July 07, 2004
THE BRIAR PATCH
We see what you're up to. You think we just wake up in the morning, poke ourselves with a stick, and look for people to hate on. Just yesterday, a kind soul asked me to "slay" this person. I do not want to slay anybody. I am all about love.
John McWhorter is a nervous saddo. He sees a bad world. Yes. We just checked. The world's bad. We can't call him entirely stupid—McMarsalis is right that Tupac is an overrated MC. But McCrouch is nothing more than a tree-killer if he can't understand why Tupac became overrated. He'd be waging a different campaign if he could explain how rage and the desire for recognition fuel a song and how the song, in turn, releases that anger and creates its own IOU of recognition. McHuntington would need to show us how the magnets of identification and funk can put mutually loathing cohorts on the same boat where Rock The Vote never could. These are only two of the reasons hip-hop is simultaneously a minstrel show, market takeover, market surrender, black power clearance sale, same old same old, and pop hit-machine. The recipe has been written down a million times: blues (rendering of singular pain as portable entertainment center), black exclusion, dissemination of duplicates, white guilt, green power. Whatevs. Dude is playing himself.
Maud, though, knows my beef zone pretty well. She asks if anyone had told me about this. No, nobody had.
(Bites stick. Tries to see blue and purple rather than red. Takes brief, icy shower.)
Damn you, Maud!
Posted by Sasha at July 7, 2004 11:46 AM | TrackBack