If you are interested in culture and race then your ears perk up any time anyone says: “we were the only white people there!”
How these kinds of things sound to ANYONE who isn’t WHITE? It sort of embodies the kind of toxic insider racist/sexist/colonialist commentary of one insider to another. I imagine one rich white bank guy leaning over to another rich white banker at a swank lunch to mock people starving in Bangladesh.
But to assume that everyone on the other side of the camera . . .or that everyone listening sympathizes with your own privileged skin color is so toxic that it can only be understood through the sad awareness that much of mass mediated story-telling has been narrated through a particularly white and colonial lens.
It is honestly hard to notice colonialism from the location of the privileged. So I appreciate whenever an artist or politician, or a hip hop pioneer explains that they were the only white person at a key point in history.
Also an important clip because of the explicit conversation about jacking African music and perhaps the single greatest responses to the accusation of colonialism: “hey man, c’mon! I’m not doing that.”
Pusha T’s album comes out in a couple of days. It was streaming on a few spots. I listened and was pleased. Nice video with wunderkind Kendrick Lamar and salty veteran Pusha.
1. Single-shot steady-cam shot is an excellent back drop for drug rap video.
2. A lot of Ivan Drago (Rocky IV) references these days.
3. At first Kendrick Lamar plays the counter to Pusha’s proud drug dealer persona with his L.A. tragedy rap. Then comes the turn. “Go figure motherfucker/every verses is a brick.” Zing.
We naturally associate criminal activity with secrecy, with conspiracies hatched in alleyways or back rooms. Today, though, foolish as it may be in practice, street gangs have adopted a level of transparency that might impress even the most fervent Silicon Valley futurist. Every day on Facebook and Twitter, on Instagram and YouTube, you can find unabashed teens flashing hand signs, brandishing guns, splaying out drugs and wads of cash. If we live in an era of openness, no segment of the population is more surprisingly open than 21st-century gang members, as they simultaneously document and roil the streets of America’s toughest neighborhoods.
How much fun would it be to see Alice Cooper in the day? Daaaaaamn. Stick around for Black Juju. It gives me some ideas for monday’s class on semiotics.
Thanks to Nah Right for the two part interview with mix tape innovator DJ Drama. Here are my favorite snippets from the interview, starting with some DJ insights:
“And I was an East Coast type of guy with my taste. When you come to school, particularly in a place like Atlanta, you’ve got so many people from so many places. So I had to relearn how to DJ, and it made me much more of a worldly DJ than I might have been [if I stayed] in Philly. You had people from California, and people from D.C. that wanted hear go-go, and people from the islands. You got your people from Atlanta that want to hear A-Town shit. Then there’s people from New York. So you gotta learn how to please a bunch of people.
I appreciate him noting that it was the absence of mixtape DJs working with southern artists that created his lane.
“There was a store called Tapemasters, my man Marco used to work in there. And I would try to sell my CDs in there, but I would get blown out, because I was making East Coast CDs trying to compete with Whoo Kid and Kay Slay and Clue, and no one was checking for me because I was getting beat to the punch [by them having the exclusives before me]. So my senior year of college, I realized that I needed to make a South tape. And that shit flew like hot cakes. The first song ever on the pre-Gangsta Grillz DJ Drama South tape was ‘Bling Bling.’ That was like ‘99. And Marco was like, ‘You need to focus on your neo-soul tapes, and your South tapes. That’s where you have niches at.’
Of course Run the jewels is competitive over-the-top rap music. In the effort to make the best art — artists attempt to outdo each other. In the genre of hip hop this means bigger, harder, louder, and more outlandish.
The financial claims of most rappers have grown to ridiculous levels, with a number of artists simply shouting out expensive brand names to convey their own particular shopping allegiances.
It makes sense that the claims about violence, drugs and sex would also become more and more outlandish.
MF DOOM always seemed like a hip-hop critic. His villainous characters (and in particular the masked versions of DOOM) always seemed pitiful — articulated as a mockery of other rappers whose representations of criminality seemed shallow in comparison to the lyrical work of the clever DOOM.
In the same way modern hip hop can be critiqued from the traditional morality perspective. It might also be performed and overdetermined (made excessive and taken to the extreme) in order to achieve a very similar moral critique.
Which works as a basic introduction for “36” Chain,” a video which contains violence against old women, violence against young women, gun violence, violence against Andrew W.K, and a dual sense of mockery/sincerity that will probably excite some people and deeply offend others.
Noting the character Killums — the kidnapped puppet plays such an important role it might be worth including the El-P video for “Full retard” in this discussion.
Of course this video contains some drinking and driving, a lot of drug stuff, violence against moms, nudity, and of course, the lightly disturbing choice to have the puppet Killums lead in most of the debauchery. We can note that the expressive fiction of a puppet gives liberty . . . a kind of implicit defense. At the same time thumbing the nose at the idea of childhood as an innocent time.
Killums seems to be El-P’s id. An expression of what he would like to do . . . the unfettered brain presented as a sex and drug obsessed squirrel. Some artists make up Tyler Durdin . . . El-P chooses a one-eyed junkie squirrel.
Dave Chappelle’s sesame street mockery Kneehigh park runs through some of the same transgressions. Pushing buttons with ever-increasingly crass discussions voiced by puppets that seems to be giving humorous versions of public service announcements.
The illuminating blog Dangerous Minds noted that today is the birthday of the electric-disco-star Sylvester. I appreciate that they frame Sylvester’s radical elements within his Disco successes:
. . . .if it wasn’t for disco there is no way that a linebacker-sized, black, openly gay, outrageous, gender-bending performer like him could have reached the top of the world’s charts.
I heard a nice tribute to Martin Luther King Junior and his speech at the March on Washington on the radio this morning. Another version of this showed up in my RSS feed thanks to the fantastic “Daily Feminist Cheat Sheet” on Feministing.
Apparently, the essential chorus of “I have a dream” was a semi-improvisation for King. It was a response to Mahalia Jackson.
As King neared the end, he came to a sentence that wasn’t quite right. He had planned to introduce his conclusion with a call to “go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction.” He skipped that, read a few more lines, and then improvised: “Go back to Mississippi; go back to Alabama; go back to South Carolina; go back to Georgia; go back to Louisiana; go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.”
Nearby, off to one side, Mahalia Jackson shouted: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” King looked out over the crowd. As he later explained in an interview, “all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used — I’d used many times before, that thing about ‘I have a dream’ — and I just felt that I wanted to use it here.” He said, “I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.” And he was off, delivering some of the most beloved lines in American history, a speech that he never intended to give and that some of the other civil rights leaders believed no one but the marchers would ever remember.
Don’t sleep on the impact of the solid gospel choices of Mahalia Jackson in motivating a political crowd. Remember that music is key for every liberation movement I can think of.
She sang two spirituals, “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned” and “How I Got Over.” King was seated nearby, clapping his hands on his knees and calling out to her as she sang. Roger Mudd, covering the event for CBS News, said after the first song: “Mahalia Jackson. And all the speeches in the world couldn’t have brought the response that just came from the hymns she sang. Miss Mahalia Jackson.”
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I hope you have some remaining monthly New York Times tokens! Or else you won’t be able to follow the link I’ve recommended to read the whole article. Pretty short-sighted New York Times. #newyorktimeshatesfreeinformation
I’m completely feeling three arguments from Robin James at Cyborgology about the indignation over the Robin Thicke/Miley Cyrus VMA performance.
1. White indignation is a way to self-identify as better-than.
What are we supposed to find likeable in all this? If the aim of the performance is trolling, then we’re not supposed to find it likeable, but irritating and infuriating. I wonder if, in a particularly insidious way, we white people/white feminists are supposed to like what we think is our righteous outrage at the performance? It’s insidious because what is felt (and often intended, at least superficially) as a performance of anti-racist outrage actually further cements our privilege vis-a-vis white supremacist patriarchy? Sharing the pics and gifs of black artists’ reaction shots (the Smith family, Rihanna, Drake), and all the positive feedback we get from this, tells us that we’re “good” white feminists? And this knowledge of our goodness is what we’re liking and aesthetically enjoying? (I’m phrasing these points as questions because they’re genuinely hypotheses–they seem right, but maybe I’m overlooking something?)
2. James also argues that new media enables sexist and racist communications to be quantified and amplified through critique via social media commentary and thus sanitized.
But today, in what we tell ourselves is a post-feminist, post-racist society, perhaps the way to dis-identify with the neoliberal mainstream is to identify with the objects of its disdain: sexism and racism. As before, the dis-identification with the mainstream is an attempt to prove one’s elite status above that mainstream. This eliteness isn’t conceived or expressed as vanguardism (being ahead of the pack), but as human capital, often quantifiable in/on social media. It’s not who’s most shocking, but who’s trending most on twitter the day after the VMAs, for example. Just think about the way Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” performances constantly throws #THICKE up on some screen.
3. The best point James makes is framing this kind of cultural appropriation + rape supportive culture + toxic corporate media garbage to be a form of trolling. Pushing our buttons in order to get more attention. Now, this is a smart argument — it gives a way to better understand the reasons why Thicke’s rape song and Cyrus’ twerking are bothersome.
I also think it might point to a kind of consumptive desire in the audience not only to distinguish themselves through mockery, but also to desire to view and replay the suffering of the mocked.
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Life of refinement 