"Cocaine Rap" Sasha Frere-Jones hilarious delusion

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nomadologist

Guest
Is anyone else as amused as I am by that New Yorker article all the indiepress is basing their reviews of Hell Hath No Fury on?

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/061225crmu_music

Does Frere-Jones know how ridiculously white it is of him not to have noticed that cocaine/crack dealing has been very near the center of hip-hop idioms and the problematic nature of life in the ghetto since, well, forever? Can he name me a hip-hop album that doesn't in some way deal with how devastating cocaine, heroin, and other drug dealing and use is to the economy of the ghetto? Is he seriously trying to say that talking about these things is tantamount to endorsing them unequivocally? I don't think he is, but what exactly makes one album "cocaine rap" while another that deals openly with cocaine use and distribution isn't? He doesn't make this clear. Does he realize that selling drugs is significant to the Clipse because it was part of how they "came up"--that it opened doors for them business-wise that have been essential to promoting their careers/music? ("Keys Open Doors")

If I hear one more white person call that album a "coke fantasy", I'm going to personally write to them and offer to take them to the projects and show them how very real and tangible coke, crack and drug dealing are. These hip-hop artists aren't bragging that they sell drugs--they're bragging that DESPITE having to sell drugs, they've come up. They're saying "look at what my people have to do to get successful, and no one cares, you just keep buying the coke, buying the albums." Yeah, it's cynical, but wouldn't you be jaded?

The next best thing is how so many of these same indiepress writers who hate The Clipse for writing "cocaine fantasies" then endorse Ghostface, whose album is called "Fischscale" after the flakey textured coke that is cut straight off the kilo, and includes songs that are entirely about cocaine ("A kilo is a thousand grams/easy to remember...")

Another great point people try to make against the Clipse is that their slang is opaque. It's not. I can't think of a single line in it that I can't make sense of using current slang. The terms they use for drugs and units of drugs are common in New York and I'm assuming most of the eastern seaboard. If it is opaque to you, it is because you are not part of a certain circle. It is not a fault of the album's.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
How so? Ever heard the saying "that's mighty white of you"? And I'm not saying I'm not white. I'm just not so white that I don't realize that cocaine use and distribution is not a fantasy, it's a very banal reality. I'm not so white that I'm so far removed from drug-related violence and tragedy that when anyone talks about it, it seems "fantastical" to me.
 
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swears

swears

preppy-kei
Lots of white people buy and sell coke over here. Every other meathead in Liverpool is on it. I've never heard the "mighty white" thing, I think it's more about class in the UK anyway. Everybody's terrified of being considered middle class, hence fake regional accents, playing dumb, etc...
 
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nomadologist

Guest
Yeah, Swears, TONS of white people do coke in the US, but then other white people go on and on about how gauche it is for hip-hop artists to talk about the banal reality that is cocaine production and distribution--because it is some kind of "exaggeration" of the truth. (If it's the Rolling Stones, or Eric Clapton, or Jackson Browne, of course, THAT'S DIFFERENT.) Lots of white people here sell coke, too--every meathead fratboy in the country does. I used to in college to everyone from townies to professors. You don't have to be from the projects to know what an "o" is, or a "z". In fact, cocaine is one of the few factors that unites all the different class substrata nowadays, but to talk about it is, somehow, to be "irrelevant" by indie standards that I will never understand.

Hip-hop is just another one of those things that the indiepress completely misinterprets then gets dogmatic about on soapboxes the internet over. When they're not just plain misinterpreting it, they're moralizing and spouting the worst kind of bullshit hypocrisy. Drives me crazy.

heh, funny video
 
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gumdrops

Well-known member
im wondering if i read the same article cos thats not the notion i came away with after reading that article at all... if anything, frere jones was in more or less total support of coke rap, not really rallying against it or anything. article aside, to act like jeezy and clipse are seeing the wider picture of coke selling is a bit OTT - thats not what theyre about, theyre 90% about the thrills of it.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
gumdrops, that's the thing--I don't think Frere-Jones is wrong exactly, he seems to get it, but it's odd to me the way the indie press has latched onto his notion of "coke rap" as some sort of wholesale dismissal of artists like the Clipse and Young Jeezy.

i don't think it's 90% about "the thrills of it" at all. the Clipse repeatedly highlight the irony in their position on Hell Hath . in the first song, remember these lyrics: "i gotta answer to marcus and janelle and to little brother terence who i love dearly so/if ever i had millions never would you push blow/NEVer" i think that people who think the Clipse are unequivocally happy about selling coke are not listening carefully to the lyrics. in "Mama I'm So Sorry" they talk about wishing they could do it over again so when they die people could say they "gave structure to the youth through the example I led." they talk about dirty money being problematic, but say "damn dirty money know how to pay the bills" after they say "damn dirty money know how to keep the girls." i played the album for someone i know who used to work in the sex industry and she thought the lyrics were fantastic, especially on "dirty money."

the album is packed with amazing couplets where they blast through the idea that drug-related violence or tragedy is "cool." and i think that they boast a LOT less than Jeezy or Jay-Z or basically anyone other top 40 hip hop artist i can think of at the moment. most of their boasting is about how they don't have to sell crack anymore--now they moved up and get to sit in clubs with the rich people in VIP and sell coke. that's a big deal in terms of the drug dealer heirarchy in the ghetto--coke is too expensive for most people who live in the projects, so they have to cook it down into rock so you can make one $50 gram into 20 $5 rocks. the boast in hip-hop is just like the diss--a lyrical convention, used formally as a means for displaying your creativity. the over-the-top nature of a boast or a diss is not meant literally, its meant to be as cartoonish as possible, a mark of the dexterity of a rapper's rhyme scheme, flow, cadence, etc.

in the end, i find all this sort of talk vastly less offensive than i do the thinly veiled, unproblematized (and usually unquestioned) misogyny of your average classic rock band. go figure.
 
wreckTech

wreckTech

Wild Horses
99% of new yorker / nytimes articles on hip hop are about 5 years behind.

however i'd rather they be discussing some musically enjoyable shit than all the inexplicable Eminem dicksucking they used to engage in.
 
T

the undisputed truth

Banned
we don't get much coke in NZ...

...I've never tried it, so listening to people go on about it in music has as much interest to me as watching the cliche hiphop booty bling video

borrrrrrriiiiinng...
 
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tht

akstavrh
these people are always good for a laugh with stiuff like 'drug dealing is a cryptic presence in cocaine rap' (someone will sample that line like...) and as for the middlebrow intolerance of' cultural references not being completely explained to them, twas ever thus etc

i like the banality of the clipse album, the cottage industry 'more songs about cooking and snow' stuff, but nobody really knows how to cope with the amorality of it all, like sfj's last line concealing a lot of equivocation i think, not just a concession to the sensbility of the publication - cos there is probably a level of depavity that is hardly acknoweledged even here (there is tangential reference to kids getting raped in jail for instance but mostly it's the same old shit)

i like this stuff cos i'm essentially a formalist, the old 'if wagner was righteous among the nations he would still be shit, and bach is unimpeachable even if he hated jews and fucked kids' (very much doubt the latter, despite the choirboys) so it doesn't bother me very much if they can release something as good as 'mr me too'; however as with clipse exploitation is almost their entire subject, it may be worth considering how you would think if this was a novel by an ex pharma lawyer about pushing some vile shit to young kids in psychiatric clinics (assuming it was a good novel, like william gaddis or something) ;)
 
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nomadologist

Guest
gaddis, wow, haven't heard him referenced in a while.

see, the clipse pushing coke is no better or worse than big pharma putting 10-year-olds on 30mgs of speed three times a day, is it? i think the clipse are posturing as a means to a very interesting end. they're playing the "everything that's wrong with the world" card so hard that people are saying "where is the morality here??" when really, the real question should be, "does any hip-hop or popular music proffer some sort of ethos that will lift us out of our moral morass?" nope. "should it?" i'd rather it didn't. morality plays are so medieval.

the clipse manage to put a dazzling pop sheen on a "dead" genre. their album sounds iceyhot *and* fresh all at the same time. it funnily enough gets people hot and bothered about the fact that people are selling coke, which exposes the hypocrisy of their stance because these are some of the very people whose peers buy the most coke and who fuel the industry in the first place. it's outrageous. coke IS ubiquitous in NYC, LA, Miami, San Francisco, Atlanta. they're just documenting their reality. there is. no. exaggeration. there. it's not showboating when you really have a kilo in the trunk of your car.

somehow, though, talking about being born into a world where selling coke is the quickest and most reliable way out of poverty is more immoral than eminem sampling his daughter's voice in a song about brutally murdering her mother and his wife? come again, new york times?? i just don't get how so many writers can be so off the mark.

undisputed, you don't have to be interested in the clipse's lyrics to like it, there's more to the album than that--i.e., some of the most insanely ingenious pop production of the past few years.
 
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tht

akstavrh
nomadologist said:
see, the clipse pushing coke is no better or worse than big pharma putting 10-year-olds on 30mgs of speed three times a day, is it?
Click to expand...

that was a bit of a shibboleth cos people always (correctly) take up the street/pharma narcotics parallel, and i thought i'd go there first

as anyone knows, selling coke doesn't get near the level of turpitude of some pharm companies (and i'm sure they can sort you out for come coke derviative anyway) and as for you selling coke in college, that really doesn't bother me in the slightest, just glad you didn't get caught (assumedly, unless they have the internet in the gulags now)

there is an awful lot in that spectrum though, selling coke to investment bankers, selling to students, selling to the addicted, selling crack to 13 year olds, trading crack for blowjobs from 13 year olds, selling crack whilst wearing cavalli fur, etc

my concern is about the claims to verisimilitude, not saying there isn't a lot in the lyrics or clipse or ghostface (nobody else that i know of compares ) but however shit life is in these places, there is clearly a lot of internecine violence, and it's just very neat for the upper (middle) class who get to see africans killing each other with uzis or crack and filling up the gulag complex with hiv+ psychopaths so any other poor cunt that steps out of line knows they're going to get fucked to death

maybe your country isn't quite this shit, it works very well in many respects and it's hard not to be in awe of it, but i don't think the ghettos are any less corrupt than the upper echelons of enron or the cia, and it seems a lot worse than the subproletarian violence of other rich countries
 
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nomadologist

Guest
there are two ways to slice it: either the clipse are wildly exaggerating, and cocaine isn't really a problem and people don't really do it and they're just parodying a tendency in hip hop to get carried away with posturing, or they're not wildly exaggerating and these things do happen and they are a problem, regardless of whether the clipse still use some classic over-the-top boasting techniques.

i'm opting for number 2, in which scenario it seems odd that the very people who consider themselves culture vultures are somehow shocked by the clipse and find their energies and frustrations displaced.

my theory is that the clipse ARE too middlebrow, or at least middle of the road, in terms of hip-hop cliches: they aren't quite Crime Mob ridiculous, which would make them a funny novelty parody of what it's like to be from the ghetto and a drug dealer that could be appreciated as one does AC/DC, that is, ironically, nor are they Kanye West, born of two college professors rapping about the irony of bling culture w/r/t african diamond mines and colonization in a way that appeals to what i call the Upper Middlebrow sort who listens to NPR and watches The Daily Show.

the clipse point precisely at all these incisive, huge cultural ironies and i think few have done this so brilliantly in quite a while.
 
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tht

akstavrh
that all seems fair enough, i feel most of what you do even if i think clipse don't go far eneough

the way you see it is sort of like the yakuza film, which in the 50s/60s was either kurosawa with his sub dostoevsky/zola morality plays* (they looked amazing though) or the hysterical nonsense of suzuki (even more amazing) which eventually degenerated in the 70s into banal films about a day in the life of a hired killer kinda thing (fukasaku?), with the same consternation and ennui

so i suppose i would like someone to do

a) a coke rap takeshi kitano, pathos of transience, chopsticks in eyes and stupid comedy (maybe this is already done in fischscale?)

b) a coke rap william gaddis, like jr an extremely polyphonic metafiction of the diasporic id to the all consuming ego of corporate usa, feat whitney houston, hugo chavez, john ashcroft, eminem and that person in the video swears posted

*the first time i thought of the term 'upper middlebrow' was in reference to one of these, i think rather like calculus this gets invented by many people
 
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T

the undisputed truth

Banned
nomadologist said:
undisputed, you don't have to be interested in the clipse's lyrics to like it, there's more to the album than that--i.e., some of the most insanely ingenious pop production of the past few years.
Click to expand...

...pharrell eh ???

i like his old stuff better than his new stuff especially after his solo album and to be honest I'm wary of your recomendation given the black devil disco you think is shit hot that i think is a bit crap actually...

...still i'll check it out

clipse myspace
 
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nomadologist

Guest
tht, i'm not a big japanese film buff so i'd have to see these films you're talking about. i think the subtlety is the good part of clipse, though. i think that's the problem--white people never catch the subtleties in hip hop, especially not top 40 hip-hop. well, subtleties exist and they're brilliant BECAUSE they go over white heads, i reckon.

i never said BDDC is "shit hot", undisputed, that is a term i reserve for special cases. i said i decided that i loved it. that took a while, and it happened while i was in a very enhanced situation and mood. it was new year's, after all. BDDC is very interesting to me as someone who loves Italo Disco and people told me BDDC spawned italo disco, so before i heard it i didn't at all know what i was in for. i think it's a fascinating curio and nearly lost gem from a largely misunderstood era/genre/scene and it's helping me put together a few pieces. 28 After could keep 10 professors busy teaching a class about the history of disco in terms of production values for semesters at a time in my audio production minor.

your taste in general is suspect if i remember correctly. aren't you a fucking backpacker, undisputed?? i guffaw at your condescending manner with regard to musical taste. i did not like the N.E.R.D. album at all, but the neptunes have revived their career on Hell Hath. so silly when people expect monstrously successful producers to stay amazing forever...like YOU would if you had that much money to sit on...please...you'd do coke in clubs in miami, sleep until midafternoon, and get up only to sit on a float in the pool just like anybody else...

i'll put up clipse songs if you don't have them. i'm myspace friends with clipse already. the bitrate you lose listening to their songs on myspace's media plugin is a shame. doesn't mean you'll learn to hear properly, though, mwhaha.
 
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T

the undisputed truth

Banned
suspect musical fucking backpacker...:D

...wherever did you get that idea from ???

i like what i like and just because BDDC may get some coke fiend music professors panties wet doesn't mean it'll float my boat...

...fuck the whole 'you gotta hear it in the context of the times and the deep intellectual and subversive message they are communicating'

a shit tune by any other name is still...
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
on second thought, i'm not casting my pearls before swine, so to speak, forget it.
 
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