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SLAM!

May 29th 2008 07:54

Slam poetry has played an essential role in hip hop since the Watts Prophets started slamming eargasmic rhymes in their wart-torn LA hood. The evolution from slam poetry goes from spoken words spat with the cadence of the street, to the polemic message driven music of Public Enemy and NWA, to today’s intellectually armed soldiers Talib, Cannibus, and Immortal Technique who tote a knowledge of this John Perkins colored world. While all of that stuff can be mixed with infectious beats, dubbed over dreadlocked pop icons and whose creators genre-bendingly collaborate with rock stars creating an assessable harangue of language, Amiri Baraka remains one of the best examples of a bridge between literature and music and the longevity of the literature/music cocktail. His words at times seem like a polemic mix that was violently blenderized to the point of being so quick and witty that the poem feels choppy because your mind cannot catch the witticisms as quickly as he dishes them out. While turning your intellect on itself, he pushes a beat, sometimes standard and sometimes unique.

Baraka is a language musician. While singer’s voices are their instruments, Baraka’s words are his. Even his scat is poetic simply because it is between his music note words. Now put a recording of his spoken word over a sick J Dilla beat and it is hip hop…or rather a beautiful composite of elements that creates a seemingly hip-hop piece. Not to say that very particular things are strictly compositional elements of hip hop, but when you combine a witty philippic with fantastically arranged beats, people tend to think hip hop. Whatever you call it, Amiri Baraka don’t need no hook for this shit.

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Posted By: Kate 4 - Category: No Category

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the endless rant

May 25th 2008 01:51

People keep asking the question "Is Hip-Hop dead?" or worse yet saying that as a statement. I don't think that the conclusivness of their reasoning can be justified because it is all opinion. No one can declare something deceased or question its life based on opinion. Every generation treats popular culture with the same ethnocentrism as they do culture in the broader sense. And while we can never succeed, as a whole, in completly irradicating the illiberality in every generations thoughts, we can try. We can, as inevitable consumers of the popular, not judge a genre based on what Clear Channel offers us, we can utilize the resources provided by our ingenuity, and revel in the fact that downloading music for no cost is a more viable option than listening to the radio. And take advantage of the fact that the most profound artists who are actually revolutionizing genres and keeping them from dying actually make their music available for free or reduced price download. You can either consider downloading via limewire, bitorrent, kazaa an act of illegality and causing detriment to the artists whose music you procure, or you can consider it a necessary action against the corporatacracy of the music business.

If we are going to successfully take back music as a culture, we need to burn and loot.

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Bushonomics

May 23rd 2008 15:23

Dr Cornel West’s collaboration with Talib Kweli in an effort to bring intellectuality to the masses is not a completely original movement and idea. There is an entire body of hip-hop work that has explicit revolutionary content and it grows larger and more influential everyday. The misconception about West’s pedagogical uses of popular culture is that it will change both intellectual’s minds about popular culture, and popular culture’s mind about intellectuals on a large scale. In reality, the marrying of the two worlds and subsequently the new ideas of one about the other have already begun to manifest through the music of Saul Williams, Brother Ali, and Immortal Technique just to name a few. While West’s attempt is a noble one, it could be considered somewhat of a failure because the culture he is trying to reach, the culture of hip hop, looks at him as an outsider and not someone who truly understands their world.
The argument at hand should not be whether or not the intellectual community should be accepting of West’s didactic use of rap music, it should be whether or not rap music listeners are accepting of his stamp on it. When placed in the pool of revolutionary and socially conscious hip-hop artists, West has the least amount of experiential association. He went to a highschool in a modest neighborhood in Sacremento, went to Harvard at the age of 17 and graduated in 3 years magna cum laude. Most rap artist’s stories are somewhat of the antithesis of West’s consisting of a childhood in a city slum, time around drugs violence, and in the case of Felipe Coronel (a.k.a. Immortal Technique) an education gained from books read while in prison. The Academy will look at all of those texts as equal discourse because they do not understand what a quality rap song sounds like. To them, it is all equally popular culture and therefore drivel however, to an artist or consumer of that medium of art West and Kweli’s attempt comes off as bombastic and boringly verbose.
To the audience it is trying to reach, it is not captivating. To the Academy, the other audience West is trying to win over, it is seen not simply as an exploitation of intellect but a failed one thus setting them back even farther into the archaic methods of thought dissemination.

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May 2008

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