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NAS_ONE_LOVE
July 26, 2020
The Nas "One Love" from 1993, tells
a story about giving a 12 year old https://genius.com/Nas-one-love-lyrics
drug-dealer advice on murdering
rivals:
"I had to school him, told him don't let niggas fool him
‘Cause when the pistol blows
The one that's murdered be the cool one
Tough luck when niggas are struck, families fucked up
Coulda caught your man, but didn't look when you bucked up
Mistakes happen, so take heed, never bust up
At the crowd, catch him solo, make the right man bleed
Shorty's laugh was cold-blooded as he spoke so foul
Only 12, tryin' to tell me that he liked my style"
"Left some jewels in his skull that he can sell if he chose
Words of wisdom from Nas: try to rise up above"
This is pretty nasty shit, but then, that's actually the
point of it, isn't it? It would be easy enough to waggle
your finger at how bad this gangsta rap is, and wonder what
effect it has on today's youth, but that's exactly what the
Nas is talking about...
Still, I wonder about Ta-Nehisi Coates waxing
lyrically about these lyrics:
TA-NEHISI_STYLE
"His advice is beautiful, which is to say it is
grounded in the concrete fact of slavery. That
was how I wanted to write-- with weight and
clarity, without sanctimony and homily. I could
not even articulate why. I guess if forced I
would have mumbled something about 'truth.' What It's not The Truth,
I know is that by then I had absorbed an it's not even The
essential message, an aesthetic, form Nas and Truth of urban
from the hip-hop of that era. Art was not an blacks-- it may very
after-school special. Art was not motivational well be *a* truth,
speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no but it's not the
responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic or whole truth.
make anyone feel better about the world. It must
reflect the world in all its brutality and Art need not be
beauty, not in hopes of changing it but in the sentimental or
mean and selfish desire to not be enrolled in its hopeful, but it's
lie, to not be coopted by the television dreams, allowed to be.
to not ignore the great crimes all around us."
Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Eight Years in Power" (2017), p.88
Ta-Nehisi Coates is presenting what strikes me as a
young man's take on the verse, identifying with the
ice cold 12 year old, perhaps even taking him as an
example to emulate, and missing the tag line:
"try to rise up above"
Not to mention that (possibly
ironic) refrain highlighted by
the title: "One love".
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a big defender of hip-hop
culture and "gangsta rap" and regards the claims
of it's pernicious influence as very dubious:
Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Eight Years in Power" (2017),
p.27 "This is How We Lost to the White Man":
"In particular, Cosby's argument-- that much of what
haunts young black men originates in post-segregation
black culture-- doesn't square with history. As early
as the 1930s sociologists were concerned that black
men were falling behind black women. In his classic
study, _The Negro Family in the United States_,
published in 1939, E. Franklin Frazier argued that
urbanization was undermining the ability of men to
provide for their familes. In 1965-- at the height of
the civil rights movement-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan's
milestone report, 'The Negro Family: The Case for
National Action,' picked up the same theme."
Is the point then just that Cosby has his timeline wrong?
The fact that a line is familiar and
has been used long ago doesn't Don't you need to talk about what was
*necessarily* discredit it: they *actually happening* using historical
might've been right both times, or and sociological data where possible,
wrong back then but right now. rather than quote critics complaints?
This reminds me a bit of critics
like Cory Robinson, who want to
use textual analysis of pundits
of days gone by to tell you about
trends in Conservative Thought--
when it could be it just tells
you about trends with pundits...
(presuming he's not just selecting
bits that confirm his thesis).
"At times, Cosby seems willfully blind to the
parallels between his arguments and those made in DAYS_OF_OLD
the presumably glorious past. Consider his
problems with rap. How could an avowed jazz
fanatic be oblivious to the similar plaints once This seems a fair
sparked by the music of his youth? 'The tired description of
longshoreman, the porter, the housemaid and the some troubles in
poor elevator boy in search of recreation, seeking the 1920s... And
in jazz the tonic for weary nerves and muscles,' the parallels
wrote the lay historian J.A. Rogers, 'are only too with the 1990s
apt to find the bootlegger, the gambler and the seem fairly
demi-monde who have come there for victims and to clear. In
escape the eyes of the police.'" arguing against a
"glorious past",
Coates seems to
be inadvertantly
establishing a
syndrome.
"Beyond the apocryphal notion that black culture
was once a fount of virtue, there's still the
charge that culture is indeed the problem. But
to reach that conclusion, you'd have to stand on
some rickety legs. The hip-hop argument, again,
is particularly creaky. Ronald Ferguson, a
Harvard social scientist, has highlighted that an
increase in hip-hop's popularity during the early
1990s corresponded with a declining amount of
time spent reading among black kids. But gangsta
rap can be correlated with other phenomena, too--
many of them positive. During the 1990s, as
gangsta rap exploded, teen pregnancy and the
murder rate among black men declined. Should we
give the blue ribbon in citizenship to Dr. Dre?"
Yeah, yeah, correlation and causation and all--
Myself I'd want a comparison to the
trends in reading among kids who I'd also want to see some awareness
aren't gangsta rap fans. of past anti-social genres, the
Edward G. Robinson/George Raft
period of gangster movies, "Bonnie
and Cylde", and the great
blaxsploitation era of the 70s...
But isn't there too much in Ta-Nehisi Coates writing
here that's relying on verbal flourishes rather than
doing any kind of solid analysis?
"apocryphal notion", "rikkety legs"
He's got one solid point: gangsta rap was on the
rise when other things were getting better-- The bad old days
which suggests it was describing the bad old while we were still
days of the 80s. burning a lot of
leaded gasoline.
LEAD_DOWN
I went through phases where I was inclined go
to with something like the case Cosby makes-- RACE_DOWN
let's say "Modern Black culture has problems".
Though myself, I never thought much about
Cosby's rants one way or another--
I did see Aaron Macgruder's take on them
from "Boondocks", (from memory):
Grandad: What's going on with Cosby?
Huey: Black people drove him crazy.
Grandad: Lord.
You can recognize that Crosby was being a cranky old man
and yet also concede there might be a point buried in there.
About the Boondocks strip:
Huey and his younger brother embodiments of two
threads running through black culture:
(1) Huey clearly references Huey Newton and the
Panthers, that's the intellectual/political line
going back through Malcolm X and James Bladwin;
(2) the younger brother is a kid sold on gangsta
rap, he's determined to go around posturing like
someone living the thug life, though we might
hope he never really goes there.
Then you know, there's hip-hop that's critical of gangsta
culture too-- e.g. Killer Mike objects to glorifying drug
deals (not to mention trashy butt-shaking)...
In the Killer Mike rap video "reagan", he goes off on
a long tangent critical of hip-hop-- his take seems to be
that the Reagan admin is guilty of creating the crack
epidemic, but hip-hop is guilty of playing along with it:
our people starve from lack of understanding
cause all we seem to give them is
some ballin' and some dancin'
and talkin about our car and imaginary mansions
we should be indited for bullshit we incited
(graphic: woman shaking her gigantic butt)
we sell the children death and pretend that it's excitin
we are advertisments for actively (?) in pain
we destroy the youth, we tell them to join the gang
we tell them dope stories, introduce them to the gang (?)
(graphic: guys trading suitcases of weapons and drugs)
just like oliver north introduced us to coccaine
in the 80s when the bricks came on military planes
Ta-Nehisi Coates alludes to voices like
this but only dismissively as "black
conservatives"... CLASS_VS_RACE
What I'm trying to get at:
there's a left-vs-right view
of the world that might also
be worth considering, as
opposed to black-vs-white.
Of course: white guys like myself *love* to quote
black people criticizing black culture-- look
around for some reviews of "Do the Right Thing"
some time-- and Coates would make the point that we
like this stuff for obvious reasons, it let's us
off the hook, and downplays the things that were
and *still are* being done *to* black people
directly by the "white power" faction and
indirectly via "systematic racism"...
I think you can also make a contrary claim: Coates
wants to reduce everything to a simple us-vs-them,
black-vs-white reading of the situation.
Coates has always liked "gangsta rap"--
to him it registers as The Real Truth.
To me, though "gangsta rap" just seems
like macho posturing, just more posing,
talking up how tough and nasty you are.
Because no one wants black guys to be
anything else, do they?
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