Sasha on Shadow, Diplo, Eminem & Minstrelsy

"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.

That's my inclination, too. Doesn't anyone here subscribe to the SoundScan database? This is like the millionth thread when we've tried to guess the relative sales figures of particular albums.

RJD2: Definitely. I felt like I've played the consistency game. After Dead Ringer came out, there was the Soul Position record, the Diverse album, the Aceyalone record, all this s**t I did was basically normal Rap music, where I was doing this simple Rap beat thing and it was fun and cool, 95 beats per minute, chop your s**t up, whatever. F***in' moron music. I like it, but it's still moron music. When it came down for this record, it's like, what's the point of re-recording some other s**t? It would be cheap of me. I couldn't be honest. This record is as honest as I can be in terms of just sitting down and saying "This is what I feel." If I had tried to do another Dead Ringer, it would've just been a marketing gimmick to me. It might have gotten better reviews but that's not what it's about. I understand if people think, "Oh this s**t's soft or corny." At the end of the day, I don't get bent out of shape about it. This is at least a representation of the music that I like.

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.