Showing posts with label Adam Mansbach. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adam Mansbach. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
Adam Mansbach Talks 'Go the **** to Sleep' on The Today Show
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Saturday, May 28, 2011
Adam Mansbach on Gil Scott-Heron
"He was Breaking Shit Down": Remembering Gil Scott Heron
by Adam Mansbach | Special to NewBlackMan
I’ve known for fifteen minutes now that Gil Scott-Heron is gone. Time enough to play “Winter in America” and “Pieces of a Man,” and to cry, and for the belief that his death is among the greatest tragedies I’ve ever known to harden inside me. That probably sounds ridiculous, and perhaps it is. Certainly, Gil died in slow motion: there is nothing to be surprised at here, no sudden violence ripping apart the fabric of a life. But the fact remains: the most incisive and salient political musician this country has ever produced – ever – is gone.
The fact that drugs took him under – and I don’t mean today, I mean over and over again ¬– makes it worse; makes me angry in a diffuse, perhaps unreasonable way: leads me into thought-rants like if he’d been acknowledged as the national treasure he was, if they (“they”) had given him a fucking MacArthur, then at least he would’ve been one of those enough-money-to-function drug addicts, and he’d be with us still, shadow-version of himself or not.
But all that is beside the point. First things first, the depth and scope of Gil Scott-Heron’s musical-political content is beyond compare. Nothing and nobody comes close: not Bob Dylan, not KRS-One, nobody. During the prime of his career (1970-1984), he was out in front on practically every major political issue – not just nationally, but globally. His commentary was incisive, nuanced, hilarious, and routinely prescient. He carved up the entire Nixon administration with a stainless steel scalpel, psychoanalyzed Reagan and Reagan-happy America better than anybody else I can think of. Challenged the South African government, clarioned the dangers of nuclear power, called out racist cops. Did environmentalism is the early seventies. Gun control in 1980. The Iranian Revolution, the No-Knock Law. Abortion.
And that’s just his topical shit; it’s harder to say what “Ain’t No Such Thing As Superman” or “Winter in America” is about… unless you just cut to the chase and start throwing around words like “zeitgeist,” or phrases like “the troubled soul of America.” And if Gil didn’t invent the pointedly-absurdist extended-free-associative-pop-culture riff, he certainly perfected it in his most famous song.
But none of that even get at his greatness, or at least not fully. The flipside of Gil’s panoramic political worldview was the depth of his self-analysis, the delicacy of his portraiture: for every world-shaking anthem, every “Johannesburg,” there is another song buried deeper in his catalogue, one that charts the quietest, most intimate of blues moments with sublime beauty, raw honesty, unfettered emotion.
I met Gil in 1994, when I was seventeen and he was touring behind the release of his first new album in a decade. Went to check him at Regattabar in Cambridge, and rushed him afterward, a sheaf of my own poems in hand. He didn’t break his stride – clearly, the man had somewhere to be – but he did take them. Several hours later, well past midnight, my phone rang (that is, the phone in my parents’ house rang). It was Gil. He’d read my shit. For the next two hours, I listened to him talk, and jotted notes. I still have the piece of paper. It says things like “Black Elk Speaks” and “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.” The word “Skippy” is underlined a bunch of times; midway into the conversation, I figured out that Skippy was Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer, and the vast, intricate web of Gil’s monologue started to make more sense – a frightening amount of sense, in fact.
Was he high as hell? Probably. It didn’t matter. He was breaking shit down, and I never wanted that phone call to end. I moved to New York City later that year, and ran into him soon after, on 112th and Broadway, in front of the used-CD stand. He didn’t remember our phone call, but I never forgot it.
There’s much more I’d like to say, but it’s one a.m. and I suspect I’ve got more tears to shed. Writing this late is probably a mistake, and so is writing this early, this soon after the fact. I don’t want to end this with a flourish, or a benediction or a cliché; I guess I don’t really want to end it at all.
***
Adam Mansbach's last novel, The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau) won the California Book Award. Named a Best Book of 2008 by the San Francisco Chronicle, it has been called "extraordinary" by the Los Angeles Times, "beautifully portrayed" by the New York Times Book Review and "intense, painful and poignant" by the Boston Globe, and translated into five languages. His new book Go the F**k to Sleep, a satire abour parenting will be published next month.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
The Believer -- Interview with Pharoahe Monch
The Believer -- Interview with Pharoahe Monch
by Adam Mansbach
“zadu za! zuh za! zu baby!”
Good things for a song to include:
Goals
Morals
Quadruple metaphors
Even in the thick of the bountiful early ’90s scene, the Queens-bred duo known as Organized Konfusion stood out. On their self-titled debut and their revered follow-up, 1994’s Stress: The Extinction Agenda, Pharoahe Monch and his partner, Prince Poetry, defined the lyrical vanguard with ear-bending enjambment, melodic cadences, stutter-stepping flows, and furious, multisyllabic rhyme flurries. Perhaps more than any of their contemporaries’, OK’s records conveyed an exhilarating sense of possibility: like the avatars of free jazz, they had the chops and the courage to take a song anywhere, at any time.
Conceptually, the group was just as adventurous, rhyming from the perspectives of stray bullets and “hypnotical” gases. The way they cloaked battle rhymes and social commentary in clouds of energetic abstraction marked them as heirs to legendary Bronx super-weirdos the Ultramagnetic MC’s—as well as forefathers to scores of unlistenable rappers who never mastered the proper ratio of organization to confusion.
Critical acclaim and $4.25 will buy you an iced mocha latte, so after a third album, 1997’s The Equinox, Monch decided to go it alone. The year 1999 saw the much-anticipated release of Internal Affairs on the tastemaking Rawkus Records. Like the disc with which it shared advertising space, Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides, Internal Affairs showcased the versatility of a newly solo artist with ambitions and influences that both transcended and embodied hip-hop. Monch crooned, sparred with a who’s-who of guest MCs, and spewed high-concept rhymefests in the OK vein.
But it was “Simon Says,” Monch’s attempt to simplify his flow for maximum commercial impact, that gave the MC’s MC a bona fide crossover hit. Over an ominous sample jacked from a Godzilla movie, it commanded dancers to “get the fuck up,” and they obeyed in droves. Club DJs loved the song; radio embraced it. Charlie’s Angels and Boiler Room picked it up for their sound tracks. Then the Tokyo-smashing monster (or his human representatives) sued for the uncleared sample, and Rawkus was forced to pull the album from stores.
It would be nearly eight years before Monch released his next long-player, Desire, in June 2007—two or three eternities in the notoriously fast-moving world of hip-hop. Few artists could have marshaled a fan base after such lag-time, but hip-hoppers of a certain era are proving to be quite elephantine in the memory department (see: the resurrected career of MF Doom), and Desire found an audience.
It didn’t hurt that the album showcased Monch at the height of his powers: pushing boundaries with conspiracy theories, multipart narratives, and Tom Jones impressions; challenging listeners to digest his wordplay at the rate he served it up (“still get it poppin’ without Artist and Repertoire / ’cause Monch is a monarch, only minus the A & R”); structuring entire verses around the names of financial institutions and wireless devices. Desire manages to be simultaneously indignant and inspiring, defiant and joyful, hilarious and paranoid. Listening to it now, it is striking to realize how palpably the record feels like a document of the late Bush years.
Monch and I spoke several times by telephone shortly after his return to New York from a European tour. He was preparing for an Organized Konfusion reunion show, the first in ten years, and also laying verses for a new album, W.A.R. (We Are Renegades), scheduled for release in February. In each case, we talked until his cell phone ran out of juice.
—Adam Mansbach
I. THIS IS LADIES NIGHT!
THE BELIEVER: It seems to me that hip-hop today is like jazz was in the early ’70s. For the first time, the major innovators are not new artists, but fifteen- or twenty-year veterans—guys like you, MF Doom, Ghostface, Nas, Jay-Z. Even Lil Wayne has been in it for almost that long.
PHAROAHE MONCH: I think there’s a couple of reasons. Having the savvy to know what you want to say, how you want to say it, and what music you want to say it over comes with time spent and wisdom gained in a music career. Back in the days, a prodigy usually was cultivated by the veterans around him—take Nas, who was surrounded by Q-Tip, Pete Rock, Large Professor, Premier, and L.E.S., all listening to the tone of his voice and the way he rhymes melodically and saying, “He’s gonna sound better over this.” If Nas had tried to produce his first album himself and hand out demos to people… whatever, I don’t need to elaborate. I remember talking to Nas after [his debut verse on Main Source’s] “Live at the Barbeque,” and he was unsure what he wanted to do. It took time for him to cultivate his mental state and decide, This is what type of artist I want to be.
These days, you don’t get development. When new artists come out and they’re not being cosigned or some company doesn’t have a stake in it, or someone’s not getting paid under the table to produce the whole record or bring it to video, the artist really suffers. You’ve rarely got an artist that’s not being chauffeured into the business by some huge-ass names. Before, it could be like, “Who the fuck are these cats Ultramagnetic MC’s?” “Oh, they’re from the Bronx and they’re insane and this is what it sounds like and this is what they’re bringing to the table.” Now, unless somebody who’s already eleven thousand times platinum is like, “We’re ushering this project in,” it’s not really gonna pop commercially.
People gravitated to the first Organized Konfusion record because it sounded so experimental. We were trying to work on something more cultivated, nurtured by Paul C., a veteran producer who would have given us a more polished, tighter groove. Then Paul was murdered, so me and Prince Poetry was winging it—taking records to the studio and trying to do the shit ourselves.
BLVR: That reminds me of something Adam Bradley says in Book of Rhymes: that MCs who rhyme familiar, standard words tend to rhyme about familiar, standard subjects. So breaking out content-wise is dependent on breaking out poetically. It sounds like breaking out musically freed you to write differently, too.
PM: I would have to agree. I think it’s one of the major reasons that the art form is suffering and we’ve hit a wall artistically. A lot of the intricate parts of hip-hop culture became non-useful to the commercial mainstream, so they made it unusable. Like the beatbox: it goes from “All right, we don’t have money for equipment, but we’ve got this dude.…” to “We’ve got the budget to make a record now; we don’t need you in the group anymore.”
There’s a lot of pressure from the industry and the radio. Especially in New York, cats are like, “I guess this is what you have to do to be recognizable or even make this a profession at all. And I definitely could do what I’m hearing on the radio.” And they get caught in a rut. But the consumer is like, “I’m not gonna buy some Jay-Z-sounding shit from somebody other than him, because I can just wait for the best person to do it.”
BLVR: Have you seen the Byron Hurt documentary Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, where he asks all these MCs standing on the street outside a record company why they all rhyme about the same shit, and they tell him it’s the only way to get signed?
PM: No, but I can imagine. A colleague of mine played me some stuff from a guy who gave him a CD and was like, “This is my group. And this is what we do.” And that shit was cool; it was cash and rims and coke. But then the same guy was like, “Here’s the CD of what I actually do outside of them, because I’m on my own shit.” And we were fucking blown the fuck away. You feel pressured to do what you think the public wants, when in actuality the sales aren’t reflecting what the radio is doing. Not in the least bit! At some point, there’s a disconnect. Five years ago, I was like, “I know this song is platinum: this is the four-hundredth time I’ve heard it this morning.” And then you check and not even the younger kids are buying into the shit. They’re like, “This is cool for my fucking cell phone alert, but I don’t believe this guy, he’s a clown.”
There are situations where I’m uncomfortable saying, “I’m a hip-hop artist.” In some circles, the response is like, “Oh, OK, so… you have whores and your ties are shiny?”
BLVR: Do you see a generation gap within hip-hop? Between the veteran artists and fans who connect hip-hop to social protest, and younger ones who just see hip-hop as a facet of pop culture? I’m thinking of the cover version of Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” on Desire, which is a brilliant way of knitting two generations together: commenting on the continuing relevance of that song, but also reinventing it.
PM: That’s exactly why I did it. I’m a big PE fan, very inspired by Chuck and the group. I laid the first verse, and I was playing it for people younger than me and they were like, “This shit is incredible. This is dope, this is relevant.” And I was like, “If you think this is crazy, you need to hear the original version,” and they were like, “What… original…?” And I was like, “Oh my god, that’s even more reason for me to do it.”
BLVR: They’re certainly never going to hear PE on the radio.
PM: Radio goes after this demographic of eight-to-eighteen-year-olds, and plays music they think facilitates that demographic, and really dumbs it down. But at the same time, my manager has a nephew in high school, and he’s telling me about the resurgence of golden-era shit in his high school. The same monster that they invented—the Internet, which is a gift and a curse, because it gives you all this access—allows kids to find Public Enemy and breeze through the shit, if they’re willing to become privy to it, and listen to “They Reminisce Over You” and fucking Large Professor and Illmatic.
When you find that music, you really feel in your soul what’s on the level with what. A producer friend of mine went to a conference in Phoenix, and all the bigwigs is on the panel, and the audience is fifteen-to-twenty-four-year-old up-and-coming producers, and a guy raises his hand and is like, “What’s going on with the music? I’m not really feeling what’s going on.” And a guy on the panel is like, “Well, you know, the Pro Tools and the Reason and the digital transfer…” and the kid is like, “Yo, forget all of that! I’m saying that I’m not feeling what cats are doing right now, what’s being served to us!” And people started clapping. You can’t fool all the people all the time.
BLVR: It’s great that that happened at a producers’ conference, in a room full of people who aspire to shape what’s going to be on the radio next year.
PM: Even at my old-ass age, I think back to my father and my older brother telling me, “This is not good.” I remember one time I bought Kool & The Gang’s Ladies Night and my brother broke the record and was like, “This is bullshit Kool & The Gang! This is not real Kool & The Gang!” And I was like, “What the fuck, man? This is Ladies Night!” It’s the same thing. There needs to be someone who can lead you in the right direction. There’s a need for pop. There’s a need for radio. There’s also a need to understand the brilliance and the depth of jazz and soul—and what hip-hop can be at its most brilliant and what hip-hop can be at its most simplistic.
Kids don’t even realize what they’re up against. If you idolize Kanye, know who Kanye’s influences are, and study that stuff. You’ll never match Kanye by starting off with his last record. You gotta go back and see that he was a great student of Jay-Z and a great student of Mos and a great student of Common and a great student of [Talib] Kweli. You just can’t jump in it and expect to be at that level.
Even the guys who I like who are coming up now, like this kid Blu from L.A., you talk to these dudes and they’re like, “My father was this,” “I listened to that,” “I was in the basement with this.” Radio makes it appear like you can get some sounds in a laptop and be the next dude. Those careers don’t really last, that’s the sad thing about it.
BLVR: Well, they used to be built on a lot more. Hip-hop was passed down through mentor-apprentice relationships, and a lot of the skills had to be learned firsthand. You weren’t going to figure out how to DJ or write graffiti unless somebody showed you. So you were responsible to your elders.…
PM: It’s crazy. I was watching an interview about the black man who performed the first open-heart surgery. Forty years later, you have surgeries removing bullets from people’s lungs. You don’t have the doctors saying, “Oh, fuck that heart surgery he did back in the day, I’m pulling bullets out of people’s lungs now,” right?
It mattered. It mattered what someone did to allow you to have the forum to do what you’re doing. There’s no way that you can say, “Fuck KRS-One. What I’m doing now is what I’m doing now is what I’m doing now.” And somebody has to pull cats aside, not for them to pay homage, you don’t need to pay homage, but to just try to understand the vehicle that’s allotted to you, why it’s there. There once was no radio for hip-hop. There once was no video shows for hip-hop. It’s like a man going, “This shit is all me, it has nothing to do with the universe, nothing to do with God, my parents….” You have to understand the vehicle, the form that allows you to do what you do, and why that is.
Read the Full Interview @ The Believer
by Adam Mansbach
“zadu za! zuh za! zu baby!”
Good things for a song to include:
Goals
Morals
Quadruple metaphors
Even in the thick of the bountiful early ’90s scene, the Queens-bred duo known as Organized Konfusion stood out. On their self-titled debut and their revered follow-up, 1994’s Stress: The Extinction Agenda, Pharoahe Monch and his partner, Prince Poetry, defined the lyrical vanguard with ear-bending enjambment, melodic cadences, stutter-stepping flows, and furious, multisyllabic rhyme flurries. Perhaps more than any of their contemporaries’, OK’s records conveyed an exhilarating sense of possibility: like the avatars of free jazz, they had the chops and the courage to take a song anywhere, at any time.
Conceptually, the group was just as adventurous, rhyming from the perspectives of stray bullets and “hypnotical” gases. The way they cloaked battle rhymes and social commentary in clouds of energetic abstraction marked them as heirs to legendary Bronx super-weirdos the Ultramagnetic MC’s—as well as forefathers to scores of unlistenable rappers who never mastered the proper ratio of organization to confusion.
Critical acclaim and $4.25 will buy you an iced mocha latte, so after a third album, 1997’s The Equinox, Monch decided to go it alone. The year 1999 saw the much-anticipated release of Internal Affairs on the tastemaking Rawkus Records. Like the disc with which it shared advertising space, Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides, Internal Affairs showcased the versatility of a newly solo artist with ambitions and influences that both transcended and embodied hip-hop. Monch crooned, sparred with a who’s-who of guest MCs, and spewed high-concept rhymefests in the OK vein.
But it was “Simon Says,” Monch’s attempt to simplify his flow for maximum commercial impact, that gave the MC’s MC a bona fide crossover hit. Over an ominous sample jacked from a Godzilla movie, it commanded dancers to “get the fuck up,” and they obeyed in droves. Club DJs loved the song; radio embraced it. Charlie’s Angels and Boiler Room picked it up for their sound tracks. Then the Tokyo-smashing monster (or his human representatives) sued for the uncleared sample, and Rawkus was forced to pull the album from stores.
It would be nearly eight years before Monch released his next long-player, Desire, in June 2007—two or three eternities in the notoriously fast-moving world of hip-hop. Few artists could have marshaled a fan base after such lag-time, but hip-hoppers of a certain era are proving to be quite elephantine in the memory department (see: the resurrected career of MF Doom), and Desire found an audience.
It didn’t hurt that the album showcased Monch at the height of his powers: pushing boundaries with conspiracy theories, multipart narratives, and Tom Jones impressions; challenging listeners to digest his wordplay at the rate he served it up (“still get it poppin’ without Artist and Repertoire / ’cause Monch is a monarch, only minus the A & R”); structuring entire verses around the names of financial institutions and wireless devices. Desire manages to be simultaneously indignant and inspiring, defiant and joyful, hilarious and paranoid. Listening to it now, it is striking to realize how palpably the record feels like a document of the late Bush years.
Monch and I spoke several times by telephone shortly after his return to New York from a European tour. He was preparing for an Organized Konfusion reunion show, the first in ten years, and also laying verses for a new album, W.A.R. (We Are Renegades), scheduled for release in February. In each case, we talked until his cell phone ran out of juice.
—Adam Mansbach
I. THIS IS LADIES NIGHT!
THE BELIEVER: It seems to me that hip-hop today is like jazz was in the early ’70s. For the first time, the major innovators are not new artists, but fifteen- or twenty-year veterans—guys like you, MF Doom, Ghostface, Nas, Jay-Z. Even Lil Wayne has been in it for almost that long.
PHAROAHE MONCH: I think there’s a couple of reasons. Having the savvy to know what you want to say, how you want to say it, and what music you want to say it over comes with time spent and wisdom gained in a music career. Back in the days, a prodigy usually was cultivated by the veterans around him—take Nas, who was surrounded by Q-Tip, Pete Rock, Large Professor, Premier, and L.E.S., all listening to the tone of his voice and the way he rhymes melodically and saying, “He’s gonna sound better over this.” If Nas had tried to produce his first album himself and hand out demos to people… whatever, I don’t need to elaborate. I remember talking to Nas after [his debut verse on Main Source’s] “Live at the Barbeque,” and he was unsure what he wanted to do. It took time for him to cultivate his mental state and decide, This is what type of artist I want to be.
These days, you don’t get development. When new artists come out and they’re not being cosigned or some company doesn’t have a stake in it, or someone’s not getting paid under the table to produce the whole record or bring it to video, the artist really suffers. You’ve rarely got an artist that’s not being chauffeured into the business by some huge-ass names. Before, it could be like, “Who the fuck are these cats Ultramagnetic MC’s?” “Oh, they’re from the Bronx and they’re insane and this is what it sounds like and this is what they’re bringing to the table.” Now, unless somebody who’s already eleven thousand times platinum is like, “We’re ushering this project in,” it’s not really gonna pop commercially.
People gravitated to the first Organized Konfusion record because it sounded so experimental. We were trying to work on something more cultivated, nurtured by Paul C., a veteran producer who would have given us a more polished, tighter groove. Then Paul was murdered, so me and Prince Poetry was winging it—taking records to the studio and trying to do the shit ourselves.
BLVR: That reminds me of something Adam Bradley says in Book of Rhymes: that MCs who rhyme familiar, standard words tend to rhyme about familiar, standard subjects. So breaking out content-wise is dependent on breaking out poetically. It sounds like breaking out musically freed you to write differently, too.
PM: I would have to agree. I think it’s one of the major reasons that the art form is suffering and we’ve hit a wall artistically. A lot of the intricate parts of hip-hop culture became non-useful to the commercial mainstream, so they made it unusable. Like the beatbox: it goes from “All right, we don’t have money for equipment, but we’ve got this dude.…” to “We’ve got the budget to make a record now; we don’t need you in the group anymore.”
There’s a lot of pressure from the industry and the radio. Especially in New York, cats are like, “I guess this is what you have to do to be recognizable or even make this a profession at all. And I definitely could do what I’m hearing on the radio.” And they get caught in a rut. But the consumer is like, “I’m not gonna buy some Jay-Z-sounding shit from somebody other than him, because I can just wait for the best person to do it.”
BLVR: Have you seen the Byron Hurt documentary Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, where he asks all these MCs standing on the street outside a record company why they all rhyme about the same shit, and they tell him it’s the only way to get signed?
PM: No, but I can imagine. A colleague of mine played me some stuff from a guy who gave him a CD and was like, “This is my group. And this is what we do.” And that shit was cool; it was cash and rims and coke. But then the same guy was like, “Here’s the CD of what I actually do outside of them, because I’m on my own shit.” And we were fucking blown the fuck away. You feel pressured to do what you think the public wants, when in actuality the sales aren’t reflecting what the radio is doing. Not in the least bit! At some point, there’s a disconnect. Five years ago, I was like, “I know this song is platinum: this is the four-hundredth time I’ve heard it this morning.” And then you check and not even the younger kids are buying into the shit. They’re like, “This is cool for my fucking cell phone alert, but I don’t believe this guy, he’s a clown.”
There are situations where I’m uncomfortable saying, “I’m a hip-hop artist.” In some circles, the response is like, “Oh, OK, so… you have whores and your ties are shiny?”
BLVR: Do you see a generation gap within hip-hop? Between the veteran artists and fans who connect hip-hop to social protest, and younger ones who just see hip-hop as a facet of pop culture? I’m thinking of the cover version of Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” on Desire, which is a brilliant way of knitting two generations together: commenting on the continuing relevance of that song, but also reinventing it.
PM: That’s exactly why I did it. I’m a big PE fan, very inspired by Chuck and the group. I laid the first verse, and I was playing it for people younger than me and they were like, “This shit is incredible. This is dope, this is relevant.” And I was like, “If you think this is crazy, you need to hear the original version,” and they were like, “What… original…?” And I was like, “Oh my god, that’s even more reason for me to do it.”
BLVR: They’re certainly never going to hear PE on the radio.
PM: Radio goes after this demographic of eight-to-eighteen-year-olds, and plays music they think facilitates that demographic, and really dumbs it down. But at the same time, my manager has a nephew in high school, and he’s telling me about the resurgence of golden-era shit in his high school. The same monster that they invented—the Internet, which is a gift and a curse, because it gives you all this access—allows kids to find Public Enemy and breeze through the shit, if they’re willing to become privy to it, and listen to “They Reminisce Over You” and fucking Large Professor and Illmatic.
When you find that music, you really feel in your soul what’s on the level with what. A producer friend of mine went to a conference in Phoenix, and all the bigwigs is on the panel, and the audience is fifteen-to-twenty-four-year-old up-and-coming producers, and a guy raises his hand and is like, “What’s going on with the music? I’m not really feeling what’s going on.” And a guy on the panel is like, “Well, you know, the Pro Tools and the Reason and the digital transfer…” and the kid is like, “Yo, forget all of that! I’m saying that I’m not feeling what cats are doing right now, what’s being served to us!” And people started clapping. You can’t fool all the people all the time.
BLVR: It’s great that that happened at a producers’ conference, in a room full of people who aspire to shape what’s going to be on the radio next year.
PM: Even at my old-ass age, I think back to my father and my older brother telling me, “This is not good.” I remember one time I bought Kool & The Gang’s Ladies Night and my brother broke the record and was like, “This is bullshit Kool & The Gang! This is not real Kool & The Gang!” And I was like, “What the fuck, man? This is Ladies Night!” It’s the same thing. There needs to be someone who can lead you in the right direction. There’s a need for pop. There’s a need for radio. There’s also a need to understand the brilliance and the depth of jazz and soul—and what hip-hop can be at its most brilliant and what hip-hop can be at its most simplistic.
Kids don’t even realize what they’re up against. If you idolize Kanye, know who Kanye’s influences are, and study that stuff. You’ll never match Kanye by starting off with his last record. You gotta go back and see that he was a great student of Jay-Z and a great student of Mos and a great student of Common and a great student of [Talib] Kweli. You just can’t jump in it and expect to be at that level.
Even the guys who I like who are coming up now, like this kid Blu from L.A., you talk to these dudes and they’re like, “My father was this,” “I listened to that,” “I was in the basement with this.” Radio makes it appear like you can get some sounds in a laptop and be the next dude. Those careers don’t really last, that’s the sad thing about it.
BLVR: Well, they used to be built on a lot more. Hip-hop was passed down through mentor-apprentice relationships, and a lot of the skills had to be learned firsthand. You weren’t going to figure out how to DJ or write graffiti unless somebody showed you. So you were responsible to your elders.…
PM: It’s crazy. I was watching an interview about the black man who performed the first open-heart surgery. Forty years later, you have surgeries removing bullets from people’s lungs. You don’t have the doctors saying, “Oh, fuck that heart surgery he did back in the day, I’m pulling bullets out of people’s lungs now,” right?
It mattered. It mattered what someone did to allow you to have the forum to do what you’re doing. There’s no way that you can say, “Fuck KRS-One. What I’m doing now is what I’m doing now is what I’m doing now.” And somebody has to pull cats aside, not for them to pay homage, you don’t need to pay homage, but to just try to understand the vehicle that’s allotted to you, why it’s there. There once was no radio for hip-hop. There once was no video shows for hip-hop. It’s like a man going, “This shit is all me, it has nothing to do with the universe, nothing to do with God, my parents….” You have to understand the vehicle, the form that allows you to do what you do, and why that is.
Read the Full Interview @ The Believer
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Adam Mansbach Responds to Boston Globe Screed on Hip-Hop Studies
from the Boston Globe
Meet the Rap-ademics
The Ivy League offers its esteemed interpretation on the ‘virtue and complexity’ of hip-hop lyrics
by Alex Beam
***
special to NewBlackMan
Adam Mansbach Responds
Dear Alex,
I wonder what you hope to accomplish with a piece like "Meet the Rap-ademics." Why bother to write about the music or the culture at all, if you're going to approach it with petulance, mockery, and ignorance? None of these is anything new, when it comes to coverage of hip-hop – not the shots you take, not the over-generalizations, not the factual errors (two glaring ones: Gates was in no way the first "rap-ademic" by virtue of his 1990 testimony; Craig Werner was teaching a course on hip-hop at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as early as 1985. And you misquote the Jay-Z lyric; it's "rub," not "run." Even the Anthology gets this line right – this error is all yours.)
Sure, you can isolate two Jay-Z lines lacking in complexity and ambivalence, quote them, and make the entire conversation about his work look silly. But if you're serious about making a critique, why take a cheap shot? Why not do it honestly, by discussing a lyric that possesses these qualities? You've got the Anthology in front of you, presumably. Why not flip the page to,"All the teachers couldn't reach me and my mama couldn't beat me/hard enough to match the pain of my pops not seeing me/so with that disdain in my membrane/got on my pimp game/f*** the world my defense came."
You mock Grandmaster Caz's clarification of his lyrics, but the truth is that it's precisely this kind of locale-specific reference that made the music vital at the moment of its inception – made it relevant, the voice of New York City kids who had been marginalized because of where they lived. Your tone here is insulting, deliberately so, but it's more than that, and probably more than you realize. Caz's stories do matter – more so because they were created in the face of just the kind of condescension and dismissal you replicate here. I wonder: why, in 2010, are you so invested in belittling them?
"Finally the academy has caught up with and embraced hip-hop," you write, as if it just happened. In reality, hundreds of courses on hip-hop are taught at universities all over the country. Neither I nor anyone else is "fretting" about a "lacunae in the hip-hop canon;" quite the contrary, we're arguing that this field of study – established and recognized – has specific standards that we intend to see met. I can't help but wonder whether you'd recognize any of the titles that make up that canon, but I'd be happy to send you a copy of the syllabus for the hip-hop course I'll be teaching this spring at Rutgers University.
All that said, I doubt I'd be bothering to write this email if not for the statement with which you end your piece. How it's connected to the rest of the essay, I can't tell. But the argument that hip-hop is "keeping African-Americans down" through its "celebration of ignorance, gangsterism... and violence against women" is just the kind of sweeping generalization that has always plagued the worst hip-hop scholarship. First of all, how can one generalize about a sprawling, multi-billion dollar industry like hip-hop? For every artist who trades in such ideas (and certainly, there are many), there is another whose lyrical content is deeply well-informed, explicitly anti-gangster, and explicitly anti-violence.
It's easy, of course, to stereotype an entire kind of music (though no one seems interested in doing do with rock, which last time I checked also had its share of sexist and violent content). More productive would be to examine the market forces that push the kind of songs you're talking about into positions of mainstream prominence – and to acknowledge that those forces do not act solely on hip hop, but on mass culture at large. But it’s easier to pretend that violence and misogyny were somehow smuggled into the country through hip hop, as opposed to forces that act profoundly on us all.
Ultimately, blaming hip-hop for "keeping African-Americans down" is a tried and true method of obscuring structural racism: if it's hip-hop's fault, then nobody has to care, do they? Nobody has to question inherent biases in education, law enforcement, the judicial system – all areas that hip-hop artists, ironically enough, have been addressing for thirty years. You’ve gotta listen to hear that part, though.
Meet the Rap-ademics
The Ivy League offers its esteemed interpretation on the ‘virtue and complexity’ of hip-hop lyrics
by Alex Beam
***
special to NewBlackMan
Adam Mansbach Responds
Dear Alex,
I wonder what you hope to accomplish with a piece like "Meet the Rap-ademics." Why bother to write about the music or the culture at all, if you're going to approach it with petulance, mockery, and ignorance? None of these is anything new, when it comes to coverage of hip-hop – not the shots you take, not the over-generalizations, not the factual errors (two glaring ones: Gates was in no way the first "rap-ademic" by virtue of his 1990 testimony; Craig Werner was teaching a course on hip-hop at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as early as 1985. And you misquote the Jay-Z lyric; it's "rub," not "run." Even the Anthology gets this line right – this error is all yours.)
Sure, you can isolate two Jay-Z lines lacking in complexity and ambivalence, quote them, and make the entire conversation about his work look silly. But if you're serious about making a critique, why take a cheap shot? Why not do it honestly, by discussing a lyric that possesses these qualities? You've got the Anthology in front of you, presumably. Why not flip the page to,"All the teachers couldn't reach me and my mama couldn't beat me/hard enough to match the pain of my pops not seeing me/so with that disdain in my membrane/got on my pimp game/f*** the world my defense came."
You mock Grandmaster Caz's clarification of his lyrics, but the truth is that it's precisely this kind of locale-specific reference that made the music vital at the moment of its inception – made it relevant, the voice of New York City kids who had been marginalized because of where they lived. Your tone here is insulting, deliberately so, but it's more than that, and probably more than you realize. Caz's stories do matter – more so because they were created in the face of just the kind of condescension and dismissal you replicate here. I wonder: why, in 2010, are you so invested in belittling them?
"Finally the academy has caught up with and embraced hip-hop," you write, as if it just happened. In reality, hundreds of courses on hip-hop are taught at universities all over the country. Neither I nor anyone else is "fretting" about a "lacunae in the hip-hop canon;" quite the contrary, we're arguing that this field of study – established and recognized – has specific standards that we intend to see met. I can't help but wonder whether you'd recognize any of the titles that make up that canon, but I'd be happy to send you a copy of the syllabus for the hip-hop course I'll be teaching this spring at Rutgers University.
All that said, I doubt I'd be bothering to write this email if not for the statement with which you end your piece. How it's connected to the rest of the essay, I can't tell. But the argument that hip-hop is "keeping African-Americans down" through its "celebration of ignorance, gangsterism... and violence against women" is just the kind of sweeping generalization that has always plagued the worst hip-hop scholarship. First of all, how can one generalize about a sprawling, multi-billion dollar industry like hip-hop? For every artist who trades in such ideas (and certainly, there are many), there is another whose lyrical content is deeply well-informed, explicitly anti-gangster, and explicitly anti-violence.
It's easy, of course, to stereotype an entire kind of music (though no one seems interested in doing do with rock, which last time I checked also had its share of sexist and violent content). More productive would be to examine the market forces that push the kind of songs you're talking about into positions of mainstream prominence – and to acknowledge that those forces do not act solely on hip hop, but on mass culture at large. But it’s easier to pretend that violence and misogyny were somehow smuggled into the country through hip hop, as opposed to forces that act profoundly on us all.
Ultimately, blaming hip-hop for "keeping African-Americans down" is a tried and true method of obscuring structural racism: if it's hip-hop's fault, then nobody has to care, do they? Nobody has to question inherent biases in education, law enforcement, the judicial system – all areas that hip-hop artists, ironically enough, have been addressing for thirty years. You’ve gotta listen to hear that part, though.
***
Adam Mansbach's latest novel, The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau) won the California Book Award. Named a Best Book of 2008 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Mansbach’s previous novel, the bestselling Angry Black White Boy (Crown), is taught at more than sixty colleges, universities and high schools. A satire about race, whiteness and hip-hop, it was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005, and the recipient of an Honorable Citation from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards and a PEN/Faulkner Writers in the Schools grant.
Monday, November 22, 2010
The Trouble with the Yale Anthology of Rap
Members of the Anthology of Rap's advisory board speak out about the book's errors. Plus: Grandmaster Caz lists the mistakes in his lyrics.
Stakes Is High
by Paul Devlin
On Nov. 4, I wrote a review of The Anthology of Rap, noting the book's many transcription errors. Last week, I wrote a follow-up article on the Yale University Press book, enumerating further errors and pointing out that the majority of the mistakes discovered in the book so far—by me and by others—also appear in the transcriptions on Web sites like Online Hip-hop Lyrics Archive. In that follow-up article, I asked the editors to explain their transcription process, and they obliged, outlining a seven-step process. The primary source, they stated, was always the music itself: The editors say they typed out original transcriptions after listening to the songs. They then checked their lyrics against other sources—including sites like OHHLA—and also, when possible, asked the artists themselves to vet the lyrics. According to the editors, "nearly 30" artists reviewed the editors' transcriptions.
I decided to reach out to one of the artists who checked his lyrics to see how that process worked. In the acknowledgements section of the book, the editors "offer special thanks to the following for reviewing transcriptions of their lyrics, offering insights into their craft, and generally providing support for this undertaking." The editors then list the names of 29 rappers.
Among them is Grandmaster Caz, a hip-hop pioneer. Caz's name jumped out at me because, in reading his songs as transcribed in the anthology, I'd noticed what I thought was a substantial mistake. So I got in touch with him and, earlier this week, visited him at his apartment in the Bronx. Reading through the book's transcriptions of his work with me, he caught a series of errors.
Read the Full Essay @ Slate
Stakes Is High
by Paul Devlin
On Nov. 4, I wrote a review of The Anthology of Rap, noting the book's many transcription errors. Last week, I wrote a follow-up article on the Yale University Press book, enumerating further errors and pointing out that the majority of the mistakes discovered in the book so far—by me and by others—also appear in the transcriptions on Web sites like Online Hip-hop Lyrics Archive. In that follow-up article, I asked the editors to explain their transcription process, and they obliged, outlining a seven-step process. The primary source, they stated, was always the music itself: The editors say they typed out original transcriptions after listening to the songs. They then checked their lyrics against other sources—including sites like OHHLA—and also, when possible, asked the artists themselves to vet the lyrics. According to the editors, "nearly 30" artists reviewed the editors' transcriptions.
I decided to reach out to one of the artists who checked his lyrics to see how that process worked. In the acknowledgements section of the book, the editors "offer special thanks to the following for reviewing transcriptions of their lyrics, offering insights into their craft, and generally providing support for this undertaking." The editors then list the names of 29 rappers.
Among them is Grandmaster Caz, a hip-hop pioneer. Caz's name jumped out at me because, in reading his songs as transcribed in the anthology, I'd noticed what I thought was a substantial mistake. So I got in touch with him and, earlier this week, visited him at his apartment in the Bronx. Reading through the book's transcriptions of his work with me, he caught a series of errors.
Read the Full Essay @ Slate
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Race, Media and Masculinity
Race, Media, and Masculinity at Claflin University
March 2, 2010
6:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
W.V.M Fine Arts Building
400 Magnolia Street
Orangeburg, SC, 29115
Guest panelists Dr. Dawn-Elissa Fischer (San Francisco State University), Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University), Adam Mansbach (author of Angry Black White Boy), and Dr. Stephany Spaulding (Claflin University) will discuss constructions of Black masculinity within the media and literature.
Sponsored by Campus Progress, The Big Read Program, and the Claflin University Lyceum Committee.
This event is free and open to the public.
For more information, please email speakers@campusprogress.org
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Recognizing the Foundation
The Ascent of Hip-Hop
A historical, cultural, and aesthetic study of b-boying
By Adam Mansbach
Review of FOUNDATION:
B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York
By Joseph G. Schloss
Oxford University, 176 pp., illustrated, $19.55
Schloss's book is a major contribution to a new school of hip-hop scholarship, one whose aesthetic and political engagement transcends the simplistic attack/defend paradigm that has plagued the public discourse for so long. "It is not enough to simply say that hip-hop is a complex and sophisticated cultural tradition," he writes. "We must demonstrate it." For a compelling and under-examined art form, "Foundation" does just that.Read the Full Review @ The Boston Globe
***
Adam Mansbach is the author of The End of the Jews winner of the California Book Award
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Adam Mansbach on "White Privilege"
From NewsOne.com
OP-ED
Former VP Candidate Fails to See Her Own White Privilege
by Adam Mansbach
"Since March, when I was accused of being racist for a statement I made about the influence of blacks on Obama's historic campaign, people have been stopping me to express a common sentiment: If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They see Obama's playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening. They're not upset with Obama because he's black; they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because they're white. It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial resentment."
When former Vice Presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro made the remarks to which she refers in her May 30 Boston Globe op-ed, pundits and commentators across the ideological spectrum consistently fell all over themselves to avoid accusing her of racism. Seldom in political life has the sinner been granted so much immediate distance from her sin.
What Ferraro actually said bears little resemblance to the facile pseudo-summary she offers in her editorial. Her comments were not about "the influence of blacks" on the Obama campaign. Her exact words to a California newspaper were "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," and she defended them by arguing that she, likewise, would not have been on the 1984 Democratic ticket if not for her gender.
Ferraro appeared not to recognize the obvious difference between being appointed to a ticket, as she was, and winning a record number of primary votes across the entire nation, as Obama has. In the days following her initial remarks, she claimed, as in her Boston Globe op-ed, that "Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?"
Ludicrous-and sad. Ferraro has officially ruined her own obituary by adding a crimson asterisk of aggressively divisive, ill-informed, race-baiting to her own trailblazing career in public service. More important than assessing the magnitude of her self-destruction, though, is examining the notion she puts forth: that whites in America have been rendered voiceless, that "you can't open your mouth without being labeled a racist," that to be black is to be 'lucky' (to paraphrase another of her comments about Obama).
Read the Full Essay @
OP-ED
Former VP Candidate Fails to See Her Own White Privilege
by Adam Mansbach
"Since March, when I was accused of being racist for a statement I made about the influence of blacks on Obama's historic campaign, people have been stopping me to express a common sentiment: If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They see Obama's playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening. They're not upset with Obama because he's black; they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because they're white. It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial resentment."
When former Vice Presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro made the remarks to which she refers in her May 30 Boston Globe op-ed, pundits and commentators across the ideological spectrum consistently fell all over themselves to avoid accusing her of racism. Seldom in political life has the sinner been granted so much immediate distance from her sin.
What Ferraro actually said bears little resemblance to the facile pseudo-summary she offers in her editorial. Her comments were not about "the influence of blacks" on the Obama campaign. Her exact words to a California newspaper were "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," and she defended them by arguing that she, likewise, would not have been on the 1984 Democratic ticket if not for her gender.
Ferraro appeared not to recognize the obvious difference between being appointed to a ticket, as she was, and winning a record number of primary votes across the entire nation, as Obama has. In the days following her initial remarks, she claimed, as in her Boston Globe op-ed, that "Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?"
Ludicrous-and sad. Ferraro has officially ruined her own obituary by adding a crimson asterisk of aggressively divisive, ill-informed, race-baiting to her own trailblazing career in public service. More important than assessing the magnitude of her self-destruction, though, is examining the notion she puts forth: that whites in America have been rendered voiceless, that "you can't open your mouth without being labeled a racist," that to be black is to be 'lucky' (to paraphrase another of her comments about Obama).
Read the Full Essay @
Adam Mansbach is the author of the novels The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau, 2008) and Angry Black White Boy (Crown, 2005).
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