Barbelith Underground > Radio & Music > The white rock fan's hip hop cd collection

Who said I was dissing? BB has indeed worked very hard to construct himself in identification with black American hip-hop culture (interesting contrasts in Pepsi Max's construction here, btw - we have "university-educated" against "working-class"), which efforts are made more admirable by the absence of the usual significations for entry. Much like women in the workplace, he *has* to work harder at it in order to refute accusations that he does not belong. Do you see me denying love to women in the workplace?

The NME, incidentally, has responded to a criticism of their "Top 100 albums" feature which went :

It's clear that you guys have a thing about white boys with guitars. Just as long as there ain't too many saxophones or pianos and definitely not too many black faces (Ray Charles? Otis Reading? Bob Marley?). Come round for tea - I'll paly you some tunes)

(Thus once again reinforcing the unfortunate fact that most anyone who feels strongly enough about music to write into the NME is going to be a fucking moron)

with:

Well done for noticing that NME tends to cover the world of guitar music. We agree with you that there aren't too many "black faces" in that world, and there shoudl be more, but we're not going to rig our own poll in the name of tokenism.

Thus once again reinforcing the unfortunate fact that anyone who feels strongly enough about music to write *for* the NME etc etc chiz chiz...has anything ever been doen in the name of tokenism? "Hey guys, if we do this, it will be really tokenistic!" "Yay! Viva tokenism! We need to show how very tokenistic we are!")

This seems to reinforce the contention that the Brit music press is heavily stratified by genre, and thus that the sort of hip-hop that turns up in the NME is going to be the sort of hip-hop that their indie-boy writers like and feel comfortable recommending to their indie-boy reader. Nothing inherently *wrong* with that, but it does mean that the "NME selection" *is*, avowedly, not based on deep understanding of or affection for hip-hop. The editors and writers might, with some justice, say that people looking for that are as likely to find it in the NME as they are in Q, Uncut etc, all of which have in their mission statement the service of people who like a paricular sort of music, and consider themselves reasonably musically cosmopolitan but don't want to go too far along other pathways (although why guitar-free Ladytron, for example, get features is another question). Are they letting the side down here, and what other press exists to supply the absence? And is this slightly romantic idea that hip-hop is a difficult and alien culture (don't Eminem albums sell rather better in the UK than "Now That's What I Call Gamelan?") for the Brits (what are the Brits described here?) also feeding into this?

Personally, I can't see why you lot are all wasting your time debating the values of two musical forms with an almost identical commitment to a regularised rhythm and atonal vocal performance. It's like Duane Eddy vs. Gene Vincent all over again...