Tag: music

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Ennui Go: Pop Culture’s Irony Fatigue

Broadly speaking, irony is the rhetorical strategy of saying one thing yet meaning another, usually the opposite. It also might be the most abused trope of our time. It has exceeded substance surpassing style and elevated into the absurd over the authentic. It’s been a “get out of judgment free” card for as long as I can remember. It’s an escape route, an exit strategy, a way off the hook in any situation, and it’s become the dominant mode of pop culture.

In his book, The Comedian as Confidence Man: Studies in Irony Fatigue (Wayne State University Press, 1997) Will Kaufman defines irony fatigue, the promise of play colliding with the pursuit of truth. He discusses Bill Hicks, for example, having to edit lines from his twelfth, unaired appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, maintaining his Warrior for Truth persona, yet claiming all the while that they were “just jokes.” He didn’t mean to offend because he was just kidding. Having it both ways is perhaps impossible for a figure under public and media scrutiny, but what of the coffee shop denizen? Does she really think her David Bowie mullet looks good on her? Is that guy really into Cher enough to wear a tour shirt from before he was born? Are they for real, or are they joking? Why is everyone so veiled in irony? In a recent New York Times article on living without such artifice, Princeton Professor Christy Wampole writes,

Ironic living is a first-world problem. For the relatively well educated and financially secure, irony functions as a kind of credit card you never have to pay back. In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime. He doesn’t own anything he possesses.

Wampole goes on to cite generational differences, the proliferation of psychotropic drugs, and technological connectivity as reasons for such ironic expressions, but three major cultural epochs came and went in the meantime: cool became uncool, the nerds had their revenge, and stark sincerity was pushed to its breaking point. One was already faltering when we got here. Personas that used to be cool, classic cool, like James Dean, Elvis Presley, or John Wayne, now evoke laughter. Resorting to irony is the only response that quells the cognitive dissonance of such images. No one can actually be like those people. Between the death of the cool and the ironic now, the geeks rose up to rule all and emo culture came to the fore allowing young men to reveal their emotions in a sort of reverse feminism. We all know the story of the geeks. Theirs was a rise to riches, an underdog having its day. But the emo kids never enjoyed such empowerment.

In America’s post-9/11 cultural climate of mourning, confusion, anger, and uncertainty, the emo subculture slipped into the mainstream as a way for young men to express and deal with their confusion, where they attended shows “to feel better at the end of the night instead of bruised” (Greenwald, 2003, p. ix). The music and the open wounds let young people mourn in public. As Andy Greenwald (2003) put it while attending a live show by emo band Dashboard Confessional at New York City’s CBGB club in November of 2001,

The city is unseasonably warm and wary—what happened two months before still hangs heavy, but not heavy enough to weigh down the enormous anticipation that’s building inside CB’s scarred innards. Before the show, I run into a friend who attends NYU. She laughs, “I never figured you for an emo kid,” she says. “Me either,” I answer (p. ix-x).

He describes his friend as, “twenty-one and three years above the room’s median age” (p. x), framing emo culture as a teen phenomenon. It’s a culture of kids who haven’t “thought the deep thoughts yet—they’re too caught up in their own private drama and they’ve found a music that privileges that very same drama—that forces no difficult questions, just bemoans the lack of answers” (p.55). Post-9/11 America might have been about forcing the difficult questions, but it was just as much about bemoaning the lack of answers. And emo made either one okay. Coming of age already leaves teenagers feeling uprooted, un-tethered, with no home, and no sense of belonging. The feeling was only exacerbated by the events of September 11th. Now, not only were their bodies and relationships changing in unprecedented ways, but the world was doing the same thing. This lack of roots provides the backdrop for the mainstream emergence of emo culture. Emo allowed dudes to be as sappy and sincere as they wanted to be. “If we stay with the sense of loss,” Judith Butler (2004) writes, “are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear?” (p. 30). The feeling of being only passive and powerless is at the core of emo culture. Butler (2004) continues,

Or are we returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? Could the experience of a dislocation of First World safety not condition the insight into the radically inequitable ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally? To foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way (p. 30).

Where emo culture folds in under the weight of affect and uncertainty, Butler urges us to follow it outward. All of these tribulations may seem trivial, but, as Jaron Lanier (2008) writes, “…pop culture is important. It drags us all along with it; it is our shared fate. We can’t simply remain aloof” (p. 385). If pop culture is just recycling plastic pieces of the past, where it is dragging us? Simon Reynolds (2011) draws a parallel between nostalgic record collecting and finance, “a hipster stock market based around trading in pasts, not futures” (p. 419), in which a crash is inevitable: “The world economy was brought down by derivatives and bad debt; music has been depleted of meaning through derivatives and indebtedness” (p. 410-420). After all what is emo if not punk-rock chocolate dunked in goth peanut butter?

Popular culture is the testbed of our futurity.
— Kumayama in William Gibson‘s Idoru

For better or more likely for worse, what emerged from emo culture was the cult of irony. In the ennui of the everyday, we no longer strive to be sincere or cool, but coldly ironic. Nostalgia for simpler times but times not taken to heart is our default stance. Filters on digital photos that make them look old represent not only longing but the undermining of that longing. It’s irony fatigue filtered in Sutro and framed like a Poloroid.

To live in the image of irony is to avoid risk. It means not ever having to mean. Wampole writes, “Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks.” You don’t even have to be cool, geeky or emo, but you can if you want to.

References:

Butler, Judith. (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.

Gibson, William. (1996). Idoru. New York: Putnam, p. 238.

Greenwald, Andy. (2003). Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Kaufman, Will. (1997). The Comedian as Confidence Man: Studies in Irony Fatigue. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

Lanier, Jaron. (2008). Where Did the Music Go? In Paul D. Miller (Ed.), Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 385-390.

Reynolds, Simon. (2011). Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. New York: faber & faber.

Wampole, Christy. (2012, November 18). How to Live Without Irony. The New York Times, p. SR1.

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Of Bullhorns and Lightning Rods

In the March 19, 1990 issue of Newsweek, they unsurprisingly attack Hip-hop with everything from unfettered racism to ignorant fear-mongering. I say “unsurprisingly” because in March of 1990, rap music was still the bane of popular culture. Yo! MTV Raps had barely started its decade-long run, N.W.A. had yet to release records from their separate ways, Public Enemy was just on the verge of dropping Fear of a Black Planet, and Tipper Gore’s PMRC was advising parents not to let their kids listen to rap. In Newsweek‘s cover story, “Rap Rage,” with the cover copy, “Yo! Street rhyme has gone big time, but are those sounds out of bounds?” Jerry Adler attempts to describe music made by groups “most Americans may never have heard of,”

…music so postindustrial it’s almost not even played, but pieced together out of prerecorded sound bites. It is the culture of American males frozen in various stages of adolescence: their streetwise music, their ugly macho boasting and joking about anyone who hangs out on a different block—cops, other races, women, and homosexuals (p. 56).

Bill Adler (1999; absolutely no relation) writes of the cover story,

It was so off-base that 49 music writers, led by Entertainment Weekly‘s Greg Sandow (and representing publications including Time, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice) wrote a letter to the editors of Newsweek insisting that [Jerry] Adler had “invented a nightmarish and racist fantasy about ignorant Black men who scream obscene threats. This is more than artistic misjudgement. Adler has slandered a major strain of contemporary Black culture” (p. 145).

To the Newsweek‘s left in the photo above is the October 18, 2012 issue of the Chicago Sun-Times in which they do much the same thing over 22 years later, furthering Chicago’s Chief Keef’s place as an ephemeral media lightning rod. All the bias, misinformation, and well-worn themes from the past two decades of mainstream Hip-hop coverage are here, from jail time boosting record sales to record companies exploiting violence. I call Keef’s treatment ephemeral because comparing him to Tupac and T.I.—as Thomas Conner does—is ludicrous and illustrates how little these writers know about their subject matter or care about reporting it accurately. It also shows how desperate their employers have gotten, especially when major news outlets sport inset “tl;dr” boxes in their articles, as if that makes them hip instead of hopeless.

Keef has popularized a rap style called “drill music” that originated in Chicago’s south side. Its use of truncated half-bars made up of single statements chanted one at a time rather than rap’s signature flowing poetry over beats makes it a distinctive vocal expression, possibly only prefigured by other one-offs like early-1990s dis-rapper Tim Dog or NOLA’s hoarse-voiced Mystikal. It’s a style that other rappers sound cramped attempting to emulate, as proven by Kanye West’s remix of Keef’s one hit “I Don’t Like,” featuring the ample vocal skills of Pusha-T, Jadakiss, Big Sean, and West himself—all veterans compared to the 17-year-old Keef. “Mr. West has rarely sounded so out of place,” writes Jon Caramanica, “and the original trumps the remix in every regard. ‘I Don’t Like’ is all hard angles and concrete walls, resistant to whatever nuance Mr. West wanted to add.” The drill sound’s closest contemporary analogue lies in the gang-fueled, club anthems of Atlanta’s Waka Flocka Flame, which feature a little more in the way of flow but are no less clipped and shouted. He’s already outlasted his critics’ expectations though and has made the transition from street tough to entertainer with a sort of gangster’s grace. That shift still remains for Keef, and for argument’s sake, here’s the original house-arrest version of his break-out hit “I Don’t Like” [runtime: 5:09]:

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I do like the song as well as his mixtapes, but I can’t say that I hear evidence of a talent like Tupac, T.I., or, more germanely, Tyler, The Creator. Mark Brown opens his Chicago Sun-Times article about record labels exploiting violence such as the gun waving seen above, by writing, “There probably ought to be a rule against a guy like me writing about somebody like teen rapper Chief Keef, the gulf between our worlds so vast that there’s no way I can relate to his life experiences let alone his music” (p. 5). You might be onto something there, Mark. He adds later, “I decided long ago there’s no value in old white guys wagging their fingers about the dangers of rap music lyrics that glorify guns, drugs, violence, and other criminal activity. I don’t like them. So what?” (p. 5) So, why did you just spend nearly 800 words doing just that?

Chief Keef’s raps are like Tweets: one-line, stand-alone missives; all comment, no story. Another Sun-Times article that emerged as I was writing this revisits how social media fuels public feuds. Much has been written about the role Twitter played in Keef’s rise to infamy, mainly due to gang rivalries that bubbled up into the music and possibly resulted in the death of his south-side rap rival Lil Jojo. “THE defining document of hip-hop’s current evolutionary state isn’t a song, or a music video or a concert,” writes Jon Caramanica in The New York Times, “Years from now cultural archaeologists will do much better to look back over the Twitter account of the 17-year-old Chicago rapper Chief Keef, who’s been exploding, or imploding, depending on how you look at it, one short burst of text at a time.” The immediacy of such a channel—someone once called it “the death of the unspoken thought”—lends it to hotheaded responses and eventual regret. “I think it’s pretty likely that instantaneity means there is no chance to ‘count to 10’ in hopes that things might cool off a bit,” says my colleague at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Steve Jones, who’s quoted in the Sun-Times article. “I don’t pin that on Twitter, though, as that is the case with other synchronous media — Facebook, [texting], etc. . . . There’s probably some perceived advantage to the public-ness of Twitter, that it seems like more of a mass medium than other options at this point. It also has the perceived advantage of having messages amplified via retweeting. If Facebook is a wall, Twitter might be a bullhorn.” The bullhorn is the perfect symbol for the nodal point I’m trying to reveal here.

In writing about these articles, I feel kind of like the people who wrote them, like I’ve gone looking for something to be outraged about. And that’s a large part of the problem: If you go looking for something to be bummed about, you will find it. Unless you want to be up on the latest trends in rap music, Chief Keef is really none of your damn business. Journalism is like the postal service: They’re both dying businesses that continually do their jobs more and more poorly. So much so that they’re redefining what it means for media to “go viral” and what it means for someone to “go postal.”

It should also be noted that Newsweek announced last week that they are folding their print edition at the end of the year. I hope it means the end of their shitty rag in all its forms. Fuck them.

References:

Adler, Bill. (1999). Bill Adler’s Top 5 Mainstream Media Rap Coverage Travesties. In Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Chairman Mao, Gabriel Alvarez, & Brent Rollins (Eds.), Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists. New York: Ego Trip Publications.

Adler, Jerry. (1990, March 19). The Rap Attitude. Newsweek, CXV, 12, p. 56-59.

Brown, Mark. (2012, October 18). Record Companies Feed Off Violence. Chicago Sun-Times, p. 5.

Caramanica, Jon. (2012, October 4). Chicago Hip-Hop’s Burst of Change. The New York Times.

Conner, Thomas. (2012, October 18). Jail Time Might Not Hurt Sales. Chicago Sun-Times, p. 4.

Conner, Thomas. (2012, October 20). Rappers’ beefs sizzle on social media. Chicago Sun-Times, p. 3.

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Many thanks to Stacey Spencer who boosted me the one copy of Newsweek I’ve ever owned and to Zizi Papacharissi and Tim Baker for additional links and input.

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Aesop Rock: Perpendicular to Everything

Anyone who questions the lyrical skills of Aesop Rock isn’t listening carefully enough. Or at all. His records reward the repeated listen, the close reading, the attentive ear. His beat-building abilities are on par with his bars making him the complete Hip-hop package. Put that together with his visual art background and his knack for surrounding himself with creative friends of all stripes, and you’ve got one of the most interesting artists of the twenty-first century.

I met Aes in 2005 while backstage at the Showbox in Seattle, and though I have tested our bond by embarrassing myself in front of him many times, we’ve been friends ever since. Whether it was dumping a box of shirts into the street after a show or drunkenly crying during Kimya Dawson’s set at Home Slice Pizza during SXSW in 2011, Aes has always had my back. He’s a good dude that way.

Aesop was most recently one-third of Hail Mary Mallon along with fellow Def Jux expatriates Rob Sonic and DJ Big Wiz. When the following interview went to press, Aesop Rock had a brand new record out (Skelethon on RhymeSayers Entertainment), and was on the road, “until forever,” he said.

Roy Christopher: Last time we hung out, I got kinda tipsy and annoyed the shit out of Rob Sonic. The time before that, I did the same and dumped a box of your merch all over East 10th street. Why do you even still talk to me?

Aesop Rock: Hm. These are facts. You dumped the merch, but you were trying to help so that gets a pass. The other was at a SXSW, so on one hand, exposure to drunken company is expected. Still, you are technically an adult. I want to like you.  Our friendship is so complex. It’s like a strange riddle whispered into an elder sled dog’s ear seconds before starting his final Iditarod. What does it all mean?  Who is Rob Sonic really? Why is Roy drunk and crying at a mid-afternoon, outdoor gig behind a pizza shop? Then I think to myself, “Ah, we are all dogs in this race. It’s cold as shit and there’s a lot of ground to cover. Mush!” That and you have been extremely supportive of me for many years, and I appreciate it a lot.

RC: Oh, of course! The last time we talked formally interview-wise, you said, “As I get older I get less obsessed with details and more obsessed with finding real general ways of saying a lot. Like an old man who doesn’t speak much, but when he does it’s some weird, clever statement that somehow sums up everything: That’s what I wanna be.” Does that statement still stand?

AR: That’s gross. Don’t quote me to me, man. I am a fucking supreme idiot. I think I obsess over some things, while other things go completely neglected.  Obsession is the spice of life – you discover something, your brain gets zapped and you are alive in a new way, actively seeking information, being productive, finally finding some details worth paying attention to, etc. Musically speaking, I know I have reworked individual lyrics and sounds to extremes nobody who wasn’t obsessed would bother with, or redoing things that sound exactly the same to others 800 times until it hits what I was looking for – whatever that means. Details rule, and I assume are emphasized by the stuff we neglect, whether artistically, life-istically, whatever. You might leave an obvious fuck-up untouched because it’s the right fuck-up. Different things take different amounts of attention to become realized. Sometimes you wanna cut paper slowly and precisely with scissors to get a clean edge, sometimes you wanna tear it to show the rip. That’s my updated take on “details,” which I just re-read and feel is as vague as my 2005 version, with way more words. The second half of my ’05 comment sounds beyond douche-y, and I’m sorry I put you through hearing somebody say those words out loud. Let’s say that we’re officially even for the merch drop now.

RC: Deal. You’ve really taken to the web lately with Twitter and various websites. What’s the aim of 900 Bats?

AR: It’s pretty much aimed at not having any aim. Albums take me a little while to make, and I guess I wanted to have a home for some public fuckery, beats, videos: just an outlet for crap when I felt like making it, as well as contributions from others looking for the same. I had some like-minded friends and we made 900 bats. Sometimes I stay super busy with it and try to gather content, make stuff, etc. Other times it goes untouched for weeks. I think it’s a tiny arena where I can be creative with zero pressure or expectations, and I hope the others that have added things to it feel the same. It’s been hard to keep up with now that I’ve been consumed with Skelethon stuff, but I find it a rewarding outlet to have when I need it.

RC: New York City seems like the place to be for Hip-hop, but you bounced to the Left Coast. How’s the Bay Area different from New York for the way you approach this stuff?

AR: I have a really different life than I had in NY for many ever-evolving reasons. It was a big move. It’s not a bus-ride away, which is the furthest I had ever lived previously. I kinda nurse this need to be alone while yelling about feeling lonely. That has led me to a relatively isolated life. Socializing in general, in the sense of hitting a bar at night, etc. never was my thing, but now that I live out here I find it even easier to escape/hide, to a perhaps unhealthy extent. Making songs has always been something I did at night while other people were out, or at least that’s what it felt like. When I was younger, painting was like that: I would rather make some shit than go out. Jumping to the other side of the country enables that for better or for worse. It kinda seals the deal on a lot of the socializing because quite frankly I don’t really know very many people here. The approach feels like “me vs. me” more than ever.

RC: When you’re not messing around in the studio, you’re out on the road. Which do you prefer?

AR: I prefer the studio because I like making things. That said, because Rob, Wiz and I are all over the country these days, touring is a nice chance to hang with those guys. Because songs have felt like the byproduct of antisocial behavior for me, hitting a point in my life when someone was like “ok, time to tour!” – I was just like… “ummm what?” I mean, in ’01 I finally quit my day-job to do my first official “tour,” and I sorta freaked out and didn’t even end up going. It felt like the exact opposite of what I was putting into the songs, and I just couldn’t wrangle it in. It still feels that way. “Performing” is an awkward thing for me. I kinda hate it. I love it, but I kinda hate it. I mean it feels undeniably fantastic to be in a room with people getting loud for you and your songs, but I will never not find it fucking terrifying. I think over the years I have adapted to the point of coping, but the entire “on tour” experience hasn’t been something I have found comfort in. Regardless, I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all.

RC: This is for the premier BMX ‘zine, so I have to ask, you ever ride BMX?

AR: Skateboarding played a gigantic roll in my youth, from elementary school through my young 20’s. In maybe 7th grade however, I was coaxed over to the local dirt track behind Pumpernickels restaurant. I’d say for about a year or so I abandoned skating and rode a bike. I enjoyed it, but ultimately had picked up skating again by the time high school came around. BMX is sick as fuck and I will still sit and watch that shit any time.

———————-

Here’s the video for “Zero Dark Thirty” from Skelethon [runtime: 3:32]:

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Ed note: This interview originally appeared in Mike Daily’s Aggro Rag Freestyle Mag #13: The Hip-hop Issue in July, 2012. As that issue is now nearly out of print, I’m posting it here by kind permission of Mike Daily for those that missed out. Many thanks to him, Chrissy Piper, Dana Meyerson, and, of course, Aesop Rock.

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Ill Ish Mixtape

Thanks in part to my dude Tim Baker over at SYFFAL, I’ve come up on a gang of nice new Hip-hop stuff. I’ve been blasting it here at the office so much that I decided to throw together a mixtape and post it up. Here’s the tracklist, and the mix is embedded below. Enjoy.

nomadboy: Ill Ish [runtime: 44:43]:

01. Fan Ran (ft. Skweeky Watahfawls & Johnny Ciggs) “Hunnid Dolla Bills”
02. Mr. Muthafuckin’ Exquire (ft. Despot, Das Racist, Danny Brown & El-P) “The Last Huzzah!”
03. Thad Newman “Graveborn”
04. Gritty City Fam “What We Do Is Wrong”
05. Gunplay “Take Dis”
06. Bo Deal (ft. Waka Flocka Flame & Chief Keef) “Murda”
07. White “D-Boy”
08. Riff Raff (ft. Chief Keef) “Cuz My Gear”
09. Gunplay “Jump Out”
10. Lil Reese (ft. Chief Keef) “Traffic”
11. White “Code Names”
12. Johnny Ciggs “Fuck You”

 

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The Four Kings of My Musical Taste

When it comes to my interests, I am extremely prone to phases. I will read about nothing but architecture or cyberpunk for a months straight, or listen to nothing but prog rock or black metal for three years.

It always swings back tough. Way back. I typically find that my all-time favorite stuff is way out by the edges. When it swings back, as it has recently, I often wonder what grounds it. In trying to find some sort of middle, I constructed the following chart:

I Tweeted not long ago that my listening was informed by the four pillars of Godflesh, Neurosis, Brian Eno, and The Bomb Squad, but I think this chart goes much further in defining it. The acts used above aren’t necessarily my favorites, but they represent the things I love about the things I love. If it’s heavy, I want the walls to warp. If it’s weird, I want cognitive dissonance. If it’s cheesy, pile it high. If it’s wordplay, make me have to come back to it a million times.

In only a partially facetious manner, this chart illustrates the nexus of my musical tastes. Music is by far the form of art I consume most, and art should show you something you can’t find anywhere else.

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Documenting Hip-hop: Ice-T’s The Art of Rap

Though he rarely gets his due outside of hardcore heads, Ice-T has always been one of Hip-hop’s best storytellers. Songs like “6 ‘N the Mornin'” (1987), “Colors” (1988), and “Drama” (1988) set the bar high for poetic narrative. These songs were gritty tales from the streets of L.A., “gangsta rap” before it was so-called (back then Ice-T called it “crime rhyme”). Now he’s set out to tell the story of Hip-hop itself in the documentary Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap (Indomina, 2012).

In addition to his pedigree as an emcee, Ice-T also knows every veteran of the game. On the selection of rappers in the film, he told Soul Culture (embedded below; runtime: 6:48), “I just went through my phonebook, that’s all it was. It wasn’t an intent to cut out the young kids or anything. I just said I’m going to do a movie (and) I can’t offer money. I can only get favors, so let’s call my friends. And I called up the people I toured with.” That explains a lot of the inherent omissions of a documentary of this nature. With that said, the film is a fun collection of thoughts from a range of Hip-hop luminaries. What it lacks in depth, it more than makes up for in breadth.

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There is a literacy to Hip-hop. “It’s just like a language,” says DJ Premiere, “You have to know how to listen to it… And if you don’t know how to listen to it, it doesn’t make sense.” The Art of Rap is similar in that it helps to already have a knowledge of the history of the culture, its major players, and their relationships with one another. For instance, when fellow West Coast rapper Ras Kass asks if Ice is getting an interview with Xzibit for the film, Ice says he can’t find him. Ras calls XZibit at his house down the street, and Ice-T makes it his next stop. Or when he’s up in Eminem’s studio. After talking with Eminem at length, Ice is chopping it up with Royce Da 5’9″, and Em comes in rapping Ice-T’s “Reckless” from Breakin’ (1984).

When Ice-T sits down with many of these folks, it’s obvious that they’ve been friends and colleagues in this for years–especially people like Ras, Dr. Dre, Snoop, Ice Cube, Rakim, Redman, MC Lyte, Q-Tip, and Lord Jamar. With others, Ice doesn’t even step in front of the camera (if he’s even there; it’s especially noticeable during the Kanye West spot). The Art of Rap gives one glimpses of the heavies in the game, but knowing a bit of their backstory helps those glimpses go together.

Of course, Hip-hop has been explored in previous documentaries. Peter Sprier’s The Art of 16 Bars (QD3, 2005), DJ Organic’s Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme (Bowery Films, 2000), and Doug Pray’s Scratch (Palm Pictures, 2001) provide a decent overview of the complexity of this art form. But Ice-T brings a special touch to the film. He knows almost everyone in this movie in a way that other documentarians of same do not.

If you lack the interest or the time to read some of the great books written about the genre and culture, Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap won’t school you completely, but it’s a fun companion piece to your further knowledge. As always, Ice-T tells the stories well.

Here’s the trailer [runtime: 2:33]:

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Separated at Birth: New Candidates

We’ve all seen how much Will Ferrell and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith look alike, and I always mix up Josh Duhamel and Johnny Knoxville, as well as having to double-take Paul Reubens and Alan Cumming.  I have a couple more specimens I’d like you to join me in comparing.

Will Ferrell and Chad Smith

I was watching The Cure in Orange (1987) last night, and it reminded me how much their very-soon-to-be keyboardist Roger O’Donnell looks like James Spader.

Roger O’Donnell and James Spader

Also, in Jay-Z’s Fade to Black (2004), there’s a clip of Jay in the studio with Rick Rubin working on “99 Problems.” Mike D. of The Beastie Boys happens in on the session. Re-watching the DVD a while back, I was struck by how much Mike D. looks like Perry Farrell.

Perry Farrell and Mike D.

Celebrity doppelgängers abound. Anyone else have any new candidates?

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It’s All in the Risk: The Creative Edge

There are plenty of people trying to get at the heart of creativity, where it comes from, and how to get there. All of us at some point need that creative spark, and sometimes it can be so elusive it’s difficult to imagine it happening at all. Knowing more about the cognition of creativity is like knowing how a car engine works: It doesn’t make you a better driver. Finding the creative Edge is a far more personal quest.

The Edge, he said, have to find that Edge. He made you hear the capital E. The Edge was Fox’s grail, that essential fraction of sheer human talent, nontransferable, locked in the skulls of the world’s hottest research scientists. — William Gibson, “New Rose Hotel”

Part of conjuring that Edge is making space for it to happen. Finding the space rarely works, so you have to tip it in some way. Just going for it is one way. Setting aside all of your fears of failure, self-editing, and just getting out of your own way. Ice-T puts it bluntly and succinctly [runtime: 1:37]:

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Playing it safe isn’t interesting. — Ryan Kidwell

As Ice-T mentions, Edge gets you right in the middle of that creative process.* you have to step outside of your comfort zone and find that space where it happens. Like the dreamers in Inception (2010), creating and experiencing the world simultaneously.

If you’ve ever seen anyone rap off the top of their head or improvisation well done, you know what getting in the middle of that process looks like. When someone is truly, spontaneously in the present moment. You can do it with any creative endeavor. Writing and riding are the two activities where I most find I need the Edge, and sometimes lightning does strike, but it’s all too rare.

Alex Burns described that zone to me as “hot space,” the place where creativity is happening in your head right then. After bouts with creative blocks, it’s namesake, Queens 1982 record Hot Space, was recorded in short bursts of studio time. Here’s a clip of them recording “Under Pressure” with David Bowie [the first half of the clip or so; runtime: 7:02]:

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Each of us have different limits, but we all have to venture outside of them once in a while. If you never cross the line, you’ll never know where those limits are, and you may never find the Edge you need to get past your obstacles. Push Your Self.

————

*This isn’t the first time the worlds of William Gibson and Ice-T have collided. The Iceberg was the leader of the Lo-Teks, “J-Bone,” in the Gibson-penned, 1995 movie, Johnny Mnemonic.

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Kickstarting Ume’s New Record

My dear friends Lauren, Eric and Rachel, collectively known as Ume, have been perched on the verge of the next level for a while now. With the interest of Grammy-winning producer Adam Kasper (Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, Seaweed, etc.), they have a chance to finally break through. And we can help them.

Ume, being the DIY-minded folks that they are, have started a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money to book studio time with Kasper. These are hard-working, hard-rocking, talented musicians, good people, and good friends. Help me help them get this thing done.

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Gilman Girls: Metal Madness Memories, 1998

During my brief stint in the Bay Area nearly fifteen years ago, I managed to go to 924 Gilman Street—the Left Coast’s answer to 315 Bowery—a few times with my friend Brian Peterson. I know one time we went to see our favorite math-rock masters, A Minor Forest, and another time was to see them do pre-…And Justice for All Metallica covers for the Metal Madness Show.

jan 31 sat: Metal Madness Show: East Bay bands doing metal 
covers: 
       Creeping Death, Rocket Queens, American Metal, 
       Iron Vegan, Motley Jews, Blizzards Of Schnozz, 
       Anal Tap    at 924 Gilman a/a $5 8pm *** @ 
       ($1 off with proper metal attire)

Iron Vegan was comprised of members of Neurosis, Noothgrush, and Lost Goat, and was the closest I’ve come to seeing any of those bands play. Their set was all Iron Maiden covers, of course, which was the closest I’ve come to seeing them live as well.

Iron Vegan: Taste the Metal.
I missed Rocket Queens (doing Guns N’ Roses songs) because this cute, blonde girl who wanted to piss off her boyfriend invited me outside to take a walk…

I made it back in time to catch A Minor Forest plus two (as Creeping Death, but not this one) and Brian shaking his head at me. A Minor Forest used to play some of the most intricate, tightly woven compositions ever conceived by a three-piece. As far as them doing other people’s music, Rush covers were what crowds wanted to hear when we’d see them play as A Minor Forest proper. Their doing old Metallica material, with the aid of the two additional members (a second guitarist and a singer), was impressive, but not quite as impressive as they normally were. They’d taken hints from Metal before though, using the line “A Minor Forest supports the destruction of humanity” in the inside cover of their first record, Flemish Altruism: Constituent Parts 1993-1996 (Thrill Jockey, 1996), which their guitarist Eric Hoversten told me they’d lifted from the masthead of a Black Metal magazine belonging to Steve Albini’s girlfriend at the time.

According to the Matador Records website, Creeping Death may have had a larger impact than I would’ve imagined:

With revolving members from A Minor Forest, The Threnody Ensemble and Weakling, Creeping Death could have been responsible for the short-lived metal cover band phenomenon, which swept San Francisco in the late ’90s. Headlining shows with such bands as Iron Vegan, Rocket Queen, and Sleigher, the members of Creeping Death found that being in a cover band paid better and drew bigger and more responsive crowds than any of their respective “real” projects.

I guess when your “real” projects play songs with gamelan structures and time signatures no one can follow, a good ol’ “Ride the Lightning” cover is just the break everyone needs. It’s not just esoterica versus Metallica though, as Chuck Klosterman illustrated while comparing a cover band to a “real” metal band, writing, “One can only wonder how the real guys in Dokken feel about being as popular as five fake guys in [Guns N’ Roses cover band Paradise City]” (p. 67). Something about the inauthenticity of a cover band makes the event more fun, lighter, more intimate. I would argue that this is the only reason Weezer ever had a career (well, that and creative, Spike Jonze-helmed videos). Something to do with the levity of enjoying a cover band.

There’s also the silent sting of nostalgia. No one goes to see a band from their youth do new material. Whether it’s a reunion tour or the latest of many, past-their-prime recordings, it’s all about the legacy, the hits from the day. It’s about reliving a piece of the past.

Memories don’t live like people do
They always remember you
— Mos Def, “Travelin’ Man”

924 Gilman Street Membership Card from 1998.

Somehow my 924 Gilman Street membership card has survived in my wallet intact since 1998. I wouldn’t still have it, but every time I’ve switched wallets, I’ve seen no reason to take it out. It’s a totem, a token from a time long past that was about another time long past, a copy of a copy of a copy. It doesn’t make me particularly nostalgic—I only went to Gilman a few times—but it does make me smile. As the best memories should.

Speaking of, the girl I made out with that night is almost in her thirties now. Memories don’t live like people do.

References:

Def, Mos. (1998). Travelin’ Man [Recorded by Mos Def & DJ Honda]. On h II [LP]. New York: Relativity Records.

Klosterman, Chuck. (2003). Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. New York: Scribner.

Lesser Biography. (2003). Matador Records website.