More strange doubling…

What is X?

THIS IS HIP-HOP! from Airwave Ranger on Vimeo.

What is X?

Rap covers, more than rock covers, allow for the voice to take full prominence. The music is the same, pure karaoke. The orchestra is empty, and the great singer alone prevails. Or, in this case, the highly adaptive Mighty Mos Def brings his inexplicable magnetism—his jazzy nonchalance? his smiley-ness in the face of everything?—to the masked world of DOOM and Danger Mouse, two stars both less street and less pop than Def, but perhaps more engaging, at least for me.

DOOM raps the way Lovecraft writes: Both could give a fuck who’s paying attention. Both deny the real, without reason, without ideology, and proceed from there to construct a new, iller real—Sur-real. Imagination somehow frees these writers to face real terrors, to use the lingo of science to question our reliance on it, our devotion toward futurity in the face of an amazingly fucked up past.

Still, it’s nice to see Mos bring DOOM back to planet earth here. The silly mask, the faux-Asian smock, the unpracticed eliding of a few key DOOM throwaways (which elision only heightens the effect of the great couplets like “[caesura] Slip like Freudian, / you first and last step to playin yourself like accordion”)—all these only add to the mystery of the original.

DOOM, like Lovecraft, creates the basis of a new mythology within his medium, a new blend or mode of story, bravado, self-deprecation, Gothic body-signs (”This one he wrote in cold blood with a toothpick”), and scathing material objectivity about, well, the human predicament—doom.

Well-written as well as immaculately said…

Hilarious. My man Kool Keith—AKA Doctor Octagon AKA Master of Robots AKA a host of other names I elide here due to both space and mental health concerns—schools us all on how to rock the perfect fridge. The answer? Seltzer water. What the…

The foodstuffs Mr. Keith suggests we stock up on comprise a list that is not mad and is not an example of a Chinese Encyclopedia; the list makes perfect sense; it includes healthy shit and excludes sugary shit with mass appeal.

The madness of this list comes from Mr. Keith’s simulation of a preference for healthy food. Mr. Keith suggests that the only reason he likes healthy shit is a pragmatic fridge-protecting function. He has simulated himself a sort of Great Wall of China for his fridge, by which it cannot be effectively looted by his sugary-shit craving homeboys. He does not, “in reality,” like healthy shit, and yet he likes it in effect, pragmatically.

One day, I will co-teach a course on Kool Keith and simulation (with the ghost of Gilles Deleuze, who wears a backwards hat made from other hats, each of which is facing forwards).

Of the Literary variety. Danger! Adventure! Perhaps misadventure! Check it out: Literary Death Match. Thursday, May 20, at Bowery Poetry Club.

If you want to see me win this DEATH MATCH… buy some cheap tickets.

Here’s the party line:

Not for the faint of heart, LDM NYC’s 26th episode promises to tantalize and titillate your most sensitive literary bits. We’ve assembled an army of brilliant judges — literary renegade Richard Nash, subversive comedian Jena Friedman and blogger/author/goddess Paulina Porizkova — to hold sway over the unruly proceedings.

A hodgepodge of lovable deviants will battle it out on the Bowery Poetry Club stage, including Melissa Febos, author of WHIP SMART, King of Counterculture Mike Edison (High Times, Screw), devilish storyteller Wythe Marschall (representing Electric Literature), and laconic absurdist-or-is-he Mike Topp, author of Shorts are Wrong and Happy Ending.

And—holy shit—it’s a Culture Mob article about the show.

If you live in New York, perhaps you really should come and see me win, on behalf of my friends’ stellar journal, Electric Literature. I will be winning via a story about a cowboy. I have many of them. Devil I am. Words I pitch, via fork, into flames. Pass the flask. All I read is words. If I had a car or a chuck wagon, all I would do is ride around shining:

Some people are funny intentionally, some accidentally, and some somnambulantly, totally without “getting it.” The Room, for example, is today billed as a “dark comedy,” thought it was obviously a very serious investigation of romance (I guess?) and, uh, cancer (?) when it first sloughed dreadfully out of the mental womb of its creator, auteur Tommy Wiseau.

Likewise, I thought, I thought—Insane Clown Posse must be an in-joke that has no out. How can they possibly “get it,” I asked, and still be or do “it,” whatever it is?

The answer finally came when ICP’s hilarious new video about miracles crossed that invisible, difficult-to-pinpoint memetic threshhold and became a megahit on the internet, which is to say, a true megahit, not one manufactured by advertising. (Remember Chinese Democracy, anyone? I don’t.)

ICP had to face up to their essential paradox: A. Are they so counter-culture and, well, insane that they deny that “it” (their steez) is all some bizarre joke? B. Or are they aware of the joke—in on the joke? C. Or can they have it both ways?

This Dave Itzkoff article in the New York Times pretty much answers this in favor of C. I never paid much attention to ICP (I’m not a big goofy clown rap enthusiast, personally), but damn, I do like magnets and giraffes… (My emphasis.)

SHAGGY 2 DOPE, INSANE CLOWN POSSE: In 1999 we made a movie called “Big Money Hu$tla$,” and that went over great. Then we started kicking around the idea we should make a prequel: “Big Money Rustlas.” It’s the main characters’ ancestors in the Wild West. It’s a satire.

VIOLENT J, INSANE CLOWN POSSE: When we’re talking to the Juggalos, it’s not always about chop-chop, kill-’em-up, you know? I guess some of it might come from having kids over the last five years, looking at everything from that perspective. I mean, a rainbow can be explained. But who doesn’t say, “Wow, look at the rainbow?”

SHAGGY 2 DOPE: If Celine Dion would have come out with that song, people would have been, like, “Oh, that’s a beautiful song.” But because it’s coming out of our mouths, all of a sudden, we’re retards.

VIOLENT: J I think we might have misused the word miracle. These things we mentioned in the song, they can all be explained. But what we’re doing is appreciating them. Even the infamous line “Magnets, how do they work?” I mean, yeah, we know how magnets work. But they’re still incredible. You can push something across the table without touching it.

SHAGGY 2 DOPE: Come on, man. The North and South Pole makes a rock magnetic, and if you touch a piece of metal with it, that becomes magnetic? That’s crazy.

VIOLENT J: I grew up in Detroit. We don’t have pelicans on every corner. We don’t have giraffes walking down the street. I’d rather be the dumbed-down guy appreciating everything than the guy who knows everything and doesn’t appreciate [anything].

[But...]

VIOLENT J: Two clowns floating around in space, swearing, rapping about wonderful things. I get that that’s funny to an outsider.

VIOLENT J: I know this sounds crazy, but I’m being as honest as I can: We planned all this out. Our tour starts in May. And then we have our nuclear weapon, which is the movie “Big Money Rustlas.” That comes out in August. This is all happening so perfectly for us.

As a friend of mine pointed out, they are funny not because they are stupid, but because their list of miracles is incongruous. Magnets are cool. But how do you filter your list of miracles down to a few aspects of science and some animals uncommon to Detroit? I love this song because it spins the miraculous in a totally unexpected direction. Miracles are now neither religious nor scientific, human nor divine. They’re… insane.

So how does this miraculous incongruity work, literarily? ICP’s list of wonders is what Borges terms a Chinese encyclopedia—a list that cannot ever be coordinated, made sense of, or indexed, as a totality, even if each component makes total sense. So, yes, those things are all dope as fuck. Magnets, seabirds, long-necked mammals, optical effects, a pet cat (?), etc. But they can never really live on the same plane, in our minds. Hence hilarity.

The song is also an ultra-dope example of systrophe, or indirect definition, such as definition by an exhaustive list rather than by… a definition. This technique works, every time. People don’t respond as well to logical definitions (such as I just gave of 2 literary terms); people like examples, especially hilarious, exhaustive examples given to them by clowns with mental health concerns.

A miracle. Photograph by Keven Law.

Back to how songs I like function as texts, read on the screen or page, sans instrumentation…

Consider this pre-hip hop jam by the unsane Bob Dylan/Robert Zimmerman:

Subterranean Homesick Blues

Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine,
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government,
The man in the trench coat,
Badge out, laid off,
Says he’s got a bad cough,
Wants to get it paid off—
Look out kid,
It’s somethin you did—
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again—
You better duck down the alley way,
Lookin for a new friend,
The man in the coon-skin cap
In the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills,
You only got ten—

[Two more verses...]

Ah get born, keep warm,
Short pants, romance, learn to dance,
Get dressed, get blessed,
Try to be a success,
Please her, please him, buy gifts,
Don’t steal, don’t lift—
Twenty years of schoolin
And they put you on the day shift—
Look out kid,
They keep it all hid—
Better jump down a manhole,
Light yourself a candle,
Don’t wear sandals,
Try to avoid the scandals,
Don’t wanna be a bum,
You better chew gum—
The pump don’t work
Cause the vandals took the handles…

Here, the line breaks hardly matter, and the rhyme and meter are so irregular that it’s hard to say in what way they matter (though they certainly do).

Reading the song on the page or screen, I come away with a general sing-song-iness, and I am dazed, battered into accepting the stream of signs. It’s a very medial song, prefiguring McCarthy: The poor Kid gets told a dozen things by a dozen interlopers, none of whom has his interests at heart. The world consumes him, even taking the fucking handles off the pump. (And what does the pump pump? Water? Gas? I’ve always wondered.)

The next song I’d like to explicate is Lupe Fiasco’s “Daydream,” which deserves a vast, vast space.

Today, right now, I suggest writers of songs consider how their words are read, even as an exercise, and readers of words begin to read aloud, breath to breath, sign to sign, feeling the ideas glued to the instruments’ sounds separate and present themselves, one by one, in time.

The following is the first installment in a lengthy, madcap investigation of how songs I like function as texts, read on the screen or page, sans instrumentation. Prosodists, sharpen your metrical pencils.

She said, she said:
“Nothin’s wrong—and I belong on stage…”

—Ted Leo, “Hearts of Oak.”

Songs aren’t always satisfying poems when read on the page. Many songs lean heavily on the voices of their performers—how their performers breathe them forward into time, meter them into space, packet of sound-information by packet of sound-information, toward our ears. The signs of the song march along, one by one, and we assemble a meaning that is not purely textual (signal, verbal) but also sonic/phonic, playful, almost religious.

In some cases, however, the written song meanders back and forth between poetry (decent, if not mind-blasting) and something else entirely—prose that’s simply being fed to us at a certain clip.

This is one reason I like hip hop so much. It doesn’t try to achieve the lyricism of a great written or spoken poem. Let the rockers try to match Dante. Rappers ape another form entirely. Their songs are often political, usually essayistic, and almost never anything but prose, spoken in a quasi-meter, with a few forced rhymes to keep up the illusion of “song”-ness.

This isn’t a criticism of my favorite genre of music. Hip hop’s strategy of not having to be poetry pur sang is brilliant. It’s freeing. Hip hop sounds more powerful, not less, for giving back to the page the powers of the line, and giving back to the metric breathers the power of the rhyme and the accented/unaccented syllable.

What does hip hop retain? The ordered flow of signs.

Consider one favorite of mine—“Throw Your Hands Up” by 8Ball & MJG, featuring Outkast, an epic and wry anthem which steers an ostensible call-to-have-a-party back again and again into the political. Sure, the people should party, the song says, but they should also examine their roots, and how they’re allowed to communicate with/in the larger world… Leaving aside its grander themes, I like this song as a song. I wouldn’t want to read most of it in a book. But there are exceptions.

First, of course, there’s MJG’s immortal couplet: “Ham sammich in the driveway—drop top, / naked women in the den, playin—hopscotch.” Wow. Talk about an image that perfectly fuses effortless cool (eatin a sandwich, ignorin the party) with money (got my cool car, dropped its top, probably put some Ds on it) with sex (the women are naked, playin around) with jeu, the game, the perhaps unintended metaphor for hip hop (hopscotch—a jumping game, a game of metered movement, accompanied by sing-song, by proto-rap).

This couplet is strongly metered and so isn’t a great example of hip hop’s prosaic-poetic style of rhetoric, but it does strike at the heart of image control. It moves us sign by sign, image by image, toward a picture of MJG, a mosaic of the generic (post-jaded/post-carnival impresario, laid back southern rapper, sandwich aficionado) and the specific (MJG—who else rhymin about sandwiches?).

But the ruckus gets brought with André 3000’s verse:

You wouldn’t understand, if you stood under it—(Oooooh)
It’s like the more that I talk to you, the dumber that I get—
The closer that I walk to you, the further that we stand,
apart, distant. Nobody has the upper hand, but my body’s resistant—
So now, throw your phalanges in the ground.
I’m still abound. Unbelievers stay from hell around.
I found negatives n*ggas, they only keep you down.
Transmitting from Native American burial grounds,
I carry around the weight of all worlds on my shoulderpads.
I’m s’posed to blast space invaders: I’m somebody’s dad…

This is complex imagery laid out complexly, via enjambment (spilling over, line to line). There’s almost no song-like meter (meaning the meter of the song is the natural meter of English prose)—at least, so far as I read these words on the page or screen.

The rhyme scheme is simple, and it’s nicely buried by enjambment and echoes and the effect of the images, which concatenate, compiling future and past (video games and Native American burial practice), to create a moment-by-moment, modern consciousness—a fully realized portrait of a writer bound up in details and vexed by many of his listeners’ failure to reform their lives in full honor of his words.

The imagery speaks prose-poetically to this frustration of the generator at his consumers: First, let’s ask ourselves what it means to be “abound.” Wiktionary gives us a hint: “To be plentiful; to be very prevalent; to overflow.” And: “To be copiously supplied; to be wealthy in; to teem with.” The example given, “Where sin abounded grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20), is enlightening in that it situates the word in a religious context. André likewise compares himself to “unbelievers.”

We also have “abound” emanating out of “abounden,” from “abonder” (Fr.), “abundare” (Lat., “to overflow”), all the way back to “ab” + “unda“—the latter meaning “wave” (think of the water-spirits called the undine). We have the verb of abundance overflowing out of the simple sign of the wave. Then we have this ultra-abundant verb being frozen in noun form—indeed, in the form of a living dude—by the frustrated writer. He’s still abound. He’s vexed but still the generator, still the verb, made flesh.

Beyond the incarnate verb, we have the notion of the world’s weight, of Atlas’s burden (the mic—mediality—gripped by titanic phalanges), which speaks to the flipside of stardom: When not eating sandwiches with fine women, the rapper is a target, abandoned continually by his shifting, gadfly fanbase. He is, to boot, in the end, a father as well—a real man, as complex and human as he is simplistically in control, generator and “overstander.”

Throughout, the cadence of the words—long pauses devolving into fast runs, runs carried over into the next lines—guides us from thought to thought at such as speed that we can read the words any number of time without being able to settle on a center or focus.

This rap is flat, merging with what comes before and after it (the chorus—heavily metered, political, a chant, a beautiful thing to listen to but in a different sphere of art from this prose-poetic verse).

The words here merge seamlessly with the chorus even as the chorus demands that we throw our hands up in appreciation… appreciation of a verse about how we’re not getting it, we’re wrapped up in the wrong things, trapped by the wrong signs… Let’s give the guy an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

In the next 100% FREE future golden American ambitious installments of this pseudo-column, Reading The Song, we find: “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” indie rock, Lupe Fiasco’s “Daydream,” Iggy Pop, the early and impeccable Jigga, & much, much more…

Bob Dylan is from another planet, a distant heavenly sphere on which it is always Christmas. He earns an Honourable Badge of Merit for this festive gem of festive gems, a very merry polka-zydeco chase sequence:

Now back to my regularly scheduled fare of Shostakovich, hip hop, and electro from other dimensions. Advised listening:

“Hold the Line” - Major Lazer

“Deadbeat Summer” - Neon Indian

Flying Lotus’s impeccable remixes of Lil Wayne

“Popular Demand” - Lupe Fiasco

Happy Festivus from Atlanta.

Frappez, Entrez, Rompez Tout.

(”Strike, Enter, Break Everything,” Fr.)

This title is so hard, it forces our imaginary troubadour to venture into new psychic realms for rap material, such as the realm of real space beer you can actually buy.

Space Wasted.

Many moons back, my friend Seth, who writes under the nom de plume “Sparrow Hall,” asked me to work with my friend Sam, the rock paragon behind the bands Arpline and Courtier, to create a tripped-out hip hop song for the soundtrack to Sparrow’s new… novella?

He wants a soundtrack to a story? I thought, remembering McSweeney’s #6, for which They Might Be Giants and a few other decidedly un-crunk musicians created a soundtrack, one designed to exactly complement the stories in the journal from front cover to back.

But Seth’s idea is more grand in scale: He wants to publish stories and books that involve rich multimedia packages, including songs, videos, dances, &c., each of which reflects rhizomatically the progenitive central piece (in this case, a novella about love and memory loss called Two Blue Wolves).

I had a blast making “Stranger In The Strangest Land,” the ant-mentioning ekphrastic song-about-the-novella with Sam. I also ended up editing the novella.

And now it’s all finally available, on SparrowHall.com. Check it.

The soundtrack features music by a dude from Elefant and many other fascinating artistic souls, including several good friends.

Also, 15% of sales benefit the Alzheimer’s Foundation.

So once more, Gentle Reader, I murmur “check it” into the windy crevasse of the internet. Stories have finally entered the post-postmodern age.

In “D.O.A.,” Jay-Z seems to ask of abusers of Auto-Tune, “Have you left no sense of decency?” We applaud him for his demanding that hip hop not devolve into a succession of fads, each one geared more blatantly at tween girls and their ringtone-money.

The Times points out that Jay-Z’s song has, rather than killing Auto-Tune software, helped spur it to record sales. Hova alone is not to blame. The “Auto-Tune the News” guys and Vimeo are also responsible, as are hordes of wack MCs and would-be humorists with access to Auto-Tune, Flash, and the interwebs.

And yet the Auto-Tune debate isn’t just about fad-ism, I think. Whether or not certain artists use Auto-Tune will be largely irrelevant in a few years. What counts, at least to Jay-Z, is that everyone care what Jay-Z thinks. In his role as the living avatar of hip hop (a role I acknowledge even if Dre3000 is a better rapper, or DOOM more adaptive and fun), Jay-Z must fight for tradition—for any tradition. Public figures must generally either court controversy (as does Eminem) or play the role of the conservative mother-father, the defender of good ole-fashioned common sense about subject X, whatever it is.

(Ever a step ahead of Jay, the incomparably paranoid and too-often-hated-on Nas, with Nick Cannon, recently released this bizarre video trumpeting the upcoming End Times of hip hop, when all rappers will have sold their souls to their corporate overlords.)

But part of the fun and challenge of being public figure in America is straddling lines. How do you come off as a defender of tradition without being stodgy, and how do you challenge norms without annoying your audience? Can you have it both ways?

Jay-Z and all current celebrity artists and thinkers should take a page from another great American publican, a lady’s man with a burly-chic, an avant-garde businessman, a powerbroker with unimpeachable (cobblestone) street cred who went by the name of Bennie “Almanac-Mackin” F-lin. Bennie’s roundly and deservedly honored today by Maria Kalman, who earns an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

By way of coda: Writing of the Almanacker makes me think of another portly, famous public figure, one not so deft at juggling conflicting images as Franklin or Hova. While Franklin or Hova might get nasty on mulled wine or designer drugs, they’d probably keep it a secret. They’d support liberal politicians and attack wack new sounds, be those sounds pressed to wax cylinder or MP3.

Orson Welles, on the other hand, blazed too quickly, spending his cultural cash early in his private war against William Hearst, and ending his life a crazy-eyed drunk, like a slurry, overweight Dracula. I love the man, but really. The footage speaks for itself.

Fans of bizarre rap already know and love hyphy, a micro-genre from the Bay Area which is… well, bizarre. Suffice to say, hyphy is fun music. Think high-pitched noises. The 1990s. Artists like Keak Da Sneak, Mac Dre, E-40 (musically, if not categorically), and New York’s own DJ Eleven of the Rub.

Perhaps a clear introduction to the form is a song created from chopped-up sections of the Ghost Busters theme. Gentle reader, I present via hyperlink and heartily endorse “Ghost Ride The Whip” by Mistah Fab, a song about driving slowly while standing on your car, looking fly, wearing unexpected vestment, maxing/relaxing, &c.

Importantly, hyphy, a word Keak coined, is pronounced “high-fee,” not “hi-fi.” I hope an intrepid etymologist, philologist, or linguist (preferably Language Log’s Geoff Pullum) can one day trace in full the evolution of hyphy’s pronunciation. Until then, I classify it a minor, enjoyably diverting mysterium. Oakland’s version of my own hometown’s crunk.

MEANWHILE: The Sci Fi Channel needed a new look, a new steez, if you will. Some branding genius was banging his head against the wall. How could he ever possibly hope to make sci fi less, well, sci fi?

(Tangent: Fantasy got Peter Jackson, hot elves, lovably queer hobbitses, and a Halo-worthy final bodycount of about 90 million orcs dead, 1 Vigo scuffed. But the genre of speculative or science fiction has had to endure an endless parade of movie or television franchises resurrected in hideous zombie form. In fact, the only growth area in science fiction, at least in terms of massively popular culture, has been that of the zombie—though near-future vampires seem due for a New Orleans-inspired/tween-financed comeback.)

What was Sci Fi (the channel) to do? The answer, according to our hypothetical branding whiz, was to change its name to something unpronounceable and enigmatical: SyFy. I saw this word, this neoloogyism, in brilliant largeness on a poster at a bus stop and read it “sigh-fee,” because of hyphy. I read the copy around the word and found out that it is pronounced “sigh-fi,” as in “sci-fi” the genre, as in “Sci Fi” the channel. I shook my head and thought immediately of Mac Dre (RIP) and the other under-sung exponents of innovation and, yes, speculation in hip hop.

Zombies are all well and good. Sci Fi getting a metaphorical haircut to attract a new demographic is all well and good. But companies seeking to foster innovation in that strange zone between future-reading and art, between astrology and entertainment need to do more than simply repackage old concepts.

What Sci Fi et al need is the sort of willing-to-defy-popular-trends spirit that inspired Firefly, that inspired hyphy, that inspired crunk, that inspired the first rap records, and before that the first jazz jams in some broke dude’s basement in some hood I’ve never heard of, and before that Debussy, and Shelley, and so on, and so forth, back to the first cave-nerd to draw a Cubist bison fucking a waterfall.