P&J 2003: Tokenism-a-go-go (WARNING: Outkast content)

The single is more rock than hip-hop, and Kenna's only connection to hip-hop is Chad Hugo's production.

I'm as whitebread as they come, I s'pose.

That was the token cool tokenist.

You really should be proud of yourself, nate.

YOU'RE NOT MY FATHER! *slams door*

I'm not dumping on Nate Sonny - I think i) it is interesting, ii) tokenism is a perfectly defensible position anyway (as O Nate hints).

Lists by committee are never a true representation of what was good in any certain year. Everyone's guilty of stuffing the ballot box with certain albums they want to see ranked, regardless of how much they actually *like* those albums.

Yeah, because they all finished in #1 albums and singles and were constantly reviewed using the terms "unlike their less-creative mainstream counterparts"

*I realize this might be a slight overdramatization.

context is everything.

For example, they tried, maybe once or twice back in the eighties, to sift out results according the voter's declared race (and I think sex, too, not sure) and there were pretty notable differences between the resultant lists, in spite of the fact that some people strenuously objected to the idea and refused to participate, and not without reason.

Doesn't the term "tokenism" get used in reference to colorblind genre affiliation on ILM on a constant basis?

I think an aggregate poll or just numbers would have been classier than a list of names but this way is more honest and we do get to unpick what the cliched Outkast-only straw man is actually LIKE (as you are doing in your posts!)

(x-post)

It does, and that doesn't make it right in that context either. Nor does it make it right that you're calling people out by name.

http://microsites.nme.com/thisweek/

So wait...I'm being a jerk for making a "perfunctory effort or symbolic gesture towards" post-grunge?

holy shit, Jody just made clear why I like "Hey Ya" so much!

TED: Welcome, wilkomen, bienvenue. It's a great honour and privilage for me to present this celebration of the wide diversity of cultures that exists today on Craggy Island, namely Chinese people and people from Craggy Island. I have prepared a short slide show presentation which reflects this multicultural mix. So without furtherado lets start the show.

SLIDE ONE - TED WITH HIS ARM AROUND A BLACK MAN
TED: This man visited the island a few years ago. I forget his name now but I got on very well with him so I just thought I'd throw that in at the start.

MAN IN AUDIENCE: Will there be any free drink at this?

TED: Yes. There will be a limited supply of free drink afterwards

SLIDE TWO
TED: The Great wall of China; a miracle of Chinese engineering, so big you can see it from anywhere in the world.

SLIDE THREE
TED: Chairman Mao. Secretary of the Communist Party of China. One of the biggest communist parties in the world and in my view the best!

SLIDE FOUR
TED: Mr. Miaggi from the Karate Kid, one of my favourite films. NOT because of the karate kid himself but because of Mr. Miaggi. Not a day goes by when I don't remember one of his many words of wisdom.

SLIDE FIVE
TED: Kato. Where would he spring from next?

SLIDE SIX
TED: The Mauri. I'm sorry, I don't know how that got in there. Ahem, of course there are no Mauris on Craggy Island.

MAN WEARING MAURI FACEPAINTS IN AUDIENCE LOOKS UP

SLIDE SEVEN
TED: Ming the Merciless.

SLIDE EIGHT - FOUR CHINESE PEOPLE
TED: But best of all the Chinese people themselves. Look at them there, aren't they great.

SLIDE NINE - A CROWD OF PEOPLE
TED: The Chinese; a great bunch of lads.

TED ENDS OFF THE SLIDE SHOW, WHILE THE SLIDE MACHINE PROJECTS A PICTURE OF FATHER TED FOLLOWED BY THE WORDS, "NOT A RACIST", REPEATEDLY.

I can see your criticism of maybe Aesop Rock, because frankly he's sorta unlistenable. But the Non-Prophets specifically call out a lot of the garbage with indie hip-hop that turns people off from them. I can't stand 75% of the indie stuff I hear, and I love the mainstream... but the NPs found a really viable form of indie that stands on its own two legs without sounding elitist or wishy-washy.

I can't see any logical reason to leave "Damage" or "The Cure" off of a 2003 GO! CD (besides personal preference, of course). You could drop that awful "Sly Beyonce" song and slot it right in there, ha!

Well, to each their own.

(Also, related to nothing, but the Non-Prophets are corny and Fannypack are ok?!)

Slumberlord, I snuck in "That Ain't Right" as a last-minute addition to my '03 CDR-go thing. I also took out the Postal Service; I mean urgh, that dude's voice

This is a moronic comment. You and Ned should reread the Xgau quote.

Well, I'm feeling unusually hostile tonight (or maybe finally displaying the hostility I repress) but lines like "the critical clamor for 'Stankonia' sho'nuff made him wise to which way the wind blows" come from the pukebrain. Simpleminded snottyass shallowness. I do assume you have a mind, if you ever grow up and use it.

(1) "Frank Kogan wrote, 'I like the first Kool Moe Dee album because it reminds me of "96 Tears."'"

(2) "Why does Kool Moe Dee love need the imprimatur of garage rock to get over, pray tell?!?"

(3) "oh please. one really obscure quote from one person /= 'the imprimatur of garage rock to get over.' I mean, really--has anyone else in the history of humanity ever fucking mentioned '96 Tears' in accordance with Kool Moe Dee?"

(4) "although my above post was deliberately misinterpreted, i NEVER said the whole wide world unfavorably compared Kool Moe Dee to '96 Tears'..."

And the next response in this hypothetical conversation would be, "And no one claimed that you HAD said that the whole wide world unfavorably compared Kool Moe Dee to '96 Tears.' And people on these threads never deliberately misinterpret each other, except for comic effect."

So, let's take this slowly, all the way through: In 1987 [in our alternate universe], Christgau says that the Pazz & Jop triumph of Kool Moe Dee transcends tokenism, and he cites as an example Frank Kogan's liking it for reminding him of "96 Tears." Now, Christgau is so used to writing in short form that even when he goes long he still doesn't spell out his ideas, which frustrates me massively because often I have to guess and also because this is how he sometimes gets away without thinking those ideas through. But nonetheless, I understand that Christgau's point here is that the votes for Kool Moe Dee didn't tend to come from a felt need to include a black person on one's ballot, and weren't necessarily for the blackness of his content. And (I say with slightly less certainty) that Christgau cites my "96 Tears" comparison as an example of a voter choosing Kool Moe Dee for personal aesthetic associations that don't particularly signify as "blackness." (Actually I didn't vote for Kool Moe Dee, but when I reviewed him I explicitly identified him with the hateful creep music of my early adolescence, e.g. "Under My Thumb," "96 Tears." "I transport myself into rage a lot. I don't know if it's stimulation or catharsis or fun or just time taken from my life. Anyway, rage is a home I go to and rage is a kind of music. And rage is accompanied by music. When I was a teenager I'd put the Rolling Stones on the record machine and pace or run around and dream of destroying my enemies. Still do it...") "Imprimatur" is not a relevant concept, that I can see. Kool Moe Dee doesn't come bearing Question Mark's approval or sanction, and even if he had, it's not the approval that gets him over with me. Now, you could say that by citing my comparison, Xgau is using it to push Kool Moe Dee over with his readers (a comparison to Question Mark somehow registering as a seal of approval), except that that has nothing to do with his point, which was about nontokenism and - probably - about Kool Moe Dee's reach. In any event, sentence (3) above makes sense to me not as a refutation of a nonexistent claim that the whole wide world unfavorably (?) compares Kool Moe Dee to garage rock, but as questioning how one can leap from a single person's very idiosyncratic comparison (that seems to have been cited for its very idiosyncrasy) to a general conclusion about people's need for imprimatur. (And back to real-life, Kandia isn't addressing Smucker's sentence for its idiosyncrasy but because it's exemplary of a need for imprimatur. Otherwise, why bring it up in the way she did? But anyway, no one's deliberately misinterpreting her, and by imagining that they are, she nicely avoids explaining what in the hell point she was trying to make in her imprimatur comment.)

But what set me off, Kandia, wasn't your misreading of other people - that's a common and human failing, and I may well be misreading you - but that the ideas you were reading into them ("them" incl. OutKast) were the ideas that made them vulnerable to your sneer.

And you all can fire "glass house" comments back at me, now that I've made myself an easy target.

I hope you didn't think for even six seconds that what you wrote in any way deserved to be called pukebrain, jerking off, or any of the other nasty things I said. Just think of me as some psycho on the street who started beating on you for reasons having to do with the voices in his head, not with you.

(And I'd get in touch with Kandia to say this, rather than just posting it here, except that I'm hoping that she didn't see the end of this thread; and if she hasn't, I don't want her to see it and therefore be subjected to it. If any of you are friends with her and know that she has, tell me.)

The only hip-hop albums I heard last year that would or might make, say, my top 20 are S/TLB, the Lyrics Born album, and the Dizzee Rascal album. "Hip-hop's corny now," sez Jay-Z, and I concur. Contemporary rap, like contemporary country music, is not an artistically robust genre, and won't be until a significant, smart and/or innovative, marginal, marginally popular, identifiably alt-rap-kinda subgenre emerges. (The Bay Area scene shows some promise on this front, but it's slim pickins at best.)

In 1982 that was more true than false. In 1989 it would've been laughably false. In 2004 the problem may be not that rap is nothing, but that it's exhausted, the province of dumbasses (the first 7,998,000 of the octuple-platinum fandom) and pomo-damaged scenesters and jock-sniffers (the last "critical" couple thousand).

My post was in response to your now-infamous list. I have not read this entire thread nor do I intend to.

i'd like to give lester the benefit of the doubt that had he lived he would have seen how wrong he was. even in 1982. heck, especially in 1982.

That might - actually, no, it clearly DOES frustrate you and you state as much in this thread as well as in your blog. But look at the dichotomies you raise in order to say, "it's not about race or black vs. white, it's about pop and indie, rockist and egalitarian, the-way-things-should-be vs. the-way-things-are." How are these binaries NOT about race in some underlying way? Yes, of course, they also represent arguments over aesthetics and values that are not WHOLLY BOUND to race but to utterly try to de-racialize the convo doesn't seem right to me either.

I mean, if boomers aren't feeling hip-hop - how is their rhetoric not racially coded in some fashion? This is from 1997, but Josh Kun's column on "The Racial Pasts of Music's Future" seems entirely relevant to our current conversation here, and in some fashion, predicts the ways in which our current discussion about Outkast, P&J, indie vs. pop, hip-hop vs. rock, et. al. has racial discourse coursing through its veins whether people want it to or not. That's the world that pop music exists in and while race does NOT have to over-determine everything (including this conversation), to try to remove it wholesale is just as bad as claiming that this thread is ONLY about race.

I agree with you Nate - it is about more than race, but that doesn't mean it's not about race too. If you want to target me for a groin-kick for saying that - bring it on ;)

I misplaced my groin-kickin' boots so there'll be none of that.

As a total aside, I actually did vote for Andre 3000 sans Big Boi for P&J. Not b/c I was hating on Big Boi (and I don't think anyone could rationally argue that I tokenize hip-hop) but frankly, I could never stop listening to "The Love Below" and thus, never got to "Speakerboxxx."

Oliver, you're right of course. But what do you think about the fundamental question that Nate is raising and that most others are evading (because they'd rather fight than think) ("they" incl. yours truly, apparently):

What is going on with so many people voting for OutKast as their only hip-hop vote?

And the further question I posed: What is going on when whole swaths of the "field" (pop, semipop) - e.g., country, adult contemporary - rarely if ever place on such polls as this, or when a swath - e.g., hip-hop - seems to place far below its desserts?

And by posting names and links, Nate makes sure that we don't come to simplistic conclusions.

This discussion hasn't really started yet.*

*Generic Frank Kogan comment. Now watch him disappear for a couple of weeks, as usual.

(Btw, I can imagine Harry Allen in 1987 believing that I was praising Kool Moe Dee, Spoonie Gee, et al. for being like punk rock, where actually I believed that Kool Moe Dee and Spoonie Gee were doing what punk no longer knew how to do. So my message was aimed at "punks": Spoonie's doing it, and you're not. Though there was a message for Harry and Greg et al. too: You've got to contend with just what it is that Spoonie et al. are actually doing, if Kogan here is upping them on account of their being punks. Maybe your own liking for them is based on a misunderstanding.)

Most importantly I think race has hardly disappeared from hip-hop's internal discourse, and is as present than ever, if not moreso -- no rapper denies how inescapable it is. Also was happy to see o. wang link to KCH's piece on native-american-drag & outkast.

But why so many ppl. are picking outkast as their only hip-hop vote should be pretty obvious -- coz the Dre disc doesn't work on hip-hop terrain, but a sort of syncretic afro-futurist humanist soulboy thing. Why Dre's leaving hip-hop terrain is pretty obvious too -- he feels the tropes therein (and even the compulsion of hip-hop sonic signifiers TOWARDS those tropes) don't talk about what HE wants to.

Is everyone who hears Outkast hearing what's driving Dre? No -- they're hearing what he's PRODUCING. Which gets to chuck's point from the P&J be improved thread:

I wish the Pazz and Jop poll told me more about hard rock,
teen pop, Nashville country, lots of things. I wish it told me less about white indie pop bands with boring singers and no rhythm
sections. But I've felt that way forever, basically. The problem is undoubtedly the composition of the electorate, though, not the voting
methods; or really, the problem is with the kind of people who decide to write about music when they grow up, which seems to be
somewhat limited. I am not sure how to change this.

By which I mean I suspect most of the ppl. voting outkast alone are probably pretty totally blind to the racial implications of how this plays out themselves, or might have some fucked-up views. Which is why I care less about how we like Outkast and more about how we hear and write about them, and how we understand what Dre is doing and WHY, which is the same thing as asking "Why hip-hop"?

An example of an interesting take on Outkast would be, for example, how does Dre concieve of time? (Listening to TLB now to help me think as I write this and Valentine's Day, say like hey ya digs further back than Stankonia did, though arguably not as far back as Rosa Parks) Like what distinguishes the sonic signifiers of the eras he uses, how does he see them?

I think Dre hears a sort of "perfect pop" bubble of oceanic emotion totally *absent* chronology, or rather drawing from moments across the spectrum of sonic history, and by nature of its ahistoricism managing to be more obviously absent racial discourse than any Outkast prior (Stankonia being arguable where this discourse was the most PRESENT, and also interrogated which is why I dug it).

So arguable Outkast are doing more to "whiten" (read: deracialize) certain elements of hip-hop than Eminem or Stagger Lee, where this stuff is ever-present.

Anyway how close is Roses to "I'm Only Human" from fear of a black hat? Not to mention which, between pimp juice and the credit card stunt in tip drill, how close is Nelly coming to that "booty juice" gag? That movie was fucking prescient.

Contrast maybe what Boi's doing almost as an answer record - equally a-historical, but rooted in difft. sounds and traditions at each step, more "soul" in the voices, more "swing" in the horns, more jump in the beats. Another bubble-world, but one composed not of escape but reaction. I gotta admit that I love "Last Call" -- the chorus reminds me of Drama's "Big Ball" which in turn is like "Leader of the Pack" which is in turn harder than anything on Dre's disc.

But Boi is as cartoonish as Dre on his own, coz roughly and broadly speaking you can map a historicism out of the interplay and arguments on a solid track together like much of Stankonia -- and a historicism which maps roughly onto the two sides of the escape narrative (struggle/postponed dream of freedom) which (again roughly) maps avant-black cultural thought in the 20th century and plays off of the DISTINCT pop/avant dynamic -- the point being Dre can make an album which doesn't barely carry anything which leaves it hip-hop but it means something difft. for him as a black man to do so than it would/did for say Pink and he CAN'T escape that. (nb: the construction and contestation of the "escape" narrative would have been a great project for me had grad schools not decided as far as i can tell that i'm too real for them -- no bitterness here) (nb2: The whole failure of SB/TLB can make a perfect case for the failure/limits of the escape narrative).

But I'm not saying most of the critics who only voted Outkast heard ANY of that. Nor maybe did plenty who voted hip-hop w/o Outkast, or even hip-hop WITH Outkast.

Which is the real problem.