Posts tagged hip hop

John Forte's Strange Trip To Russia

Art Imitates Life: A playlist

So tonight, we were talking about Medicine for Melancholy. You know, the only mumblecore movie with black people. Anyway, the soundtrack is great and I’d forgotten about it. Some guy posted about the soundtrack and how strange it was (to him) that an indie black people movie didn’t feature any hip-hop.

I’m not sure that it really fit how the film was made. The music seemed to work to me and I don’t know that adding Jurassic 5 song or something would’ve improved the experience. 

But it did inspire me to make my own Spotify playlist featuring songs from the playlist that were actually available, coupled with some other tracks.

I’d tell you to go listen, but you all don’t listen very well it seems. So do whatever you want, I don’t care.

Drake, Childish Gambino, and the Specter of Black Authenticity

That headline is a link to an article I obviously did not write. But I am responding to it:

I don’t really agree with his premise, because anyone who follows the genre knows that hipsterism and the gradients of blackness in hip-hop have always been there. What’s strange and what I do agree with is artists who break into a sort of mainstream prominence by simply being some facet of “themselves.” 

In Dizzy Drake’s case, this involves much of the same stuff other hip-hop and R&B artists talk about — breaking girls off, drinking lots of booze, spending a ton of money and professing a love of their crew (no homo, of couse) — but doing so with a falsetto and a face that the ladies have been in love with since I first saw him on nahright thinking “who is this dude from Canada that all of the girls know the words to his songs.

I think what separates Drake and Gambino from say, Lupe Fiasco is really what separates the mainstream from what the effete music snobs amongst us called the underground until the lines blurred. There’s a possibility to achieve mainstream exposure by speaking with a message that appeals to a mass audience. But once you paddle your canoe away from the dominant sound, it becomes more difficult for you to get spins, which make it harder to attract interest from a core audience and the sort of buy-in necessary to stay relevant.

The article ignores Drake’s time spent in Memphis and the fact that as a hip-hop baby growing up in the present, it’s hard not to be influenced by what you hear, even if you grow up in Fargo. This isn’t a world that’s curated by radio DJs and music stores anymore, it’s controlled my music blogs and what people are able to discover using their own time and resources. Luckily, it’s a pretty cheap hobby that’s only limited by time and bandwidth for the most part.

Without speaking for a wide swath of folks, I think there a real feeling of satisfaction for the cognoscenti within African-American nerdom that proclaims a sigh of relief at seeing weirdos that they can somewhat identify with.

What separates Janelle Monae from TV On The Radio is the buy-in that she gets from the cred that umbrella of hip-hop provides. Cee-Lo Green can wear dress like a chicken on national television and it’s all good, because dude was in The Goodie Mob. He earned his stripes in the trenches, kids.

It’s not about “sounding white” as much as about feeling like they’re saying something that folks feel like they can relate to. When Childish Gambino spits on an album about being the “only white rapper allowed to say the N-word” he’s fully aware that he’s making an album that would simply not have had much mainstream buzz a decade ago. The cognitive dissonance is palpable. 

There are lots of times I sit and listen to music and think “I’m so glad I’m living in this time.” But the more I listen to stuff, the less unique it feels. Things go in cycles, everything in waves and as much as stuff is different; it remains the same.

I enjoy the increased literary criticism of hip-hop, because it seems that it’s being taken more seriously in review circles. This is a reflection of that, whether or not I agree with all of the points of the piece.