TAN

2012-03-28

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

brain damage, eminem

love this bit from the “The Slim Shady LP” wiki:

Additionally, Bailey had previously admitted to bullying Eminem in the April 1999 issue of Rolling Stone. The lawsuit was later dismissed by a judge, who, in her explanation, wrote a humorous rap verse: “Bailey thinks he’s entitled to some monetary gain/Because Eminem used his name in vain.

we repeat: the judge was inspired to craft verses.

“It is therefore this court’s ultimate position / That Eminem is entitled to summary disposition”

wait, what?

we rephrase: a judge ethered DeAngelo Bailey’s lawsuit with a hot 16 (or however many bars is 36 lines)

“The lyrics are stories no one would take as fact/ They’re an exaggeration of a childish act”

unh. holla.

i wonder if a judge writing rhymes about you is like, “cool story, bro!” or like, permanent dark night of the soul.

2011-10-07

You might be a rapper!: Steve Jobs, Dr. Seuss, others

over at Grantland

(illustration: Brandon Bolt)

2011-08-12

frankocean:

hip-hop.

word

Source: jpegheaven

2010-07-18

Bill Murray: You might be a rapper.

Bill is in shots fired hip hop mode in his must-read-if-you-like-bill-murray GQ Interview.

On Garfield: “At least they had what’s-her-name? [Jennifer Love Hewitt] At least they had her in good-looking clothes.

On Seinfeld: “I never saw Seinfeld until the final episode and that’s the only one i saw. and it was terrible.”

GQ Comedy issue is pretty good so far.

Also a perfect opportunity to re-run this classic Coffee and Cigarettes scene with GZA and RZA. #pleasegodletrzagzabillmurraymakeamixtape

2010-06-04

Just saw an unpacking of Rashida Jones doing a comic on Jezebel (what if Paris Hilton was actually a savvy sophisticated spy? what??!?). Which reminded me of another cool-girl Mary H.K. Choi’s comic…

Verdict: Cool Chicks, err, LADIES, dig the Comic Book.

Olivia Munn comic coming in 3, 2…

(per the hip hop scholarship agenda, I see this all as foreshadowing to a good 35-40% of journalists becoming rappers)

2010-06-01

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

“With the knowledge there’s a little thug blood in me”

A little while back I stumbled on this old 90s song, “Verbal Murder 2” featuring NORE, Big Pun (RIP), and Common. Off Pete Rock’s Soul Survivor album. The Common verse, which I’ve clipped and posted here, has always been one of my favorites.

I like to talk about the intellectual DNA still embedded in hip hop lyrics that we need to recover, and this verse is a good example. The Common line I quote above gets right to the heart of some recent Bill Maher “real Black President” backlash. What Maher wants to say, and has said before, is that he wants his President to do the knowledge, but don’t lose that thug sensibility, because Thugism is not all bad. Common nails the sentiment with room to spare should he choose to tweet it out.

“this stud bumped into me, beef there was ‘fin to be, my appetite for destruction is finicky…”

Swap “BP CEO” for “stud”, and Obama doesn’t even need to hold a press conference to share his state of mind.

Another awesome line is “he spiked his punchlines with current events”. This is a nod to old school rhyme ciphers, where you got no points if you said something like, “i tear your ass down like the berlin wall” right after it happened just for the name recognition (if you made it witty, all good). Or to be less dated, “I make the ladies go gaga”. nah, son. don’t go spiking your punchlines with current events.

Of course, if you think about the state of the news-aggregating blogosphere, most of them are just spiking their punchlines with current events. Headlines being the punchlines in a link-don’t-tell culture. So, you see, Hip Hop had a sense of integrity about page views and SEO before the internet even existed (in a popular, functional sense). That’s why I like to tout blogging as the new rapping whenever I can. Cause just like all the real bloggers out there, and real rappers, and Common in this verse,

“I can’t take this fake shit …”

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Miss Tila: Hip-Hop, we lost that a long time ago. There’s a lot more rap today then there is Hip-Hop. Run-DMC and Wu-Tang is all Hip-Hop. Nowadays anyone can be out there and call themselves a rapper. And now people have people ghostwriting for them now. What’s the point?

This is from an “Inside the Lyricist’s Studio” interview with Miss Tila, formerly known as Tila Tequila. And if you’re currently thinking, “huh, that’s weird”, you should probably go with that feeling. And also go read the full-on amazing interview. I’ll probably try and unpack this Emcee Miss Tila madness in the future, after I find my brain.

2010-05-21

You Might Be A Rapper: Franz Kafka

F to the would have had platinum potential as a dark-emo emcee. His profile projects the reserved effeminate-existential style of a Kid Cudi. But Kafka would have brought more technical skills to the table. He’d be Eminem with less snark and more humility. A Def Jux crew member in spirit, their smarty-arty tones with more pop and accessibility.

This may be a stretch. The Franz has nuance and sophistication that may very well be inaccessible in 4/4 measures. But then I remember, he didn’t actually put out any of his records. He just had his diaries. His octavos. His rhyme book. As one of those commenters on that linked page says, “strange little ditties, just stray melodies and such”.

Oh yeah, Kafka in 2000-america would definitely scribble some hot 16s. If only to throw some cracks in that frozen sea while the axe is being sharpened.

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Norman Mailer was most definitely a rapper. The Naked and the Dead is his street album; his Reasonable Doubt or Illmatic. That’s forever cred. But in my opinion what really gave Mailer that swagger was his willingness to take it off the books into the streets ANY TIME YOU WANT. ARE YOU READY TO APOLOGIZE???

Nas is supposed to be hardcore rapper. Tough. How come he didn’t stab his wife Kelis with a ballpoint pen then? You think quick-bic Norman would let any woman walk off with his Pulitzer paper? You do no want it with NoMal!

KRS-One once famously threw PM Dawn off the stage. Mailer was this type. Aggressive, hostile ego. violent alpha-intellectual. And what distinguishes their brand of bombast for the better is the egotism is not rooted in capitalism. It’s art, culture, country. If Mailer was in his prime now, rapping, he might not be rich or lavished with awards, but there would definitely be some bloggers with black eyes. Some of these fools hurting my sense of intellectual pollution.

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feelingsaregross:

shawnblog:

bringmethathorizon:

(via obsessionful)

Jesus Christ, you might be a rapper!

Source: obsessionfull

2010-05-20

You Might Be A Rapper: Dr. Seuss

I don’t even need to really argue this one do I?

What’s funny is back when hip hop was more small-minded, Dr. Seuss would sometimes be referenced as an example of a simple or bad emcee. This is back when the evolution of lyricism in hip hop was simple +1 math. More rhymes, more syllables, more and more in the bars. You wouldn’t want to be the clown kicking those Dr. Seuss rhymes…

But it’s becoming more apparent that such an approach eventually maxes itself out, and you have to regress. And subsequently rationalize your regression. It’s not regression, it’s addition by subtraction. It’s moving out of the old rhyme box. When hip hop was small-minded there was no room for “Children’s Hip Hop” vs. “Adult hip hop”. Now we can ask, why not? Look at Dr. Seuss, he’s a genius.

We know Dr. Teddy G had rhyme schemes for days. So the only question with him would be who’s a good producer match for him. I think you need someone with a bit of a twee sensibility, but still has some edge. No Dilla, no Primo, no Dre, no Just Blaze. But Kanye might work. And I feel like Danger Mouse would be a good fit. If only for the one-off album:

DANGER SEUSS

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You Might Be A Rapper: Susan Sontag

(I didn’t want to leave Moe just hanging out there. every rapper needs a crew.)

She might not have seen it this way, but Susan Sontag tapped into her inner Dead Prez with her, “the white race is the cancer of the earth” line. Her essay “Against Interpretation” and the general spirit of that whole collection is in ideological sync with songs like “They Schools” and “Mind Sex”. Sontag was an intellectual but often hostile and resentful of it in the same way that hip hop is smart, but anti-intellectual (i have a lyric to the effect of “hip hop: smart n’s without a BA”). She was trapped, a soldier with nothing to fight for due to socioethnocultural circumstance.

2010-05-19

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 ?