Tuning up in Dixie

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

13 March 2012

Next up on the Republican primary calendar are the votes tomorrow in the deep South states of Mississippi and Alabama. Southerners are apparently too polite to poll reliably, but if you believe the forecasts, Mitt Romney has a slight lead in Mississippi, Newt Gingrich has a slight lead in Alabama, and Rick Santorum is surprisingly unpopular. There isn't too much at stake in these contests, but a good showing from Romney might help convince his rivals that this race is indeed over.

It's become a bit of a tradition on this blog to warm up for each state's primary with a relevant song. In that spirit, here's "Mississippi Girl," Faith Hill's ode to the women of the the Magnolia State:

"A Mississippi girl," the country singer informs us, "don't change her ways just because everybody knows her name." No mention on whether Massachusetts men have a similar aversion to flip-flopping.

After the jump, an Alabama tune. (Though not one by Alabama.)

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This is "Let's Roll," by Alabama rapper Yelawolf, with some help from Mitt Romney-supporter Kid Rock. Yela's not your everyday Southern rapper; he's a white boy who looks like a skate rat and spits thick, fast syllables about life in the boondocks of Gadsden, Alabama. His view of Southern life is a melange of Confederate flags, violence, poverty, American cars, methamphetamine abuse, and local pride. It's a place where a black music born in New York City sits comfortably alongside the white tradition of Southern rock, too: "Why's he playing Beanie Sigel?/Cause his daddy was a dope man; Lynyrd Skynyrd didn't talk about moving kis of coke, man," he raps on another song, "I Wish." The modern South is more complex than stereotypes will allow.

Incidentally, I didn't post a tune for Kansas, because its primary was held on a weekend. If I had, it would have been "Campfire Kansas" by revered Lawrence, KS emo group The Get Up Kids.

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What America sounds like

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

24 January 2012

I've talked often in this space about the utility in using hip-hop as a lens to examine American culture, so I was pleased to find someone making well the same point in otherwise unremarkable Financial Times article:

Rap music is the defining American art form of our time. In its showmanship, its exuberance, its hunger for innovation, its love of technology and its ruthless competitive discipline, it represents mass culture in the US like no other medium.

Country music, the only other contender, showcases a different set of equally American values: community, tradition, compassion, patriotism, resilience, faith. But it is principally a domestic phenomenon, largely ignored overseas. Hip-hop, meaning rap music and its associated culture, is both a global force and a central feature of the face America presents to the world.

Rap as a form of American soft power is easy to see if you know where to look; the relationship between hip-hop and the Arab Spring, for instance, is well documented. This is helped by the music's malleability; it offers its Americanness to the world as something to be remodelled and localised.

The FT piece is right that country doesn't have this global appeal, and it may seem less interesting as a result. I prefer, however, to focus on the similarities between hip-hop and country — each being folk musics for a certain subset of American society that have been adopted by the culture at large. And if country music's conversations are consumed on a largely domestic basis, rather than adopted globally as those of hip-hop are, this suggests that it has something to say about the aspects of American culture that don't cross borders: the strange trivialities unique to that society; the most unassuming type of American exceptionalism.

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Annals in celebrity babies: Blue Ivy

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

13 January 2012

Beyonce Knowles and Jay-Z

This isn't a bad point by Damon Young, about Beyoncé and Jay-Z's six day old daughter:

...I wonder if, 20 to 25 years from now, the birth of Blue Ivy Carter will be an historically relevant moment. I realize this seems like hyperbole — she’s not even two days old and it sounds like I’m already reserving her star on the Walk of Fame — but she’s already made history. She’s the first African-American ever who was famous before she was even born.

Think about it. There have been black child stars (Michael Jackson, Emmanuel Lewis, Raven Symone, etc), black stars who had children at the height of their fame, famous children of uber-popular black people (Malia and Sasha Obama) and even established black stars who had children while at the height of their fame and saw those children become famous while they were still children (Willow and Jaden Smith).

But, never has there been a child produced by an African-American couple while both mother and father were A-list celebrities...

Celebrity babies are one of the more esoteric measures of racial progress, but it certainly seems that, until Blue Ivy Carter came along, the only couples famous enough to have the birth of a child be an event of national pop-cultural obsession have been white. Suri Cruise, Lourdes Leon, and Frances Bean Cobain all look distinctly diifferent to the progeny of Jay and Bey, but America's tabloid fascination with a black newborn is the logical next step to its adoption of an African American couple as its first celebrity couple.

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Jay-Z's place in supermarket checkout fame is remarkable in itself. He is, after all, a man who first came to public attention thanks to gritty tales of drug dealing and violence, ostensibly based on his own life growin up in Brooklyn's Marcy Projects. Middle America has tentatively embraced hip-hop over the past three decades, but that a man whose musical output still includes stories of routine criminality, and whose most recent album was one of the most fascinating artistic engagements with American racial conflict of the year, could become the object of the country's most banal cultural product — the celebrity press —  is oddly cheering.

On that most recent album, a collaboration with Kanye West called Watch the Throne, the men included a song, "New Day," addressed to their hypothetical children. Jay dwelled on the state of black fatherhood, and contemplated his own unusual place in black America: "Sorry junior, I already ruined ya/Cause you ain’t even alive, paparazzi pursuin’ ya." For his actual daughter, Jay released a quickly recorded (and artistically dubious) tune called "Glory." It features snippets of his daughter's babbling, and has made its way on to the Billboard charts. Blue Ivy Carter might or might not be the first African American celebrity baby, but she's definitely the youngest person to ever be credited with a hit single.

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I'm no fool, I'll make it up in summer school

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

22 November 2011

Like Brandon Soderberg, and unlike Gawker, I have no problem with Georgetown University teaching a sociology course based on Jay-Z. In fact, I wish I had the chance to take it. Here's Brandon:

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, [Michael Eric] Dyson is teaching a Sociology course! And Jay-Z's career is perfectly suited for the study of that discipline.

Born in 1969, towards the end of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, Jay is old enough to recall the first rumblings of hip-hop, yet young enough to have come of age during the crack era. He then flipped all of those experiences into a hip-hop career, and from there, into a successful business career, as well. Unlike most rappers who endlessly mine the complexities of thug life as if they just left the corner yesterday, Jay-Z, especially on his bumpy but fascinating "post-retirement" work, has truly wrestled with his criminal past even as he becomes more superficially "distant" from it.

I've talked before about how hip-hop is a useful lens for examining US culture, particularly the culture of some of the country's more marginalised populations, who may not have as easy access to traditional media to discuss ideas important to them. In fact, I've made reference to Jay-Z specifically while making those arguments. Academics have developed a respectable body of work in hip-hop studies, and Georgetown and Dyson should be congratulated for furthering that study. In the words of the man who calls himself Young Hov: Damn, where's the love?

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Jay-Z, small government, and the declining Tea Party

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

27 July 2011

Jay-Z and Oprah at Marcy projects in Brooklyn, NY

Earlier this month, I put up a post explaining how hip-hop can function as an important and insightful voice for marginalised communities, using the DC rap scene as an example. Coincidentally, I came across a section in Jay-Z's book Decoded in which the rapper argues the same thing:

But even when we could shake off the full weight of those imposing buildings and try to just live, the truth of our lives and struggle was still invisible to the larger country. The rest of the country was freed of any obligation to claim us ... Hip-hop, of course, was hugely influential in finally making our slice of America visible through our own lens — not through the lens of outsiders.

Decoded is a fascinating read, and I highly recommend it, but it needs to be understood in context. Jay-Z is an entertainer, not a politician, and the book functions, in part, as his attempt to make a case for his own legacy. Even so, when read in that light, he has much to say worth heeding. (It also recounts a conversation the rapper had with President Barack Obama, in which the rapper recounts the then-candidate Obama saying "he wanted to close it out like Jordan." If so: awesome.) I found the following passage says a lot about America as well about hip-hop:

Poor people in general have a twisted relationship with the government. We're aware of the government from the time we're born. We live in government-funded housing and work government jobs. We have family and friends spending time in the ultimate public housing, prison. We grow up knowing people who pay for everything with little plastic cards — Medicare cards for checkups, EBT cards for food. We know what AFDC and WIC stand for and we stand for hours waiting for bricks of government cheese. The first and fifteenth of each month are times of peak economic activity. We get to know all kinds of government agencies not because of civics class, but because they actually visit our houses and sit up on our couches asking questions. From the time we're small children we got to crumbling public schools that tell us all we need to know about what the government thinks of us.

Then there are the cops.

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In places like Marcy there are people who know the ins and outs of government bureaucracies, police procedures, and sentencing guidelines, who spend half of their lives in dirty waiting rooms on plastic chairs waiting for someone to call their name. But for all of this involvement, the government might as well be the weather because a lot of us don't think we have anything to do with it — we don't believe we have any control over this thing that controls us. A lot of our heroes, almost by default, were people who tried to dismantle or overthrow the government — Malcolm X or the Black Panthers — or people who tried to make it completely irrelevant, like Marcus Garvey, who wanted black people to sail back to Africa. The government was everywhere we looked, and we hated it.

You don't need to agree with Jay-Z's framing of the relationship between government and poor urban America to recognize that parts of the American population subscribe to it. This is a description of people with a decidedly anti-government viewpoint, but one that manifests itself in a different way to the anti-government viewpoint of conservatives, Tea Partiers, and libertarians.

A brand of lazy cultural analysis claims political salience by conflating conservative "small government" rhetoric with a long American history of individualism and suspicion toward concentrated power. By claiming a certain set of pro-business economic and political policies as being congruent with minimal government, American conservatives have reduced a shared and varied cultural history to a partisan agenda. Such has been their success in this regard that some liberals believe, as Matt Yglesias puts it, that "for progressive politics to succeed [they] need to raise the social status of 'big government.'"

The kind of anti-government views expressed by the predominantly white, middle to upper class Tea Party is as selective and nuanced as the anti-government views explicated by Jay-Z in his assumed role of avatar for predominantly black, lower class America. The people Jay-Z describes value the welfare they receive and the medical services the government provides them, though they do not appreciate the overbearing bureaucracy that comes with it. Much of their irritation with government springs from its failed presence: poorly-performing schools, for instance. The relationship they have with government power exercised by means of the police force derives from its intrusiveness, but also, as Public Enemy alluded to in "911 is a Joke," its inattentiveness. This is a view of government that demands its involvement but is hostile to its encroachments.

The "small government" stance is concerned with different functions of government, but it is not that different — and certainly does not result in a reduced government presence. "Small government" conservatives tend to value government involvement in broad-based universal programs like Medicare or Social Security, infrastructure projects and regulation that facilitate suburban lifestyles, regulations that shift externalities deriving from polluting industries on to the population at large rather than the polluters, rigorous defence of borders, a strong capacity to extend military power, and strong enforcement of property rights. (Not every conservative endorses all these types of government power, but they tend to support most.) By contrast, conservatives tend to bristle at what they notice as failures of government bureaucracy, such as business regulation, income tax, or services provided to people they consider not worthy of receiving them.

Certainly it's correct to acknowledge certain widespread cultural beliefs common amongst Americans pertaining to government and individual liberty. It is a mistake, however, to suppose these accord with a specific political ideology — that Americans are therefore conservative. (Although some are!)

And as far as specific demands from Americans for their government to do more or less: they fluctuate. At the moment, however, it seems Americans would prefer their government did more. That's what this chart suggests, anyway:

American opinion regarding whether the government should do more or less

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Fox News's war on Common Sense

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

12 May 2011

To be fair, the rapper born Lonnie Rashid Lynn dropped the "Sense" to go by the shorter alias of Common years ago now. Either way, Fox News was unimpressed by him being invited to the White House to perform at an Evening of Poetry event. Conservatives are displeased that, to quote the Daily Caller, Common's "poetry includes threats to shoot police and at least one passage calling for the “burn[ing]” of then-President George W. Bush."

That is true, as you can see in this video. I'll explain this quickly: rappers are artists, not politicians. The things they say are not speeches detailing personal positions, but are — as their audience understands — impressionistic collages of character, hyperbole, invective, bravado, and fantasy. That is not to say there is no truth in rap; the spoken word piece that has got Fox News all bent out of shape is a lucid critique of the antagonism between law enforcement and black communities. The truth is, as it often is in art, filtered through aesthetic devices and genre conventions.

But I shouldn't need to tell you Fox News is ginning up controversy where there should be none. More interesting is the story around the story. Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, comments on the not-so-subtle racism of this episode:

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David is pointing to something else, something which I tried to get at in my Malcolm piece. Throughout the 80s and 90s, there were a lot of black folks on the public stage who many of us loved, but never really held up as role models or hoped would be "accepted." You can understand why, say, Mike Tyson, Chuck D, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, OJ Simpson, NWA, or Snoop Dogg might be polarizing. A lot of these folks were polarizing even within the black community. You didn't really expect these people to be received as your ambassadors.

But Common is the dude in the Gap ad. His mother is a teacher. Shirley Sherrod is a victim of white supremacist terrorism, who lectures black people on seeing their own prejudice. Eric Holder went to Stuyvesant. Michelle Obama's mother was a homemaker. Her parents forfeited a full athletic scholarship to send Michelle Obama's brother to Princeton. They used to watch the Brady Bunch together.

The point is that Common is not NWA. In fact, though he's deservedly a hip-hop icon, I see him as someone kinda corny these days. He hasn't made a great album in years (2005's Be was aight), he's dropped some seriously wack verses in high profile appearances ("Get 'Em High" on Kanye West's College Dropout is the most egregious offender), and his music has lately devolved into this kind of fluffy, grown-folks wallpaper. If ever a rapper were going to be invited to the White House for a poetry reading, it would be someone as friendly and unabrasive as Common. Which is Coates's point, though I don't know if he shares my distaste for the rapper's latest musical adventures: When conservative opinion-makers get themselves worked up for no good reason about a parade of nice, perfectly innocuous folks, you start wondering whether it might be their skin colour that is the problem.

Even so, Fox News is right on one point. Inviting a rapper to a White House function is a bit out there. Rap is more than thirty years old now, and it has never been accepted by the establishment — musical or political. While listeners outside the genre accused it of being noise, lobby groups tried to ban it for its foul language, its distate for law enforcement, its violence, and its at times lunkheaded attitude to women and gay folks. As you can see from some of the examples Conor Friedersdorf gives of previous White House musical guests, people for some reason get a lot more worried when less-than-kosher speech is coming from the mouth of a young, angry black kid than when it originates from, say, a mop-topped British white man.

So, just like when Barack Obama made reference to the Wu-Tang Clan at this year's White House Correspondents Dinner, or when Jay-Z, Nas, and Kanye West were involved with his campaign or inauguration, it's a small but significant shift in the American cultural landscape. Hip-hop is now considered respectable enough to be heard inside the confines of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. This is partly because hip-hop is getting older, but it's also, I believe, a conscious part of the Obamas' effort to expand the cultural language spoken by the powerful so as to include a broader swathe of America.

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Funked out with a gangsta twist

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

16 March 2011

Warren G and Nate Dogg - Regulate (1994)

"The rhythm is the bass and the bass is the treble" was the manifesto for G-Funk, the West Coast musical movement of the '90s that wasn't grunge. Spearheaded by producers like Dr. Dre and Warren-G and rappers like Snoop Dogg, it captured the sound of California in the Clinton era, as the violence of the LA riots faded into economic prosperity. The scene's staple soulman was Nate Dogg, whose smooth vocals added just the right amount of melody to the music's tales of sex and violence. According to Long Beach paper the Press Telegram, the man whose birth certificate read Nathaniel Dwayne Hale died today. He was 41 years old.

Nate Dogg was the consumate hip-hop hookman, and in addition to his handful of studio albums, he had contributed to a slew of other rapper's tunes over the past couple of decades, working with everyone from 2Pac to 50 Cent, Eminem to Ludacris, the Game to E-40. He was an iconic voice in one of America's most important and vital recent artforms. His presence will be mourned and sorely missed.

While it would be terribly tacky to even seem to politicize his passing, I can't help but note Nate Dogg's relative youth, particularly in light of how often other rappers die similarly premature deaths. Considering that most of these musicians are African American and frequently come from poor backgrounds, I wonder how often black folks who aren't well known because of their artistic ability have their lives similarly cut short due to poor health. Nate Dogg had recently suffered two strokes, and in that light, this news wasn't terribly unexpected. Perhaps Nate Dogg was simply unfortunate, but it's a real shame a citizen of the richest country in the world should not have lived to a much older age.

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I know a place where the grass is really greener

By Jonathan Bradley in Los Angeles, California

16 February 2011

As that little location tag gives away, I've been in L.A. for the past couple days. I've visited Los Angeles a few times before, but I'm staying with a friend this time, and receiving a tour from a local will always offer a new perspective on a city. The strange thing about L.A. is that the deeper knowledge confirms as many of the town's stereotypes as it does deny them.

L.A. doesn't get a lot of love — whether from those outside of America, outside of California, or outside of the city itself. People see it as a sprawling, trashy, superficial behemoth splayed out on the very western edge of the United States, a place where the country's excess and insanity hurtles lemming-like to the edge of the Pacific coast. People are kind of right.

It's hard to hate this town, however, when you wake up in the middle of winter to weather in the mid 60s fahrenheit/late teens celsius, and particularly not when I can step outside and see tall thin palm trees teetering along the horizon and the Hollywood sign in the distance. Even though I spent 90 minutes in traffic to travel eight miles yesterday, I'm enjoying this town in all its absurdity. Billboard-lined streets criss-cross wherever in a futile quest to get the endless number of Los Angeleno motorists to their destination quicker; the people I meet tell stories about C-list celebrities and writers for B-list movies; and everything everywhere, including the people, seems to have a glossy, slightly surreal look. And yet I strolled around Venice Beach yesterday — a genuinely walkable neighbourhood! — admired the town's Spanish-influenced architecture, and ate at the famed In-N-Out Burger. In Los Angeles, the absurd, the brilliant, and the banal are difficult to distinguish.

Today I'm headed to the Getty, and then getting on a flight headed for Sydney. Like each day in Los Angeles, this will require a lot of driving. This is why Californians invented a salve for this indignity: gangsta rap. Rolling down endless, expansive highways is an activity perfectly suited for the slow, rolling funk rhythms pioneered by Dr. Dre. It's great music anywhere, but in its local environment, it seems as natural an outgrowth of the city as film sets or smog.

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This is Packer country; where's your green card

By Jonathan Bradley in Seattle, WA

7 February 2011

It's Super Bowl Sunday today, and I'll be watching, of course. I'm not the biggest sports fan in the world, but I suspend my boredom with athletics for an endeavor "that combine[s] balletic grace, keen intellect and brute strength" in the way football does. Besides, during this game, they show some neat commercials?

I can't work up much enthusiasm for this game however. I'm siding with the Green Bay Packers today, but that's mostly because in my adopted city of Seattle, the Pittsburgh Steelers are personae non grata; they defeated Seattle's Seahawks in Super Bowl XL thanks to some decidedly dubious officiating decisions, and ever since, the Emerald City has had no sympathy for the black and yellow. Add to that six Super Bowl championships already in the team's possession — more than any other franchise in the league — and a quarterback — Ben Roethlisberger — who only escaped having to stand trial for rape because the alleged victim didn't want to have to go through a court case, and you have a decidedly unsympathetic team.

The Packers aren't anything to get roused about, however. I find them rather dull, and nothing about their story this year or their history has me excited about them the way I was about last year's winners, the feel good New Orleans Saints. The Packers already have three Super Bowl wins, so they can't claim underdog status, and, oh yeah, a few of their players have been accused of sexual assault as well. 

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Can you blame me for getting most excited thus far about New Orleans rapper Lil' Wayne's opportunistic tribute to his claimed favorite team, Green Bay? As a track it's not bad — he gets in some good shots at the Steelers' players — but it has a shelf life shorter than that of a plate of nachos in a football fan's living room today.

The track is a remake of one by local Pittsburgher Wiz Khalifa, who originally wrote it as a dedication to the Steelers, and titled it "Black and Yellow." When I reviewed it for another blog I write for, The Singles Jukebox, I said:

I didn’t imagine Pittsburgh to be a city of pattering synth lines, champagne, and neon colors, but it is now; Khalifa’s song is the biggest song, rap or otherwise, dedicated to the town I can think of. Its steel heritage has been subsumed by pharmaceuticals for a while now anyway, so perhaps it’s not surprising its new anthem has more in common with slick nightlife than blue collar industry. “Black and Yellow” gleams like a candy painted whip, not iron alloy, but Khalifa delivers the kind of precision needed to produce the sort of song that rallies a metro area, and he’s assisted by some drums that thwack hard enough to overcome any lyrical boilerplate. Because if I have one complaint, it’s this: Khalifa, I’ve seen a Steelers game, and I know your hometown’s favored hue. I also know how much Ben Roethlisberger means to you guys. But couldn’t you dig a bit deeper into local trivia when putting your city on the national stage?

Andrew Noz went further at Cocaine Blunts:

And therein lies the true genius of “Black & Yellow”: at face value it serves to rally the hometown troops. If Wiz never makes another record he could probably comfortably live off the residuals that will come from being played at every hometown sporting event over the next twenty years. It’s destined to become the “I Like To Move It Move It” of the Three Rivers. It doesn’t alienate anyone, but in the most purposeful manner. It’s carefully non-specific. Apart from the Terrible Towels in the video, Wiz makes no specific reference to the ‘Burgh or the Steelers.

Kind of sums it up for this game: not even the hometown anthem is anything but perfunctory. The game starts at 6:30 p.m. Eastern/3:30 p.m. Pacific, and 10:30 a.m. Sydney time. To get you excited, here's Wiz Khalifa's video. It has some nice shots of Pittsburgh:

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