Pitchfork Thought-Provocation Re: Themselves

I was more just surprised by Sam's take on it: (a) there's a buck of the Pitchfork orthodoxy for you, and (b) I don't know if I "really" like it, but I certainly like it more than he seems to. (At worst, for me, it'll be an "interesting to listen to a couple times, never touched it again" sort of proposition.)

this is just stupid.

erhaps Dose One would benefit from being reminded that hip-hop is derived from the spoken word traditions of the Last Poets and not the modernist obscurity of Ezra Pound or H. Doolittle.

saying that the last poets existed in some sort of "european" stylistic vacuum is about as historically accurate as saying the art ensemble of chicago or cecil taylor did.

is he trying to say that hiphop was likewise stripped of "advanced" sentiment? that it doesn't overtly express it, that it internalizes it as part of its basic cultural dialogue? because otherwise we're getting into very shaky noble savage territory here...

But when something is as purposefully obscure as The No Music you have to wonder whether it qualifies as being revolutionary or merely self-indulgent

the eternal argument, no? water/wine; one mans trash, etc etc. etfuckingcetera.

the thing is that chennault probably hits what would be my own take on the album (i.e. it sucks) (nb: i haven't heard it), but *not* for the same reasons i would. (having not heard it, i can offer no opinion on the album itself.) the review seems very conceptually slim.

pitchfork is always at its weakest when it's trying to do state-of-the-union style omni-reviews or trying to shoehorn a definition of an entire scene/sound their not readily familiar with (i.e. basically anything other than indie, rock/pop, and idm.)

I thought it came from Jamaican toasting.

Jess is OTM (Nate says Jess OTM shocker!) as far as what didn't sit right with me in that article. It makes me feel a bit less dense for the "no no really this IS hip-hop I swear it" tone to my own review.

'conceptually slim' is right, the whole thing is just an "rap is supposed to be simple and stupid so i can dance to it" dis with no substance. it's a complaint, not a review.

Um, no. If you hadn't had taken my comments out of context, you be able to see that i was just commenting that hip hop is derived from a spoken word tradition and not a written one (which holds water whether i referenced jamaican toasting or the last poets). I didn't privilege one over the other. I wasn't trying to patronize the "noble savagery" of hip hop, but i was attempting to diss the pointless and indulgent mystification (hence the mention of the modernist and the allusions throughout) via artifice and boring western art theories that has been (for the most part) absent from hip hop up until this point. Anticon, and their fans, seem to be tripping over themselves to change this. And they’re almost just as quick to hold this purposeful obscurity and injection of grad school notions of art as signs of progress and evolution within the genre, which is an elitist and somewhat racist and classist view. And Dave, I'm not saying that "rap is supposed to be simple and stupid so I can dance to it." That's a very twisted and simple assessment of my review. When I wondered whether the no music was self-indulgent or revolutionary; the former was implicitly my choice. And who used the word "advanced?" I feel reticent even quoting you using it.

I fuckin' hated reviewing this album (because it begged for a "state-of-the-union" review that I didn’t want to give) and am not satisfied with the results. There are pretty obvious flaws in it, but I don’t think you have mentioned any.

(I was hoping this wouldn't turn into an every-line-of-the-review referendum but anyway: Jess, are you bothered by the Cambodia thing because you don't like the idea of linking Themselves' approach to the idea of an "intelligensia?" I ask because a key issue in all of the undie threads lately has been whether the acts themselves think of their approach as intellectual or whether that's just some of the listeners, and either way whether it's fair to think about the music based on that premise.)

Um, no it isn't. Brief research into the Jamaican sound systems you mention will reveal that they featured DJs chatting over instrumental versions of reggae hits. And rappers frequently accompanied DJs like Grandmaster Flash when they first started playing. Furthermore, the review opposed the oral tradition to a literary one, not to DJ culture.

And I think the review sounds exactly like the standard anti-undie line round these parts.

spoken tradition: taking sides: field hollers vs. henri chopin.

but seriously, folks...

fair enough, sam, re. written versus oral (which is revealed to be right under my nose upon careful re-reading when not right on the way out the door earlier this afternoon). (i don't want the above to seem like i'm picking on sam, because i have a feeling that we probably come from roughly the same place re. hiphop. maybe this is just bizarro-world jess week wherein i attempt to defend all the indie and obscurities i normally diss.) however, a line of deconstruction of the human voice can just as easily be drawn up in the history of hiphop (from sly stone mouth noise to flash to the skratch piklz to prefuse to the vocal hiccup in bubba sparxxx's "twerk a little" and on to tangential musics like uk garage, todd edwards mixes, etc. etc. which of course can be "traced back" to things like dada, chopin, musique concrete, "williams mix", etc etc. of course there's little to suggest a direct link: it's doubtful bambaataa was consciously aware of pierre's schaeffer or henry, but there was "something in the air". i can just as easily see an a-opposite review which takes these "secret" hidden connections as its basis to prop up themselves, rather than take them down as "modernist obscurities." (hiphop is nothing if not a thoroughly modernist music. fuck post-modernism and anyone who uses it.) of course, i still haven't heard the record, but...

Hm. Could you explain? I sense what you're getting at but enough years of grad school actually muddied those waters instead of making them clearer.

archetypes, perhaps?

modernism

n 1: art and literature that makes a self-conscious break with previous genres 2: the quality of being current or of the present: "a shopping mall would instill a spirit of modernity into this village" [syn: modernity, modernness, contemporaneity, contemporaneousness] 3: practices typical of contemporary life or thought.

pretty well covered, i think!

of course, the most troubling defn. is the first: hiphop has made plenty of self-conscious breaks with previous genres, but no more than any other music nu-for-the-late-20th-century ("i'd rather jack/than fleetwood mac"), but it's not entirely ignorant/dismissive of its own past. the rate of turnover is great (and far greater in mainstream rap than undie rap), but it's not as if the basic format has changed that much (beats & rhymes, as simon trife likes to helpfully break it down for the hiphop impared) in the last 25 years. i suppose i said what i said above because hiphop is really the only pop music still fresh for '02 that continues to at least have that frission of excitement between *having* a history and recycling/obliterating it. "dance" is far too fragmented; house is only about 16-17 years old as a distinct genre, so perhaps too young to have really reinvented itself (although the argument can and has been made that hardcore/jungle/garage represent just such a reinvention...)

here's something i was thinking about (through the gauze of being tired and slightly drunk) while writing this: is it possible for pop music to be "modernist", really? at least in the hardline sense of "making a self-conscious break with previous styles." rock certainly didn't; it was a (rather fast, yes) evolution, like house ironically enough. (elvis singing "blue moon of kentucky"...heard in the isolation of recording without attendant imagery/hype obv not as shocking as elvis thrusting his dick suggestively through mary jane's glass eye? likewise, house music "just disco". acid, perhaps, represents a more shocking break, certainly the machinic jack side, the repetition, but kraftwekr/daf/test dept all played with repetition/"alien" textures, etc....insert genesis p'orridge bit here...) hiphop, maybe a little moreso, since the antecedents are more disparate (dancehall/oral frippery/novelty records/comedians/vaudville) and thus seemed more shocking and New and Now when sprung on a wider public. (although the opening salvo riding the bassline to "good times" obviously a wiser commercial decision than dropping "death mix" on the put-put golf in downtown Anyville, USA.)

(this is JUST novelty music. this IS novelty music. this is NOVEL music. this is music. this is just music. repeat.)

the self-consciousness is the key: how conscious of their (decidedly not presupposed) radicalism were the architects of early hiphop? or marley marl? or the bomb squad? (in the case of the b.s., very much so i should think.) or timbaland? (kind of a gray area...)

is being self-consciously radical a bad thing? well, like any experiment, it depends on the results, i guess. there's a lot of cloudy solutions that don't hang together in the history of 20th century music.

i'd liken less self-consciously experimental hiphop more to cooking than to science (wu-tang clan plz forgive me): dishes get shuffled and spiced and chopped different here and there and slowly new cuisines and hybrids take place and you serve them up and if someone goes "that tastes like shit", it doesnt come back and the recipe card exists as an (possibly) interesting footnote. people come back for seconds for stuff that tastes good. any grandmother knows that.

sometimes you can stick a pickle in the middle of a foodstuff and you might get something really fucking tasty. and sometimes you're just gonna throw up.

maybe hiphop's modernism is self-consciously BREAKING old styles of music:

afrika bambaataa (paraphrase): "i used to drop the break in the middle of 'mary, mary' and the room would go crazy. people would come up to me afterwards and be like 'what's that record you played?', and i'd be like 'the monkees', and they'd be like 'no way was i just dancin to no monkees.'"

i'm contradicting myself left right and center here, i know, but really i'm just throwing out ideas. and drunk.

side note: was dose one the anticon guy on the hood record last year? if so, i'm willing to concede sam everything.

they didn't have much effect or anti-influence on their peers/ followers "brothers gotta workit out, and stop chasing .." -- no they did -- so are all of the n.w.a./n.r.a. derivitaves still "fighting an enemy"

jamaica was the last bastion of elton john and james bond wasn't it, colonialism, uh "dutch antilles" let's call it, musical imperialism's tools turned back on the imperialists

ok, very 20th century, but slightly after the turn of the 19th wasn't ezra pound flogging translations of "chinese haiku" ? ain't that rap or iambic pentameter or rhythmic democracy just a little too all over the place without any sign of stopping ? i mean help me god, rap's evolving, teething, and it gets all this feedback, press, and p.e. have been and gone and the bros' aren't still a little chaste ?

There was this guy called Kool Herc...

If you're trying to argue that modernist poets have no stake in a "spoken word tradition" (whatever that is), I'd advise you to someday listen to the recordings of Ezra Pound reciting his poetry. He was as concerned with how his poems sounded as how they read on the page.

and yes, i was reluctant to define hip hop. but i did it based on two factors (and please let me know if this is an incorrect assumption, because i wasn't 100% on this, but i had a deadline):
a. by making self-consciously experimental music that tested the boundaries of hip hop (which is how i read a lot of anticon), the critic is entitled to present their definition of hip hop and determine whether or not the artist fits into it. since the aesthetic parameters of hip hop was obviously (or so i read) such a big part of the music, it was almost my duty to address that. If the reader/ listener (who seems noticeably absent from a lot of these discussions) agrees with my definition, (s)he probably won’t like themselves. If they disagree, they can write angry letters and post dissections on British message boards.
b. that the form of review is implicitly subjective (and i don't see how it can be objective), so these definitions are my own. i could have presented a less opinionated and personalized definition, but this is a review...so i thought i had a little more room to insert these opinions.

and i would argue that the modernist poetry were primarily associated with the written word (just as hip hop is *primarily* derived from a spoken one), although i have never heard ezra pound read.

btw, i realize it is a bit egotistical to defend my review, but these are ideas that intrigue me, and i'm not closed off from criticism on this.

From Jamaica! From where he transported the JA sound system vibe to Bronx block parties? Hello???

Shit, forget about Herc. The aesthetic commonalities are so obvious I can't even be bothered. Sure, reggae's not the only source of hip-hop, but it's one of the biggest.

"Hip Hop.. the whole chemistry of that came from Jamaica... I was born in jamaica and I was listening to American music in Jamaica.. My favorite artist was James Brown. That's who inspired me.. A lot of the records I played was by James Brown. When I came over here I just put it in the American style and a perspective for them to dance to it. In Jamaica all you needed was a drum and bass. So what I did here was go right to the 'yoke'. I cut off all anticipation and played the beats. I'd find out where the break in the record was at and prolong it and people would love it. So I was giving them their own taste and beat percussion-wise.. cause my music is all about heavy bass..."

http://www.daveyd.com/koolherc.html

(oral vs literary = Eurocentric Romantic Theory anyway surely? => the Poundist gesture predates Pound... I think its strongest immediate ancestor probably emerges in the 18th Century, with Ossian and anti-Empire dialect verse, then much busy erm "translation" of Chinese and Icelandic poetry)

w/o extensive on-the-spot this-is-what-i-mean-by-it defn, "modernist" is not a very helpful word, : like influence album post-modernism it delivers far more confusion than it removes