Bill Cosby defents criticism of Hip Hop...music industry "glorifies the wrong things..."

Kinda with Shakey here: I don't really understand the LOLs/shocka aspect of Cosby being among millions of older Civil Rights-era black Americans who are annoyed by how what's considered "black culture" looks these days -- he's not even that batty in how he talks about it. (Batty, sure, but not that batty.)

What do you expect, nabisco? This is ILM we're talking about; pretty much any time Bill Cosby gets brought up, it's in the context of young white guys getting defensive about listening to black people call each other "nigger".

who's getting defensive?

Up until just now, not you.

Whatever. I just think one can find rappers lacking as role models and still find Cosby's rants incredibly batty, crotchety, what have you.

I'm kinda curious about this loaded statement: They, they put it—they put themselves on the train and on the buses, and they don’t even care what color or what age somebody else is. Why does the race of your fellow bus patron matter?

who the fuck thought cop killer was ironic

The writers for Law & Order: SVU?

Two strands here. I think Ethan was responding to this:

Bullshit. The "irony" argument may have been passable with "Cop Killer" 15 years ago -- it isn't now.

...and he was right: what "'irony' argument"? There isn't & wasn't one, as far as I know; there was and remains a personified narrator trope, in which I believe, that can be advanced to explain a song like "Cop Killer," I think persuasively.

The other strand is white men on ilm explaining each other how neither "nigger" nor "bitch" are at all degrading when the musicians they like use them, and that strand I won't be touching with a ten-foot pole.

can we name names on this latter strand?

bebop is pretty rad

^^^this

haha Dan you wanna field that one?

I just don't get how pointing out that hip-hop's basically always had violent/mysognistic elements in it somehow invalidates Cosby's critique.

Also, he's old.

The other strand is white men on ilm explaining each other how neither "nigger" nor "bitch" are at all degrading when the musicians they like use them

Prof. Isiah Thomas of NYU says that the word "bitch" is Negro for something much less offensive than the white man thinks.

What do you expect, nabisco? This is ILM we're talking about; pretty much any time Bill Cosby gets brought up, it's in the context of young white guys getting defensive about listening to black people call each other "nigger".

-- HI DERE, Monday, October 15, 2007 8:07 PM

i'm just gonna let that sit there.

thanksbighoosakathesteedriver.jpg

i don't get it what you mean hoos.

oh unless....

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why does black people never want to goth?

haah while looking for thanksbighoos.jpg i found this:

I think black people would either be more or perhaps less likely to kick a drunk woman out of a hotel for calling a gay coworker a fag. Does ILX have an opinion on this?

-- Dom Passantino, Sunday, May 27, 2007 3:05 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Link

It's the question that needs to be answered.

"Y'see Theo, when you call my gay co-worker a fag, y'see..." etc etc etc etc

I think I'm going to sit this one out.

should bill cosby kick jay blanchard out of a hotel for calling ronaldinho a fag?

Depends how much he tipped.

"The most important reason for the decline of musical miscegenation, however, is social progress. Black musicians are now as visible and as influential as white ones."
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/10/22/071022crmu_music_frerejones?currentPage=1
dear cos, everything is fine. yours, sfj

everything is fine?

This really deserves its own thread (or just to be ignored), but WOW I love how he makes his thesis about how rap and rock couldn't be further apart by dismissing rap-metal and hip-hop influenced pop-rock as "commercial, if generally unappealing" even though it's sold shitloads more than Flaming Lips, Wilco and every other white act he'd rather blather about in relation to Snoop Dogg.

and all the indie rap groups that are actually pretty much rock groups like why? and all that anticon type stuff.

Linkin Park? What's a Linkin Park? Are they as big as Devendra?

I only read the first page of that article and I'm not sure I want to read the rest.

I'm glad he's articulating what I find...troubling about the likes of Panda Bear, but his ill-advised journey through the last 35 years of rock stops the thing cold (although, what I know, maybe this is news to New Yorker readers). And then stuff like this:

Last month, in the Times, the white folk rocker Devendra Banhart declared his admiration for R. Kelly’s new R. & B. album “Double Up.” Thirty years ago, Banhart might have attempted to imitate R. Kelly’s perverse and feather-light soul. Now he’s just a fan

Substitute "white folk rocker Joni Mitchell" for Devendra and "admiration for Marvin Gaye's new Let's Get It On" and it's not as far-fetched as he thinks.

*although, what do I know

Maroon 5? Gym Class Heroes? White Stripes? Those aren't popular "rock" bands really, they're not as relevant to the discussion as the Fiery Furnaces and Panda Bear.

When discussing the history of rock bands mining black music for inspiration, it's important to ignore all acts that reach shooting range of gold.

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I see that he's now calling his own old group Ui, a funk band. Did he always do that--I seem to recall them being considered a postrock band or some such. Parts of the article make sense to me, but then elsewhere he 's got unsupported statements that I strongly disagree with. Am not sure what Bill Cosby would think. Sasha's been warning on his blog that he was gonna post or write something that would get attention. I guess this it it (it's a followup of something he presented at the EMP a few years back, isn't it?).

the real question: would Cliff, Claire, and Sandra Huxtable have gone to a Ui concert?

relax people there's always been honky music, it's not a crime

indie musicians making shitty music bcuz of cowardly indecision = new yorker article

I think that article's pretty good - cringeworthy references to own music and debatable cherrypicking of history aside - certainly it articulates a dynamic that seems readily apparent to me, and has been for quite some time (at least, as he notes, since the early 90s and Pavement)

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um, college rock in the 80s was plenty white too

and the entire history of the British charts in the 1980's.

i miss the ass shakin' beats of dino jr. and throwing muses

i mean if we're gonna focus solely on art-rock, we can take this much further back than Pavement.

Whatever -- it's an article in the goddamn New Yorker! I don't expect its audience to understand the distinctions between a Style Council record and Panda Bear's attempts to studiously avoid sounding like a Style Council record.

hahaha

i never really got why it was so bad that some indie rock wasn't danceable or sounded white or whatever, excepting like douchebags that think indie is inherently superior, like i dunno there's got to be music for dancing, there's got to be music for being unemployed and sitting around at 2 in the afternoon feeling sorry for yourself and smoking schwag.

ew!

nobody said it's bad, we're just laughing at the idea that this is news or has anything to do with a decrease in "miscegenation" in popular music.

i wish he would finish upending the canon and just stop talking about bad indie bands altogether.