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.