We Got To Write The Powers That Be

I am the Northern Alliance's Minister of Funk.

Damnation by faint praise, perhaps - but as far as I know I'm among very few christian conservative republicans that has ever worked as a rap DJ. In my day, I was called the Best Bald, White, Father-of-Two Rap DJ in the Twin Cities. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only former rap DJ in all of conservative talk radio.

So while I recoil in a bizarre mash of boredom and revulsion at what 99% of hip-hop is today - bling, b*tchez, benzos, blah blah blah - there's a small slice of hip-hop from the past 25 years that I geniunely love. Run-DMC, Flash, Monie Love, Erik B and Rakeem, Digital Underground, Rob Base, NWA, the DOC, the Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Qwest, Me Phi Me, old LL Cool J, Kanye West, Eminem, and most of all the great Public Enemy stuff from the late eighties - there's a lot of great stuff, and most of all it's all better than the nihilistic bilge that passes for most hip-hop today.

Established: I'm not a conservative who spurns rap by reflex.

Resolved: I'm not one to gag at the thought of the "Twin Cities Celebration of Hip Hop" festival, least of all at the behest of Tom Barnard and the KQ Morning Show. Barnard is a radio genius (yes, he is), not least of all because he reflects his audience's cultural icons (and does it naturally; people in the know tell me Barnard doesn't really like much of anything from after 1975).

So when Tom Barnard and the KQ Morning Crew start swerving into cultural criticism, I mentally turn the radio down. Barnard is about as articulate about rap as Phil Wise is about...anything.

And for all that, they're still better than Chris Riemenschneider's piece on the topic.

I don't give most music critics a lot of slack, of course; most of them are lousy writers whose facility as critics comes from partying with musicians. There are exceptions; Jim DeRogatis was a standout because he was a good writer and genuinely knew music.

I don't know if Chris Riemenschneider qualifies on either count because - in an admission that would have shocked me twenty years ago - I rarely read the music crit beat anymore. But this particular piece caught my eye.

My comments are inset in blue:

The KQRS-FM morning crew -- who, it goes without saying, know as much about hip-hop as Kanye West does about Lynyrd Skynyrd [But let's be honest; Barnard wasn't yakking so much about the music (not that he could, really) as much as mainstream hip-hop's well-deserved rep for thuggery, crass materialism and violence. What else does one need to know?] -- lambasted the Celebration on the air two weeks ago, after a man was shot outside Myth nightclub following the Lil' Wayne concert Aug. 8. Talk about guilty by non-association [Bollocks. The association is one those of us who live in the city have seen countless times; you get crowds of teenagers, many of them banger wannabees, together in one room and trouble erupts. Riemenschneider is either disingenuous or ignorant if he doesn't recognize that] .

Over a backdrop of gunshot noises, Tom Barnard & Co. went down the list of Celebration performers and ridiculed each name. You haven't heard the Spanish language butchered until you've heard Barnard pronounce Maria Isa. They also made fun of the nonprofit organization that puts it on, the youth-oriented Yo! the Movement [Well, it's kinda funny. It's argot, for starters. Argot is slang and jargon associated with a group of people - cockneys,soldiers, criminals, rappers, whatever. It's like a language within a language. And it's designed to exclude people who aren't part of the fraternity, while identifying and giving fraternity to those who are. It also sounds curious - faintly ridiculous, sometimes - to those who aren't part of the fraternity. Which Tom Barnard is not. Groovy, baby. Capisce? Ooorah - or is that Hooah?] . Then they predicted that there would be nine shootings at the event, three for each day. Oh, the laughs.

For the many, many local music fans and community activists who understand the Celebration's value, the stupidity of the KQ crew requires no explanation. But for those who don't know, their actions are comparable to a high school principal suspending a bunch of honor-roll students for being in the same gym class as some idiots who got into a fight [No, it's not. It's like questioning festival seating, in 1980.] .

"We've worked hard for five years to make this a positive event in every way," said Toki Wright, the local rapper and Yo! co-founder who directs the three-day festival.

Wright and the other young organizers behind the Celebration of Hip-Hop don't get any money/fame/glory off of the festival. They work their tail off so people their age and younger can experience the positive effects of hip-hop. You know: the powers of self-expression, working in a community, raising your voice, etc.

As someone who has attended three of the previous four Celebrations, I can definitively say they're extremely safe, wholesome (in a PG-13 way) and inspiring [Which is fine. More power to them. But you'd have to be a fool - or an overly-idealistic dogmatic music critic - to assume that the whole world is going to ignore hip-hop's larger image - an image the hip-hop industry pays a lot of money to promote, might I add.] . As someone who has attended a lot of KQ-sponsored events, I can also say that a crowd of break-dancing, baggy-pants-wearing kids watching Brother Ali is nowhere near as intimidating as beer-guzzling, mullet-headed 50-year-olds watching Ted Nugent or Alice Cooper. (Look, Mom, I can stereotype, too!) [Well, Chris, there was little doubt about that. But the simple fact is, not many people wind up shot, or dead, outside of REO Speedwagon gigs at the Fair. ]

Barnard's team might actually have done the Celebration a service, much like Monica Lewinsky did conservatives a favor. Even their timing was great.

Mainstream hip-hop is once again loaded with dim-witted thug rappers who glorify violence, or at least don't do much to denounce it. Case in point: Rick Ross' "Port of Miami," an album that went straight to Billboard's No. 1 last week, makes it sound as if life as a cocaine dealer in South Florida has never been better or more fun [Right. It was in the papers. So we should cut modern hip-hop a break with that in mind, right?] .

Wright staunchly believes, "You can't blame hip-hop for the bigger problems of society," but I don't think N.W.A.'s riotous commentaries from South Central L.A. can be equated to Ross' thug-praising party tracks from Miami [NWA's "riotous commentaries" - brilliantly done as they were - included uplifting bits like "F*ck Tha Police", "A Bitch Iz A Bitch", and lyrics like "AK-47 is tha tool, so dont' make me act the motherf*cking fool/me and you can go toe to toe, no maybe/I'm knocking niggaz off the block daily/yo weekly, monthly, yearly/til the punk motherf*ckas see clearly that I'm down with a capital CPT/boy don't f*ck with me..." ] . As for Lil' Wayne (who, coincidentally, was arrested on drug charges Monday), he's a culprit only of bland songs, not violent music, but his concert was still part of the lowest-common-denominator trend that pervades the genre nowadays [I'm sure that Chris Riemenschneider isn't edited in any way -more or less like Nick Coleman - which is why his piece manages to undercut its point and reinforce Barnard's point (which started the article looking justifiably weak, but is looking better and better, paragraph by paragraph] .

The Celebration of Hip-Hop is the highest common denominator [Knock wood!] . It's part of the solution. Its performers are thought provokers, not violence promoters. A lot of them are pretty amazing artists, too. Let's hope the one positive thing that comes out of the KQ crew's bashing is that more people will understand the difference.

Here's the difference that Chris Riemenschneider doesn't seem to understand; the artist on stage isn't really the issue. Crowds of idiots - race notwithstanding - are still idiots. It doesn't matter if they're a mob of drunk bikers outside the Whiskey, a clot of jacked up speed-metal kidz, a throng of hammered AC/DC fans (remember the kid who got stabbed to death outside the Met after an AC/DC gig in '86?), or a street full of teens flashing colors and showing what they got - are always something to be wary of.

Whatever the people on stage intended.

I wish the festival all the best.

Posted by Mitch at August 18, 2006 06:55 AM | TrackBack