Blog # 8 Private Enemy:Two New York rappers dreamed of stardom. MF Doom got it. MF Grimm didn't.

Reading this article reminded me of L’il Ze’s story in City of God. It’s a little hard to be compassionate towards someone who’s “longtime friend” describes as "He was a fucking murderer. What do you want me to say?" I am left thinking “Man, this guy doesn’t deserve a ‘comeback’ in the recording industry, why am I wasting time reading about “a fucking murderer”?”

I am having a bit of trouble finding a response to this article, I just feel like it’s a waste. It’s probably based on my own recent run-ins with hoods and violence, but I just feel angry that we’re even asked to read about this guy... you got shot ten times? Good for you, but how many people do you claim to have murdered? If this man thinks he’s paid off his karma by surviving in a wheel chair, maybe he’s missed the concept of even return. Maybe my head and heart are “full” and I’ve gotten out of this class everything I can get out of it for the time being, but I really feel like I can only give someone so much consideration for growing up in the upper west side and their life experiences of running a drug ring… “a fucking murderer”—not thanks, I’m not thinking this person contributes much to the advancing of society. Maybe that’s closed-minded.

For me, this article reads as a more mundane example of how distracks are involved with battles in contemporary hip hop and publicity (citing last weeks article) than an important testament to an artist’s bio.

The article hones in on his physical disabilities and his doubtlessly cute cameos on Sesame Street, but these just augment the fact that he continues to rap about a murderous lifestyle that he’s claimed to repent from—I believe in forgiveness, but I think it has to be backed up with some positive action. I can have compassion for this man, but I don’t think he should be accepted as a role model or respected artist for our society, maybe that’s just me, maybe that’s closed-minded, but more importantly, maybe I don’t really know enough about him or the article we read just didn’t frame his position well enough for me to understand.

Blog #7 - In Rap Industry, Rivalries as Marketing Tool

When we viewed the video in class of Kool Moe Dee and Busy Bee I found it really educational, understanding where one battle arose from (and even where the tradition of battling gets a lot of its roots). I haven’t gotten a good grip on where so many of the contemporary battles arise from. The Biggie / Tupac thing makes a bit of sense to me after half a dozen side-line conversations in class, but it still seems like there are so many producers and artists and they all have beef and form little cliques—it kind of reminds me of high school, which is a place I *don’t* like to revisit when I don’t have to!

These articles are pretty broken up and it’s hard to catch a theme. Ja Rule’s section is insightful and gives me some sense of his own fidelity. His comments about feeling more comfortable around white fans kind of surprised me and I don’t really know whether to think of that as stereotype or his experience or “common sense”—but the dangers of his job in general do command respect.

Mr. Padell said that performers who make a 500,000-copy

gold album, might end up with more money working for UPS.

Many of these costs apply to musicians working in any

genre, but the high costs of producers, the short careers,

the pressure to support family members, and the competitive

flaunting of wealth weigh heavily on hip-hop acts. As one

hip-hop executive explained, a rock band can show up at a

music event in a Honda.” I wonder if that is a superficial distinction, to claim that rap has more expenses because of the nature of the style. I would agree that producers may be more expensive and they are perceived to be more necessary, but I think that is a function more of the higher record sales that we’ve discussed variously in this class. It costs more to succeed in rap, but I think success in rap is on a bigger scale than success in rock over the past ten or fifteen years. In both cases, a lot of the money goes into expenses, but to claim that tithing and family support disproportionately effects rapper’s salaries seems to both glamorize the virtue of rappers and degrade that of rockers. I would *love* to see real data about the relative philanthropy of rappers and rockers in comparable degrees of success, and I imagine it doesn’t correlate at all to style or genre (but rather individual personality)

After reading this article, I find it’s a little repulsive to use violence and animosity so plainly to sell albums. What message does that pass on to the consumer? Using grudges decorated in threats to sell records seems so corrupt—it doesn’t seem to go for the artists well being except the petty cash flow and it doesn’t benefit the society to which those messages are circulated. I’m left thinking of Pink Floyd’s great commentary on the record business—“Welcome to the machine…”

Blog #6 – New Ms. Booty

For me, this article relates to some short presentations I did at the beginning of this semester. I was reading up on some books/authors that had recently come to my attention—Pamela Paul and her book Pornified and Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs. The later takes a special issue with Girls Gone Wild and the culture of female hyper-sexuality and sexual callousness that surrounds the interplay of promiscuity, binge drinking and college campus “sexual liberation.” Both books talk about how this changes the way that men interact with voyeurism, sexuality, and dominance.

Even questioning the play of sexuality in popular media is almost immediately foreign to pop, but I have to respect women like India.arie coming out with promises to not strip in their videos, even if it means losing valuable awards of recognition to Alicia Keys. I also quickly ran out of common ground in popular debates against pornography—I somewhat mistakenly found myself at the Porn Nation event on campus where Michael Leahy quickly admitted his powerlessness to porn and incited the audience to call upon the grace of Jesus to transform our hedonism. I felt like my views against pornography in it’s modern form left me still, as a whole, much more sympathetic with Kate Bornstein’s radical sex positivity and refusal to yield to discussions judging anyone’s sexuality. So I feel like I’m the odd-ball out—I’m a humble quasi-buddhist, feeling like media and sexuality shouldn’t be mixing in the way they are, and feeling like I don’t really see eye-to-eye with most of the people who agree with me on that… I’m a feminist, and I refuse to reconcile that with any branch of the religious right (unlike much of the anti-pornography feminists of the 80s).

So, why do I have beef? Bubba Sparxxx was praised as introspective and ahead of his time when he released Deliverance, so why is he now trying to compete with Fergie’s Humps to get air play? Why do artists sell their own work short?

One thing I’ve learned this semester is that it’s hard to take a stand against something to universal as pornography and visual exploitation of sexuality in media. I can be enraged about what one musician puts in their videos (saying that, I’m recalling a really disturbing parallel that Dreamworlds draws between a gang rape scene in a movie and 80s hair metal videos) but then I look at my own life and those of the people I love, and I realize that we all participate in this misogyny and patriarchy in confounding and complex ways. My best hope is just to speak my views, admit that I’m not perfect, and try to live my life as clear of this broken system as I can.

Blog # 5 – Distribution – Wendy Day

This article was really informative, though it didn’t fill me with paradigm shifts and value judgments that inspire great response writings for me. While reading this, I was thinking about how popular some rap is and comparing that to the DIY culture that’s come up in rock music while rap has been dominating the airwaves. Do upcoming hip hop artists and stylistic movements have something to learn from indie rock bands producing their own records and distributing them on the small-scale until an indie label will pick them up? The movements seem pretty analogous, but I wonder if less indie rock bands actually expect success. The “role models” of successful rock bands in the 90s and recent years are few and far between and in a lot ways, indie rock bands seem to be opposed to their style—Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day are as much important stylistic examples for modern rock as they are the elements that indie rock variously try to avoid.

I like the line in the first paragraph—“Especially when you take into consideration that the stores exist MAINLY to supply the Top 40 records in radio rotation, and on M-TV and BET. The stores also sell some back catalog.” I liked this because it probably is a great description of a lot of music stores—but I’m someone who has probably paid 20% more than I needed to for records on several occasions because I bought them at the now-defunct Tower Records rather than Best Buy because of Tower’s extensive back catalogue and variety of distributors they work with. I must have bought hundreds of albums from used CD stores, and I fret at how many hours I must have spent in the past ten years flipping through those stacks of CDs. Sometimes I have no choice but to download an album over the web because it is simply the only way I can find an album I’m looking for. But if you ask me about who has been on the top 40, especially since I’ve been in college, I really have no clue—even when listening to popular artists, I have to ask other fans which tracks the singles are and how popular they were on their tour-de-billboard. Other music snobs care about how new the artist is and how popular they will be after said music snob has ‘discovered them’—me, I care about how unique a sound is, how they are connected to the music world and how much the artist has a really impeccable discography of great albums with amazing songs. In the past year or so, the music world has been buzzing about discovering L’il John or the Game, I’ve been buzzing on discovering Calexico.

“It used to piss me off when I saw the bullshit some distributors chose to release, but then I realized that the average distributor knows NOTHING about rap music or what’s hot on the streets, other than “is it selling or not,” I just wanted to pull this quote because I completely sympathize with it! I guess there’s a market for everything in music and that there are a lot more people who are putting out music than can be produced.

Essay – Drawing the Line: Victims, Violence and Hip-Hop

Hey, I just wrote the first version of this essay, I guess for my weekly reflection on Hip-Hop, it deals pretty seriously with race relations and contains some swearing; if you don’t want to read that, don’t read this essay.

Drawing the Line: Victims, Violence and Hip-Hop

I am white. I would like to say that when I got mugged, it was an exception to stereotypes. I wish I could say that people’s prejudice couldn’t walk all over me, that I didn’t have to rethink my beliefs. Sadly, it wasn’t and I can’t. The only thing that was “exceptional” about me being mugged is that it happened at three in the afternoon, broad daylight, on a Sunday on a street that was populated with passers-by and shoulder-to-shoulder apartments.

I was walking down the street, alone, talking on my cell phone, as I was about to enter a community center I am involved with. Two African-American boys were walking my way—about 14 years old, dressed in billowing baggy clothing with the clumsy strut of the inner city and a fad pop culture that has been overblown. One of the boys was carrying a one-by-two piece of wood that was about four feet long. “That’s weird,” I thought to myself, smiling and talking to my friend who was in town from New Orleans. Raised on the discourse of liberal egalitarianism and the ideals of acting against prejudice, I decided, as I have so many times, that I was not going to cross the street. I would not submit to those “subtle forms of oppression”—the pervasive racism that creeps along the skin of America, like hives, or maybe a rash. As we were passing each other, in an instant the first boy (and I do emphasize, this was a little boy) turned and demanded I give them my money, and the second hit me across the temple with the piece of wood. My cell phone plummeted from my hand, breaking on the ground, and I swooned, catching my balance. “Hey, hey, hey!” Yeah, I quoted Fat Albert—it wasn’t intentional. The boy with the piece of wood hit me again, I blocked it with my hand; he hit me again, breaking the wood on my head. “Give us your money,” he repeated. Spiteful and angry, I was finally able to say, “I don’t have any money!” I lied—I found out later I had one dollar and eighty rupees left over from a trip to India (about two USD).

A man had pulled up in a car, honking. I don’t know what he said, but the kids stopped hitting me, pulling away to think for half a moment. The man started to pull away, and I hollered, “No, wait!” I saw the boys turned and kept walking down the street. “Thank you!” I added, wondering what I could say to the man who was driving off. I picked myself up—“Fuck… Jesus fuck.” I grabbed my cell phone off the ground, glad that I had worn my contacts that day, or I’d be picking up broken glasses, too. As I stepped away, I glanced at my phone, the back of the phone and the battery had fallen out. I turned around, hesitating. The kids were walking on, in that stupid strut. I cautiously and quickly doubled back, grabbed the battery and its cover, and hurried back towards the community center, the kids and I both headed in the direction we had been two minutes earlier.

Walking into the center, I found my friend who was in from volunteering with Katrina-affected areas. Both of us volunteer with the Art of Living Foundation, we work a lot towards teaching inner city youths several self development programs including stress management techniques and supporting them in finding direction in life. My friend had been working in trauma relief and youth program in New Orleans, and she was in Washington for a couple weeks helping to renovate the community center that the Foundation had recently purchased. Some callous DC paramedics came to the center, probably called by that passer-by who had really saved me. One paramedic seemed to not believe me; infuriated, I sent them away. My friend and I went for coffee.

“These poor kids, they feel like they have no options in life. It’s so stupid and ironic, I would love to sit with these kids on a course, learning meditation and yoga.”

“You know, it’s bullshit, because these kids only attack me for a little money or what they think I represent.”

“I guess it’s good it was me and not someone else—I can experience that without hating the kids, without really holding on to that experience, without letting it make me racist or paranoid or something.” I said a thousand things, just talking, trying to think about the event.

“Wow, you really got me thinking about all this, Sean.” My friend said. I wasn’t sure if she was humoring me. She talked about some people who had gotten mugged at gunpoint while working in New Orleans. She talked about one of our friends who was really active in the black communities in Washington.

“It’s funny because I’m not really the victim, here… you know? These kids have life so hard, and I’m… you know, it’s all relative… but really, I mean all of us… we’re all so privileged… I mean…” Across the street from Starbucks, as cars quickly passed by, I was at a loss.

“Yeah, we are all really privileged…” She couldn’t complete the thought either.

The black boy working the bar at Starbucks gave me some attitude when I asked for whipped cream on my gingerbread latté, the way that I’m sure it is supposed to be made; I worked at Starbucks for two years. Because he had also added foam, when he put the lid on the drink, it spurted out and covered the cup in overflowing sugary-sweet latté; he handed me the dripping drink. “Umm, can I have a second cup for this?”

After ten or twenty minutes, we walked back to the center. We meditated and sang some prayers. I had been very afraid of falling asleep—the paramedics had warned me of the symptoms of head trauma, so I didn’t completely relax, though I was so tired. I let my friend know that I had to go—I had to study for a final exam that was the next day. After a few offers to drive me back to the suburbs in Virginia, (and my stubborn insistence to go alone) I was off. On the road I called the advice nurse at George Mason University before heading into the study group. When asked about the appearance of my bruises, I looked for the first time at both sides of my index finger. “Oh it looks like shit, it’s black, I didn’t see that before.” What kind of pain is it? “Unpleasant!” The nurse and I both laughed. “Umm, my finger is throbbing. My head just hurts pretty bad, but my finger is throbbing.”

Instead of studying, I spent about two and a half hours in Kaiser Permanente’s emergency clinic. My sister and brother-in-law came to wait with me after I called them. As we talked in one of the waiting rooms that we were sent to, a young black man waited with his mother for her x-rays, he was obviously over-hearing our conversation as his head turned back and forth, glancing over his shoulder. I told them the story in the radiology waiting room. “These kids obviously aren’t good at it, they picked a college student—like I have money?” “Yeah, I guess they need to aim a little older!”

While I waited for the doctor, I called my mother. I found out that she would have to wake me every four hours that night, so I figured I would let her know what happened. “Did you file a police report?” “No.” Suppose that even if the kids had been caught, juvenile detention would only make matters worse for them—it would be more apathy and violence in their life, and maybe they would pick up more skills in crime. “Are you going to?” “No.” “Yes you are.” “No I’m not.” There was no point in explaining my feelings about the justice system in America. My Mom and I have very different viewpoints on a lot of social and political issues, and it’s not very productive to try and reconcile them. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow,” she concluded. We better not, I hoped.

After about a dozen x-rays of my head and both hands, the doctor said that I had a broken finger. She gave me a splint and a printout about head trauma and what was symptomatic of an emergency. “Yeah, so when I can’t read the paper, I need to come back in?” The doctor laughed, I smiled; I had to pee. I got home at about eleven in the night, it had been eight hours since the mugging.

Coming home, I went over the story with my parents. “That’s not the best part of DC, you know?” My stepfather has lived in the area for twenty years; he knows it better than I could ever hope to. “Yeah, it’s not a bad part of the city, either.” I pushed off to bed pretty quickly. Restless and unable to sleep well after midnight, I started reading through different books, looking for a quote by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar on karma that my friend had cited that morning, before the mugging. I found one quote I liked a lot:

“An ignorant person’s compassion is toward the fruit of an action – the sickness or suffering that he witnesses. But a wise person’s compassion is toward the lack of knowledge – the underlying reason for sickness or suffering. Compassion for suffering shows ignorance. Suffering comes because of karma, and if you believe in karma, where is compassion? One reaps the fruit of one’s actions.”

I slept at two or so, and was only interrupted by headaches or pain in my finger, and one check-in at five in the morning by my Mother, making sure my pupils weren’t dilated and that I could speak fluently.

So, where does this experience leave me? Cornel West and bell hooks are among my favorite authors. I love to hear Michael Eric Dyson speak. One of the things I love about being American is our ideal of equality in treatment and opportunity across communities, no matter how far-off that ideal is. I aspire to be a fierce liberal, a revolutionary, and someone who holds all people dear to heart, but what can any of that be worth if I don’t feel secure among a couple of black youths?

Of course I know that not every black man in the world is “out to get me.” I know that it is a minority of black people who resort to violence and crime, just like it’s a minority of any other racial group. I know that there is a lot of classism at hand also, or, as my sister challenged me in the waiting room, I assume there is classism at play—“These could have been kids who took the metro in, just looking to kill time,” she insisted.

Did I too readily give these children the benefit of doubt? Did I too readily ascribe to them a life filled with challenge and danger, a life without role models and a life with few opportunities? In an argument, my brother-in-law described me as “sorry for existing,” and that I felt guilty for the impact I make on the planet, “Why else would you be forgiving these kids who just attacked you? Why else would you talk about how hard they have it in life?”

Maybe he’s right. As the last few days have passed, and I’ve experienced a bit of sleeplessness here and a bit of nausea there, as I was ready to attack a person who startled me from behind, “Excuse me, could you tell me how to get to Dupont Circle?”, as I’ve paid out $40 or so in medical expenses for this experience and rearranged my life around lost study time and moments where I just needed some “time out,” in short, as I come to realize the extent that those ninety seconds effect my life in so many ways, I’ve also experienced a lot of anger about the incident. Anger is simply more pleasant than fear. I relive those moments on a Sunday afternoon, and I think, “What if I could have grabbed that stick from him?” I picture meeting up with the kids, only now I have a baseball bat. The reversal of tragic moments cascade in my mind. The violent aspirations of a helpless victim haunt me, in so many ways. My own violence and victimization unite me to my assailants—violent reactors that are victims of society, to pop culture, to ignorance. I am their victim, and maybe they think I am their victimizer, but regardless, they are victims, of so many things. Paul Farmer calls it structural violence in his book Pathologies of Power. Most of us just say it sucks.

So, I don’t walk on water—it poured rain today, I checked. There is an interplay between my ideals of forgiving saint and exacting vigilante. Maybe I couldn’t fulfill either role completely, and maybe neither role is safe on urban streets today. Maybe neither role is condoned by society—maybe society doesn’t want me to forgive, maybe I am supposed to become a crotchety conservative white boy or succumb to white liberal guilt. Maybe those roles better fulfill society’s vision for me—it’s dangerous to be open-minded and condemning, there is so little precedence!

Taking Hip-Hop Literacies this semester, we’ve talked a lot about understanding the origins of hip-hop, we’ve talked about the value of gangsta rap as communicating realities of life, and we’ve talked about the persistence of hard social conditions and the skepticism of politics and legit opportunities (what Cornel West describes as “nihilism”.) In response to some of that, let me try to draw the line here, to be that “open-minded and condemning” person, to seek to understand and not hesitate to interject moral and practical boundaries. This is my manifesto:

Wherein a social movement condones violent reactions and easy escapes, it is bullshit. Crimes against property and social class may be aimed against injustice, but they seek to fight injustice with unjust means of redistribution. If a people subscribing to the belief that the social class system in a society is unjust seek to sabotage that system and gain recognized symbols of power, status, and success, then they are immediately participating in the perpetuation of that system—they are, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, trying to dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools.

Wherein the propagation of violence, classism, racism, sexism and heterosexism is defended by the pundits of a culture in attempt to allow the recirculation of these ideas to an increasingly large audience, it is bullshit. Hating others and condoning attacks on others can not be justified by any experience of social conditions that an artistic movement claims to arise from. In hip-hop, the angst of millions of children across the world is fueled by a few stale emcees talking about the life they participated in creating in Compton or the South Bronx. The refusal of any artistic movement to account for its own impact cancels any claim that its artists make to “represent reality.” They are not representing reality; they are creating their own vision of reality. If artists are creating a hard reality by means of claiming to represent a hard reality, then that artist is a perpetrator of violence on all the consumers that are victimized by their vision.

Hip-hop is dead. Any movement that claims roots in activism and “knowledge” that accepts guidance from prophets of violence, materialism and chauvinism is contradictory. Any contradiction that is grown to the scale of hip-hop can not survive, it must implode like any empire that has spread its possessive grasp too far. The sources of positive social change and artistic expression will automatically disassociate themselves from the victim-consciousness and powerlessness that pervade the nihilistic minds of pop culture. Two decades of emcees declaring that others are “fakin’ the funk” or, more simply, “frontin’” has left us ripe for a change. Like any other social and artistic movement, hip-hop has claimed its generation or two, and now the minds of the world are hungry. The consumers of creativity and culture must ask, what is the revolution that we will stage against hip-hop? That revolution will be my revenge; that revolution will be my offering of redemption.

Epilogue:

Somewhere in DC, maybe ten or fifteen miles from where I write this paper, those two boys are doing something. I don’t really know what, I can’t project that on them, but they are existing. We exist in separate worlds, but they collide so poetically, like a Hollywood movie (or a short essay.) I do wish these boys well. I know that at twenty-five years of age, odds are that black young men in the inner city will have been killed or imprisoned by the time they reach my age, and that they won’t be attending college. However, in the States, it is so often young black men in the inner city that start cultural revolutions, so I can close with this—I hope my two kids turn out to be the revolutionary type.

Ch 8 - Zulus on a Time Bomb // Weekly reflection....

I thought this was a good chapter... it pairs well with the previous chapter about the boom in the record agency with "scouts" tracking down acts after sugarhill records / the sugarhill gang... it's a pretty different picutre-- FAB 5 FREDDY says on p 151 "I knew nobody had a sense or clue about anything because barely any real rap records had hit the market commercially, maybe 'Rappers Delight,' but nobody really understood it as like a scene."
And it was the picture of this as a vibrant scene that I liked about this chapter... graffiti in art galleries, how people came together to make documentaries and the reference to 'folkies'...
Being an ex-quasi-hippie and art school guy, I think I maybe just more readily relate to stories of installation peices and all that more than how Grandmaster Flash turned a toaster into a turntable with intuitive electrical engineering (umm... does anyone relate to that?)
The chapter goes pretty directly to the heart of our Greg Tate article-- talking about whether hip hop would become folk art or co-opted pop culture on p 158.... I think it would be really interesting to see what would the pop culture world be like and what would hip hop culture be like if hip hop had remained more of a local phenomenon... if that would make it more 'authentic'... (and would it be dominated more by manhattan folkies and suburban surveryors than the voices from the Bronx?)
I'm finding in reading the Chang text that it's hard to get a good sense of hip hop by reading these endless name-drops in b-boying, graff, DJing and MCing history... it's so confucsing and you don't get much of a sense of anyone's style or how this really all was distinct from modern hip hop culture... I'm glad we have had what multimedia stuff we've been able to use in class... Wish we could have more, though, on one hand, I want to understand hip hop culture like I understand all the sub culture of the rock and jazz world, and I realize that all of that is thr product of more than half my life learning names and styles... maybe I'll never really understand hip hop that way... what can I do about it? I guess it's better than if I were trying to fake the funk... :)

Hip Hop Turns 30-- Whatcha celebrating for?

I wanted to include the transcript from my chat about the “Hip hop turns 30” article by Greg Tate because I think it sums up what I would say about the article… I lost a bit of the transcript though because the chat was so long I guess the chat module truncates at a certain length, it starts with Eric and I discussing how hip hop has ‘declined’ into consumerism and what to make of it’s present in context of it’s roots….

>> how bout this
Eric Lindner>> in terms of where it has come from day 1 - we
should celebrate
Eric Lindner>> what it has turned into, we should mourn
Sean Moore>> how about this:
Sean Moore>> we should remember where it came from, analyze where
it is, and celebrate where it has potential to go?
Eric Lindner>> hmm
Sean Moore>> BUT
Sean Moore>> how well does that lend to the average hip hop consumer?
Sean Moore>> how well does that become accepted by inner city
kids where the question is still survival?
Eric Lindner>> how bout this
Eric Lindner>> lol
Eric Lindner>> that moiney that these records make
Eric Lindner>> need to fix
Sean Moore>> is the analysis of hip hop culture is necessarily
separate from the vibrancy of it?
Eric Lindner>> the inner city
Eric Lindner>> lol
Sean Moore>> right on... I can agree with that
Eric Lindner>> sicne they can breed it
Eric Lindner>> they can fix it
Eric Lindner>> IT being the images
Eric Lindner>> that are now in kids minds of themselves
Sean Moore>> what would hip hop look like if the inner cities
were uplifted?
Eric Lindner>> probably not be rapping about violence, bitches
and hoes anymore
Eric Lindner>> i mean, have u heard that song - this is off topic
- but its called do your chains hang low
Eric Lindner>> one of the few rap songs ive heard recently with
nothing bad in it
Eric Lindner>> its a song about your chains hanging low
Sean Moore>> but what do you think that line means?
Eric Lindner>> the bigger the chain, the better
Sean Moore>> I mean, I haven't heard the song, but it sounds
like the old call of "how authentic are you?"
Eric Lindner>> no not at all, its just some dumb song about the
bigger your chain is the better
Sean Moore>> It's an interesting claim on the bottom of the 2nd
page that hip hop connects the african world
Sean Moore>> I've only recently heard some south african hip
hop... it's good, but it seems pretty distinct from american
pop
Eric Lindner>> yeah i remeber seeing that
Eric Lindner>> so what do you feel the main points are in this
article
Eric Lindner>> we just went over one
Eric Lindner>> but i know theres another
Sean Moore>> For me I think it's analysis about what's good and
what's
Sean Moore>> "corporate
Sean Moore>> " about hip-hop
Eric Lindner>> ahhh, yes. makes sense
Eric Lindner>> HH has been engulfed by the corporate world
Eric Lindner>> in reading the article, its pretty clear
Sean Moore>> hrm.. I wonde rif hip hop has partially engulfed
the corporate world--
Eric Lindner>> the entertainment industry defitnitely got a shock
when it boomed
Eric Lindner>> well
Eric Lindner>> if you think about it, corporate engulfed it because
those white people who graduated college used it as a backbone
for $$
Eric Lindner>> in the past readings, that can be noticed
Sean Moore>> I wonder if the hypersexuality and misogyny and
bling-bling in hip-hop is a product of the corporatization
or if that was the logical extension of the original seed
of hip hop
Eric Lindner>> oh no doubt it is
Eric Lindner>> i agree with that
Eric Lindner>> i think its like this:
Sean Moore>> is which,,,
Sean Moore>> (you agreed with an either/or)
Eric Lindner>> eneratinment industry took over the HH world and
made it bloom. HH then, in turn, turned it into that first
quote we discussed
Eric Lindner>> its like.... mold
Eric Lindner>> it gets started and then feeds off what it starts
on and consumes it
Eric Lindner>> if that makes sense haha
Eric Lindner>> best analogy i could think of
Sean Moore>> I like this quote:
Sean Moore>> "If we woke up tomorrow and there was no hiphop
on the radio or on television, if there was no money in hiphop,
then we could see what kind of culture it was, because my
bet is that hiphop as we know it would cease to exist, except
as nostalgia. It might resurrect itself as a people's protest
music if we were lucky, might actually once again reflect
a disenchantment with, rather than a reinforcement of, the
have and have-not status quo we cherish like breast milk
here in the land of the status-fiending."
Eric Lindner>> that goes back to your point in the beginning
Sean Moore>> Yeah, but now I'm *right* ! :)
Eric Lindner>> oh shut up lol
Eric Lindner>> i think the ego is taking up spac ein this room,
i may have to leave ;) jk
Eric Lindner>> hmm
Sean Moore>> Hey man, I'm just doing my game...
Eric Lindner>> i saw a quote i liked, let me go find it
Eric Lindner>> Picking up where Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts
Movement left off,
Eric Lindner>> George Clinton realized that anything Black folk
do could be
Eric Lindner>> abstracted and repackaged for capital gain.
Eric Lindner>> there
Eric Lindner>> i think the fortunate white corporate america
fed off of this
Eric Lindner>> and turned it into what it is now
Sean Moore>> That paragraph mentions Biz Markie... who's that?
Eric Lindner>> never heard of him
Eric Lindner>> i know outkast
Eric Lindner>> i find them annoying
Sean Moore>> I would say fortunate black "entrepeneur artists"
too.... look at Hammer or P Diddy
Eric Lindner>> yeah but
Sean Moore>> I like some of OutKast's stuff, I'm only really
familiar with Speakerboxxx/Love Below
Eric Lindner>> they wouldnt be where they were today without
that exploitation
Sean Moore>> I think it's all exploitation our revolution, there's
not a lot of ground between the poles there... what do you
think?
Sean Moore>> our --> "or"
Eric Lindner>> in the prior readings, again, it went over how
the corporate american used it as a money maker (it being
HH music)
Eric Lindner>> its exploitation
Eric Lindner>> civil rights had just ended , what late 60's ?
Eric Lindner>> im so bad wiht my history dates sometimes
Eric Lindner>> rap came big not to long after 1970
Eric Lindner>> excuse me, HH music
Sean Moore>> well yeah...
Eric Lindner>> i mean
Sean Moore>> and those weren't dormant years
Eric Lindner>> where anythign black was bad, which was a shame
Eric Lindner>> they were missing out on alot
Sean Moore>> dude... I lost my conection, sorry
Eric Lindner>> its all good
Eric Lindner>> ur in here 3 times lol
Sean Moore>> those were the years of the black arts movement
and black power... the civil right movement didn't end when
King and X were shot
Eric Lindner>> nope
Sean Moore>> it was more about class inequality in the early
70s I think
Sean Moore>> You better get used to me, then...
Eric Lindner>> i almost thinks its like, since the white corporate
exploited it and introduced it to young americans
Eric Lindner>> all over, it kind of slid its way into the younger
generations
Eric Lindner>> becaue the older americans had specific social
Eric Lindner>> where anything black was bad, which was a shame
Sean Moore>> Yeah, but the artists were definitely all about
trying to make their 5 cents per record too...
Eric Lindner>> specific social norms*
Eric Lindner>> yup
Eric Lindner>> anyways, i think its not revolution
Sean Moore>> I think the prospect of money made a lot of artists
lose the political edge
Eric Lindner>> i think a revolution was just enDING
Sean Moore>> hrm...
Eric Lindner>> thus being a product of exploitation
Sean Moore>> that's cool, an interesting point...
Eric Lindner>> anyways i think we are past our time limit
Sean Moore>> what I get out of that is the question of whether
or not Hip Hop boomed when political activism was fading
out anyway in history
Eric Lindner>> hey with our grade on the last chat, i know i
spoke with TV in the chat room the day after you guys chatted
Eric Lindner>> did he see that??
Sean Moore>> (the 80s were a pretty sad decade, in my opinion,
in a lot of sub-cultures as far as activism goes...)
Eric Lindner>> and i have no idea in regards to what you just
typed
Sean Moore>> he must have...
Eric Lindner>> the 80s was like... people crying out for attention
lol
Eric Lindner>> if i wore some of that shit i would have shot
myself

Chang Ch 7 and KRS One readings in Vibe & JoHH

wow... after the group project and the WebCT chat rooms and the quizzes, I feel like the Chang book is the last thing in the world I want to spend time talking about! If I haven't rehashed 3/4 of the sections of the chang reading in some form of assessment or another, then I don't know what...
The KRS One reading was interesting... I remember that I used to be really confused about KRS One, I thought he was a member of the band Sublime for the longest time because as their lead singer Brad Nowell sings (during a jam at the end of one of their albums my friends used to listen to all the time), "And I know... yeah I know because of KRS-One..." (That's the closest thing to an amusing KRS-One story I have!)
Anyhow, it was pretty cool to read about KRS One and how he was incorporating these ideals about pursuit of "knowledge", or our favorite "fifth element" of hip-hop, into the mores we had talked about in class-- the political skepticism and the insistence of pride (I guess I'm trying to say the competitive nature of hip hop, the importance of being the best)...
I wonder if street smart and popular image are inherently contrary to spiritual truths and more cross-cultural kinds of wisdom... it seems like "conscious hip-hop" is only given free reign to extend so far as vague political critiques but it's not allowed to go deeply into issues (Dru talked in class about younger generations not knowing Chuck D and how one young guy said he didn't want to "listen to that black power shit...") or take knowledge and consciousness into self-reflective modes and self-awareness (Like the discussion we had yesterday about Common's latest album being "smiley all the time"...)
Anyhow, rather than right off KRS One as hypocritical, why not do something more daring and insightful and actually hold a pop icon accountable for the things he says... how does someone named after Krishna (footnote: "Krishna of the Krishna religion"? Man the Vibe book is not edited by scholars.... how about "Krishna of the Vaishnava sect of Hinduism"?) who uses the self proclaimed epithet "Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone" bash college education (of which he has never experienced) and a medium as diverse as the written word, claiming that books are all lies?
I think maybe there's something here, something we might be able to make sense out of in one way or another, when conscious rappers are advocating not reading, not going to school... is it more to preserve their own coolness, that they aren't seeing everything as "smiley all the time"? I kind of think of this as a weak sense of character, if that's really what's happenning... if KRS One is not willing to go against the flow and speak his truth that people need some form of education, some form of scholarship to improve their own lives (and I don't necessarily mean getting a masters degree and working for a corporation) then how "conscious" is his message?

Reflection on Hip Hop for October 19th - White women and slam

I think slam is probably my favorite piece of Hip Hop culture. I love the variety of sound and style in slam, I love the wisdom in the poetry and I love the personality in the artists...
I've been getting hooked on Ruckus over the past week so I'm in the musical abundance that is always such an overwhelming awesome experience... I just got Amethyst Rock Star by Saul Williams which works a lot better for me than his second (self entitled) album which is so punk-rock / indie-rock that it's easy for me to lose out in his poems... it's still not the live act transferred to an album experience, but it's a great attempt at that...
I also came across a couple novel experiences... Nellie McKay which is some pretty far out stuff crosses a lot of styles on her first album, "Get Away From Me"-- I think I've passed over this album a billion times in record stores, mistaking it for a Jazz / Singer-Songwriter album (which it kind of is, kind of isn't) the cover is like something you might see on such an album, but when I looked closer, she’s posing in front of a wall of Graff, (reminding me of a story Simon & Garfunkel tell on a live performance of theirs I have—“We had just spent hundreds of dollars and many hours taking photos and picking just the right shot for the cover of our album Wednesday Morning, 3 AM and when we presented it to the executives of the record label, there, painted on the subway wall behind us…” (Laughter) “…was the usual suggestion… then we had to explain to them that that was just the one we wanted to use.”)

Anyhow, Nellie’s album is really abrasive, really fun… I was totally impressed when the third track, “Sari” it’s really evident the hip hop influence that has come in…. the lyrics are great, as with her other songs, but she really is rapping them, which is a cool sound in the context of an anti-folk album, where her other songs sound as if they are somewhere between regina spektor and norah jones… it’s worth downloading that track from ruckus for some good fun :)

This leads into the next person I wanted to talk about, Alix Olson… a friend recommended me her stuff after a conversation about Ani DiFranco… that was actually several years ago, and I’d never come across Alix’s work… however, I’d heard her referenced as a great slam / spoken word poet recently, and so I thought to check for her on ruckus.. they have her full first album available which is totally amazing…

I’m very at home with Alix’s style—the common string on amazon that I’ve seen is that she just rips off Ani’s style, but being a dedicated Ani fan and basically coming of age listening to her music and poetry, I have to say that even when Alix’s sound is indistinguishable, having another artist doing that style is welcome…

However, the slam poet in me is so-so tempted to say that the rhymes are not slam… If anyone wants do grab some of these tracks on Ruckus and start a dialogue about them, I’d be happy as a pig in shit… (I can’t believe I said that)….

Blog Readings 3 & 4 -- Race and Class in the States

Plight deepens for Black Men

Some quotes and comments from the article:

“Especially in the country's inner cities, the studies show, finishing

high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and

prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks

even as urban crime rates have declined.”

This is strange, it’s really foreign to the experience of life in the suburbs, where it seems like all people have this erroneous perception that education is free and easy for all people everywhere and that drop outs are somehow “defective” “rebellious” or even “dangerous”…

"Many of these men grew up fatherless, and they never had good

role models," said Mr. Jones, who overcame addiction and prison

time. "No one around them knows how to navigate the mainstream

society." --

Even more remote to my experience! What does it mean to not know how to navigate the mainstream society? I think I’ve so much been steeped in “mainstream society” via media and middle class surroundings that I don’t directly experience what it is to be outside of that… one thought I had about what it means to not “know how to navigate…” would be a tendency / habit of returning to underground culture, and so I wonder if this statement isn’t a polished way of saying that Black men are time and again turning to drug dealing, gangs, and other kinds of criminalized “non-mainstream society.”

“The second special factor is related to an otherwise successful

policy: the stricter enforcement of child support. Improved

collection of money from absent fathers has been a pillar of welfare

overhaul. But the system can leave young men feeling overwhelmed

with debt and deter them from seeking legal work, since a large

share of any earnings could be seized.”

Another way that the author has packed up the same “non mainstream society” stuff? Hrm… this was definitely an interesting article!

As far as the “Minority population pattern changes” article is concerned, I felt it didn’t exactly speak to the discourse of racial hegemony and inner city experience that I was hoping it might elicit. While demographic are always interesting from a Sociological perspective, analysis of implications (and contributing factors) was a bit lacking in this article. I found the most interesting part of the article to be the last paragraph, though it seemed like an afterthought of the general article. I wondered why, as the article portrays, Washington has one of the highest rates of urban immigration across ethnic lines. The closing sentence aroused my curiosity: “Unlike many diverse areas, the Washington region gained enough whites to rank 10th for numerical increase.” This made me reflect on a conversation I had recently, someone was describing how the building of nice apartment buildings and shopping areas in otherwise ‘bad parts’ of DC was creating a renovation of many parts of the city, and encouraging middle class people to move back into the city, a contrast to the “white exodus” that many cities experienced when suburbs flourished under the influence of GI Bill in the 40s and 50s.

Talking Trash: bell hooks in dialogue on the movie "Crash"

I wanted to say something in class when the movie Crash was mentioned because I was aware of this article, but I kept my mouth shut since I hadn't read it yet...
Trash on Crash
Anyhow, I'm reading it now, I'll comment on this post with my thoughts...
I have to say though, I really loved the movie... I saw it a year ago when it was all the buzz in my Gender Representations in Popular Culture class... which is interesting, since that class owed a lot to the work of bell hooks, so I'm pretty ready to hear what she has to say about it!

Reflection on Hip Hop for October 12th

I was channel surfing while I ate lunch the other day and there was an astounding amount of "nothing on"... I got to VH1 and I was kind of surprised that they were airing rap-- VH1 was always the slightly weak rock and pop holdout when I was in high school, the last time I really had much time and access to cable for channel surfing (not to suggest I have lots of free time now, but I have cable since I moved in with my stepdad)
Anyhow, I was surprised by what they were showing-- not rap videos or anything but like reality shows about hip hop culture... kinda. One was a preview of an upcoming show: Ice Cube taking suburban middle school students around the Bronx and showing them that the hood was a positive place, the preview showed Cube trying to teach the kids to be emcees and the whole crew walking around the Bronx...
After the preview ended, the general programming was about "the ghetto pass", talking about honoring White people who were "keepin it real" and being "authentic" in living life in the hood-- they talked a bit about eminem and gave Vanilla Ice as a counter example, they talked about how no Black people in the interviews actually had any clue what the word "wigger" meant (they laughed, "Yeah, that was probably made up by white people...") and they talked a bit about a really interesting guy I'd never heard of -- Mr White Folks, a white pimp who commented "You can't just come into the ghetto and act a certain way-- people will laugh at you... you have to live here for years before you're accepted." I turned off the television.
When I got Dru's e-mail about this week's reading, the link was messed up for me... I tried to correct it by taking out some of the stray characters, and wound up with an article about Black people in the Indie Rock movement that was a quick and interesting read...
Indie rock article
Anyway, I'm not sure if we were supposed to read that, but combined with Mr White Folks... (hrm.. let me find a link, I'm sure this guy has a page...) Hrm... Maybe he is a real street pimp, I can't find his homepage! Anyway, he's featured in this documentary: Pimps up, Hos down (I'm not attesting to having looked at that site! It warns abt adult content and I'm not in the mood!)
All that combined with the Styles P article has me thinking more and more about race in hip hop the week... I don't know... I feel like white people are at times really full of it when they do the hip hop thing sometimes... it totally depends on the person though... so much of our social identities are just big inflated acts... that said, in the States especially people of our generation are so self obsessed... who really cares who "you are" who gives two shits about "your statement"? For real... go make a change in the world and quit being so self important... It's tricky as college students because our role is to study and write and all that, but still, people walk around like knowing the latest CDs is going to make a difference in anyone's lives... what crap. People talk about holier than though stuff because they listen to "conscious" hip hop or because they're too good for hip hop or something, but it's seems to me that the point of "conscious" anything is that you go out and spread that word, you make an impact...
I was interviewing a Mason faculty for my capstone class and he mentioned how one folk singer who sang all these conscious activism songs said in an interview "Yeah, I don't go and do anything in these global situations, my role is just to sing about them" And that's fine... I don't mind if the artists aren't out feeding the poor, but the people who are buying into their stuff as an identity should be doing something... spreading the word or doing some service... instead people just get off on themselves "Yeah, I know all about everything hip hop" or "everything punk" or "everything rock" (or "Everything classical") Who cares?
That's definitely not where I thought I was going with this blog, but hey, it's good for what it is... Yeah, race and hip hop... I guess I'll save that for another time :)