"Bitch" Fight

Poking around on the internet this time of year (like specifically this time of year, i.e. post-holiday) always makes me breathe a bit easier, free as we now are of the various knots, loops, and information clots that are year-end lists. Why the list is the favored rhetorical device of the holidays, I can only venture to guess. Maybe some displacement of that Santa Claus fantasy we all harbor deep down (you know the one I'm talking about).

And everybody bitches about other people's lists, because everybody's own special list is just a little bit more special then that other guy's list who the first guy is bitching about, regardless of how interchangeable they all seem after you read about 20 of them. So maybe it shouldn't be that much of a surprise that Village Voicer Status Ain't Hood offered up this riposte to the Stereogum bitch-session about Pitchfork's year-end lists. The spleen-venting surrounding any mention of Pitchfork is business as usual, but the unusual amount of racial hand-slapping maybe signifies some kind of newly (re)upped-ante. People (either white or black) getting pissed about white people writing about black music is as old as, well, white people writing about black music, true, but the old argument is, "We (black musicians) don't need your white paternalism and condescension to 'explain' our music, thank you very much. And how would you know, anyway?" This new argument, at least in its Status / Stereogum articulation, seems to take one meta leap over and out of that frame, and somehow reconfigure itself as, "We (white critics) don't need you racist, white commentators to tell us how not to, or where not to write about black music."

The comments on Status address the problem more directly (and with a more racially diverse cross-section of respondents, I would guess), though most of it is just saying, "Rappers shouldn't be praised (or written about) because they (mostly Cam'Ron and Young Jeezy and the Clipse) say bad (i.e. misogynist, socially irresponsible) things," or "Rap should be praised, in spite of all those things, for its vital, creative use of language, and an ear for the rhythm of a line that is as sensitive as any poetry," but frankly nobody is really treating the problem seriously, I don't think. This is the old form vs. content argument par excellence, and it seems to me that without looking at the complex interactions between "form" and "content" (and, to head off criticism that I imagine would come my way, were anybody who cared about this problem reading right now, this can be done in a space outside the rip-tides and ice floes of academic prose), or in fact looking at them as valences of the same thing, it's going to be hard for anybody to do anything that is going to convice anybody of anything, as far as the ethics of a certain artform are concerned.

Let's also keep in mind that this is a familiar but weird debate about ethics. Familiar because, at its base, the argument about whether or not art that is both very good and profoundly disturbing / ethically questionable should be considered "valid" or "good" (or whatever) has been played out hundreds of times, from Bosch to Mailer. Weird because it essentially asks us how uncomfortable we will let art make us feel before we can no longer take it, or at least sanction it. Note the debate is never, "Should rappers be talking about bitches, bling, and blow?" but always, "How can you listen to rappers talking about that stuff and call it art?" In other words, censure rather than censor.

Obviously whether or not any of this bothers you, whether you can listen to Cam'Ron rap about rape on SDE, or the Clipse and Young Jeezy rap about dealing coke, depends on how you feel about the way all of this (admittedly reprehensible shit) references the real. That is, is it all just talk? Or does it matter once it hits the public, because any fib in service of a verse might as well be true, or a lie, so long as it sounds right? If the rhyme's autobiographical does that make it more wrong than a fictional rhyme, because the rhyme's origin is in a real crime? Are these the right waters in which to float your critical boat in this debate?

Theories of reference and signification don't really do much for a debate like this (or they get everything sort of muddled, like this unfortunate invocation of something called "free interplay" which Jacques Derrida supposedly made up [though it's more likely that Derrida borrowed a concept called "freeplay" from Claude Levi-Strauss (see "Structure, Sign, and Play" in every anthology ever)] [and plus I've got a whole 'nother thing to say about that Derrida / Dipset blog post]), or at least not if you invoke them explicitly. I'll stop short of saying the solution is something like a practical criticism informed by theory, accessible but not dumbed down. I'll stop short because it sounds a bit condescending, and a bit like some middle-class white guy trying to "explain" a music who relationship to reference he can only ever guess at, and whose proximity to said relationship is way, way too far gone. That's what I really believe, but I do think that such a belief is tempered by years of learning to think a certain way about culture and language, and in order for me to believe that I could have the right answer, I would first and foremost have to assert that I was right. That's something I can't do.