worst protest song/political song to place in the Pazz & Jop singles poll

legendary ko

self destruction 41 shots & free nelson mandela dont bother me rlly

"Mosh" is so bad

Mandela, Bitburg, Self Destruction and Geo. Bush are all great fucking songs that hold up

man it is hard not to vote for bright eyes

Mosh is so much worse than Bright Eyes and Bright Eyes is like the worst

Legendary K.O. and the Ramones are brilliant.

srsly. exactly what type of bullshit posturing are you doing when you say the Legendary KO track is the worst one, deej

the Legendary K.O. certainly is a legendarily great rapper, he didn't at all just play pop culture mad libs with a mixtape freestyle in a way that pushed the buttons of a lot of lefty rock critics, no sir, that's why he's had such a long and rewarding career outside of that song.

^^^^bullshit posturing

anyway i think i'm going to bed soon, have fun ruining my thread, you two

"same thing we do every night, pinky - try to take over the thread!"

― zvookster, Friday, January 21, 2011 8:41 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark

lol yeah like this wasnt a controversial thread topic to begin with. i dont understand why al isnt ever lumped in w/ me & whiney in the 1st place

"now that ive made this thread & shitted on whiney, ill pass the beef off on deej"

dude if you can't handle jokes about you and whiney fighting you might wanna jump in the time machine and live the last 2 years of your life differently.

ahahahahahahahah DAMN

shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit

http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/8408/fifty.gif

2 years?? jesus. this is like past 5 months

regardless maybe u should stop talking shit about beef when u are worse than anyone w/ the provoking & shit stirring

i know, making such a "controversial" thread like this, i'm such an instigator.

"now that ive made this thread & shitted on whiney, ill pass the beef off on deej"

― challopian youtubes (deej), Monday, January 24, 2011 9:13 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

have you ever consciously tried to make a relationship hard on a person you loved

i love how if you read that sentence 100% literally, it sounds like ship ate some beef, took a shit on whiney and is now going to shit on deej

for the past week any time i post shit whiney starts in w/ ad homs & distortions & shit talking everyone immediately jumps in like OH SHIT DEEJ WHINEY BEEF stfu already

like how is this shit not stale at this pt

american skin prob in my springsteen POX

the whirlwind of beef, i drown whiney in it

have fun ruining al's thread, you two

we should use this thread to talk about how good american skin is

i do like that song pretty well

This thread is incomplete without all the year-end write-in blurbs defending these awful songs.

croooooss this bloody river

deej accusing people of "distortions" makes you sound like a cable news pundit fyi

how many rock artists released songs about oscar grant this year? its in the area of zero right

deej accusing people of "distortions" makes you sound like a cable news pundit fyi

― trv kvnt (some dude), Monday, January 24, 2011 9:28 PM (35 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

whiney trying to force running jokes about how im always talking about the Tunnel is on some fox new shit its true

idk yo -- he was pretty much calling you a rap elitist, which, i mean shit, it's a message board idk

you take whiney's bait EVERY TIME. just like you take my bait EVERY TIME. that, and your lack of sense of humor about it all, is what makes you the chump. EVERY. TIME.

i take him seriously because hes certainly not funny

is it a gun?

is it a knife?

is it a wallet?

this is your life

jesus is this you trying to 'use' people's 'words' against them 'cleverly'? please just stop.

if u want me to not take it at face value try bringing lols? idk what to tell you

xpost to deej, not iatee.

although "Land Of Hope And Dreams" >>>> "American Skin" imo

"Sun City" is a horrible song with horrible guest spots.

the ramones song is so fucking awesome. neg polls generally get negative and are shitty in my limited experience of not really paying attention to neg polls bc they suck

"We Are The World" is "A Change is Gonna Come" by comparison.

"Bonzo" is terrific, especially in the last verse.

zvookster negging a neg is NAGL

I don't remember anyone offering you a grindstone.

i got a grindstone by any means necessary

And the idea that '88 righteousness was the creation of white gatekeepers or whatever is an amazing fiction.

oh god

ppl get mad defensive abt rap on here!

lol @ the idea that i suggested '88 political rap was related to white gatekeepers

i posted that fuchs quote bcuz i think it applies to 'legendary ko' not every political rap ever

u effin nerds

jay-z kowtowed to barack obama not christgau

obama demanded anti autotune song

poll should've been for best not worst

― ex-heroin addict tricycle (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, January 25, 2011

yeah wld have preferred that as i said upthread but there's a lot of good stuff itt so idk

― zvookster, Tuesday, January 25, 2011 5:57 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

'best' thread would've had probably a very similar conversation and a much more predictable poll result, with this i really don't know where it's gonna go, which for me is the main criteria for making a thread a poll

obama demanded anti autotune song

― emma goldbond (San Te), Tuesday, January 25, 2011 8:12 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

oh so by "critics" we mean "rap fans" those notorious agents of change

its fair to say that this is the kind of song rap fans dont give 2 shits about

rappers & rap fans kowtowing to critical norms from 'respectable' genres has been a blight on rap thru-out its history

Not defensive, more just amazed in a baffled kind of way, and genuinely curious about the imagination and projection that would inspire these lines.

Ha, I'm not even sure I'd say "Superrappin" is better than "The Message" these days -- they're both pretty great.

did Bangs vote in '79, the year "Let It Blurt" placed in the poll? and what's up with that, was it like a bunch of his friends and contemporaries voting for a fellow crit's song?

I wasn't there, yet. But I could've sworn that, in his P&J essay that year, Xgau said something like "I feel compelled to mention that at least X votes for 'Let It Blurt' came from confidantes of Lester, and at least one came from Lester himself. I also feel compelled to mention that it's a pretty good record anyway." But looking at the essay on Xgau's website, I'm not finding any of that. (Did I dream it? Or maybe the web version edits the original print version, which I'll check the next time I did through the closet.) At any rate, Bangs definitely did vote that year; his album ballot is still on the website. Not positive he voted for the single, though.

"dig" through the closet, I meant.

Guess it's also possible Christgau wrote that somewhere other than his P&J essay, but I'm not sure where that would be.

Not defensive, more just amazed in a baffled kind of way, and genuinely curious about the imagination and projection that would inspire these lines.

― Pete Scholtes, Tuesday, January 25, 2011 7:38 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ive never heard a non-pazz & jop generalist pop critic (who naturally being ~40 yrs old has been a 'rap fan' for longer than me blah blah blah) say anything ever about legendary ko

re: the 2nd quote, pete, what do u think the entire kanye debate is about? the celebration of latter-day jayz? there's a big underlying strain of thought in rap that it needs to be more respectable & less 'ghetto' & more bourgie

xp: I'm terrible with tone--I actually meant my last sentence. Like, I love that quote from the Toop book and sympathize with someone having a vision of how music should be and filtering everything else through it in a polemical way. I love that you care about audiences, too, deej. So I'm curious where these fantastical generalizations and self-identification some imagined audience come from. I filled in the racial stuff because that's the somewhat provable reality behind the code of "respectability" and "adult norms" or what-have-you, at least through the '80s.

xp: So from this slice of experience you've determined that "rap fans" don't like "this type of song."

I totally agree that the strains of thought you mention among critics exist and need to be challenged, but I think those biases are more complicated than being "respectable"--a lot of them go back to punk and the counterculture before that.

nah i mean that u have rap fans who like rap (& will defend 'classics' like cuban linx even if theyve got a bunch of drug talk on them) but they do crave mainstream critical respectability particularly with new records. think about bun b getting 5 mics from the source years after his best records, but shortly after his mainstream critical approval

like, i think there are different motives between the source critics & pazz n jop critics -- the pnj ones voting for KO are coming out of punk, the source ones are on some 'rap has gotten so much worse' tip. these dudes also tend to venerate 'legends' to a much greater degree than pnj critics -- who at least had that lester bangs thing about not paying deference to your idols or w/e. But they're coming at rap w/ their own biases, and rap criticism has its own tradition (more in the ego trip vein)

i should say i doubt there were many source critics into KO -- but the source critics do pay attention on other artists

I can only speak for myself, but the timeline was something like this: 1) Katrina happened; 2) about a week or 10 days later, I read about the Legendary K.O. record somewhere; 3) I found it, downloaded it, loved it; 4) within days, I played it on my radio show. I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't even emptied out the Superdome of people yet--playing this record on air while the crisis was essentially still happening was thrilling. My point is, this all happened very fast--there wasn't a lot of deliberation that went into any of it. All of this analysis you're doing of people's relationship to the song, and rap in general, is interesting, and you're certainly entitled to do so, I just think you're missing the forest for the trees. (Or you're missing one very tall tree for the forest...or something. There's trees, and there's a forest, and I think you should be here, but you're over there.)

xp A ha! I didn't dream it; it just wasn't in Xgau's essay -- It was at the bottom of the actual singles list that ran in 1979. I was close!:

**The Poobahs feel impelled to point out that at least seven of those voting for this disc are intimates of Lester Bangs, and at least one is Lester Bangs himself. They also feel impelled to acknowledge that it's a pretty good record anyway.

i mean i love the message & so do most rap fans but did u know that its classic verses were actually not a part of 'the message' but another, non-'message' song?

So the only worthwhile verse in the whole song is the final Mel one? I mean, you're right as long as you ignore the first five minutes of the song but I don't think that's what most people do.

Also, deej, I think your argument that the Legendary KO were kowtowing to "respectable" norms is bullshit. It may have been warmly received by generalist critics but it was made for a hip hop audience at a racially charged moment in US history in an ad hoc mixtape style with a sense of humour. A record that kowtowed would have been far more worthy and solemn. You come dangerously close to suggesting that any kind of political thought in rap is insufficiently "ghetto" and only designed to appeal to 40+ white rock critics. I can understand the trend you object to, but you're backlashing against it so hard that you end up disparaging the motives of a whole bunch of MCs.

I'm pretty sure most rap fans are more likely to rep for "The Message" than "Superrappin'".

the premise of the poll samples is basically a question of whether all these particular tracks suited 40+ white rock critics, the KO is just one of them, and is one particular rap song. it seems like a very big error (to me) to extrapolate from that that some dude & deej are close to disparaging any kind of political thought in rap? & surely it's another one to separate ghetto reportage from the political in any case.

I meant deej, not some dude, but OK, maybe I read him wrong. deej's arguments can be hard to follow.

Good point about distinction between ghetto reportage and politics though The Message is more political, as in aware of the broader social context for the narrator's problems, than most examples.

I can only speak for myself

This is the forest.

Also, deej, I think your argument that the Legendary KO were kowtowing to "respectable" norms is bullshit. It may have been warmly received by generalist critics but it was made for a hip hop audience at a racially charged moment in US history in an ad hoc mixtape style with a sense of humour. A record that kowtowed would have been far more worthy and solemn. You come dangerously close to suggesting that any kind of political thought in rap is insufficiently "ghetto" and only designed to appeal to 40+ white rock critics. I can understand the trend you object to, but you're backlashing against it so hard that you end up disparaging the motives of a whole bunch of MCs.

― I've been dancing since 9 and I'm tired and hungry (Dorianlynskey), Wednesday, January 26, 2011 4:51 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

im not talking about the artist im talking about the critics' reception of the song

clemenza, seems like you should put Kanye's outburst (hate to call it that) somewhere in yr timeline? Only reason I bring it up is that any kind of timeline involving Katrina is necessarily tricky imo. I seem to remember that the fed gov't took meaningful action five days after the shit hit the fan, but I think it actually took the general public about three days to come to full awareness of the magnitude of the disaster.

Katrina was real creeper, and when things went bad, I think the only person who was talking about it was my grandmother, whom I lived with and who was a real news junkie. Everybody else where I was didn't really register until 3 or 4 days later...

or "it didn't really register with anyone else I knew at the time (including me) until the third or fourth day after the flood..."

Might be useful vis a vis relating the song to the timeline - part of an interview I did with Legendary KO:

The news coverage started to get a lot of people. A couple of days after the storm we started seeing a lot of coverage about the extent of the damange but then the story started to focus on the people who didn’t leave. Basically saying that they were idiots for staying around, when a lot of people had legitimate reasons for why they couldn’t get out of the path of the storm. In the US the news cycle goes on 24 hours a day and you start to see the same images over and over and they used a lot of images that showed “poor people” stuck in their houses. One thing that got to me a few days into this was a lot of us started to realise that these people who are still stuck in New Orleans have no idea how they’re being portrayed in the news, and while they have cameras in their face they’re not even getting any help and a lot of them were cyring out for help.

Two or three days prior to doing the song each of us had done volunteer work at the shelters. When you talk to the people these are normal people like you or I – normal tax-paying citizens who unfortunately had a huge storm level their city. What they didn’t know was the media was portraying them like refugees – they’re nomadic people now, they’re poor. They don’t even have a chance to rebut what’s being said about them because they don’t have an outlet to tell their side of the story. Noone really granted them their own say in the matter. So I was at work one day and Mike called me and he said I’ve got an idea for a song. And I’m like OK. And he said, I think this one might hit close to home. So I said OK, just email it to me. I’ll be home in 15 minutes. And when I got home in my inbox was the first half of the song and I was like, wow, this is pretty interesting. We didn’t understand what type of impact it would make, we just thought it was a cool song because it actually discusses the events of the past week or so from the viewpoint of people who were affected by it. We threw in the Kanye reference because we’d been talking about it the entire weekend before. A lot of what we were saying on the verses was stuff we’d already been saying amongst ourselves. It was just a matter of putting into song format. When we did that song it was so easy to do because those feelings and what we needed to say were already on the surface.

A couple of days after the storm we started seeing a lot of coverage about the extent of the damange but then the story started to focus on the people who didn’t leave. Basically saying that they were idiots for staying around, when a lot of people had legitimate reasons for why they couldn’t get out of the path of the storm.

not to be all optics-obsessed, but this is hugely OTM and I think a major reason why the tragedy got such a false start i/r/t national attention. I'm not even sure how many news stories covered it this way, I just think that was the "common sense" public perception, that they were dumbasses who stuck around for a hurricane and now needed our help. It took a few days for those assumptions to be replaced by "oh shit, this is actually not good at all, is it?"

It's why I like the song - it's not from the POV of a concerned outsider, it's trying to put the arguments into the mouths of the people at the heart of the crisis, people who weren't being represented in very many places.

yeah I imagine that actually interviewing KO and getting a lot of his first-person experiences about Katrina would prolley deepen the song's meaning for you quite a bit...quite different than just heaping on the kneejerk acclaim for a rap song bcz of its "political relevance"...

I think a lot of threads are kindof informing each other atm, and I think that "Mosh" would prolley get my vote because to me it marks the end of Em's transformation into what some dude called "constant hectoring, repetitive irritant" on the top 77 tracks thread.

Ha, yes. I respect Eminem for stepping up and saying it but the style is so nagging and jabbing and unpleasurable. He makes it sound sour and dutiful instead of (a la PE) thrilling.

I of course should have added Kanye's original comments to my timeline of Katrina--that fits in between 1) and 2). One thing I pointed out on the Facebook countdown I mentioned earlier: Legendary K.O.'s record would seem to be emblematic of the lightning-fast rapidity in which something like Katrina can go from news event to widely-distributed mp3 in the internet age. But if you check the timeline for "Ohio," the gap between event and song isn't all that much larger--I think "Ohio" was on the radio about four or five weeks after the fact.

that's why it was a single wasn't it? to get it out that fast...

Mark Mothersbaugh was at Kent State at the time (in fact he mentions in a few places how the shootings were very much integral to the inspiration of the Devo concept); I think I remember him saying that the reaction around campus to "Ohio" was v. negative, and that the perception among them was that rich rock stars were trying to cash in on their tragedy...

I actually think I might've read that in Shakey (Neil Young bio) actually...

wow, 'actually' overdose lol

I read that Mothersbaugh quote too, so maybe it was Shakey. I gotta admit, I thought the idea that Neil was trying to cash in on what happened struck me as absurd. CSNY was already a money-making machine; putting out a song like "Ohio" (as opposed to, say, "Our House") would seem to me to put that in jeopardy, not solidify your commercial viability. It made it to #14 on Billboard. Knowing the way recording deals were structured in those days, I wonder what riches Neil cleared from a #14 single in 1970? At a gut level, though, I guess I understand how someone who went to Kent State at the time would resent "Ohio."

Geez--just noticed that "Our House," the follow-up to "Ohio," only made it to #30. So what do I know about commercial viability? Maybe "Ohio" was just a big cash cow after all.

^right, I get the impression that even back when it was released Crosby Stills and Nash kindof represented the hippie movement sticking its head up its own ass, contemplating agrarian idylls (Our House, Teach Your Children)...

Ohio prolley seemed to those sort of close to the tragedy as exploitative, soft-rock sell-outs using their showdown with The Man to bolster their countercultural cred...

prolley belongs in this poll.

(prolley not, i know, just joking...)

x-post yeah, whether it's a cash-in for $$$ or not, it could easily be seen as a co-option of a tragedy. It's not like CSNY were on the frontlines at this point.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

The '00s were awful.

in terms of '00s songs/albums where ppl do self-consciously "political" and "about" Bush + The War On Terror and stuff, I really like The Evening of My Best Day by Rickie Lee Jones, though that angle is pretty low key for the most part, and the song that's most in that vein is "Tell Somebody (Repeal the Patriot Act)" which is maybe my least favourite track on the album

The Specials - "Free Nelson Mandela" (#17, 1984) 3

WTF, 3 of you?!