EL ORÅCULO DEL SAN GENNARO

HIP-HOP IS DEAD, LONG LIVE RAPPING

The “Death of …” piece is a genre of criticism that’s fallen into disrepute (there was a period when you’d be constantly tripping over essays announcing the End of something: art, theory, rock, rave ). People now seem to feel that “no genre ever really dies” (to adapt the Neptunes/NERD motto). Was this in fact one of the problems with the Noughties? No genre went gently into that good night: they all clung on, cluttering up the musical landscape. This not only made it harder for new things to emerge, it’s meant that we’ve all come to forget that, in fact, totally new things have emerged in the past. There was, for instance, a time when hip-hop didn’t exist. The refusal to admit that a genre can die (which doesn’t mean literally disappear – it may even generate good stuff now and then –but refers to stagnation, irrelevance, becoming uncoupled from the zeitgeist) is a denial of the possibility of change, renewal, the unexpected. The very vitality of a form of music implies the possibility of its eventual death.

—Simon Reynolds, guardian.co.uk 11/09

Finally dipping my eyes in the mire that is this unkillable zombie of a debate.  Best bit I’ve seen so far is Gordon Gartrelle’s article at wearerespectablenegroes.com from last month and I think my least favorite is this Victor Vasquez piece at flavorwire.  Race-baiting seems like a complete dead end to me—- I just really can’t see at this point that a miraculous eradication of subconscious or cryptoracist tinges in music criticism would actually benefit anyone’s actual life that much.  As long as crackers have to buy rap records to make them successful, and successful rappers have to enrich whole rosters of cracker-ass corporate employees, how could somebody piss around like demanding an overbearing class consciousness from rap critics/fans wouldn’t be a million times more productive than this “gotcha!” shit the professional observers love to pop off with?  Racial politicking with no serious class component is a total boon to those who feed off the underclass— plain ol’ divide & conquer.  The argument becomes actually useful to people beyond nose-against-the-map fanatics once it starts to take the money as seriously as it takes the colors.

Also, I highly recommend jamming the new Monolake LP if you’re going to slog through any of these columns.

PUNCHLiNES

Spending the holiday watching the new AMC remake of THE PRISONER with my dad, a big fan of the original series.  Only the broadest aspects of the original are retained, with the cute cold war spy tropes of the original exchanged for a kind of muddled post-911 paranoia that feels like it was written poolside.  I started googling around to see if I could find out how likely it is that writer Bill Gallagher actually has a pool in his backyard, when I stumbled upon this telling quote about his reaction to the original series: “I couldn’t work out what it was all about but I was completely compelled.“  Oh my.

Where McGoohan’s #6 was stubborn and passionate, Gallagher’s is confused and defensive.  And as nice as it is to hang with Ian McKellan for a while, ditching the rotating-#2s gimmick for the soap-opera exploration of the character’s family life makes everything a lot less eerie.  (I guess the sub-Southland Tales Lynchisms like the twin psychologists or that groanworthy grenade motif is supposed to pick up the slack in that department?)

They’ve also expanded the number-names in The Village to three and four digits and sussing out the allusions is the funnest part of the show.  There’s a few real obvious ones: 93 is the original 6, as in nine-minus-three.  147 gets his name from police radio code for an undercover officer.  1955, a man under surveillance, must be named for the McCarthy era, but fudged up a few years for euphony’s sake.  11-12, the doe-eyed son of #2, is obviously named after the BOP-copping demographic the character exists to attract…

BUT then— 313 and 909.  Say what?  There’s not really a whiff of Detroit techno in the show’s soundtrack, but I can’t imagine it’s a coincidence that these highly-fetishized codes both show up as the names of major characters.  I’m going to assume these numbers are there to help me not watch the series all the way through and pretend that it ends with Mad Mike and his team of commandos storming The Village with AKs blazing to liberate the cab driver and his family.