2.25.2004
Wax on, Wayne.
When Wayne Marshall isn't making music or studying it, he sends me emails like the one excerpted below. The latest entry in the neverending back-and-forth known as "The Politics of Theorizing How We Talk About the Politics of Jin tha MC in the Post-Eminem Era, Even Though His Record Will Probably Never Come Out." Hey, I love this stuff like a fat kid loves cake.
Seriously, Wayne has a pretty interesting take. If you couldn't tell, he's got mad knowledge of Jamaican music. Be sure to check his site, he has sound clips to substantiate all this.
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yo hua,
i'm sure you've been over this one again and again at this point, but i've been kinda fascinated with jin's "learn chinese" since i finally heard it last week. what really struck me was not the play to (ridiculously stereotyped) ethnic particulars that seems the common strategy for too many non-black MCs. what really struck me, of course, was jin's rather jamaican way of saying it.
i've been tracking a few jamaican musical memes, if you will, across time and space, and one of the more common ones starts with yellowman's "zungazung" and spins off into super cat, BDP, bounty killer, biggie smalls, black star, and joe buddens, to name a few. the same recurring phrase--although perhaps rather removed from any recognition of its source--turns up in jin's rhyme, though here it simply seems like an allusion to joe buddens's allusion to biggie smalls's allusion to yellowman (and i suspect that, in this chain, only biggie knew this consciously). the combination of this obscure(d) reference to king yellow, however, with an interpolation of his "mister chin"--reggae's "black korea," if you don't know it--seems significant enough to work its way into my chapter on this particular instance of circulation. "learn chinese" is a pretty awful song, i think, but interesting as hell. why wyclef decided throwing an orientalized version of that hackneyed "egyptian" melody over the james brown sample that DasEfx should have retired, and scream "bombaclaat" over the ending, is totally bizarre and explainable perhaps only as a lazy and uncreative production job, if a possibly savvy bit of marketing.
>>>
Seriously, Wayne has a pretty interesting take. If you couldn't tell, he's got mad knowledge of Jamaican music. Be sure to check his site, he has sound clips to substantiate all this.
<<<
yo hua,
i'm sure you've been over this one again and again at this point, but i've been kinda fascinated with jin's "learn chinese" since i finally heard it last week. what really struck me was not the play to (ridiculously stereotyped) ethnic particulars that seems the common strategy for too many non-black MCs. what really struck me, of course, was jin's rather jamaican way of saying it.
i've been tracking a few jamaican musical memes, if you will, across time and space, and one of the more common ones starts with yellowman's "zungazung" and spins off into super cat, BDP, bounty killer, biggie smalls, black star, and joe buddens, to name a few. the same recurring phrase--although perhaps rather removed from any recognition of its source--turns up in jin's rhyme, though here it simply seems like an allusion to joe buddens's allusion to biggie smalls's allusion to yellowman (and i suspect that, in this chain, only biggie knew this consciously). the combination of this obscure(d) reference to king yellow, however, with an interpolation of his "mister chin"--reggae's "black korea," if you don't know it--seems significant enough to work its way into my chapter on this particular instance of circulation. "learn chinese" is a pretty awful song, i think, but interesting as hell. why wyclef decided throwing an orientalized version of that hackneyed "egyptian" melody over the james brown sample that DasEfx should have retired, and scream "bombaclaat" over the ending, is totally bizarre and explainable perhaps only as a lazy and uncreative production job, if a possibly savvy bit of marketing.
>>>
