The Thread Where We List The People Who Put Kanye As Their Token Rap Album on an indiecentric top 10 2004 list

One my best friends in town would say the same thing (so will Xgau!).

I wonder how many people who love hiphop would also find valuable an 'indiecentric' 2004 top 10 list

hey, I voted for Devin AND Kanye! where's my laudibly non-gangsta prize?

http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~mbarret1/Graphics/berkely03/gangsta.jpg

(xp stevie: I really dreaded this, y'know)

-- What's this place, Biblevania? (natepatri...), December 30th, 2004.

Nate is pretty OTM, especially there. and Anthony, are you actually using that asshole Byron Crawford to back up your point?

ANYway - other than that Al, I agree w/ you and Nate, and I think the Kanye album is pretty damn great on the whole - and no, many of the album tracks are just as strong as the singles ("we don't care," "family business" "Two Words" etc.)

Moving on:

yeah the kanye rhetoric is quite possible by far the most fucking absurd i've seen around any hip-hop record ever, outdoing speakerboxx/thelovebelow, outdoing lauryn, outdoing 16 years of 'nation of millions' hyberbole even maybe (ok maybe not that).

Huh? So Rocafella convinced a bunch of corny rock fans that they were listening to backpacker rap bcuz kanye doesn't talk about guns. The "Not since de la soul and public enemy!" rhetoric is stupid, but it always is - this is just another of countless examples.

all the rockcrits feeling icky about getting gop cooties from country and then rallying around fucking "jesus walks" is fucking insane.

Maybe ILM/the blogosphere is somewhat to the left of the critical mainstream but shit - the country poseurism that I sense - and I want to make it clear I'm not calling anyone out, it is just highly suspicious when suddenly everyone jumps on the mainstream-country-is-so-great bandwagon when chuck eddy mentions how good big and rich are - seems pretty fucking pervasive around here. In fact, I'd say Big & Rich would be a much BETTER example of Outkast for the 2k4 than Kanye is - and I like that Big and Rich album more than SB/LB (SB was the better half, by the way).

anyone wondering about how christianity's been used to 'tame' the black man in america for over three hundred years need only glance at a couple of the hundred or so "jesus walks" hosannahs - "dont be angry / dont be fucking / just pray and pray again": ugh. i guarantee you if rove thought bushco had a real shot at the black vote or hadn't (astutely) decided "fuck the blacks, lets try to get the hispanic vote" then "jesus walks" woulda been the "born in the usa" of 1984. plus kanye's a shitty rapper.

I disagree w/ practically all of this. And your narrative of the history of black christianity that neglects to give any agency to african americans is pretty disturbing too.

One thing that contradicts my argument that could be accurate was the statement people made last year that andre's album was an introduction to hip-hop, and perhaps the fact that kanye - who, as Nate said, is "100% hip-hop" - is about to win is somehow related to andre's success. And perhaps this parallel will translate to big and rich + some other act next year. But I have a hard time believing it.

I've only been reading the blogosphere/ILM critical thing for about two years, so maybe my ability to detect critical trends lacks perspective, but I can't help but feel like there are certain "in" genres/styles/albums every year that are in vogue to the critical establishment - and while ILM/blogosphere may be the more progressive end of the critical establishment, i see the same sort of thing happening here.

Example:
Not that she has a perfect perspective or anything, but a friend of mine from school is jamaican and has a huge interest - understandably - with jamaican music, and she said that she felt dancehall had a better year this year than in 2003. Yet in the critical blogosphere, the opposite conclusion was reached. Not that she has a "more correct" view or anything - but I guess what I'm getting at is that it seems that trends and fads do sort of sweep the critical world and I felt like that was happening here. I mean, look at how Dizzee is doing this year vs. last year - respectably, but aside from enthusiasts, the pfork massive haven't (to my knowledge) exactly been shaking stores down for wiley albums or other grime singles.

http://www.cantstopwontstop.com/blog/2004/12/robert-johnson-rockism-and-hip-hop.html

As quoted there:

The neo-ethnic movement was nourished by a spate of LP reissues that for the first time made it possible to find hillbilly and country blues recordings in white, middle-class, urban stores. The bible was Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music...Smith was specifically interested in the oldest and most-rural sounding styles, and set a pattern for any future folk-blues reissue projects by intentionally avoiding any artist who seemed consciously modern or commercial...

Far from balancing this taste, the other record collectors tended to be even more conservative. Much as they loved the music, they were driven by the same mania for rarity that drives collectors of old stamps or coins, and many turned up their noses at Jefferson or the Carters, since those records were common. (Ed. note: Like Rick James, bitch!) To such men, the perfect blues artist was someone like Son House or Skip James, an unrecognized genius whose 78s had sold so badly that at most one or two copies survived. Since the collectors were the only people with access to the original records or any broad knowledge of the field, they functioned to a great extent as gatekeepers of the past and had a profound influence on what the broader audience heard. (Ed. note: Like Freestyle Fellowship or Bun B, bitch!) By emphasizing obscurity as a virtue unto itself, they essentially turned the hierarchy of blues-stardom upside-down: The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958.

This fit nicely with the beat aesthetic, and indeed with the whole mythology of modern art. While Shakespeare had been a favorite playwright of the Elizabethan court, and Rembrandt had been portraitist to wealthy Amsterdam, the more recent idols were celebrated for their rejections: Van Gogh had barely sold a painting in his lifetime, The Rite of Spring had caused a riot, Jack Kerouac's On The Road had been turned down by a long string of publishers. Where jazz had once been regarded as a popular style, a new generation of fans applauded Miles Davis for turning his back on the audience and insisting that his music speak for itself, while deriding Louis Armstrong as a grinning Uncle Tom. On the folk-blues scene, Van Ronk and his peers regarded anything that smacked of showmanship as a betrayal of the true tradition, a lapse into the crowd-pleasing fakery of the Weavers and Josh White. As he would later recall with some amusement, "If you weren't staring into the sound-hole of your instrument, we thought you should at least have the decency and self-respect to start at your shoes."

As in John Hammond's Carnegie Hall (Ed. note: a concert called Spirituals to Swing that packaged a grand narrative of black music), art was opposed to entertainment...

...Clapton and the Stones were the first pop stars ever to insist that they were playing blues...that was the sound they loved: no horns, no string sections, no girls going "oo-wah"--just slashing guitars and wailing harmonica.

Then the English kids flew across the Atlantic, bringing the gospel home. And they did something unprecedented: Unlike the hundres of white blues singers before them...they took it upon themselves to edcated their audience. "Our aim was to turn other people on to Muddy Waters," Keith Richards would later say. "We were carrying flags, idealistic teenage sort of shit: There's no way we think anybody is really going to seriously listen to us. As long as we can get a few people interested in listening to the shit we think they ought to listen to..."

It's probably a much bigger issue w/ dancehall bcuz most bloggers/critics aren't engaging w/ the form the way most jamaicans are - simply for practical/economic reasons.

1. more jamaicans online (obviously there are some socioeconomic realities that have to be dealt w/, but this is the hopeful future)
and
2. More non-jamaicans get access to a wider view of jamaican music.

Sorry if I'm totally sidetracking the thread.

I'm thinking this probably has a little more to do with C&W's post-Garth upward shift in sales and cultural status than anything Chuck has done. Otherwise...maybe you want to pin Gretchen Wilson winding up on VH1 and Shania Twain duetting with Mark McGrath on Chuck, too? How about the Nelly and Tim McGraw duet? Shania Twain, Toby Keith, Tim McGraw, George Strait, Gretchen Wilson, Rascal Flatts, Big & Rich, Alison Krauss and Kenny Chesney all in the Billboard Top 50 Albums list? (Some of them in greatest hits configurations, but still!)

Sorta similar to what I've just said, but maybe some of those "other" things that that attract P&J voters to B&R are also what attract C&W fans to them, too. In fact, weren't they on a CMT show called..."Outlaws"? (And look who else were on it.)

It's just fun to type "ask Byron Crawford" when discussing kanye.

My "token" rap albums weren't even American - I went for M.I.A. and Dizzee. Ghostface almost made my top 10 pazz and jop, but he got edged out at the very last moment. I kinda regret not including him.

The other: T.I.,
who is more a songwriter
than a "great" rapper.

Trick Daddy: so close!
Xzibit surprising, good,
but there was no room

This was the last year
that I think I will listen
to U.S. music

FEAR FOR AMERICA

and i'm not sure what at all his point has to do with hiphop, which is neither his subject nor apparently his enemy. it's facile to celebrate the non-'gangsta', especially when what falls outside the set is not in fact 'gangsta' (is that true here?), but can someone tell me why 'gangsta' is something to be valued or why non-'gangstas' should not be 'laud'ed for, where otherwise applicable, their relative bravery, humanism and rejection of a profit-motive (at least where not seeking some other status sign).

i think it's not-half-bad writing.

?