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Derecka Purnell: Kanye West keeps moving further and further to the right. Why? (The Guardian)
Derecka Purnell: Kanye West keeps moving further and further to the right. Why? (The Guardian)
The problem is, Kanye behaves as if the only real and brave truth tellers today are conservatives with money. He acts as if the rich right wing holds a monopoly on criticisms of the Democratic party or liberal activists. This ignores a host of progressives and radicals – people like Cornel West, Nick Estes, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Mariame Kaba, Aja Monet, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, and too many artists and grassroots organizers to name who criticise the liberal establishment more fiercely than the right and with commitments to end oppression. In fact, entire progressive and radical traditions exist where people of all races offer vigorous critiques of the status quo with surgical precision. We need fewer “free thinkers” and more critical thinkers who ask about these traditions and find their places within them. The question for me is whether billionaire Kanye can ever really know about these robust traditions. Not because he doesn’t already know or will never learn about them, but because to know them is to also learn their critiques of gross wealth accumulation, Black capitalism, desire for imperial leadership, and so much more of what Kanye currently represents. Supporting free thinkers with weak conservative analysis does not threaten his status, land, antisemitic views or bank account.
·theguardian.com·
Derecka Purnell: Kanye West keeps moving further and further to the right. Why? (The Guardian)
Mychal Denzel Smith: Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” Is Not the Capitalist Anthem You Think It Is (Pitchfork)
Mychal Denzel Smith: Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” Is Not the Capitalist Anthem You Think It Is (Pitchfork)
Twenty-five years after its release, the iconic rap group’s biggest hit remains deeply misunderstood. --- If Deck’s life, at the ripe old age of 22, felt no different inside or outside of prison, Meth’s cries to “get the money” are utterly meaningless. They sound less like a rallying call and more like desperate pleas of escape shouted into a void. Chasing cash, by whatever means available, is the only option for survival, as it rules everything around us—but should it? Should a lack of money make one’s life indistinguishable from prison? These are questions that arise if we’re listening to the song as a whole, but pop success alters the way music is heard. As such, “C.R.E.A.M.” has been stripped for parts: The only aspects of real interest to a mass audience are the use of “cream” as slang for money and the repetition of the hook as an admonishment to work harder, longer, and more ruthlessly in the pursuit of it. The song has become a tool of the unscrupulous system it was meant to expose. By 2014, Drake and JAY-Z were interpolating the hook into their opulent collaboration “Pound Cake” without any semblance of the struggle Wu was rapping about, while Financial Times was using “Cash Rules Everything Around Me” as a headline for a story detailing a select few rappers’ immense wealth. At this point, there’s even a nerdy YouTube tutorial that borrows the acronym to extol the virtues of Google Instant Buy. In this way, “C.R.E.A.M.” has become something like the hip-hop equivalent of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” Right out the gate, Springsteen’s hit was being co-opted into a bland patriotism. After attending one of his concerts in 1984, the conservative columnist George Will wrote: “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’”
·pitchfork.com·
Mychal Denzel Smith: Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” Is Not the Capitalist Anthem You Think It Is (Pitchfork)
Nitsuh Abebe: Why Does America Love Skrillex? (Vulture)
Nitsuh Abebe: Why Does America Love Skrillex? (Vulture)
‘When you have huge numbers of people flocking to one spot with the agenda of getting messed up and hearing something crushing and spectacular, the race to please them stands a chance of rushing out on limbs and creating new things. You don’t hear much of that in Skrillex, or among many of his peers; so far, there’s just a lot of collisions and amplifications of sounds we’ve already heard. But that’s what people said about our mess-headed emo and hardcore scenes at the start of the century, and they rapidly became their own weird world.’
·nymag.com·
Nitsuh Abebe: Why Does America Love Skrillex? (Vulture)
SPIN.com: Defending Dyson's Georgetown Jay-Z Class
SPIN.com: Defending Dyson's Georgetown Jay-Z Class
‘Jay-Z’s lyrics would work just fine in a literature or poetry class (Decoded is basically his own Norton Critical Anthology of Jigga), but that's irrelevant to this discussion because, as nearly everyone who mocked the course seemed to ignore, Dyson is teaching a Sociology course! And Jay-Z's career is perfectly suited for the study of that discipline.’
·spin.com·
SPIN.com: Defending Dyson's Georgetown Jay-Z Class
Steven Hyden: The monoculture is a myth (Salon.com)
Steven Hyden: The monoculture is a myth (Salon.com)
‘If we stop looking to the past, we might realize that we’re living in a golden age of music listening and discussion. The Internet has enabled more people to hear more music than at any point in human history. More people are writing about music than ever — on websites, on personal blogs and Facebook pages.’
·entertainment.salon.com·
Steven Hyden: The monoculture is a myth (Salon.com)
Vulture: Nitsuh: Watch the Throne: Uneasy Heads Wear Gaudy Crowns
Vulture: Nitsuh: Watch the Throne: Uneasy Heads Wear Gaudy Crowns
“It’s a portrait of two black men thinking through the idea of success in America; what happens when your view of yourself as a suppressed, striving underdog has to give way to the admission that you’ve succeeded about as much as it’s worth bothering with; and how much your victory can really relate to (or feel like it’s on behalf of) your onetime peers who haven’t got a shred of what you’ve won. It’s not a topic that deserves to be scrubbed up, either; there are things about Kanye’s tiresome self-involvement and moody debauchery — the way he sounds like some sullen hip-hop emperor, stalking around the crumbling gilded palace of his own psyche, muttering angrily and getting aggressive with the help — that belong in any such portrait.”
·nymag.com·
Vulture: Nitsuh: Watch the Throne: Uneasy Heads Wear Gaudy Crowns
Grantland: Hua Hsu on Kanye and Jay-Z's Watch the Throne
Grantland: Hua Hsu on Kanye and Jay-Z's Watch the Throne
“What makes hip-hop such a durable form is its capacity to scramble fiction and fact; the artifice and the realities that art conceals or amplifies become one. In this way, Watch the Throne feels astonishingly different. It captures two artists who no longer need dreams; art cannot possibly prophesy a better future for either of them.”
·grantland.com·
Grantland: Hua Hsu on Kanye and Jay-Z's Watch the Throne
NYMag: We Must Be Superstars by Nitsuh Abebe
NYMag: We Must Be Superstars by Nitsuh Abebe
“And if you want to talk about pop music between 1980 and now, that issue—the question of who’s singing and who’s being sung to—is an important one. The study assumes that hit singles in the eighties and hit singles in the new millennium play the same role in our culture. But over the past 30 years, the weekly charts have seen changes a lot more significant than any surge of ego. It’s not just that pop’s audience has changed; it’s that its whole purpose has.”
·nymag.com·
NYMag: We Must Be Superstars by Nitsuh Abebe
Marc Weidenbaum — Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album
Marc Weidenbaum — Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album
I may never get around to listening to this, but the idea is fantastic. "An article in the May 2010 issue of the magazine The Atlantic critiqued the current generation of young music fans for rampant copyright violation. In a small irony, the illustration used to decorate the article interpolated a detail of a preexisting work that appears to not yet be in the public domain. This notice isn’t intended as a criticism of the illustrator — quite the contrary; the illustration is excellent — but instead of the theoretical foundation of the article, which suggests a clear line between right and wrong where there is, in fact, significant ambiguity. I forwarded Traum’s image, and article it accompanied, to various musicians and asked them if they would record a piece of music that took Traum’s picture literally: use it as a score.”
·archive.org·
Marc Weidenbaum — Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album
The Verge Q A: Punk Pioneer Steve Albini on Music Festivals, The Future of Radio and Why He Wants GQ To Fail: The Q: GQ
The Verge Q A: Punk Pioneer Steve Albini on Music Festivals, The Future of Radio and Why He Wants GQ To Fail: The Q: GQ
A strong perspective on music culture, the music business, and the state of things today. "Had Sonic Youth not done what they did I don't know what would have happened—the alternative history game is kind of silly. But I think it cheapened music quite a bit. It made music culture kind of empty and ugly and was generally a kind of bad influence."
·gq.com·
The Verge Q A: Punk Pioneer Steve Albini on Music Festivals, The Future of Radio and Why He Wants GQ To Fail: The Q: GQ
Fuse.tv: Listen Closely by B Michael Payne: Love the Music, Ignore the Message: How Critics Are Failing Odd Future
Fuse.tv: Listen Closely by B Michael Payne: Love the Music, Ignore the Message: How Critics Are Failing Odd Future
"Overall, there seems to be a critical disconnect between the way the predominantly white, male critical establishment writes about violence and misogyny—especially as it’s primarily exhibited in hip-hop, i.e., music made predominantly by black artists. Critics such as these seem uncommonly drawn to violent, misogynistic music simply because it is shocking. This thrill of novelty seems to be nothing more than a fetishization of an alien culture."
·fuse.tv·
Fuse.tv: Listen Closely by B Michael Payne: Love the Music, Ignore the Message: How Critics Are Failing Odd Future
The Guardian: Insane Clown Posse: And God created controversy
The Guardian: Insane Clown Posse: And God created controversy
"'I stuck her with my wang. She hit me in the balls. I grabbed her by her neck. And I bounced her off the walls. She said it was an accident and then apologised. But I still took my elbow and blackened both her eyes.' That's clearly a song about domestic violence. So your Christian message is... don't be like that man?" "Huh?" Violent J repeats, mystified.
·guardian.co.uk·
The Guardian: Insane Clown Posse: And God created controversy
Riff Market: Regarding Hipster Runoff's Animal Collective Post
Riff Market: Regarding Hipster Runoff's Animal Collective Post
"You can try to know, and own the fact that there are things you do not know, or you can be knowing, and hide your own ignorance with sideways shots of been-there done-that familiarity. You can understand that shit happens and try your best to keep things together and accomplish something against all odds — YOU CAN DANCE, as this album begins — or you can blow up the hospital just to show everyone that at any moment anywhere, a hospital can blow up for no fucking reason whatsoever."
·riffmarket.com·
Riff Market: Regarding Hipster Runoff's Animal Collective Post
Ars Technica: 750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy
Ars Technica: 750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy
How the two astronomical numbers most often thrown out by the intellectual property lobby are utterly bogus. Interesting: "When someone torrents a $12 album that they would have otherwise purchased, the record industry loses $12, to be sure. But that doesn't mean that $12 has magically vanished from the economy. On the contrary: someone has gotten the value of the album and still has $12 to spend somewhere else."
·arstechnica.com·
Ars Technica: 750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy