Sasha on Shadow, Diplo, Eminem & Minstrelsy

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