rolling ringtone thread 2008

its not like we havent witnessed this shit happen so i dont get whats so hard about it to understand. why diplo? right place right time, played the media game, had ACCESS to the media game. does anyone here really think that hipsters in socal couldnt wait to hear about this guy who plays mashups at parties in philly?? well, once they heard about it in urb they did!

or stylus lol preemptive zing

odds on this 'hipster-rap' biz managing any kind of significant presence in englishesland, anyone?

given the amount of PR email bombardment i've had re: the cool kids, sadly high. i've never heard their stuff though.

on the one hand i totally feel what deej is saying, it's so frustrating to see the 'hipster kids' who dominate our little media & music industry bubbles pick up on this sort of music. the reason the music itself seems lame is because it kind of tries a little too hard to be 'different', and that those differences are manifest in distancing itself from the rest of the genre. and warning bells really start to ring when i see a hip-hop act whose audience seems to be exclusively indie kids who don't care about hip-hop generally. it's like, they only like hip-hop when it's sufficiently not-hip-hop.

(cool kids, diplo, MIA et al : hip-hop :: justice, simian mobile disco et al : dance)

on the other hand i think it might just be better if we acknowledged that just cuz these people dominate our bubble of music discussion etc doesn't mean they dominate, um, the wider culture...we could all just try ignoring that pfork exists apart from tom ewing's columns cuz it's a) totally lame b) totally indie so what do you expect c) not that important. it helps that the site always crashes my computer.

though i also see deej's point re long-term cultural capital - cometimes you can just FEEL stuff being canonised, placed on this pedestal for the next gen to unwittingly swallow up, and so much of it is so bad

(nb i LOVE 'pro nails' and kid sister generally)

i hesitate to back up the dance parallels primarily bcuz here in the states there isnt a mainstream club sound that has the kind of pervasive presence that hip-hop does so its not like kids who get really into smd are passing up on shit that is right in their backyard already

it's "hip-hop geared specifically to indie kids" and "dance geared specifically to indie kids" - it follows really obviously that hipsters/indie kids will be into that shit more than people like us, who are more into hip-hop and dance than indie. real qn is - why are we attributing so much tastemaking power to the indie kids? (or if we're right to do so, why do they have so much tastemaking power? why don't we dismiss it as another example of people w/lame taste jumping on music which is geared towards their lame taste, and get on with liking what we like?)

fab's a milli
http://www.zshare.net/audio/1347064340e31214/

b/w the punch lines on this and his verse on "nuthin on me" he's approaching an o_O level semi-comeback here

"i only smoke dutches/i ont feel ees muhfuckas"
"ill serve your fruity ass like wet willies muhfucka"

etc etc

-- J0rdan S., Thursday, 12 June 2008 07:27 (5 hours ago) Link

kinda gets my goat when people are suddenly on Fab's dick because of the Carter III feature and saying it's his best verse ever or best in years -- his Gangsta Grillz a few months ago was really good!

dg yola wth a live band

http://thefader.com/articles/2008/6/11/freeload-dg-yola-the-xo-band-live

dude u a lil jimmy olsen intern at fader or some ish if i wanted to read the fader blog i would str8 up read the fader blog

it's "hip-hop geared specifically to indie kids" and "dance geared specifically to indie kids" - it follows really obviously that hipsters/indie kids will be into that shit more than people like us, who are more into hip-hop and dance than indie. real qn is - why are we attributing so much tastemaking power to the indie kids? (or if we're right to do so, why do they have so much tastemaking power? why don't we dismiss it as another example of people w/lame taste jumping on music which is geared towards their lame taste, and get on with liking what we like?)

-- lex pretend, Thursday, 12 June 2008 13:05 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

Isn't the only rap you listen to Saul Williams and Princess Superstar?

man get off my dick with your tired old man bitter rap hardbody fake steez you're posting on the internet

ive mentioned yola before, dude is dope, ths is the rap thread...

^love this dude

i met yola in 2005 got a copy of his 1st mixtape on cd-r i live 4 blocks from apache cafe and i still dont give a fuck about fader videos of dude rapping over a live band esp when you post like 40 fader links a week in this bitch

lol ok dude

that post was like timbaland street shit...just so fucking street!!!!!1

Isn't the only rap you listen to Saul Williams and Princess Superstar?

am i supposed to be annoyed at this? pretty sure dudes know my actual tastes all too well

kinda gets my goat when people are suddenly on Fab's dick because of the Carter III feature and saying it's his best verse ever or best in years -- his Gangsta Grillz a few months ago was really good!

-- some dude, Thursday, June 12, 2008 7:51 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

i mean imo it his best verse in a long while but im not suddenly on his dick or anything-- imo even his non-loverman raps had fallen off (i will admit to not listening to much of that gangster grillz- kinda hard to get through those sometimes) but im pretty sure ive expressed my luv for fab at various points in this thread/throughout this board etc

lex to answer yr question seriously i dont think its helpful to set it up as some tribal us-vs.-hipsters kind of shit but to look at it as a strain of aesthetic options and interrogate why certain options get more critical 'play' than others, turning into 'oooh i hate those indie kids!' just kind of ends up being unnecessarily confrontational and also there is a big risk for being guilty of lacking self awareness

i mean imo it his best verse in a long while but im not suddenly on his dick or anything-- imo even his non-loverman raps had fallen off (i will admit to not listening to much of that gangster grillz- kinda hard to get through those sometimes) but im pretty sure ive expressed my luv for fab at various points in this thread/throughout this board etc

-- J0rdan S., Thursday, June 12, 2008 12:21 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

his loverman raps definitely fell off (none of the soft batch stuff on From Nothin' To Somethin' can touch "Can't Let You Go" or "Into You") but all the Street Fi-di-di-di-dam shit has been pretty consistent I think. Fab really just needs to get on a run of remixes, break into the Khaled circuit or some shit.

i mean the question isnt why should we avoid aesthetics 'indie kids' like, its what aesthetic strains are being ignored and why and what are the motives and who benefits from this situation xp

its not like we havent witnessed this shit happen so i dont get whats so hard about it to understand. why diplo? right place right time, played the media game, had ACCESS to the media game. does anyone here really think that hipsters in socal couldnt wait to hear about this guy who plays mashups at parties in philly?? well, once they heard about it in urb they did!

i guess if youre ultimately asking me how hipster rappers get to know media types, i really dont know. is that a poisonous relationship? probably, but, like i said, i don't think that this "small" group of people have that much of an influence over rap discourse so i dont think its as drastic, esp wrt the canon, as you're making it out to be

deej what do you mean by "aesthetic strains"? clothes and musical styles? i'd say someone like joell ortiz is getting ignored by mainstream media v the cool kids cuz white rock listeners are much more apt to relate to the cool kids than a dude in tims w/ real grimy raps, unless that dude comes out w/ "in da club" or something

i talked about indie kids cuz i didn't want it to be all "oooh i hate those hipsters"! hipsters vary, in my experience, and calling them out really would be a lack of self-awareness.

ok then we need to talk about what kind of values are privileged by people who get to set the critical agenda (whatever we want to call them), cuz this is really the only sense in which hipster rap is being privileged over whatever other strains of hip-hop we're talking about. i mean who gets no 1 hits, flo rida or the cool kids?

xp jordan otm - esp as hip-hop has its own internal canonising process which means that what mainstream rock crit determines is the best of the genre isn't so influential

of course my perspective is one of living in a godforsaken country where pretty much all hip-hop gets ignored except kanye

the go-go band on those fader tracks sounds kinda shitty.

sometimes you can just FEEL stuff being canonised, placed on this pedestal for the next gen to unwittingly swallow up, and so much of it is so bad

thing is, maybe I'm wrong but isn't this stuff gonna go away in about three minutes? it's hard for me to get too worked up about. I don't really foresee a big next wave of Cool Kids clones, or if there is a big next wave it will be, like, in 2009 and everyone will be bored with it

Not to get all challops but it's tourism, yall. The Cool Kids are rap that can be safely consumed (retro aka knowing embrace of ironic distance ("Irony is found in the distance between two ideas") + reviving already canonized style = mad safe) and they're fashionable, which means easy embrace by dilettante audiences. It's the kind of rap you can dally in without having to understand a fuller culture. Drought 3 era weezy is like this too: so many of his refs are larger pop cultural moments that it shouldn't be a surprise he got hipster love.

You can't really dally in Fabo or Joell Ortiz or Saigon or w/e.

As Sarge points out their geekier reference points are ready-made for the audience of The Fader.

It's like you say deej, the grimier aesthetic strains are being ignored by a dilettante "art" media. Ghostface gets to be on Paste, Bishop Lamont doesn't. A certain view of rap music gets pushed to a certain audience by a certain media catering to said audience. Why is that surprising?

its not surprising, its lame

but also a lot of times the 'watered down' narrative is just straight up wrong or there is good music that is 'watered down' versions of real shit, im arguing that this weak shit isn't weak just cuz its 'watered down' but because its getting by more on networking than on making music ppl actually like

I'll buy that for a dollar.

rap these days contains so many multitudes and subgenres and niche markets that I really can't be bothered with worrying about the popularity of the niches I dislike (and belive me, I really dislike the one being discussed right now). so I guess I'm more on the "water finds its own level" side of the discussion w/ Sarge. I might get annoyed when Gym Class Heroes or The Love Below or whatever outsells the stuff I prefer, but there's pretty much always going to be a market for the kind of rap I do like.

^~^~^this^~^~^

im not talking about sales but whatever, i dont really have the interest to continue arguing this

Yeah, I dunno...the critical/media response to this stuff is interesting and worth discussing, but I think I've just gotten to a point of ambivalence about it. I thought it was funny a few years ago when Pitchfork was writing positive reviews of these kinds of artists but also kind of dismissively referred to it as "gallery rap." For all I know, their coverage of that stuff was completely on point (quality judgements aside), whereas I know that the coverage of Dipset/Weezy type stuff was (and is) frequently batshit insane.

whining about some chump on the cover is like... who reads urb? why are you looking at urb if you dont want to hear about urbish bullshit rap?

i think its dumb when blogs are like THE COOL KIDS ARE BRINGING FUN BACK TO RAP or whatever but thats my fault for reading blogs

who reads blogs

wtf

The Teriyaki" Boyz. Or should I say Pharell? Whatever the combination is, this joint right here, "this joint right here!" is ridiculous.

This un-fruty-looped beat is needed right now. Im sick of this cookie cutter mess in hip-hop. I wish Soulja Boy would disappear. Bamma's garbage!...but I digress.

After getting put on to this joint, I did a lil bit of homework and found out the Teriyaki Boyz were discovered or introduced by Nigo of Bathing Apes. They also did one of the main songs on Tokyo Drift.

Not positive if they're signed to Star Trak, but if they are its a rap. That's the right branding move for these guys to make. They seem to be more 80-90's hip-hop style oriented as such, (without knowing Japanese) they seem to be bringing fun back to the game.

They're styling and the look of this video reminds me of the new rappers coming out who are a throwback to real hip-hop. Groups like The Cool Kids and Kidz in the Hall and the Teriyaki Boyz are the breath of fresh air needed in the game right now.

I miss substance and the lack of "My cars are shiny, my women are twerkin' and I shoot guns." That's play pimpin.

I need depth like this:
"I started out starvin/now they got me out here Brett Favrin'/ Tryna see if I still got it...I guess it's like a bike think about..." Andre 3000

Not:
"Yahhh! Yahhh! Yahhh!"

Clown.

why do rap writers say ridiculous so much it sounds gay mott

what they hell u mean by "game" in there. that's the worst usage imo

Tracy: [referring to Ridikulous] He bit Shug Knight! He made Rasheed Wallace cry!

Jack: He’s harmless, don’t be ridiculous!
Ridikulous: I am Ridikulous.

whining about some chump on the cover is like... who reads urb? why are you looking at urb if you dont want to hear about urbish bullshit rap?

-- and what, Thursday, June 12, 2008 12:57 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

if we didnt read urb we wouldnt get to clown articles like 'niggardly nas'

here is a post on the ADVERTISING AGE blog entitled URBAN IS THE NEW MAINSTREAM:

http://adage.com/bigtent/post?article_id=125437

"I'm seeing this happening in every city I hit. When I'm watching J DaVeY rock a totally mixed crowd at the Viper Room on Sunset in L.A., I get the same vibe as when I go to New York or when I go to see Janelle Monae in Atlanta. This new breed of artist has tapped into something, a geeky kind of coolness that embraces who they are, but also gives the crowd permission to be left of center and be who they are -- comfortable in an uncomfortable urban gray area. Urban is not what it used to be. It's everyone now."

hahahaha

"when I go to New York and L.A. suddenly I see all these urban people! my god it's everywhere now!"

here is a post on the ADVERTISING AGE blog entitled URBAN IS THE NEW MAINSTREAM:

http://adage.com/bigtent/post?article_id=125437

-- thomp, Thursday, June 12, 2008 3:48 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

theres something extremely naive about this