The Battles Of G-Baby →

I have a story in the new issue of the Texas Observer. It’s the first in the magazine’s new monthly format, which is exciting — previously, the magazine ran bi-weekly, so this one will be on stands for twice as long.

The story is about Whitney Perkins, who raps under the name G-Baby. I first met Whitney when I was sitting in on a performance/sharing at Travis County Correctional Complex — Kat teaches theater classes to women incarcerated there, and she invited me to see their end-of-term project. Whitney was definitely the most charismatic performer that day, but I was still very surprised to see her retire a 5-time champion on 106 & Park’s Freestyle Friday a few months later.

The article is about battle rap, and sexism and homophobia in hip hop, and Whitney’s completely indomitable spirit. I’m pretty proud of how this one came out — give it a read, will you?

A challenge for music writer friends!

Every time you file a story about Odd Future and whether we should take them seriously and the conflict you feel about the fact that Tyler is so good but so awful at the same time, and how great art can be destructive and reprehensible but probably still great — let’s also be sure to file a story about a woman or a gay person who makes music, too, cool?

Because if all of the energy we spent blogging about and contemplating Odd Future and the meaning of misogyny and homophobia in art was matched by energy championing the people who are marginalized by those things, then our hand-wringing has the potential to be about changing them, at least to some extent, instead of just growing this kid’s influence by making him the only thing people want to talk about.

I’ll play if you will. What do y’all say?

Common and Childish Gambino and Karl Rove and me.

“Yes, let’s invite a misogynist to the White House.”

— Karl Rove on Common’s appearance at the White House poetry event.

This has all been super weird. I don’t believe for a second that any of the conservative outrage regarding Common has come from anyone who’s even dimly aware of Common’s recording career. I am fairly certain that anyone who’s outraged by the fact that “a misogynist” was invited to the White House (like Common is the first one EVER to get that phone call!) got a context-free crash-course in Common’s lyrics over the past week, at best, and is just making assumptions because he’s a rapper, more likely. If people are going to whine about “the race” card when they’re called out for describing Common as “a thug,” then it’s really, really clear that it’s just an attempt to silence people, because the real racism is pointing out racism. “Oh, I hadn’t even noticed he was black when I said that!”

That said: I kinda agree with Karl Rove a little bit here. Which is weird! But so much of the outrage-to-the-outrage has revolved around the fact that this is Common! He’s one of the good guys! And I get it — socially-aware hip hop fans have pointed to Common as a shining star for over a decade. I mean, I’m talking about myself there — I used to love H.I.M. I quoted the dude in my wedding vows. But this kerfuffle has reminded me of something I’ve been putting off writing about for a while now, at least since I interviewed Donald Glover a couple months ago. 

Which is: I think it’s actually worse for me when someone who’s thoughtful and insightful and expresses viewpoints I relate to starts dropping thin misogyny than when it’s over-the-top, Nate Dogg or Odd Future shit. That’s a thing that really bothers me about Glover — as a comedian, he says a lot of things that I think are insightful and perceptive and challenging. As a rapper, meanwhile, he says a lot of shit like “cumming on her face” and “fuck a bitch to pass the time” and “I’m a rapist!”

So when I got the chance to talk to him in March, I asked him about it. His answer wasn’t really satisfying — basically, he got kind of defensive and made excuses, and then his publicist pulled him away because he had to shoot a video thing, and when I asked a follow-up after he came back, he took the question in another direction (incidentally, he talked about his defensiveness about being called “faggot,” where he was once more thoughtful and making decent points). I’m never quite clear, with entertainment journalism, how much you’re supposed to poke these issues. I know that I am very interested in Donald Glover’s misogynistic lyrics, but I don’t think my editors particularly want an interview that’s 1500 words of me trying to get him to admit that he’s full of shit. Furthermore, he’s not on camera — he can always blow me off if he doesn’t like the questions. So in this case, I took the fact that he didn’t really engage with the questions to mean that I needed to move on to something else. Which means I never got at what bothers me, which is this: When you have a guy who has obviously given some real thought to the social forces at work behind gender issues — one of the “good guys” — and then he starts dropping this sort of casual misogyny, he’s saying some ugly things about the concept of being a responsible dude. He’s saying, A, that it’s a part-time job, and B, that at the end of the day, it’s still totally cool to cut loose and go on about all the bitches you want to fuck.

I’m not a prude. I recognize that Glover is a single dude in his 20’s who is suddenly rich and famous and who is rapping about his life. I don’t think that there’s anything inherently wrong about rapping about horniness — when he drops his line about how he wants to “fuck small girls / minus SM / meaning fuck all girls,” I’m not sure he’s doing anything besides honestly talking about himself. It’s the “fuck a bitch to pass the time” shit, where he’s so obviously posturing in a way that’s actually dishonest that bothers me. Because if you’re a thoughtful, insightful dude who’s socially conscious and who talks about women respectfully, you gotta drop a no homo in there somehow, right?

And I don’t think that was ever more clear to me than on Common’s verse on “Make Her Say” by Kid Cudi. The song is awful — I love Cudi’s first record, but that’s not a highlight of it, with a lazy, obviously lying-around Kanye beat and sleepy rapping from Common, Kanye, and Cudi — built around the fact that the words “poker face” sound like the words “poke her face.” Like with your dick!

But Common’s verse is offensive even within offensiveness. Because he is so quick to dismiss everything that made people like him to express this shit. “They say, ‘you be on that conscious tip,’” he raps, “Get your hair right and get up on this conscious dick!” And — man! What a bummer. Because that’s the point he’s making, expressly and explicitly — just because he’s got a reputation as a socially conscious guy, that doesn’t mean he’s not willing to treat women like total shit. Haha, poke her face! Because it’s not about horniness — it’s about violence.

And so when Karl fucking Rove starts talking about how wrong it is to invite a misogynist to the White House — because lord knows we’ve never done that before! — I want to be able to point to the guy who wrote “The Light” and “I Used To Love H.E.R.” and say that he’s obviously full of shit. But I can’t, because even the leading example of what a progressive, conscious rapper is can be accurately characterized with that word. And I fucking hate agreeing with Karl Rove.

Mr. Lif's Kickstarter Campaign →

Kickstarter campaigns are tricky. Generally, my rule of thumb for good ones include low-dollar pledges that cost about what I would expect to pay for the project when it’s completed. If I’m pledging to the record you’re trying to record, I want the album for about $10-$15, not just a thank you card; if you’re putting on a play, my $25 ought to get me something close to a pair of tickets. I’m sure the point of the site isn’t strictly to do pre-orders, but it makes sense to me to think of it that way.

Other campaigns completely run out of steam after the first $50 or so in rewards are gone. Like, maybe they offer the chance to travel from anywhere to see the play, or whatever, but you could just buy your own plane ticket and go see it for cheaper — since the point of Kickstarter isn’t charity, it’s tough to find the right rewards.

But this new campaign by Mr. Lif? Wow, did they find great rewards. The first $100 worth are kinda iffy — concert tickets and CDs look a little overpriced, honestly. But you hit $150, and suddenly you’re talking an afternoon in the studio, a credit in the liner notes, and free tickets to every show he (or Brass Menazerie, his collaborator) is playing in the next year. An afternoon in the studio with Mr. Lif? I met him at SXSW a couple years ago when we did an interview, and he’s a pretty awesome dude to be around. Sounds like a pretty good deal. Make it $500 and you get all that plus an invite to a private show, with dinner made by the members of Brass Menazerie.

Or you can up it to $850, and the newest collaborators on your next recording are Mr. Lif and Brass Menazerie. Lif will drop a verse and the band will punctuate whatever you’re working on with horns and percussion. Which is awesome. I mean, $850 is not very much money, when you’re talking music production. A guest verse by Mr. Lif, who is not a lazy rapper, is pretty reasonably priced there. But more than that, what makes this such a neat campaign is that they’re not treating the fans who’ll fund the project as a weird little money farm. The thing that makes Kickstarter exciting is that it replaces the middlemen and gives people the chance to participate in the process of creating art. And part of that process has always been that the people with money have access — the label dudes could drop in on the studio when they needed to, and if their investment in you was heavy, they could convince you to contribute on an upcoming artist’s track. The perks always included being able to go to a show whenever it was happening, private parties, and things like that. I mean, that’s why people get into the business side of it — because they want to feel cool and be included in the behind-the-scenes shit.

There’s something remarkable about the fact that they’ve figured out a way to offer that to fans, in a crowd-sourced campaign like this. Maybe there aren’t a ton of aspiring MCs or producers with $850 to drop on a collaboration with Mr. Lif and Brass Menazerie, but I’d be interested in hearing what they produce, if they do.

Some Thoughts On Lauryn Hill →

Also at the A.V. Club, I recapped Lauryn Hill’s show at Stubb’s from Sunday night. It was a weird night for a few reasons, but probably the main one was the fact that it coincided with the news about Osama Bin Laden. Joe Gross, the Austin American-Statesman music writer, made that the focus of his review of the show, while I left it out of mine. I understood his impulse to do so, though — while the spot in the venue from which I was standing was full of people really super excited about Ms. Hill, I had an eye on Twitter from the moment I got a text informing me that Obama would be giving a “national security speech” at 9:30 on a Sunday night, and I doubt I was the only one. (From Gross’ seat, it seems that was all anyone was doing.)

Anyway: A few thoughts on Lauryn Hill, the concert, and that stuff.

• At a show like this, I really have to make a concerted effort to recognize that my show-going experience is different from most people’s there. They paid for their tickets, and I didn’t, and these were not cheap — it cost $55 plus fees to get through the door at Stubb’s. Also, when I go to a show like that, I am very aware that I am at work, and it is usually quite nice to realize that my job, right now, is to watch Lauryn Hill play and not to be loading trucks or pushing buttons on a cash register anymore. I try to keep that perspective and the privilege that I enjoy in my mind as I am writing about the show, because it feels like failing to do so is disrespectful to people who paid to go for fun.
• Which is maybe why my review of the show is pretty strongly in the Lauryn Hill is really great, y’all vein, and not grousing so much as the people who commented at the Statesman write-up? Because those people are kinda pissed.
• But I also wonder if those people are pissed because there’s a narrative around Lauryn Hill now, which is: She is late to her shows, she hates her fans, her performances are sloppy, she’s frizzy-haired, she’s a mega-diva, etc. And so when those things that you’ve been told are confirmed for you in any capacity, you respond with outrage, because we’ve decided that being outraged at Ms. Hill’s is appropriate.
• But is it? I mention in my write-up of the show that she wasn’t really late to the stage. For a one-person bill at Stubb’s, 8:40 is a more-than-reasonable start time. The doors to the venue opened at 7pm. Typically, the first act goes on at 8pm. The second opener around 8:40, and then the headliner about forty minutes later. They play for a little over an hour, and the show’s over. It’s a formula. In Ms. Hill’s case, the DJ came out to warm up the crowd at 8:40, and began the extended process of setting the stage for her set. The band came out, then the backup singers, etc. It took 40 minutes, yeah, but she wasn’t late — she was making an entrance.
• So why’s everybody so angry at her? Why’s she got this reputation?
• If you’ve been reading my blog for a little while now, you might have a clue where this is going: I suspect strongly that Lauryn Hill gets all of this negativity sent her way for the manner in which she presents herself because she’s A) a woman and B) a black woman.
• Because let’s face it: This is all Big Rock Star behavior, and if the person engaging in said behavior looks like our image of a Big Rock Star, we eat that shit up. We love the story about Van Halen wanting the brown M&M’s removed from the dressing room. The entire country of England forgave the Gallagher brothers any number of behaviors that could charitably be called “diva-like.” Neil Young is weird and cranky and doesn’t care if his fans like him. If Julian Casablancas is short with the waiter, people aren’t all, “Julian Casablancas is the worst dude ever!” They’re excited, because he’s acting like a rock star.
• But that’s not what we’ve decided Lauryn Hill is. We’ve decided that she’s a diva, and that is a bad thing, even though it means the exact same thing as rock star, it’s just that one term is for white dudes and the other term is for ladies of color. She has it written into her tour rider that she must be called “Ms. Hill” backstage? Do you ever wonder how much disrespect Lauryn Hill has probably been the recipient of that, say, Damon Albarn never has to deal with? If she’s finally in a position where she can force people through a legally binding contract to address her with respect, then good for her.
• Because this is the thing about Lauryn Hill: She is not like other artists. I mean, ultimately, she’s not. The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill was a bigger, more important record than any of its contemporaries, and the mystique that she cultivated by insisting on doing everything her own way after it was released — playing guitar, reading poetry, refusing to just show up and sing the hook on a bunch of rap dudes’ singles, spending her time with the Marleys, leaving her all-star rap group because she didn’t like the way she was treated, not releasing an eagerly-anticipated follow-up album, etc, etc — makes her significant in a way that very few musicians are significant these days.
• Hence the $55 ticket price, which is at least double what I can remember ever seeing a show at Stubb’s go for. No one ever really expected they’d get a chance to see her perform all of the best songs from her entire career before.
• And no, she didn’t play them straight. It wasn’t a Vegas revue. But — and I mention this in the A.V. Club write-up — so what? Bob Dylan does the exact same thing in his stage show, and he has for four decades. He plays his songs the way that he feels like playing them. If he’s going through “Masters Of War” and he’s mostly interested in bar-band-blues on this tour, you’re going to hear a bar-band take on “Masters Of War.” If he’s in a country mood for this record, then the version of “It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” is a country take on it. The only time he ever gives you what you want in the way you expect it is for the encore, where he’ll usually lazily drop in the Hendrix version of “All Along The Watchtower” or some shit. But we don’t grouse about how Dylan is disrespectful of his fans and cashing in and shitty because he doesn’t play songs that he wrote in his twenties the same way now that he’s older.
• So, yeah — Lauryn Hill does not perform like it’s 1997 and she’s trying to win your approval. But rock stars with her credentials never do. She took almost a decade off for a reason, and it wasn’t to give audiences exactly what they’d hoped she’d be when she left. And even if I got in for free, and the people who are angry in the comments paid sixty bucks for their tickets, I think we have to accept that we were all there to see her, and not whatever our idea of what she should be is like.

I interviewed Donald Glover for the A.V. Club. →

Also, here is a picture with him and my wife, because it makes her happy when she looks at it and she will probably see this post on her phone while she’s on the bus ride home! Hi, Kat!

Anyway: This time out, we talk about his IAMDONALD tour, the fact that he hits on Rashida Jones in his songs kinda a lot, and the six years he spent working hard to become an overnight success.

(My previous interview with Glover ran on MTV Hive earlier this month, if you’re interested.)