(no subject)

[dot_fennel]

Hear it on Youtube

I'm temporarily fascinated by this song. As Uffie says early on, "There's two kinds of MCs out there / The ones who rap and the ones who don't care / And frankly I don't give a fuck". In other words, she's too tough to bother being good at music, and that toughness is (unspokenly) exactly what she thinks makes her qualified to be a rapper. That and record sales, anyway.

I feel like that's the aesthetic argument implicit in a lot of Ol' Dirty Bastard too. I mean, plenty of performers are more endearing for lacking technical skills, but most genres don't have a convention of totally identifying some non-musical characteristic with being good at that genre. Maybe if Madonna or Britney wrote a clumsy song about how lazy she was, in a way that made laziness seem sexy?

There must be some other example involving slackerhood and mid-90s indie rock. It's tough, though; I never felt like the looseness of "Slack Motherfucker" would have been self-described as incompetence by the band at the time. Maybe!

Comments

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

Didn't punk have a thing where there was an inverse correlation between how punk you were and how well you could play your instrument?

[dot_fennel]

Maybe. That's still less indirect than the Uffie thing, though-- being a bad rapper isn't inherently tough (but she makes it so) AND being tough isn't inherently raplike (though the genre's history makes it so). So I guess the question is whether personal 'punkness' counted as being unrelated to punk music.

[dot_fennel]

Huh. No, you're right, if you take the intermediate quality to be... "defiance"?

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. That screwed a lot of bands that had been about to make it big from the British pub rock scene when punk broke. It was like the Cultural Revolution: you spent your life working on your craft, then someone declares you inauthentic because you know more than three chords.

Well, okay -- nobody got executed nor spent seven years shoveling manure in a labor camp for being good at rock. The analogy only goes so far.

There is always the sense in music that certain references have been out of favor long enough to be allowed as callbacks, but others haven't yet. You couldn't get away with doing disco homages via folk instruments in 1986, but you could by 1996.

Right now people still don't seem to be tired of uber-Vocoder / autotuning / Cherylization. I can't wait. Then singing with notes will come back for a while. I miss three-part harmonies that aren't heading into a musical.