S/FJ

SET IT OFFIER THAN THOU: PHAZE TRACE

Hi everybody.

My name is Felizitas, and I like Red Vines! Also, I am helping Alexander the Boy Prince with his run-down blogged-out feeling. So until he's blogged-in again, or I get das boot, I will be guest hoisting up in this soi doisant spot.

And of course I feel all hyped up (like Latifah. Remember when she was hyped up? Remember Barney Miller? You know I got rhymes like Abe Vigoda) to climb onto this extreme bullet train of debating on rap misogyny. You can find an all-important broadside from The Poodle Among Cowboys here.

So that's all very Phaze One, calling bullshit when it wants calling. If it has a question, it goes "What the fuck is wrong with that punk Calvin?" But as we all know and some knucklehead is bound to say anyway, just going wack-a-mole on a Snopes Dog n'is hardly a thing, since some other woman-hater will pop forth from some other hole exactly 7 seconds later.

That leads to Phaze Deuce, big pic action—not just placing upon blast "misogyny in hip-hop," which remains a showy subdivision, but dropping bombs on the whole city. That's why the mighty Poodle directed us, through Lynne's site, to an essay by bell hooks tossing some major context. The question that shines behind Phaze Deuce is, "Why we, out here in culture at large, pay Calvin et cet to be that kinda punk, anyway?"

Both Poodle and hooks (that's my new pilot for a mid-season replacement and ABC, heard?) are super-ultra-on-it, and I would be seriously false if I claimed I could shine Phazes One or Deuce even at all. They are tight. But I wondered if I could speak for a minute on the next Phaze, trying to reconcile what seems all-but-irreconcilable (check it: I learned those words from Jon Caramanica, peace to Harvard class of whatever year that was!)

If hip-hop is so down with the sickness, just so much mud flung from the wheel of white capitalist patriarchy, why does it just happen to be the place that some of the most geniused-up music freaks in the world wreck their craft? My question that kicks off Phaze Trace is, basically, "Okay, so why does the funkentelechy reside in hip-hop even now?" And if you think that's a made-up word, a fauxnoun, well it is! But don't call me on it; dial George Clinton. "Funk" is pretty self-evident, like a truth we hold to be; check entelechy. It's where the vital force is at, like Paris for theory 1955-1975, like post-War New York for painting and sculpture and poetry, like Seattle rock city 1989. Those places just had the vital spirit, it was all happening, right? And now hip-hop, if that's a place, has it, and has had it on lock for a severe while now. So this is shit that seems to me like it has to be confronted, and I am just the person not to do it! Sacha Jenkins is probably the person to do it, or Jeff Chang, or Elizabeth Mendez Berry.

So instead I mean to throw up "The Five Propositions," some thoughts on musical genre: one a day, I hope, for the next five days, taking as a starting point the Boy Prince's proclamation, "Fuck rap, you can have it back." There will also be photos, yeah, more damn photos. Clap back, Feliz.

Posted by at December 4, 2004 09:45 PM | TrackBack