Of Dragons and Fireballs
So I’m back from home. It seems fitting in a way that I left 2011 one way and 2012 begins and it’s feels different. Going back east always enables me to reconnect to a former self that I often forget exists. Years of moving places, meeting new people and so forth leave me constantly reinventing myself. While this offers me new opportunities, it leaves me wondering what I’ve left behind.
More than anything, going home always makes me remember who I’ve become and more comfortable in that. My uncle always reminds me when I see him, “when you were a kid, you always said you were gonna move far far away and you did.” Then he laughs. I think back to that loquacious little guy and I wonder what we have in common now.
Our hopes and our dreams. He saw the globe and believed the world was smaller than it was at a time when it really wasn’t. Now it is, but I look around and wonder where I fit into this whole mess of things.
Driving back I thought about video games. I don’t really play them. But life can sometimes be like them. If you think back to the original Super Mario Brothers, there are levels and each has a boss at the end. You beat the boss and advance to the next level. At the end, there’s a big boss and you win if you beat said creature. Older games didn’t allow you to waste time deviating on your own little tasks. I watch my brother or friends play current games and it’s possible to be part of the ecosystem while specializing in a particular kind of gameplay. (Guys who only sniper in Call of Duty)
In real life, there’s the path you’re on and where you’re headed. Then there’s all of these extraneous things on the outskirts. I told my dad that when I was younger, I saw possibilities and opportunities and always wanted to take them. Not because all of them were necessarily fit for me; but simply because I didn’t want to miss out on anything. When you traffic in the mysteries of what’s possible, you want an escape hatch or a scratch-off ticket that gives you what you want faster than just hunkering down.
When you’re younger, life seems full of mystery. When you get older, it feels very different. People still impose their will, they still communicate their expectations and want you to ascribe to the absolutes that govern how they live their lives. I’ve always been estranged from these ideas because they simply defy how I see the world and live my life. But I’ve been fighting upstream for years trying to get where I want to do in the face of all of it.
Right now, it’s about building a foundation from which the other stuff can live on. It was interesting when someone said as much without me having to express it. “You’ve got these goals and you’re working towards them. You’re building the future you want for yourself and I’ve got nothing but respect for you for that.”
I try to be ethically consistent. I don’t necessarily know my ultimate destination, but I know what I don’t want now in a way that I never used to and have become a lot better at avoiding it.
So another year of chasing down dragons and dodging fireballs.
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.
