Showing posts with label White People. Show all posts
Showing posts with label White People. Show all posts

Friday, July 1, 2011

Hip hopping to the punch line

Vanilla Ice.
In 2009, Slate's Jody Rosen had finally  gotten tired of the joke that 'White people can't rap", and good for him. I wrote and slim rant a couple of years ago that whites are the last minority group one can make safely make fun of, free of the fear of being condemned outright and en masse. Rosen's  blog entry is  here  .On this matter, it would seem an effort on the part of purists to more or less undermine the idea that anyone of   pale countenance'  can have  hip hop street cred; not an organized conspiracy, just a habit of ridiculing the possibility . This , thought, constitutes the proverbial that has left the barn years ago.


Rap has been around for decades, it has saturated the mainstream culture it was trying to undermine and has, in fact, become the common expression of impatient self-gratification. Rap is no longer a black thing exclusively; while it remains an created by black musicians and whose architects and innovators remain predominately black, the style has been absorbed by young white people who've taken it as their own. White people can rap, some of them can do it brilliantly, many others succeed to lesser degrees. This is something black-centric exclusivists need to get over; music evolves, music changes, music is taken up by others who hear and adapt to their experience and sense of what makes musical and emotional sense; this is how musical forms remain viable, that is to day, dynamic. This has been the case for jazz, for blues, for soul, for rock; change or become an oldies act.

Friday, August 8, 2008

Whiteness ll


Stuff White People Like is a blog dedicated to mocking the ways of white folks, the class that is cursed with white skin and too much education and money, and as I've remarked elsewhere, white European Americans are the only ethnic assortment someone can make fun of with impunity; it's now beyond whatever value it as irony or poetic justice and now exists as a bad habit for taking cheap shots. Now we have a piece in the NY Times about the site's principle author talking about another white person's groupsyncratic curse, poetry readings.A laugh and a good wicked snort can be had making fun of the habits of poets, but limiting the odd ways to white folks alone amounts to taking the easy way out no less than some of the poems that appear on Slate. Everyone is in a hurry to get to an easy punchline, not in the interest of having an audience see their own foilbes but rather so the motor mouthing wise guying can jet through another batch of sarcasms so lame that one wouldn't even dare utter them at 1am on a Comedy Store Amatuer Night. Is someone brave enough to investigate the wierdness that besets ethnic groups in particular once they become infected by the poetry flu? Not really, it seems, and white people remain the easy target one may mock with out the slightest fear of being called to the carpet for the stereotyping disrespect. It's a sorry, lame ass practice