Sasha on Shadow, Diplo, Eminem & Minstrelsy

My thinking about this panel started in the most obvious place: Eminem, the closest we have to a single, unified, popular 21st century minstrel. A few minutes later—I am slow—Beastie Boys came to mind. And then there was a long pause. It went on for hours. Despite the prolonged and acute popularity of both of these acts, they are the whole kit and kaboodle, and I am using kit and kaboodle in its technical formation: acts that stick to one genre, sell lots of records consistently and that people care about. Hip-hop is the subset of pop music that ate the set—it is the set now, and making the distinction that Eminem is more blackface than, say, Limp Bizkit or Linkin Park, would not hold true in every theoretical showdown. We don’t want to make the mistake of importing the terms of Lott’s discussion—which begins many lifetimes ago, in the 1830s—into the present, difficult to decode historical moment. Blackness, like capitalism, is an idea that has diffused itself through both social relations and artforms. Anyone looking for a pure specimen of “whiteness” or “blackness” has gotten lost on the way to the hockey arena. But still—hip-hop started black as midnight and is now as popular as money itself. And yet we have only two significant, while Billboard Top 10 superstar rap acts, almost thirty years into the game. I don’t think that means blackface has disappeared. It may have simply left the face behind.

In Love and Theft, Eric Lott describes how minstrel music of the 19th century assigned specific aesthetics to specific racial groupings. Lott points out that the popularity and ubiquity of minstrelsy—like any pop genre, I’d add—reinforces the aptness of these assignments, turning artistic relationships into correlations then classed as “natural.” As I read, and thought of how actual, solid people get stuck to music that is never not in flux, and how this helps pop music to do its work so quickly, a passage jumped out. Reading it, I felt like I was in the present moment. I thought about how pop, especially hip-hop, is a game of telephone where people understanding each other is subordinated to simply hearing each other, an act where any tools of amplification are considered fair game. This is from page 23: “There was a third tradition infusing the most common characters of antebellum minstrelsy, who, Nathan Huggins argues, were often little more than blackfaced version of heroes from southwestern humor.”

Doesn’t matter who thought it up; once the cork is on, and the show is a hit, the move is “black.” This took me back to my introduction to the cultural politics of pop music. I was sitting in on a rehearsal as a teenager and watching my hero guitar player talk to his bass player about a part the bassist was playing. The two went back and forth, talking about picks and fingers and thumbs, but they couldn’t understand each other. Eventually the bass player, whose name I have fortunately forgotten, said “Oh, you mean you want me to play like a nigger?” This was about 1980, in a terminally liberal Brooklyn private school.

Twenty-five years later, the question hangs in the air. In fact you could say that much of those twenty-five years—which include almost all of hip-hop, Dave Chapelle’s TV show, books like Love and Theft, and a lot of cultural studies scholarship—was taken up by answering, dismissing and rewording that question. White musicians now know an awful lot about the theft behind their love. I may be in the minority here, but I think musical kids know more about the world around them now than I did when I was a teenager. Can these increasingly educated young artists fully participate in a process of artistic miscegenation that may be, not epiphenomenal, but possibly the big point of American popular music? 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.

So blackface brings us to having no face at all, a possibility, a way to have your love and eat your theft. I am talking about the 90s and the 00s, and two talented young white men, Josh Davis and Wesley Pentz, who might have been minstrels one hundred years ago. But as DJs and producers, their music usually comes without a face. They may have a considerable aesthetic and spiritual link to Eminem and the Beasties, but they have made very different choices, choices that change their relationship to the past (which includes minstrelsy), their chances to be popular and the audience they can reach. In fact, I am more interested in the idea that Shadow and Diplo are not modern minstrels, and what kind of loss that might represent.

Neither of the people I am talking about are rappers. Both are DJs and producers. Josh Davis is known professionally as DJ Shadow, and Wesley Pentz performs and records under the name Diplo. Shadow has been working for over ten years; Diplo just a few. But both began their careers as white DJs with an affinity for black music. One of Shadow’s first gigs in the early 1990s was providing a remix for a rap group called Lifers Group, black prisoners doing life sentences who had made an album for the Hollywood Basic label. His early songs and mixtapes showed a terrifying appreciation for the funk records that had been sampled to create hip-hop in the 1980s. Diplo first gained notice a few years ago as a member of the Hollertronix duo, a Philadelphia DJ duo who specialized in playing Southern and Eastern rap to club audiences and making skilled, funny mixtapes. Recently, Diplo has been one of the most visible European-American DJs playing the working class Brazilian dance music known as “baile funk,” “funk,” or “funk carioca.” But when both Shadow and Diplo got signed and had to make proper albums people could buy in stores—and Shadow confronted this moment almost a full decade before Diplo—a similar tendency crept into the work of both artists. Though their DJing is firmly rooted in black music, Shadow and Diplo recorded songs for their albums full of white signifiers: electric guitars, slow minor-key melodies, sluggish tempos, cinematic strings. The crunk was in the trunk, at least some of the time. Live, as DJs, Shadow and Diplo still play music that most people, if pressed, would call black. But, under contract and in the studio, they move closer to signifiers of whiteness. Shadow, several albums into the game, is moving further and further from the hip-hop he started with.

I am not pretending to be a mind reader: I have no evidence the music Shadow and Diplo make on record is any less dear to them than the music made by other people that they choose to play in clubs as DJs. I have no evidence that, like many artists, they simply want to keep themselves engaged and play with as many forms as they can master. But I also can’t pretend I don’t hear a significant difference between what got them in the door and what keeps them in the room, and that difference is a big one, out there in the world of consumers and producers. What makes this happen? Does political correctness, the condom of pop culture, prevent them from directly aping the music they love? Did they read “Love and Theft” and freak out? Do they make “whiter” records prophylactically, to forestall the wearying effects of being called cultural thieves in the pages of newspapers, on message boards and blogs? Do white DJs play black music out, but lean white in the studio because we’ve got hard evidence that your sales go up when you sound more like Depeche Mode and less like Ultramagnetic MCs? Or are they sick of having to justify their love? A hundred years ago, maybe Shadow and Diplo would have ignored the theft and made music only from love, showing their faces, perhaps with freaky social consequences. Maybe the language of cultural studies is impoverished now. Maybe there is no way to tell the love from the theft, except by looking at the difference between, say, Eminem’s and Devin the Dude’s royalty statements.

That stuff isn't exactly filler on these guy's records.

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.

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.

Uh, some are, some aren't.

Oh bullshit.

the biggest internet dud of all time is "This shit has been covered." Maybe for you and your three friends, but not for a whole lot of intelligent people who are busy thinking about other things. And—please put this on your refrigerator if you give a shit about these things–I am not writing for your three interfriends, nor will I ever. These ideas want to circulate in the big, bad bloodstream and will, I think, read as news to many people.

He's wrong if he thinks he didn't write it for my three interfriends at least - they all went to EMP!

Shakey, I don't think it's irrelevant, not if the issue is really -- as I'm kind of banging on about -- this anxiety about having the background that your music "belongs" to. There's a big difference in character between a middle-class white person dealing in American black music and dealing in Brazilian lower-class/black music, but the dynamics of them do have something to do with one another.

x-post

Haha, well, I was looking for the exact quote, and that came up. But it's also probably a by-product of fact-checking and copy-editing for a living.

Dude, Shakey, it doesn't have to be about stealing and ownership; it's a lot more interesting if you think about it from the perspective of where people artists feel comfortable. From that perspective the mythical inner city and the even-more-mythical Rio slum are equally outside the immediate circle, you know? Jordan's voice thing is dead-on -- they can do the brass, but they have some self-consciousness that if they bring in their own voices it might not sound right, won't have the same quality as what they're playing, might even (to put words in his mouth) have fake or awkward qualities. Similarly: how would people react if Diplo, instead of just making some baile-inspired beats, actually tried to rap like that?

I don't think so. One is a community that's in your own backyard and may actually come after you over perceived injustices/thievery - while the other is distant and (probably) completely oblivious. The difference in the power politics of either scenario is self-evident.

x-post

the idea of doing indie rap instrumentals as a shit job to "pay the bills" is pretty funny!

I agree, it's different in character and more hotly and obviously contested with white and black Americans, but the personal dynamic inside it can stay similar across the board.

x-post

x-post

Why is it that thirty years on, there's still such a sense of "the other" involved? Is it about authenticity? It's definitely not about quality, since there's a lot of crap that goes out on the radio and hits the top ten.

Over 30 years ago there was the Black-Rio movement in Rio de Janeiro in the era of soul, where we played James Brown, Parliament, the Blackbyrds. In that era there were two types of baile, where people went to halls and set up sound systems; there was the rock baile where they played Bachman Turner Overdrive and all that, which was white and there was the black baile where they played soul. They stayed separated for a time and the Big Boy arrived on the scene, you know Big Boy?

A: Err..No.

DJM : Well he's dead now, but he played this sound 30 odd years ago, he had the baile de Pesada (Heavy Dance) which he started where he played soul and rock, rock and soul. There wasn't a difference and people came from the suburbs and brought their own characteristics with them. Before, those who liked rock would go to the suburbs for their parties and there was a kind of rivalry between black and cocota (whites who play rock), just playful, no fighting or violence, just having fun. And then at this same moment, Brazilian soul was born, which gave us Tim Maia, Sandra de Sá, Cassiana, Gerson King Combo, Banda Black Rio etc.

Soon after this came the Disco craze which swept through the world and the white dances became discotheques quickly, but the soul dances continued playing soul. The rock bars virtually disappeared becoming disco-bars.

Stuff that was played in the soul dances, like Kool and the Gang, started to make music which was more disco, y'know "Ladies Night" etc... and Brazilians like Deodato were producing and creating a more commercial sound with brass and stuff and this moved closer to funk and the two different bailes came together as one, and the crowds mixed together.

(cue shitty Bulworth jokes)

Is it only a minstrel show when it crosses class AND race boundaries, or is race alone the defining factor?

Mike, I think everybody thinks that, because we probably should, but there's still this image-awareness about it, to do with race and class and a million other signifiers -- and the end fact is that certain white people rapping, no matter how skilled, would still provoke WTF reactions and mockery and derision. It's not just a race or class but really a whole pile of signifiers involved in, well, "passing" in different hip-hop fields.

It's worth noting that the same thing affects black people, too -- the myth-world of rap has developed itself to such an insane point that even successful artists seem to have to spend lots of time trying to play into it right.

those mixes are great though!

(x-post)

can't it be as simple as white people catching on?

If it's appropriation you're worried about, it's not like Diplo is taking food -- purple food, mind you -- off Cam'ron's table. I mean, we're not talking about the marginilization of the kinds of artists that Diplo is accused of stealing from.

You might say that the Beastie Boys are a better example of making money while other, more "legitimate" practitioners were not, but the answer to that is that it doesn't happen anymore the way it did -- the channels are so far stuffed with better things -- call them more "real" if you want -- that the beastie boys are an afterthought at best. We don't exactly have to worry about Kanye opening up for Northern State.

Because Sasha seems to be more concerned about performers and their personae rather than misappropriation and (white) people generally making money off of a historically "black" form, the paper seemed to me to boil down to the suggestion that people are staying outside of or on the margins of the game because "blackface" carries a stigma because of blackness rather than a stigma because of inauthenticity.

In my opinion it's the latter that presents the stigma WAY more than the former. Somebody like eminem is able to transcend the inauthenticity question because, as most people seem to agree, he is (or used to be) really good. Diplo, not so much -- either because he just doesn't have it, or he's too self conscious (as someone suggested above). Note that Paul Anka and everybody else have all set their signs on doing super white-guy versions of INDIE ROCK, where even Pat Boone does not fear to tread, not hip-hop.

Anyway, my point is that this reluctance of "white" performers -- if you agree that it's based on authenticity self-consciousness rather than "blackness" stigma, articulates some degree of progress insofar as it suggests the absence of misappropriation from the "black" people that are generally making the music in question (setting aside the question of whether the industry makes white non-artist people rich and etc. etc.)

Anyway, just saying.

yeah but 130 posts in and i don't think anybody's managed to make a more convincing case for that than SFJ did for the "'blackness' stigma".

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

totally different case!! because diplo never made those manix 12's. the equivalent would be if 4hero got famous off djing hardcore records and made noodly techno in the studio right off the bat. for a while, at least, 4hero were making music that reflected the music they were playing in the clubs.

meanwhile, diplo's first outing as a producer features martina topley bird and vybz kartel! couldn't he have found someone a little more ... you know ... gully?

anyway i read SFJ's article the same was as shakey mo, except i don't think suge knight was acting out of cultural nationalism. and negative repercussions from the black community is a red herring, too, since they haven't been anywhere near majority consumers of hip-hop product for a really, really long time.

also i have my own problems with lots of the historic ideas about minstrelsy now prevelant in academia which i think are back-projecting more recent forms of cultural mishmashing back into a v. difft historic period and thus confuse matters quite a bit. but that's a whole nother axe to grind. however it does make sasha's point about trying to establish a continuum and then mark what and how things have changed a more interesting potential solution to this issue. but to talk about that, i think there needs to be more talk about the bigger issues of how things changed so we've got representation as indicating power (among many things) rather than the crude notion of representation AS power.

=

**back-projecting more recent forms of cultural mishmashing back into a v. difft historic period and thus confuse matters**

right...

-- ppp (pp...), May 28th, 2005.

I think the key quote of the Sasha piece here is: "In fact, I am more interested in the idea that Shadow and Diplo are not modern minstrels, and what kind of loss that might represent." I think he's saying that because these guys merely spin black music they like, but don't try to make music like that on their own records or make it a bigger part of identity, it's some kind of cheat or loss. Which is, I think, the most questionable idea of the whole piece.

The comeback to this would be, I think, that a shortage of white rappers might be a small price to pay to see a black-dominated culture finally to get to take a dominant place in American entertainment, and it might be smart not to try to rush past this stage in the name of integration, lest that end up being just a shortcut back to white hegemony. I mean, Eminem's good, but the reason he got so much bigger than nearly all other rappers was not because he was that much better than all other rappers, y'know what I mean?

yeah, bullseye. the Diplo baile funk mixtape doesn't have one, and it just seems to go against the entire point of DJ'ing--educating the audience, as corny as it sounds, is and/or should be the first impulse of the practice, not dangling a carrot in front of you.

xpost And he's a shitty DJ anyways. The Hollertronix party were some of the most painful I've ever been to. The tracklist thing isn't that surprising since their whole scene hinges on "look how cool we are!" rather than any sense of craft or acknowledgement to the music they play.

('we' = people in general)

xp: i donno maybe im wrong but i swear i saw sales figures for '84 that showed thriller and can't slow down as having very similar numbers. i'm sure thriller's outsold it since.

I've posted this before, its an excerpt from elijah wood's book on the blues but i think it applies to critics too. Certainly not in the exact same way, but i do think that writers are constantly distorting the way we see the past.

The neo-ethnic movement was nourished by a spate of LP reissues that for the first time made it possible to find hillbilly and country blues recordings in white, middle-class, urban stores. The bible was Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music...Smith was specifically interested in the oldest and most-rural sounding styles, and set a pattern for any future folk-blues reissue projects by intentionally avoiding any artist who seemed consciously modern or commercial...

Far from balancing this taste, the other record collectors tended to be even more conservative. Much as they loved the music, they were driven by the same mania for rarity that drives collectors of old stamps or coins, and many turned up their noses at Jefferson or the Carters, since those records were common. (Ed. note: Like Rick James, bitch!) To such men, the perfect blues artist was someone like Son House or Skip James, an unrecognized genius whose 78s had sold so badly that at most one or two copies survived. Since the collectors were the only people with access to the original records or any broad knowledge of the field, they functioned to a great extent as gatekeepers of the past and had a profound influence on what the broader audience heard. (Ed. note: Like Freestyle Fellowship or Bun B, bitch!) By emphasizing obscurity as a virtue unto itself, they essentially turned the hierarchy of blues-stardom upside-down: The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958.

Pitchfork: When Hollertronix started to go global, did you catch shit for being a white kid who was playing dirty south records?

Not really. People, like, say Swisha House for instance, they respect what I do, [and] I have a really good connection with Murder Dog Magazine...it took me a while to really get [to] all of the underground, say, Houston artists, but they really love what I do. They're all about me, they're showing me Mp3 a capellas and stuff because they kinda see me as an outlet for something different. Southern hip-hop is really just looking for a new way just to be out, 'cause there's so much going on and there's so much talent. But a lot of it's getting watered down now and they see me as a breath of fresh air. But for a while I did get flak from the intellectuals up in the North.

I just e-mailed dj/rupture, 'cause I wanted to connect with [him]: We were crossing paths a lot, and he had something on his blog which was like a "Hollertronix co-opted black culture" kinda thing, and I wasn't really pissed about it but I don't really know the guy. I was just starting a discussion on it with a lot of people because I think it's important to talk about things like that, but at the same time, I just wanted to meet him and say I'm really honest about what I do and I love the music that I play, and nothing about me is trendy. We've had three e-mails now and he seems like a really cool guy and we have the same friends, but I think it's important to have a dialogue about that kind of thing because it's obvious that I'm a white dude who's playing a lot of black music. But I think I'm just playing good music.

this 'i'm giving southern rap a new way to be out' is kinda specious - i suspect it's a very generous phrasing of "giving southern rap a new white moneyed hipster audience" (even if this is the case, it isn't necessarily meritless! but yeah, we're talking about tracklistless mixes and anonymous mp3s, not really very sincere promotional vehicles)

I'm watching Diplo's 'Florida' DVD as we speak and any suggestion that he's either blackening or whitening his music or his vision on this is nutty. This ain't black music. It ain't white music. This is FUN (and 'Indian Thick Jawns' is about tittays).

Hahahaha! I can't believe I've been ignoring this thread. There is some crazy shit on here.

so yeah, i like sasha's sense of historicity, his sense that rap is music that uniquely has continued (benzino notwithstanding) to ground itself in black america and remain largely black-produced/performed (if not always owned) far longer than prior forms of initially black music -- and this is *significant*.

Now that we're IN that new century, with a public that's intelligent enough and vocal enough to call horseshit when music is being hijacked. So while "hip hop" is now synonymous with pop music (WTF is Sasha getting at with "we have only two significant, while Billboard Top 10 superstar rap acts, almost thirty years into the game"? SIX of the current top ten pop singles are hip hop influenced/produced), there is still a vocal and active subset of artists that are keeping rap current and pointed to the streets. That's more a function (I think) of the times than the music necessarily. It's not as if blues or ragtime COULD be black produced and performed when clubs were segregated and the records were entirely run by whites, eh?

in the same way, i don't think the non-hip-hop but hip-hop-influenced pop singles you reference (not sure which ones) are perceived as "race music" the same way lil' jon is (gwen stefani? kelly clarkson?)

And has anybody noticed that frikkin' BABY BASH has TWO top twenty pop hits right now?

i think it's fair to ask HOW and WHY and if it's at all related to the shift in diplo's music from mixtape (race music: trina and trick) to album (non-race music: martina topley-bird).

(i am ignoring "diplo rhythm" because i think dancehall and grime and baile funk are functioning more like exotica in that context)

I haven't listened to the radio since I was fifteen or so; not meaning to be dismissive, just sayin' that I'm not claiming to be any kind of an expert on what passes for radio airplay rotation. I'm just goin' by the charts. I do find it hard to believe that Gwen isn't getting hip hop airplay; is that actually right?

It's on heavy rotation on Mpls's Clear Channel, urban/hiphop/RnB/whatever station, for what that's worth....I imagine that indicates most of CC's hiphop stations are playing it alot....

The problem here is what SFJ defines as significant. He ignores Beck, Timberlake, Stefani (whose "Rich Girl" and "Let Me Blow Ya Mind" hook count as well), Linkin Park, etc. etc. cuz they don't do hip-hop in the most obvious fashion, even though its an integral element to their current appeal.

bingo bango. now let's all to Bellagio.

that's a really bad definition of minstrelsy.

since when did minstrels have to offer that?

miccio, that's what minstrels do! the quality and validity part i've never heard, frankly. but if you want to talking about aesthetic and ideological concept[s] affirming the "nature" of Black culture then i'd say you're treading really close to the definition from "love and theft" that sasha laid out as his working definition.

You basically answer question one within the paragraph. As hip-hop are has such a core black identity most attempts at miscegenation will be blended into other genres. You yourself note that pop stations are hip-hop stations that also play your Gwen Stefanis, so while on one level they are indeed miscegenation outside of hip-hop. But in the pop context, they aren't. They interact and crossover in the pop mainstream. And if we're going to talk about these artists as 21st century minstrels (which he does) we need to acknowledge that.

As for question 2, hell, artists black and white have always filled their full-lengths with pretentious, saggy dross. I said that right at the beginning.

x-post to vahid. dude, Beck raps.

Which is not to say racial politics are irrelevant -- when Puff Daddy used Dave Navarro's electric guitar (and his white skin in a video) the message seemed to be partly "Hey, it's a party and everyone (regardless of race) is invited (to buy my records)". But the result, the song, was fucking awesome, so I don't much care.

"'Sblood, thou stinkard Miccio, there are pale-skinned leaders of cheering roisterousness as well, forsooth."

"Indeed sir, those mystical creatures coined the word "hollaback" as a sign of their strange talents."

so, while rap's blackness is seemingly unchangeable, rap's METHOD and more importantly sense of self is apparently completely portable to any other racial context (i mean shit, the carioca thing only confirms this, it's 2 live crew, ppl)

beyond the van gogh movie (whose hip-hop-ness might be very exaggerated re the real state of dutch-arab culture, who knows), i don't know the facts on the ground abt how this plays out around europe; are germany's turks into rap? i know there's french rap, what else? further afield, are like indonesia's chinese big rap fans? eh probably not more than everyone else on earth.

the other big parallel narrative is reggae in the UK but i don't know much about that either beyond the basics. it's way different geographically obv...

all that is tangential i guess. i think rap has remained a closed-black world for so long while becoming dominant is that language is a barrier, it IS "community" (benedict anderson) but beats are modular and can go anywhere. since rap is built on such specific linguistic stuff (more than any other pop form ever, surely) but also on the most insistent and "open" rhythms ever, well, there you go.

qn 2: i think the reason yr shadow and diplo records are what they are is less racial than just dependent on the body-phenomenology of western music: if yr going to make Something Very Serious and Personal, then that = murky, floaty, slow, minor key twinkly, etc.

now why they want their "name" records to be SVSaP is the q and where where race comes back. not to be too simple with it, but a bunch of relationships map onto one another, and making a choice on one yanks the rope on all the rest: seriousness over fun, contemplation over action, ownership over labor, white over black (this is cliffnote bourdieu i think) so if you're making your standard modernist auterist move... but then every rap album ever is something very serious and personal so this really doesn't get us anywhere, forget it.

this has serious epistemological problems. capitalism is 'an idea'? the fuck it is. but if blackness or capitalism *are* ideas which diffuse themselves, surely there has to be, somewhere, a pure specimen? otherwise we don't have blackness/capitalism-as-idea-that-diffuses, but blackness/capitalism-as-aggregate.

The first of those guys to name a song or CD My Sampler Is Black wins.

Sasha's thing reads as ideas, notes, hypotheses, speculations. For what it's worth, I like its literary style way more than what I've read in his New Yorker pieces. I think he freezes up in the New Yorker, though perhaps I'm projecting my own authenticity issues onto him. He might like the voice he dons when he goes upmarket, after all.

Anyway, being almost in note form, his thoughts are condensed. I basically needed to read down this thread before understanding why he was contrasting Eminem and Linkin Park. This is what I think he's getting at:

"Blackface" is a role or mask that forces you/allows you to do something that you couldn't do without the mask. This can be true of its black performers as well as its white. (I've not heard or read about much minstrelsy, but I know that it did have black performers as well as white, black audiences as well as white, and the stereotypes weren't always derogatory.) So "minstrelsy" doesn't mean "plays a predominantly black genre" or "derives from black music" or even "has the look and the feel of black music." Rather it means that you play a particular role that signifies "black character" but doesn't necessarily imply that you're depicting all black people or being particularly true to black music. So Eminem and the Beastie boys signify "hip-hop" which signifies "black," whereas Linkin Park don't signify "hip-hop" and therefore don't signify "playing a black character." Well, probably what Sasha meant was that Linkin Park don't consistently play black characters (if "playing black character" is what he meant; I think it's what he needed to mean, and come to think of it, the more I write this the less I'm sure I understand what Sasha was getting at).

Of course you could argue that inconsistently playing a black character is even more characteristic of minstrelsy, or you could wonder why Vanilla Ice and Kid Rock aren't central to Sasha's discussion, since though they don't come across as playing black characters they come across as playing ghetto characters, way way way way way more than the Beastie Boys and Eminem do - and the fact that Kid was playing more to the rock audience than to the hip-hop audience would therefore make him especially apropos. And the fact that Vanilla Ice couldn't maintain his career and that Kid Rock switched roles and genres actually focuses Sasha's point even more: The two who maintained lucrative careers in hip-hop (and two might be one; how much of a hip-hop audience did the Beasties maintain beyond their first two albums?) are two who don't particularly signify as "playing a black character" or as "playing a hip-hop character" - or, if Eminem signifies a "hip-hop character" it's a character he brought to hip-hop and that no other hip-hop star before or since has adopted.

To put it another way, the only two white acts to maintain a big-selling career in hip-hop are punks. The Beasties were punk rockers from the get-go (the first time I saw them was on a multi-gig hardcore bill at the A7 Annex; I'd seen a precursor version of the Beasties opening for the Replacements and Hüsker Dü at Great Gildersleeves). And whether Eminem gives a thought to punk rock or not, his persona is a thousand times closer to Axl's and Iggy's and Johnny's than to Dre's or Biggie's or 2pac's. The mask that Eminem put on wasn't blackface but Slim Shady, and I don't see where anything in hip-hop foreshadows Slim Shady (well, a little bit in Spoonie Gee and Kool Moe Dee and even Public Enemy where they use their brains to cut the floor out from under themselves, but they never played this deliberate self-destruction card with any consistency, much less made it part of their personas). And I don't see where anything in the concept "minstrelsy" explains Slim Shady.

So I don't know if the concept "minstrelsy" is updatable in regard to white performers. It seems to me nowadays if you're going to signify "black character," you've got to be black. (And I doubt that anyone not using "minstrelsy" to include "signify a black character" would be even interested in updating the concept.) So if you're going to apply the term "minstrelsy," you'll apply it to black performers - except I find that extremely problematic. The cliché goes, "the audience for hip-hop is now predominantly white, so gangsta and bling and Lil Jon and Snoop and Trick and DMX are the new minstrelsy, portraying an image of 'black' that conforms to white tastes." The problem with this argument is that it's so broad it can apply to any black person of even slight prominence, since they all have to play to whites in some way or another. If you're going to call Snoop Dogg a minstrel for playing to whites, then don't you also have to call Cecil Taylor and Chuck D minstrels (not to mention Kelefa Sanneh and Greg Tate and Cornel West)? The only black performers who'd escape this would be in gospel, I think. So the distinction between "nonminstrel" and "minstel" would be based on your approval or disapproval of the performer or on making invidious comparisons between the whites who find something appealing, as if to say you're a minstrel when you appeal to mainstream whites but not to intellectual whites. (Well, the situation is more complicated; I wouldn't automatically say that some performers don't perpetuate negative stereotypes, or that these stereotypes don't maintain the status quo, but I can't see how to test this contention in any particular instance; it becomes a matter of pulling characteristics from the air and using one's own taste to make assertions about what they perpetuate.)

By the way, that the audience for hip-hop is predominantly white is a theory that has not been proven and may not be true. The Voice just ran a piece saying that no one has undertaken a demographic study. (The author, Bakari Kitwana, thought that the audience seemed like 70-80% white for indie/undie/"conscious" hip-hop shows, and about 50-60% white for commercial hip-hop shows. Presumably, more whites than blacks can afford shows, and black sales are always undercounted by Soundscan.)

-- Forksclovetofu (forksclovetof...), May 30th, 2005.

this bullshit sums up the whole diplo/hollertronix steez right there- "dont worry, it aint black music! but, dont worry, it aint WHITE music!'

Dude, the point of said note was to point out that there ain't _shit_ intrinsic in music that marks it black or white any more so than music made by women is intrinsically different than music made by men; music is motherfuckin' music, ultimately it stands on its own merits.

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog and behind the guitar, nobody knows if you're a white boy from Topeka or a black woman from Melbourne.

Furthermore, all the additional wordplay and crit. analysis surrounding tunage is just circle jerk if it don't move ya booty and Diplo moves the booty. If you want to tell me that "movin' the booty" means it's white or that NOT movin' the booty means it's black or vers vica, well then I call bullshit on you, sir; but I imagine you're too busy riding your hobbyhorse to hear.

also i think #@# is rt insofar as the internet is not that anonymous, in fact

xp sterling kinda did it better

Sounds

Sounds deep? Thx to the bootyness of the tracks I've always half-assumed all of the baile funk stuff Diplo covers is about, I dunno, analingus or something.

i guess i cant get past the assumption that listening to music, even alone, cubicle listening, im always thinking of other ppl, or of listening w them, doing shit w them

8 really otm abt crack. theres been such heated talk abt sex and misogny and males and violence, and race, but ive never noticed ppl acknowledging the appeal there, or exploring it

not that there arent ppl talking abt some crack romanticism in or particular to dipset or whatever, just like i dont remember any

I was happier that he was repping for Ludacris, really.

which argument candicissima? if your talking abt what i sd, i meant specific to the dipset pro and con, altho i dont think i made that clear, still im sure theres some great shit abt rap and drugs, which is why i ws trying to be so hesitant

how abt on crack is good?

That means no Clipse for you, of course.

x-post: nevermind! some people find complexity.

Anthony is wrong today. But right about that being a totally ILM thing to say.

re: the clipse, you may not be convinced by their complexity, but for me the clipse have a lot more (rather non-specific) stories to tell about crack than dipset do, and they dont wear it as a badge, they engage with it.

i ws reading colette today and she had this funny phrase, civilized immorality

The Clipse use crack as means to an end, it is a tool that they use to investigate, i donno, themselves, human nature, blah blah blah. You may not agree with their conclusions (if they ever draw any) but the way they both *use* crack in rap is different.

Vahid - just because you're not convinced by the Clipse's approach does not mean that its the *same* approach we're critiquing dipset for.

You told me to put the pipe down in my comments box the other day.

Indeed. But I wasn't saying it to be funny (and didn't necessarily mean crack). I mean, you said R. Kelly was a better performer or whatever than Teddy Pendergrass. You obviously were indulging in some wrong kind of narcotics.

I think crack is disassociated from its actual social connotations because its such a pop culture cliche.

And if that doesn't speak to privilege, than I don't know what does. I'm from East New York. Crack is not a joke nor a cliche to me.

The Clipse use crack as means to an end, it is a tool that they use to investigate, i donno, themselves, human nature, blah blah blah. You may not agree with their conclusions (if they ever draw any) but the way they both *use* crack in rap is different.

And that's OTM. I'm Not You is a fucking brutal ass song, but amusing since they are those rappers now that they were slagging off.

also i totally agree w/ the "rap bloggers making tasteless and dumb crack jokes" = fools.

And the hustler imagery is a powerful one. Not a day passes that I don't feel slightly envious of someone else getting paid to basically bullshit while I'm supposedly better off by being "respectable." The minstrel is a hustler, the occupier of the overlapping space that others can not for various reasons and making you buy the idea that they've got it made. I think of Eminem as a minstel. Diplo is just a carpetbagger.

That reminds me of this asshole that almost made me break out of my mask and beat his ass. I said where i was from and his response was "oh cool! I've got a connection to that neighborhood! I used to drive with my brother from Jersey to buy drugs there!" Good for him!

yeah, like those dipset-pushing fuckers at turntablelab.com!! sweater late, wrong size, screwed on shipping charges, no tracking number ... (i mean this in all seriousness!)

??

http://gay.ru/wolfy/cinema/prostitute/justso.jpg

xp

yeah as in "crack : dipset :: tshirts/mixtapes : my website". obv it's a stupid formulation on the part of the listener.

it seems to me there are a million and one things to blame for the proliferation of crack - though haven't crack use / sales / arrests been on the downswing for a long time now? - before the dipset and their fan base.

though if you were to say it was encouraging an unfortunate mentality, i'd agree.

and its not about every review being all "this is BAD FOR AMERICA" but just like some sense of reality in the response, you know. which, say, lets ppl. also not get freaked out about the wu promoting samurai swords or something.

something like this happened to me once this guy was like where are you from and i said such-and-such and he said "oh no shit i used to hustle there"
xp because i haven't got anything meaningful to contribute at this point

sterling and 3 otm

And thanks to someone's nice ping, I was reminded that I did say crack pipe in Anthony's comment box. So shoot me.

Also, more to the point, IT'S AN OBV. METAPHOR; as in: my rhymes and my style and my swagger and ME is as addictive as crack.

Of course, ILMers frontin' like they slang rock is nonsensical and cooked cocaine is a helluva drug and so forth but I don't recall anybody being this snooty and shameshame when it comes to Lou Reed/Kurt Cobain heroin-chic.

And vahid, wtf is your problem with people liking music about swaggering?

what the fuck, asshole, what the fuck

my thing is i dont think cam is that one dimensional on drugs, that even if its always heartless and fake its still appearing in and shaded by a number of contexts. i need to listen to the record again though! but i think w rap being so dense comparatively, so many lines, that its easy for ppl to poach on, here, cams non sequiturs and then to go back and revise or reduce everything he raps abt to those terms

but, sc, i like the way you highlight ambivalence cuz rap for me, theres always shit i remember v specifically and then other shit thats notional or that i suppose i sorta remember what it ws abt, what it ws like, inside every song

Kind of disappointed the discussion moved away from the racial characteristics of non-verbal expression and how this can be detected and toward some PMRI shit about Cam'ron making it seem cool to smoke crack. (If great tragedy can't be made into great comedy I'm packing up my things and going home.)

Does someone want to, you know, tie it all together for me?

Alternately, are hip-hop artists supposed to carefully monitor the demographics of their audience and once it passes a certain percentage of white people stop being funny? I mean, in an ideal world, but...

Finally, Eminem's career arc explained.

Sure. Never heard of a ghetto pass? (I'm only partially joking)

But, what is real even? Is "I go on a lot of vacations and hang out with models" less real than "I remember well slinging rock on the corner?" Usually the actual fact of the matter is somewhere in between anyway, so it doesn't really make a difference except in the mind of the listener eating up the projected fantasy.

actually i wouldnt even suggest that a cam record contributes directly to a crack problem, altho i think he and we are implicated in smthng larger that does, just saying my suspicion is cam fans of the blogger persuasion are basically getting off on it, and ignoring it publicly

haha xpost- http://governmentnames.blogspot.com/2004/07/yo-dizzawgs-saturday-night-was-off.html

And do you think cocaine is exclusively a black problem? Do you that only blacks are misogynistic? Maybe you should check some of own assumptions, anonymous.

and cam is misogynistic, violent, greedy, hateful and self-serving. that ain't black people. that's me, and it sounds like that's you. and that's why cam'ron equally repeals me and intrigues me. that's the ambiguity that i was speaking of.

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.