Scary Movie 4: "They're taking everyone... young, old, rich, poor, Chingy."
I've been busy lately and posting has been the last thing on my mind. However, preparing a radio show about the teen movies of 1995 (Hackers, Empire Records, Tank Girl) that ever so subtly builds into a crescendo of "pretty clothes and trinkets aside, Wes Anderson is a caste monger and the point of all his work is that a rigid class system guarantees a quality, pretty consumer aesthetic... and that's the profane reality behind the high-sounding libertarianism that's currently all the rage among my peers in the US." has been exhilarating. Having had to watch a whole lot of 1995 to reach that point was incredibly exhausting, and after the show, on Saturday night, I came home and passed out in bed. But the next morning I was awoken - perhaps for the first time in my life - by the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with knowing that the world is a better place because of something that I did. Radio waves carrying my solid condemnation of Super Bad, Wes and premium cable ideology are now out there somewhere, floating through space. Who knows, perhaps someone was even listening and paying attention.
I've been riding that high ever since, and it's led me back to Drop Aztek.
After the show, I went and got a drink with Riley, a talented photographer who's in Slovenia to research the Erased, and somehow the conversation went to Chingy (I think I had used the term "chingy" to refer to money, as I'm wont to do). I believe her words were "we bought that album and listened to it like all the time!", which wouldn't have struck me as noteworthy had I not just spent three days cataloging the little differences between a time when you'd "buy albums and listen to them all the time!" and now.
My main memory of Chingy comes from 2003, when, looking at the CDs on the best sellers rack at Best Buy, I suggested, as a joke that I knew would be well received, that my friend Dennis get his sister Chingy for Christmas. We both laughed as the cover, featuring Chingy standing by his ride beneath the St. Louis arch, delivered the punchline.
Why did the joke work? Because this was a Best Buy in the middle of what must be one of the largest suburban retail clusters in the US and consequently the world (the Roosevelt-Butterfield-Oakbrook shopping area cuts through 5 cities). And there, at that moment in time when Best Buy was the place for white people to be on account of where consumer technology (and shady consumer credit to pay for it) was going, was this strategically placed black guy, looking all street, staring down the throngs of suburban holiday shoppers from the cover of his album. There is something inherently funny about that, and the joke would probably have gone over just as well had I merely pointed to the CD and said "Chingy."
Nor was it an isolated incident. Back then, I'd say up until about 2006, many laughs were to be had as my boys Dennis and Lev would deliberately put on their worst accents and recite Eminem and Chingy lyrics; Lev with his thick Slovene accent "spontaneously" (he may have actually been practicing this at home, which, if you know the guy, makes it all the more funny) working "and when you sleep I hope you dream about it, and when you dream I hope you scream about it" into a conversation was probably a high point. And for a ladies' perspective, there was Sis singing "I Don't Wanna Be a Player No More" as she donned a faux snakeskin tube top (oh, she was warned) for some suburban clubbing with her Italian friend Monica. That same Sis would make me proud several years later, when a broken jukebox stuck on "My Humps" would lead to what perhaps was the one of the finest bouts of ironic whiteness the world - or at least that townie bar in Villa Park - had ever seen.
Of course, one would certainly be right to detect a hint of scorn or derision: towards the brashness and perceived silliness of black culture, and in Eminem's case, towards the idea of wiggerism. Add to that college, which makes people, and Americans in particular, incredibly fun and incredibly obnoxious, and it wouldn't be difficult to apply the word "racist" to some of the funnier moments. But it is in fact only once one readily admits to the white self-assuredness underlying some of our reactions that the true significance of the hip hop and RnB of the early 2000 decade, of this black music that, for a good five years, had established itself as a synonym for pop music, reveals itself. Having secured a place in the pre-internet pop pantheon, it brought with it a whole slough of non-white ideas about hyper-consumption, violence and sexuality. Already accepted by the mainstream and heavily promoted, among other things, by an MTV that still played videos, once the music had kicked up all these incongruities, they were just out there. Complementing that was way that the nature and (for perhaps the last time) potentially extreme profitability of the pipeline then in place for distributing and promoting music discouraged the establishment of a uniform discourse, of an agreed upon "neutral" location for our encounters with Chingy & Co., which would have streamlined the process of reacting to the music (this, it should go without saying, was to eventually be provided by the internet, which was then still in its infancy). Without something like that to aid in processing a black guy's boast that while he does have numerous existential problems, some involving possible imprisonment, a [nasty expletive for girlfriend] is not one of them, all we were left with was our pile of preconceived notions, some rooted in the Clinton-era PC movement and the efforts made in our early to mid 20s to explore music, and with it black music in some form or another (be it jazz or indie hip hop or even Kid Rock in the Americans' case, or house music in the Europeans' case), and others in the everyday racism of anecdotes and off-hand observations, inherited ideas about blacks and black culture, and a wide range of media treatments, many of which themselves were reactions to black culture - "And all the girlies say I'm pretty fly... for a white guy".
And I feel that it is in that openness, in the sort of necessity that more or less everybody felt to interact with or react to this music on the one hand, and in the free discretion and circumstantial nature of those reactions on the other, that the true value of not only that era's hip hop and RnB, but of hip hop and RnB in general lies. It explains why Kanye West, for reasons no one can exactly pinpoint, sounds damn good right about now and why the music of, say, Kendrick Lamar, though perfectly fine and well, somehow feels lacking. Look at it this way: in 2004, my dad called me with the express purpose of telling me about this rapper named 50 Cent who was shot like 13 times. Later that year, he insisted I download the Up In Smoke! DVD (which in itself was a veritable laugh factory) and watch it with him. And guess who beat Facebook to the punch in filling me in on the Kanye incident at the Grammys and Kanye's relationship with Kim Kardashian... yup, my dad, the retiree.
Forget my dad, my sister doesn't know who Kendrick Lamar is. And Pitchfork's elusive near-perfect rating for his album only serves to underscore how unimportant Pitchfork is.
