IT DIDN'T HAPPEN HERE

Back from Chicago, where I spent some quality time with M.F. Doom and inhaled something called "strawberry cough." Some odds and ends that won't make the final cut:

"I was into everybody. Alpha Flight was ill. Vindicator--they bodied him too early, he was an ill dude. Same with Sasquatch."

Have you ever heard that Boogie Boys diss track, 'KMD Step Off?'
"Oh word?"
Yeah, it's about Kool Moe Dee, but they use the KMD initials..
"Do they say his name or do they say KMD?"
They go (adopts gruff voice) KMD STEP OFF!
"(Cackles) That's hot. I might answer that. Make a diss record!"

When you say that everything is wack, what do you mean? What are you actually feeling these days?
"There's a couple people who ain't wack. Madlib ain't wack. Pete Rock ain't wack; that's my ni99a. Premo aint' wack. Guru ain't wack. The whole Wu is dope. Who else is not wack? Nas, he do his thing. Even the other genres'Kelis, she a good friend of mine, I love her music. This dude Kurt Elling, a jazz singer, he's ill, he's not wack, his music inspires me a lot too. Diane Reeves is a woman vocalist, she's not wack. It's like we're all kind of the same age, I look at what they're doing. Who else is not wack? Kurious he's not wack, he need to comeback. Talib ain't wack. Mos Def ain't wack. The whole Spitkicker crew ain't wack. My Rhymesayers fam ain't wack either. Everybody else is wack. (cackles)"

***

"This airplane takes twenty minutes to board but only ninety seconds to evacuate." - Flight attendant, coaxing us into paying attention to the pre-flight safety video.

***

-I thought I did, but prior to Sunday, I did not understand Daniel Dumile. I may have understood M.F. Doom or KMD or Monster Island, but that is nothing like understanding Daniel Dumile. I still don't understand him, but I think I know why.
-Speaking of which, I was reminded, as a result, that it is a lot easier to be all ho-hum yeah that's cool-noncommittal to rap when you don't actually come into contact with the grist. When your experience with the 'culture,' any 'culture,' is mediated through various scrims, it becomes easy to forget that, deep down, most of the people you respect are actually thoroughly depressing/depressed people, even if they don't see it that way themselves.
-I have a friend who works in the SF Giants' luxury suites, and he confirms that Willie Mays is one stingy dude. I understand this more nowadays. Kris "Big (pay)Days Ahead" Benson is getting rich because of you, just as you got paid on the backs of people who were paid even less than you, if at all. I understand why this might irk you.
-In contrast, rap provides no pensions.
-Which isn't to say Volume 10 or Willie McCovey deserve to be paid like Roger Clemens. Roger Clemens doesn't even deserve to be paid like Roger Clemens.
-Yeah. Fuck Clemens. Even if our ex-President Bush thinks the Rocket deserves to get paid because he's "a good guy."
-But I digress.
-It's not that critics should base their judgments on something soft and doughy like empathy. At times, though, I fear what we are letting happen. Happening to what? Compared to what? Who we? I don't know. It's just a feeling. Like the cloud from White Noise.
-I've been thinking about Greg's piece about hip-hop at age thirty, and the acid it inspired. Was it merely generational? And why do blogs seem to produce so much casual, petty hating? Is the proliferation of voice - of thinking out-loud, not actual thought or opinions - an unqualified good thing?
-Because by and large I find the blog world's armchair quarterbacking icky. For every thing that provokes me in a good way, there are three things that make me wonder, Would someone have really formed these words with their mouth, as opposed to their fingertips?
-Tangent: Why don't people close the door behind them when they walk into a cafe? You already know it's cold outside - you just walked through the damn door.
-Back to blogs, etc. While the bifurcation between twee/hothead might once have seemed weird inna college radio sort of way, the Younger Generation - bloggers, mainly - take eclecticism to that elusive "Next Level." I don't deny that they/you/we mean it, it's just so different now than when I was young, when most curious civilians were studied adherents to either Sonic Youth or NWA, and rarely the twain shall meet. Nowadays, that eclecticism - that Looking for the Perfect Playlist mentality - is the norm in a way it never was pre-Interweb. Not to say there aren't provincialisms - my Screamo-loving cousin, for example - I just wonder how I would relate to these things nowadays. Just a totally random, rather obvious thought.
-(Before you jump the cyber-handlebars, I'm saying most dudes back in the day were like that. Not that there weren't miscegenators, and a lot of them. They were just more diffuse, less the norm.)
-(And I think you see the result of all this in the culture writ large. Nowadays, there seem to be far more records out there produced by or for people nurtured by iPods rather than the elitism of single subcultures.)
-(I suppose this is why Pavement appealed to me. The sprizz and spray, the nonsequiturs, the smallness of it all - it sounded like a distress signal from kids marooned somewhere, with only a faint college radio signal for rations. It sounded like it had no idea what was going on in the rest of the world. I would have been ripped open by metal explosions if I had heard the Rapture or Bloc Party back then.)
-This, more or less, is something I like about how things are/will be. It's like when Bristol reconstituted hip-hop as Massive Attack and all that other stuff - something new (and possibly Hegelian) will come out of it, and it's a bit nearsighted for me to cling to the old provincialisms and past-due orthodoxies that irked me in the first place.
-But then I think about what I said up above, about how the Internet - the parts of it I check, at least - is largely an amoral place. When not amoral, they are anti-moral, which isn't like saying it's immoral.
-This is not an argument that there is a moral way to relate to music. They already dealt with these kinds of things.
-I'm going to stop this jingle jangle ramble. Unlike Doom, who inspired this runaway train of thought, my fingers are cold, not metal.
-One last thing: in re: the hint of trouble mentioned above. This is why I always skim (his flow is infinite, my time is not) Exo's blog. Because, more or less, I can't really associate with a lot of stuff out there, and Kris has been sent here to annoy us, to hate on haters. Ditto t h e m, a n d others (see right). You want to love it, but there's part of you that can't. Because that part of you knows that this book should be re-published, but few in 2005 would buy it anyway.

***



I'm not in love with Street's Disciple but it's compelling even in its foibles. He has that sound of someone who survived a near-death experience - it's like a clarity that takes on a didactic shape. Watching the 'Bridging the Gap' video it made me wonder how it must feel to love your dad but still be part of hip-hop, which sometimes seems fueled by exorcising a buried raging against deadbeat dads.

I interviewed Nas right around the time of Stillmatic. I think he and Kelis had just started dating. The interview took place in his hotel room. He was in a real shitty mood from being on a bus all day. A woman walked in and just splayed herself across the bed, listening to us talk - I didn't look at her, as I was too worried about Nas' defiant unpleasantness. The only thing that brought anything resembling a smile to Nas' face was when I asked him about Super Lover Cee and Casanova Rud or Poet or MC Shan's Audi, and he would look over to the woman, who I then noticed was Kelis, and ask, "You remember that? Super Lover Cee - 'Do the James?'" She would shrug her shoulders and then smile to me, "He always does this. He's like Mr. Trivia." Nas would laugh. Near the end of the interview, I asked him where he saw himself going in the next ten years, and he said he just wanted to be happy. He wanted to write screenplays and raise his seeds and eat grilled corn and be with a woman he loved, someone he could wife. He looked at Kelis, but at the time, it looked like he was looking right through her. His glare seemed icy, like she wasn't at all the one he was describing. Maybe it was just the weariness of riding on a bus all day. In retrospect, maybe I was the only one he didn't want around.

Labels: ACTUAL CONVERSATIONS