Breihan vs. The Hip-Hop Blogosphere: FITE!

...

I wasn't gonna do it.

And in one sense, that's the only substantive complaint that's being lodged here -- that Breihan's tastes are (allegedly) those of a person with the wrong background, the wrong way of thinking about hip-hop, etc. Which is fine to complain about, if you want to, but when it turns out that that background and perspective are probably fairly well-suited to the audience of the publication in question -- and when the writer in question is a pop-music writer, who's covering rock bands and dance music every other day -- it's a bit ... well, pointless and untenable.

I don't really care about hip-hop pissing contests but this made me doubletake. I mean, say what?? The term ninjas goes back to like '91 or some shit (when did Raw Fusion do that "nappy-headed ninjas" chant...?) I don't even know who Byron Crawford is.

Tom Breihan is the LL Cool J in this battle, and Combat Jack thinks he is Kool Moe Dee just killing him (older, wiser) but he's really a little more like Canibus (pulling a publicity stunt)?

http://www.hhv.de/images/cover5/7899.jpg

Oooh, Combat Jack calling out the Jews... A stupid shock tactic in a lame argument.

Frankly, I think he does himself a disservice by attempting to distance the question from one of race; if the screed really has nothing to do with Breihan's ethnicity than it has absolutely no substance at all.

Tom has some of the worst 'fruit flies' of any blog; there's some material to work w/ as far as criticizing his writing, which does have its fair share of unknowledgeable condescension and some overdone hyperbole; but lots of talentless haters have taken any fun out of it.

Byron-Crawford-being-the-voice-of-reason shocker: http://xxlmag.com/online/?p=6621

I mean, if we accept that it's offensive for whites to use the word "n*gger" in almost any context simply because it's so profoundly offensive to blacks (and to just about everybody else, mind), then doesn't that imply that other things might be similarly offensive and thus off-limits? Like judging hip-hop?

Absolutely. But where do you stop? Would you really follow the "proposition or set of guidelines for white writers" if someone took the time to write it up? And should there be similar sets of guidelines for writers with differing melanin levels? And what about income bracket? Should rich people enjoin themselves from judging the cultural products of the poor?

I agree that black/white race relations in America are uniquely and spectacularly fucked-up in ways that might not apply to interactions between other racial groups, but still... How far is too far?

Just like a lot of the quotations that you respond to, what you're saying is laudable in theory, but troublesome in practice. Within the context of our own lives, we are not just entitled, but almost obligated to ruthlessly judge and evaluate that which we perceive. What is it? What does it mean? What does it do? What is it worth?

And public criticism is only meaninful to the extent that it honors the core judgements of our private hearts. Criticism that merely parrots publically acceptable points of view is worse than worthless.

After all, offending people is not necessarily a bad thing.

There's a very thin line between meaning a lot of things, many of them contradictory, and meaning nothing at all.

I have a lot more to say, but I also have a hot sandwich sitting in front of me. I'll be back.

Yeah, this is interesting to bring up, because pretty much everything I've seen him write about metal spends half the wordcount sweating whether his love of metal is dilettantish or what "hipster metal" is, because it's still a relatively new interest for him. He's self-conscious and keeps admitting his outsider status, but he rarely if ever puts these kinds of qualifiers in front of what he writes about rap. If he comes off as 'entitled' or presumptive when he talks about hip hop, it's because he's been listening to it for a lot longer, and like most of us who own a TV, has been swimming in it for a decade or two, at least moreso than underground metal. It's possible noone's complained about his take on metal because he's so cautious and sheepish about it, or maybe just because the music's of interest to a lot fewer people (at least, on the music blog circuit). But I don't know if his rap writing would be any better, or less vulnerable to criticism, he spent most of it hand-wringing about whether it's OK for him to like this or that because he's white. In fact, it would probably make the writing a lot worse and even more people would dismiss his opinion or ignore him entirely.

I think it's probably because metalheads aren't as pants-wettingly defensive as rap fans.

oh wait rap fans do that too

cardiff in the late 1970s = apparently pretty bleak

Oh, I don't know. I'd say meaning a lot of contradictory things still = meaning a lot of things; and besides, it's not necessarily the number of meanings cathected in rap so much as the intensity behind them: no one looks at rock (anymore) as a seriously revolutionary music that represents an entire race, or as an entire (race-related, I guess) culture. Is this overblown and mistaken and oftentimes factually incorrect (like, say, the claim that rap has since its inception been explicitly political)? Well, sure: but that doesn't mean we can't/shouldn't take that weight into consideration when we (black or white) write about rap. When I said "respect" I didn't mean that a critic should have to "respect" Jim Jones as an auteur, but that he/she should have respect for the genre as a whole and the people who make it, and not reduce it all to "ghetto artist" or whatever. Maybe "respect" is the wrong word, in any event.

adam: I don't really even know what to say. You're right, the idea of rules or guidelines is wrongheaded and ludicrous. Frankly, I don't really have an opinion on this yet anyway, and I struggle every time I write a rap review. But I'd argue that what people are jumping on TB for isn't the judgment (well, that's what CJ is jumping on him for, but I think we've established that d00d is wrong) but the way he treats rap music; that he's not actually taking into acct. "what it is" or "what it's worth" or "what it means," and that maybe he'll never be able to--that true "understanding" of rap music only occurs, can only occur, with people of the same background. I don't think that's true, necessarily, but I think we're doing ourselves a disservice if we pretend that we're entitled to write however we want about cultures we don't belong to just b/c we're critics. We have to acknowledge our own relative positions of power & privilege and realize that we can't be objective enough to answer the question "what does it mean?" in any absolute way divorced from where we stand.

Let's extend this a little. Should black critics write about country? Should critics only write about music sung in languages they speak or understand? Should, as many jazz musicians have argued, critics only review jazz records if they play an instrument themselves?

>We have to acknowledge our own relative positions of power & privilege and realize that we can't be objective enough to answer the question "what does it mean?" in any absolute way divorced from where we stand.

We (okay, mostly you in this case) also need to acknowledge that objectivity has exactly jack shit to do with criticism.

shit x-posts

Perfect. That's it. That's almost all the elephants in one fell swoop. And while I'm tempted to play the "white guilt" card, I won't. Wouldn't help matters.

But we're always talking about cultures we don't belong to. We're not just separated by race. There's class, and age, and location, and income, and education, etc., infinitum. When it comes to hip-hop, it's not like there's a single uniform, distinct white culture in America that is clearly separated from an equally distinct black culture, anyway. American pop culture is bleeds constantly in every direction possible.

Any understanding is a true understanding, as long as it's honest. A white suburban kid's taste in rap music is just as valid as Talib Kweli's. I mean, a pop critic's job is twofold: to communicate a personal point-of-view, and to parse culture on some level or other. The second part does demand some understanding of the cultures in play, but that's not as straightforward as it sounds. Someone evaluating CDs for a nursing home newsletter is probably gonna do a better job if they're NOT totally and authentically immersed in hip-hop's street culture.

And all critical judgements are inherently subjective. When evaluate the meaning, quality and significance of things, the fact that we're speaking from a specific set of cultural circumstances and reflecting a merely subjective viewpoint is a given, and doesn't need to be mentioned.

The unmentioned elephant in this room is the fantasy of authority. The fantasy of expertise. Critics (especially in the age of Googlability) like to feel as though and be perceived as though they're infallible experts. But many white Americans (for reasons both good and bad) have come to feel deferential and inexpert with regard to black culture. This undercuts the dominant critical fantasy. Therefore, white critics often go out of their way to undercut their own viewpoints in talking about hip-hop. While harmless, it's kinda silly.

Now we're into the idea that writers who criticize hip-hop are doing so because of racism. Maybe you wanna walk that one back. It seems to me you're very hung up on race. You're not alone, but it's probably getting in the way of your ability to actually hear music.

>If I wrote an article about country without an eye towards the history of the genre or the context from which its coming or my own position as a non-southerner (or whatever), I'd be doing myself, the work, and my audience a disservice. This shit doesn't exist in a vacuum.

But context is not everything. No free jazz saxophonist picks up his horn thinking, "This next one's gonna doom the white power structure for sure!" Music needs to be heard as music. Music that requires extrinsic sociopolitical understanding to communicate is music that fails in music's primary task, which is the encouragement of transcendence. Music is supposed to help you leave earthly bullshit behind while it's playing. That's why political music almost always (like, 99 out of 100 times) sucks dead dog balls.

Here's how I see it. You hear a song; you get what you get from it; and here's the great part - you're never wrong. I like Pitbull's two albums better than anything and everything I've heard from Nas in the past decade. I am not wrong about this. If you have heard both Pitbull albums, and consider them inferior to the work of Nas, you, too, are not wrong. Doesn't matter who your mama and daddy were, doesn't matter where you live, only matters that you have functioning ears.

x-post with beales

You hear a song; you get what you get from it; and here's the great part - you're never wrong. I like Pitbull's two albums better than anything and everything I've heard from Nas in the past decade. I am not wrong about this. Doesn't matter who your mama and daddy were, doesn't matter where you live, only matters that you have functioning ears."

So perfectly centered and blanced O top of that M, I have nothing further to say.

And, again, I'm with you, Combat Jack is wrong: if you like Pitbull more than Nas (and certainly El Mariel gets more plays from me than Nastradamus), no one gives a shit. I think he framed his argument in the most retarded way possible (like assuming that a lot of people read the Voice blogs, and claiming that Nas was like somehow objectively better than Pitbull or whatever). At this point I think it's more of a question of whether or not Breihan (or any white, or bougie, or whatever rap crit) is treating rap "condescendingly" or as some kind of "savage music" or fetishizing its from-the-streets-ness.

This is way too flowery of a statement for me. Music is a matter of transcendence for people for whom music trips a passion button; for others, music may be about the communication of an idea or even a formalist exercise or nothing but a distraction. Music isn't by design for any one specific thing and laying down rules about what its job/function is supposed to be is simultaneously a mugg's game and the type of pretentious presumption that I assume sparked the initial Breihan vs hip-hop blog FITE.

Also, the presumption that two people of the same race ALWAYS have more in common than two people of the same class is not a valid one to make; one only has to look at the whole Bill Cosby debacle to see that.

Brief side trip: I have in fact argued exactly this in the past. See, the advent of digital storage media and the massive reissue programs this has engendered on the part of jazz record labels have effectively yanked history out from under jazz. Louis Armstrong and Albert Ayler exist side-by-side in the digital Now, and you can listen to one or the other or both and it doesn't matter whether you heard Armstrong first or understand the role of New Orleans polyphony and pre-jazz forms in Ayler's stuff or any other thing. You pick up discs in any pattern you want, keep the ones you like, and form your own jazz canon. History has been defeated by the 1s and 0s of digital simultaneity. The only history that matters now is that which is created by folks' albums not getting reissued, and MP3 blogs that post rapidshare links to vinyl rips are helping solve that problem, too.

>I'm with you that not all rap is specifically or explicitly about race but I think that denying the close relationship rap has with African-American culture (and in some cases Latino culture) is being intellectually dishonest

I'm not denying the relationship; I'm saying the relationship is not nearly as important as a particular subset of the "hip-hop community" (I don't believe there's any such thing, just like there's no such thing as the "pop community" or "pop community" as a concept) wants you (and by "you" in this instance I mean "skittish white people") to think it is.

dan--that was a rash thing to say, admittedly; the point i was trying to make (i think) was that speaking in pure generalities abt. questions of power and privilege, dudes of same race but different class have more in common than dudes of different race same class. again, in terms of power & privilege (which is whats important in this case i think)

1. Rap is not always about race. This is because rapping is a thing, a thing anyone can do, with varying degrees of success totally unrelated to skin color or parentage. You have basically conceded all this above, so we'll move on.

2. Rappers do not represent black people. Rappers are black people. There is a huge difference.

(xpost: Okay Phil, that second point is true but also grossly naive in terms of the way most human beings live by the "perception = reality" credo.)

Given the underrepresentation of black people in American popular culture at large, I think it can be safely said that rappers do represent black people to a considerable portion of the white American populace.

On top of that, rappers do represent precious few examples of publicized black success. I wouldn't presume to speak for the black community, but if the only people of my color I see in the mass media are rappers, I'd imagine they'd represent a very specific model of success for me.

post of the day

this is kind of a ridiculous statement - non-rapping black people are all over TV, sports, films, etc.

I'm raising it to remind thread denizens that there are a whole lot of black people who see rappers as reductive, infuriating stereotypes. I would say that, for example, if I surveyed the black folks I know, not a single one of them, given $500,000, would spend it on a set of teeth rather than a house. This discussion is not just about rappers whose hidden depths are missed by uncomprehending white folks. It's also about black folks who wish said rappers would stop playing into, if not encouraging, white stereotypes.

You're right. I just got out of my sociology final. Sorry everybody, &c.

I didn't say they did represent black people. And I understand that there are hundreds of thousands of blacks in this country who detest the fact that rappers comprise such a large portion of the relatively small number of famous African Americans. But this isn't about representation. All I'm saying is that the relationship between race and rap, especially in this country, is undeniably important, for any number of reasons. That's not to reduce rap to being "about race." But we can't extract rap out of the circumstances of its creation/production/reception and pretend we're being fair to it.

and Dan--as a rich white guy, I hate you.

It is? I thought it was about the white critics encouraging and fetishizing those stereotypes.

YAY oh wait

otm

Nas: Better Than Nas

YEAH U COULDN"T DO THIS WITH VINYL OR TAPE, LOL THIS IS THE DUMBEST SHIT I EVER READ

That doesn't sound promising in the slightest.

"a lot of ostensibly indie-rock people like me have also been nurturing pet metal obsessions this year, and that's probably because indie-rock has purged itself of all its ugliest, most misanthropic impulses on the way to being Sufjanized. This whole phenomenon would help explain, for instance, how that garbage-ass Boris album ended up getting so much love. Metal types, of course, are pretty uncomfortable with the idea of their power-fantasy scene being invaded and diluted by all these dilettantes; that's why Decibel, the best music magazine in the world right now, did its hipster-metal roundtable. But then, that's basically the fate of anyone who wants to explore a whole lot of scenes: you're an outsider wherever you go."

lolz