P&J v.2--tokenism and beyond

Hey. This was meant to be a post on the last thread, but it seemed too long. So:
When I first heard "Hey Ya" on Phil-Two's iPod I remember talking to another buddy later that night about whether the single'd turn on real rap kids or (not having heard the album) whether Outkast had finally turned into an indie band-- and I remember not coming up with an answer. Now we've obviously got one, qualified as it is, with the Voice this week and TRL the last few months, and it goes: "Uh, um, yeah, they did. Or no. Wait, yeah. What was the question? Wait... wait a sec. (months pass) Ooh! got a pen?"
It's not hip-hop crossing over, it's hip-hop crossing over to indie kids crossing over to rap kids crossing over to indie kids crossing over to ol' style soul 'n' pop kids crossing over to the mainstream. One thing P&J shows us this year is that pop music in 2003 was a dukeout not necessarily of musicians but of pop kids-cum-musicians, and the ones who conglomerated the most fave records at the right time are the ones who win. Right or wrong, practically all the most revered rap producers this year are the ones who reached further into the ethervoid of influence for their ideas--Timbo obviously, and the L'il Jon folks weird as they are and Pharrell and whatever. You do it for mass appeal or for love and if you're lucky it amounts to the same. You apply this to demographics of listeners as well as producers of pop music and you've got Outkast (who I think are awesome anyway).
What makes a track like "Hey Ya" attractive to the college radio commentators that make up a muy grande percento of the P&J polling group is not so far from what makes them attractive to the real rap kids who (kinda) chose to embrace a big pop song that doesn't wanna make all them females crawl, isn't into sex not into makin' love, but only wants, in lieu of meeting your mama, to make you come-a. That is: it's original and catchy and has a lot to hear in it, and it doesn't seem to pander to anyone, and everybody loves it. And, just and significantly, it insults nobody on any level that I know of. This is a bad thing? This is tokenism?
Nobody talking about derivation can feel patronizing to Andre 3000 : come on now. You've seen the video: you're not dealing with a foolish man (despite those suspenders flappin' all over the place). He knows where he's at, and you got to know the white audience he's supposedly courting is in his noble noodle the one behind those big rolling NBC cameras 50 years ago, the kids screaming in the sepia stands and scandalizing their folks in Andre's projected pop past-life. Whatever's come since then, including his birth, is just texture. This kind of jizz&pap is a velvety lampoon of everything black music used to promise to square audiences-- retaining a whole lot of its supposed "innocence" (an innocence--or at least its pointedly unspoken lack--that became grist for the baritone-soul mill an easy 35 years ago, natch) and still filtering itself though a half-century of sexy shenanigans for rock and dough and salvation and coming out smarter on the other end and transmitting all that experience and disillusionment and thrill and bruisedness in a quick little pop song off a weird album. And on top of this phantasmagoria of history the poor guys are being tokenised? Gul durn: along these lines a lot of the Outkast record is just as much a candidate for tokenism on Hot 97's playlist as in the Voice, but I don't hear no one complainin'.
You're a critic of the music you're hired to criticize; if you're not, then what are you? Awright: nothing much moved forward this year, but you know that Outkast moved backward better than anybody else in the Kazaaniverse. And if that makes them easier to endorse for a grad student someplace with a Lester Bangs anthology flattened on his desk and a jar of Robitussin warming in his fleshy palm--if that moves his iMouse: well, then so be it. Save a shot of that shit for me. I know it's better than that sizzurp everybody was sippin' on a few years back-- now what was the name of that song?

On the other hand, what the fuck's up with the Dean's List, Grampa? I feel as well that in times of terrible repression and political upheaval the popular art of a culture should reflect the anxiety of that culture's underclass, and that pop music and culture is a tremendously powerful medium for social and societal change and should be treated as such--but if that underclass and that society is so beat down they can't think about nothing but a good time (and if that society's ruling class is frustratingly infatuated with the fashion of acting poor and rough and street and pissed-off, all of which makes 'em tough to write songs against or pick fights with--or to identify at shows for that matter, on the stage or off), then that's no excuse to lard your list all over the place with reissues and wildcards and obscurantisms. People trust you and buy what you tell 'em to. You can't make a list politically for people who are going to dig it aesthetically! Unlike the last many many years, there's lots of reasonably independant and creative people making new stuff these days, and good or bad if you're going to snub them it better be for some young turk that's a revelation for all of us who trust your judgement, and not this roll-call of oldsters, jokesters and croaksters. Can I get a witness?