Category Archives: mainly rap music

Saturday Links

Posted on by under Authors, education, mainly rap music, Pooms/Poetry, Reviews, Visual

Ayo, readers. Here are some weekend texts to keep you cozy during each November day’s 26 hours of darkness. (Or, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, to give you something to read on your phone so you don’t have to interact with other people.)

  • From The Economist, a brief piece on America’s repulsive penchant for mandatory minimums and life-without-parole for nonviolent offenders. Being TE, the bosom publication of neoliberal trans-Atlantic “moderates,” they have to screw it up by pasting “none too bright” onto “typically poor” when describing inmate demographics, and by pivoting (in fewer than ten words) from acknowledging that the best available estimates indicate that two-thirds of nonviolent lifers are black (ninety-one percent in Louisiana!) to assuring readers that “the problem with the system is not racial bias; applying such draconian, hope-crushing sentences to non-violent offenders of any race is cruel and pointless.” This is like saying that the problem with Stalin wasn’t so much that he butchered and enslaved millions of Soviet subjects, but that killing/enslaving anyone is evil. The fact that the second part is true doesn’t somehow invalidate the first, dear editors of major publication.
  • The branch of the UAW that represents UC graduate students recently released a report titled “Towards Mediocrity: Administrative Mismanagement and the Decline of UC Education.” Read ‘er here. It points out plenty of things this blog has underscored in its own little way: that holding impersonal classes in decaying buildings is bad for the UC; that not investing in teachers and researchers (especially younger ones) is bad for the UC; that going whole-hog for privatized online classes which are demonstrably expensive and shitty is bad for the UC; that reducing the amount of intellectual and material support for low-income students is bad for the UC (and the US); that well-compensated administrators, like UC Irvine’s chief medical officer, do not need quiet little (massive) bonuses, like said CMO’s $73,000 moving-expenses stipend. (Was dude moving to Argentina?) No doubt this report will do nothing to change the situation that inspired it. But hey, the President gave a speech.
  • Labor conditions got you down? Lucky for us, many episodes of The Muppet Show (1976-1981) are on YouTube. Here is the episode where Johnny Cash was the guest. Fair warning, though, if you don’t have a sense of humor or grasp of irony: At one point JC performs with a Confederate flag in the background while Gonzo rides a bronco in the fore.
  • This early half-gem of David Foster Wallace’s is being sold at Urban Outfitters now. Seems like an odd marketing move, considering that among the 200 or so undergraduates whom I have forced to read essays of his, precisely three—as a DFW fanboy I remember the number—had even heard of the man, let alone read anything he wrote. I am actually hoping that UO knows their target demo and is onto something wonderful. Like, maybe copies of Infinite Jest will be piled next to deep-Vs and cheap boat shoes. Could happen.
  • Now in the Grantland stable, Wesley Morris is my favorite film critic. Like DFW, Morris wields a sophisticated, erudite critical vocabulary when talking about American culture, including some of its trashier prongs, without being self-conscious about the performance. Read some stuff here (at his first home, the Boston Globe), here, or here. A sample sentence, from a review of Spring Breakers: “What [director Harmony] Korine does with the beer-soaked skin, face-devouring makeouts, and piles and piles of barely dressed people is intensify the college-party atmosphere in a way that feels simultaneously orgasmic and repulsive.” He hyphenated the phrasal adjectives! Even though I’m straight, I’m swooning.
  • I live in California, and these short days will only shorten for the next few months. Winter’s coming. So here is Karl Shapiro’s “California Winter,” a wonderful elongated lyric. Don’t worry if you don’t live in California, unless you believe that only English people should read Dickens.

Bonus Beats: Lou Reed Lives On

Posted on by under mainly rap music, Weekend Beats

As you are no doubt aware, Lou Reed died yesterday at the age of 71. I won’t bore you with a “Lou Reed was super important to me when I was in college” story. He was, especially when I moved to Santa Cruz and didn’t really know anyone. But Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground were super important to a lot of people, at least most of the people I know, and I’m hardly a VU fanatic. They were simply a great, really influential band. So here’s a little something sweet for your Monday.

Weekend Beats: Numbers on the Boards

Posted on by under mainly rap music, Weekend Beats

I try not to carry too much water for Slate by continually linking to stuff they publish, because they are a behemoth and do not need my slavish attention, but this is tough because they’re a great magazine (or website, or what have you), even if a neoliberal demigod owns them now. With that in mind . . . Over at Slate, Jack Hamilton has two fine pieces about Pusha T’s new album My Name Is My Name, in the latter of which Hamilton deftly annotates Pusha’s/Clipse’s “strange anti-charisma,” that Virginia blend of “brute creativity and dizzying swagger.” On the working top-ten list Hamilton assembles, one finds this new blood diamond, “Numbers on the Boards” (prod. at least in part by Kanye West):

The production showcases Kanye’s ability to chisel out beats that are simultaneously appealing and unnerving: it’s poltergeist pop. Good luck getting it out of your head. Buy King Push’s album, too. He has been one of the best MCs around for over a decade without ever making the Scrooge McDuck money he deserves.

Aaaaand because My Name is My Name is so good, here is another track, “Suicide,” a chilling diss of Drake, et al. Assuming you aren’t the kind of person who clutches their pearls (Ohmygod he’s cussing and just talking about money and drugs stuff and objectifying women) when confronting anything that isn’t piously middle-class—in which case you should not be reading this blog—you will enjoy it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXMTFNBfrjk

As one of the Web’s best vernacular hip-hop critics, Big Ghost (who has a new website and is not, despite some early rumors, actually Ghostface), puts it with his usual demotic verve (WARNING: salty urban language ahead):

Niggas at Def Jam musta lost they damn minds yo… This shit is reckless b. This is REALLY like some Hell Hath No Fury shit all over again. I aint eem playin when I say this shit make me wanna cop a kilo on consignment n snort the whole brick right muthafuckin now. Im liable to do some irresponsible shit while listenin to this muthafucka b. Ya boy liable to make some bad decisions n act out in a very irresponsible way right now yo. The sound of that money countin machine dont help matters none my nigga. I cant be held accountable for my actions right now…not if niggas is gon make songs like this n release em to the public. Yall reckless for that… Ionno how Pharrell can go from makin electro french disco n happy ass Captain & Tennille type shit to joints this filthy son. This shit jus dirty bruh. Im disgusted. Im makin faces like I jus walked into a room witta dead raccoon hangin off the ceiling fan right now. I might gon order a pizza jus so I can punch somebody in the face right now dawg. Word is bond I might gon bicycle kick the pizza man thru the skylight if this shit is playin again when he get here. The boy Push takin aim at certain inviduals in these bars too. [. . .] Ab Liva did his Ab Liva thing on this shit too. He might actually be the last rapper on earth still doin the Young Chris whisper flow that Hov made famous. Bars was on point as usual tho. Not like it really need to be said  it but I all the way fucks wit this shit right here.

Me too, Ghost. Happy weekends everywhere, everyone.

Weekend Beats: “Miss You”

Posted on by under mainly rap music, Weekend Beats

By the late 1970s the musical residue of the late 1960s had become troublesome ground, given the passage of time’s ability to turn the cool into the passé as well as the rise of genres that challenged first-wave rock’s popular ascendance, some of them enduring (punk) and others (disco) not so much. To be honest, postwar rock had taken some gross turns, like prog.  And the musically abetted idealism of “The Sixties” hadn’t done much in terms of, you know, preventing Nixon or a terrible recession. And a lot of great postwar bands were gone (the Beatles), close to disintegrating (Zeppelin), or on the early slopes of a long decline (the Kinks). And really, the Sixties in general *did* suck (ewww, Baby Boomers as young people are even worse than Boomers as anything else).

The Rolling Stones endured these winds with their standard vulgar genius, so different from the Beatles’ awkwardly self-conscious, cerebral magic. In 1978, as the Clash exploded toward London Calling (1979), the Stones dropped Some Girls. You’ve heard the lead song from this honky-tonk scumbag-disco masterpiece a thousand times, but I’ll bet “Miss You” still feels as urgently dirty as it did the first time you heard it bump. What’s a matter, man? We’re gonna come round at 12 with some Puerto Rican girls that’s just dyyyyyyin to meet you.

Picking the best RS albums is like picking the best Shakespeare, as in about fifty percent of the work they did in their prime could legitimately be called their “best.” On the other hand, this album clears most of the decks: Some Girls is their second-best album, after Sticky Fingers, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise, which is probably, like, eighty percent of Stones fans, given the above-noted reality of all those classics.

Weekend Beats: Tournament Style

Posted on by under mainly rap music, Other Critics, Weekend Beats

It’s way too hot here in Los Angeles this weekend. We live on the second floor, so our apartment is just gross today. Still, we have a marginally functional air conditioner, which makes staying in better than going out, giving me a lot of time to pore over Grantland‘s “Battle for the Best Song of the Millennium” feature. It’s an utterly pointless exercise, but they admit as much. Songs are given seeds and pitted against one another in an NCAA-style bracket, and readers vote to determine the “winner.” Some of the results have been disheartening. That “Stay Fly” by Three 6 Mafia was given a 15 seed, and that people with ears think “Drop It Like It’s Hot” is a better song by almost a 3 to 1 margin really shake my faith in humanity. But M83 and Phoenix upsetting Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, respectively, are reasons for hope. In any event, you should follow the action.

In a follow-up feature discussing the bubble songs that just missed the cut, the NIT songs, if you will, the always insightful Steven Hyden diagnoses what is wrong with the bracket’s composition: very few mid-major songs made the field. He writes:

Let’s acknowledge a few of the biases inherent in the creation of this bracket. There is no metal. There is only a smattering of country. Rock music is consistently relegated to the lowest seeds. Pretty much anything played on an acoustic stringed instrument is apparently verboten. Bands you might like — Spoon, the National, the Hold Steady, Queens of the Stone Age, the Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, Drive-By Truckers, Bon Iver, Mastodon, Fucked Up, TV on the Radio, Muse — are nowhere to be found. This is a list where “great song” is synonymous with “rap and pop bangers that were popular on the radio once.” That doesn’t mean the bracket is terrible, necessarily — just that if you happen to be among the troglodytes for whom “rap and pop bangers that were popular on the radio once” does not constitute quality listening, sorry, you are left out.

He says this before recommending the Shins’ “New Slang,” a song that most of the folks who read this blog probably listened to on repeat in their college bedrooms while pining away after people who weren’t in fact as cool, smart, or attractive as they seemed. It’s the perfect song for that sort of thing, and as such deserved to be included in the field over something like Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” which is just another serviceable, and frankly boring, pop song. It’s like when a 19-12 Illinois team with a .500 record in Big Ten play gets invited to the tournament over a 26-6 Long Beach State squad from the Big West. Both teams are likely to lose in the first round, but I’d rather see how the team from the small conference and that runs an unorthodox system fares against a tough opponent. We’ve all watched enough middling Big Ten basketball and heard enough middling pop music.

So here’s a mid-major gem some of you might know, and some of you might not. It’s from 2011 and merits a Parental Advisory sticker for its adult content: lyrics acknowledging that there are some things in life you can’t come back from. Not kids’s stuff. Then again, Gillian Welch was no Mouseketeer.

 

Weekend Beats: Brick James Games

Posted on by under mainly rap music, Weekend Beats

Even if you’re dealing with a fascinating, appalling affair like the American drug wars; even if you’re digging into the under-appreciated criminal side of things; you need a demonically inventive lyricist to make the day-to-day business of slinging weight seem to be interesting, let alone a rhapsodic practice. (That, or you need David Simon’s creative team.) Not because Drugs are Bad (although some of them are), but because Modern Business, even a violent, fluid modern business like selling lots of drugs, is fundamentally boring, at least to most people who care about what lyricists do in the first place.

Coastal-Intellectual-Approved, and working over the beat from Mobb Deep’s “Cobra,” here is a since-disbanded band of bandits, the Re-Up Gang, which includes Pusha T and Malice from Clipse, one of the greatest hip-hop duos American civilization has yet produced. Most of the 2005 mixtape it’s from (We Got it 4 Cheap, Vol. 2) is worth bumping in your Civic.

You can stop listening around 3:45, because that’s when Pharrell shows up to remind everyone that he has never been able to rap. The track also contains the usual strains of paranoia, brutality, profanity, and nihilism that rap music about the drug game usually does. Otherwise it might not have been as good.

Hate, Hate, Hate

Posted on by under guides and nudges, in the news, mainly rap music

This is just a quick one: Carl Wilson (no, not that Carl Wilson) has penned a wonderful (and at times wonderfully pretentious) essay about why it is okay to hate certain bands (insert any type of artist here) even when you know that they are pretty good and have a lot in common with other bands (or artists) you like. We all have these irrational hatreds. Wilson’s advice? Give in to the Dark Side…

Saturday Links

Posted on by under Authors, guides and nudges, mainly rap music, sports

It’s Saturday and the weather here in LA is weird, so here are some ways to avoid having to go outside if you simply can’t bear it.

  • This short but sweet piece by Christopher Hitchens about the tyranny of waiters insisting on pouring your wine for you in restaurants is always worth revisiting.
  • Every year Bill Simmons ranks the top 50 assets in the NBA using a simple, but sensible metric: how likely the player’s current team would be to trade him. This year’s list is broken up into three installments, so prepare to lose  at least half an hour of your life.
  • Are you convinced that there’s no way someone could make a movie that successfully twins a meditation on the cosmos with testimonials about the atrocities committed by the Pinochet regime? You’re wrong. Nostalgia for the Light is a gorgeous documentary about just that, and it’s streaming on Netflix. I swear, it won’t make you feel nearly as bad as you’re assuming it will.
  • Kathryn Schulz has written a piece worth reading on why she hates The Great Gatsby. Not Luhrmann’s trite film version, mind you, but Fitzgerald’s novel. Obviously, I don’t agree with her assessment of the novel’s value. Virtually all of the reasons she gives for disliking the book are the precise reasons I love it. If there’s one excerpt from this article that sums up Schulz’s failure to actually engage the book on its own terms, it’s this one: “As readers, we revel in the glamorous dissipation of the rich, and then we revel in the cheap satisfaction of seeing them fall. At no point are we made to feel uncomfortable about either pleasure, let alone their conjunction. At no point are we given cause, or room, to feel complicit.” If you don’t feel uncomfortable or complicit (as Nick does) when reading about a culture that encourages people to use others up like natural resources, you have led a very moral, cloistered life that includes never having seen a rap video. Kudos to you for that, Ms. Schulz.