Part I: In Which I Admit Apathy for Most Hip Hop

Once again, I’ve been catalyzed by the newspaper. This essay is part one of a two-part series in response to New York Times music editorials. Mea culpa, but after the relatively Herculean effort that, within the past thirty days, I put into an article on Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, I’m just not up for writing about literature just yet.

The Tuesday, January 3rd, issue of The New York Times ran the first article I’ve seen (by Jon Caramancia; you’ll have to create a free account with the Times to read the complete piece) that questions the ubiquitous and copious lauding of Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It’s a rather insightful article, and I’m glad to see it published somewhere prominent, like the Times, especially considering that the places I’d've expected to see it—Stereogum, or Pitchfork, or AMG—are still tripping over themselves to siphon the last drops from Mr. West’s reputedly huge and perpetually tumescent member (that lyric from “Breathe In, Breathe Out” about having “a PhD: a pretty huge dick” couldn’t be a lie, could it?). Fantasy was ranked best of the year by Rolling Stone, Spin, Vibe, Pitchfork, and Stereogum—the agreement of which has to be a first, and possibly a sign of the apocalypse (quoth Kent Brockman: “It’s in Revelations, people!”). Three of the publications’ reviewers even gave the LP a perfect score (not so rare for Rolling Stone, but quite recherché at Pitchfork‘s site). Here’s my problem: I’m pretty sure the disc is not all that good.

Caramancia disagrees with me, ranking the album as third best of 2010. This is fine by me, because along the way, he makes some salient points. Speaking of the perfect scores, he says, “These ratings and rankings make a statement about not only the presumed quality of the album, but also about institutional decisions regarding an artist’s worthiness, and about those institutions’ desire to be seen acknowledging an artist’s worthiness.” Just like the indie rock kid who wants you to know that he practically discovered Death Cab and The Shins and loved them deeply from the get-go—aware of how popular and esteemed they would, in a just world, be), Pitchfork and Spin want to be damned sure that you know that they understood and loved Kanye’s LP more than anyone else from day one. Makes sense to me; it’s sensible marketing on the individual level (that indie rock prick always seemed to get the girl) and as a business model (confirmation bias in reverse: you’ll go back to the magazine that tells you what you were already thinking and which thereby validated your judgment, practically assuring your status as Hip Visionary).

Continuing, Caramancia presents a very sensible explanation of the fervor for the LP. “Mr. West received these simultaneous accolades for several reasons. There’s the recent egalitarian streak in pop criticism—the death of nongeneralists—even if this specific embrace of Mr. West is merely a case of exceptionalism masking as democracy. Twisted Fantasy is a hip-hop album accessible to both insiders and outsiders, arriving in a moment in which other genres are as open-armed as ever. Since his debut album Mr. West has boldly asserted his primacy, demanding that others—critics, award shows, other artists—fall in line. By asking to be judged at a higher level Mr. West implicitly allows for it by creating the language for that acclaim. And maybe in some way fear plays a role, with institutions worried that history will not smile on dissenters.” Of that last point, it’s got to be true: there was probably a publication or two that slammed Radiohead’s Kid A when it came out. Examined in retrospect over the past decade, that album cured AIDS and, if played seven-seconds-out-of-time with another copy of itself, it prompts virgin birth in barren women. Where are those dissenters now? No longer working for music magazines in any visible capacity, that’s for sure. Job interviews probably went like this: “Okay, good experience, I like your writing sample, and…wait. What’s this? You were the guy who said Kid A sucked? Thank you for your time. We’ll be in touch.”

Caramancia concludes, “Mr. West also spent months doing things critics like: using the Internet to reveal his inner self, which, it turned out, was pretty much the same as his outer self; giving away music; and providing a peek into his methods in the process.” He also adds that it certainly didn’t hurt that the album was released in November, as all awards shows and Year’s Best lists favor late releases: the love buzz hasn’t yet worn off. In December, Pitchfork was asking “Beach House who?” despite the 9.5 they awarded it in January. All of this adds up to a solid explanation of the situation. I understand how it’s played out. But my initial problem persists: the album still isn’t all that good.

Of course, one could easily cavil with my judgment on the issue. Admittedly, I’m not the world’s biggest hip hop fan; in fact, I find most hip hop to be extraordinarily boring. Usually based on repetitive loops, as the years go by, the beats often feel to me less like beats and more like a gesture towards the idea of beats, as if the artists are saying, “Yeah, I know there should be killer beats back there, but whatever. I’ll just let an 808 thump and you just listen to me rap.” This would be perhaps innovative and irreverent if the lyrics weren’t so often terrible. Saul Williams’ spoken word/hip hop-structured track “Raw” is just him and a dying 808, and it’s brilliant. But more often than not, in my experience, the lyrics comprise a series of loosely connected metaphors about the sexual/criminal/financial/intellectual or even lyrical prowess of the rapper at hand. Not that it’s not fascinating to hear someone extoll his or her own virtues over and over again, but…but I just can’t think of a way to end that sentence. The rhyme structures themselves aren’t often that inventive; the bulk of MCs put together words with matching suffixes and leave it at that. The really lazy ones don’t even seem to understand the concepts of assonance or meter. By and large, rappers ignore slant rhymes and enjambed rhymes—when one line’s final word rhymes with the middle syllable(s) of another longer word (in the early 2000s, I’ll give it up to Eminem: he was quite good at those more complex rhyme structures).

I spent the better part of two decades trying to love hip hop with the same passion as my friends and peers; I went from Grandmaster Flash to Slick Rick, I spent some time with Public Enemy and NWA, and I spent a lot of time with Wu-Tang and Jay-Z. I discovered “underground” stuff like Aesop Rock and explored experimental stuff like cLOUDDEAD. I’ve just named many of the better artists, lyrically speaking; still, even when compared to the lyrical dadaism of Beck’s oeuvre—excepting the rather linear Sea Change—I feel like the rap’s lyrics are more often than not flaccid, repetitive, uninventive. Not that it grants me some spectacular cross-racial insight, but I did minor in African American studies, and so I try to be sensitive to the issues that are in play where hip hop is concerned, yet I still feel like most rap lyrically underaddresses those very real issues which it could be addressing and, when it does address such issues, the message quickly gets lost in a haze of misogyny, self-aggrandizement, and tales of self-righteous persecution—the latter of which seem with increasing frequency to be less about the very real and problematic persecution of African Americans in a society that laughably believes itself to be “postracial,” and more about another sort of persecution: haters hating on the MC because his flow’s just too wet, because he’s just so fucking good at everything that you can’t help but hate him.

From Kanye’s first LP, “Golly, more of that bullshit ice rap/ I gotta apologize to Mos and Kweli/ But is it cool to rap about gold if I tell the world I copped it from Ghana and Mali?/ First nigga with a Benz and a backpack/ Ice chain Cardy lens and a knapsack/ I always said if I rapped I’d say something significant/ But now I’m rapping ’bout money, hoes and rims again.” There’s a point in there (the Ghana and Mali bit which, to his credit, he pursues a little further with Late Registration‘s “Diamonds from Sierra Leone”), but it seems to be lost when, after the “apology,” he continues on to the rest of the hoes and rims rap. Sure, there’s the self-awareness of the statement, but—and I’ve made this statement before—ironic self-awareness can serve a purpose, like nihilism, but something has to come afterwards. Marilyn Manson’s career started off as a man turning himself into a caricature of himself, becoming America’s “shit” so that it could know that it “should be ashamed what [it] has eaten.” His original plan was to serve as an ironic sort of cautionary tale: by pretending to endorse murder, hate, drug abuse, the culture of celebrity, meaninglessness, and America’s conflation of sex and death, he was actually making a powerful self-aware statement against these things. But then he got addicted to the prop cocaine and absinthe and, well, the rest is a sad history with a lousy soundtrack. After his ironically self-aware act, nothing followed. I don’t see much difference between his show and Kanye’s. Kanye’s high point may have been when he said on national TV what every right-minded person in the country was thinking—”George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” But how am I supposed to take seriously the ironic self awareness of “is it cool to rap about gold if I tell the world I copped it from Ghana and Mali?” when it’s coming from a man who just had his lower teeth fucking replaced with gold and diamonds?

All of that behavior would be just fine, if Mr. West didn’t expect to be called and call himself “the voice of his generation.” Or rather, if he didn’t want the title Voice of His Generation to be linked to a generation with only insipid things to say. Being the Voice of One’s Generation is pretty meaningless if the people you’re speaking for have nothing of consequence to say. If we’re all just “rapping ’bout money, hoes and rims again,” is there a point to speaking for us? I haven’t given it the twenty-listen test, but My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy allays none of these lyrical/social concerns. And sure, some of it is musically catchy, but it’s not exactly the bombshell that 36 Chambers was in ’93.

This, of course, could slide into the sort of argument liberal white people love: in which black people are expected to be role models for their race, making great strides every second, with every move. And every misstep is a shame because concerned liberal white people know best and “(s)he’s just setting the whole race back.” Of the many flaws here, the biggest is perhaps the persistent assumption/reality that white people can just be silly without causing their race harm (read Richard Dyer: since people don’t consider “whiteness” a race, it’d be hard for any one white person to damage its integrity). To be clear: I don’t expect all rap to take on pithy race-related issues like reparations and the subjugation of black women, or gay black men; I don’t expect every rapper to find a way to work in a rhyme for “no informed consent” in a concept album about pharmaceutical testing in Africa, or one for “cliterodectomy” in a disc focused on sub-Sahelian black-on-black cruelty. If he or she did, I would consider probably the work exceptional and of import (and I will go out of my way to high-five anyone who can come up with a non-shitty rhyme for “cliterodectomy”). But if one’s rap is devoid of that sociopolitical import and not aesthetically (lyrically or musically) innovative or subversive, then I’m not going to clap when it’s given gold stars. Do I like Best Coast? Yep. Are they lyrically vapid and sonically simplistic? Yep. So, would I give them album of the year? No. I make the same argument against Fantasy, excepting that I don’t really like any of it. The lead track, “Dark Fantasy” sounds like the same auto-tuned shit I hear every time I pass someone who still uses a radio, and includes the incredibly ingenious lyric “Too many Urkels on your team/ That’s why you’re Winslow.” Wow. 10-point-bloody-o. When he gets intense for a moment—”Is hip hop, just a euphemism for a new religion/ The soul music for the slaves that the youth is missing”—he manages, within a sentence to turn it into self-aggrandizing, cliched crap. “This is more than just my road to redemption/ Malcolm West had the whole nation standing at attention…but this pimp is, at the top of mount Olympus/ ready for the World’s game, this is my Olympics/ we make ‘em say ho cause the game is so pimpish.” From a valid insight into a comparison of himself to Malcolm X, then a claim that he’s godlike (no mortals are allowed on Olympus), and then finally we’re back to hoes again. “Monster”: “She’s claiming that I bruised her esophagus/ My presence is a present, so kiss my ass.” Fuck it: 10.5.

Kanye West’s new album reminds me very much of his other albums: it’s unspectacular crap with great, no—spectacular—production values that caters primarily to the lowest common denominator (people will always fall under the thrall of exciting iterations of the word “fuck” paired with a head-nodder of a beat—especially really stupid white kids who believe they understand black American suffering, that they’re no longer at all prejudiced, and that they’re paying real reparations because they buy and listen to rap music). Quoth Mr. West: “Fuck it, choke a South Park writer with a fishstick.” That line alone will sell a couple hundred records. As such, West’s oeuvre garners accolades for the same reason “Friends” was allowed to go on for ten years, all the while considered excellent entertainment: most people are fucking stupid, even into their fifties they’ll laugh at poop jokes and sexual innuendo (In your endo!—see what I did there?), and they like what it is they’re told to like. It helps if there’s a huge budget to work with.

Part of the problem is that, unless one is willing to do a good deal of digging, the mainstream media doesn’t provide listeners with a wide range of options. You can either like A) Green Day, B) Paramore, C) Kanye West, D) Taylor Swift, or E) Lady Gaga. Fill in the bubble. Like the accursed aptitude tests we recall from high school, you’re left with no option for “other” or “none of the above.” Though there’s the great equalizer of the ‘net and torrent files—if I want Marnie Stern’s self-titled album, or Autechre’s LP#5, or Best of Van Halen, or Greig’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” or Atmosphere’s Seven’s Travels, I can, within twenty mouse clicks and twenty minutes, immediately have them all on my iPod, literally at my fingertips, for no charge. Hell, to doublecheck myself on a few of West’s lyrics, I downloaded Fantasy and it literally took me less than one minute, and it’s four in the morning. But most people don’t have the time or wherewithal to do the requisite digging to locate options F-Z. Read Adorno & Horkheimer’s The Culture Industry: Popular entertainment is the opium of the masses. So they’re stuck with Kanye and they don’t know they’re stuck. They like it, because they need to like something, there is a small range of easily accessible options, and they know, thanks to all the reviews, that they’re supposed to like it. They’ve been assured that they’re “cool” if they’re spinning Twisted Fantasy—no matter how old you get, I refuse to believe that there is not lurking deep down in the heart of every American an atavistic desire to be “cool.”

For instance, my deep, secret self tells me that I must be cool because I’m the only person who doesn’t seem to like the album. Of course, the rest of the world thinks I’m the guy who panned Kid A.

Before I close Part I, I want to reiterate, in case it’s unclear, that I don’t think hip hop’s a worthless genre. Not by any means. There is great talent out there; there are still innovators—there always have been, and there always will be. A lot of it, even the good stuff, may not suit my palate, but that doesn’t mean it’s not quality art. Yet I know what’s in my face every day—Kanye, Lil’ Wayne, Chingy, Soulja Boy, Dre (who, with his new single “Kush” seems to still be singing the same song about weed he was singing twenty years ago?)—doesn’t impress me. Meanwhile, in a glimpse of Part II, Jon Pareles’ January 2nd article insists that I’m wrong, that “the rhapsodic, convoluted song lived on in 2010 releases by the Arcade Fire, Titus Andronicus, Joanna Newsom, Erykah Badu…and…Kanye West.” I found Titus Andronicus’ Monitor too punk/baroque for my tastes, and I thought Joanna Newsom’s triple-LP could have been condensed to a more amazing single-LP, but I am regardless aware that they’re impressive constructions that, perhaps, just don’t suit my palate. I find Moby-Dick and Ulysses aesthetically displeasing, but I’m aware that they’re grand, impressive constructions. And like I know that The Lovely Bones doesn’t belong on that book list, I also know that Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy does not belong on that list of albums—despite having maybe the best album title of the year.

A short list of ten or so artists who do impress me, off the top of my head: El-P, Blackalicious, Soul Position, Talib Kweli & Mos Def, both halves of what was Outkast, Tricky still has his moments, Lyrics Born, Jurassic 5, & Busdriver. I’m not counting instrumentalists like DJ Shadow, RJD2 (before he went insane and created The Third Hand), and Cut Chemist—once the constraint of having to cater to an MC are removed, for some reason, hip hop seems able to become a lot more complex and nuanced. There are many more, probably even many better, I’m sure, but I quit looking because, all left-brained arguments about hip hop aside, I’ve just never felt the music the same way my friends and contemporaries did and do. And eventually, sometime shortly after buying The Streets’ Everything Is Borrowed, I think (that was such a heartbreaker, Mike Skinner, that I actually stopped spending for hip hop), I quit working so hard  to like hip hop—which I was doing for the same reason I tried to like Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor and James Joyce: because, as a late Generation X liberal white male contemporary music snob, I know I’m supposed to like it. I guess I just got too old and tired to put on the show. After all, I’m a late Generation X liberal white male with an advanced degree: I’m pretty sure that I’m also supposed to like opera, but I’ve never made any pretensions about that.