You think of my name now whenever you say, "Hi"
Became a commodity because I'm W-H-I-
-T-E, cuz MTV was so friendly to me
-Eminem
White rappers I can think of off the top of my head at this writing: Eminem, Kid Rock, Beastie Boys, Everlast/House of Pain, Fred Durst, Bubba Sparxxx, Zack de la Rocha, 3rd Bass, Crazy Town and a few other nu-metal acts that abandoned hip-hop as soon as Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit stopped selling out stadiums.
Hip-Hop is a uniquely black genre, straight up. R&B, Rock & Roll, Jazz and the Blues have all been co-opted by white artists but hip-hop has always stood its ground. To be accepted into the hip-hop community one has to prove themselves either through the clarity of time or on the lyrical battlefield that exists to keep the genre vibrant.
To be fair hip-hop has always been a very multi-cultural phenomenon since its start in the Bronx in the late 70’s. Things simply can’t be born in New York and not be worldly. But the artists have been predominantly black with latinos and whites filtering in, Asians seemingly not existing.
A couple other white rappers I forgot: Vanilla Ice, The Streets.
White rap starts lets say with Rick Rubin and the Beastie Boys. Def Jam, the late 80s and Rick Rubin has teamed up with Russell Simmons to help produce some of the most important early documents of early hip-hop; artists like LL Cool J, Run DMC and Public Enemy trade hip-hop’s Disco roots for the hard edged rock guitars favoured by their long-haired, Jewish producer extraordinaire. One of the best things that Rick Rubin produced was the Beasties debut Licensed to Ill. Not that it’s the most aesthetically appealing animal but its an important milestone for hip-hop, its biggest crossover into the white markets, Licensed might’ve been seen as a potential coup on Rap by some with its fratboyesque mentality (something the Beasties would later renounce). They renounced that early sound and after three years they finally followed up the most successful rap album up to that point with a flop that eventually was given its dues as one of the greatest documents of the hip-hop spirit and a damn near perfect album. The fact that it took so long to follow up is situational but its also common for successful white rappers, while most hip-hop artists will follow up albums within at least two years and generally at an annual basis when they are at their peaks (in the last five years there have been at least 9 Ghostface Killah or Wu-related albums that feature him heavily). The amount of time between Beasties albums in general points to the trio’s desire to constantly evolve their sound and although they’ve experienced varying degrees of success they will never be as big as they were when they were dumbing it down and turning the amps up to 11.
Vanilla Ice is known now as a one-hit wonder and generally dismissed as a white guy cashing in. That is simply not true, Vanilla Ice was a major voice in the Miami Bass movement. Chuck D and the Roots have publicly shouted him out and the money that Suge Knight extorted from him helped fund Death Row records which housed Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and 2pac. Contrary to popular belief, Knight never dangled Ice out of a window and in spite of Knight, Ice was still able to keep his financial gains in check and now lives very richly in his mansion’s mansion with his pet kangaroo and beautiful family and more beautiful car collection.
3rd Bass is a hip-hop cred late 80’s duo, Bubba Sparxxx and Paul Wall are hip-hop cred from the 2000’s. By hip-hop cred I mean that these guys existed in the culture without their race really playing a big part, Eminem is also hip-hop cred but I’ll get to him later.
Rap-metal was a more comfortable medium for white people to enter rap. Some bands flirted with it: Aerosmith/Run DMC, Anthrax, Faith No More, Taproot, Papa Roach, Slipknot &c; but there were some that truly loved hip-hop and stuck with it. Probably the most revered of these bands would be Rage Against the Machine, they mixed MCing with singing and they had those Tom Morello guitars that sounded like turntables which nobody has attempted to imitate on a big level. Their first three albums are some of the best of the 90’s. Deciding whether these guys count as white rap is about as tricky as rocking a rhyme though, because Morello was black and de la Rocha half chicano and half whitey.
If there was anybody that did rap-metal better it was Kid Rock on Devil Without a Cause. Kid Rock got his start on a major label in the late-80’s with a nasty Kid-n-Play style haircut and an opening slot for Ice Cube and Too $hort Things were optimistic as the start but alas the world was not ready and Rock lost his contract and had to hone his skill over the 90’s releasing music independently (check out the History of Rock for excellent highlights of this era). Finally in 1998 the world was ready, in fact they were really ready, Devil Without a Cause sold 11 million copies beating Eminem’s Slim Shady LP and Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other (both released about a year after Devil) by a good 4 million albums.
I think Kid rock was so successful for the same reason that Prince was with Purple Rain in the 80's, he had managed to hone in on a bunch of popular styles like old-school hip-hop, southern & country rock and, of course, heavy metal which was rearing its ugly head again for the first time in a while. His songs were big, creative and trailblazingly original. Devil certainly was a major reason why every metal band that came out around the turn of the millennium claimed Public Enemy and NWA as major influences but the flurry of activity by this new-crop of rap-metal artists (brought on by Korn's and Limp Bizkit’s success too) drained the subgenre of its flavor. With Devil and the stopgap History of Rock album that followed it, I feel very comfortable using the adjective genius. But when Rock finally properly followed up Devil with Cocky about five years later the genre had deflated and Kid Rock’s rhyming skills went down the tubes with pretty much everything else rap-metal minus Linkin Park, who nevertheless cut back on the rapping and DJing that was integral to their early sound. Incubus retained their DJ and so did Slipknot but neither band was really that invested in the rap-metal sound. Luckily Kid Rock found success with his Sheryl Crow duet Picture and was able to reinvent himself as a partying Bob Seger who occasionally rocked the microphone. One last point and then I’ll shut up on Kid Rock: All Summer Long is a hip-hop song that "samples" some majorly type-whitey songs.
Linkin Park might not warrant discussion in this essay as the group’s hip-hop element, MC Mike Shinoda and DJ Mr. Hahn were Asian. Singer Chester Bennington’s vocal style signified the direction heavy rock would take as Kid Rock and Fred Durst’s vocals had done before him, but this time the singers would give up on the whole rapping thing.
Limp Bizkit probably don’t have the hip-hop cred that Fred Durst and DJ Lethal would have hoped for but I’ll always stick up for these “Flo Rida’s” just as I will for Vanilla Ice. There first three albums have dumb moments and may seem absolutely garish to the ears of today's indie-aesthetes but it’s good metal and it’s rap-metal that actually follows the traditions of hip-hop just as Kid Rock’s and later Linkin Park’s music did and since they got their major label start in ’97 they actually were the first true rap-metal act in the genre’s biggest wave (Korn, since they never actually rapped themselves don’t fit into this category although they were perhaps the most influential group in metal at the turn of the millennium and RATM came before that wave).
Rap-metal is a comfortable place for white MC’s to exist if they are good and creative but in the actual rap world things are much trickier. Eminem is proof of this, just watch 8 Mile if you haven’t already to understand why. Eminem is easily the most important white rapper to exist so far and his first three albums are masterworks that deserve to stand next to those of Biggie Smalls, 2pac, A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube &c. What Eminem had and a lot of other white MCs didn’t was the will and the ability to release his music consistently and thus was able to keep himself in the public eye, releasing 4 albums in 5 years. As we all know pills took their toll on Eminem and he stepped out of the spotlight only to come back softer and lyrically weaker but whether he makes a great album again doesn’t really matter. Eminem proved that a white person can become a hip-hop artist and not rely on rock music (although his controversial antics followed a long tradition in rock & roll called shock rock which started somewhere between Elvis and Little Richard or maybe with Screamin' Jay Hawkin's and worked its way through artists like Alice Cooper, KISS & Marilyn Manson). More importantly that initial run of albums was complimented by Interscope Records, Eminem’s personal label that housed D12, 50 Cent and Obie Trice as well as his “Purple Rain” 8 Mile and the accompanying soundtrack, in terms of hip-hop Eminem proved everything he needed to within a few years. He also compared himself to Elvis a lot, which worked in the sense that he was invading a black genre but not accurate because he never truly turned the tide like Elvis did.
The Streets, deserve a mention to. The main guy, Mike Skinner, is very much white but he's British white and thus is a part of a very different musical culture that has seemingly little to do with anything on this list. Still as far as hip-hop goes it's very interesting stuff, Skinner's rhymes never quite sound like they're gonna make it but they always inevitably do. Their second album is a full-blown hip-hopera that tells the story of a very bad week for Mike Skinner (in)complete with an alternate ending.
Finally I gotta shout out the very weird Faith No More. As one of the great non-grunge alternative acts of the late 80's/early 90's they pushed rock's boundaries and made Axl Rose very upset when he thought that they thought that he wasn't cool. Their big contribution to white rap was Epic, a song immortalized as probably the easiest track on Rock Band to beat on the expert vocals setting. Their use of rapped lyrics was emphasized by their fantabulous rhythm section and although singer Mike Patton would rarely MC his band frequently DJ'd.
I always like looking back at the history of white rap and rap-metal. It’s lines are very traceable as there have only been a handful of souls brave enough to attempt it. I’ll also say that at the turn of the millennium when a lot of metal bands were trying to incorporate rap they were actually fusing two very hardcore genres and coming out with something that was popular but that also stood in direct contrast to the heavily processed and corporate sounds of Britney Spears, N*Sync, Celine Dion, Shania Twain...ad nauseum. I’ll finish this (sorta) with a shout out to some great white/non-black voices in hip-hop: Cypress Hill, Rage Against the Machine, Paul Wall, Eminem, House of Pain, Limp Bizkit, Faith No More, Anthrax (but only for getting white people interested in rap, their rap-metal is pure shite), Lil Rob, The Roots’ new/white bass player, Eminem, Crazy Town, Vanilla Ice, 3rd Bass, Papa Roach, Linkin Park and of course my favourite still Kid Rock.
As a side note the word nigger/nigga appears three times in white rap as far as I know. First on a demo cut but never released officially by Eminem. Marshall Mathers used the slur out of anger due to an embarrassing high school break up with his black girlfriend (the break up itself allegedly due to Mathers’ race). The song was leaked and Eminem publicly apologized for his use of the word. Kid Rock rocked it on the autobiographical Devil closer, Black Chick, White Guy. It never sparked controversy possibly due to Rock’s audience or to the song’s emotional honesty (about his relationship to his black babymama). Finally I most recently heard it on Crazy Town’s The Gift of Game. This time we get the more colloquial form “nigga” but that doesn’t take away the bad taste of it. Of course this is coming from a guy who probably says nigga/nigger probably way too much. For another “tasteful” use of the n-word check out Randy Newman’s subversive and sarcastic “Rednecks.”
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
Radiohead's The King of Limbs, Listen #1
Well I didn't exactly plan to do a blog on the subject but I have a little time and it seems worth riffing on. Yesterday I downloaded Radiohead's newest album The King of Limbs. It came out only a few days ago and is available on their website for purchase. Now pay attention to that word purchase because that one confused me. You see their last album, 2007's In Rainbows, was "sold" off the band's website in a digital package too but you could pay as much as you liked for it, or you could pay nothing either. For me, this was nice because I knew I'd buy the hard-copy disc when it came out anyways and In Rainbows was mine, initially for no cost. This time, Radiohead are selling it for about $10 off their site.
Now, I'm a little past hating bands for selling out but I'm kinda ticked at Radiohead for this move. I mean maybe the pay your own price thing was a one album deal or maybe the band didn't see the returns they were hoping from it, I don't know but I kinda feel like it should be the norm now. So anyways, I went to trusty old isohunt.com and downloaded The King of Limbs in record time and last night I gave it my first listen...
In terms of mood it reminds me of Kid A or Amnesiac, in that it's made of these ethereal songs. The problem I found was that the songs didn't really go anywhere, they just kinda hung out. At ~39 minutes it's Radiohead's shortest album but to me it felt like it had no desire to end. Of course, a new Radiohead album is always a big deal and aside from Pablo Honey they've never had a bad album. I don't feel comfortable giving this new album a bad review, unless I have to, but on first listen I didn't see what the big deal was. Which is kinda how I felt about this new Coen Bros film True Grit, it's good but what's the point?
Now, I'm a little past hating bands for selling out but I'm kinda ticked at Radiohead for this move. I mean maybe the pay your own price thing was a one album deal or maybe the band didn't see the returns they were hoping from it, I don't know but I kinda feel like it should be the norm now. So anyways, I went to trusty old isohunt.com and downloaded The King of Limbs in record time and last night I gave it my first listen...
In terms of mood it reminds me of Kid A or Amnesiac, in that it's made of these ethereal songs. The problem I found was that the songs didn't really go anywhere, they just kinda hung out. At ~39 minutes it's Radiohead's shortest album but to me it felt like it had no desire to end. Of course, a new Radiohead album is always a big deal and aside from Pablo Honey they've never had a bad album. I don't feel comfortable giving this new album a bad review, unless I have to, but on first listen I didn't see what the big deal was. Which is kinda how I felt about this new Coen Bros film True Grit, it's good but what's the point?
Saturday, February 19, 2011
My Top Ten (Now/Back Then)
I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody.
LCD Soundsystem
Whenever I get into writing on the internet, I generally theme my writing heavily on music. I used to for instance write a lot of music reviews, generally on stuff I thought was awesome and should be canonized in some form or another. The canon, however, is one of these theoretical literary terms that never can be truly pinned down. Anyways I was obsessed back then when I was in high school and trying to find this thing, or rather these things, and by that I mean I was obsessed with finding the best music by anybody. I graduated in '04 just as the Flames were reinvigorating their fans and their city, and Bush was beefing with Kerry, and Iraq was kinda looking like a dumb idea and political songs against all that stuff (minus the Flames) were just starting to make a lot of liberal-Democrat bands some Republican-sized money. Ooops I ran on again. So around the age of 16 I had amassed a lot of information about music and a lot of great CDs and I was under the impression that my opinion meant something and thus needed to be documented. I was reading a lot of music lists back then (primarily Blender Magazine's top 100 American albums and their list of the 500 CDs You Must Hear Before You Die) and also a lot of Allmusic.com's 4.5 and 5 star review and from these sources I was getting all my music and even today I still use these as points of reference.
So I started this list of the greatest albums of all time and eventually I made a master list of 117 that I cannot abide by but before that I settled on a top ten. This was based on the critical opinions I had read on these albums and also my opinions. This list was made probably when I was 18 and I've generally stuck by it because it's pretty good and I'm not so pretentious to try and make a list like this again. I bring it up here because I've been listening to these albums as of late and I thought I'd share some thoughts on each. The pictures are listed in the order I feel they belong now, although there have been shifts within the 4-9 range over the years. 1-3 and 10 I've always felt occupied the right spot, more or less.
1 Sgt. Pepper's and this usually duke it out for the top spot in lists I've seen over the years and it's taken me years to really understand and like Pepper's. The Beach Boys on the other hand hit me write in the gut right away in high school with this album. Maybe it was the hyped-confidence that comes along with this album, or the idea of Brian Wilson's "teenage symphonies to God," He only knows, but I loved this album right from the start. In high school it fit my disposition so well that I've never been able to appreciate Sgt. Pepper's because I just don't feel like John and Paul really approached the human condition nearly as much in their wild studio experimentation (a move based in part of the group's appreciation of this album).
2 Revolver is another album that I think Sgt. Pepper's fucks with too. The band has far more memorable tunes here than anywhere I think (minus Doctor Robert, which apparently only I know about). I guess having the Beatles occupy the second spot has always made sense to me. Revolver has some of the greatest moments for each Beatle (Taxman, Here, There and Everywhere, Tomorrow Never Knows & Yellow Submarine). This album and its gamut-running tracklist, I think, best represents a band that made their music like a shark would, constantly moving.
3 Besteveralbums.com rates this at number one and they have a very democratic way to making their list. My faith in my top three has only been shaken by the fact that I've listened to all three so much. I now have to really be in the mood for these to hear them. Generally though I've felt they make a great top three and I like that we move away from the 60's at this point. Nowadays I listen to the reggae version of this called Radiodread by Easy Star All-Stars (who also did Dub Side of the Moon) more than the original but as I listen to Yorke and crew rock out on Electioneering at this writing my faith is very much affirmed.
4 Neil Young recently took the fourth spot due to the fact that I've never had a bad listen to this short masterpiece. Split into an acoustic and an electric half (featuring his greatest rock band Crazy Horse) Rust Never Sleeps is like Revolver in that it does a great job in pinning down an extremely elusive artist. Kurt Cobain would later cite Young's question on burning out or fading away with his pen and a bullet but Young has managed to keep his fire burning strong. Or as Eminem put it: "when I go out I'ma go out shootin' / Not when I die, when I go to the club stupid!"
5 As a hip-hop fan Public Enemy needs to make fifth spot for me. Generally this is regarded as the towering moment in hip-hop when the stars lined up and for one moment the Public Enemy operation (as it involved many producers, an MC, a hype-man, a DJ, a goddamn Minister of Information and a Media Assassin) climaxed this burgeoning movement called hip-hop. I'm glad the word climax came to me because that really seems to encapsulate the way the people that loved this album felt about it. For me there's only one bad moment here and it is Flavor Flav's track but even then it helps push the other stuff to catastrophic levels. Chuck D's rhyming at the time was more advanced than most rappers and his topics were cutting edge. Soon after this release, NWA came and proved they had more A than Chuck D plus that pesky Minister of Information pulled a Mel Gibson and hated on some Jews which gave their detractors a lot of detracting room. Still, they managed to release another critical favourite and have some hits and hit reality shows as well way after the fact. Plus they made it cool to wear a giant clock as a pendant, so take that fashion world.
6 Prince's "White Album" was his last perfect one and his most perfect at that. Each song is in stark contrast with its comrades here as Prince abandons his backing band, the Revolution, and treks forward on his own and creating an R&B tradition wherein the cocky motherfucker R&B genius produces, arranges, composes and performs their own work (on Brown Sugar, D'angelo credits himself with all these roles and one more). The thing I like the most about Sign is that Prince does almost all of the vocals and he uses Queen-style harmonic, hearing so many Prince guises together (including his female alter ego Camille) can be haunting.
7 If I were ever to redo this list it would be Highway 61 Revisited representing Mr. Dylan but at the time I bought into the hype that this is Dylan's best album and it's pretty fair hype. As well as Dylan's best it is seen as one of the greatest break-up album along with Blue by Joni Mitchell. I listened to this a lot after my first taste of heartbreak, back then it made a lot more sense to me, nowadays Highway 61 says a lot more to me.
8 This brought hip-hop back to New York in a big way. Although the guys from the west were still selling more LPs, it was now clear that New York's ghettoes had a lot to say and they didn't have to rely on samples of 70's hits. NaS, Biggie, Mobb Deep and the individual members of the clan would lead the East Coast Hardcore movement which brought hip-hop to its raucous past while at the same time creating a world that was as menacing as the one they were trying to leave.
9 The Beastie Boys debut outsold Run DMC's Raising Hell (rap's first platinum album) but it didn't do much to better the genre aesthetically. The success of the Beastie's first run looked to be shortlived especially when the group denounced their antics. Three years later at the close of the 80's They released the last true old-school hip-hop album and also the best of the form. The vocal interplay of the Beasties had otherwise died in hip-hop and the density of samples was almost dead too, but the Beasties managed to get the Dust Brothers ditch their sample-collage album and let them rap over the music instead. the album flopped but as time went on people warmed up to it.
10 The last album to make my list, I think, and this one like some of the others seemed an obvious choice. Now I might put his other Born album in here but maybe not. Born to Run was supposed to sound like Phil Spector producing Roy Oribson singing Bob Dylan. To me, it succeeds in such a pretentious endevour and for that I love it very very much, so much in fact, that I wore out the CD playing it in my car too many times.
LCD Soundsystem
Whenever I get into writing on the internet, I generally theme my writing heavily on music. I used to for instance write a lot of music reviews, generally on stuff I thought was awesome and should be canonized in some form or another. The canon, however, is one of these theoretical literary terms that never can be truly pinned down. Anyways I was obsessed back then when I was in high school and trying to find this thing, or rather these things, and by that I mean I was obsessed with finding the best music by anybody. I graduated in '04 just as the Flames were reinvigorating their fans and their city, and Bush was beefing with Kerry, and Iraq was kinda looking like a dumb idea and political songs against all that stuff (minus the Flames) were just starting to make a lot of liberal-Democrat bands some Republican-sized money. Ooops I ran on again. So around the age of 16 I had amassed a lot of information about music and a lot of great CDs and I was under the impression that my opinion meant something and thus needed to be documented. I was reading a lot of music lists back then (primarily Blender Magazine's top 100 American albums and their list of the 500 CDs You Must Hear Before You Die) and also a lot of Allmusic.com's 4.5 and 5 star review and from these sources I was getting all my music and even today I still use these as points of reference.
So I started this list of the greatest albums of all time and eventually I made a master list of 117 that I cannot abide by but before that I settled on a top ten. This was based on the critical opinions I had read on these albums and also my opinions. This list was made probably when I was 18 and I've generally stuck by it because it's pretty good and I'm not so pretentious to try and make a list like this again. I bring it up here because I've been listening to these albums as of late and I thought I'd share some thoughts on each. The pictures are listed in the order I feel they belong now, although there have been shifts within the 4-9 range over the years. 1-3 and 10 I've always felt occupied the right spot, more or less.
1 Sgt. Pepper's and this usually duke it out for the top spot in lists I've seen over the years and it's taken me years to really understand and like Pepper's. The Beach Boys on the other hand hit me write in the gut right away in high school with this album. Maybe it was the hyped-confidence that comes along with this album, or the idea of Brian Wilson's "teenage symphonies to God," He only knows, but I loved this album right from the start. In high school it fit my disposition so well that I've never been able to appreciate Sgt. Pepper's because I just don't feel like John and Paul really approached the human condition nearly as much in their wild studio experimentation (a move based in part of the group's appreciation of this album).
2 Revolver is another album that I think Sgt. Pepper's fucks with too. The band has far more memorable tunes here than anywhere I think (minus Doctor Robert, which apparently only I know about). I guess having the Beatles occupy the second spot has always made sense to me. Revolver has some of the greatest moments for each Beatle (Taxman, Here, There and Everywhere, Tomorrow Never Knows & Yellow Submarine). This album and its gamut-running tracklist, I think, best represents a band that made their music like a shark would, constantly moving.
3 Besteveralbums.com rates this at number one and they have a very democratic way to making their list. My faith in my top three has only been shaken by the fact that I've listened to all three so much. I now have to really be in the mood for these to hear them. Generally though I've felt they make a great top three and I like that we move away from the 60's at this point. Nowadays I listen to the reggae version of this called Radiodread by Easy Star All-Stars (who also did Dub Side of the Moon) more than the original but as I listen to Yorke and crew rock out on Electioneering at this writing my faith is very much affirmed. 
4 Neil Young recently took the fourth spot due to the fact that I've never had a bad listen to this short masterpiece. Split into an acoustic and an electric half (featuring his greatest rock band Crazy Horse) Rust Never Sleeps is like Revolver in that it does a great job in pinning down an extremely elusive artist. Kurt Cobain would later cite Young's question on burning out or fading away with his pen and a bullet but Young has managed to keep his fire burning strong. Or as Eminem put it: "when I go out I'ma go out shootin' / Not when I die, when I go to the club stupid!"
5 As a hip-hop fan Public Enemy needs to make fifth spot for me. Generally this is regarded as the towering moment in hip-hop when the stars lined up and for one moment the Public Enemy operation (as it involved many producers, an MC, a hype-man, a DJ, a goddamn Minister of Information and a Media Assassin) climaxed this burgeoning movement called hip-hop. I'm glad the word climax came to me because that really seems to encapsulate the way the people that loved this album felt about it. For me there's only one bad moment here and it is Flavor Flav's track but even then it helps push the other stuff to catastrophic levels. Chuck D's rhyming at the time was more advanced than most rappers and his topics were cutting edge. Soon after this release, NWA came and proved they had more A than Chuck D plus that pesky Minister of Information pulled a Mel Gibson and hated on some Jews which gave their detractors a lot of detracting room. Still, they managed to release another critical favourite and have some hits and hit reality shows as well way after the fact. Plus they made it cool to wear a giant clock as a pendant, so take that fashion world.
6 Prince's "White Album" was his last perfect one and his most perfect at that. Each song is in stark contrast with its comrades here as Prince abandons his backing band, the Revolution, and treks forward on his own and creating an R&B tradition wherein the cocky motherfucker R&B genius produces, arranges, composes and performs their own work (on Brown Sugar, D'angelo credits himself with all these roles and one more). The thing I like the most about Sign is that Prince does almost all of the vocals and he uses Queen-style harmonic, hearing so many Prince guises together (including his female alter ego Camille) can be haunting.
7 If I were ever to redo this list it would be Highway 61 Revisited representing Mr. Dylan but at the time I bought into the hype that this is Dylan's best album and it's pretty fair hype. As well as Dylan's best it is seen as one of the greatest break-up album along with Blue by Joni Mitchell. I listened to this a lot after my first taste of heartbreak, back then it made a lot more sense to me, nowadays Highway 61 says a lot more to me.
8 This brought hip-hop back to New York in a big way. Although the guys from the west were still selling more LPs, it was now clear that New York's ghettoes had a lot to say and they didn't have to rely on samples of 70's hits. NaS, Biggie, Mobb Deep and the individual members of the clan would lead the East Coast Hardcore movement which brought hip-hop to its raucous past while at the same time creating a world that was as menacing as the one they were trying to leave. 
9 The Beastie Boys debut outsold Run DMC's Raising Hell (rap's first platinum album) but it didn't do much to better the genre aesthetically. The success of the Beastie's first run looked to be shortlived especially when the group denounced their antics. Three years later at the close of the 80's They released the last true old-school hip-hop album and also the best of the form. The vocal interplay of the Beasties had otherwise died in hip-hop and the density of samples was almost dead too, but the Beasties managed to get the Dust Brothers ditch their sample-collage album and let them rap over the music instead. the album flopped but as time went on people warmed up to it.
10 The last album to make my list, I think, and this one like some of the others seemed an obvious choice. Now I might put his other Born album in here but maybe not. Born to Run was supposed to sound like Phil Spector producing Roy Oribson singing Bob Dylan. To me, it succeeds in such a pretentious endevour and for that I love it very very much, so much in fact, that I wore out the CD playing it in my car too many times.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Blue-Eyed Handsome Man
Vanity thy name is...whatever his name is.
-The Community
I am a very ugly man. I'm not saying this cause I'm fishing for compliments or I'm insecure or to incite any reaction from my mother who I'm sure is reading this and getting ready to console me, perhaps tell me that I'm not that ugly. I should add one caveat though, I am an ugly man underneath my facial hair. You see, I was always a clean shaven individual. It came in part due to my hair being blonde. Growing facial hair was always a damn paradox because it would always come out clear like a polar bears.
this is, of course, until I decided, for the hell of it, to do the Movember mustache thing. At the end of the month I had this phenomenon of a mustache that I couldn't help but love. I either had the advice or thought it up myself to grow out the hair on my chin and the soulpatch to match it and all of the sudden I've got myself a serviceable goatee in time for Christmas.
So this new year has been quite a new year for me due to my new look. I'm an iPod guy, so I stick to the shadows at times and having this new face is pretty awesome for that. People are a lot less likely to know it's me when they notice me. But now all of the sudden I'm not the ugly guy anymore. Now I'm this handsome dude and it's a weird experience. I relate it to the famous SNL skit where Eddie Murphy paints his skin white and all of a sudden everybody's really nice to him. Girls are a lot nicer to me these days, it's weird.
-The Community
I am a very ugly man. I'm not saying this cause I'm fishing for compliments or I'm insecure or to incite any reaction from my mother who I'm sure is reading this and getting ready to console me, perhaps tell me that I'm not that ugly. I should add one caveat though, I am an ugly man underneath my facial hair. You see, I was always a clean shaven individual. It came in part due to my hair being blonde. Growing facial hair was always a damn paradox because it would always come out clear like a polar bears.
this is, of course, until I decided, for the hell of it, to do the Movember mustache thing. At the end of the month I had this phenomenon of a mustache that I couldn't help but love. I either had the advice or thought it up myself to grow out the hair on my chin and the soulpatch to match it and all of the sudden I've got myself a serviceable goatee in time for Christmas.
So this new year has been quite a new year for me due to my new look. I'm an iPod guy, so I stick to the shadows at times and having this new face is pretty awesome for that. People are a lot less likely to know it's me when they notice me. But now all of the sudden I'm not the ugly guy anymore. Now I'm this handsome dude and it's a weird experience. I relate it to the famous SNL skit where Eddie Murphy paints his skin white and all of a sudden everybody's really nice to him. Girls are a lot nicer to me these days, it's weird.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
HER and the Heart
Yo Hip-Hop started out in the heart
Now everybody tryin' to chart
-Lauryn Hill "Superstar"
If you take English courses at U of C right now then you might know this guy named Daniel. He's got long hair and I'm guessing some form of ADHD. If you have a class with him then you've heard his opinion and probably chuckled a bit too. His cypher (my word), he tells me is "Punk Rock," and he likes to tailor his points to this style at times. So I think if Daniel is punk than I'm hip-hop, straight up though both of us look like goddamn hippies.
Hip-Hop and punk got a lot in common. Both are from the ground up type operations. Hip-Hop is a major force in post colonialism, along with dub/reggae music and punk too, it was/is the music of the ghettos. Peoples disenfranchised found solace in these forms of music as it didn't take much money to get your start. Computers have democratized the form of hip-hop much further all the while putting the record-spinning DJ on the endangered species list. The anger of punk and hip-hop and sometimes reggae is also a connector, the coolest example of this for me is the label Def Jam. Chief label architect Russell Simmons may be the tamest dude on the planet right now but back in the day he had the foresight to hire metalhead Rick Rubin to produce/"reduce" the rappers that would end up breaking the form on a worldwide level. The scant beats and blaring guitars were one thing but Def Jam artists were also encouraged to be as ridiculously controversial as they wanted to be. It worked with the fratboy mentality of Beastie Boys but more importantly it really worked for Public Enemy who sold to white teenage boys black radicalist music. I was one of those teenage boys (albeit 15 years too late).
Run DMC, Public Enemy, Kid Rock and the Wu-Tang Clan are, for me, where hip-hop started, and yes it started in the heart, like love at first listen. The Wu started me on the term cypher, but it was NaS that completed it for me with this line: Wipe the sweat off my dome, spit the phlegm on the street / Suede Timbs on my feets makes my cypher complete. That rhyme has been bitten many a time including once by Jay-Z midway through his beef with NaS. I like to think of a cypher as something that we all have. There are certain things that go in to us, that identify you and all that shit.
Biting is another great hip-hop term and I'll let Lil Wayne defend it:
Now hey kids
Plural I graduated
Cause you could get through anything if Magic made it.
And that was called recycling
Or rereciting
Something cause you just like it
So you say it just like it.
Some say its biting
But i say its enlightning
Besides Dr. Kanye West is one of the brightest.
And Dr. Swizz can stitch your track up the tightest.
And Dr. Jeezy can fix your back up the nicest.
That's respect, and generally when a rapper uses another rapper's lines it's out of love but not every rapper hears it that way. Long before the whole east-coast/west-coast feud. Biggie Smalls had beef with NaS via Raekwon and Ghostface Killah. There's some lines about bleach being thrown in people's eyes that speak to this and there's an interlude on Raekwon's Only Built for Cuban Linx called Shark Niggas (Biters) where Ghost says that B.I.G. bit NaS's album cover. I'll let you decide for yourself:
Another term I think everybody needs to know if they wanna know hip-hop is Hearing Every Rhyme (HER). Common's song I Used to Love HER is one of the most important songs in the genre. People talk about HER in rap songs all the time and it sparked one of rap's best and most symbolic beefs when Ice Cube took offense to the song. Back then Common was Common Sense and he was part of an underground movement in hip-hop to bring the genre to an intellectual level that was true to the start, ie the heart. I still love HER, just like I still love Alberta Beef but it's not always an easy love. The Dirty South is awesome and very much a return to Rick-Rubin style reductionism but there are some dumb-ass dudes from that area, poeple that, as Lupe Fiasco would call it, "Dumb it Down" (youtube this song along with the Common Sense piece). Canadian hip-hop drives me nuts too, it's generally good and it loves its traditionalism but a lot of these Canadian MCs sound like they're a good 20 years too late. Australia apparently has this problem too and the accents don't help. I leave you with one final song to check out and that is the Hilltop Hoods' She's So Ugly, another song about HER but from freaking Australia. The lyrics are smart but can you handle the accents?
Now everybody tryin' to chart
-Lauryn Hill "Superstar"
If you take English courses at U of C right now then you might know this guy named Daniel. He's got long hair and I'm guessing some form of ADHD. If you have a class with him then you've heard his opinion and probably chuckled a bit too. His cypher (my word), he tells me is "Punk Rock," and he likes to tailor his points to this style at times. So I think if Daniel is punk than I'm hip-hop, straight up though both of us look like goddamn hippies.
Hip-Hop and punk got a lot in common. Both are from the ground up type operations. Hip-Hop is a major force in post colonialism, along with dub/reggae music and punk too, it was/is the music of the ghettos. Peoples disenfranchised found solace in these forms of music as it didn't take much money to get your start. Computers have democratized the form of hip-hop much further all the while putting the record-spinning DJ on the endangered species list. The anger of punk and hip-hop and sometimes reggae is also a connector, the coolest example of this for me is the label Def Jam. Chief label architect Russell Simmons may be the tamest dude on the planet right now but back in the day he had the foresight to hire metalhead Rick Rubin to produce/"reduce" the rappers that would end up breaking the form on a worldwide level. The scant beats and blaring guitars were one thing but Def Jam artists were also encouraged to be as ridiculously controversial as they wanted to be. It worked with the fratboy mentality of Beastie Boys but more importantly it really worked for Public Enemy who sold to white teenage boys black radicalist music. I was one of those teenage boys (albeit 15 years too late).
Run DMC, Public Enemy, Kid Rock and the Wu-Tang Clan are, for me, where hip-hop started, and yes it started in the heart, like love at first listen. The Wu started me on the term cypher, but it was NaS that completed it for me with this line: Wipe the sweat off my dome, spit the phlegm on the street / Suede Timbs on my feets makes my cypher complete. That rhyme has been bitten many a time including once by Jay-Z midway through his beef with NaS. I like to think of a cypher as something that we all have. There are certain things that go in to us, that identify you and all that shit.
Biting is another great hip-hop term and I'll let Lil Wayne defend it:
Now hey kids
Plural I graduated
Cause you could get through anything if Magic made it.
And that was called recycling
Or rereciting
Something cause you just like it
So you say it just like it.
Some say its biting
But i say its enlightning
Besides Dr. Kanye West is one of the brightest.
And Dr. Swizz can stitch your track up the tightest.
And Dr. Jeezy can fix your back up the nicest.
That's respect, and generally when a rapper uses another rapper's lines it's out of love but not every rapper hears it that way. Long before the whole east-coast/west-coast feud. Biggie Smalls had beef with NaS via Raekwon and Ghostface Killah. There's some lines about bleach being thrown in people's eyes that speak to this and there's an interlude on Raekwon's Only Built for Cuban Linx called Shark Niggas (Biters) where Ghost says that B.I.G. bit NaS's album cover. I'll let you decide for yourself:
Mee Against the Internet
Holden: If the buzz is any indicator, that movie's gonna make some huge bank.
Jay: What buzz?
Holden: The Internet buzz.
Jay: What the fuck is the Internet?
Holden: The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another.
-Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
This is blog number 6 perhaps? A lot of failed blogs, one that ran for a good chunk of my high schooling (that I now keep hidden due to god knows what stupid shit I put up there). I've been thinking about Mee Against the World for a long time. I used to do Facebook notes but those fucking pissed me off after a while. Well really they didn't but you just never know what you can write on Facebook anymore. Everybody's gotta be your friend and since you're in, or past, your mid-20's you have to think about their feelings too. So a blog is nice because I don't have to put my name up and can maintain a little anonymity. Of course, I love the attention so I'll be milking the Facebook aspect and thus kinda paradoxing myself.
Starting shit on the internet is always a weird experience. There's these little hoops that we jump through to get things from the internet. If you buy off iTunes then usually once a month you're completely ignoring a 50+ page contract and clicking a box saying that you've read understand the damn thing. Starting this blog I had to type out one of those word-image things that validify my existence. As I'm finding more and more I couldn't freaking read it. So I clicked the handicap button, which by the way what the fuck is up with that? I mean it's not that I'm in a wheelchair and I can't read this thing, it's that it's unreadable. The vocal translation that is made for physically disabled people and regular old retards like myself wasn't even a word, it was numbers over creepy vocal effects.
I'm sure the internet drives everybody a little crazy but like any technology that we come to rely on or life in general we gotta put up with it. Maybe that's why blogs came about, expression is key. People need people to talk to, I'm finding that more and more, the hermit's lifestyle is only for the extremists, and when we can't talk to somebody because it's Sunday morning and you'd rather blare some George Jones then call up somebody (a concept that died to my generation with our first cell phones) and texting isn't something I'm eager to do either right now. So we blog to express and why do we need to express? Because the internet is fucked.
Jay: What buzz?
Holden: The Internet buzz.
Jay: What the fuck is the Internet?
Holden: The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another.
-Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
This is blog number 6 perhaps? A lot of failed blogs, one that ran for a good chunk of my high schooling (that I now keep hidden due to god knows what stupid shit I put up there). I've been thinking about Mee Against the World for a long time. I used to do Facebook notes but those fucking pissed me off after a while. Well really they didn't but you just never know what you can write on Facebook anymore. Everybody's gotta be your friend and since you're in, or past, your mid-20's you have to think about their feelings too. So a blog is nice because I don't have to put my name up and can maintain a little anonymity. Of course, I love the attention so I'll be milking the Facebook aspect and thus kinda paradoxing myself.
Starting shit on the internet is always a weird experience. There's these little hoops that we jump through to get things from the internet. If you buy off iTunes then usually once a month you're completely ignoring a 50+ page contract and clicking a box saying that you've read understand the damn thing. Starting this blog I had to type out one of those word-image things that validify my existence. As I'm finding more and more I couldn't freaking read it. So I clicked the handicap button, which by the way what the fuck is up with that? I mean it's not that I'm in a wheelchair and I can't read this thing, it's that it's unreadable. The vocal translation that is made for physically disabled people and regular old retards like myself wasn't even a word, it was numbers over creepy vocal effects.
I'm sure the internet drives everybody a little crazy but like any technology that we come to rely on or life in general we gotta put up with it. Maybe that's why blogs came about, expression is key. People need people to talk to, I'm finding that more and more, the hermit's lifestyle is only for the extremists, and when we can't talk to somebody because it's Sunday morning and you'd rather blare some George Jones then call up somebody (a concept that died to my generation with our first cell phones) and texting isn't something I'm eager to do either right now. So we blog to express and why do we need to express? Because the internet is fucked.
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