Sasha on Shadow, Diplo, Eminem & Minstrelsy

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.

Can 'machinery' be replaced with 'instruments' and have the statement still be true?

Maybe Diplo is a good test-case in what I'm thinking about here: how do you think it would work if, instead of associating with M.I.A., he was making a record with a white rapper or vocalist from Philly? How would it have worked in process, and how would the reception have gone?

(NB Matos the Diplo album was maybe further marred by being a little boring, even within the post-Shadow genre.)

based on this - http://www.indiana.edu/~teleweb/T101/independent.html - El-P says Fantastic Damage sold less than 50k in a year, surely RJD2's audience is smaller than that.

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.