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Rock and Rap

  
  

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Regrettable Juvenilia
08:13 / 18.04.07
Because Morrissey, when pushed, wouldn't honestly come up with much more than a witty barb against his worst enemy (whatever that means) whereas Fiddy would have them kicked in, I think.

On what basis do you think this?
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
08:33 / 18.04.07
miss wonderstarr - the problem is, in terms of finding examples of things which have been written about critically, is that I tend to mean reviews, interviews and features in newspapers and magazines. Therefore it's hard to pick out specific examples - the effect is cumulative - and moreover, some of the pieces of writing I'm thinking of, even if I could remember who the writers or subjects were, are not archived online, nor do I still have copies. And then on the internet, where there's more chance of things being archived, you have the countering problem that I'm thinking of discussions on blogs, other boards, etc. Unhelpful, I know. I will try to think of some examples, but I'm going to an El-P gig tonight and then on holiday tomorrow, so I wouldn't hold your breath.

In terms of previous discussion on Barbelith, this is the big long recurring thread about commercial hip hop, how it's typically viewed and other ways to view it (there are others, and that thread is even billed as a sequel, but this being Barbelith they're quite hard to find). There's some pretty old stuff in there that I for one posted that I might not still support, and some fairly tedious knock-down drag-out fighting, but it's still a reasonable place to start, I think.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
12:43 / 18.04.07
Would I be totally wrong to say that maybe white commentators have an unconcsious bias in that when they see white artists like David Bowie, Goldfrapp, and Morrisey (among countless others) flirt with images of Fascism in their artwork and concept (Thin White Duke, Low album cover, Weimarism, Goldfrapp in first world war fighter-pilot outfit, Morrisey with 'Bengali in Platforms' and British flag etc etc) - that when white commentators see this stuff, they have an unconcsious bias towards writing it off as theatre, playing games, appropriation of signifiers, etc etc, but when they see problematic images in hip hop they assume that the artist "is actually like that" or perhaps even "isn't intelligent enough to know how to play games", because of the white commentator's accumulated ideology about race and things like the Fundamental Attribution Error?

I know that idea could be seen as problematic, because, among other things, a) who are these "white" and "black" people anyway, and b) some people are negative about both "rock" and "rap", blaming all popular music for "moral decline".

I think it still holds some water, though, if my own experience as a music fan is anything to go on - I used to be pretty much hate everything that wasn't Nirvana (I was fourteen), and saw all music using electronic beats and involving a black/urban theme (Garage, Hip Hop, Drum and Bass, and more) as all being essentially the same (and all being essentially evil). I know we're talking about exacerbating negatives, but in terms of ignoring positives about music, I was, for example, unwilling to enjoy a hip hop bassline in the same way as I was willing to enjoy a grunge guitar riff, unwilling to enjoy the "diva" aspect of someone like Christina Aguillera in the same way as I enjoyed the "Diva" aspect of the grunge singers. It was only when I fell out with the other grunge people that I started being more open to music, and now I listen to Bowie, space disco, Lady Sov and Mika, and can't stand bands who six or seven years ago I would have practically dryhumped. I'm sure that I can't be the only white/middle class (complicated, but certainly economically)/male/opinionated/young type to have undergone a similar change.

Now in terms of unfairly exagerating negative aspects of (what we will for simplicity's sake call) "rap", I have even more evidence - again, this is anecdotal, but is so common in my peer group. Basically, people who listen to bands like Slayer, with their lyrics about Josef Mengelle and dead skin masks and so on, who will criticize, say, Dizzy Rascal of all people for being "violent" (or at least flag that up as a reason why they would never listen to him). They might also accuse the music of being, not misogynistic, but boastful about sexual conquests, encouraging drug-taking and so on - it's amazing how many would-be Mall Rat stoners suddenly turn into their parents in this sort of conversation. And, frankly, if my proposition above is not true, I don't understand how these people could manage to be so intensely witless and ignorant...
 
 
Mr. Joe Deadly
12:45 / 18.04.07
Have rappers been brought to trial over the messages in their lyrics? I honestly don't know.

As Jackie Susann alluded to above, it would, I think, be helpful to look at the current Don Imus firing scandal that has been all over the American MSM, as it seems to cover much the same ground as this thread (which perhaps partly explains the thread's 'ickiness'?). For those unaware of how former radio host Don Imus' use of racist, sexist language against a women's college basketball team relates to hip-hop, it doesn't. Or at least it shouldn't, but the conversation has been deflected onto hip-hop and the alleged double-standard that exists between Imus and rappers who use "bitch" and "ho" in their lyrics.

Dr. Todd Boyd wrote an excellent response to this nonsense on ESPN.com. One particularly relevant paragraph lists a number of high-profile cases where rappers (and of course hip-hop in general) have been brought to trial. Here it is:

Rappers have long been held accountable because of their speech. For people who do not really pay attention to hip-hop, but only focus on stereotypes of the culture, this is something they might not be aware of. Here are but a few examples: In 1990, The 2 Live Crew was arrested, taken to court and eventually acquitted on obscenity charges. In 1992, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton blasted rapper Sista Souljah and her lyrics, comparing Souljah's words to that of former Klansman David Duke. Ice T's single "Cop Killer" was deleted from the album "Body Count" and his band bearing the same name as the album was dropped by Time Warner because of the controversial song. William Bennett and the late C. Delores Tucker prompted congressional hearings on the impact of gangsta rap music in 1994, hearings that eventually lead to Time Warner selling its shares in Interscope Records and its rap subsidiary Death Row Records. Jennifer Lopez came under fire for her use of the n-word in the remix to her song "I'm Real" in 2001. A Nelly concert planned for Spelman College in 2004 was canceled because some of the women at this historically black woman's college felt his video for the song "Tip Drill" was demeaning to black women. Jadakiss received a great deal of heat for his rhetorical question "Why did Bush knock down the towers?" on his 2004 single "Why? "

For more information on the obscenity trial Boyd mentions, check the 2 Live Crew wikipedia entry.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
13:03 / 18.04.07
B-but Curtis Jackson's entire media persona is based on the supposed authenticity of his reported experience - remove that and you're left with Bernard Manning, really. And I've no doubt Fiddy's telling the truth, as he sees it.

See, one of my points was that no such assumption of or demand for "authenticity" is placed on someone like Morrissey. Morrissey's songs are not required to serve any documentary purpose (despite the fact that they're largely rooted in a British social realist tradition) or to be autobiographically true (despite the fact that they're often in a confessional mode).

Flyboy suggested above, I think, that demands for authenticity are placed on indie bands. To some extent, I'm sure that's true ~ I'm sure some of the aura and persona of Manic Street Preachers is based on an indie-rock variation of keeping it real. But Morrissey is required to be authentic, I think, only in some sense of emotional truth ~ I think his fans require some trust that he really feels the sort of things (alienation, bitterness, disappointment, faint hope) he's singing about. Not that he's actually done any of the things he's singing about.

Whereas, as you suggest, Fifty Cent is somehow required to present a different kind of "authenticity" ~ on a far more literal level. I don't think that's because there's some idea that he could shoot his critics and Morrissey couldn't.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
13:04 / 18.04.07
this is the big long recurring thread about commercial hip hop,

Gee, that is long. Thanks though.

Is this thread "icky", then?
 
 
Mr. Joe Deadly
14:23 / 18.04.07
Is this thread "icky", then?

Bad phrasing on my part, sorry. I meant the strong, dismissive ("Lock and delete thread?") response to the thread early on.

But instead I went for "ickiness" because I am 4.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
14:34 / 18.04.07
lol, OK thank you for the clarification. Make sure you wash your hands before dinner.
 
 
grant
14:38 / 18.04.07
How could I forget 2 Live Crew? That happened not far from where I live, and I once worked on a set for a Luke Campbell cable special.

Everyone seemed to be getting in trouble for obscenity in that period, though -- that's the same era as the Dead Kennedys/Alternative Tentacles Frankenchrist obscenity trial (1987) which kept Jello Biafra in speaking tours for a decade.

What I'm taking from this is that rock and rap have faced largely the same *official* censuring. I'm suspecting that if rap is facing more criticism now, it's a reflection that rap is more popular and has displaced/replaced a certain segment of expression that used to be rock. (I also think to a certain degree hip-hop *is* rock, in the same way that rock and roll is blues, but that might not be a useful idea for discussion.)
 
 
miss wonderstarr
14:43 / 18.04.07
Actually I find this section in the article you linked to the most interesting with regard to this discussion:

However loudly hip-hop might claim to be real, it is not real; it is a form of representation. This is why so few rappers use the names on their birth certificates when performing. Rappers are in essence characters performing a fictional life. Though the culture is rooted in the notion and style of authenticity, it is decidedly fictional. If not, the cops could arrest every rapper who talks about selling drugs or killing someone in his or her lyrics. So we should be judging hip-hop the same way we judge a novel, a movie, or a television show, and to do so means we have to afford hip-hop the same latitude we afford any other form of artistic expression.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
14:47 / 18.04.07
Allecto Regina:

when they see problematic images in hip hop they assume that the artist "is actually like that" or perhaps even "isn't intelligent enough to know how to play games", because of the white commentator's accumulated ideology about race and things like the Fundamental Attribution Error?

That's what I was moving towards ~ and also there may be the factor that these moral panics about dangerous cause-and-effect in media always depend on some notion of a vulnerable audience group. It's never the people drawing attention to the dangerous media who are at risk of copying it or being influenced by it ~ it's always someone else. The idea that black working-class men in particular might be vulnerable to some simple "listen to a lyric and copy it" syndrome would be the second plank in a basically-racist anxiety about hip-hop ~ the first being that black hip-hop artists don't have the art or intelligence to perform theatre and play around with characters (or do anything except talk about their real lives) whereas Goldfrapp, Bowie etc are.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
15:38 / 18.04.07
@MW: Aye. I mean, no-one in the media actually says that Pete Doherty is a bad influence on students - people rip him, take the piss, make big beef about him being into blow, but no-one actually says "and this is bad because it will enourage white indie boys to mess up their lives" - they'll say Pete Deoherty is an idiot for taking cocaine in the manner of a personal thing, he's denounced on a personal level.

I know there was some OMG Teenage Girls Will Take Drugs Because Kate Moss did bollocks a while ago, but then that's just it, because the young/females in that situation are also other to the largely male media - you still never see serious articles about the Terrible Effect of "Indie Rock" on White Young Men - the fact that people will say that about "black kids" and "those rappers" with a straight face is, as you say, indicative of the kind of racism at work here.

Which racism, if I may go a little meta, really is bollocks, isn't it?

If anything I'd expect a streetwise kid from a poor area to be far more capable of defending themselves against spurious myth/role models than a typical Libs kid, simply because of the extent to which the former have to live in the crushingly real world every day - obviously that means there's going to be more pressure on them from having perhaps dealers and gang members in their immediate family and social circuit; but I think living on the estates or in the blocks can give people a hard shell of refusal to take bullshit as legit.

I think this is why so many under-priviledged kids, when told that "hey, did u know, if you stay on at school, you can be a bank manager/tycoon/marketing director!", make the perfectly reasonable decision to quit - because a) nobody really wants to be a bank manager and b) they're aware of the sort of shit you have to fake and condone and suck up to in order to acheive that position - and maybe also that money itself is no guarantee of happiness. This relates to what I was saying about how kids bunk off not because they don't want to learn, and not because they're stupid, but because the school experience today is geared around creating non-reading, non-creative business drones - it's the education system that's got it wrong, and the kids know.

Getting back to what I was saying about middle-class indie kids possibly being more at risk from role models - of course really I don't think anyone is, but I have met university kids who are kiling themselves in order to become super thin, or wilfully ignoring criticism and ethics because they only allow themselves the priority of getting rich - they've been sucked into an ideology - and I think looking at Pete Doherty's story you can see someone from an entirely well-off background (parents are doctors or similar) in love with the myth of the Boho junky loft artist in quite a pathetic way.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
16:10 / 18.04.07
I think living on the estates or in the blocks can give people a hard shell of refusal to take bullshit as legit.

I think this is why so many under-priviledged kids, when told that "hey, did u know, if you stay on at school, you can be a bank manager/tycoon/marketing director!", make the perfectly reasonable decision to quit - because a) nobody really wants to be a bank manager and b) they're aware of the sort of shit you have to fake and condone and suck up to in order to acheive that position - and maybe also that money itself is no guarantee of happiness. This relates to what I was saying about how kids bunk off not because they don't want to learn, and not because they're stupid, but because the school experience today is geared around creating non-reading, non-creative business drones - it's the education system that's got it wrong, and the kids know.


I agree with the first section of what you're saying, but the passage above maybe seems to risk constructing another myth, about working-class kids in general, and working-class black kids specificially, as tough, cynical, "genuine", "authentic", with a mission to stick it to the man and reject middle-class capitalist values. Sorry if I'm stylising or caricaturing what you're saying here, but I suppose I feel you're taking it too far in one direction ~ yes, being "successful" and earning a reasonable salary within a capitalist society does involve some sucking up and bullshit, but I don't see rejecting education outright as a positive life-plan. This is getting off-topic, but I'd just be wary of constructing a counter-stereotype of estate kids not as vulnerable dupes, but as the opposite, heroic rebels.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
06:11 / 19.04.07
On what basis do you think this?

Well, I've heard some (of course legally insubstantiated) bad shit about Fiddy, and his crew.

Plus, I met him once.

It was the worst day of my life.
 
 
Janean Patience
10:08 / 19.04.07
Alex's Grandma: Curtis Jackson's entire media persona is based on the supposed authenticity of his reported experience. And I've no doubt Fiddy's telling the truth, as he sees it. The bullet wounds are there, I'm sure, all over his bod, and it seems clear that he likes the idea of walking into a massage parlour and having his pick of the bunch, because he's sung about it, again and again.

According to a close friend, a non-threatening white Jewish accountant of his acquaintance handles 50's financial affairs in Britain. This accountant, who comes from a background so middle-class that both his parents are doctors, has been surprised to find himself becoming very close to Curtis. Indeed, Curtis now describes him as "my soul" so it would appear that there's more to the man than his public persona.

50 Cent's relentless, one-note harping on the decried aspects of hip hop - guns, drugs, hos - would perhaps imply that 50 is a persona created specifically to appeal to those who demand rappers be demons. I don't like him much myself, to admit bias, but he's been very successful in appealing to an audience who want their rappers to be gangsta. The schoolkids in deprived areas love him.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
10:25 / 19.04.07
Actually, couldn't any man with £50 or so walk into a massage parlour and take his pick?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
14:55 / 20.04.07
The schoolkids in deprived areas love him.

Bear in mind there's also the issue of the music, as something that sounds powerful, cool and can be danced too, regardless of what the lyrics might be about.
 
 
_Boboss
08:37 / 22.04.07
somebody knows something you don't know...
  
 
haus of fraser
09:22 / 22.04.07
Word

  
 
_Boboss
09:30 / 22.04.07
there's something wrong with my post upstairs i think,and that makes me angry. how angry? tell em fred

  
 
haus of fraser
09:36 / 22.04.07
Rockrap has been around ages... and they love each other.
  
 
_Boboss
09:36 / 22.04.07
be serious, else i'm a air guitar yo head off foo-

  
 
miss wonderstarr
11:23 / 22.04.07
This thread isn't really going how I planned right now.
 
 
Harrison Ford, in a battle suit, wheels for feet, knives and guns
08:25 / 23.04.07



Now that's more like it!
 
 
grant
13:02 / 23.04.07
This thread isn't really going how I planned right now.

You just have to walk this way.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
13:26 / 23.04.07
If only a moderator were about to put this thread back on track...
 
 
Harrison Ford, in a battle suit, wheels for feet, knives and guns
13:47 / 23.04.07


The Mods don't give a monkeys they have their own problems.
 
 
grant
16:48 / 23.04.07
OK, OK, last time I checked, the mods weren't actually active in the hip-hop scene.

But what does one make of the permeable barrier between rock & rap? Is Kid Rock assumed by the mainstream to be "theatrical" rather than "autobiographical"?
 
 
Janean Patience
18:56 / 23.04.07
I said: The schoolkids in deprived areas love 50 Cent.

Allecto Regina: Bear in mind there's also the issue of the music, as something that sounds powerful, cool and can be danced too, regardless of what the lyrics might be about.

Very true. And what ever you may think of 50's rhythm and rhymes, me personally not being a fan, he's had fairly stellar tunes since his debut. In Da Club deserved to take over radio just for that Dre hook alone. Never mind being the first to rhyme party and Bacardi, which has since become a hip hop staple. The schoolkids I knew of were into all kinds of hip hop and certainly the popular stuff. Play them Ludacris and they'd be bouncing in their chairs. Play them 2Pac and they'd honestly get tearful.

Their devotion to Fifty, though, outweighed that. I think, and it's obviously subjective, it was because he'd so successfully turned himself into a cartoon. The muscles, the guns, the naked lust for money and power were everything they wanted from a rapper and he didn't spew confusing sick shit like Eminem. Fifty was the very model of a gangsta rapper and they loved him for it.
 
  

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