Rapping Isn't Fundamental

When I did ironic little rap ditties (diddy's?) for 50 Cent's Vitaminwater, Nerve.com, Gawker and such I thought I was on to something new and different. The future. Hip hop's untapped potential as both an art and a more compelling form of communication. Like cellphones and twitter, Hip Hop was a new technology to deliver whatever message you wanted: Like, Eat at McDonald's!, or, buy khaki pants!, or, we love black people!

But just like watching a movie on your cellphone, you realize in execution the premise doesn't totally satisfy. turns out some of the things that make the cellphone convenient (i.e. it being small) undermines your ability to totally indulge the movie. Likewise, a rap's rhythm, pacing, style that make it artful undermine its ability to function as effective, direct communication (make your point and stop internal-rhyme-scheming already!).

As a hip hop enthusiast and champion, i always thought if you had flow and make some good punchlines, you could convert anything into the form and the young urban kids would bob their head and be like, yeah, i feel you. And even the white-people-rapping pandemic of the mid-2000's didn't persuade me otherwise. Those people just weren't good.

But now it seems, most people can at least kick a few bars without totally embarrassing themselves (right, Miley Cyrus!). And it's just like, eh. Not bad, you have competency ... but why are you doing this again? Anyrap, that's what I thought after seeing this journalism school graduation video...



It's like, don't stop on my account. Go, have fun! Rap! But i don't know, it's like seeing an interactive exhibit at a museum or something; I nod at the proactive gesture of edutainment more than i feel viscerally engaged by it. knahmean?

Packed My Bowl, Err Bags, And Moved To Portland

From the town that brought you the Portland Jailblazers, and mad roses, comes the latest smellgood sensation: the first "marijuana cafe" in the United States.

The Cannabis Cafe in Portland, Oregon (opened mid-November), is the first to give certified medical marijuana users a place to get hold of the drug and smoke it -- as long as they are out of public view -- despite a federal ban.

Just make sure it's not Oregono you're smoking. hey-O!

Previously From the Oregon News Dispatch:
There's a "Meet A Black Guy" Booth In Oregon [TAN]

The Assimilated Piano

They're calling it "the fluid piano"; I'll just call it a "culturally assimilated piano", since that's longer and more cumbersome to say or write. In either case, here we have an instrument of art that dares to step outside of its western music roots/tradition like artists themselves occasionally do. how fancy!



Pretty awesome. I mean hip hop/electronic music producers etc. have been doing this for a while through sampling, keyboards etc, but this seems like a serious breakthrough with all the never-seen-before tuning/modulating options now on the instrument itself.

if kanye gets wind of this it might be the piece that finally lets him be great. we could also call it the Lady Gaga of pianos. or maybe the tiger woods of steinways since it's kinda-sorta cheating on the plain ol' regular notes. or maybe the michael jackson of [piano instrument] for reinventing how black-white notes sound when children play with it ...(?) hmm, that last one is a little off-tune but you know what i mean if you think about it. right? RIGHT???

Looks Like Someone Put Something in Katie Couric's Drank

I dare you to deny your love for some Katie Couric after seeing photos of her getting her freak on...

surreal... but ooh, looks like Katie was the one that got the party started also

yo, she's backing that thang up and erything!

seriously is she, like, bogling and doing the butterfly?!!? work those legs, katie!!!

I'm putting my money on it being Weezy that's responsible for this Moment of Assimilated Genius ...

pics via: gawk

Where For Art Thou Black Lady Gaga?

I've caught the Lady Gaga fever of late. Methinks the proof for her legitimacy is in the live acoustic pudding.

When she's sitting at the piano doing her hipster-glam-quirky Amy Winehouse meets Alicia Keys (Alicia Winehouse?) thing we get a more intimate feel for the song itself, along with her naked vocals (vs. nude body suits, etc), and her own personal charm/isma.



and Paparazzi is a pretty tight piece of songwriting craftsmanship ...



Compare those with her official cinematic vids for those two songs and you have a spectacular case study for "Art over Artists".

Then her recent American Music Award exhibit is a nice capper on a string of raising-the-bar performance art stage shows.



I'm excited she and Kanye are schmoozing, I feel she represents exactly the over-the-top fantastical sensibility hip hop emcees struggle to assimilate into their own "art". Kanye is surely inspired by the ambition of her whole Artist Presence. Also, Beyonce. This video with her and Lady G is fairly compelling dreamscaping ...



Gaga says herself she played it down out of respect for the B, but I still think Beyonce holds her end down as Superstar Presence. (it's a video that raises other questions as well: for example LG schtick seems "post-racial" and Beyonce's def has a "black/racial" quality (is it just the hips, etc?) to it. what does that mean?) ... but either way - as to the race/culture angle on all this, per TAN commentary objective C-1-4.2 -- negroes need more of this kind-of-crazy so maybe B's alter-ego Sasha Fierce and Kanye's alter ego, uh, Kanye West could make some sort of Amorphous bi-inquisitive Black Lady Gaga superartist. it's like a homosexual black dude who raps, video-hoes, and plays the flute all at the same time. And lights his balls on fire at the end of every show. And he's twelve. A 12-year-old ball-lighting cello-farting falsetto-beatboxing prodigy. From a broken home in a forgotten hood. And diddy discovers him. And he blogs. And he's me. Or am I him? Or am I a she? Kanye Fierce: flute-fart-beatboxer extraordinaire? perhaps, perchance to dream bwahahahahaheehehehehoohohohoh, uhhhh, o-k-bai......

DJ David Sedaris on the Wheels of Steel

yo, i knew my homey, my stromey david sedaris was down with hip hop! that's got to be why he's dropping his next audiobook in a format they used to call vinyl. wax. phonograph records.

i think it's a very cute hipster-funky idea, but i honestly haven't seen a working victrola in some time now. does apple still make those?

i can't imagine at a hopped up price and less material ($25 and doesn't have all the material, huh?), that it's getting the best opportunity to succeed. but i sincerely wish this "vinyl" good tidings on the marketplace.

And I definitely hope DJ Sedaris takes the opportunity to cut and scratch and blend his essays for a pipin' hot new yorker literary party or something. he should include katie couric and black lady gaga in his video girl entourage.

word.

Popular Author's Audiobook Tries New Format: Vinyl [NYT]

image: via

"Am I In The Right Place? I Don't See TAN's Laptop Anywhere ..."

while you're fixing your straps and awaiting my return. here are some old items to peruse at your leisure while smoking a cig, or not:

Michael Vick's been in the news. I once challenged the dogs on his behalf.

Eminem's back. I once did a spoof of "My Name Is".

Football's back. Do you remember Negro Bowl I?

Who Will Be America's Next Top Racist?

I still think Salt Water Taffy is a fairly retarded invention...

internal: might be worth revisiting Post-Racial Fight Club again ...

since we know Post-Racial is not PostModern, or somesuch...

Who's Got Next???: y'know on the whole Minorities Being President tip ...

remember the girl whose booty Obama supposedly looked at? No? Well she probably remembers you sizing up her booty.

unrelated: my shower doesn't talk anymore....

hmm, speaking of showers, i haven't talked about sex in a while. i wonder if i should re-sex "Sex is re-sex"...

kanye's still around, but who's the new 50?

eh, should be back by the time you finish this and listen to lykke li's black cab session 500 more times.


pic via: Ye

Table Beat-Boxing Has Improved Since I Was A Kid

As a kid in the south bx, banging a beat on the desk or table was standard practice. nothing to see here folks. when i went off to prep/boarding school, and me and my boys would start orchestrating multi-track instrumentals in the dining hall, it was probably a little more avant garde. a future look at the assimilated learning curve, or somesuch....

and now it's just cool to see that the kids are a little bit on some table beat-box 3.0 with it. this business with the pencil was definitely beyond our skill-set in the 80s, 90s.



via videogum

TAN: Out To Greece

TAN is away in Greece. Athens, Mykonos, and Santorini. Your regular irregularly scheduled programming will resume end of this week. The Greek assimilation will not be be televised, but probably blogged. holla.

Hov's Blueprint 3 Leaking, Might Be A Little Watered Down

If the world is made of two people, artists and executives. animals and zookeepers. or somesuch. I've long thought Jay-Z's legacy might be most interestingly framed as testament to an executive pushing the artist envelope as far as possible. A zookeeper jumping around with gorillas, hunting with lions, and pulling it off, for a while, with great success. The Black Album might be where he even blacked out and ate like some raw carrion or some shit before puking out Kingdom Come on some "raw, uncooked flesh does not agree with me" ish. Hov is technically brilliant, and knows his *brand* inside-and-out, but he lacks the stomach for the risk required of the most brilliant, soaring, time-spanning art[ists].

The Blueprint 3 looks like its fitting the same formula. Recent leaks from nahright and the NMC:

Reminder (prod. Timbo)
Off That (w/ Drake (on hook))

of course DOA makes airs of ambition, but ends up staying a solid song.

Run This Town bumps, but the vid is conceived in a much airier space; the song itself is much more dense, inert. It's a solid song.

Jay-Z |MTV Music

that's 4 of 15 or so. 25%-ish for the lazy mathematicians in the building. suffice to say, there's probably some decent music coming- we hope. which is nothing to complain about. but for jay, if he really cares about such matters, it's clear The Chase is still on.

When Will Hip Hop Get That Woodstock Love?

TAN's bringing in guests and correspondents! Herewith: MGJordan on Woodstock, hip hop's lack of media respect (no Rodney Dangerfield?), and how he learned to stop worrying and love Jonah Weiner.

Last week, anyone with access to a TV or computer was treated to a display of boomer self congratulation so vast and insistent that experiencing it became compulsory—Woodstock turned 40. The entirety of the MSM stopped to remark on that glorious occasion when America’s youth gathered in the mud of upstate New York to drop acid and listen to the Grateful Dead’s poorly amplified noodling. For a single slight shimmery weekend the 60s counter-culture realized its belief in peace, love and understanding—and then everyone grew up and ushered in Reaganomics.

Yes, put me in the group dedicated to deflating the Woodstock bubble. The continuing fellation of the boomer’s moment in the sun—remember Woodstocks 1995 and 1999? (hopefully not)—annoys me to no end. But even though it’s beyond obvious that Woodstock reverence is beyond hyperbolic, it’s not necessarily its extent that irks me. Culture, to a degree, is delusion on a grand scale and that’s fine. There’s no real difference between scrawling “Clapton is God” on a London subway wall and swearing to your friends that Jigga man is the God MC.

What really bothers me about the Woodstock celebration (besides boomer hypocrisy…that’s a horse to flog on another day) is the disparity it reveals between the press’s attitude towards hip hop and the press’s attitude towards other cultural movements. This October marks the 30th anniversary of “Rapper’s Delight,” the first top 40 rap single and the song that launched hip hop culture’s global explosion. Will Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood put together a retrospective like they did for Woodstock? Doubtful.

I suppose that’s fine in a way. The appreciation gap between rock and rap doubtless has much to do with racism and classism, but it probably has even more to do with age—rock is old and rap is young. Rock, already canonized, has affected all the change it ever will—rap is rock’s kid brother, all grown up but still largely undefined by critical consensus. So I guess I’m okay with hip hop not receiving as wide coverage as rock does—how can we celebrate hip hop as a group if we haven’t really agreed yet on what parts to celebrate?

My real beef is that the press seems congenitally incapable of treating rap as a legitimate art form. Consider the lazy journalistic device of rendering articles humorous by mashing up hip hop and a “serious subject.” As offensive and nonsensical as these articles are, they’re still alive and well. Check out this NPR piece on how the feud between Jay-Z and The Game mirrors world politics. The author writes:

The Game is the erratic wildcard.

"He's North Korea; he's Iran," Lynch says. "He might not win, but he can hurt you if he drags you down into this extended occupation, this extended counterinsurgency campaign."

Why is he doing this? After Jay-Z released "D.O.A. ('Death of Auto-Tune')" The Game saw an opportunity to peel off Jay-Z's key alliance partners to form a coalition and undermine Jay-Z's hegemony.

No. Fine, Game is an erratic wild card. But what “key alliance partners” is he trying to peel off from Jay? What, he wants Memphis Bleak to guest on The R.E.D. Album? It’s just confusingly wrong. Anyone who knows anything about hip hop can recognize that this article is logically barren.

But that’s sort of beside the point, isn’t it? The intent of the article isn’t to conduct an interesting juxtaposition between hip hop and international relations. The article exists to compare a subject that is, to NPR’s audience, obviously silly—hip hop—with a subject for grown ups—international relations. The whole thing is just an excuse for suburban house wives to exclaim “well, isn’t that a riot?!”

Hip hop deserves better than that. Hip hop definitely deserves better than blogs like Snacks and Shit, which gets its name from a woefully misinterpreted Jay-Z lyric and purports to catalogue “preposterous” rap lyrics. I’m all for acknowledging that hip hop can be ludicrous and stupid, but most of the blog’s posts either aren’t funny or depend on taking a lyric outside its original context. I mean, wow, if you take rap lyrics literally they often make no sense? I guess these guys never heard of figurative language.

Rock ‘n’ roll is no less inherently silly than hip hop (“I am the eggman, they are the eggmen/ I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob”), but it hasn’t been held up as an object of ridicule since hair metal went out of style. Enough with the goofy or ironic hip hop references: hip hop, even when it’s being fun and insane and over the top, is worthy of serious consideration.

That’s why the embrace of rap music by mainstream critical outlets—Pitchfork, The Village Voice, Slate, The New Yorker—is so important. Reading Jonah Weiner painstakingly explain the ins and outs of rap to a rap illiterate audience may grate on the nerves of serious hip hop heads (see comments here), but at least Weiner’s articles propagate the idea that rap is a legitimate art form. Maybe with a few more Weiners (and a few more Nathan Rabins and Sasha Frere-Joneses), hip hop will eventually get the mainstream respect it deserves.

~MGJordan

Quotable Nietzsche: Why TAN Is So Wise

(more and more feeling like TAN is trending towards a meaning closer to that of "The Assimilated Nietzsche" over "The Assimilated Negro", but then any minority rising to power is Nietzschean, so yeah, makes sense ... anyFried, more/excess is coming...)

"How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? more and more that became for me the real measure of value. Error (—faith in the ideal—) is not blindness, error is cowardice ... Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself ... I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them."

~~

"Under these circumstances I have a duty against which my habits, even more the pride of my instincts, revolt at bottom, namely, to say: "Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else!"

~~

"My practice of war is formulated in four principles: First: I only attack causes that are victorious,—I may even wait until they become victorious. Second: I only attack causes against which I would find no allies, so that I stand alone—so that I compromise myself alone ... I have never taken a step publicly that did not compromise me: that is my criterion of doing right. Third: I never attack persons,—I avail myself of the person merely as a powerful magnifying-glass that allows one to make visible a general, but creeping and elusive calamity [...snip...] Fourth: I only attack things when all personal differences are excluded, when any background of bad experiences is lacking. On the contrary, to attack is to me a proof of goodwill, sometimes even of gratitude. I honor, I distinguish therewith by associating my name with that of a cause or a person: for or against—that makes no difference to me at this point.

- all quotes from Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is
(no homo?)

Real Recognize Real: 2 Years Is a Long Time On the Internet

A couple years ago I posted a Failed Ideas in Hip Hop video, billing it as "a funny sketch by people who do funny sketches". Lo and behold, "It's The Real" (I think they changed their name from "The Real to "It's The Real"?) are still making funny videos a couple years later. As the hip hop loving jews say, muy impresivo.

Also they got all kinds of internet and hip hop cameos/testimonials in their 2-year anniversary video. Which is like the internet version of "making it rain" or something.

2 Real 2 Furious from jeff on Vimeo.

Congrats to It's the Real, here's to two more years, 95 more vids, 200 more testimonials, etc. etc.

If Obama Is The Joker, Who Is Batman?

The couple of posts I've seen with these Obama-as-Joker "socialist" pics all say the same thing: it's a striking image, that's making it way around not only on the internet, but in The Real World (so much as Los Angeles can be called The Real World), but no one knows or has any sense of what it means.

And to that I add: Ditto.




via: American Thinker, NRO

About TAN: Web Hunk, 4.0

The Houston Chronicle included Patrice Evans, TAN, The Assimilated Negro in their gallery of Web Hunks today. Indeed, as you suspected, the Apocalypse is nigh!

Since I don't want to just be ogled as a savory hunky piece of melanin-meat laptop. Here are some links:

Hip Hop Stuff:
Will "Keeping It Real" Ever Go Right?
Is Elzhi Deeper Than John Updike?
Maybe We Should Just Hand Hip Hop Over to the Ladies?

Racial, Post-Racial Stuff:
Black People film boobs like this, White People film boobs like that
The 4 Horsemen of the Post-Racial Apocalypse
Negropedia Brown and the Case of the World White Web

Matrices, Video, and Random Hits & Misses on/for Gawker stuff:
The Morality Matrix
A Bronx Tale: In Search of Sonia Sotomayor
Does Weed Have "5" On the Economy?
miscellany

House of Hot-Ass Interviews: including The Roots, Sasha Grey, Larry Wilmore and, uh, still more... (?)

100 Things About TAN: this is kinda old, but, y'know, has a personal facebooky touch.

What Else???
sports head: not so much recently, but for nbc new york, deadspin, fanhouse and others in the past. I also think the Mets Are Better Than Sex.

I've done readings: about letters to my genitals, and sex on shrooms.

book deal, "Negropedia" is no longer the title, fyi.

There's more if you want to noodle around, but I'm guessing that should be plenty to scare you away at this point. But before you go: PLEASE SUBSCRIBE -- i don't blog-churn out volumes, but there is more, bigger, better in store. And Subscriptions allow you to keeps tabs from a safe distance, and maybe I won't have to whore my body out for internet celebrity currency. it's like saving an african baby, except i went to prep school and live in nyc.