The first thing I'm going to do when I get to Iowa City is put an ad out looking for musicians to form a Dirty South tribute/cover band. The setlist I've come up with so far is pretty limited:
ESG and Slim Thugg - Getcha Hands Up
Lil' Flip - The Way We Ball
I think those two songs do capture exactly what I'm looking for, though - big, bouncy songs with chants rather than verses, along with simple acoustics and mostly organic-ish backing, since they'll be performed by humans on real instruments. But I really need some suggestions, because while it's perfect, I'd feel a bit weird doing "The Way We Ball," since that was already done by the Ten-Eleven All-Stars, a friends' band from a couple years ago who gave me the idea (they also did a killer "What's Your Fantasy"). I'd love to do "Get Low," of course, but between the completely inimitable voices of Lil' Jon and the Ying Yang and the very, very electronic sound, I don't think it'd work. Maybe "Back That Azz Up" will be added, but I've got to go back and listen to it again.
The other track that's definitely on the setlist is Scarface, "My Block," though it's gonna take some practice for me to get that keyboard part down. It doesn't completely fit the template I just laid out, but it'll be a nice little low point we can put in before the big closer (whatever that turns out to be).
Other than that, I'm looking for suggestions. I'm also looking for bandmates, so let me know if you're heading up to Iowa City and play bass, guitar, drums, or actually any other instruments, since I'd really love to do grossly elaborate orchestrations. I'm particularly on the lookout for a Hot Chick Drummer, though that would admittedly put me even more in the shadow of the immortal 1011's.
Saturday, July 17, 2004
Garage Sale
Thanks to everyone who came out. We made nearly $120 for the
Global
Fund. That's enough to pay for a full course of
tuberculosis treatment for twelve people - good stuff. There are
still a trampoline and a heavy punching bag left for sale (the profits
from which I will probably pocket/give to the DNC).
Tomorrow, we swim.
Global
Fund. That's enough to pay for a full course of
tuberculosis treatment for twelve people - good stuff. There are
still a trampoline and a heavy punching bag left for sale (the profits
from which I will probably pocket/give to the DNC).
Tomorrow, we swim.
Thursday, July 15, 2004
Devin the Dude - To Tha X-Treme
So I took Cocaine Blunts’ advice and went to get the new Devin album yesterday. I got to revel in the magnificence that is Music Mania, Austin’s very own hood rich record store, where fading LPs of Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits rub shoulders with the new Color Changin’ Click CD, and the old white owner (who if you squint just right looks like he could be some foulmouthed New Jersey eye-taliano) talks about how such and such show is “gonna be crunked.” Browsing the racks there you’ll come across things like, say, five albums by KnightHawk, who looks like a forty year old Hispanic Frankenstein throwing up sets. You’ll see lots of albums by the kind of guys who can record songs with titles like “Lifestyle of a ‘G’” or “I Wanna Fuck Me Some Hoes,” and you know that they’re not even kidding a little bit, and that moreover, they probably live around the corner and will beat your cracker ass if they see you looking at them funny. It’s fun, but yeah, kind of intimidating for, you know, the white folks. And for those in Austin, I found out Z-Ro is apparently doing an in-store there on the 20th, the day of his Paradox show.
So anyway, yeah, Devin. The album nearly made me cry, it’s so perfect. Granted, I only discovered “Just Tryin’ Ta Live” like four months ago, so I can’t claim any sort of Devin cred, but it’s just . . . wow. I can’t go into a whole review routine right now, but there’s a song about him dying happily in an airplane crash, wondering why all the uptight people screaming around him didn’t live their lives better. There’s a song about how his life sucks because he can’t trust anyone anymore (between this and “Doobie Ashtray,” you can tell Devin isn’t taking his success for granted – which given the complete lack of support for this album from Rap-A-Lot, is probably wise). There are stories about infidelity that end with Devin getting his ass schooled in Jamaica, stories about . . . well, about life. It is, as CB points out, pretty smooth, but that’s just Devin. I am a little disappointed that the hick voice from “R & B” (I’m pretty sure it’s Devin doing the voice – right?) shows up again on this album as an “Officer N****r Hater” type(1), but that’s a minor quibble. Cop that shit. I’m telling you, Houston is going to rule the second half of the oughts/0-dec.
(1) Footnote: One thing I didn’t mention in my previous post about race and hip hop fandom is how much the fantasy of black/white brotherhood means to white hip hop fans. Hearing things like “R&B,” or seeing Paul Wall (white) and Chamillionaire reppin’ Texas hard in Color Changin’ Click feeds the fantastic scenarios that occasionally run through our heads. These are the situations where we’re walking down the street, carrying some new, really really street album we just bought, and some brother walks past and does a double take – “Wow, I didn’t know white people listened to that! That’s my music! You must really understand my people. You should come to my house and meet my sister.” There’s no shame in imagining you’re Ghostface, but imagining that listening to rap makes you something other than part of the problem is really heinous. It’s a fantasy that I can’t quite shake, and to be honest, what have I ever done for the black community to merit any sort of acceptance? I substitute taught at public schools for six months, so maybe that counts for something, but still.
P.S. I just found Government Names for the first time, another blogger seemingly up on Screwston.
So anyway, yeah, Devin. The album nearly made me cry, it’s so perfect. Granted, I only discovered “Just Tryin’ Ta Live” like four months ago, so I can’t claim any sort of Devin cred, but it’s just . . . wow. I can’t go into a whole review routine right now, but there’s a song about him dying happily in an airplane crash, wondering why all the uptight people screaming around him didn’t live their lives better. There’s a song about how his life sucks because he can’t trust anyone anymore (between this and “Doobie Ashtray,” you can tell Devin isn’t taking his success for granted – which given the complete lack of support for this album from Rap-A-Lot, is probably wise). There are stories about infidelity that end with Devin getting his ass schooled in Jamaica, stories about . . . well, about life. It is, as CB points out, pretty smooth, but that’s just Devin. I am a little disappointed that the hick voice from “R & B” (I’m pretty sure it’s Devin doing the voice – right?) shows up again on this album as an “Officer N****r Hater” type(1), but that’s a minor quibble. Cop that shit. I’m telling you, Houston is going to rule the second half of the oughts/0-dec.
(1) Footnote: One thing I didn’t mention in my previous post about race and hip hop fandom is how much the fantasy of black/white brotherhood means to white hip hop fans. Hearing things like “R&B,” or seeing Paul Wall (white) and Chamillionaire reppin’ Texas hard in Color Changin’ Click feeds the fantastic scenarios that occasionally run through our heads. These are the situations where we’re walking down the street, carrying some new, really really street album we just bought, and some brother walks past and does a double take – “Wow, I didn’t know white people listened to that! That’s my music! You must really understand my people. You should come to my house and meet my sister.” There’s no shame in imagining you’re Ghostface, but imagining that listening to rap makes you something other than part of the problem is really heinous. It’s a fantasy that I can’t quite shake, and to be honest, what have I ever done for the black community to merit any sort of acceptance? I substitute taught at public schools for six months, so maybe that counts for something, but still.
P.S. I just found Government Names for the first time, another blogger seemingly up on Screwston.
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Whiteness Studies
[Cross-posted to the GNC]
O-Dub and the Quarterwit have come together like flint and steel to spark a discussion regarding the role of white fans in hip hop. It’s a recurring discussion, of course, but I think this instance of it happens to be particularly informed and subtle. In case you haven’t picked up on it, I am a white man, and have certainly spent plenty of time turning this question – the question of whether I am, by listening to “Freek-a-Leek,” perpetuating a history of exploitation by members of my race, the question of whether laughing at Ol’ Dirty makes me a racist – over and over, trying to figure out just what the reality is. Hell, I wrote my damned undergrad thesis on the issue (a gesture which was itself emblematic of the deep, deep divide between the sources and consumers of hip hop).
I’m not particularly insecure about my place in hip hop - I’ve done my bit for king and country. I held down a moderately significant radio slot for a year or so, was one of the first guys in Austin really representing the CoFlo wing of the underground, and I did some really good work in exposing that music when I was at Audiogalaxy, particularly giving early wide exposure to the Rhymesayers and Def Jux, and, um, anticon crews. I also, obviously, write about hip hop quite a lot, but I don’t know if I’m comfortable classifying that as a contribution to the culture.
Regardless of my accomplishments and contributions, the strange part is that I’m still a perpetrator when it comes to the kind of fantasy wish-fulfillment that Mos characterizes as the defining feature of the white suburbanite fair-weather fan. I went through a not-brief-enough phase of having dreadlocks and wearing baggie “hip-hop” style clothes, a phase memorialized on a driver’s license photo, which I still have and in which I look much more like John Walker Lindh than KRS-One. But even having outgrown that unfortunate indulgence, now that I’m back to dressing like the standard-issue white hipster that I was through high school, I hold back a sequestered corner of my soul in which to store “Rap Dave.” I let him out every once in a while when I need to have some voice in my head telling some asshole to go fuck himself, or whispering sweet nothings to some fine girl passing me in the street. Of course Rap Dave rarely makes it out of the confines of my head intact, but I know for a fact that his presence influences my behavior in other, more subtle ways – having the template of hip hop masculinity to draw from has changed my personality, allowing me to open up and let loose in ways I never could in my younger days.
I think it’s safe to say that every hip hop fan is, to a greater or lesser degree, engaged in emulation of their idols’ behavior. It’s just the way things work, and there’s nothing wrong with it as outlined above. The problem comes when we acknowledge that the dynamic between lil’ white me and (to take the obvious example) Ghostface is different than the dynamic between me and, say, Lemmy (another idol of mine), because I know people like Lemmy (or at least, Lemmy minus the musical genius), and so have an automatic reference point for the humanity that lies behind his persona. On the other hand, I quite frankly don’t know anyone like Ghostface. I’m not even going to get my feet tangled up by talking about all the black people I know, but suffice that none of them are risen-from-the-ghetto hardmen. So even when Ghostface is working harder than anyone out there to make it easy for outsiders to understand what it means to be like him, I don’t think I really can. I’ll always mainly see the flash and the grit and the smooth bedroom talk – I’ll only rarely, if ever, see the man underneath. This is why, to me and many others, guys who make less or no effort to be understood by non-blacks – guys like Cam’Ron or Juvenile – seem like one-dimensional cutouts. They operate on an assumed common understanding that we’ll never be a part of, and in which their seemingly empty boasts and posturing are transformed into . . . what?
One thing that happened recently that made me realize that I’d crossed some kind of line was when I found myself genuinely moved by Z-Ro’s “I Hate U.” Of course I’ve grooved to my share of ghettolicious R&B schmaltz over the years (mostly courtesy of Robert K.), but always with a very white sort of detached irony, recognizing the cheesiness of the sentiment while singing along in an absurd falsetto. But the Z-Ro song, it’s different. I can’t entirely tell whether a) the song transcends the cheesiness of the genre and reaches a level of true emotional depth, or b) I’ve listened to nothing but cheesy pop hip hop and soul for long enough that my emotional palette is starting to shrink, to a point where I find the following lyrics moving: “I was daddy for a while, though I’ve got no seed/ But the kids are my H-E-A-R-T.” I think if I was listening to more Neutral Milk Hotel, there wouldn’t be even the slightest chance of me getting taken in by this sort of one-dimensional higglety-pigglety, but then again it isn’t a black/white thing particularly – the same could be said with, I’m guessing, Angie Stone or Cody Chestnutt in place of NMH above.
The problem, though, is that I sub/consciously tend to interpret this acceptance of Z-Ro as some sort of proof that I’m no longer separate from hip hop culture, that it has in fact become a part of me from such long exposure and dedication. But of course, while hip hop music may very well have become my own personal lingua franca, it’s not my native language. It’s as if I had moved to Japan at 18 and was now fluent – I may understand the meaning of everything going on around me, even the ever-shifting slang and colloquialisms involving vegetables and figures of speech based on Buddhist legend, but I wasn’t born in Japan, and so there are levels that I will never have access to. I was not born speaking hip hop, I was not born to the people whose language it is, so I’ll never truly understand it. This doesn’t mean I can’t have a real relationship to the music or the culture, it just means that, regardless of how much knowledge I cram into my head, there will always be parts that I won’t understand on a gut level. It’s as simple as that.
O-Dub and the Quarterwit have come together like flint and steel to spark a discussion regarding the role of white fans in hip hop. It’s a recurring discussion, of course, but I think this instance of it happens to be particularly informed and subtle. In case you haven’t picked up on it, I am a white man, and have certainly spent plenty of time turning this question – the question of whether I am, by listening to “Freek-a-Leek,” perpetuating a history of exploitation by members of my race, the question of whether laughing at Ol’ Dirty makes me a racist – over and over, trying to figure out just what the reality is. Hell, I wrote my damned undergrad thesis on the issue (a gesture which was itself emblematic of the deep, deep divide between the sources and consumers of hip hop).
I’m not particularly insecure about my place in hip hop - I’ve done my bit for king and country. I held down a moderately significant radio slot for a year or so, was one of the first guys in Austin really representing the CoFlo wing of the underground, and I did some really good work in exposing that music when I was at Audiogalaxy, particularly giving early wide exposure to the Rhymesayers and Def Jux, and, um, anticon crews. I also, obviously, write about hip hop quite a lot, but I don’t know if I’m comfortable classifying that as a contribution to the culture.
Regardless of my accomplishments and contributions, the strange part is that I’m still a perpetrator when it comes to the kind of fantasy wish-fulfillment that Mos characterizes as the defining feature of the white suburbanite fair-weather fan. I went through a not-brief-enough phase of having dreadlocks and wearing baggie “hip-hop” style clothes, a phase memorialized on a driver’s license photo, which I still have and in which I look much more like John Walker Lindh than KRS-One. But even having outgrown that unfortunate indulgence, now that I’m back to dressing like the standard-issue white hipster that I was through high school, I hold back a sequestered corner of my soul in which to store “Rap Dave.” I let him out every once in a while when I need to have some voice in my head telling some asshole to go fuck himself, or whispering sweet nothings to some fine girl passing me in the street. Of course Rap Dave rarely makes it out of the confines of my head intact, but I know for a fact that his presence influences my behavior in other, more subtle ways – having the template of hip hop masculinity to draw from has changed my personality, allowing me to open up and let loose in ways I never could in my younger days.
I think it’s safe to say that every hip hop fan is, to a greater or lesser degree, engaged in emulation of their idols’ behavior. It’s just the way things work, and there’s nothing wrong with it as outlined above. The problem comes when we acknowledge that the dynamic between lil’ white me and (to take the obvious example) Ghostface is different than the dynamic between me and, say, Lemmy (another idol of mine), because I know people like Lemmy (or at least, Lemmy minus the musical genius), and so have an automatic reference point for the humanity that lies behind his persona. On the other hand, I quite frankly don’t know anyone like Ghostface. I’m not even going to get my feet tangled up by talking about all the black people I know, but suffice that none of them are risen-from-the-ghetto hardmen. So even when Ghostface is working harder than anyone out there to make it easy for outsiders to understand what it means to be like him, I don’t think I really can. I’ll always mainly see the flash and the grit and the smooth bedroom talk – I’ll only rarely, if ever, see the man underneath. This is why, to me and many others, guys who make less or no effort to be understood by non-blacks – guys like Cam’Ron or Juvenile – seem like one-dimensional cutouts. They operate on an assumed common understanding that we’ll never be a part of, and in which their seemingly empty boasts and posturing are transformed into . . . what?
One thing that happened recently that made me realize that I’d crossed some kind of line was when I found myself genuinely moved by Z-Ro’s “I Hate U.” Of course I’ve grooved to my share of ghettolicious R&B schmaltz over the years (mostly courtesy of Robert K.), but always with a very white sort of detached irony, recognizing the cheesiness of the sentiment while singing along in an absurd falsetto. But the Z-Ro song, it’s different. I can’t entirely tell whether a) the song transcends the cheesiness of the genre and reaches a level of true emotional depth, or b) I’ve listened to nothing but cheesy pop hip hop and soul for long enough that my emotional palette is starting to shrink, to a point where I find the following lyrics moving: “I was daddy for a while, though I’ve got no seed/ But the kids are my H-E-A-R-T.” I think if I was listening to more Neutral Milk Hotel, there wouldn’t be even the slightest chance of me getting taken in by this sort of one-dimensional higglety-pigglety, but then again it isn’t a black/white thing particularly – the same could be said with, I’m guessing, Angie Stone or Cody Chestnutt in place of NMH above.
The problem, though, is that I sub/consciously tend to interpret this acceptance of Z-Ro as some sort of proof that I’m no longer separate from hip hop culture, that it has in fact become a part of me from such long exposure and dedication. But of course, while hip hop music may very well have become my own personal lingua franca, it’s not my native language. It’s as if I had moved to Japan at 18 and was now fluent – I may understand the meaning of everything going on around me, even the ever-shifting slang and colloquialisms involving vegetables and figures of speech based on Buddhist legend, but I wasn’t born in Japan, and so there are levels that I will never have access to. I was not born speaking hip hop, I was not born to the people whose language it is, so I’ll never truly understand it. This doesn’t mean I can’t have a real relationship to the music or the culture, it just means that, regardless of how much knowledge I cram into my head, there will always be parts that I won’t understand on a gut level. It’s as simple as that.
Monday, July 12, 2004
Dirty Kicks and Cheap Thrills
The Aaron M post will probably have to wait 'till tomorrow - grab onto your whole seat, even if you only need the edge.
Three weeks 'till Iowa. Fucking major.
Update - In the interest of full disclosure, Urban Outfitters is run by Naz- er, right-wingers. Thanks to Noixe for reminding me.
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