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)….