Sasha on Shadow, Diplo, Eminem & Minstrelsy

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.