Stuff White People Like: Thinking they know more about hip hop than other white people

Apparently, in his recent review of Big Boi's new album, Sasha Frere-Jones didn't find it important to talk about any of the rapper's work pre-2003, and, furthermore, to properly discuss the album he was reviewing. This isn't the first time Frere-Jones has fallen short in the face of a hip hop review. While that piece on MF Doom last fall was solid, really solid, I always find his reviews to exhibit such a narrow, well, aging white person perspective; they lack a general understanding of hip hop as a genre, and base their critiques on trivial elements usually involving an artist's career, blankly bypassing the heart of the album, the point. In this review, Frere-Jones spends a lot of time discussing the style on Big Boi's most recent Speakerboxxx album and his decision to release Sir Luscious under Def Jam, but doesn't bother mentioning any of Big Boi's, or Outkast's earlier work. I understand that Frere-Jones is attempting to paint a portrait of the artist by spending 3/4 of the article dissecting his previous work, but when you limit the scale of that portrait to that of a single, fairly commercial album released ten years after the beginning of an artist's career, it just seems silly. I appreciate that the New Yorker branches out into the genre when it does, but I just wish it tackled the subject with the same level of no-fucking-around-legitimacy that it does everything else. Like, if they want help, they can just ask, you know? In any case, the last paragraph was pretty good, so here it is:

"The musical DNA of 'Sir Luscious' lies in a simple strategy that Big Boi has used for years: he often raps in double time, no matter what the tempo of the song is. This means that even the slower songs, like 'Fo Yo Sorrows' and 'General Patton' (the latter has one of the better opera samples in recent hip-hop), which hover at around eighty beats per minute, don't drag--Big Boi uses the space in the beat to provide another rhythm with his words. More than once, I thought of the clatter of a lawnmower, where secondary rhythms whisper underneath the main beat. Though there are rappers with more puns and wider purviews than Big Boi--he raps too often about the club, for instance--there are not many who can be simultaneously forceful and careful. Despite any clichés about Southern dispositions, Big Boi is never laid back when he raps: he defines wide-awake."

[The New Yorker, 8/2/2010]