Sasha on Shadow, Diplo, Eminem & Minstrelsy

I'm kind of annoyed that he's still pulling the Eminem is a minstrel thing long after the dude has flipped the script from destructive "black" figure to "white" defender of morality and decency.

I like how Shadow's "You Can't Go Home Again" starts off post-punk gets more and more Three 6 Mafia as it goes along.

good plan.

my point is that i dont really see SFJ bringing anything that new to this discussion other than 'eminem = MINSTREL!!!!!!!!' all over again. its not the same thing for a whte artist to do black music as it was in 1910. there are new factors at play now. not saying its a clean cut matter, or that indeed it doesnt matter, just that this seems like it could have been written in 1976 - just substitute eminems name with say, jagger and durst with plant.

i haven't had time to go back and re-read yet.

compare: the manix 12's on reinforced. the 4hero album

same problem

why?

and is it possible that a similar motivation could be at play with shadow and diplo?

"If white people were so willing to do blackface, wouldn’t there be more than two white rappers who regularly chart in the Top10? And there are still only two, almost thirty years in. And there are hundreds of new hip-hop records released every year."

(sorry)

(xpost)

for the most part, blacks wouldn't have gotten those jobs in the first place. also, there were lots of black minstrels--African-Americans who corked up for the stage.

[[raises hand]]

The mistake here is assuming that rap is the only form of blackface available to white people, rather than simply the most obvious.

There's a level on which I really do think it's an issue of identity and distancing. DJing, mixing, digital signal processing -- they've all made it possible for gangly white kids to approach genres they might not physically feel comfortable in (whether having to do with hip hop or sonic assault) with some sort of built-in distance; they're kind of playing the stuff, activating it, and manipulating it, but they don't have to exist in it in a physical sense. And I kinda wonder if there's some of that same removal that happens here. I mean, I doubt it's the case with Shadow, at least, or probably Diplo either -- but it's easy to imagine a situation in which a guy feels comfortable running off hot beats for some vocalist (assembly-line removal) as opposed to putting something out and saying "I MADE THIS, this is what I actually centrally do and put my name on," which is a slightly more vulnerable position.

what's weird about this is that none of it really sells or garners even a decent-sized cult audience. or does it? I can't think of any examples that did offhand, at least. happy to be proven wrong, though, as always.

the fact that people are ripping off the template. it reminds me of Elvis Costello bitching about John Wesley Harding sometime around 1991: "If you're gonna rip someone off, rip off someone who sells records!"

also, there seems to me to be a world of difference between 1) a white rapper who employs a lot of black slang and cultural reference points in their lyrics and 2) a white DJ who plays primarily music by black rappers. the former is inhabiting the same roles as black rappers, whereas the latter doesn't necessarily cop to the slang (although they often do, as in the case of, well, people who call themselves things like 'hollertonix').

as caught up in my profession as I can get, I tend to think that if an artist makes a decision, good or lousy, it's actually the artist's fault.

are you you? or that other one?

Selling on what level, though? On the level of the artists they remix? I mean, Shadow and RJD2 seem to do fairly well.

I want a watermelon.

miccio and xhuckx: officially off the hook.

i just doubt how many other facets of black life these rich white post-PC hipsters actually wanna think about besides crack sales, violence and misogyny. like, how come rock nerd/hipster white folks always choose biggie over pac?

tons of reasons, not least of which is that 99% of the time, hipsters are more interested in cleverness than in raw slice-of-life emoting (charlie parker always more popular in nerd-jazz circles than billie holliday).

how come all their fav white artists are nerdy pussies but then on the rap side its cam and lil jon?? it just feels like some white folks choose a few stand-ins for black culture and usually its hilarious ghetto fuck-ups (or intentional avant garde geniuses, depending on what kind of rap blog asshole you are)

or maybe they get their cry on to sensitive people with guitars (John Mayer, Modest Mouse, Coldplay) and their dance on to hip-hop, which if you haven't noticed is what MTV/BET/Vibe/XXL are constantly telling us is The Way It Is. i'm not saying this is an excuse, but it's not like the hipsters' take on hip-hop is any more fucked up than the rest of the world.

between all the jacked iconography and regional exoticism and nerdy messageboards and all-white parties w/ mad southern crunk jernts and nuff indie dance flava i think alot of these clued-in white kids now dont care or think about real actual black folk beyond slang, punchlines and 'entertainment'

but this is what always happens, has always happened. thanks to record stores, mail-order mix tapes, all-white parties and DJs, you can be down with whatever hip-hop you want and never have to lay eyes on a black person outside of an album cover. which usually means you're going to have a distorted view of black culture, based on the values of your own culture (in this case, valuing cleverness over authenticity), and you're going to get it wrong. it's not just these hipster kids, it's everybody.

the problem isn't that white people are listening to hip-hop, it's that white people/Dipset fans still aren't engaging with actual black people, which might make us think twice about laughing at jokes about crack. but other than chastising them for being so insular, i don't think it's fair to blame someone who gets their music criticism from their local alt.weekly for liking only Dipset. it's a problem with not enough black voices in the media, at record companies, at MTV.

(basically i'm just repeating ideas from Bomb The Suburbs now, sorry)

"based on the values of your own culture (in this case, valuing cleverness over authenticity), and you're going to get it wrong. it's not just these hipster kids, it's everybody."

how come i know all kinda regular white non-hipster kids who love pac than?! and for his authenticity instead of cleverness? how come pac is the best selling rapper of all time, for authenticity instead of cleverness?

"or maybe they get their cry on to sensitive people with guitars (John Mayer, Modest Mouse, Coldplay) and their dance on to hip-hop, which if you haven't noticed is what MTV/BET/Vibe/XXL are constantly telling us is The Way It Is. i'm not saying this is an excuse, but it's not like the hipsters' take on hip-hop is any more fucked up than the rest of the world."

what about nu metal?? i love some korn & distubed & limp bizkit cuz its crunk as fuck just like bohagen or youngbloodz or trillville or what the fuck ever. if black folks dont get to make sensitive music for non-hipster ppl how come the billboard charts is half r&b ballads at any given time?? and how come 99% of hipsters hate r&b ballads almost as much as they hate pac?

I dunno which is worse really but I know in my experience I know more 2Pac-loving insufferable "it's all about the authentic expression and experience, man, damn the man cause he's got his boot on the neck of the blacks" white people than the "ohmigod, cam's take on crack is totes rofflicious" type. Who like to rail on most R&B as sterile and overly commercial. Hipsters don't have the market cornered on willful interpretations of the black experience via their musical choices.

to Amoeba's credit that was the only time I ever saw that kid working there.

how come i know all kinda regular white non-hipster kids who love pac than?! and for his authenticity instead of cleverness? how come pac is the best selling rapper of all time, for authenticity instead of cleverness?

i'll admit i don't know a lot of pac's music, so i'm out of my depth. maybe you're right. all i know is that to these ears, pac seems less interested in constructing clever puns than biggie. what little pac i've heard is very confessional and melodramatic ("Dear Mama"), and i think that appeals to teenagers and other normal people. hipsters hate a certain breed of melodrama more than anything - the indie rock weepy stuff they like is mostly oblique, the emotion mediated somehow. but i don't think it has a lot to do with race. i don't think you'll find a lot of people giving props to Dashboard and Weezer at the same time as Dipset.

what about nu metal?? i love some korn & distubed & limp bizkit cuz its crunk as fuck just like bohagen or youngbloodz or trillville or what the fuck ever.

i never ever see nu-metal on Much Music (local video channel) anymore. the only rock i see anymore is sub-ATDI bullshit. the fact that hipsters hate nu-metal but like Lil Jon is at least partly due to self-loathing; they want to rock out but not like their little brother does, so crunk is the only other heavy thing available. (it's not a coincidence that lots of radio stations boast "everything but rap and heavy metal" or sometimes "rap, heavy metal and country").

if black folks dont get to make sensitive music for non-hipster ppl how come the billboard charts is half r&b ballads at any given time??

yes R&B but not ballads (i'd say a ballad is something you couldn't play in a club). go look at the hot 100 singles. how many R&B balladeers sell more records than hip-hoppers?

... and how come 99% of hipsters hate r&b ballads almost as much as they hate pac?

i've always wondered about this, but i think it's because they're too emotional and not clever enough. again, most hipsters like things that deliver their emotion through an intellectual screen, through deliberate obtuseness. not there in a Beyonce ballad.

"Since 2002, when the two began collaborating, Hollertronix’s aesthetic has become the template for modish d.j.s all over the Northeast: bumping, grinding commercial hip-hop blended with unlikely samples from well-known pop songs. Pentz is a particularly talented bricoleur, who knows how to match non-American beats (Radiohead, Elephant Man) with big-selling American voices (Lil’ Flip, Trina) and produce a sound that is unexpectedly fresh. When Interscope Records commissioned a remix of Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” which was the No. 1 single in the country for four weeks this spring, the company hired Pentz."

At Rothko, Pentz’s d.j. partner was not Low Budget but Fernando Luis Mattos da Matta, a forty-two-year-old Brazilian who goes by the name Marlboro and to whom Pentz has become close, thanks to the latest in a dizzying series of cross-cultural musical appropriations that began nearly thirty years ago."

i mean i know more pac-was-revolutionary white guys than dipset LOL white guys (them i only know from the internet thank god) but you really think theyre equally bad?!?!

Neither is necessarily bad but about equally annoying. I say both types always seem to me to be a little too excited to interact with real life black people. Or tell you about those other ones that they know.

xpost And the cynic is me is not especially surprised that Diplo and Malboro are teaming up together now. Maybe Diplo got a little tired of the "you're just a carpetbagging white boy" grumblings.

"Cousins, first, second, third and distant, let's have Mantan take us all the way back to a much more simpler time. A time wen men were men, women were women, and Neggras knew their place. Cousins, I want all of you to go to your windows. Go to your windows and yell. Yell, I'm tired of the drugs, the crack babies born out of wedlock to crackhead aids infested parents. I'm tired of the inflated welfare rolls while good wholesome Americans bring less and less of their paycheck home every two weeks. I'm tired, you're tired, we're all tired of these so-called bible- thumping God fearing, whore mongling Professional athletes. Aren't you tired of these basketball-dunking, football-running, hop-hip rapping ebonic-speaking sex offenders who got ten kids from ten different Ho's?"

ok, 1st thing and this is experience talking so its limited, but this big over pac shit has dick to do w cleverness or melodrama. 2 otm. its just some efficient we cn buy ready to die and be thru w them bullshit. i heard a ton of live pac and big w bonethugs gettin rides w kids in the midwest, no limit too, pun, whatever, but i think to this post or retrospective audience the pac cds are recursive and infinite, untouchable, parentheses like um the quote crack problem, and if you just look at the music videos, pac ridin thru the dust, little preadolescent posthumous notorious clean as fuck, that its most of all a class thing? big rappin abt videogames, plus shakier body image, coffin speculation

earlier today i ws reading this twelve year old luc sante review of clockers and obv much shit has changed not least the way ppl wanna fuck w rap in terms of persona but i like the spirit, the caution

"Still, what engages the reader is not merely the mechanism of the mystery but the depth and spaciousness of the depictions. The book's chief pleasure lies in recognition, that lure of naturalism rendered suspect by modernism, the immediate identification of people, places, and things we've maybe only glimpsed peripherally in life, but which are here suddenly presented in rounded trompe l'oeil, not to mention trompe l'oreille. There is, of course, more than a hint of voyeurism in our appreciation of this vantage."

"The surface particulars of the inner-city experience have been represented with varying degrees of glibness so many times that they have become hollow conventions in the minds of most people who do not live there, no more substantial than the main street of Dodge City or the floor of Doc Holliday's saloon, so that their bona fide counterparts on the evening news can be briefly perceived and then dismissed as abstractions."

"After all, while fiction may be fiction and owe no fealty to the matter it transforms, a novel that depicts an ongoing disaster bears a special responsibility. Price's intentions are entirely noble, and his skills are more than sufficient to give them force. It may be, however, that no intentions or skills can contend with the poverty of realism in an age of documentary saturation. It may seem unfair to cavil this way at Price's large achievement, but then it may be a measure of its success that it suggests a further step: that the reader, who can so easily and passively consume the experience of the novel, be made to work for it."

Has anyone on ILM commented on the fact that Diplo's Electronic Press Kit makes heavy usage of footage of his djing a mostly black high school dance?

Seems to be working on a couple of levels: first, it's a kind of lo-fi, anti-rockstar-rockstar sensibility "Haha I'm playing at a high school, etc." But more importantly, it gives him the "Black People Seal of Approval" -- the same one Eminem needed to launch his career as the first white rapper to escape the gravity of Vanilla Ice. Look, they're dancing to it! They like it! And it also reaffirms his image as a merchant of music raw, exotic and sexual ("look at the freaky dances they do!".)

And yet I have to admit my first reaction to the video was just that I really liked it. In fact I watched it a bunch of times. It made me want to dance. It made me want to have more fun in general. And I think what saves the whole thing from being COMPLETELY condescending is that a lot of the footage is just about kids having fun and acting goofy.

the revive that had to be made

http://www.divecambodia.com/images/DiveSites_KohRongSaloem1.jpg

http://www.geocities.com/katarin3109/ZhuRong.jpg

http://www.holidaycity.com/rong-wei-guangzhou/map.gif

can't we turn our attention to freeing t.i.?

http://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/z/fotos/zhu_rongji.jpg

http://www.nsbd.gov.cn/zx/ldzjt/images/17.jpg

so president bush-- the first one, the old one-- says to rhu rongji, "put us in charge for three days and we'll give you human rights, democracy and a free market." and zhu rongji says to bush, "okay, and we'll give you three 河南人 and america will be GONE in three days."

FREE T.I.

so president bush-- the first one, the old one-- says to rhu rongji, "put us in charge for three days and we'll give you human rights, democracy and a free market." and zhu rongji says to bush, "okay, and we'll give you three 河南人 and america will be GONE in three days."

-- dylannn, Friday, October 19, 2007 1:57 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

^^^this was actually funny.

here's another bush joke, big j

so, when george bush eats at a western restaurant in washington, he's always really proper: fork in left hand, knife in the right hand. but when he eats in a chinese restaurant in washington he's got a green onion in his left hand and a bottle of tsingtao in his right hand-- like a 山东大汗.

haha the joke itself wasn't funny, i just loled at the random appearances of "rong"

i don't know anymore zhu rongji jokes, man.

http://news.china.com/zh_cn/history/all/11025807/20070406/images/14029511_366556.jpg

http://bp0.blogger.com/_VXQinw7KBZE/Rxa_cSSjt0I/AAAAAAAAAYY/Uohe9Y4_H8k/s1600/Huaguofeng.JPG

hua guofeng, the forgotten leader between mao getting put in the ground and deng xiaopeng wresting control back. still alive and sleeping at the big 17.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/images/photo/2007/10/16/20071015CHINA/20345322.JPG

http://www.cas.ac.cn/Images/2003/12/26/1618134.535276E-02.jpg

http://photo.sohu.com/20050103/Img223765752.jpg

http://www.tzxf.gov.cn/upload/060814083648243.jpg

http://cimg2.163.com/cnews/2006/10/4/2006100401082077fe7.jpg

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/dec/30/audiences-dont-want-white-anger-how-white-rap-grew-a-conscience

isn't that exactly the same trajectory that Everlast and Vanilla Ice had?

Makes me think of when eminem started producing and people were like, God this is funkless. But maybe he was just embracing his whiteness lol. Message seems to be, everyone should just stick to their own. If that gets rid of Iggy azaleas shtick then great, but pushed to extremes, it seems pretty limiting.