3 posts tagged “hip-hop”
Last night, doing what I do, I found this post on okayplayer.com a site I used to frequent a lot as The Roots are one of my all time favorite groups in music history.
"The Roots Say Goodbye To Hub after 17 years
Let me end all speculation ladies and gentlemen and officially announce that yes indeed Hub played his last show as a member of The Roots on August 31st of this year.
One has to understand off the bat to be a member of this group is to sacrifice your life. If you look at it (and this is applies to most of the artists that you talk about on this site) there is nothing "normal" about our lives. Well at least my life. (Hold the violins please.... there is cool shit like 1am jams with Prince in his living room watching Joni Mitchel dance like a teenager.....but there is also a downside like being in your mid 30s and your dating life is still on some high school shit.)
Even as i write this i got 34 minutes to haul my ass to rehearsals for the VH-1 tour. (this is after sleeping for 5 hours fresh from working with the Score winner of the VH-1 Hip Hop Awards, which came after a 4:30am lobby call to the Las Vegas airport, which came after all the crazy MTV activity and gigs i had to do, which came after the morning flight and the 6am lobby call from Montreal which came after the 10 hour mission to get a lawyers affidavit to get me into Canada (a mere half hour before stagetime)---of course not before trashing my entire house looking for my lost passport.---that was just 48 hours.
try to make that 17 years. This isn't a pity party. Nor an explanation. Just a confirmation.... I say we use this moment and opportunity to raise our cyber glass and toast Hub in his new endeavors.
(raises glass) -?uesto "
Aw shit! The Roots have for some time been a group that for me, mixed the funky jazzy music my parents raised me on, with the the music my cousins had taught me to love, hip-hop. As the source for this quote was ?uestlove himself, I get it. I understand. Its a tough game, he also points out that its happened with 3 (Rahzel/Scratch/Ben... tear) other members, but Hub, Hub has always been there. As tough as it was to hear, the cost of fame can clearly be weighted. The cost of anything done for that long of an amount of time where one sacrifices a lot for their group, can surely run one down. Hm, something I might have said to myself a few months ago?
Either way, as sad as it is, I'm a grown ass woman so I'll let one tear shed. That's all the tears I have for something silly like a band I like breaking up. I don't have time or energy to do any more mourning, don't get me wrong, I don't wanna cry for days, it was the shock that got me. And let's be truthful, I haven't been too down with some of the stuff they've put out lately anyway. I'll still have Organix, Illadelph Half Life, Do You Want More, and Things Fall Apart as my favs. So as ?uest said at the end of his post, the show will go on like it did before. Hub will be missed.
This is a paper I wrote my senior year of college, found it and it really hit home. I modified some, but its generally a feeling I hold true to this day.
I Used to Love H.E.R, but… what if the Microphone is a Metaphorical Penis?
“Little [GIRL], you’re not allowed to stay/ You have to evolve inevitably/ And I’ve sure come a long way…” — “Getting Grown,” Cee-Lo Green
Scholars of 19th century female authors often ask “Is the pen a metaphorical penis?”. Over the course of my career as a hip-hop fan I have asked, a similar question, “Is the microphone a metaphorical penis?” One scholar notes, that “artist’s most essential quality, is masterly execution, which is a kind of male gift, and especially marks off men from women... The male quality is the creative gift.” I ask this question of the microphone, as the microphone is often equivalent to the pen in hip-hop, as they both become the way an artist communicates to an audience. At this juncture in our nation’s history, hip-hop has become synonymous with black male voices, and expressions of black masculinity, and in creating a space for women in hip-hop, one aspect of hip-hop that has seemingly left out women, is the way that hip-hop has been gendered as a woman when an artist expresses their love of the art form, truly supporting the notion that the pen/microphone is a metaphorical penis.
For some time now I have truly felt that hip-hop had been “the only man I could depend on.” I say this taking the risk of personifying hip-hop as a man, when so many of the male voices I was hearing were telling me it was a woman. In any case hip-hop has served different purposes for me over the course of my life, but over all has acted almost like another older brother among my many pretend ones, another prevalent and important male voice(s) in my life.
In my early childhood, groups like Outkast, Goodie Mob, Run D.M.C. and N.W.A. would speak to me through not only male voices but through my older male cousins taste’s in music. As I got older, artists would speak to me on my own. Warren G & Nate Dog, Snoop and Dr. Dre would talk to the girl who had run with pre-adolescent gang bangers, Richie Rich would remind me that there was “something about the west coast, that [made] me wanna ride (shake it west side, throw your hands up lets ride)”, and Tupac would become the first rapper I could ever remember having a crush on. Mos Def and Talib Kweli, The Roots — oh Tariq/Black Thought how you spoke to the backpacker inside— would set me upon my underground venture when I’d swear that I listened to the Mountain Brothers because they were good, and not just because they were Asian. Regardless, hip-hop has been through everything I have been through, has been along side me, a shoulder to cry on, a voice to reassure me, or feed fuel to my fire when need be. All of this through mostly male voices, sounding like older brothers, uncles, friends and in extreme cases boyfriends as they reminded me I was beautiful.
There was a time however when no voice spoke to me more clearly than Cee-lo did in his track, “Getting Grown,” off of Cee-lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections. The track really hit me at a moment where I was dealing with my own growth spurt. Senior year had come and senior year was about to go. I felt like he was talking specifically to me in his first verse of this song, simply change “boy” to girl, and there was my Uncle Cee-lo telling me that yes, my new life was coming, and not to fear it (quoted above).
“Magtonic,” he’d say between sections, “[You] never won’t be perfect I know/ but workin on it is worse than [you] know / Life is just learning as you go.” Most of all he’d tell me “Oooo, time changed but it feels the same/ There's no tellin what tommorow will bring/ Even if I could I wouldn't change a thang,” letting me know I wasn’t alone. He would reassure me as he concluded, “Say, young [woman], there's no need to cry/ Because I know you will get by/ Look your destiny in the eye.”
DAMN. That was it. The song had done something to me, had changed my outlook in such a way that I was ready for the end, ready for the beginning. And I started thinking, this kind of voice, is the voice hip-hop had been when “it found me.”
It’s arguable that voices like Cee-lo’s, do not reflect standardized visions of black masculinity that we see elsewhere in hip-hop, the second I heard this song I was reminded that in my eyes, hip-hop is not the “chick” Common met when he was ten years old, but that hip-hop is truly a matter of black male voice, and black masculinity. It is my firm belief that anyone who loves hip-hop loves H.I.M. as opposed to H.E.R. So I ask, if hip-hop were a person why would it be a woman, when the voices that we hear the most, are male? Someone pointed out to me that it’s an art flooded with men, so of course hip-hop will be personified as a woman, hyper-hetero-masculinity being a key component in the structuring of hip-hop personas and hip-hop content. And yet another person pointed out that in industries that are dominated by men you will often find that they gender objects as women, as if it were some symbol of control and as if it somehow upheld notions of patriarchy, and the mastering of domains (ships and cars being named after women were the first things that came to mind).
And that’s when a friend who was writing her thesis on female authors of the 19th Century pointed me in the direction of a few texts that look at the paternalistic nature of language and male domination of the literary world. Margaret Homans writes, “Women’s place in language, from the perspective of an androcentric literary tradition, is with the literal, the silent object of representation, the dead mother, the absent referent, so that within a literary text the shift from figurative to literal connotes a shift from the place of the signifier, the place of the speaking subject to the place of the absent object.” If we apply this to hip-hop we can see a similar pattern as men personify hip-hop in terms of being a woman, and only become the subject in their own work through either a boast or a confessional, which are also attributes of male identity, as they are “master’s of a the creative gift” and as the only way they can critique themselves, their ability to master something without compromising their role as masters is to turn such critique into a confessional. Where as women, in both the 19th century and today, “Women who do conceive of themselves as subjects — that is, as present, thinking women rather than as “woman”— must continually guard against fulfilling those imposed definitions by being returned to the position of the object.” Women in the rap world, as they are forced to defend themselves, in such a way that even if they boast as men would, they remain the object their work speaks of In some cases however there can be an exception to the rule.
“Maybe it shouldn’t be us two/ and maybe I’m just not the one whose right/
and maybe we can’t be together tonight/ and maybe you need another girl/
and maybe I just can’t be in your world/ and maybe we just can’t be together/ for you, whatever.”
The second time around she tells us that no, maybe she was wrong the first time.
“Maybe it should be us two together/ and maybe I’m the one for you forever/ and maybe we’re supposed to be together tonight/ and maybe everything is just right/ and maybe I’m your love till the end of time/ and maybe I’m supposed to be your and you mine/ and maybe yes its all right/ and for you still forever.”
What Grae is saying in her lines, the contradictory sentiments she is going through, is not only what other hip-hop artists have expressed when they themselves are personifying hip-hop as a person, but she is also portraying it in a way that some how seems more real, more serious and more true to the actual industry and what goes on it. In contemplating her dilemma, to sign, not to sign, to love him, not to love him she says, “catching feelings truly upset when he had to go school me on the ways of catching a mate,” and is in other words expressing her frustration with having to be taught how to act within this industry, and how to find a record label (or “mate”) she is told by men what she must do as a woman once again asserting traditional gender roles. Yet as this is a common experience I once
again must question if men could see exactly why, as a result of this very dilemma, hip-hop should be seen as a man.
Common, in “I Used to Love H.E.R. expresses his own frustration in his relationship with hip-hop saying “I did her, not
There is a commonly held belief that hip-hop and love songs do not mix, that hip-hop love songs inevitably fail. However, the few exceptions to this rule have always been when the love of the very art from is discussed. In “Love Jones” an article by Miles Marshall Lewis (The Village Voice, 3/9/99) he reviews Things Fall Apart, by The Roots, but begins arguing that at the time he reviewed the album, the new version of a hip-hop love song was not going to sound like L.L. Cool J’s “I Need Love,” but would instead exhibit a “love jones” for hip-hop itself. Only one artist that I am aware of has been able to express this love through the personification of hip-hop, but has done so with out gendering it and I would go as far to argue that while Grae’s attempt to personify hip-hop as a man is fitting of her work, and Common was the first to ever do this so explicitly, this artist does so flawlessly, without subjecting the listener to view hip-hop as a male or female creature.
In “Act Too (The Love of My Life)” off of The Roots album, Things Fall Apart, Black Thought opens the song with a verse describing a seemingly spiritual experience. But quickly follows with:
"When it came to gettin mine I ain't tryin, to argue/ Sometimes I wouldn'ta made it if it wasn't for you/ Hip-Hop, you the love of my life and that's true/ When I was handlin the shit I had to do/ It was all for you, from the door for you/ Speak through you, gettin paper on tour for you/ From the start, Thought was down by law for you/ Used to hit up every corner store wall for you /We ripped shit, and kept it hardcore for you/ I remember late nights, steady rockin the mic/ Hip-Hop, you the love of my life.”
However, in an attempt to make this truly “I Used to Love H.E.R.” Part II, Common steps back into the scene and continues his masculine bantering saying things like:
“Usin, no protection, told H.E.R. on _Resurrection_/ Caught in the Hype Williams, and lost H.E.R. direction/ Gettin eight/ate in sections where I wouldn't eat H.E.R./ An under the counter love, so _Silent_-ly I _Treat_ H.E.R./ Her Daddy'll beat H.E.R., eyes all Puff-ed/ In the mix on tape, niggaz had her in the buff/ When we touch, it was more than just a fuck/ The Police, in her I found peace (like who?)/ Like Malcolm in the East/ Seen H.E.R. on the streets of New York, trickin off/ Tried to make a hit with H.E.R. but my dick went soft…”
The era of hip-hop has been synonymous with the black male voice, as it is the one of the only mediums that has allowed the expressions of black masculinity to exist, and be presented to a mass audience. However, because it has stood alone amongst other aspects of mainstream media as the only outlet for these men, the generalizations regarding black masculinity that have been perpetuated by rap personas — the balla, the thug, the multimillion dollar hip-hop mogul, the pimp, the black nationalist— force me to admit that there is a possibility that the answer to my question is simply the fact that these representations of hip-hop as a woman are a “give in” as this medium is wrought with masculine bravado and performances of machismo. To complicate my question, I must say that when discussing this paper with others, one person noted that if the mic really is a metaphorical penis, it might be weird to sing into a mic if it looked like a vagina, or was a metaphorical vagina. And yet another person presented me with the notion that if the mic is a metaphorical penis then perhaps a lot of these artists should consider the fact that they must look like they are performing oral sex (symbolically and quite literally in appearance) upon a man. These simple questions make me wonder if it perhaps isn’t that I am arguing that hip-hop should only be seen as a man, and not a woman, but rather that as hip-hop is something so personal, spaces should be created where upon women and or men, can discuss their jonesing for the art, with out feeling the need to say, “I love it like I would love a man/woman,” but instead simply say “I LOVE HIP-HOP/ I HAVE A RELATIONSHIP WITH HIP-HOP!”
Marshall argues that those who attempt to address this jonesing, are exhibiting a sort of self-reflection, or expression that when broken down, is simply an expression of a pure interest in the art, a pure involvement and pure love. If that is the case, loving hip-hop to whatever degree, purist or not, is loving not only the music, but also the voices behind it, be they male or female, and it is just that in my eyes those voices are my brother’s, my lover’s and my best friends.
I’ve created a monster.
What does one do when your ultra hip boss suddenly takes an interest in something that is the total opposite of them?
The Back Story
My boss, 31, white, former raver and now up and coming businesswoman who has been through a lot in the last few months, has been listening to the same cd for 2 months. When we get in the car, ready to head to a meeting, or run an errand for the business it’s the same 6 Lily Allen songs, some classic gangsta rap or the radio. Having been a woman so busy that other people have always introduced her to new music this meant that cd was on repeat, her inability to get it on her own due to not even knowing what to look for.
The Mistakes
As a woman with many interests, a few weeks ago we started discussing the whole hyphy generation and thizz crap.
That was mistake #1.
Since that day she occasionally goes around misquoting me asking people in her age bracket, professionals even, if they know anything about the “nation of thizzopolous.”
At stop lights she puts on the emergency break and stands up through her sun roof to dance a bit, her own interpretation of ghost riding the whip. It’s not that she’s into these things, it’s not even that she likes them, she’s one to hate with love. If you catch my drift. That and she loves creating scenes sometimes. She’s even attempted to “go dumb” on occasion, highlighting that if the entire dance looks like is a more rhythmic seizure she’s got it down, hell she was a raver she can dance to anything. “I invented going dumb!” Is often heard from her.
Last week, we had incidents 2 and 3.
Her daughter, 4, and I were listening to my ipod as we were working on a few projects. Out of nowhere she started to sing along with a particular song, apparently it moved her to try and copy the words. Granted the song wasn’t too hard to learn, as the hook is just the words “Ooooh and Aaaaah,” but to me it was both hilarious, and bad.
Crap, her daughter, was suddenly into a hip-hop song, being Ms. Bad-Memory lately, I freaked out and likened it to if I had tried to teach her a Tupac, Biggie, or 50 Cent song. This is would be bad. After repeating the song for her again, because she nearly threw a fit it cliqued.
Grits is a CHRISTIAN RAP GROUP. Great. Now I’m shoving hip-hop AND religion down her daughters throat. Or so I thought. Before I knew it, in the 3 times her daughter had heard the song, and 1 that boss lady had, they were ALL about it. Mom saying “MY LIFE BE LIKE-“ daughter responding “Oooooh Aaaaah, Oooooh Aaaaaah,” while dancing around their kitchen. It was quite a scary call and response scene for this hip-hop lover.
That was mistake 2.
Mistake 3 came in the form of responding to a comment boss lady made, about how all our co-workers were “busted.” I took offense. When asked to explain I told her, in my vocabulary, busted either takes on its intended definition of broken, or more so it’s assumed definition of UGLY. When she said busted, she meant it to describe the fact that we were all exhausted, emotionally and physically from a crazy workweek, but laughed at the ugly definition.
The rest of the day, she walked around calling all ugly things she saw, busted.
“That car is busted… That cat is busted… Oooh he’s busted.”
The Consequences
Now two disclaimers here. My boss is not oblivious to the world; many of these things really shouldn’t have been surprises to her. Secondly, she is not trying to make fun or appropriate a culture not her own.
As a businesswoman, and mother, she is genuinely interested in what goes on out there in the world, but I did NOT intend to teach her things, or share things about my own culture(s) and have her hit the ground running with them. Although I’ve known her quite some time and consider her a friend as well as boss I can’t help but say, why are you taking this so far? I really should not be surprised.
What have I done?! I’ve introduced this family to a culture I adore, one they aren’t ignorant to as they know about classic hits, artists and its roots, but their venture into modern hip hop is my fault.
My boss’s introduction into modern hip-hop was a movement dedicated to x, ghost riding the whip, and Christian rap. I am an embarrassment to my people.
She wants me to make her a mix… am I doomed to repeat these mistakes? I certainly don’t intend to. Instead this is going to be the most edited down, thought about mix I’ve made in years. Preferably no beat will be imbedded in that cd that will allow her to do her ghost riding at stoplights any more. Although I assure you, that will fail as she’s done it to Lily Allen before.
My Groups
-
Quarter-Life Crisis (host) Updated: Jun 20, 2008
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
