From Sean Cooper Sent Fri, Jul 16th 1999, 22:18
From Sean Cooper Sent Fri, Jul 16th 1999, 22:18
>>i don't think it's THAT outrageous >>for Multsanta to have beef with artists taking >>the music that is tied inseparably to the urban >>culture of america's cities, distilling the political >>and cultural element out of it completely (and please >>no one try and t ell us that there is no political >>element in rap & hip-hop) and turning it into >>an uncharged, sterilized + acceptable way for >>white folks to 'get their groove on.' nothing is tied inseperably to anything. if that were the case, hip-hop shouldn't exist, and the conservative music critics that derided funk and soul as the sterilization of jazz should take their bow. >>i don't really think anyone is saying trip-hop >>or whatever is ethically wrong or anything, just >>that trip-hop and other caucasion attempts at >>harnessing the spirit of hip-hop just don't do >>it for most people with an intimate attachment >>to hip-hop and the culture it is borne of. and since the orientalist assumptions that make having an intimate attachment to hip-hop inherently of greater value than having an intimate attachment to anything else need not be questioned, we can all give praise to the convoluted discursive movements by which you've just argued to "keep it real." this, of course, is to say nothing at all about whether "trip-hop" can be exhaustively identified as a caucasian attempt at harnessing the spirit of hip-hop (and of whether or not it should, for that, be hated). >thank you! rjyan hit the nail on the head there. >when i wrote that previous post it was 2:30 am and i really wasn't >communicating my ideas properly. it didn't occur to me that i was speaking >to people who have no concept of the extreme cultural value of hip hop (no >offense) having a sense of the extreme cultural value of hip-hop does not also mean hating that which is not hip-hop, or that which hip-hop gives rise to. one can certainly find it lacking in value for this or that reason, but simply debunking it as not black or not authentically black is, frankly, banal. >>you think pop culture is >>the product of and for the suburbs? > >no, pop culture is usually the product of the ghetto, then watered down and >produced by marketable white musicians for consumption by all. this is absurd. pop culture pulls from the spectrum of human experience. it is the case that most pop music of this century has direct or indirect ties to the african-american diaspora, but let's stop at generalizing this to pop culture as a whole. a more interesting question might be, when is it no longer appropriate to assert these ties in a definitional sense? that is, when does nirvana or limp bizkit stop making sense as the latest telelogical moment in the ongoing evolution of the delta blues? or maybe, is dj shadow or kruder & dorfmeister expressive of a certain impulse to fetishize black experience? and does your lambasting of them have its source in a similar impulse? >i understand that, but remember, we're (at least i'm) not talking about pop >culture in it's entirety, but rather, specifically trip hop, which has >virtually no presence in the ghetto... how often do you hear dj shadow >pumpin' out of a ghetto blaster? ibid. dj shadow does not speak to the ghetto, and so the ghetto does not listen to his music. what are you trying to argue? your comments smack of a conservative's purism and i find them frankly hilarious on a list like this, where most of the music discussed wouldn't exist were this the prevailing attitude. >np: mr. bungle- california... this is excellent. everyone get this now. some of this is excellent; some of it sounds like getting out of a record deal to me. many people on this list would probably hate all of it. sc