“It” is fife and drum, an African take on colonial English marching songs, and one of the oldest forms of distinctly American music, played by the slaves of Jefferson’s Monticello and still played today — by one family, once a year, at this, one of the last of the traditional farm picnics celebrating the end of the growing season. I first met Tamke earlier in the day, before the sun had gone down, when the party was still getting going. He sat beside me on a hay bale, friendly-like, and struck up a conversation. He introduced me to his father, John, who sat nearby in a wheelchair, his left leg amputated above the knee due to the ravages of Agent Orange (and who has since died). After coming home from Vietnam, Tamke Sr. became a local judge. Back in those days, he told me, it was a point of family pride to “take care of the minorities,” and he reminisced about his grandfather bringing him outside, 50 or 60 years ago, to hear the drum call the field hands to the picnic.
Blues Travelers - Adam Fisher, NY Times
So Kotaku ran a story the other day about Geeks in rap, which I thought it was pretty cool in the abstract. I’d thought for years now about how weird it is that guys who NEVER WOULD’VE BEEN CONSIDERED COOL when I was in high school (in the mid-90s) are completely owning the game now.
A lot of rap know it alls are coming and saying “geeks have always been in rap. This is not new. Author does not know rap.” I think they’re completely missing the point.
I think she’s making a good point about how mainstream rap is dominated by backpackers. She had to write that article for a base of people who probably don’t have a ton of exposure to rap (it’s Kotaku) and so, she had to give them Rap 101 and couldn’t write it for some HipHopDX/DatPiff/NahRight audience folks. She had to dumb it down a bit and embedded lots of links figuring that she was almost doing outreach. I appreciated this and understood what she was seemingly trying to do.
But to write back and say “Nuh Uh. What about Wu-Tang” completely misses the fucking point. Just a bunch of people getting all rappier than thou on someone. Because all I know is, the first time I saw Lupe Fiasco’s “Kick Push” video it tripped me out that he was legitimately skateboarding (ok, legitimately is a bit of an overstatement. But still…) in a rap video. These Odd Future kids are weird and Kanye’s success is mind-boggling at times…I’ve thought many of times, “it’s so weird that all of these nerds are really taking over rap.”
I came into rap late. I grew up around it, lived in the NYC metro area, but was not a fan at all until my late teens/early 20s. I just didn’t like the association and didn’t identify with it at all. It just didn’t seem to fit me and I avoided it almost always save for a few songs here and there. I certainly didn’t own any rap and I don’t feel like I missed out because in retrospect, the me back then really wasn’t enlightened enough to get it. I feel like I missed out on a broad array of music, but I’ve enjoyed digging in the crates over the past ten years to discover how much awesome stuff I missed. I appreciate it a lot more now.
Maybe if you grew up in rap, you take exception to anyone but a “true” hip-hop head writing about rap. But it reminds me of moving to a small town and always being considered “new” even if you’ve lived there for 40 years.
At what point does the experience of a person who picked up rap late get considered credible enough for them to weigh in on their experience?
@AdamSerwer @AlyssaRosenberg shorter Patricia Hernandez: “Rappers aren’t scary black people anymore!”
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) May 11, 2012
Aah, enlightened commentary always makes the conversation better.
Even if it means that their experience doesn’t match up with you as “hip-hop fan of knowledge and wisdom” considered to be authentic? But for so many of these fans it turns into this contest of “I’m more rap than you.” Ok, congratulations here’s your merit badge. Now can we consider the topic at hand? Or write a substantive rebuttal about the legacy of nerds in rap to provide even more exegesis for those newbies who will inevitably be attracted to dive in thanks to an article like this?
I didn’t really get into rap until some other black guys I met in the Air Force got me into it. How? They listened to much of the same rock I listened to. But also listened to rap. So they’d start me off with things I’d like and from there, I explored it no different than I’ve explored the myriad of other genres that I dig.
The bottom line is, the whole dust-up is just a bunch of people trying to pull out their rhetorical hip-hop encyclopedia browns to let us know how much better they are at rap. But it doesn’t change the premise of the story. She could’ve gone about it with a different approach that was less aiming to inform; but she knew her audience and I argue she tackled it well.
