Look Deep Within Your Soul To Find Out If Maybe You, Too, Are A Rapper

An ever-growing list of folks you might not have recognized as rappers:

Moe Tkacik

Susan Sontag

Dr. Seuss

Norman Mailer

You Might Be A Rapper [TAN3000]

Breaking: Possible Lady Gaga, ft. Tiger Woods, Mixtape Song (audio, lyrics)

my name's eldrick, you can call me tige
mr. woods if you bring some friends
we can have one hell of a night
through the day

Dear TAN: Who's Better Drake or Walt Whitman?

Send your questions/letters to theassimilatednegro [at] gmail [dot] com.

In this edition: Hip Hop is new human technology!

Dear TAN,

Is it fair to compare Drake to Walt Whitman?


- Curious

~~

Dear Curious,

It can definitely be instructive to compare, say, a writer like Guru to a writer like Saul Bellow; or perhaps confer the cachet of a Walt Whitman to a modern American troubadour like Drake. But there is some risk, especially if those with only a passing familiarity with the art and culture assume the role of instructor.

For example, in the case of Drake & Whitman. If you truly respect the craft of hip hop lyrics, and the evolution of our human species, then drake is more like whitman five million thousand. times titties. and i'm not saying titties casually. stop and think what titties mean as a metaphor for life or the human condition.
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Knicks Trade for TMac, Pray to the God of Big City Sports

A starting five of notes on the Knicks trading for former superstar Tracy McGrady:

1. The TMac Narrative: everyone in the analysis business wants to write off TMac as a strictly cap-money acquisition. The brains say he's too old to really help. And even if he is good he'll be too expensive to keep on the roster. It's a lose-lose in terms of him sticking around for Knicks fans. But I'm thinking sports, if nothing else, is all about defying our rational intellectual senses. This is why despite exponents of stat-head freaks overpopulating the globe compiling every statistic known to man we still in any given game NEVER KNOW WTF IS GONNA HAPPEN. This was a man crying(breaks down circa 1:50 mark), emptying his heart in front of a crowded press room only a few years ago. Sports can get schmaltzy, but still not many superstar athletes expose themselves quite like that. Allan Houston was our All Star, he never cried. Nate Robinson has heart, but he ain't been broken up over much. And it's not like these guys haven't had plenty to sob about for the last decade. I don't know how Eddy Curry gets through the days. But I think TMac has a particular qualitative element to his story that fits in with the majestic arcs demanded by the city of skyscraping dreams (too much?). Its not likely, it's not something to bet your rent on. But if we snooze, he's the kind of player who can sneak up on you and become a factor. I guess I think it's good that he's being written off by the media.

Haiku for the Politically Correct

Now
I'm
Gonna
Get
Everything
Right


...d'oh!

(per wiki: Haiku (俳句 haikai verse?) is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 moras (or on), in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 moras respectively... In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line, while haiku in English usually appear in three lines, to parallel the three metrical phrases of Japanese haiku.)

Not Bad: NBA All Star Game Rap Battle

Recently enamored of Lydia Davis and her unique brand of short story/poetry (shoetry? hmmm, pronounced show-a-tree? ...forget it, ugh!) ) I've been thinking about rapping as a form of prose styling. Which fits in with a growing notion that hip hop's grand error is its creative cachet being tied to the musical arts and not the literary arts. The music was the conduit to commercial empowerment, but the lyrics are where all the cultural and intellectual DNA reside. So as smarts trumps capitalism, hip hop is losing inventory (mostly due to bad accounting in the past).

When seen as a form of lit stylizing, then the rhythms, cadence, dialect choices all conspire to signal artistry at work in a more tangible way. Per Samuel Beckett (via Lydia Davis interview):

"I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine. I wish I could remember the Latin. It is even finer in Latin than in English. 'Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.' That sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters."

This is why the art of hip hop, of rapping, can/should be respected even if the content is about nonsense. Not that nonsense, especially of the lazy commercially-pandering variety, shouldn't be held as a demerit. But fact remains you can rap about the money, the cars, the hoes artfully. The heft of the craftsmanship in quality lyrics come from the person shaping their content/story/themes into proper "hip hop form" ...

of course that leads us into style vs. substance debates, amongst other tangents. but that's for another time. my point here was to set up this nba all star rap video, which i enjoyed as a stylizing of the "who's better: east or west?" conversation/debate most nba fans are engaging in to some degree during the All Star break.



so yeah, i mean hardcore sports fans are going to find the broad nature of this as substantively compelling as the latest black eyed peas joint (or whatever fluffy pop hip hop song is at odds with your intellectual sensibilities at the moment). but, like your average BEP song, it's mostly a fun aesthetic conceit. one that more and more people are finding accessible, if not fundamental. maybe soon rapping will be the equivalent of writing someone a note in thick permanent marker, as a sonnet or something. just having fun with language/communication! word, yo!

(also, i love the east coast production style, but think it makes the song a bit biased.)

Remembering Black History

I wrote this Objective Perspective of Black History Month a while back, somehow it still feels relevant ...

In the long and storied history of the universe, nothing has come so far and overcome so much as Black.

Some have theorized that in the beginning there was only Blackness. And it wasn't a color. It was just a void. Nothingness....

(continued at McSweeney's...)

Black History Month: An Objective Perspective

TAN Guilty Pleasure Guide

so i write down things all the time. and sometimes you do it with no annotations or clues. sometimes you have some of the clue but not all of it.

all to say, i recently came across this and was bemused....

Guide To Guilty Pleasures

A: Anything From the 80s, ass, alternative porn, **award shows for black people

B: being racist, *blaming the condom, biz markee, buying from crackheads

C: Cosby, *Cuba Gooding Jr (hating on), **cumming too soon, [candy] cereals

D: *Diary/Email reading, other people's

Publishers In Agreement On How to Market the "New Negro" Literature

Tracy Morgan memoir: I Am The New Black

Helena Andrews (black, female) memoir: Bitch is The New Black

Paul Mooney Memoir: Black Is The New White (points for originality!)

Disclosure: my book WAS gonna be called .... Black Is The New Black.

what's up with that? ... my original title was deemed a little dangerous, and this was a suggested alternative. i wonder if that's the case with the others. it's sort of whatever, sort of an interesting bit of ethnocultural groupthink by publishing pros who have to determine the best ratio of risk/reward with books on race.

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