goines just didn't weave into the rest of the book.

Still, the final scene with Terry, childlike, her parents devastated, nearly succeeds because Goines totally sells it. And he's able to sell it because unlike most drug tales, Goines never sets-up a “square”/”hip” dichotomy. There's a moment, after Terry's fired from her job for stealing, when her mom even “laugh[s] self-consciously at her own ignorance” about drugs and when the truth's revealed, it's rooted in a parental denial (127). This is contrasted by an earlier scene with Teddy's family, who are well-aware that he's, in the words of his sister, “nothing but another dopefiend” (61). These are people with a stake in their children's lives--not clueless, unhip squares.

The other “square” treated not only with respect, but as essentially, the only truthful character in the book, is Terry's ex-schoolmate Billy. Billy's almost too perfect, his dialogue's written like he's from Leave it to Beaver or something (“That sarcasm doesn't become you, Terry. You really have changed in the past few months.”) but his perspective's dead-on and he's revealed to be hip to addiction because of his own brother's descent (76). Given the nature of the book, the established nihilism even this early on, one expects Billy to try to molest Terry or something—instead, he's just disgusted.

Interestingly though, Goines doesn't entirely let the “squares” off-the-hook. Particularly fascinating is the scene late in the book where Teddy's sister has him arrested for stealing her check from the mailman (whose naivete is also exploited) and Teddy's mother gets her to drop the charges. She cries out, with the same “logic” as nearly every mother of an addict/enabler: “Dear God, Jesus. I'd rather see him dead than in here like this. I can't stand it, Jesus. I just can't stand it.” (233). Even here though, there's a kindness to Goines' implication—she's only described as “stubborn”--because we see where she's coming from and because heroin isn't a bad-ass ride or anything, Teddy's immediate tumble back into the routine of drugging is pathetic (233).

There's also a subtle implication of white society throughout Dopefiend as Goines often highlights the small, but notable ways society benefits from the actions of addicts. All the stolen stuff in the book is sold to local businesses or even to one's neighbors for cheap. When Terry begins hooking, both of her johns are whites, the second of which, is a stereotypical nerd who lies about how much money he has in his wallet (202-203). Teddy and Snake's lawyer is an aged, white shlockmeister who tries to hustle them out of an extra two-hundred bucks (213). Porky is jumped as he's delivering his monthly payola to the police and after he's stabbed, one officer asks if the money's there before checking on the wailing bloated dealer (258). Goines continues this in many of his books, as often white people are shown to be particularly brutal and lecherous. Unfortunately, too much has been made of this by critics eager to connected Goines to the deeply politicized black literature of the time.

What is much more revolutionary about Goines' work is his incorporation of a black middle class into a narrative that doesn't need it. That his investigation into social strata doesn't stop at “poor blacks” and “rich whites”. Terry exists not only as the cliched “Good girl” necessary in every harrowing account of addiction, but also as a comment on how inextricably tied, due to institutionalized racism, the black middle-class is to the black under-class and underworld. How it is much more conceivable that Terry could easily meet a Teddy because she is black. This is as much Goines injecting autobiography into his book as all of those ugly details of addiction.

But, these tangent are the byproducts of a focused, non-Romanticized drug narrative. Rather than rope in bigger ideas or over-arching comments on this or that, they leak out of a multi-character addiction tale. Nobody's a symbol and heroin's never turned into a means to some bigger, end. Of all the patterns to pull out of Dopefiend, the one that occurs the most is references to characters' bowels and farting and that's kinda perfect. Early on, the reality that Terry's hanging out with “that dopefiend-ass bitch” Minnie make the constipated-from-addiction Teddy unable to focus on “trying to have a bowel movement” (56). Terry farts at the sight of heroin on page 118, and Porky's associate Dave does the same in the middle of a rather tense drug deal on page 186.

This focus on the body is about as down-to-earth and simple as a writer can get. Though it sounds strange, it's the perfect example of what Dopefiend does so well: Break addiction down to the ugliest, least ideal functions and leave it at that. This ability to turn small details into big ideas while not reducing them to symbols may be specific to Goines and only Goines. Heroin isn't a symbol for anything, as it so often is in other tales of the drug. It isn't a metaphor for innocence lost—Terry and Teddy aren't some urban Adam and Eve—or a way to investigate friendship and it most certainly isn't transgressive or “hip” as it was and continues to be in so many works of art.

SOURCES CITED:
-Allen Jr, Eddie B. Low Road: The Life & Legacy of Donald Goines. St Martin's Press: New York, 2004.
-Goines, Donald. Dopefiend. Holloway House: Los Angeles, 2005.

Okay. Finally. Sorry about the delays. Whoreson essay will still go up on Friday, February, 26th. There's plenty here I missed, so feel free to send the conversation in a direction different than my essay's...-b

Locating Goines Pt. 4: Goines & Street Fiction

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 04:49:00 +0000

Though Goines' desire to write stems solely from reading Iceberg Slim, and Goines' and Slim's names are now mentioned together as the founders of Street Fiction, their work is pretty different. Goines, following Slim, approached crime and the underworld with an unflinching reality that still holds-up in 2010 and combined it with a hard-to-explain, unconditional empathy for the characters. Unlike Chester Himes, who did similar things, the law and order element is all but gone in Slim and Goines' work and that's crucial.

But what Goines left behind, when he took up writing (with Slim in the front of his mind), was Slim's wired subjectivity. Not so much Slim's frequent use of the first person even though that's part of it, but more, Slim's off-the-wall jazzy, slang-filled, kinda impenetrable language. If not for Slim's dirty old man tendencies (he can be just plain lurid), I don't see why his work wouldn't be the mid-point between African-American Literature in the the Harlem Renaissance era and the post-modern era. Slim's a genius with words--Joycean really--and his stories are thick with slang, tangents, and asides that make him part of the writing-about-writing, joy-of-words, style of Modernism whether he knows it or not.

Goines, not so much. He's direct and straight-forward, always. But what Goines saw in Slim's work was a lot of things he'd also seen and experienced put--for the first time as far as Goines was concerned--into a book: Less sentimental, less "square" crime narratives rubbing up against a kinder approach to the criminals. And this made Donald Goines write. He even ended up at publisher Holloway House--the closest to white patronage guys like Slim or Goines could get in the late 60s--because they published Slim's work.

Slim's unrelenting bleakness, a worldview as dark and depressive as any more respectable Modernist must've also grabbed Goines. This too is why Goines is closer in spirit to McKay than DuBois--there's no room for the kind of reformist idealism DuBois suggests in Home to Harlem or any of Goines' novels. Moments of hope, the possibility of change, yes, but it's kinda there, hovering around out of reach, just to further illustrate how fucked things are. Though institutions and institutionalized racism are a significant part of Goines' work, there's always more than a suggestion of free will and choice.

This lack of hope, coupled with a more conventional demand for personal accountability, is what made Goines' work separate from the politicized literature of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, popular at the time. Despite the progressiveness, despite the radical pragmatism, the goal of Black Power in particular, had its roots in the same puritanical ideas of every organized American group. And that kind of hope and idealism just isn't something Goines could hold onto.

Even in Goines' books about the character Kenyatta, a Black Militant out to rid his city and the world of drugs, the character fails. Many like to read this as the ultimate indictment of American racism--that the country would not let change like that happen--but reading through the four books (Crime Partners, Death List, Kenyatta's Escape, Kenyatta's Last Hit), there's enough milling around to suggest that Goines finds Kenyatta's ideals more than a little bit absurd. That he had a kind of slanted, deeply suspicious take on everybody and everything--shades of Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice. Really, it only makes sense that Goines would not find his work aligned with the political literature of the 60s and 70s, but that doesn't make it any less unfortunate.

Goines though, who rejected and was rejected by Civil Rights and Black Power artists, developed the next wave of African-American Literature: Street Fiction, now Urban Fiction. His disinterest in radicalism, along with an approach much more low-to-the-ground (big ideas are couched in little ideas, never the other way around), allowed Goines to side-step ideology, and ultimately provide his work with something closer to universality. Other people's, other group's ideas never step into the work and derail it from its focus on individuals, their actions, and their surroundings.

On the topic of big ideas, of over-arching statements--you know literary stuff--note that Goines never wrote a conventional autobiography. He has no personal manifesto. No breakdown of his own struggle. He doesn't have his Pimp: the Story of My Life. Goines' Whoreson is more an attempt to mimic Slim's work (almost a work of Juvenilia), and that all his books in one way or another, are autobiographies makes him more like most conventional authors (pulling from life, turning it into fiction that then, resembles life).

A fairly conventional--dare I say, middle-class--sense of morality dominates Goines' works as well. His books aren't these odd, sideways street fables/parables like Slim's books, but novels where what's "right" and "wrong" is actually pretty clear. Though the "street code" is important to the books, Goines' constant introduction of regular, working people and the interruption of a narrator who can't always hide his disgust for the events he's describing, balance the books out. He's adroit at sequencing events in a way that makes the reader understand why a character's doing this or that, but there's not this nihilism in there that suggests it's the only way. There's stability in his books, there's hope, it just isn't always that easy to find.

The hope comes through in the obvious moralizing, but also in his sensitivity to the psychology of his characters. What lots of critics think of as inconsistencies in the book--shifting motivations, sudden kindness, etc.--is just reality. The way people shift or change in the moment, the way they don't make sense, despite the soul-crushing patterns and codes they follow, is what Goines writes about...and all that Goines writes about.

And it's this doesn't-totally-work mixing of lurid, ugly "reality" with fairly conventional morality, with detours into street-code pragmatism that's dominated the Street Fiction market since Goines. Slim is of note for sure, but his connection to what's now categorized as "Urban Fiction" comes down to his early embrace of slang and influencing Goines.

Most Street Fiction though, misreads Goines. There's a kind of pat, wrap-around morality or "everyone gets it in the end" that Goines wisely avoided or truly earned in his books. Go find a sex scene in Goines book and realize how cold and disinteresting it is. Notice how the violence pops-up out of nowhere and is over very quickly. They're in there because the plot needs it, his publishers demanded it, and the audience loves it, but he keeps it moving A lot of contemporary Street Fiction reads more like what a Goines book seems like it'd be like before one actually opens it up and reads it.

This though, speaks more for Goines' rarefied body of work than it does for Street Fiction in the 2000s, which indeed, must conform to today's standards of shock, all the while smuggling in as many tougher doses of reality and insight as possible. All the while of course, under an even more watchful, limiting eye of the publisher, because Street Fiction's big business now. I take what I previously said back--Goines was lucky to write in the early 70s.

Locating Goines Pt. 3: Goines & The Harlem Renaissance

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:16:00 +0000

Street Fiction author Jihad, in an essay called "The Resurrection of Street Fiction" put it bluntly: "Saying street fiction is dead is like saying poverty is non-existent. [Contemporary] Street fiction is the re-emergence of the Harlem renaissance era." (par. 2) If that's the case--and there'd be a case for it if anyone were taking any of the stuff now relegated to the "Urban Fiction" section seriously--then the mid-point between the Street Fiction Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance would be Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. And though Goines' biggest, maybe only influence is Slim, Goines' work most closely resembles Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay, specifically McKay's Home to Harlem.

Home to Harlem tells the story of Jake Brown, a black soldier, who returns from WWI to Harlem, takes up with a prostitute and spends the rest of the novel trying to find her once again--the search sends him on a trip through Harlem's working-class and criminal underbelly. Though much is made of the interaction between McKay's text and white Harlem Renaissance patron Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven--a book that despite its title, was appreciated at the time by Renaissance gatekeepers and was certainly not intended as racist--there are a few more notable texts McKay is messing around with in Home to Harlem: Homer's The Odyssey and W.E.B DuBois' article "The Talented Tenth".

Back to er, Nigger Heaven for a moment. Due to its unfortunate title and an increased sensitivity to whites writing about the black experience, McKay's book is often seen as a "corrective" to Van Vechten's view of Harlem. And that's not far off. But it isn't the big political corrective it's often presented as and more the publication of a sentiment whispered amongst black writers of the time, about one of their most notable patrons: "Man, he got it wrong!". That's to say, the corrective is subtler, more mired in details and specificities. McKay doesn't avoid the chaotic side of Harlem that Van Vechten portrayed, but he does it with little of the weird, kinda racist interest of Van Vechten, but the same contrarian love of working-class wildness.

This is where Goines' similarities to McKay begin. This outsider (McKay was born in Jamaica, he was also Communist and homosexual) who's also an insider portraying a maligned aspect of reality with a sensitivity to detail and character and none of the two problems that usually characterize this kind of work: the condescension or self-justification of the lower-class. Most notably, there's the strange, tangential chapter in Home to Harlem, "He Also Loved", Chapter XVII. In short, it tells the tragic story of a pimp named Jerco, and the overwhelming sadness he felt when one of his whores dies. The theme of the chapter and in a way, the book, is summarized by Ray--the other main character of Home to Harlem--when he tells Jake, "And I have been forced down to the level of pimps and found some of them more human" (244).

It's worth pointing out that none of this stuff I'm discussing is revolutionary, it's recounted in a ton of scholarly texts, but McKay's ability to touch on a sentiment--a sympathy, even empathy with the criminal element, the under privileged and under-discussed--that would define Depression-era Hollywood cinema, the crime genre as a whole to this day, Goines and Slim's work (in a sense, Goines' Street Players is "He Also Loved" stretched to an entire book), all subsequent Street Fiction, and even most hip-hop is fascinating. You see why rappers reference Goines so much. They should probably read McKay just as well.

Unlike Goines though, McKay had a literary movement backing his aggressively trashy, literary bestseller (though it was still maligned by many) and a conscious sense of literary tradition/literary tradition-bucking in there too. Home to Harlem is essentially a parody of Homer's The Odyssey. An ugly, perverse re-telling of the soldier, back from war, trying to find his love, only this time, it's WWI and the soldier returns from fighting for his country to being another "nigger" and his "love" is a whore he shacked-up with his first night back. McKay plays the white literary establishment game--he's interacting with "the canon"--and totally destroying it by flipping all its ideas around.

McKay's use of the canon though, is also in response to W.E.B DuBois' "The Talented Tenth" essay and the assertions that go along with it: That a black elite must form, put its best face forward, that "The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." (par. 1). This meant a refusal to celebrate or even really, properly consider works that may encourage or verify stereotypes. Langston Hughes' response to DuBois was an essay called "The Negro Artist & the Racial Mountain" which politely eschewed DuBois' assertions: "If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too." (par. 14) This debate continues to this day--Tyler Perry, anybody?

In "Donald Goines as an Allegorical Figure", C. Liegh McInnis uses Eddie Allen's Low Road as a kind of jumping-off point for an analysis of Goines' worldview. McInnis interestingly, aligns Goines with McKay, though not entirely:

"Goines never completely rejects Du Bois but moreso embraces the notion of Claude McKay in his Home to Harlem that the truth of humanity is found in how people react to and endure the worst of times and themselves. Neither Goines nor Allen suggests that we must celebrate nihilism, but it must be addressed if we are to ever conquer it." (par. 1)

It's important to stress that Home to Harlem stands on its own, free of all this "Talented Tenth" context, the same way the appended context to Goines' work isn't important to reading, but McKay was indeed, consciously and aggressively confounding the things DuBois was talking about.

Goines, as McInnis suggests, is doing something similar but different. There's always some hope or escape in Goines' work. You will always find characters who, in one way or another, could be part of DuBois' "Talented Tenth" and they are often used as really obvious contrasts to the criminal main characters. This I think, has a lot to do with Goines' explicit "choosing" of a life of crime. That's to say, every criminal at one point or another "chooses" that life, but that it becomes more hulking, less like a choice, when not a whole lot of other options surround you. Goines to some extent, had other options.

That said, "the life" pulled Goines in really early and affected him deeply and those characters, events, and experience were all turned into his books. Though there's very little humor or joy in Goines' work, the hope comes through in the obvious moralizing, but also in his sensitivity to the psychology of his characters. What lots of critics think of as inconsistencies in the book--shifting motivations, sudden kindness, etc.--is just reality. Harlem, the working-class, and the underworld, in one way or another, remain symbols in McKay's book. Goines wasn't interested in this kind of thing, presumably not even aware of this rarefied but consequential variation on white supremacy that is "the canon", but it was McKay's rigorous intellectual approach to something anti-intellectual that laid the groundwork for Goines and others' similar works.

SOURCES:
-DuBois, W.E.B. "The Talented Tenth".
-Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist & the Racial Mountain".
-Jihad. "The Resurrection of Street Fiction". The Urban Book Source. January 2009.
-McInnis, C. Liegh. "Donald Goines as an Allegorical Figure". Mississippi Political.
-McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem. Northeastern University Press: Boston. 1987.

Locating Goines Pt. 2: Goines & the Literary Tradition

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:07:00 +0000

Some throat-clearing before, we get down to business with Dopefiend. This project's been slow, my bad. I'm usually obsessive about delivering on "theme" blogs and stuff on time, but real-life got in the way this time around. If you're participating, I hope you've started Whoreson, as I still plan to have the essay/discussion stimulator for that one up by February 26th. Dopefiend discussion on Monday. I promise.-b

On the overall list of tragedies (addiction, jail time, being uh, murdered with his kids in the house) that befell Donald Goines during his way-too-brief life, the lack of support he got for his writing, probably ranks pretty low. This is important to note because too often, critics or just semi-amateur chin-scratching types like myself can get a little too caught up in the creator/artist and forgot about the person behind it all.

Don't forget that Donald Goines was more than his sixteen books, but frankly, that's what mostly "matters" in 2010. He was a troubled guy, who all too often resorted to crime, and wrote a bunch of incredible books that were really influential but percieved as "trashy" then, and are only slightly more respected now. That's a bummer. Tragic from a certain point of view.

Better yet, Urban/Street Fiction--the sub-genre he helped found--is a phenomenon that's still dismissed or laughed-off as a whole, while the critical discussion of Goines' work is relegated to a lot of very boring, kinda out-of-it French scholarship (and no matter how bad my online translator is, these essays are clueless), some decent but marginalized American criticism (which I'll occasionally cite), a terrible book called Donald Writes No More, and Eddie Allen's Low Road, a book that wobbles but never falls down under the weight of being the only actual biography of Goines as well as the only American book to take the writing seriously.

Goines' critical reputation could do a lot worse, but it could and should be better. This though, isn't entirely a bad thing. The continued lack of critical interest, coupled with the unwavering appeal of his books amongst regular-ass people preserves Goines' work in a good weird way. No matter what happens at this point, he'll never fall into this armpit of respectability where so many other pulpy writers' reputations currently reside: Not read by a lot of people, not really canonized, just kinda uh, there. "Cult" in the worst sense of the word.

There are at least a few more decades before Goines' work becomes of only "ethographic" or pop-cultural value--like books by Horatio Alger or Charlotte Temple or something. In twenty years, Goines still won't be part of any canon that matters, but more people will pick up his books than whoever's dominating the bestseller list right now. If that's the case, and I think it is, it's the perfect time to look at Goines' work from something resembling an academic standpoint. No amount of lit-crit nonsense could dessicate Goines' populist appeal and some long-hard looks into his books could only serve them well.

In the first part of this supposed-to-be quick intro to the "Goines Book Club", I tried to nail-down Goines very weird place as a writer. I called his perspective "next to the hood"--neither above it all, nor down in it and self-justifying. In a series of essays over the next few days, I would like to show how Goines is equally out-of-place when it comes to literary traditions; constantly straddling stuff from the past and stuff that hadn't happened quite yet.

Again, hesitant to use the word "tragic" here, but there's something really unfortunate about Goines' five-year (would've been longer had he not died) literary epiphany: It arrived at an inopportune time for grabbing onto any kind of literary or popular fiction zeitgeist. And popular interest and critical respect were indeed, something Goines was after. Writing wasn't a hustle for him anymore than it was for any guy, no matter how many fancy awards they got, who decide to sell their fiction to the public.

Part of positioning Goines into literary history involves, unfortunately, labeling him. Right now, he's "Donald Goines, Street fiction pioneer" and he'll always be that. But it's important to find the ways Goines' work dips into many literary traditions of his time (1950s-1970s) and how he fits into American Literature and African-American Literature overall. Goines the African-American Author, Goines the Sociologist, Goines the Social Realist, Goines the Post-WWII Writer, Goines the Post-Modernist.

Among the many reasons no one's really connected his work to literary tradition before is because it can so easily be combatted with the cynical point that Goines wasn't much of a reader. That he didn't know anything about post-WWII American Literature or even know who the hell say, Claude McKay is. The only author Goines ever cited as an influence was Iceberg Slim--and really, his work only superficially resembles Slim's.

A lot of this cynicism, or this refusal to connect literary dots, comes from those studying Goines' work though. There's a fear in most Goines criticism (again, except Eddie Allen) of being clowned for taking it too seriously, or not going well out of one's way to discuss Goines' foibles, how he's a poor writer (he isn't) or misogynist (most certainly not) or thug with a pen (no fucking way). This has to stop and part of what I want to do is save Goines from these kinds of caveats.

Critics' rather low-rent expectations of the author become clear when even an apparent homage to Chester Himes in Goines' White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief (the main character is named Chester Hines) gets viewed speculatively. Eddie Allen says it would be "an uncanny coincidence" if it weren't "a literary tribute" and goes on to describe Himes and Goines' parallel lives in many ways (middle-class blacks who got into crime and took up writing in jail) but doesn't try to read any intertextual meanings to the homage (152-153). Greg Goode's essay "From Dopefiend to Kenyatta's Last Hit: The Angry Black Crime Novels of Donald Goines", in Melus (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), says "White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief is perhaps a tribute to Chester Himes' prison novel Cast the First Stone." (44) Note that "perhaps"--you'll find qualifiers like that throughout Goode's tentative essay.

Goines never cited Himes' work but then again, there's very few places where a record of Goines speaking-on or citing much of anything exists. With most writers though, this reference would open the doors up for all kinds of inferences and text-to-text analyses and it's surprising that it hasn't. It's also good; precisely what I mean about Goines occupying a good weird place when it comes to criticism. It's important to consider Himes' influence on Goines and not lean on it too heavily.

Personally, this kind of critical connect the author-dots is a little boring and lazy anyway, and what's more important is Goines' stylistic and thematic connections to authors and literary styles, intentional or not. That kind of "in the air" of the decades thing that makes books of the past strangely connected whether they were all reading one another's manuscripts or not.

In short, it doesn't matter if AUTHOR X and AUTHOR Y knew one another or read one another--they were doing similar things during similar times and that can really illuminate the work. With Goines, I'd like to not so much label him as this kind of author or that kind of author, but show how Goines' work very much aligns with specific literary styles...and how it doesn't.

This between a lot of things position is what makes Goines' work interesting and once more, makes him like every great author. How the stuff that makes say, Hemingway a Romantic is as interesting as the stuff that makes him not only a Modernist, but the Modernist. With Goines though, there's a sense of "what if" to this literary tradition stuff because, had he been writing in nearly any other decade but the 1970s, his work would've easily found a more sizable audience and one that could've afforded him a more sustainable living and writing career. No amount of criticism in the world can alter that fact, but more serious criticism of Goines' novels may right that wrong in one way or another. It begins with placing Goines in the American literary timeline, really for the first time.

SOURCES:
-Allen Jr, Eddie B. Low Road: The Life & Legacy of Donald Goines. St Martin's Press: New York, 2004.
-Goode, Greg. "From Dopefiend to Kenyatta's Last Hit: The Angry Black Crime Novels of Donald Goines." MELUS, Vol. 11, No. 3, Ethnic Images in Popular Genres and Media (Autumn, 1984), pp. 41-48.

Dilla Donuts Day

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 06:31:00 +0000

First, picture by the awesome Kelly Connelly. Today is J Dilla's birthday, which means it is also the day, four years ago that Donuts came out. Below are the links to last year's Donuts extravaganza. The concern in talking-up an album like Donuts is sucking it of all its wonder and joy; explaining it, solving it. As far as I can tell, that wasn't the result of "Donuts Month".

I just got home from a friend of mine's DJ set and he dropped Pharcyde's "Runnin" and I use the term "dropped" advisedly--my dude was spinning all vinyl because his hard-drive crashed though he didn't advertise it--and you had a whole room of people mouthing the lyrics or dancing to it like it was just the next song in an night of songs to dance to...everyone digging into the song on their own personal level, but enjoying it together.

Though certain songs on Donuts may still remind me of the same stuff they did last year, and I may envision say, Dallas Penn's video when I hear "Anti-American Graffiti", Dilla's masterpiece remains as vital and weird and ambiguous and endlessly fascinating as it did when it was released.

1. "Outro"
2. "Workinonit"
3. "Waves"
4. "Light My Fire"
5. "The New"
6. "Stop!"
7. "People"
8. "The Diff'rence"
9. "Mash"
10. "Time: The Donut of the Heart"
11. "Glazed"
12. "Airworks"
13. "Lightworks"
14. "Stepson of the Clapper"
15. "Twister (Huh, What?)
16."One Eleven"
17. "Two Can Win"
18. "Don't Cry"
19. "Anti-American Graffiti"
20. "Geek Down"
21. "Thunder"
22. "Gobstopper"
23. "One for Ghost"
24. "Dilla Says Go"
25. "Walkinonit"
26. "The Factory"
27. "U-Love"
28. "Hi."
29. "Bye."
30. "Last Donut of the Night"
31. "Intro"

Village Voice: "On Richard Christy's Fun-Metal Opus Charred Walls of the Damned"

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 02:59:00 +0000

So, my article on the first great album of 2010--Charred Walls of the Damned's self-titled debut--is in the Village Voice this week. CWOTD is drummer Richard Christy's metal project--you may know Richard Christy as one of the writers on the Howard Stern Show but he's also a metal veteran, having drummed for bands like Iced Earth and Death. Talking to him was a big deal, as I'm a huge Stern fan and just a big fan of his music and stuff. A lot of things we discussed just didn't make it into the article due to word-space, but I especially loved a rant he had about how John Carpenter is his favorite songwriter.

After the interview, he was awesome enough to give me a tour of the Stern show studios which is sort of a dream fulfilled since I was eight years old listening to Stern with my dad. In Richard's office, amongst the metal CDs and porno DVDs was a bunch of Carpenter movie soundtrack LPs. Charred Walls of the Damned came out today. Go get it!"It's early in the year, but Richard Christy has already released two masterpieces. First, there's his epic rearranging of Sarah Palin's audio book—one of many pre-recorded bits he provides for The Howard Stern Show—wherein the comedian turns Going Rogue into Penthouse Forum, cutting and splicing Palin's voice so she's describing an indefatigable orgy that includes, among other things, her inclination to "jerk off a caribou." But don't forget Charred Walls of the Damned, the self-titled debut of his new songs-in-the-key-of-Maiden metal supergroup.

The Stern affiliation often outshines Fort Scott, Kansas's favorite son's nearly 20 years in the heavy-metal scene—including bygone gigs as drummer for death-metal pioneers Death and the concept-album-obsessed Iced Earth, among many others—but Christy is comfortable with that. "I work on the greatest radio show in the world," he exclaims. "I get paid to goof around..."

Locating Goines Pt. 1: "Next to the Hood"

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:11:00 +0000

"In the early days, the best rappers weren’t necessarily from the hood. Run-D.M.C was from Hollis. Eric B and Rakim were from Long Island. They lived next to the hood.”-Chris Rock, Time Magazine (57).

For those familiar with this blog, this quote swiped from Chris Rock comes up a lot. Namely because it's good, smart, and catchy, but also because it touches on issues of “authenticity” and “reality” and all the stuff at the core of nearly every hip-hop discussion, for better and worse.

Rock's quip though, has legs beyond hip-hop because he's speaking on a phenomenon that applies to nearly every, interesting, game-changing, creative type. This sense that they stand inside and outside of their respective surroundings and as a result, inject their art with duel insight--familiar and foreign, sympathetic and critical.

Donald Goines is a “next to the hood” author and what makes his work so fascinating. A Goines novel is far from celebratory, it's not entrenched in the moronic logic of "the life"--the biggest problem with most contemporary Urban fiction--but it isn't above it all either. Goines has an impressive ability to be both, rooted in the realities of whatever experience he's documenting and step outside of it and provide sober commentary on it, without tipping the scales towards "jus' keepin' it real" or projecting some above-it-all morality to the proceedings.

He isn't telling first-person, ghetto fables like Iceberg Slim. He's not making street life literary like Chester Himes. And the black underworld isn't a transgressive symbol as it was for Claude McKay in Home to Harlem (arguably the earliest blueprint for Street/Urban Fiction), Goines is doing a little bit of all those things--those three authors made Goines' work possible, though he only read Slim--and something else entirely.

Goines' work isn't explicitly literary at all--even Slim's work is in part, about wordplay and language--and it's "merit", as more than just a good story, only arrives to those sensitive to the subtleties of the work. The very reason he's very popular is why people don't take his work seriously. You can read it, get your thrills, and close the book, but there's more there too...but there doesn't have to be. There's nothing to "get".

You don't read a Goines novel for the themes because they're kinda obvious, but you do read it for all the characters and asides and details that make that rather obvious theme palpable and new. This is why it's very easy to toss out backhanded compliments to his novels. You'll frame it around surprise--that it's as insightful as it is, that it's so well-structured, etc.--rather than simple, glowing acclaim. This though, is the unfortunate byproduct of being "next to the hood". Rap is decades old and still essentially confounding to most people due to a stance that often hovers between unwitting and cognizant. Hell, last week, Vampire Weekend were at the center of an extensive debate amongst music critics precisely because they're "next to the hood".

If it isn't Goines' rather complex approach to his characters and environment that makes his work so rarefied, it's the Goines legend that paints him as very much of the hood. As a guy killed at his typewriter (he actually was not at his typewriter when he was killed), who lived a life of crime and addiction and for a few years before his death, who spit out some really influential, autobiographical crime fiction. This legend, which helps sell his books and justifies critics' disinterest, ignores his black, middle class upbringing. An upbringing that he rejected very early on by running with the wrong crowd, and an upbringing he escaped when he decided to fake his birth certificate and join the Air Force at just fifteen.

Eddie Allen, Goines' biographer—do check out Allen's book Low Road--offers an interesting piece of psychology on Goines' air force decision: “As [Goines] grew older, his cravings for new experiences and adventures exceeded that which his peers in the gang could provide” (33). This analysis by Allen retains the Goines legend—as somebody of “the hood”--but also as someone beyond it, interested in something else. Robbing and stealing and pimping grew old for Donald pretty quickly and he looked beyond his immediate surroundings for escape. Though he'd return—with a heroin habit he picked up in Korea—the weird, meandering narrative of Goines' life is worth charting out, especially as it applies to his fiction.

Here's a guy who rejected his middle class upbringing for a life of crime, then joined the Air Force when crime got boring, who returned to the states an “adult” kinda spoiled by his weird decisions (making regular jobs an impossibility), who'd wander around in the underworld up to his death, writing remarkable books about that life for a few years until he was mysteriously killed in his home. Though that isn't exactly “bohemian”, a word we love to append to slept-on, underappreciated, and self-destructive artists, it kind of is too--and it's “next to the hood” for sure.

Next Up: Locating Goines Pt. 2: Literary Traditions. A little behind on these posts, my apologies-b

SOURCES:
-Allen Jr, Eddie B. Low Road: The Life & Legacy of Donald Goines. St Martin's Press: New York, 2004.
-Tyrangiel, Josh. "Why You Can't Ignore Kanye." Time. 29 Aug. 2005: 54-61.

How Big Is Your World? Good Rap from January.

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:04:00 +0000

-Fabo "Put Some Gik On It"

In every corner of whatever tinny, post-Snap beat he's not quite rapping, not quite singing on, Fabo finds enough hooks and memorable melodies for five singles. It's always infectious and really fun, because it's just a guy kinda going off--only Fabo's understanding of "going off" has nothing to do with what's expected in rap music. It's actually out of control and unpredictable. Every song is about being stuffed so full of drugs that you're like, rolling around on the floor and drooling and spazzing out. Fabo goes there. On "Put Some Gik In It", listen to those "agggh!" ad-libs all over the background of the track and how a few times they morph into stunning, wordless crooning--this lurching, sorta harmonizing he's mastered at this point. And despite all the infectious silliness, he's got a genuinely beautiful, emotive voice (makes sense that he references James Brown and the The Temptations on this song instead of other rappers) he just uses it towards a really personal, really goofy, really somber end.

-Yelawolf "Love Is Not Enough"

"What made it come to a stop?/Had to be the money issue." Yelawolf's really wrapped-up in working-class concerns and to exclusively focus on his technical abilities or his deep understanding of tradition or whatever, is a bigger disservice than pumping his raps full of some context. Speaking of context and tradition: From Rick James' "Hollywood", to Triple Six's "Da Summa" and Devin the Dude's "Anythang", and now, "Love Is Not Enough", Yelawolf's tagging along on some sad-sack, Southern rap classics. Unlike those songs though, Yelawolf's still in it, so he employs his elastic rapping style towards the song's confused, drunk off Jack, speeding down the highway emotional chaos. His voice jumps forward in the verses, speeding through all the frustrating details of the relationship ("you began to lie to your parents", the real or imagined college graduate she's now dating) and suddenly slows-up on the hopeless hook. And it is hopeless, because it's beyond world of the forms stuff like "love" or having things in common, it's hard, touchable, but unmoveable things that ended his relationship: stuff like social class and economics.

-Rich Boy ft. Yelawolf "Go Crazy"

Let's just get a whole album of Rich Boy rapping over Jim Jonsin's kinda awesome, kinda stupid beats. At least a mixtape. These Jonsin/Rich Boy team-ups aren't exactly radio-ready or nothing, they're too slow, too murky, and weird--kinda what that group jj thought they were doing to Jonsin's "Lollipop" on their song "Ecstasy". You can't even throw for-the-ladies concession accusations at these songs, they're just these bizarre, slow-burning shit-talk tracks. Rich Boy just kinda combining cool-sounding words and phrases together, digging deep into his Alabama accent and grumbling out some raps. There's also a kinda funny thing when Yelawolf dropkicks into this one, like suddenly there's enthusiasm and energy there, not a kind of simmering disgust with any and everything. As a result, Rich Boy's second verse sounds a little amped by Yela's guest spot.

-Just Blaze "Exhibit GFP"

You get a chance to hear that Just Blaze House music set? He ended his set with this jokey but actually awesome refix of "Exhibit C". Blame Jersey Shore I guess? The set, all the way thorough, is really genius. Almost a cruel joke on his audience, as it starts with a kinda perfunctory run-through of a bunch of his hits and favorites and then suddenly, it shifts into a masterful, dance set and doesn't let-up. And it's a real dance music set, not the never-get-too-crazy kinds that you usually hear at places like Fool's Gold, where it encourages people to sorta dance but not go all-out because going all-out isn't cool. Seriously, at places like this--or your city's low rent, but probably better version--when a chick actually busts-out and dances, unironically, with moves and shit, people get weirded out or get this "hater" attitude. Downloading the set, and having a context for this remix (it was out on the internet in late December) was a great way to begin 2010, like a joyful death knell on the genuinely destructive indie takeover over dance music that happened during the 'aughties.

-Araab Muzik "Death By Electric Shock"

This is audio ripped from the MPC performance of Dipset producer Araab Muzik, which you can watch here. When it was on YouTube, it was labelled "Death By Electric Shock" and that's a cool title so I'm keeping it as that. Free of the very awesome video though, you start to realize how bizarre this song is and it shows that Araab's almost bass-less, treble-filled beats on Crime Pays, Boss of All Bosses 2 and many other places, are not the result of a guy who doesn't know how to mix or is on a budget, but a guy developing a weird, very new aesthetic. The drum and bass in the intro, the DJ Shadow homage, dude is looking at hip-hop from a very expansive and not all that popular right now perspective. His ears are open. If he were British and 12 other twits were doing this to diminishing returns along with him, it'd get covered in magazines. He should do live performances. He could open for Xiu Xiu or something. He could tour with The Knife. He should release an instrumental version of Boss of All Bosses 2.

-No Gang Colors "Killer Season"

Half of No Gang Colors is Joseph of Geek Down but that doesn't matter, no playing favorites here, this is the weirdest, angriest, open-minded extreme music I've heard since Strength & Vision by Slavia. A focused, determined aesthetic fighting with a kitchen-sink approach to genre and expectation. Like all the songs listed above, these releases not only give me hope that something's shifting in how people vomit out their post-iPod/Google Blog Search influences but that all the mash-up, po-mo cleverness, sell-out, genre-hopping is over and we're just gonna have awesome weirdos doing whatever they like--and doing it right. Was this Burzum-y punch of guitar and drums scored to Cam'ron's sideways motivational speech from Killa Season? Like everything on No Gang Colors' EP This Is Your God--the hilarious/sad Mike Tyson sample, a screech of vocals, all the sounds sent into one speaker and then the other, the occasional growl of vocals, a dose of screw music--it feels purposeful, inspired, and assured. Seven songs in eleven minutes assured.

further reading/viewing:
-Billy Madison Clip
-DJ Burnone on Fabo
-Rick James performs "Hollywood" on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert
-jj "Ecstasy" track review by Marc Hogan for Pitchfork
-LIVE @ FOOL'S GOLD x LTD HOLIDAY PARTY PT 2: JUST BLAZE
-AraabMuzik (Dipset Producer) [In Studio Performance]
-Go get No Gang Colors' EP This Is Your God
-Sean Murphy (artist)

Goines Book Club & Formspring

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:09:00 +0000

Real updates coming soon...

For now, a few things about the whole "Goines Book Club" jump-off. I started a Formspring account like every other asshole out there, but it's going to be set-up for the Goines book club in the sense that it's a place to toss-out some questions or comments about Goines, his work, and the specific book for the month. Feel free to use it as more something like a message board, as in, you don't have to have a simple question for me. Of course, if you have a simple question about Goines--or hell, even a non-Goines question--you wanna ask me, I'll answer that too.

But really, the main reason for the Formspring is so I can gauge the interest in the book club and what direction to take this whole thing. My issue with Formspring is the same one I have with conventional teaching--the whole, one dude in charge of it all thing--and so, I'd like to at least try to temper my view on his work by providing a place to read what others want to talk/think about in his work.

This weekend, there will be a series of essays introducing Goines and where I think he's coming from. They'll be called "Locating Goines". On Monday, I'll drop an essay on Dopefiend and ideally, some of you will like it or hate and we'll argue about it. Originally, it was just gonna be a Dopefiend essay and then I wanted to do some like, throat-clearing introductory shit, but then I didn't want that to cloud you guys' readings of the book, so I'm dropping it on you last minute, right before we get into Dopefiend.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the Goines Book Club Syllabus.

Pazz & Jop 2009

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 02:59:00 +0000

So, the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop is up today and as usual, it's fascinating and infuriating and fascinating again when you dig through all the individual ballots and comments and everything. Below's my ballot, tell me the shit I missed or why the stuff I liked sucks and whatever else. That's the point of this poll, right?:

Albums
1. Ryan Leslie, Ryan Leslie
2. G-Side, Huntsville International
3. Maxwell, BLACKsummers'night
4. James Ferraro, Edward Flex Presents: Do You Believe In Hawaii?
5. Wavves, Wavves
6. Diamond District, In the Ruff
7. DJ Quik & Kurupt, BlaQKout
8. Jay-Z, The Blueprint 3
9. Robert Glasper, Double Booked
10. Ryan Leslie, Transition

Singles
1. DJ Class "I'm the Shit"
2. Bat for Lashes, "Daniel"
3. Keri Hilson (ft. Kanye West & Ne-Yo), "Knock You Down"
4. Gucci Mane, "First Day Out"
5. Girls, "Lust For Life"
6. Emynd, "What About Tomorrow"
7. Mariah Carey, "Obsessed"
8. Cam'ron, "My Job"
9. Soulja Boy Tell Em', "Turn My Swag On"
10. Raheem DeVaughn (ft. Ludacris), "Bulletproof"

Was also quoted twice in the section "Michael Jackson and Hip-Hop". On Hip-Hop, not Michael Jackson, who I'm either going to just keep quiet about or write a 10,000 word thesis on the song "Human Nature". No in-betweens there. But yeah, I got to talk about two of my favorite things: Why Kanye is always interesting and great and the awesome ways rap gets smart and mature and how all of y'all are ignoring it...

"Besides Kanye being right—Beyoncé did have the best video—he more quietly outshined Taylor Swift with his verse on Keri Hilson's "Knock You Down," which one-upped Swift's "You Belong With Me" and its high school love histrionics. In Kanye's version, high school binaries are broken down—the class clown gets the prom queen—and then it turns sour anyway. Another awkward, awesome bummer from Mr. West."

"Jay-Z tells you it isn't cool to carry a strap. The Clipse wanna watch Madagascar with their kids. And Internet rap is no longer indulgent day-glo whatever, whatever, but wizened, worker-bee rap from every region. In short, hip-hop finally answers a lot of its critics—it grows up, it actually matures, and not in a "Ludacris goes on Oprah" way—and everyone's favorite rap album of 2009 is a facsimile of a 1995 coke-rap blueprint. OK."

Misreading Rap: Fish Tank & "Life's a Bitch"

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:58:00 +0000

Two things comes up in pretty much every review of Fish Tank, a British film about a troubled fifteen year old girl into "urban dance" and nothing much else (that is, until her mom's new boyfriend shows up): The apparently stellar performance from "non-actor" Kate Jarvis and the use of Nas' "Life's a Bitch" in a poignant scene between mom and daughter.

Whenever rap finds its way into a movie and it's not as either source music or for a cheap laugh, it's something of note, but what's so cool about Fish Tank is how its given a bunch of film critics the chance to riff on the Nas classic. It's a crucial part of the movie, so it's sent critics previously unaware of the song to IMDB to figure out what it is and for most, a chance to throw in a sliver of rap criticism into their movie review. Unfortunately, most are misreading the song. Dana Stevens of Slate called it "unremittingly depressing"--AZ's hook maybe, the song itself, not so much.

The biggest offender though, is Armond White, who lines-up the perceived phoniness of Fish Tank with Nas' own "baby brother impudence". Like most of White's writing in um, the past ten years, his point is brave and valid (let's reconsider Nas' talents), he's just building it all on a base that's flimsy at best. Stevens' descriptions and the many like it can be partially excused by the simplicity word counts often demand, but White's just completely wrong.

The best explanation of the song, in connection with Fish Tank at least, comes from, of all places, Thinking Faith (the online journal for British Jesuits). Aaron Kilkenny-Fletcher begins his review with a quote from AZ's verse and quotes the hook later, but is quick to explain that, "Life's a Bitch" is, "in spite of [the hook], a song of hope and of escape." Exactly.

"Life's a Bitch" though, isn't even that hard to "get" which makes all the misreading all the more frustrating. If there's a common strain in the "Nas kinda sucks" revisionism that's been wandering around in the past bunch of years, it's fueled by the relative simplicity--and therefore, perceived insincerity--of his work. That doesn't make Nas a bad rapper or Illmatic any less of a classic, but there's a "teachability" to Nas' work, that you know, would lend it to short-hand poignance in art films or a pretty mindless book if you peeped that Dyson disaster Born to Use Mics.

There's still plenty of room for complexity in something teachable, and a lot of the power of "Life's a Bitch" comes out of its adherence to structure. Really, "Life's a Bitch" hinges on structure. It's a song built on pieces that complement and contradict one another. AZ's verse and hook are apparently all that many people hear--really, just the hook--and it's easy to see the song as "cynical" or "unremittingly depressing" through that lunkheaded lens, but that ignores the shifting context of that hook, Nas' entire verse, and the joyful coda that is Olu Dara's horn solo.

Really though, AZ's verse isn't even conventionally "depressing", it's beyond "fuck the world" and all that. His verse is not only a celebration of making money, but a quick mini-history lesson on why that's all he believes in ("we were beginners in the hood as Five Percenters/But something must've got in us 'cause all of us turned to sinners") and a clear acknowledgment that indeed, it's a fruitless exercise: "As long as we leavin' thievin' we'll be leavin' with some kind of dough". The depressing part isn't that he desires money but that he knows exactly why he does what he does and has no interest in doing different.

AZ's verse and hook though, are viewed as the contrast or set-up to Nas' significantly more "hopeful" verse, but that's too simple too. There's the same amount of vibrancy and intelligence at work in AZ's verse as Nas', it's just being employed for a different end. Both verses sound good and are perfectly put together pieces of rapping. They are equally persuasive in terms style--they sound awesome but Nas' verse could not exist without AZ's--this is literally true if you read the XXL making of piece--because it's through AZ's acknowledgement of just how fucked things are, that Nas can come to his 20th birthday epiphany. That oft-quoted, "That buck that bought a bottle could've struck the lotto" comes from a guy who's spent a lot of bucks on bottles, you know?

When the hook returns after Nas' verse--again, all about structure here and how structure highlights meaning--it's nearly "ironic" because Nas has just rejected it or at least, found a way to not believe that "life's a bitch and then you die". This is the inverse of most songwriting wherein the "happy" chorus is undermined by the verses or a sad chorus is sung happily--there's a real give and take going on here. Then it's punctuated by Olu Dara's horn solo which is happy, but hardly glorious.

And "hardly glorious" is precisely the kind of minor victory joy director Andrea Arnold's at least trying to employ in Fish Tank: That good-bad, good enough, tension of the song transported into her film. Not sure where it falls in the white people/black music poignance meter--The Big Chill and Motown as a "1", Schooly D in the Bad Lieutenant as a "10"--but there's an attempt to wisely engage with the song's tensions, which is more than what a lot of critics are doing.

further reading/viewing:
-"Automatic Pity for the People" by Armond White of New York Press
-Fish Tank by Dana Stevens for Slate
-Fish Tank by Aaron Kilkenny-Fletcher for Thinking Faith
-XXL's Making of Illmatic
-"Deconstructing Illmatic" by Dan Love for Oh Word

No Trivia Book Club: The Year of Goines.

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:51:00 +0000

So, I thought about putting up a kind of obnoxious message about how the "New Year's resolution" for everybody reading and writing about rap on the internets should be some attempt to at least like, foster discussion?

And then it seemed wiser to create something or another that might facilitate discussion instead of simply demanding it.

The result is gonna be a book club. All during the upcoming year, I'm going to read every novel by "street fiction" originator Donald Goines and at the end of each month (ideally, the final week day of whatever month it is), post some kind of fairly in-depth essay about each book. The comments section will ideally be a place for people to discuss the month's book and if anyone wants to contribute more notable pieces about any of the books, they can do that too. They can be posted here or linked here, if you want to use your own blog to post your thoughts.

But real quick--some stuff about Goines: Was a pimp and a junkie, along with Iceberg Slim pretty much established Holloway House as a publisher and developed the current craze that is "street fiction", was shot dead at his typewriter, is idolized by tons of rappers (personal fave lyrical reference here) and most importantly, is still kinda slept-on as an author of a whole bunch of deeply compelling work.

If you want to read-up on dude a bit more, do not, I repeat do not consult Eddie Stone's Donald Writes No More. Do go find a cheap copy of Eddie B. Allen Jr.'s Low Road: The Life & Legacy of Donald Goines though, but only a cheap copy because even Allen's book isn't a masterpiece, but it does provide you with Goines' life story and some terse but effective criticism of the novels. All Goines' novels are relatively easy to find, relatively easy to read, and all will run you like $7 or $8 bucks new.

Below you'll find a "syllabus" and after that, some quick notes on why the reading list is structured as it is.

January: Dopefiend
February: Whoreson
March: Black Gangster
April: Street Players
May: White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief
June: Black Girl Lost
July: Eldorado Red
August: Swamp Man
September: Never Die Alone
October: Cry Revenge
November: Daddy Cool
December: "The Kenyatta Quadrilogy 1 & 2" Crime Partners & Death List
January: "The Kenyatta Quadrilogy 3 & 4" Kenyatta's Escape& Kenyatta's Last Hit

This reading list primarily goes in the order his books were published. The most notable shift is moving Crime Partners, Death List, Kenyatta's Escape, and Kenyatta's Last Hit towards the end and all in order because they are essentially one big novel--and a long-ignored American epic in my opinion. I've dubbed them the "Kenyatta Quadrilogy" because that's the guy that slowly becomes the main character and through which all of the action kinda sorta connects. Though these months, you'll have to read two novels instead of one but it's totally do-able. I read all four of them in a week.

Goines' Inner City Hoodlum is omitted from this list because it's up-for-debate as to how much he actually had to do with it. It was finished by another author after Goines' death and well, you can tell. That book will be used as a kind of February "coda" for the Year of Goines Book Club, a way to identify Goines' style and structuring through its rather apparent absence in that particular book.

Yeah, get reading! Any questions or suggestions on how to run this can be put in the comments section.

Metal Lungies Beat Drop: Best of 2009

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:09:00 +0000

I picked my five favorite beats of 2009 along with a ton of other people for Metal Lungies' Beat Drop. My picks were "Rising Sun" by G-Side (produced by the Block Beataz),"Run This Town" by Jay-Z (produced by No I.D and Kanye West), Rhymefest's "Pull Me Back" by Rhymefest (produced by The Matrax), "In the Ruff" by Diamond District (produced by Oddisee), and "First Day Out" by Gucci Mane (produced by Zaytoven). Here's what I said about that Zaytoven beat. Click to check out the whole feature:

"Usually, a great beat brings together a bunch of disparate chunks of sound into a dope, cohesive whole. This beat by Zaytoven does the opposite: It stacks the same sound (a ping-ponging Zombie movie synth) on top of itself until it’s a crawling mess of bleeps, bloops, and whines, all up in your speakers. It’s deceptively simple and the power comes from the like, casual chaos of it all…the seemingly accidental rhythms and syncopations that stem from this sound-stacking."

Yelawolf's Redneck Manifesto

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 05:43:00 +0000

"Confederate flags, I see em' on the truck with the windows down/Why's he playing Beanie Sigel?/Cause his daddy was a dopeman./Lynrd Skynrd didn't talk about movin' keys of coke, man/Ain't no such thing as a free bird..."

That's from Yelawolf's "I Wish", which features Raekwon and has a beat that rumbles like a Booker T & The MGs instrumental, a Duane Allman solo, and Triple H's entrance theme all at the same time. Notice how there's no interest in resolving all the tensions in that rap, how all the details float out there and link-up in some ways and don't connect in other ways at all. You either get it or you don't.

The Gadsden, AL rapper points out the absurdity an outsider would immediately gravitate towards--a Confederate flag on a truck, as hip-hop blasts from its speakers--and then, explains where the interests of Beanie Sigel and what a lot of you would call "a bunch of rednecks" intersect: Black or white, both poor, they're afforded those few luxuries they have because of dope money.

In the words of James Baldwin, Yelawolf is "put[ting his] business on the street": Letting-out some previously ignored, problematic reality for the rest of the world to see. In this case, it's the reality that the drug trade holds in its grasp as many whites as blacks, and not only on the typical, higher-up rungs, but on the, work-a-day, keep-the-lights-on levels illustrated in the music of many trap-rappers or on a show like The Wire.

This has never been a fun chunk of reality for white people to hear. Namely because white privilege (which exists when you're white, but not white and poor as fuck) makes it relatively easy to disassociate one's self from "white trash"...all the while of course, invoking it when necessary, as country singers like Toby Keith or ex-presidents like George W. Bush are wont to do.

Yelawolf though, like the scores of black rappers before him, realizes some kinda change, real awareness--and interesting stories--stem from actively putting one's business on the street, regardless of the perceived "hurt" it might do to one's race or reputation. And so, his music isn't only engaging with race/class on a political/social/"message" level, but in the dirty, details that've always been rap's specialty.

"Pop the Trunk" is full of them, drenched in novelistic details that build-up over and over, to that increasingly terrifying hook/threat: "Don't make me go pop the trunk." It's like when Wayne recalls having to go "get the cleaver" on Tha Carter III's "Playing With Fire" because his mom's "pussy second husband" is beating the shit out of her. Just serious, intensely personal, cinematic rap. Pay attention to the final verse of "Pop the Trunk", which makes good on the hook's threat, but it's a kind of country road shotgun stand-off, and the victim of some buckshot to the chest slows Yelawolf's staccato flow a to illustrate those bloody last gasps of life.

But there are everyday details too, the kind of sweatpants he's wearing when he's awakened, that both his parents are actively working--another reality for the working-class, there's always bullshit to do--and lyrical flashes of the fucked-up night before. And there are quieter, less loaded pieces of insider info running through Yelawolf's work, illustrated quite well in his interpolation/almost covers of rock hits of the past.

He screeched a Flock of Seagulls hook on Slim Thug's "I Run" and he's gotten a lot of interest lately for his "Subterranean Homesick Blues" reinterp on Juelz Santan's "Mixin' Up the Medicine"--that he's got Stereo, a whole mixtape of classic rock-sampling rap songs, speaks to open-minded, all over the place listening habits of regular-ass people. That his parents probably partied to Flock of Seagulls and reflect on a shit-day at work over some beer and a Dylan record. This is also deeply hip-hop, this grab-from-anywhere if it sounds dope approach to songwriting.

There's also something to say about a guy with an off-kilter flow that's super comfortable just doing hooks--he's the anti-Drake--and fully understands the fluidity of his rap persona. Because that persona's scattered, it's real, and because of that, it doesn't fit nicely into this category or that one, and he can fluidly move around.

He's a total rap outsider. He's an awesome hook man. He's as attuned to ghetto realities as any other rapper. He's a skate-metal, trailer-park, drug-dealing, white hip-hop head from Alabama, deeply in-tune to the contingencies of his upbringing, which ain't all that different from all his rap heroes and the dudes he grew up with.

Example: While Yelawolf's adjective-filled, scene-stealing verse on G-Side's "Who's Hood" overflows with trailer-park imagery, it's 6 Tre G who's got the Jeff Jarrett punchline on "Feel The"--the song right before.

Namely, Yelawolf realizes that by simply existing and speaking on his life, he defies much of the classist bile espoused by popular media, white and black cultural gatekeepers, and the types that use phrases like "red-state/blue-state" unironically--the people that don't want to acknowledge the ways the white and black working-class not only have a whole lot in common, but are one in the same.

That they're listening to the same rap and rock and metal, rocking the same fashion, selling the same drugs, trying to cop the same clothes, circling their town's hot spot in the same cars, hanging out at the same skate parks, of the same community, with the same interests, the same pleasures, the same pains.

further reading/viewing:
-Wikipedia Entry for Gadsden, Alabama
-The Redneck Manifesto by Jim Goad
-A weird interview with Yelawolf by J Dirrt of Baller's Eve
-"If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" by James Baldwin
-Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell
-William Faulkner's "Snopes Trilogy"

How Big Is Your World? New rap.

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:35:00 +0000

-Z-Ro ft. A-Ro "Best I Ever Had (Slowed)"

Z-Ro and um, A-Ro, go in over Drake's only good song because well, this rap-sing schtick's been Z-Ro's forever now. Not sure, but I suspect it bugged 'Ro and company when Drake rapped over "June 27th" and in some weird, smart way, this is the "response" record. Please note how Z-Ro's freestyles (and even A-Ro's in a way) are just as effortless and meaningless as Drake's but they work--nothing contrived, a guy going off the dome, wandering around the same topics (drugs, money, blowjobs, how fucking fake everybody is) because it's what was on his mind the day he recorded this, which was pretty much like every other day in the life of Z-Ro. The screwed version of the little bit ignored Relvis Presley tape came out before the regular version, which is genius because it's much better screwed--or "slowed" as it's listed--and it's the only way anyone would really give that version a proper listen.

-Gucci Mane ft Lil Wayne & Cam'ron "Stupid Wild"

The decade in mainstream but completely insane rap can be told through these three guys. So here they all are, the freaky-freak trap rap triumvirate rapping over a big, horrifying beat from Bangaladesh. Gucci waddling around the beat and locking-in like he does on damn near everything, and tossing in some genuinely mature insight ("Someone dissed me yesterday, what I supposed to do now, cry?") and a depressing hook. Then, it's over to Wayne who raps like he cares again which means enunciating in a way we haven't heard since he spoke to Miss Katie Couric and being all meter-obsessed, threatening to shoot your grandpa, and cackling a whole bunch. Cam'ron's still not quite there, but you still get something like "all the haters hate me" and that line about using your wifey for food-stamps.

-DJ Quicksilva "Where They Do That At"

This song's been out for a minute, and by "a minute" I mean since the summer, but there's been recent Baltimore and "DMV" remixes of this supposed-to-be-fleeting party song from DJ Quicksilva of DC's WKYS 93.9 and now it has a video too. The sub-regional remixes add rapping and a seriousness that the "Where They Do That At" totally doesn't need (though it is a good primer on Baltimore/DC rappers) so this original version stays winning for just following in the tradition of something like "Lookin' Boy" or Chalie Boy's "I Look Good". Like the former, it's full of edifying, hilarious observations (these songs are the closest we have to 60s/70s "party records"), and like the latter, it's just a kind of visceral, post-snap synth track with a hook fun enough to repeat for months and months. Mainly though, it's just a goofy, fun song that at it's heart calls for people to be reasonable.

-Nite Funk "Am I Gonna Make It"

On Stones Throw, remixing Animal Collective, collaborating with Nite Jewel...thing is, Dam Funk's music is just too good to be bogged-down by schtick or contained by potential niche audiences. Save for the brilliantly subtle female vocals (as coy and quiet as Dam's are loud and confident in their lack of confidence), it's hard to tell exactly what Nite Jewel brought to the song, but it seems like it's probably the dying-battery electronics and atmospherics that give "Am I Gonna Make It" that one more layer of sadness that it really needs. Unlike most Dam Funk songs, which are either blissed-out instrumentals or heart-on-the-sleeve love songs, "Am I Gonna Make It" is self-reflective and self-loathing, a song about being on one's way to some kind of epiphany--having fucked-up and well aware of it, but only like 70 percent ready to accept it.

-Harlem Children's Chorus "Black Christmas"

"Black Christmas" is from that weird, transitive era between 50s Liberalism and Black Power-informed Civil Rights. It quietly demands equality but wraps it around the Christmas holiday and still has that "we're gonna make it" power that all good soul has. Crime and poverty are invoked but instead, the joy that nevertheless exists is the song's focus. A few years later, hip, with-it, blacks and whites wouldn't dig the sentiment or the glowing warmth of the voices and production. It'd just not be political enough--a Christmas song built with the master's tools if you will. Re-released now, thanks to Strut's recent In the Christmas Groove compilation, "Black Christmas" is a weird time capsule, a sideways response to the use of kids voices for transcendent twee rather than sincerity in stuff like Where the Wild Things Are, and most importantly, a "new" awesome song for Christmas mixes.

further reading/viewing:
-"Gucci Mane, No Holds Barred" by Jon Caramanica for The New York Times
-DJ Quicksilva's MySpace
-Video for DJ Quicksilva's "Where They Do That At"
-"New Singles from Dâm-Funk, Solange, and Simian Mobile Disco" by Michelangelo Matos for The Stranger
-Food One/Jim Mahfood Art

City Paper: Year in Movies, Gomorrah

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:28:00 +0000

One more thing. Actual blog content is soon to come. I wrote about Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah for the Baltimore City Paper's "Year in Film", it was ranked #2, right after Revanche, whatever that is...
"Sinners in the hands of an angry director. Eurotrash beats apathetically pound over scenes of sitting around and shooting all the same--and no self-justified, too-tan character is spared director Matteo Garrone's scorched-earth disdain. Not the "just doing my job" money collector, the knuckleheads who think this crime shit's like Scarface, or the guys in charge, stomachs spilling over too-tight DIESEL jeans. Even those far from Naples aren't absolved when the web of corruption stretches to Oscar night couture and Camorra cartel investments in rebuilding the World Trade Center. Gomorrah's biblical pun title is more than earned."
Also, here's my ballot:

1. Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, United States)
2. Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America (Tony Stone, United States)
3. Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, Italy)
4. Madea Goes to Jail (Tyler Perry, United States)
5. Public Enemies (Michael Mann, United States)
6. Two Lovers (James Grey, United States)
7. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, United States)
8. Good Hair (Jeff Stilson, United States)
9. Tyson (James Toback, United States)
10. Moon (Duncan Jones, United Kingdom)

Village Voice: "Huntsville's G-Side Are Thriving on the Internet—and East Village Radio"

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:38:00 +0000

The reason this blog was relatively silent about G-Side's masterful Huntsville International was because of this article in this week's Village Voice about G-Side, the new mixtape, and their connection to East Village Radio's very awesome "Baller's Eve". In the process of doing the article, I managed to lose my driver's license, spill Crystal Light all over my Macbook, hang-out in New York with G-Side and The Baller's Eve dudes, as well as meet Joseph of "Geek Down" and yes, the Internets Celebrities Rafi and Dallas. Loads of fun. On the way back to Baltimore, I listened to Huntsville International for the first time and it just totally devastated me. I hope I was able to put some of that experience into words.
"Kat Daddy Slim, one-third of the East Village Radio show Baller's Eve, takes a shot at summing up Huntsville, Alabama's finest hip-hop duo, G-Side: "Outkast on steroids." His co-hosts, DJ Dirrty and Minski Walker, just nod their heads: "Yep."

G-Side themselves—rappers Clova and ST 2 Lettaz, alongside Codie G, manager of their label, Slow Motion Soundz—are taken aback. There is a moment of modest silence.

We're gathered in the EVR office after a mid-November Baller's Eve episode (there's another one every Wednesday, from 10 p.m. to midnight) heavily devoted to tracks from G-Side's Huntsville International mixtape, released for free online earlier that day. Clova's eyes grow big, taking in that profoundly flattering comparison. ST drawls out an appreciative "Shit . . ." Codie G, for once, has no words..."

Village Voice, Sound of the City: "Free Gucci, Fuck Diplo, & The History of "Free ___"

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:42:00 +0000

So there's a pretty nutty thing I wrote about Diplo's loathsome "Free Gucci" T-shirt and upcoming mixtape up on the Voice's "Sound of the City" blog. Word to Zach Baron for sculpting it all into something that sorta makes sense:

"Gucci Mane's new album, The State vs. Radric Davis is in stores today, but the insanely prolific, remarkably consistent Atlanta rapper has been in jail since November 12th. This is Gucci's second stint in jail for a parole violation this year. Both sentences stem from a 2005 incident in which Gucci attacked a promoter, served six months for the attack, and was released under the agreement that he would take rehabilitation classes and do some community service--which he's now failed to do, and gone to jail for failing to do...twice.

And though this recent return to jail brought about another wave of "Free Gucci" T-shirts, mixtapes, and Facebook groups, there's an equal amount of healthy, hands-up-in-the-air frustration with the guy. It's impossible to turn Gucci Mane into any kind of victim of "the system" because the system's given him second, third, and fourth chances to get his shit right..."

Hip-Hop's Dying, Ya Heard?

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 05:41:00 +0000

"One of the tasks of the film critic of tomorrow--perhaps he will even be called a "television critic"--will be to rid the world of the comic figure the average film critic and film theorist of today represents: he lives from the glory of his memories like the seventy-year-old ex-court actresses, rummages about as they do in yellowing photographs, speaks of names that are long gone. He discusses films no one has been able to see for ten years (and about which they can therefore say everything and nothing) with people of his own ilk; he argues about montage like medieval scholar discussed the existence of God, believing all these things could still exist today. In the evening, he sits with rapt attention in the cinema, a critical art lover, as though we still lived in the days of Griffith, Stroheim, Murnau, and Eisenstein. He thinks he is seeing bad films instead of understanding that what he sees is no longer film at all."-Rudolf Arnheim, 1935.*

Regions have splintered further into town-specific styles, there's just a couple of discernible stars, a whole bunch of rappers it's hard to get one's critical bearings on, and it all meets on the streets and the internet, not the Billboard Charts or MTV. Hip-hop isn't dead. It just isn't as easy to write about anymore. That's what Sasha-Frere Jones' intriguing though problematic "Wrapping Up", and Simon Reynolds just plain retarded "Notes on the Noughties" are actually saying.

But instead of acknowledging the weird, new species that hip-hop's evolved into, it's gotta be just plain dead or at least, "ag[ing] out". Skipping over these dramatic shifts in "the industry" and the ever-growing influence and eventual reliance on the internet--best represented with mixtapes--is a huge oversight if you're diagnosing hip-hop in 2009.

These guys think they are hearing bad albums instead of understanding that what they hear is no longer an album at all.

Industry changes hover in the background of SFJ's piece and bubble up through the focus on Freddie Gibbs' mixtapes, but its Reynolds who out-and-out dismisses the mixtape, with the pithy adjective of "obscure". Now, it's depressing when a critic--even a pop critic--tosses out "obscure" as a negative descriptor (sorta how indie critics used "lo-fi" to negatively describe Wavves) but it's another thing when that same critic both performs ignorance (that unfortunate "Gummi Bares" joke) and proves his ignorance (lumping Soulja Boy, Yung Joc, Gucci Mane, and Boosie together like they have much of anything in common) and then tries to tell readers anything about hip-hop.

Many of the mixtapes one could cite to prove hip-hop's still vital aren't really obscure--if you're a notable critic and you declare them obscure, they'll remain obscure--but more importantly, these "obscure" mixtapes are maybe the only way vital hip-hop can even get out there anymore. You'd be hard-pressed to find a rapper that's debuted since 2004--the year Reynolds says rap started withering away--whose best work isn't on a mixtape or at least, has some mixtapes competing with their albums in terms of quality. This isn't a coincidence. It also isn't a coincidence that 2004 or so is about when hip-hop and the internet really started mingling. Just saying.

You know, on Tuesday, new albums from both Clipse and Gucci Mane drop. Most of you reading have already heard them. Neither of these albums are particularly good, both of them have their moments, but only Clipse will truly suffer from making a sub-par album. Clipse made their proper debut in 2001--though their first album dates back to 1999--while Gucci debuted in 2005.

The reason Clipse will suffer and Gucci will not is because Gucci's established himself as a creative rapping force via mixtapes, while Clipse fell back on the mixtape when their official stuff got mucked-up in label drama. Clipse need--or think they need--the album. Gucci's using it purely as a means to an end: More money, more ubiquity, maybe some respectability. Indeed, even if The State vs. Radric Davis were a masterpiece, it wouldn't sell better (it'd maybe sell worse) and in a world of "Gummi Bares" jokes by notable critics, it doesn't seem like "Gucci Mane" and "masterpiece" could even be conceived of in the same sentence. So why bother? Go get Gucciamerica or the official unofficial Murder Was the Case which is structured like a tight, worker-bee album...which means it's structured like a Gucci mixtape.

Clipse though, in part because they clearly care about rap in the long-term sense--Gucci does not, proven by the fact that he's going to jail again--and in part because they're undoubtedly from a different era, tie rap artistry to the album format. They also want to be successful. Til the Casket Drops is torn apart by this tension, neither as good as their past work nor pop-oriented enough to yield any hits, in part because the brothers Thornton translate "pop" as "stick a broad on the hook". Til the Casket Drops misses both of its intended targets and farts around in no-man's land. And unlike Gucci or plenty of rappers who've come since (but didn't indeed, have a few singles like "Icey" and "Freaky Gurl" to buttress their street buzz) Clipse don't promise a deluge of new material and so, this all we get.

The State vs. Radric Davis is a product and that's clear to all involved: a guest-heavy, bets-hedging group of songs that hopefully maybe will sell a lot of copies and make a lot of money. It begins like Gucci's mixtapes, rolls into a sequence of R & B jams, and wraps-up with a group of songs with big-name guests and up-and-comers. Gucci's artistry is on display on dozens of album-like mixtapes, not the actual album. In 2009, rap fans just know this. Critics apparently, do not.

*More accurately: J. Hoberman in 1998 quoting Rudolf Arnheim in 1935.

further reading/viewing:
-"Wrapping Up" by Sasha Frere-Jones for The New Yorker
-"Notes on the noughties..." by Simon Reynolds for The Guardian
"Audio: Gucci Mane Calls Into DJ Drama's Show w/Young Jeezy" from Dirty Glove Bastard
"The Film Critic of Tomorrow" by Rudolf Arnheim
"The Film Critic of Tomorrow, Today" by J. Hoberman

No Trivia in XXL's 100 Best Hip-Hop Websites

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:50:00 +0000

Comments have been disabled so this doesn't seem like some kind of back-patting party or something. Finally held the new XXL in my hands and read the very kind comments on my blog ("Better known as No Trivia, Soderberg's blog gives rap the kind of intellectual, analytical respect is deserves.") and the other ninety-nine picks. It's a different thrill than seeing my byline in-print and we're all supposed to be too cool about this stuff, but damn, I'm honored.

XXL, besides being a magazine I actually read from time-to-time--there was a time when my sanity was kept by the routine of picking up XXL, Wax Poetics, and Film Comment after work on the days they came out--is one that's sorta active in the blogging world, so the list means a bit more? And not just because I'm in it. But because a big, giant, alphabetical list of dope blogs and websites is the proper way to advise someone on how to figure out the rap-blog world. The magazine's also always printed kindly letters from inmates and for a while, I was shipping out copies of the magazines to prisons, helping the children, wives, and girlfriends of the incarcerated help their in-fucking-jail loved ones...so in some weird way, my stupid name being in the magazine in any form means a lot on that level too. Thanks to XXL and Ben Detrick.

How Big Is Your World? New, good rap.

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:35:00 +0000

-G-Mane ft. Bentley "Listen"

Guest rapper Bentley reveals the anti-message of "Listen": "Moral to the story, not a damn thing/Just another nigga trapped, trapped in the game." G-Mane puts it a little nicer ("See I done learned from folks' mistakes/And you can learn from mine too/I share the stories of my life, so you figure out what you gonna do") but either way, it's grabbing from the weird humanist moral center that pimp-hustlers like UGK and 8Ball & MJG took from. This is something sociologically-aimed, gender-worried rap "scholars" still haven't figured out. Simply by speaking on this shit, with the right degree of detail and self-seriousness, does it become "message music". It doesn't need to formally/structurally "redeem" itself or anything.

G-Mane's two verses are expertly put together here, the first verse outlining his path to rapping and the second verse, how he started selling. The song, the mixtape, his career--the intersection of the two. Weird, interesting details aren't spared either, be it the fact that his DJ/musician father didn't want him to get into hip-hop or that he used the projection booth of the movie theater where he worked to deal. This isn't just "I been into hip-hop/selling crack for a long time" type banalities. It's lived-in, cherry-picked from life rhymes. Then there's Bentley, younger than G-Mane, a relative newcomer, who tells a story that pretty much sounds just like G-Mane's only a decade or so later. It reinforces that final, resigned line about just being "another nigga trapped". Time and circumstances mean little. G-Mane and Bentley's tale is thousands of others' too.

-Mannie Fresh ft. Russell Lee & The Show "Get With Me"

Okay, "Get With Me" is burdened with a verse from The Show, an absolutely terrible Lil Wayne wannabe who shows up on too much of Return of the Ballin. Seriously. All you guys who throw around the word "ignorant" need to listen to The Show. Not because he's particularly offensive, but because he has no concept of how punchlines--or verbs and adjectives for that matter--really work. Still, there's an almost Haiku-like genius to, "All you gotta do is suck a dick and chill", so dumbness wins again.

But that almost doesn't matter or rather, the rest of what's going on in "Get With Me" makes The Show's part negligible and even kinda fun eventually. Fresh just brings an overdose of personality and fun to the song. His masterful and hilarious bridge--"get that, on e'rything"--rubbing up against just plain gorgeous beatmaking.That "1-2-3 Ow!" sample at the beginning, the rolling acoustic guitar loop, the rush of angelic synths in right after the sampled-hook...that hook itself which rest awkwardly but perfectly, like it was stuffed between the drums after the fact. Just another immaculate Mannie Fresh production, so immaculate here that you wish F-F-Fresh were less of a worker-bee beatmaker and would let this shit roll-out for 7 minutes or so, ONP style.

-G-Side ft. Kristmas "Rising Sun"

Wow. From the last chunk of upliftingly depressing songs on G-Side's Huntsville International. Block Beattaz are on some like Eno/U2 style mixing and production here, that same kind of chintzy glory where everything's reverbed and booming and it makes the shit really cinematic without being "cinematic". For awhile, they relied on the trance samples to bring it to that next, melodramatic level, but now it's their assemblage of sounds alone that hits you in the gut. When that bizarre sample comes-in on Clova's verse, like CP and Mali Boi sampled the music you hear in your town's Chinese Buffett and sent it through auto-tune a few hundred times, it's well, damn.

Credit should go to ST, Clova, and Kristmas too, who wisely rap against the Slim Thug hook. If this song "is for the Gs and the hustlers" it's "for" them in the sense that they need to hear "Rising Sun" so some sense gets knocked into them. ST's "Somehow, the game got twisted to shit/The whole point in flippin' the brick was to flip it legit" and Kristmas' extended brag about having a bank account feel immortal, inarguable. Clova then, sorta plays the role of drug dealer here, dropping contemporary coke-rap punchlines--"shit, we flippin' chickens call it Zaxby's" is personal favorite--but still centering his verse with a reminder: "I don't sell dope, or cut the dope no more-".

-Sensational & Spectre "Rip Like This"

Spectre's one of many, many, many hip-hop weirdos wandering about Baltimore. There's King Tutt or Labtekwon or Will Roc, and there's Spectre. Ostensibly dude is making "beats" but they're all airy and squonky and downtempo sometimes but not trip-hop or anything--they just defy categorization. Phaser sounds. Death knell drums. All coated with a fog of general insanity that still sorta knocks good and proper. So, pairing up with no-nonsense, nonsense spitter Sensational makes a lot of sense. Maybe too much sense. With age, Sensational's schtick becomes both legendarily hard-harded and kinda played-out. But man, when the shit works...

"Rip Like This" has a lot more hip-hop in it--a buzz of foggy guitar, some real drums-- than most of Acid & Bass and so, it doesn't deflate or get boring after a minute or so (the story of "avant hip-hop"). This song actually gets more interesting and doles-out surprises left and right, like this indie-blues kinda guitar-solo that sounds like the song's coda, but then, Sensational's GZA with brain damage flow comes in one last time. Wire almost got it right this month, it's just that they put the wrong part of this duo on the cover.

-Rich Boy ft. Rico Love "We Like It"

Rich Boy goes "hard" on this one, but he's just singing about girls and there's a hook from some guy named Rico Love. The low-end, Bladerunner rumbles at the beginning suggest a sequel to "Let's Get This Paper" and then it slinks in, and it's nearly electro-clash or something. Like it's from that weird, interesting time a few years ago where everything synthetic was on some full-of-menace, retro-futuristic shit, be it Pharrell, Poni Hoax, or Fennesz.

What does this track mean in 2009 going on 2010 though? A pretentious, music-crit question yeah, but one that's sorta vital for a guy like Rich Boy who's gonna forever chase the zeitgiest that made "Throw Some Ds" a hit while tossing-out some roaring mixtapes along the way. "We Like It" is also of course, just Jim Jonsin's beat for Beyonce's "Sweet Dreams" minus the "Beat It" influence and made for the speakers in a strip club instead of a regular club--darker, oozing more, but still essentially a weird Atari-informed piece of pop production that a bigger star already turned into a hit. What's Rich Boy to do, then? Rap viciously on it, like he isn't just saying strip-club platitudes and find an odd, off-to-the-side synth melody to ride and keep it moving.

-DJ Pierre "I Deserve This"

Upping the energy of Drake's "The Winner" just makes sense, but doing so appends some swing, some soulfulness to the stilted, stunted production of Tha Bizness. Without a mumbling lightweight like Drake to worry about, the BPMs can go up a bunch and the song's allowed to really move. And it's this swing, the soulfulness at the center of an otherwise chaotic, discordant Club track that gives the latest Pierre track its legs.

"Deserve This" is very much of-the-moment and inching towards a more classical, less temporal type of Club too. The kind where the drums destroy (more Booman than Blaqstarr) and the structure's sophisticated--no longer just a cicada whirl of "hey"s and "what"s, samples of samples, and kick-less drums. It's got that oppressive craziness, but out of the cloud of stutter vocals, weird half-basslines, and space-noise syncopation comes that glorious brass. Pierre's already a masterful DJ--challenging and pragmatic at the same time--and a very clever post-Blaq Starr Club producer, but "Deserve This" sounds like DJ Pierre's first, tried and true Club classic. His "Ryda Girl", his "Pick Em' Up", his "Niggaz Fightin'".

Be Thankful For What You Got.

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:26:00 +0000

Posted this last Thanksgiving but thought it'd be appropriate again, so I drastically rewrote it and here it is. Have a good holiday.-b

Like What's Going On? or all those Sly and Curtis albums, William DeVaughn's 1974 album Be Thankful For What You Got is politically-minded soul--but it's also quieter than those message music classics. Less concerned with tackling the big picture head-on, DeVaughn's record is fascinated with all the smaller things that made Marvin wanna holler and made Curtis confident that if there's a hell below, we were all gonna go. It's a minor soul masterpiece tinted with a "the people's history" approach.

Be Thankful For What You Got's focus is less the world's problems than those directly affected by those problems. Opening track, "Give the Little Man a Great Big Hand" celebrates the guy behind the desk or the dude who picks up your trash without reducing the titular "little man" to a symbol of this or that. The less explicit point of the song though is, "no one else is paying attention to regular-ass people" and that's particularly true in times of historical turbulence and change, which was the climate of 1974--when the country was coming out of Vietnam, the boiling over of Watergate, when Patty Hearst was kidnapped, when Hank Aaron beat Babe Ruth's homerun record, when the "Rumble in the Jungle" took place, when Beverly Johnson smiled proudly from the cover of Vogue.

That's to say, in an attempt to bottle-up all the socio-political insight and outrage and even joy roving around, the piece of art that's "political" often loses track of the people really being twisted and turned by that history. So, when DeVaughn's album begins with a polite guitar and the sound effects of a room applauding, it's a gift to the people often skimmed over for that broader, sweeping message about the state of the nation.

And on "Something's Being Done", the album's sorta reassuring closer, DeVaughn assures listeners that change will come and stuff will get better. The fact that stuff's not currently all that good--the focus of most political music--sits around in the background: He wouldn't have to tell listeners things will be better if they weren't bad right now. That DeVaughn looks ahead with a little less cynicism than other political soulsters and rockers probably has a lot to do with DeVaughn still being "the little man" himself.

DeVaughn's sensitive to "the little man", so he knows that hearing how bad everything is, all the time, is a little unnecessary, even obnoxious, because "the little man" knows it, sees it, and lives it, day in and day out. When a big star get political, it's noble, but it's decadent too; rarely do the the concerns of the singer/artist affect that artist on a palpable, daily basis. And it's this disinterest in trying to be a voice of the generation musician and just being a thinking, affected-by-shit singer instead that makes Be Thankful... so humane and wisely closed-off from giant statements.

"We Are His Children" is a simple celebration of God. "You Can Do It" takes on vice and kindly urges people to stop drinking too much at parties. "Kiss and Make Up" encourages reconciliation, getting over the little stuff and moving on. There's a brilliant, teasing aspect to the chorus, where DeVaughn coos "Let's kiss...and make up" and that "make" plays on the tens of thousands of love songs heard and you expect it to be, "Let's kiss and make love".

But it isn't. For now, DeVaughn's concerned with the very immediate present of just not arguing or "taking off our rings". It's like that scene in Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep where works-in-a-slaughterhouse Stan embraces a dance with his wife but quietly rejects her increasingly feverish advances for sex--because shit's just too heavy on his mind, body, and soul. "Kiss and Make Up" has that kind of world-weary, wordly-wise sensitivity inside of it. 70's soul merged with political let's get-alongs bumping into let's get it ons.

Another reason for DeVaughn's specific form of modest social protest meets "it could be worse" appreciation may be his roots in Washington, DC. Marvin Gaye too, was from DC, but Marvin was already a celebrity by the 70s, no longer as closely connected to the city. DeVaughn sang on the side and worked for the government until he stumbled upon the soon-to-be-classic "Be Thankful For What You Got". Gaye addressed the politics with a question, DeVaughn answers with a sincere but simple statement. This is common for people from or residing in the District. They're way closer to politricks than the rest of us, and are more apt to digest the bullshit and come up with a pithy answer, and skip over the self-righteous indignation stage.

Musically too, it resides somewhere between comfort and ready-to-break-out ennui. Quite a few songs kick-off with a memorable slam of drums or stab of strings ("We Are His Children", "Sing a Love Song") before politely slipping into a groove, like that first moment of knee-jerk frustration with something on CNN followed by the point where you get your head around it a little more and actually process the reality of it all. Take the title track, which is all slow-burn atmospheric organ, with some plucked funk guitar that all just sits back and supports DeVaughn's brilliant chorus that lays out what "you may not have" ("Diamond in the back, sun roof top, diggin' the scene with a gangsta lean") all the while assuring you that it's okay to not have it and that you can "still stand tall".

Though DeVaughn's answer isn't as attractive as Marvin's rhetorical question, it's not as simple or besides the point as one might think. DeVaughn's not so much telling you not to freak, or to just chill-out--indeed, you don't sing this much about how we don't have to worry if you're not worried--as he is adding some right-minded moderation to Marvin's message from the year before, eschewing the get-with-it cynicism for minor victory appreciation.