A REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
ONE OF THE RISKS involved with having so much of one’s past writing available online is the risk of readers finding something you wrote long ago, which in retrospect has proven to be rather stupid.
Example: Somewhere back in the early ’90s (oh, the ’90s, weren’t they such a simpler time?), I wrote something to the effect that rap music had “fulfilled what the bebop jazz guys had set out to do: create a black music that didn’t
need white people to ‘popularize it’ (i.e. muscle in).”
I seem to have actually believed at the time that hip-hop culture had attained the long-sought holy grail of African-American musicians–a style so intricately, innately black that any white hipsters who tried to take it over would sound hopelessly inept at it.
I was SO wrong.
Not too many years after I wrote that, Hollywood promoters essentially took over rap. They aggressively promoted their gangsta stars to nakedly exploit white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men as sexy savages. Whereas early hiphop had often been about challenging images of black males as dumb, sexist, gun-happy drug dealers, gangsta rap relished in precisely these images.
This gave rap a much bigger market. But it also turned the white “crossover” market into the force that drove the business. It helped determine which artists would get signed, get radio and MTV play, get large promo budgets, etc.
That shift, in turn, meant that mainstream rap would become more musically tame each year. Samples became more obvious. Wordplay became simpler. Delivery became slower, steadier, easier for an untrained listener to understand.
The result, by late 1998, was a hiphop sufficiently dumbed down that not only could clueless white guys understand it, they could make it.
Hence, Insane Clown Posse, Eminem, Kid Rock, Korn, Limp Bizkit, and the other “aggro” acts and novelty acts now profitably spreading messages of egotism, violence, misogyny, profanity, etc.
Thus, the music that began with messages of black intelligence has morphed into something that, as often as not, wallows in notions of white stupidity.
I don’t quite call that progress.
TOMORROW: Some things that aren’t as much fun in one’s forties.
ELSEWHERE:
