You know the Pun'll dis you, if you're whole steez is unofficialHmmm. I normally love those lines--especially when jogging down Malcolm X, or even in Central Park. But, somehow there amongst the natural wonder of Colorado, Big Pun just felt wrong. I thought about that while reading over Conor Friedersdorf nuanced take on white people who play gangsta rap at their weddings. Frankly, I think such a practice is the ultimate in white privilege--any respectable black groom committing such an act would get a beat-down from his grandparents. But, in all seriousness, Conor hits on one of the saddest things about hip-hop and modern R&B--the abandonment of euphemism and subtlety. I have my theories about where Ronald Isley's "Voyage To Atlantis" ends, but I'd rather here him being coy, than hear R. Kelley snickering like a eight-year old with a dirty magazine.
I'll come and get you and let the Desert Eaze tongue-kiss you.
With one pistol and two clips, I'll make you're crew do flips
Like acrobatics, my gat is magic.
« Through a lens darkly | Main | CHFF comes with the ratings » When keeping it real goes very wrong11 Sep 2008 10:41 am
On the last day of the Democratic convention, I strapped on my Ipod, and took a nice trail-run through the wilds of suburban Denver. I was lovely scene, the mountains in the distance, the full blue sky, prairie dogs (I'm not making this up) scampering through the fields. And then crashing through my ear-buds came the following lines:
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This isn't just a phenomenon in Hip Hop or R&B. It's happening in all music.
For instance, I love Buckcherry's "Crazy Bitch," I do. But there is no subtlety there whatsoever.
Hey - you're crazy, bitch. But you fuck so good I'm on top of it.
Compare that to Zeppelin's classic:
Squeeze my lemon, baby. 'Til the juice runs down my leg. The way you squeeze my lemon, baby, make me fall right out of bed.
It's happening in all forms of music. It's happening in the movies, it's happening on television.
It's about society, and more specifically, the dumbing down of society. In today's environment of short attention spans, people don't have the inclination to get subtlety or euphemism. The jokes would go right over their heads. Today, if you're not beating someone over the head with obviousness, they'll just change the channel.
Avoid the prarie dogs, nice way to get bubonic plague.
1. Do you like Anthony Hamilton
2. How much do you hate the term neo soul?
Playing dirty hip hop at a wedding is not acceptable for white folks. It may happen, but it is unacceptable and will piss off alot of your guests. The DJ at myc cousin's sweet 16 a few years ago played "Lean Back" and almost got his head put through a speaker by a mob of juiced-up middle aged irishmen (want to laugh? They objected to the use of the N-word).
At my own white wedding, we played tamer rap classics, like "sawed off shotgun" by Cypress Hill and "automobile" by NWA [im kidding].
I agree that lack of subtlety in music is a problem. It takes alot of the artistry out of the work.
At my wedding we played "If I Were a Moose" by Fred Small, which must be the most ungangsta choice ever.
I think Jason's right. It's an oddity that back when discussing sex explicitly in movies or songs was verboten they had to come up with clever ways to phrase things so the song or scene worked on two levels. (All those train tunnels.) Watching the Charlie's Angels movies with my daughter a few weeks ago I flinched at the heavy fisted double entendres--not that it was a sex reference in front of my middle schooler, but that it was such a thuddingly unsubtle, unfunny sex reference. Compare that to Some Like it Hot in which I managed to miss as a (very sheltered) teen a whole bunch of sex--the movie works on both levels. I sang along to "Dancing with Myself" for years before any other interpretation of the lyrics occurred to me.
Being not much of a rap person I don't have much to say about the violence half of this in songs. But in fiction I much prefer a writer who can convey that torture is horrifying without being graphic (Bujold's Mirror Dance), rather than something that's casually tossed in (Alias, 24, and a lot of post 9/11 tv) or done as torture porn.
The loss of subtlety means there's less and less chance for kids to say "wait I just got that on a whole different level." Which seems not good.
I dunno man, I'm not sure it gets any better than "Feelin' on Yo Booty."
Was Shakespeare being subtle when he dropped that joke about "country matters" into Hamlet?
There's absolutely nothing subtle about Juvenal's Sixth Satire, the story of Rabbi El'Azar in the Bavli, much of Canterbury Tales or a huge variety of Western and world literature.
Even in historical periods of supposed greater sexual subtlety, you get utterly outrageous things like the rape narrative of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" that would never fly in an analogous contemporary song.
The "squeeze my lemon" lyric is not of Led Zeppelin's creation, but they lifted it from Robert Johnson, who likely lifted it from another country-blues song of the time, and like all great lines, it most likely dates back into a folk tradition of spectacular dirtiness.
DivGuy makes a good point. The blues songs on the first couple of Zeppelin albums were mostly (expertly done) covers.
This thread brings to mind some old Tool lyrics:
I've been to a lot of weddings of white people, and I'd estimate that 95% of them play AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long" at some point.
Sample lyric:
Taking more than her share
Had me fighting for air
She told me to come but I was already there
I dunno. I really don't see that gangsta rap is somehow more graphic or unacceptable as a genre than rock or country. I don't think we're in an age of particular dirtiness on a historical level, and I don't think there's anything necessarily bad about unsubtle discussions of sex in art. (I study ancient history, and once your Latin or Greek gets good enough to read the untranslated bits, you get a sense that our culture was remarkably prudish compared to the Ancient Mediterranean.)
I think there are ways of appreciating gangsta rap among white people that reflect white privilege - the ironic mode, primarily - but I'm having trouble condemning whole hog the public enjoyment of gangsta rap by a group of white people.
I was at a wedding in Camden, Maine a few weeks ago where white people played Kanye. As you would expect in Camden, ME, the wedding was replete with seersucker suits, Izod logos, and nifty, faux-rustic decor to make us all feel like we were at a Kennedy picnic. At one point, Gold Digger came on, with its famous line, "I ain't sayin' she a gold digger, but she ain't messin' wit no broke n*gga" and every person shouted every word of the track. I thought, "50 drunk white people shouting n*gga at a New England wedding... I don't think this is what Kanye had in mind..."
ML raises a good point. There are very important differences in what it means to sing along to certain lyrics in much contemporary hip-hop for listeners of different races. That Camden wedding you describe surely hits the sweet spot of Ta-Nehisi's condemnation of white privilege in the public enjoyment of hip-hop.
But it seemed to me that he was speaking more broadly, and particularly about sexual or violent imagery and language, and he's following Conor's argument that gangsta rap really is particularly bad in those respects. I just don't see it, and I think the claim that gangsta rap is particularly bad in those respects arises greatly from the way that people in our society are attuned to hip-hop as being "violent" or "misogynistic" - not that all hip-hop is blameless, at all, but that the shape of this attention doesn't match to the actual existence of violence or misogyny in popular art.
I dont think that the violence/misogny in hip hop is the problem as much as the ubiquity of it. I mean there is room for all types of musical expression, including what we find now typically associated with "gansta rap". But sometimes you want to bang out to something without hearing b*itch or nigga, and frankly, there aint much of it out there.
I know it aint all like that, but really, how many times can I listen to reflection eternal?
Div,
Good points--especially with the history. But is Conor really arguing that gangsta rap is particularly bad? Or is it just that that's the music of his peer-group, so he's focused on it. I certainly wouldn't argue that gangsta rap has a monopoly on the profane. But I love hip-hop, and kinda love gangsta rap, so it's what I'm focused on. It doesn't mean that this doesn't happen other places currently or in the past.
I would argue, not so much for subtlety, as for discretion--knowing when to go hard and when not to. I generally dislike art that shifts either way to strongly. I do agree with the first commenter that we live in era where More is More seems to be the mantra.
TNC-
Thanks for the response.
If you and he weren't singling out hip-hop for its unsubtlety, then I was misreading you, and I guess we don't really disagree on that point.
On the other point, I think that really great art has arisen is periods and places that were even worse on the "more is more" front than our own. I'm much more interested in what artists do with and within the constraints of their culture than in whether the culture is or ought to be more or less constraining. I don't see a lot of good that comes of critiquing the entire culture for being "more is more" - rather it's about the particular bad expressions of "more is more" that ought to be critiqued.
Well, Pun has always been, first and foremost, about his flow, breath control and the way he flipped words. You're not going to Pun for substance.
Check out Time Machine's "Life is Expensive". Less myopic than your typical underground backpacker type joint, less egotistical than Kanye, and with an instrumental track called "Mountains" that would have been perfect for your run. Best hip-hop album I've heard in years.
Yeah I don't believe in "the culture" being more restraining, per se. But to your point, too much "More is More" is, I think, a fair critique of some of the problems with hip-hop. We can debate about whether that is in fact the case, of course. Just one fan's read on the art he loves.
My gat is magic as well, particulalry in the middle of Little Italy... [Pun reference]. TN, I think the new generation has no appreciation for the exhiliration one feels when they catch a new reference the 5th or 10th time they hear a song. They are, on average, a people lacking in curiosity. I was listening to the intro on Nas' new album with a younger mentee and I was marveling at how Nas destroyed 50 cent in two obscure lines. The dude could not look behind the words; I had to explain every single reference and afterwards, instead of being impressed by the word play, he was upset that he had to think so much to understand the substance. It's the way of the new.
Hey, at least it wasn't "Make it Rain".
"the saddest things about hip-hop and modern R&B--the abandonment of euphemism and subtlety"
This is precisely why a lot of old-school folks like me - who love blues and classic R&B - find so much "hip-hop", "rap" or whatever incredibly lame and embarrassing to its practitioners and its fans.
(the other thing is the fact that in production terms, it was a spinoff of disco developments - mountains of synthetic riffs and studio gimmicks. It's not about "sampling" as objectionable - Charlie Parker "sampled" show tunes and then showed his chops in real time. It's the gimmickry and, to put it bluntly, the sophomoric nature of too many of the lyrics.
My two cents - maybe I haven't dug deep enough, but I have yet to hear a rapper who doesn't sound like an adolescent punk compared to Howling Wolf.
"My two cents - maybe I haven't dug deep enough, but I have yet to hear a rapper who doesn't sound like an adolescent punk compared to Howling Wolf."
I don't know if you're listening to enough rap. It's a genre in which the shit tends to rise to the top while the cream sinks to the bottom. There's a lot of underground and independent stuff that's really deep. I'll take the opportunity to plug my personal favorite: Brother Ali.
I remember once as a teenager driving on a perfect summer's day, wind in my hair, boyfriend in the next seat, to discover my brother had loaded the car with Pearl Jam CDs.
We made do with what was on the radio. Some music is just wrong for the setting.