dot_fennel | (no subject)

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!