You Might Be A Rapper: Moe Tkacik
Rappers are often accused of:
1. inserting themselves into their rhymes (Moe as Kanye)
2. stream of consciousness style (Moe as Nas)
3. intellectual rigor is replaced by visceral, intuitive feeling for the message. in short: soul (Moe as most rappers)
4. often political (Moe as Dead Prez, Public Enemy, Talib Kweli)
5. hung up on capitalism (Moe as Jay-Z)
Her “Look at Me!” essay for the Columbia Journalism Review does strike a chord.
The reflections on journalism as metaphor for America echo thoughts I have on hip hop as a metaphor for America. Remember hip hop’s first come-up on a mainstream level was as a “CNN of the streets”, so when Moe says,
“If journalism’s more vital traditions of investigating corruption and synthesizing complex topics are going to be restored, it will never be at the expense of the personal, the sexual, the venal, or the sensational, but rather through mastering the kind of storytelling that understands that none of those things exists in a vacuum.
it sounds like a lot of overlapping well-intentioned agendas. in this context Jay-Z strikes me as a Bob Dylan/David Simon hybrid. Well, at least David Simon. Jay’s best work is The Wire on wax.
But is the notion of Simon, Jay-Z and the NY Times working together on an artful journalistic experience on behalf of the people (not to say there’s no $ involved) still absolutely ludacris? Couldn’t someone maybe post this idea on Obama’s facebook wall and like it a couple times to accelerate the process from impossible to difficult-but-doable ?
In addition to the hip hop journalism stuff, Moe’s thoughts on her feminist awakening at Jezebel makes my spidey-race sense tingle a little bit. Joni Mitchell was once set on the first line in her autobiography being “I was the only Black man at the party”. And Moe and I ourselves have had some exchanges on the sexism-v-racism transom. (disclosure: we know each other via gawk media circles) And much like journalism and hip hop can be used as political tools, those tools are often employed on behalf of feminist or race issues. As she says,
before coming to Jezebel, I had never much dwelled on the misfortune of being born a woman. But women, who so disproportionately bear the nothing-based economy’s unrelenting fusillade of invented insecurities and predatory sales pitches, were ideally positioned to share my list of grievances.
it’s pretty much the same gripe black people have, especially re. reparations talk. as we’ve turned the century so much of the cultural fraud in the way of advertising and lifestyle magazines and false demographics is about capitalizing on the insecurities The System created to exploit. there’s a sucker born every minute, and there’s even more if you pack a bunch of foreigners in a boat and tell them to act like suckers to survive. or convince anyone with two breasts that the dumb magazines are the ones for them…
AnyMoe, when you get into these types of big bad broad metaphors there’s always more to get into, and I’ve already overstayed my attention span (huh?). But there’s definitely an open invite for Moe to drop a hot sixteen if she ever wants to spit that hot fire another way.
