No Trivia

On ‘20K Intro’ from the latest Clipse tape, Pusha mentions a “tree-huggin’ ass bitch” that told him he was “nice” but proceeded to give him a lot of shit about how his songs are all about “dope” and “street shit”, which of course, is very, very bad. Pusha, in one of the few points on the depressive tape where anyone climbs out of their frustration, responds with “Tree-huggin’ ass bitch please” and asserts who he really rhymes for: “niggas on the corner.”

This kind of defense or half-defense met with an angry assertion about “street niggas” or “niggas on the corner” isn’t new to rappers’ attempts at sounding “real” but it seems more glaring because well, the Clipse simply aren’t rapping for those “street niggas”. Maybe they are in the sense that that’s their intended audience, or maybe they mean it in some instructive way, but in terms of whose ears are open to Clipse, it is not who they claim to be rapping for; if this were true, Pusha wouldn’t even be confronted with a woman offended by their crack rap, you know?

Maybe some drug dealers have decent music taste, but the assumption that because one is from the street, one is apt to embrace street music, is incorrect. I see the logic, but most people are just more into ideas of escape and it’s why blue-collar whites listen to mainstream country music and not sad-sack songs about why their life sucks. The illusion that the drug-dealer is some near-Nietzschean businessman beyond good and evil that embraces his/her fate is a myth sold by dealers and the popular rappers that leech off of that myth. It’s a fucked-up circle of bullshit and the reality is, dealers are stupid too. They want to feel good about themselves like everybody else so, 50 Cent’s image of thuggery is way more appealing than say, ‘Chinese New Year’. In last night’s episode of ‘The Wire’, there’s a scene of Snoop and Chris driving down the street with Hurricane Chris playing out their speakers; that’s what I’m getting at!

Not that Clipse is the pinnacle of actual street realness- whatever that means- but they represent something a little less ideal than many of the other rappers talking about how street they are. The brilliance of Clipse is the way they offer up the same old bullshit but said a little better, song after song, and then suddenly drop a particularly dark insight or emotional reality. These details weave through ‘Hell Hath No Fury’ but they become palpable on the closer ‘Nightmares’, despite or in spite of its cloying acknowledgment of regret. Malice’s verse on the last track on ‘We Got it 4 Cheap Vol. 2’ about being “a hamster in a wheel” is all the more affecting because he hasn’t been this emotional, depressed rapper on every track. On the latest tape, the depression seems more real and upfront but the main point is still drug-pushing punchlines. Peppered throughout however, are lines like “we keep it from the kids and tell em’ it’s detergent”. Young Jeezy might say that line, but he’d be half-bragging or throw in one of those “Ha-HA”s to downplay the reality of selling crack with a bunch of kids around; Pusha just drops that fucked-up reality and keeps going.

If anything, Pusha should stop dropping weird defenses about who he makes his music for or who listens to it, because he should be proud “niggas on the corner” don’t want to hear his fucked-up version of reality: It means he’s doing his job! It also says something about how deluded the criminal element is, that Clipse don’t offer enough escapism and justification, but this is getting long already…

Although Clipse boast and glorify, their music never feels too exciting and their swagger is on the defensive and defiant, never there on principle or some fake-ass Tupac “I don’t give a fuck” thing…the Clipse care, a lot. The dudes aren’t perfect but they certainly do not create ideal forms that can be embraced by delusional thugs or angry too-cool for rock but too-dumb for real rap middle-schoolers. That’s what the current debate on hip-hop’s quality is really about and always has been: ideal vs. the reality.

On DocZeus’s entry on Clipse earlier this month, the lively comments debate went into a smart and even-handed breakdown of what exactly made Clipse more complex or better or less amoral than Young Jeezy. At first glance, the two have a lot in common. Both rap coke braggadocio with a vague catering to regret, over cold, sterile, electronic beats but as smart listeners have pointed out, even when the darkness of dealing is not apparent in the rhymes, it’s heard in those harsh, beats. But there’s a difference.

Indeed, Clipse are hardly the ideal non-ideal rappers and Jeezy is not totally in drug-dealing fantasy land, but comparing the two illustrates my point. Clipse have production that is almost tinny and truly minimalist and it underscores their bragging; Jeezy’s production is disturbing but has a triumphant edge that turns his non-rapping into an unstoppable force of hard-ass synths and regal horns. Jeezy is what a drug-dealer wants to be and Clipse are a little closer to what a drug dealer really is. So, it makes sense that “street niggas” would gravitate towards Jeezy and it makes sense that jerkoffs who think drug-dealers are cool or people who think they’re drug dealers, would also prefer the Jeezy treatment of dealing.

I’m reminded of a similar division between the ideal and the real in film scholar Ray Carney’s The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies. The book’s primary argument is that filmmaker Cassavetes consistently avoids the clean-edges of Hollywood cinema- including the Hollywood art of Welles, Hitchcock, etc.- for a less ideal and more accurate representation of life (I’m really simplifying…). Late in the book, Carney contrasts Cassavetes’ crime film ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie’, a portrait of a down-and-out strip-club owner who has a lot of debt, with Orson Welles’ classic ‘Citizen Kane’, a very different kind of portrait of a failed man. Carney’s most effective point is to suggest that even as Orson Welles makes a movie opposed to Charles Foster Kane, it really only “pretends to criticize the excesses of capitalistic arrangements and manipulations in its content [and] collaborates with them in its form” (230); Welles’ movie is as bombastic and overblown as Kane. Cassavetes’ relationship to Cosmo (the main character of ‘Bookie’) is very different; the movie constantly seeks out ways to undermine Cosmo’s illusion of himself and his surroundings.

Cosmo is never smooth even when he tries to be, the women of his strip-club are either downright beat or beautiful in a way that is realistic*, and his gangster friends are hardly Deniro cool or handsome. To drive the point home, Carney creates a hypothetical, wherein the main character of each movie could watch the movie about themselves: “As his political rally suggests, Kane would love the style of his own film (even if he might have problems with its satiric point). Cosmo would hate his movie’s style.” (231).

*Sorry about the soft-porn link, there’s not a lot out there on Azizi Johari…

I know that comparison is not perfect, for rappers are not in the same exact position as the movie director, but despite most rappers’ tendency to use the “I” whether telling the truth or not, both rapper and director tell stories, create portraits, and generally, subjectivize experience. And just as Kane would approve of the however negative still aggrandizing portrayal of self in ‘Citizen Kane’, would most “street niggas” prefer the version that paints them as larger-than-life transgressors. Replace “Welles” with just about any drug-talk rapper in the following quotation and the connection seems clear: “Welles [or Young Jeezy?] is addicted to crafting a self-contained, self-justifying, self-referential imaginative world…” (230). Carney of course, is interested in art and so, his focus is on the creator but I’m shifting the focus on the audience- or a part of the audience.

The world Carney describes is the one that Jeezy chooses to reside in, but it is also the world that his audience prefers because it breeds complacency and zero self-reflection. Those “true” dealers on the corner like it because it justifies their way of living and then pumps it up a few sizes. Those outside “the life” generally think its either cool or somehow want to connect their own dreams to Jeezy’s motivational speech rap, so they too prefer the idealized form. It’s not how Jeezy intended it, but he really is like a motivational speaker in the sense that like Tony Robbins or Dr. Phil or those twin midgets that sell real-estate kids on TV at 3am, he feeds his audience a load of complacent bullshit masquerading as insight or theory.

I think I need to clarify that the embrace of this ideal is held by everyone, and is hardly exclusive to black drug-dealers (which is what we must assume Pusha means by “niggas on the corner”). I generally do not concern myself with being offensive, but I do fear this could be misread as a critique of the black criminal mind-set or blacks in general, when I’m first, discussing the escapism of popular rap and second, the growing obsession with escapism in the world at-large. That is to say, Pusha is not referring to white drug dealers or criminals, not because he uses the word “nigga”- for this word is often used as nearly all-inclusive, go to a Ghostface show, he’ll call his crowd of many white faces “my niggas”- but because going back to ‘Lord Willin’, Pusha and company have been focused on their community and their world.

Basically, when it comes to ideals, everyone likes to feel cool and smart and not part of the shitty reality in which they live. Rock musicians still revel in an ideal version of the debauched rocker, or, when it comes to crime, escapist forms of the life of crime are hardly exclusive to black drug-dealers. The best example would be the mafia, which has pushed idealized forms of their life since their life came about during the 1920s and 30s. Most “gangster” movies end morally and have an edge of justice to them, but they are first and foremost, obsessed with the criminal and his (especially during that early era) transgressive acts of crime.

It is interesting to note that so much of the glorification of the criminal life that is so pervasive and sensitive to criticism in rap, has its roots in white crime films that mainstream critics have praised since the 1930s. The pinnacle of course, is hip-hop movie royalty, ‘Scarface’ and ‘Goodfellas’ and rappers have continually picked apart these movies for influence. Ridley Scott’s recent ‘American Gangster’ and in some ways, Jay-Z’s accompanying album, would be the pinnacle of this embrace of the ideal life of crime and a conflation of the white-oriented “gangster” ideals with the black oriented “gangsta” ideals.

As Jay-Z recently said on ‘Ignorant Shit’, “Scarface the movie did more than Scarface the rapper for me”, and of course, that’s true because despite occasional forays into a less glamorous image of thug-life, Jay-Z has worked in ideal gangsta forms in a way that Scarface the rapper, never has. Even on his recent semi-hit ‘Girl, You Know’- a song that is a rejection of love, another ideal- there’s that reference to how “she don’t suck dick like she used to do” and he dubs in this gross slurping sound, which you now, is real because getting your dick sucked is this weird thing of this girl like slurping all over your dong; it’s weird if you think about it.

The point is, you watch ‘Scarface’ or ‘Goodfellas’ and while they end poorly and do not approve of their characters’ actions, the movies are celebrations of the swagger and confidence of the lifestyle. The directors reject the moral perspective of Henry Hill or Tony Montana, but love the attitude. This is why you read stories of real-life mobsters watching and performing the actions of these characters; it makes them feel awesome and not you know, gross weird, kinda pathetic criminals (which is how ‘The Killing of Chinese Bookie’ and maybe a Clipse album and certainly a Ghostface album, makes you feel…). Corner dealers, once given the option, will choose nebulous coke rap over the well-wrought realities of Ghostface and to a lesser extent, Clipse, every time: Nobody wants reality!

-Stills stolen from DVDbeaver.com.

-Carney, Ray. ‘The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies’. Cambridge UP, 1994.

The video- or possibly first half of the video- for Kanye’s ‘Flashing Lights’ premiered last week and it’s a pretty brilliant three minutes. Summary will be spared because you can watch it above and it’s fairly clear what it’s about, because even though people toss around phrases like “avant-garde” and “next-level” to describe the video, it’s fairly straight-forward: a few long, elegant camera moves that culminate in a women presumably stabbing a tied-up-and-in-the-trunk Kanye with a shovel. Like everything on ‘Graduation’ it’s about how celebrity and sex appeal are fucked-up.

The model in the video, Rita G, is gaining an insane amount of press- which in and of itself, shows how “exploitation” of women for videos is way more complicated than old-fashioned feminists would have us believe- and is a kind of sprucing-up of the classic video chick. She has a thicker body, which is way more attractive than the classic rock image of the video chick or the sexless and super-safe “hot” but not too hot indie chick staple, but Kanye puts her in lingerie instead of underwear and gives her actual poise and confidence. The video girl now takes actual center-stage, no longer being only ass and titties but the thematic and emotional focus of the video too. It’s a kind of “revenge of the Gold-digger”, as Rita G’s modern mixed with vintage lingerie were first seen in Hype Williams’ video for ‘Gold Digger’, Kanye’s most explicitly negative song about women (and one of his biggest hits…surprise surprise).

Kanye putting himself at the center of a revenge fantasy for rap’s misogyny and exploitation is typically cloying and oh-so-contradictory of ‘Ye, but it works because the video is genuinely real and disturbing and never gives in or steps back from its intended concept. Dunno why this comes to mind, but think of this Toby Keith video, which too involves revenge on the opposite sex (and a shovel!). Way more disturbing and genuinely misogynist than anything Nelly’s ever done (note to everybody: Sliding a credit card between a girl’s ass cheeks is funny), Toby’s video shows him singing an angry song to a tied-up Ex as he walls her in the basement, brick by brick. In the final moments of the video, the joke switches and is on Tobes as he somehow accidentally walled-himself in! Hilarious. This video’s always annoyed me because it’s a video of genuine misogyny that covers its ass in its final moments with a twist that allows it to still get airtime. Fuck that- ‘Flashing Lights’ sticks with its gender-revenge reversal to the end and gives you a genuinely complex and fucked-up experience.

Kanye takes a genuine backseat to the video chick, and in a darkly comic way, absorbs rap’s misogynist sins. He doesn’t even show up until half-way through the video and when he does, he gets stabbed with a shovel. The model, on the other hand, is allowed to strut in slow-motion and totally take control. The moment where she tosses the zippo and turns is as bad-ass as all the mean-mugging done by rappers in other videos. I get the weird sense that this will all be played for laughs when there’s a second half of the video and go the way of Toby Keith, but as it stands now, this is how I’m reading it.

The comfortable and patient camera too, adds to a certain level of respect (or relative respect) to the entire thing and moves it further away from being any kind of “typical” music video. This avoidance of the typical is the root of Kanye’s brilliance as well as why his work so often falls short of being brilliant but here, it works because it’s fairly out-there and it thematically connects to the song’s sense of how fame can put you in some goofy and/or dangerous positions. Upon seeing the video, I was immediately reminded of a comment on my ‘Flashing Lights’ entry by commenter Miss Shai:

“Maybe I read too many gossip blogs (maybe? lololol) but from the moment I heard it I figured this track was about his last girlfriend Brooke, the one that ‘be running on myspace’. The chorus about her taking things too far would be a reference to her apparent affinity for fame, being photographed everywhere (whether Ye was around or not)and then discussing her relationship issues on the internet or to anyone who’ll listen. Anyway, thats my reason for assuming both verses are about the same girl. I also felt like his reference to the paparazzi was a frustration with being caught cheating by the paparazzi, like them catching him out to dinner with other women or in places where he told her he wasn’t, making them a believable target for his contempt. The ending of the verse is her discovery of the infidelity and the end of the relationship, the beginning of the next is the separated reminiscing.”

Yeah! Taken with Miss Shai’s reading of the song, it’s a very confessional video in the sense of delving deep into Kanye’s post-fame fears of the women he’s fucked, fucked-over or both.

The entire thing has the feeling of a dream (or nightmare). The song never really matches up with the video in any overt or kinetic way and the actions both make sense and seem inexplicable. Why does she park the car, walk twenty or so feet out, strip, burn her clothes, and then walk back to the car? It doesn’t matter because you feel it and that’s what dreams and nightmares are about; a feeling. And it’s a feeling that matches the song quite well. It’s both obvious symbolic and totally free of a simple interpretation. The burning of her clothes is a sort of classic ritualistic trope but here, what does it mean? She’s in a sense, reduced to “shoes and cars” when she removes her clothes and walks in heels back to the car…but Monique pointed out to me, that the car is sort of unidentifiable and has the dust of the dirt road all over it; most videos go to great lengths to keep cars and objects of wealth clean. This is the second video where Kanye has sort of used the car as a sort of after-thought. One of the best parts of the ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ video is the brief appearance of a Lamborghini, as if it’s stuck in there for a few moments to say “Look, I can get a Lambo but I’d rather give you this weird Madonna ‘Frozen’ type shit…”

It is interesting that Spike Jonze “co-directed” this video, for he’s a director that only occasionally makes rap videos but always breathes new life into the ones he does. It’s fun to see this video as the opposite of ‘Gold Digger’ because in a way, Spike Jonze is the anti-Hype Williams. Both guys are perhaps the most well-known music video directors of all-time and both have immediately identifiable styles, but while Hype’s style often signifies nothing, everything Jonze does is intended to serve the song or feeling of that song. The desert, car, and woman too, recall Williams’ ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ video. We’re again in the desert and it’s again this beautiful night, but Jonze cuts a great deal less and incorporates a grittier film stock, not the super-clean imagery of Williams. I never thought Williams and West fit because Kanye’s always something of a joker and Hype Williams is embarassingly sincere, even though his videos are like, Ma$e floating in Vegas-space in a shiny-ass jacket.

The ‘Flashing Lights’ video is a good excuse to look back at Jonze’s decidedly anti-Hype Williams rap videos:

-Beastie Boys ‘Sure Shot’

Spike Jonze has made better and more conceptually cohesive videos for the Beastie Boys than ‘Sure Shot’ and that’s why I’m highlighting it. It’s a conventional performance style video but finds way to be weird and kinda reverse hip-hop video conventions. Like Kanye, the Beasties are dudes who’ve constantly moved in and out of the world of rap and are defiantly “hip-hop” in the same way that they are defiantly “punk rock”: because they do whatever they want.

You get the classic rap video “beatdown” shot here, but it’s the Beasties and Hurricane and they are having fun and it’s like mid-day in California and not like, midnight in Queensbridge. If you listen to the commentary on the amazing Criterion DVD of their videos, they mention that those weird igloo-ish homes they are walking around are some kind of California version of housing for the homeless, so in one sense, they’re as surrounded by poverty as any of the other “real” rap videos that would have followed this on ‘The Box’. Don’t sleep on Ad-Rock’s Peace Frog shirt.

-The Pharcyde ‘Drop’

Another thing that’s great about Spike Jonze is the way he totally commits to super-complicated concepts and rarely shorts-cuts on them, which for this video as you probably know, meant shooting the whole thing backwards, including the Pharcyde memorizing their lyrics backwards and other impressive stuff. Again, a kind of variation on rap video cliches that doesn’t try to be some corrective , but just happens to be a stranger take on a conventional concept.

-Notorious B.I.G featuring 112 ‘Sky’s the Limit’

A video that puts Jonze’s sometimes annoying cleverness to good use. Quite a few videos or guest verses by Biggie after his death used old-footage of him, which had a way of being very affecting, but somehow, this video that recreates Biggie videos with children is fun as well as affecting. It’s the sort of video that if not out of necessity, a label probably wouldn’t have approved because it breaks Biggie’s mainstream “gangster” persona even though it highlights the playful and funny side of Biggie that real fans remember equally well. As usual, the idea is saved because Jonze keeps it as authentic as possible, doing his best to match the old videos.

-Fatlip ‘What’s Up Fatlip?’

A totally low-budget video that perfectly fits Fatlip’s depressive but hilarious single. Some of it invokes the aesthetic of ‘Jackass’ which Jonze had a part in…the kid kicking him in the nuts, the obviously-shot-without consent gags, the shaky cameras, and a general sense of on-the-fly fun. The part where he visits his Mom is really great.

On the Spike Jonze Director’s Series DVD that Palm Pictures put out, there’s a pretty lengthy documentary about Fatlip that’s really revealing and funny and adds another level to his insane persona.

-Ludacris ‘Get Back’

This video seems to be sort of forgotten because it came in a time where rap videos stopped being fun on like, any level. The concept of giving Ludacris Robert Altman’s ‘Popeye’ arms and a team of uniformed fat chicks is brilliant and fits Ludacris’ comedic take on aggression; a lesser director would’ve taken the song’s hard-ass message as serious.

The fact that the arms are these big rubber things is good as well becauses it avoids annoying CGI (see Luda’s stupid ‘Stand Up’ video…) and you can tell Luda’s having more fun because he really is inhabiting the dude with big arms character. Some of the best parts are these quick, obviously improvised shots of Ludacris just being goofy with the arms. The whole video is a celebration of easy, old-fashioned special effects…the wire effects when he punches people, Fatlip’s twisted legs, the exploding bricks of the wall, it’s just really fun. When it came out, it made me wish the Keenan Ivory Wayans would’ve just turned this into a movie…like a low-budget blaxploitation pic about this dude in the hood who fights pimps and drug-dealers because he was born with these big-ass arms.

Schooly D’s ‘Signifying Rapper’

-Click here to download ‘Signifying Rapper’.

A decade before Puffy got Jimmy Page to recreate his own riff for the ‘Godzilla’ soundtrack, Schooly D got some guitar player named Mike Tyler and some drummer named Andy Kravitz to recreate Jimmy Page’s ‘Kashmir’ riff for ‘Signifying Rapper’. Movie director and friend of Schooly D Abel Ferrara, says here that ‘Signifying Rapper’ is “50 million times better than ‘Kashmir” and I uh, sort of agree (the best Zep song is ‘Fool In the Rain’ but you already know that…).

The replayed riff is as bad-ass as Zep’s proto-Metal but it lacks the pretension and adds some funk that makes it sound like the Bad Brains covering Zeppelin, which fits Schooly’s sound and rage more appropriately than if he were to have sampled the actual song. The repetition overwhelms you in a way that the original, because it breaks out or changes due to its adherence to musicality, cannot. There’s nothing elegant about ‘Signifying Rapper’s “beat” and Schooly D’s not really rapping, he’s just shouting (it’s ordered shouting, which is rapping but you get my point) a tale of a “little rapper” who stands-up to a “bad-ass pimp”.

The sort of catch of the song (and the reason David Foster Wallace named a book after the song) is that it addresss “signifying” which is referred to with frequency in the African-American tradition but also the sort of shit Roland Barthes and other literary types talked about. Real quick because it’s not that interesting and sort of obvious- the rapper who insults the pimp is insulting the pimp through another rapper (who will later actually kick the pimp’s ass). The rapper confronting the pimp is “signifying” what “this big bad, faggot” rapper is going to say to him when he confronts him. There’s also the double-signifying of the signifying rapper using the pimp’s insult of “faggot” to describe the big bad rapper. It’s not interesting that a rapper would know about “signifying” but it is interesting that he would openly refer to it. Rap often shies away from being so overtly intellectual but Schooly pulls it off because the song itself is about the signifying rapper; you don’t need to get what that means or entails to enjoy the song…

But I said that wasn’t that interesting, right? And it’s not because the real thing about this song is that it fucking rules. As I said, the “beat” is heavy like Zeppelin but tougher and scarier due to repetition and the rawness of the recording. It just starts and goes and goes for almost five minutes only letting up for the final line: “I shoulda kicked your ass/My motherfuckin’ self”. Schooly is technically rapping, you can break the lines down and everything- but the storytelling aspect of his delivery takes over. He moves in and out of emotions, performing different voices, and he shifts his cadence to match the tone of the story rather than the beat. It’s just fucking awesome. Drive around to it, you’ll see.

I mentioned this book above and I talked about it here and I do recommend the book even though its intellectualism can be grating and it often feels more bemused by rap than appreciative (the original wigsters?). Nevertheless, it also bursts with enthusiasm, even if it’s the kind of enthusiasm that makes one spout out postmodern theory. Wallace really gets the song and sums up its point well:

“a person, even if small, marginal, and oppressed, can still say pretty much whatever he likes to whomever he wishes, and do it with impunity, so long as he has enough ball to present what’s said as a message…a delivery from the heart and mouth of some Other”(78)

What troubles me about Wallace’s intellectual interest in rap is that it sucks the life out of the song. Can’t you just imagine, even today, a Professor being incredibly “intriqued” (my god, they’re always fucking intriqued) by a rap song that makes the signs and signifiers of rap so explicit as when Schooly says “Remember that law?/When you had to put your shades on to be cool?”. This intellectualism too, permits Schooly to say stuff like “She so low/She suck the dick of a little maggot…”. It is excused because Schooly knows what “signifying” is but also because the signifying even extends to Schooly and sensitive, intellectual types can see Schooly as only the deliverer of these insults (which he is and isn’t and is and isn’t and is again); he’s not gasp- actually saying faggot. Well, fuck that, that’s why the song is good and why rap is better than anything else ever made (pretty much). It can be really “smart” and actually smart and dumb all at the same time! Wrap your head around that Bill O’Reilly…

Last week, I watched Abel Ferrara’s ‘The Bad Lieutenant’ which originally featured ‘Signifying Rapper’ in three different scenes. I say originally because at some point after the theatrical release and home video release, Jimmy Page heard his riff on ‘Signifying Rapper’ and sued. Subsequently, the song was removed. I could explain it but Abel Ferrrara does a much better job in this interview:

“Oh, yeah. I’ll strangle that cocksucker Jimmy Page. As if every fucking lick that guy ever played didn’t come off a Robert Johnson album. “Signifying Rapper” was out for five years, and there wasn’t a problem. Then the film had already been out for two years and they start bitching about it. And these pricks, when their attorneys are on the job, our guys are afraid to come out of their office. You’re not gonna fight their fucking warriors, you know what I mean? Can you imagine, this was down at a federal court in New York, with a 70-year-old judge, and they’re playing Schoolly D and Led Zeppelin to the guy? It cost Schoolly like $50,000. It was a nightmare. And meanwhile, “Signifying Rapper” is 50 million times better than “Kashmir” ever thought of being. And then, this prick [Page] turns around with Puff Daddy and redoes it for the Godzilla soundtrack. Here’s Puff Daddy, where every other song this boy sang was King Of New York this and King Of New York that. And I would never even fucking think of suing these guys. Why sue? You should be happy that somebody is paying homage to your work.”

Lots of good points there. First, there’s the whole aspect of what “sampling” really means? Wasn’t Page “sampling” Willie Dixon and Robert Johnson and others? Yes, Willie Dixon sued his ass at some point, making Page’s suit even more retarded. Schooly D was certainly commenting on this when he decided to base a song around ‘Kashmir’; He’s smart like that, remember? I’m also confused as to how it is illegal to re-play something on a record like that? Isn’t that how sample laws are avoided? Maybe a reader can explain it to me?

Second, it’s messed-up because it seems directly related to Page playing on ‘Come With Me’. To me, it seems as if ‘Signifying Rapper’ was wiped away as not to somehow compete or co-exist with Puffy’s ‘Kashmir’-sampling track. It becomes particularly egregious as if someone really had a grudge against Ferrara because of course, Biggie called himself “Black Frank White” in reference to Ferrara’s hip-hop classic ‘King of New York’.

Third, the absence of ‘Signifying Rapper’ in ‘The Bad Lieutenant’ is felt. I rented the DVD and only reading about the movie later, did I find out about the Schooly D music. I was lucky enough to grab an old VHS copy from a local video store that still has ‘Signifying Rapper’ in the scene. It doesn’t totally change the movie or anything but it certainly shifts the context of certain scenes and broadens some of the movie’s points.

Scene One: “Get Back, Police Activity”
As the Lieutenant runs down the street, the Zep rip-off riffs of ‘Signifying Rapper’ play. A group of young black kids, one of which just handed off drugs to a moving car, run away from the Lieutenant. He chases one into an apartment and at the top of the steps, the chase stops. It was a ruse; the Lieutenant is a customer (and occasional supplier). The scene also shows the movie’s dark humor as the Lieutenant shuts up a complaining neighbor between hits from a crack pipe.

At first, you hear the super-identifiable ‘Kashmir’ riff and it maybe reads like some bad-ass theme for the white cop. Then, Schooly comes in and the song becomes a typical, Hollywood “ghetto” atmosphere-setting song (play rap when white characters go to a black area). Then…once the Lieutenant is shown to be pretty much the same (only way worse of a person) than the dealer, the song sort of becomes the Lieutenant’s theme. This would be missed or ignored for most viewers then because even today, rap music is rarely used in relation to white characters for anything other than irony (exceptions: ‘Boiler Room’ & ‘Office Space’).

Below is the scene without the Schooly D (presumably ripped from a DVD)…

Scene Two: The Rape of the Nun
One of the best thing about the movie is that it is essentially plotless, structured around a couple of days in the life of this self-destructive Lieutenant. Yet, it has some threads that hold it together and one of them is the investigation by the Lieutenant of the rape of a nun.

Ferrara plays the rape out fairly respectfully. Although it is explicit, it is not gratuitous and it has an over-stylized feeling to it. A Virgin Mary falls in slow-motion. The entire scene is bathed in red light. It’s sort of surreal and kind of reminded me of Alex’s biblical sex fantasies from ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Originally, this scene was accompanied by ‘Signifying Rapper’ but in the DVD, it is replaced with classical music. This is a real shame because the super-obvious visuals are moved into pretension by the music. In the original version, ‘Signifying Rapper’ acts as counterpoint to the super-serious religious imagery and was meant to complicate the scene and give it one additional shock (besides a nun being raped!).

Scene Three: End Credits
The DVD version ends with a Dylan-esque song called ‘The Bad Lieutenant’ played by Abel Ferrara which gives a very different feeling than ‘Signifying Rapper’. For me, ‘Signifying Rapper’ just kind of feels like the Lieutenant and I think that ending the movie with the song really does sort of solidify it as the Lieutenant’s theme. Imagine leaving the theater to ‘Signifying Rapper’! It becomes a final reminder of the Lieutenant which makes sense because the movie has, while not exactly sympathetic, a non-judgemental perspective on his actions.

The camera is often hand-held bouncing right behind him, nearly subjective. It also captures his explosions of anger as well as his explosions of guilt and regret, so he isn’t just a horrible, remorseless person.

Harvey Keitel gives a really amazing performance, especially when he kind of grimaces and scream-grunts in frustration (see the clip below) like a little kid. You don’t like the Lieutenant in the movie (okay, I did, but there’s something wrong with me) but you’re so close to him for just about every minute in the movie that you can’t help but feel something for him. Ending on ‘Signifying Rapper’ nearly resurrects him one last time as you’re leaving the theater.
-Costello, Mark and David Foster Wallace. ‘Signifying Rappers’. Ecco Press: New York, 1990.

Rap & Community: A Scene from ‘Trans’ (1998).

One of my favorite scenes in any movie, comes from Julian Goldberger’s ‘Trans’ (1998). The movie is about Ryan Kacinzski, a kid in a juvenile detention center who takes up a chance to escape and well, just sort of wanders around Southern Florida. The movie itself isn’t that great, like many low-budget, “improvisatory” independent movies, it tries to skate by on realistic cinematography and regionalism alone. Nevertheless, the movie has moments of insight, Ryan briefly reuniting with his brother, a strange scene where Ryan tries to get a train ticket for cheap, and this one:
(Sorry about the quality of the video. It wasn’t on Youtube so I was relegated to video-taping it off my television and uploading it…)

The scene comes after a strange montage wherein Ryan wanders through a 24 hour supermarket, doing whippets and talking to some lady about corn. On his way out of the supermarket, he passes by two beer-drinking, parking-lot loser types and steps on a bottle cap. One of the ‘necks taunts him for stepping on “his” bottle cap and proceeds to beat the shit out of him. The movie fades-out, presumably along with Ryan’s consciousness, we get a pretentious arty-image of a Woman in front of a sunset (???) and then it goes back to black, and the voices of some black peers calling Ryan’s name fade-in.

Their appearance in the movie is a relief for Ryan, happy to finally see someone he knows, but it is also a relief for the audience who has felt as isolated and off-balance as Ryan. The early parts of the movie in the juvenile center are sterile and oppressive. When Ryan escapes, Goldberger briefly matches the thrill of escape but slowly winds it down into a rambly, unfocused journey. The thrill of escape quickly farts-out into uncertainty and worry.

You again feel alive when these black kids, presumably acquaintances from high-school, show up. Their acting is significantly more engaging and real than the actor playing Kacinzski, who feels afraid to commit to anything. Their scenes feel actually loose and fun as opposed to artfully rough. The movie should probably just be about these guys but the independent film world is only slightly less negrophobic than Hollywood, so you know…

To me, the scene represents the inclusive nature of hip-hop culture and in certain ways, black culture, which as a whole, is a great deal more inviting and familial to all than the white, middle-class culture from which Ryan comes. He is immediately brought along with them, they recognize his dire situation and it even is suggested that this isn’t the first time Ryan has been found like this.

The kids are generally kind, offering Ryan help, but they also mock him, in part because of the hilarious situation of getting his ass beat and also, because well, I bet he’s the goofy white boy they know that is always getting in trouble. Their looking for girls and their freestyles (or attempts) about weed and pussy are realistic and used to complicate their character. For a rap outsider, the contradictory nature of being so kind and rapping about weed and girls would be hard to resolve but Goldberg wisely moves beyond racial or cultural presentation and just lets all of the character be themselves.

The failed attempts at freestyling are particularly good because often in movies, scenes of battles are often used as shorthand for authenticity or being hip to the culture. Here, it’s more like the freestyle competitions you see in your high school science class or at a party, where it’s just a bunch of people fucking around. No one sitting there thinks they are the next Nassir Jones, they’re just having fun.

The party part of the sequence does the interesting thing of being totally in Ryan’s head. We don’t hear the music they are dancing to but music that reflects Ryan’s state of mind. We get this sort of depressive, rambling, jangle-rock. His inability to fit-in has nothing to do with race which is the way most movies would develop it. They are not presented as black kids and Ryan is not presented as a white; it’s a scene about people getting along and how hospitality isn’t always accepted. Ryan’s inability to fit-in is not because of race but because he sort of doesn’t fit in anywhere. The universal reality of alienation is the focus, not the cultural specific “reality” of racial tension. Ryan’s isolation is chosen, not imposed and still, at the end, one of the kids tries one more time to offer him a place to stay. It’s a very kind and genuine scene.