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]

Eternity of the moment

"Cartier-Bresson has the weakness of his strength: an Apollonian elevation that subjugates life to an order of things already known, if never so well seen. He said that the essence of his art was, 'the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event, as well as the precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.' Too often, the 'significance' feels platitudinous, even as its expression dazzles. Robert Frank, whose book 'The Americans' treated subjects akin to many in the older photographer's work, put it harshly but justly: 'He travelled all over the goddamned world, and you never felt that he was moved by something that was happening other than the beauty of it, or just the composition.' The problem of Cartier-Bresson's art is the conjunction of aesthetic classicism and journalistic protocol: timeless truth and breaking news. He rendered a world that, set forth at MOMA by the museum's chief curator of photography, Peter Galassi, richly satisfies the eye and the mind, while numbing the heart." Finding flaw in the seemingly flawless, Peter Schjeldahl reviews the Cartier-Bresson retrospective at MOMA.

[The New Yorker]

“I started writing and making up characters in the first place because nothing or not much away from the typewriter was reaching my heart at all.”-J. D. Salinger

[Lillian Ross, The New Yorker]

Fits of ecstasy

"Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic, sometimes so much so that it was almost too intense for me--as when you first bite into an apple or a confection that tastes so delicious and causes such a flood of oral juices that there is a moment of intense pain in your mouth and glands--particularly in the late afternoons of spring and summer, when the sunlight on sunny days achieved moments of immanence and became the color of beaten gold and was itself (the light, as if it were taste) so delicious that it was almost too much to stand, and I would lie on the pile of large pillows in our living room and roll back and forth in an agony of delight and tell my mother, who always read on the couch, that I felt so good and full and ecstatic that I could hardly bear it, and I remember her pursing her lips, trying not to laugh, and saying in the driest possible voice that she found it hard to feel too much sympathy or concern for this problem and was confident that I could survive this level of ecstasy, and that I probably didn't need to be rushed to the emergency room, and at such moments my love and affection for my mother's dry humor and love became, stacked atop the original ecstasy, so intense that I almost had to stifle a scream of pleasure as I rolled ecstatically between the pillows and the books on the floor."

There are few writers that can keep a sentence going, keep your eyes on the page, like David Foster Wallace. (From his story "All That" in the Dec. 14th Yawka)

I'm kidding

Paige would like to extend her thanks to the "pro surfers" who helped themselves to all the peanut butter and jelly in her kitchen last night. You guys are awesome!!1!

GOOD MORNING VIETNAM!

Striped cashmere sweaters. Mmm. Just saying that phrase aloud tickles what little soul I can muster up, and soothes me in the most electrifying yet comforting of ways. Cashmere sweaters by themselves are, seemingly, unbeatable, but when you add stripes to the mix, you're really onto something eh.

Why is it that the longer I study literature the less capable I feel of writing anything? I can't even construct my thoughts, in my brain, let alone on paper. Computer. What's the protocol for that? What does, 'in writing,' really entail anymore?

So yeah, there's that. There's also this low, chugging beat, in about the same pitch as a pair of maracas coming from somewhere in this room, or flat, or building, so there could be an explanation for that, or I could just be going fucking crazy. The guy in the flat across from mine has been sat at his desk reading under the penetrating glow of a very sturdy-looking desk lamp for.. hours I'd say at this point, and I'd just like to say, in the exceptionally microscopic chance that he might fall fatefully at the hands of this clusterfuck of a blog and actually have the attention span to power through this much of an entry, Way to go. That appears to be fairly torturous. Just in case that doesn't exactly pay off (eh), i.e. reflect in the outcome of that which you are (I'm presuming) preparing for, please accept my sentiment as.. some sort of consolation; you fill me with pride, to be of the (almost!) same make as you, sir. But also, consider this a big 'YOU ARE APPRECIATED', on behalf of mankind, for being the one to remind us why it's ALWAYS BETTER TO STUDY IN BED DAMN IT. Damn, you look uncomfortable! And while I'm momentarily stepping over that wall, Shaun, if you're out there: take pride in the yellow jumper. Don't keep it locked away in the darkness of your wardrobe. Set that jumper free. But, most importantly: wear the sweater--don't let it wear you. If you don't think you're capable of this, you should probably give it to me, because I would gladly take it off your hands. I could give you this awesome bedside table from Ikea that I just have lying around if you want something in exchange. I'd be cool with that.

So I spent the majority of my evening exploring previously uncharted regions of the Wu Tang catalogue, because obviously there are no more productive options for my time when I have a presentation on Impressionism to prepare, and I stumbled upon this episode of Fresh Air on which the guest is the RZA. It's worth listening to at least the introduction just to hear Terry Gross say "Old Dirty Bastard". Of course, this is (was, 2005) just a precursor to the inevitable marriage (allying) of the rap community and the Upper Class Left Wing Idealists (see profile of MF Doom by Ta-Nehisi Coates in a recent issue of the New Yorker that I forgot to bring to light because I've been busy being fucking awesome). It just makes so much sense. When that day comes, the planets will align. Or maybe vice versa. Either way, some of us are fucked, and some of us, will taste that righteous taste. Ever hear that song, "What's Gonna Happen On the Eighth Day?" by Screamin' Jay? Yeah, it'll be sort of like that, but with a more subdued enthusiasm, and more bass. I'd actually like to hear--and I've been thinking about this for awhile now--more sampling of talk-radio on rap albums. Apparently they're not entirely convinced over at Gawker (what else is new?):


So yeah, almost done, but I would just like to mention the fact that at the end of a long night, I've come to the conclusion that I really just don't think I could marry a man who wasn't well versed enough with the Tao of the Wu to wax lyrical about them at any given moment. Shit's just too important. Sorry dudes of the world.

And the search for a husband continues.

"Siberia was the blankness in between, the space through which apocalypse flew."

I finally got around to reading Ian Frazier's two-part piece in the August 3rd/10th issues of the New Yorker, documenting his trip across the Grand Russian Frontier. And it's fucking awesome. Also awesome are his sketches from the trip, which have inspired me to sketch more and write less in my own notebook this fall.

that he wished to be human again

"Though the gas was disabled, the Friendreth’s electricity flowed, thankfully, just as its plumbing worked. Biller provided Perkus with a hot plate on which he could boil water for coffee, and he’d have a cup in his hand by the time Ava returned from her walk. He imagined the volunteer could smell it when she opened the door. Coffee was the only constant between Perkus’s old daily routine and his new one, a kind of lens through which he contemplated his transformations. For there was no mistaking that the command had come, as in Rilke’s line: You must change your life. The physical absolutes of coexistence with the three-legged pit bull stood as the outward emblem of a new doctrine: Recover bodily prerogatives, journey into the real. The night of the blizzard and the loss of his apartment and the books and papers inside it had catapulted him into this phase. He held off interpretation for now. Until the stupendous cluster headache vanished, until he learned what Ava needed from him and how to give it, until he became self-sufficient within the Friendreth and stopped requiring Biller’s care packages of sandwiches and pints of Tropicana, interpretation could wait." -Jonathan Lethem, "Ava's Apartment"

This story is, in my opinion, the finest piece of fiction I've seen in the New Yorker in quite some time.

'We were seized by a frenzy: we began to gallop across the continent, through the savannas and forests that had recovered the earth, burying cities and roads, obliterating all trace of what had been. And we trumpeted, lifting up to the sky our trunks and our long, thin tusks, shaking the shaggy hair of our croups with the violent anguish that takes hold of all us young mammoths when we realize that now is when life begins, and yet it is clear that what we desire we shall never have.' Italo Calvino, 'The Daughters of the Moon'