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I mean, where do those indie rock artists come from? It seems a bit silly to imply that he music/culture is the source of the issue and not the fact that most of these guys are coming from abject poverty and, in turn, communities larded with crime and violence. There are lots of young black men dying for stupid reasons who aren't successful rappers. I guess it's possible that this is all just a question of culture, that some people just love living in neighborhoods where they're unsafe and at constant risk of burying their children, but I guess I'm inclined to believe that there are broader, more systemic forces at play that are either indifferent to or actively exploiting the suffering.
To be fair, nobody sincerely cares about this stuff. Online outrage is a Schrodinger's cat thing, where people get furious if you point it out to them, but the moment their attention is diverted elsewhere it may as well not exist. I don't even intend this as a criticism of the average culturally liberal music consumer, but just a recognition of our insane, breakneck media consumption. There's so much evil in the world, and so many outlets to give us knowledge of it, that no one can internalize all of it without being driven mad. You have to pick your battles, and unless the only news you consume is related to pop music, it's hard to rationalize that an imprisoned R&B singer possibly receiving some royalties is more offensive than, say, legal abortion being functionally outlawed in the US.
The first time I heard Charlotte was on "In Your Eyes" from BADBADNOTGOOD , and I assumed she was a Sharon Jones type, a journeyman soul singer who was having a late-career renaissance working with younger retro-leaning funk/soul musicians. When I did a search and realized she was a 20-something blonde Canadian girl, I was dumbstruck. The point being, CDW is the fucking truth. I don't know what tragedy has befallen her at such a young age, but her voice absolutely bleeds the hard-earned soul of someone decades her senior.
I find this whole thing hilarious. I mean, obviously Lana comes off as kind of clueless, but I think it's illustrative of the fact that there's an entire rhetorical framework within the online left that's kind of inscrutable to anyone who's not regularly engaged with it. I think people ascribing ill intent to what she's said are being unfair, but it's kind of wonderful seeing her just continually stumble into culture wars landmines without even realizing that her leg is about to get blown off. She's like Sideshow Bob repeatedly stepping on the rakes, except the rakes are woke discourse. More seriously though, I think it's a genuine issue that so many left-leaning people feel alienated from what should be movements that don't just accept them,. but welcome them with open arms. Conservative fascist types will take in anyone off the streets who expresses even an inkling of discontent with "SJWs" or "feminists", but it feels like too many progressives expect people to arrive fully-formed. to come to the movement already understanding the language and the discourse and the politics. I don't know how you can expect to build a mass movement of disaffected people while at the same time frothing at the mouth to "cancel" anyone guilty of even a single infraction. I think this is a big part of why leftist movements have had such trouble migrating offline and affecting actual electoral politics (certainly not the only reason, but an unforced error nonetheless).
Danny Brown has been on Twitch for at least a few years, not just since "last week". Just to confirm that I wasn't crazy, I checked on this site (http://twitch.center/follow) and confirmed that I first followed his channel on 10/19/16 (username: kerdakai | channel: xdannyxbrownx). The difference now is that he's begun taking it seriously and streaming multiple times per week. In the past, he would only get on once every month or two, at best. Also, I don't understand how watching people play video games online is a concept that people still treat as some wild, brave new world-type shit. I'm not saying that you have to "get" it, but Youtube "Lets Play"s have been a thing for, what, around a decade+ by this point? In fact, I would argue that Lets Play/streaming culture is actually older and more established than modern digital "mixtape" culture. Watching a stranger play Madden online isn't anymore "Kids These Days" than downloading a Fred The Godson mixtape off of DatPiff.
Is it weird to say that you're proud of a rap group who you don't personally know or have any financial stake in? If not, then I'm proud of the Zombies. There are so, so many early-2010s art rap acts that just disappeared into the ether as soon as they stopped getting coverage on Pitchfork, but FBZ have stayed grinding and, most importantly, improving. I can't think of many other, if any, young rap groups who've done better at balancing a sense of history and a dedication to "bars" with an aesthetic capable of speaking to people younger than 25. It's just nice to hear guys who can actually spit but aren't moon-faced goons in XXXL Pelle Pelle jackets.
Nicki is a solid rapper with tremendous pop sensibilities. That's fine, and she deserves commendation for that. There's a legacy of great late 80s/early 90s pop rappers that Nicki is carrying on the mantle of, and I like the fact that rap music has opened up enough over the last decade that people like herself, Drake, Rae Sremmund etc. can make ebullient, unabashedly poppy music within a rap framework and still be accepted as part of the culture, and not just dismissed as "sellouts" or whatever. But Nicki is not a great rapper. She uses rap vocals effectively as a tool in her songwriting kit, but if we're really, really going to talk about people who are doing genuinely exemplary things within the realm of rap vocal performance and writing, Nicki is unexceptional. Even going back to 2010, I've always been baffled by this desire, this NEED for people to cast her as "one of the greats", when she's so evidently not. I always assume that people get swept up by her (undeniable) charisma and star power and the (not terribly novel) novelty of a pretty girl who can actually rap, and it just makes a more exciting narrative to cast her as being at the pinnacle of the genre.
No, not in my opinion at least. I've been a fan of Bronson for years, and I've always described the "Action Bronson" persona as a mix of Ghostface Killah, Anthony Bourdain and the Dos Equis Man: sort of a fantastical, cosmopolitan dirtbag who travels the world dining with royalty and pissing in alleyways. He's a guy who very much revels in the sort of gleefully scummy sensibility of mid-90s New York rap, but there's pretty much always a tongue planted firmly in cheek. An example from his song "Steve Wynn": "Green Timbs, in Vegas I'm like Steve Wynn/ At the same time fellatio from three twins/ Those are triplets, I been wildin' since the rabbi snipped it/ Then they laughed and made brisket" Why does he seem to piss people off more than guys like Young Thug, or Kevin Gates (whose song "Posed To Be In Love" is literally about beating a girl who cheated on him), or myriad other rappers with equally/more "problematic" content? Because he's white, and he's safe to criticize without facing charges of cultural insensitivity/being racially tone deaf. And I say this as a black guy ( I shouldn't have to note that, but I know the assumptions people will make if I don't). I personally love a lot of rap that, in terms of content, is deeply, deeply fucked up, and I overall tend to have a more liberal view on art, in that I don't see artists as having a moral obligation to "punch up" in their work or advocate on behalf of my personal politics to be interesting/worthwhile. But it does bother me that a lot of the same people who will get very, very angry because Mark Kozelek heckles a female journalist will all day profess their love for Future, a guy whose oeuvre the past few years has been built around shitting on his ex wife. Either you're sensitive to this kind of stuff or you're not, but be consistent. If your righteous indignation in defense of oppressed people only swells up when you're attacking a soft target, then you're a fucking phony.
So a black rapper, who goes by the stage name "Young Thug", spent his week getting arrested for threatening to shoot someone, indicted for plotting to murder a competitor, and finished it out by releasing a song entitled "I Need Chickens". This sounds like C. Dolores Tucker's vision of a dystopian future.
This is sort of the eternal question of hip-hop, whether you're talking about drugs, or misogyny, or crime, or violence or whatever. It's not being conservative or reductive to acknowledge that, yeah, a lot of the cornerstone subject matter of the genre is deeply fucked up stuff, and coming from communities where it's not just a thought experiment or cheap sex appeal, but real shit that real people are dealing with/being influenced by. In one sense, my attitude has always been "It is what is is", since I vehemently reject the notion that black musicians/artists in general should be stuck having to relay "positive" messages, since life (black or otherwise) is chock full of negative shit. Examining that negativity, even in some cases reveling in it, is part of what gives value to art. Exploring the darker side of ourselves is just as worthwhile a pursuit as focusing solely on uplift or a false, unearned sense of hope. However, a lot of modern research on substance abuse posits that it's as much if not more based on circumstance, and not just a product of chemical addiction. It's not unrealistic to think that music glamorizing really dark/risky stuff is going to have an outsized influence on people who simply don't have a lot of resources/opportunity. No reasonable person thinks that Johnny getting turnt to Future is going to turn him into a lean addict, not when he's heading to college in the fall and working at his dad's car dealership over the summer, but Johnny is a lucky motherfucker. I think the ideal would be more music with more nuance. Talk about dark shit, but talk about it in a more rounded manner. A guy like Danny Brown makes drugs sound equal parts exhilarating and horrifying, sometimes on the same song. Vince Staples can make music about gang violence that makes you puff out your chest one moment, then wince in pain the next. This stuff doesn't have to be dour and humorless, but it would be nice if it felt like it emanated from a more grounded, human place than a lot of it currently does.
At first blush, it confused me that a guy who began his career with a Vanilla Ice hightop and naked aspirations to be the Midwest version of 3rd Bass or House of Pain has gone so hard with the "Red State" Natty Lite pandering in his middle age. But really, his approach is probably more authentically hip-hop now than it was in his youth. Kid Rock of 2015 is selling a stylized, megaphone version of rural whiteness, the same way that most rappers of the past two decades have sold an exaggerated version of urban blackness. The people who identify with Rock and said Anglo artifice do so for the same reasons that people connect with black rappers: outsiders find it exotic, sexy and/or funny, and culturally marginalized insiders appreciate having some semblance of their lives cast as heroic on a grand stage. Even if the vision of rural whiteness Rock peddles may not be nuanced enough to capture the truth of an insider's life, its exaggeration helps it to pass the uncanny valley. By leaping over reality into the realm of the fantastic, it manages to in some ways feel more authentic than a staid, grounded, fucking depressing reflection on these communities defined by crime, poverty and a sense of abandonment. So, am I defending Rock, and some of the knucleheaded shit he says? Yeah, I guess I am to a degree. I can look to my right and see a "Heavy Rotation" recommended mixtape by Juicy J, a contemporary of Rock who's around the same age and still extolling the virtues of good pussy, fast money and strong drugs. I doubt that a deep dive interview with Juicy would reveal a guy of any greater sensitivity or progressivism than Rock, and it would be hypocritical of me to accept his exaggerated urban blackness while shitting on Rock's exaggerated rural whiteness. Both guys are indestructible vets who sell a very particular image that resonates very deeply with a certain audience (probably a lot of the same people, in truth), so more power to them both.
I think Killer Mike said it best: "You really made it or just became a prisoner of privilege?" There's something profoundly terrifying about the idea that a guy as successful as Wayne, who's been rapping professionally for the last 20 years and has been a gargantuan, world-conquering household name superstar for the last 10, could be so jammed up and beholden to the whims of god knows how many bad actors and scumbags that he has to beg for career help via Twitter. I mean, WTF? Weezy is about as successful as a post-mp3 English language musician could be, rap or otherwise, so imagine how monumentally fucked all of the Schoolboy Qs and A$AP Fergs of the world are.
For her own sake, I hope Meredith is never exposed to rap music. I think she would have a seizure at the sheer volume of hyper-aggressive, oft times violent imagery that's been a hallmark of the genre since its inception. Even worse, most of that music has come from the sorts of long marginalized voices that she seems to be hanging her utopian hopes for the future on. Human beings are assholes. Artists, in particular, are assholes. Being an asshole isn't a trait unique to those who are old, or white, or male or "rockist". I promise you there are plenty of young, black, queer, female artists out there who are raging douchebags with inferiority complexes (see: Azealia Banks). Artists do and always have fought amongst each other, independent of medium, independent of race, independent of time and place. It's monumentally silly to try to spin this one wholly unexceptional example of a guy being a prick into an epitaph on white male privilege. I also don't see how Mark Kozeleck telling a band to "suck his cock" is in some way more "problematic" than Perpetual Think Piece Generating Device Beyonce screaming "Bow down, bitches".
Wow.... I don't shock easy, but this is one of the most skull-numbingly fucked up things I've probably ever read. For the most part, I don't subscribe to notions of certain people being abjectly "evil", as I believe pretty much everyone is capable of immense cruelty and barbarism, and "evil" is more a product (of circumstance, of culture, of too much power and too few boundaries) than it is a state of being. However, stuff like plotting how to get children addicted to meth so you can train them as sex slaves, or filming yourself fucking a baby, crosses a line that I can't really rationalize. I don't know what circumstance or mindset you could find yourself in where these things seemed reasonable or justifiable. This is just indulging in depravity because you can, because you're intoxicated by the idea of subverting fundamental notions of humanity. This is the embrace of "evil" as a fully-consuming state of being.
In today's rap scene, a mixtape is largely just a free album. In the 90s, hip-hop mixtapes were more like actual, traditinal mixtapes, in that you had a DJ creating a mix of current hits, upcoming, unreleased singles by both label and underground artists, and freestyles. This was technically illegal, since they were selling copyrighted music, but labels put up with it since it was effectively free promotion. Mixtapes were the original music blogs, and were the fastest, most effective ways to break new songs and artists. This changed somewhat in the early 2000s, as you had an influx of single artist/crew mixtapes from collectives like G-Unit and Dipset that were less about the DJ and more akin to slapdash albums playing loose with copyright law. There was an entire era of (largely failed) "mixtape rappers" who had released hundreds of songs and freestyles before ever releasing major label debuts (Joe Budden, Papoose, Saigon, Uncle Murda, etc.). It was actually Budden's 2006 Mood Muzik 2 that really began the trend of mixtapes featuring mostly if not exclusively original production and fully formed, hook-laden, radio ready songs. Mixtapes became a way for rappers to release music in an era where the label business was imploding, finished albums were sitting on the shelf for years and traditional big budget marketing and promotion only existed for the Jays and Ems of the world. Mixtapes in the "blog rap" era have just taken that to the extreme. On the whole, major labels don't fuck with rap anymore, and if you're a new artist trying to make a name, without a marketing machine behind you, you can't realistically expect people to come to your Bandcamp page and put down money for a 7 song EP. So, you release that shit free, and if you're lucky, some blogs pick it up, and you can go on a small tour, and maybe a street clothing brand or a liquor company will want to co-opt your coolness by paying you to make a video, or even sponsor a new mixtape, at which point the cycle begins again. There are a not insignificant number of rappers who've never released commercial albums but tour the world just off of succesful mixtapes. So basically, a modern mixtape is what would've been referred to in the past as a demo, except it's publicly available, and you have to keep making them to stay relevant in the endless churn of the blogosphere. Being a rapper circa-2013 is like being a professional amateur musician.
I very much agree with this. Also, while nobody would deny that Eminem is one of the all time great rap technicians, I've always felt that he gets elevated a bit beyond his accomplishments due to the fact that he's many older people's only real exposure to serious, verbose, dexterous rap music. The original MMLP was very much a product of late 90s/early 2000s hip-hop album construction: overlong, brilliant in spots, droning in others, and a prime example of the singles legitimately being the best songs on the album. I think there are a lot of 30s/40s "rock dad" types for whom Em is still the first and last word on artistry in rap music, and I think you'll see that reflected in the reviews. Youth music outlets are going to skewer it for being out of touch, tonedeaf dreck, but establishment papers and mags are going to cheer the return of their beloved enfant terrible, the guy who scrubs hip-hop music of all of the groove and dangerous, unhinged sexuality that makes it so threatening, and replaces it with good old-fashioned all-'Merican ultraviolence. The fact that pre-orders for this have topped the iTunes charts all week, while Danny Brown never even cracked the top 10, makes me deeply sad.
Man...people are kind of dicks about women's bodies. It's not like this is a particularly erotic photograph. Doesn't it seem strange that a woman can't display her naked torso without the image being decried as pornography? Doesn't that embody the unhealthy degree to which we fetishize and claim public ownership over women's bodies? It's creepy and patronizing to construe a woman's decision to present her body as intrinsically exploitative, as though clothing is the only means by which women can maintain agency over their art. Also, saying "she's just desperate for attention" ignores the fact that ALL artists are desperate for attention. A desperate need to be validated by others is sort of the default prerequisite for dedicating your life to a creative pursuit. People who are "well adjusted" and satisfied by the love and respect of close friends and family aren't typically inclined to throw themselves naked and raw to a cruel, disinterested public, to present the bloodiest, most wounded slabs of their person up for consumption.
Why are there so few (any?) black writers working at the major youth music sites/magazines? As this article attests to, there's probably never been a point in American music history with less overt segregation of consumption than right now, so while it's both reasonable and positive that formerly indie-dominated media would begin covering traditionally "black" music in earnest, it's a shame that we haven't seen a similar sense of diversity creep into the ranks of the people actually writing the coverage. "What’s not up for debate is that any privileged person who is interested in behaving benevolently needs to focus less on their rights and more on how they affect less-privileged people. That’s a conversation whose terms the less-privileged ought to dictate." Good point, but sort of hollow when said people of "less-privilege" aren't really being invited to join the discussion, let alone dictate it. That being said, Stereogum and every other site are going to hire writers capable of translating a vast world of diverse music down to a language and sensibility that connects with their readership, a readership that I'm going to guess skews heavily towards the young, white and educated. I get it, but it makes articles like this come across as disingenuous and self-serving, where the point isn't to dig at a challenging nugget of cultural politics, to get messy and pose hard questions to your audience, but to assuage their conscience and politely brush aside misgivings while waving the neon flag of "poptimism". I guess my point is that you can't have it both ways. Either you make an effort to have an active dialogue with a diverse coterie of writers about a diverse selection of music, or you accept your role as an anthropologist, translating outsider culture for consumption by the insiders.
It must suck to be an Asian girl. You've got a constant stream of THE creepiest white dudes coming up to you and thinking that you're the embodiment of their submissive schoolgirl fantasy. Really, I don't know that any demographic in this country are as overtly, perversely fetishized as women of east Asian descent. Clever marketing gimmick, though.
1) This song is horrible. 2) It's like Em has devolved into a late 90s self-parody of "white rap". I feel like I should be playing cornhole and getting buzzed off of Natty Light while listening to this. 3) That being said, has Eminem ever released a first single that wasn't borderline unlistenable? "My Name Is" was sort of a fun novelty record, but everything since has been roughly equivalent to the idiocy of "Berzerk", so there's still hope that the rest of the album will be more palatable. But I'm not holding my breath. I'll always contend that Eminem is one of the most technically gifted rappers in history, but has never released a true, honest to god classic album. MMLP sold a lot of copies and introduced large swaths of white America to virtuosic "lyrical" rap, but it's a bloated mess.