Are white people who say "I don't like hip hop" yet listen to it when white people make it really saying "i don't like black people"?

This puts it better but I'm not sure if it means something different to what I'm saying - ie. saying "here are three ways that Eminem is like punk" also says "here is how to listen to Eminem as if he were punk" ie. "here is what to listen for in Eminem".

It actually does at that!

So you should like the Pistols because they're sweet like the Crystals (if you overlook all the noise and caterwauling and destruction, that is).

Walter, I actually think that rock and hip-hop have a lot in common emotionally, and I think the trouble rock fans have with hip-hop is that the latter has moved beyond them formally. (That is, some rock and some hip-hop have a lot in common, though by now those two genres encompass several universes each.) I don't see why a Beasties fan wouldn't like Cypress Hill (who had a minor hit last year with a song based on a Clash sample), but I can see how the Beasties are easier on his ears.

Yes I agree with this!! So then I'm not sure where we disagree. What am I saying that seems odd?

See, I believe it was the very last major case of "white guy=rock, black guy=rap, even if all sonic evidence points to the contrary" industry thinking. The very thinking that Eminem's debut, in effect, ended. Rock radio never played his singles again after that. But for those first several weeks, they did.

*still doubt that these so-called gatekeepers have as much impact on people's tastes as walter and tim do

not true at all - whfs in balt/dc played "the real slim shady" pretty heavily, if i remember, and i believe continued playing many of his singles as he kept releasing albums. i stopped listening to that station a few years ago, but i seem to remember even something as late as "without me" getting airplay.

Oops I think I understand yr resistance now. I don't see myself as being outside of this process at all! My tastes have totally evolved according to the sorts of groups i've moved amongst and ideas I've been exposed to. I too really dislike attempts to distinguish between sheep listeners and liberated listeners. What is ILM if not a "community" that does the exact same thing that e.g the alt/indie rock "community" does? How else would people be able to complain about the "hivemind"?

And Ned is right, it's not at all about individual gatekeepers (can't remember who used that word first) so much as an entire structure of ideas and ways of thinking about music that you get from radio, magazines, television, your friends, your workmates, the bars you go to etc. etc. The success of eg the Beastie Boys is helped along by all of these - not just cover stories in Spin, but also friends making copies of Hello Nasty for eachother etc.

Because he's obviously smarter than that but he's an artist in love with provocation/uses ghetto tropes incidentally as grist for his creative mill/some other shit that halfway makes sense...

I mean, yeah he obviously is some of that but why does that realization(or rather, examination) require such a leap of faith when it comes to the hordes of black rappers with similiarly complex and disparate personas is the question that gets soft-pedalled in discussions like these if it comes up at all. The fact that if you lined them up in front of the casual non-rap fan(who has heard of them), Nas would=50 Cent=Snoop=Mike Jones=Busta Rhymes=Ghostface=Ludacris, and it's the black skin that's papering over wildly differing levels of playfulness, bravado, malice, imagination, etc. of their respective musical packages. I don't know at what level the "let's at least listen to the white guy" meme is being maintained or furthered, and if the only problem was sloppy assignment on the critical chessboard(in "purely" musical terms) it would be a massive improvement, as it stands there's plenty of space made for 'those rappers over there' but very little actual consideration and engagement is afforded at all(and listening /=engaging) and the reason why has a lot more to do with the question at the top of the thread than most of this discussion belies.
Speaking personally, it's a red flag when someone lists Paul Boutique as "the greatest rap album ever" without apologizing and identifying themselves as clueless dilettantes, at which point I'm willing to swallow an oopsish scenario with Beastie Boys as 'perfectly reasonable point of entry' but not without rolling my eyes.

You're probably right; but it probably did cross their feelings: something felt indie or alternative or modern rock about "My Name Is," probably, some emotional resemblance (and the white skin color could have contributed to the feelings as well). And also, the song doesn't move in the way that hip-hop tends to move, even Eminem's other tracks (in fact that's why I don't like it as much as "The Real Slim Shady"). It's more of a talk than a rap. And one of the things that may have made it feel "rock" is that the voice sounded white.

In regard to the question that started this thread: It's not surprising that a rock fan would hear something that rings his bell in Eminem and the Beastie Boys. Like attracts like.

What if said person is highly knowledgeable about and enjoys the more canonical (i.e. black) hip-hop albums, but just likes that particular album a little more?

Licensed to Ill. Way better.

I think you're too quick to assume it has to be one but not the other. To make a simple and not too carefully thought out analogy, taste in music is probably somewhere between taste in food and taste in literature: on the one hand some stuff just tastes nice (per food), but on the other, how we judge good/bad music is very much bound up in all the other music we've heard, and the way we've been "taught" to listen to it (per literature).

Even with food, there are some tastes you can get used to if you stick at it and even begin to approach in a very formalist manner (see wine tasting) so it's not totally unmediated enjoyment. It's not like adults start drinking a glass of wine with their meals because their taste buds spontaneously start responding well to wine at a certain age.

That said, people who drink wine do genuinely enjoy it: it's just that their enjoyment is following a model of enjoyment they have been encouraged to adopt. And of course this model would never have been adopted so widely in the first place if wine wasn't amenable to be enjoyed. But that doesn't change the fact htat drinking wine is a social practice. There is no primal cause for this practice, no person whose taste was totally unshaped by social factors, any more than peer group pressure at school starts with one kid, or the pressure to "keep up with the Joneses" actually starts with one family of Joneses.

how we judge good/bad music is very much bound up in all the other music we've heard

this is I think, for the majority of the population, the greatest determing factor in what music people do and do not like. it ties together our two arguments: most white people grew up listening to rock and this has shaped their aesthetic musical preferences. then it all snowballs and fold back on itself, as people interact with one another, particularly those within their social circles who have presumably grown up exposed to similar music.

So we are basically in agreement, then... Also, more on the "like attracts like" front: English is not my first language, and although I am perfectly comfortable with it now, I do run into occasional trouble with rap lyrics - Eminem's excepted. It's a slightly embarrassing confession but... there you go. Since he sounds "white," he is, perhaps sadly, more intelligible to me. (He's also not nearly as heavy on regional slang as most rappers, probably because he doesn't feel he has the right to usurp it). I wonder if that's the case for some native speakers as well?

Are these groups totally divorced from eachother? If someone says, "I don't know much about wine but I do think a chardonnay over dinner is more dignified than a beer", they're already drawing on assumptions about wine which are rooted in social practice as much, if not more than taste.

"this is I think, for the majority of the population, the greatest determing factor in what music people do and do not like. it ties together our two arguments: most white people grew up listening to rock and this has shaped their aesthetic musical preferences."

So why do most white people grow up listening to rock then? Is it because white people are genetically designed to enjoy rock? Or are you agreeing with me that enjoyment is socially mediated?

No I'm not trying to be as hardline as this - individuals obviously break free of their social contexts all the time (most frequently by joining other social contexts). But I'm not talking about individuals so much as overall trends within groups of people, and I think that on that level it's clear that those social contexts still have quite a sway.

Again the ILM analogy is useful here: there are individuals on ILM who will refuse to see any value in chart pop until their dying breath, but nonetheless ILM has had quite a good success rate when it comes to opening up people to chart pop who previously disliked it. It's not that the latter group are passive receptacles for ILM's position on chart pop. Rather, that there was always the chance they might begin to like some chart pop if they were placed in a social context which encouraged as much.

What I'm trying to do, and what I think Oops is trying to do as well, is demand that we dig our circles deeper, if we want to understand what's really happening. The question of this thread wasn't "I have a friend who likes some things but dislikes some overall related category, so does he have social attitudes?" The friend was expressing specific likes and dislikes.

Let's take this a model. Lester Bangs wrote in his review of the Stooges' Metallic K.O.:

Jungle war with bike gangs is one thing, but it gets a little more complicated when those of us who love being around that war (at least vicariously) have to stop to consider why and what we're loving. Because one of the things we're loving is self-hate, and another may well be a human being committing suicide.

("I just drank a fifth a vodka/Dare me to drive?")

Of course, you can answer that question - correctly - by saying, "Well, one reason is that cultural gatekeepers like Lester Bangs (and Frank Kogan, and Paul Simon, and Lou Reed, and Peter Laughner) tell a Hero Story in which self-destruction is portrayed as heroic." This answer is true, but what the hell does it tell us? Why did we gatekeepers come to buy (and sell) that story in the first place, and why does anyone buy our story and keep paying us to man their gates?

("Cars are crashing every night/I drink and drive everything's in sight/I make the fire but I miss the firefight/I hit the bull's eye every night.")

One answer is that we were raised on this story (thanks to earlier gatekeepers), various Hero Tales of noncompromise unto death, so that's why it appeals to us later; but surely there's more to it than that. Not that there will ever be a "reason" that doesn't have a story underneath it, or a story that doesn't have a reason underneath it. ("I lay awake and strap myself into bed/With a bulletproof vest on/And shoot myself in the head.") But the point is, if you're willing to dig through to these stories, the discussion makes its way to the lived experience of at least some of the people who are deciding to listen to Eminem but may or may not be listening to Snoop Dogg. How can you have a discussion of why people might listen to Eminem and the Beastie Boys, and not talk about Eminem and the Beastie Boys? ("You get nothin' for nothin' if that's what you do/Turn around bitch I got a use for you/Besides you ain't got nothin better to do/And I'm bored.") (The Beastie Boys' "Fight for Your Right to Party," by the way, uses a close cousin to the riff from the Stooges' "I'm Loose" and the MC5's "Kick Out the Jams.")

So anyway, Lester and I were brought up on previous gatekeepers, and were repeating an old story. For example, way back when, Kenneth Rexroth wrote this (New York Times book review) about the poet Weldon Kees:

When Weldon Kees started to write, the alienated poetic hero was at the height of his fashion. Conrad Aiken and T.S. Eliot had launched him on his poetic career a generation before, and young W.H. Auden had picked him up and put him on the science-fiction stage of a near future of universal disorder and decay. At first Weldon Kees' poems seemed to be unusually successful exercises in a very current idiom. Then, as they accumulated, it became apparent that they were something very different; in fact quite the opposite - this man really meant every word of it....

He is Robinson Crusoe, utterly alone on Madison Avenue, a stranger and afraid in the world of high-paying news weeklies, fashionable galleries, jazz concerts, highbrow movies, sophisticated reviews - the world in which Weldon Kees was eminently successful. When he said, in these gripping poems, that it filled him with absolute horror, he meant it. On July 18, 1955, his car was found abandoned on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. He has never been seen since.

(Typical numbskull pseudointellectual response to this passage would be "Oh, he meant it! What a rockist thing to say." As if calling it rockist would help us to understand the story, or to explain its appeal.)

Anyway, to answer the question posed at the start of this thread: Well, I don't know what gives with your friend, or why he likes Eminem and the Beasties and Beck and Buck 65 but doesn't generally like hip-hop. There could be all sorts of reasons, and your friend might like Eminem and crew for reasons very different from mine (and I haven't analyzed all the reasons why I like those guys anyway [I've heard them all except Prefuse 73], and since I love hip-hop I wouldn't be attuned to your friend's dislike of the genre, anyway); but I do know that there are no black equivalents to Eminem, Beck, Buck 65, and the Beasties (not that those guys are all that similar to each other, mind you), so the music rather than the skin color might be what's moving your friend towards Beasties and away from Snoop, and how the music plays to his life (as a white person) and to his own hero stories, which might not or might not have some similarity to mine.

("Since age 12 I felt like someone else 'cause I hung my original self from the top bunk with a belt.")

Possibly one too many "nots" in that sentence, though maybe not.

he's also from the midwest!

how do we negotiate between "It's not surprising that a rock fan would hear something that rings his bell in Eminem and the Beastie Boys. Like attracts like" and "What's REAL is what's happening SOMEWHERE ELSE"?

(ie that great frith quote frank has often leaned on, where frith looks at and tries to explain the attraction early british jazz and rock had for music from entirely elsewhere)

I've never really come across this, to be honest. The only thing vaguely along these lines I can think of is the appeal of Three Feet High & Rising, because it drew references from white and black culture. So, basically, my answer to the question would be no.

sometimes when i listen to stuff i don't think...but then other times i'm thinking about stuff and people are talking to me but i'm not really listening.

I think I interpreted the original post a bit differently insofar as Jacobo rock seemed to be saying his friend dismissed hip hop as a whole but then liked certain tangential examples of hip hop or quasi-hip hop made by white artists - presumably he does not consider this music to be "hip hop", or he's thinking of something more specific than these groups when he says "I don't like hip hop". Furthermore, presumably he expects jacobo rock to understand that when he says "I don't like hip hop" he doesn't mean those groups - i.e. it's not merely that the Beastie Boys are not hip hop in his own head, they are also not hip hop in reality. On what does he base this assumption if not the existence of a discourse that would support this distinction?

Your stuff above is great and insightful as usual Frank, but are attitudes towards genres as a whole really about personal hero stories? I tend to think any discussion about genre as a whole is always a discussion of social attitudes - if not necessarily racist ones.

If I apply your interpretation - that this is merely an expression of specific likes or dislikes - then I agree with everything you said.

How can the discussion go anywhere if we don't talk about particular words and music and what is done with them?

i know this will be annoy a few here, but to me hip-hop is mostly just stupid and juvenile music for teenagers. it's either juvenile or totally pretentious. i don't want to hear some guy "spreading the knowledge" any more than i want to hear some guy talking about how big his dick is. i know not all hip-hop is like this, but it's rare that i find a hip-hop act where i like the production, the lyrics, and the rapper's style. i like a lot of groups that don't meet all of that criteria, but i don't love them.

'minimal' hip-hop production is a joke. i often hear some of these songs critics rave so much about, and think they have all been bamboozled somehow. timbaland (in his prime) is the only hip-hop producer that did minimal well. i lost so much respect for so many music writers over that retarded ying yang twins song, it's not even funny.

Indie-alternative bands who've made my P&J ballot since 1998: Rocket from the Tombs, Mirrors, Notekillers, Manu Chao, Fabulous Disaster, The Donnas, Turbonegro, Lifter Puller, Ugly Casanova, Gore Gore Girls, Clone Defects, Winfred E. Eye, A.R.E. Weapons, The Hold Steady, Country Teasers, Electric Six. Anyway, this list is unrepresentative of indie-alternative as a whole, starting as it does with some archival punks and no wavers from back when punk was punk and sheep were sheep (though back in the '90s I did once vote for the Auteurs, and I might have voted for Franz Ferdinand last year had a paid them sufficient attention). So anyway, old punk, old no wave, neo glitter, neo punk chicks, bands that remind me of the Fall, bands that remind me of the Electric Eels, bands that remind me of Red Dark Sweet, bands that remind me of Foreigner, bands that remind other people of Suicide, Manu Chao. (Red Dark Sweet was a band I was in 1981-1982.) Anyway, these performers loosely represent something of a sensibility (or several sensibilities), and this sensibility isn't incompatible with my overall opinion that indie-alternative blows chunks. (However, I hope I'm able to like things that are way outside my sensibility.)

By analogy, Jacobo's friend's list could therefore represent a sensibility rather than his swooning strictly on the basis of paleness of face.