Sasha on Shadow, Diplo, Eminem & Minstrelsy

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.

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.