Problem World

—

Don’t let the green grass fool you: The Roots are one of the most respected hip-hop acts in the world; why can’t they leave the sad stuff alone? | Capital New York (via iamdavidbrothers)

My Pitchfork review of undun gets cited in this article (among others), and in a way that I think underscores why, more than a week later, I’m still second-guessing myself about not really “getting it” — the message, the meaning, the intent, the whole deal. I don’t want to see myself in that DJ/promoter who gets cited as saying that people should stick to listening to escapist, accessible stuff that just makes them dance, and I don’t want to fall into the trap that Greg Tate talks about where someone like 50 Cent is venerated as some invincible hood-Superman figure instead of someone who’s had to cope with a lot of tragedy in his life. And every time some white dude snipes at strawman Okayplayer types and derides the Roots or any other veteran “conscious” act as “granola” or “music for white people” in the process of propping up the latest gunshot-chorus club-rap anthem, I have to question what his idea of legitimacy is, what he values in his notion of “the streets,” and how much of it is based on empathetic human interactions in actual reality.

But that doesn’t always feel like enough. I’ve been listening to hip-hop for more than twenty years, but never to the exclusion of anything else, and not really in a way that spoke to me in any way deeper (or more superficial) than rock or pop or R&B did. It was in the air, it was what my brother and my friends and my classmates and co-workers listened to, and it provided things that hit me right in the gut — new, transformative reclamations of previous generations’ sounds and styles and ideas from across nearly every source in recent or distant memory, ways of expressing character that ranged from unfiltered declarations of true identity to self-made, ultra-unreal mythologies and all points in between, things done with language that actually started affecting how I heard and read and comprehended.

But the point where I go from listening to it and looking for connections, to the point where I actually attempt to hold court and explain my feelings on it, where I try to assert some kind of authority on what it really means and then tack a grade onto it — there will always be that feeling that I’m just scratching a surface I don’t have the tools to break through. I’ve lived the vast majority of my life in a major city, and part of my ’80s childhood was in a place that suburbanites would take one look at and immediately declare “ghetto,” but my memories of it are dim and my family’s brush with poverty was practically over by the time the Crack Era’s cowboy figurehead left the White House. (And the city in question? It sits right in the middle of a Chris Rock punchline.) I was given endless amounts of shit by my grade school and junior high classmates for being Jewish — enough that I can’t remember a lot of my pre-teen years without that sting — but all that could’ve been avoided if I just hadn’t told anyone I was, if I just assimilated as another white kid. And from all outward appearances I could still keep from worrying about walking through the “wrong” neighborhood, still not get followed through convenience stores, still be told all the dumb racist-ass jokes that white classmates would share amongst themselves but never reveal to anyone who might be the butt of them. I’ve gone through some shit, and I’ve felt like some weird loser kid, but I’ve never struggled — never had to feel like there was always something that was going to keep me down, institutionalized through generations to make sure I was a permanent underclass. I recognized that struggle, I hated that people had to go through it, I feel conscious about how my privilege ties into it — but I never had to live under it myself.

Does this mean that I shouldn’t review hip-hop? I don’t know. I’ve listened to a ton of it in my life, from nearly every conceivable subset and region and era, and I try not to take a superficial or essentialist view of what it represents from artist to artist or track to track. I try to connect with as much as I can, try to defer to the artists’ experiences, even when those experiences result in a record I can’t get into at all. But when my perspective means I miss the point, when the initial week’s worth of listens don’t completely click in the face of a short-term deadline, when I’m left wondering after trying to reconcile what the artist does and intends with what I expected and infer, it’s hard for me not to feel like I’ve done that work a disservice.

(via iamdavidbrothers)