[...] The thing is [...]: what if the artists are not influencing or informing, but rather just reflecting their audience, holding up the mirror their world can see itself as world in? [...]

Do those of you in like Chicago or NYC ever notice how commuters on the train tend to get all quiet and intense when South Side or South Bronx starts to flow past? If you look closely at the faces, you see it's not depression, not even discomfort; it's a kind of rigid fascination with the beauty of ruins in which people live but look or love nothing like you, a horizonful of numbly complex vistas in slab-gray and spraypaint-red. Hieroglyphs on walls, people on stoops, hoops w/o nets. White people have always loved to gaze at the 'real black world,' preferably at a distance and while moving briskly through, toward business. A view from this remove yields easy abstractions about rap in its role as just the latest 'black' music. Like: the less real power a people have, the more they'll assert hegemony in areas that don't much matter in any grand scheme. A way to rule in hell [...]

...when a big-jowled Dixiecrat Senator leans into the microphones to ask, mock-incredulous: 'Now, Mr. Costello, isn't it in fact the case that you once cowrote and also authored a book published under the title Significant Wrap-per, in which you argued that Mr. Brown's habit of saying "Huh" and "Smokin' " and "Give it here" and "GoodGod" (pronounced as if it were one word) was not, in your opinion, ee-sen-shul to the cold dead heavy funk as practiced and popularized by my fellow native son of Georgia, Mr. Brown. In fact,' the Dixiecrat waxes prosecutorially, 'isn't it true that you stated in the pages of this alleged book that you considered the .guitarwork of Bobby Byrd, and not the individual named James Brown at all, to be the essence of that music we call "James Brown"?'

At which point Mr. Costello, eyes on the prize of a cushy lifetime judicial appointment, squirms and offers smally: 'Yes.'

Now the Dixiecrat Senator bears down: 'And what's all this I hear about you leaving phone messages on the machine of a Jamaican drug kingpin's front company back in 1989?'

A PLEA FROM D.

Bette Midler's intuition—which I share—is that there's some fundamental difference between: (1) pirating a piece of music and its attendant pavlovs for artistic reasons; and (2) doing so, as Ford seems to, as part of a cold, calculated effort to increase sales of a product. Well, but except the 'art' of popular music appears quite often as records, tapes and CDs, which of course are themselves saleable. Does that mean that songs, like Fords, are all and only products? Which is the product, in pop—the sounds or the containers they come in? Does it make a difference? If you, like me, are insistent about an important distinction between Ford's use of Midler's pavlovs and Midler's use of (or tribute to,
or comment on, or response to) Freeman's pavlovs, can you articulate what that distinction is in some way that isn't circular, or hideously digressive from this whole sampler's subject, or so freaking long it can't even be a way-too-long footnote? Any reader who can do so will be invited over to Somerbridge for a rousing game of MTV with D. and M. Simply send your articulated dis-tinctions, in let's say 20 pages or fewer, to:

DISTINCTION BETWEEN ARTISTS RIPPING OFF OTHER ARTISTS AND ADS DOING SO
[...]

Rap, under close scrutiny, becomes 'critic-heavy'—a unique pop opportunity for the application of Marxist & poststructural principles to the cultural production, not just reception, of texts, lyrics, art [...]. Rap is the self-conscious–self-consciousness loop academic feminists and deconstructionists drool over—and often the loop's right there on the music's surface, less to be rooted out truffle-like by the eager interpreter than the result of much such rooting by the rapper himself. But so rap, in its love of the overtly complex, often usurps the ('serious') outside critic's hallowed interpretive function: little wonder few licensed determiners of seriousness seem much disposed to take rap seriously. Just don't be duped by their rationale. Especially today, the unsubtle does not necessarily mean the simple or crude.

[...] it's quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today. 'Real' (viz. academic) U.S. poetry, a world no less insular than rap, no less strange or stringent about vocab, manner, and the contexts it works off, has today become so inbred and (against its professed wishes) inaccessible that it just doesn't get to share its creative products with more than a couple thousand fanatical, sandal-shod readers, doesn't get to move or inform more than a fraction of that readership (most of the moved being poets themselves), doesn't generate revenue for much of anyone save the universities to whom the best Ph.D. poets rent their names and time ... and especially does not inspire a whole culture's youth to try to follow in its Connecticut-catalogue brogan's prints. Because of rap's meteoric rise, though, you've got poor kids, tough kids, 'underachievers,' a 'lost gener-ation' . . . more young people—ostensibly forever turned off 'language' by TV, video games, and low U.S.D.E. budgets—more of these kids hunched over notebooks on their own time, trying to put words together in striking and creative ways, than the U.SA. has probably ever had at one time. [...]

[...] He had served only one day when he was told that an anonymous 'well-dressed Negro' had paid the $178 fine. King protested; he wanted to stay jailed. The Albany police chief refused, explaining that since King's fine had now been paid, it would be illegal to keep him behind bars. The 'well-dressed Negro' was a fiction invented by segregationist police as an excuse to release King, whose stature grew with each day jailed. The well-dressed-Negro ploy would be one of the few strategies effective against nonviolent protest, getting civil rights leaders off the streets overnight without allowing them the symbolic martyrdom of a well-publicized prison term.

... Is it real freedom, though: a world where Chuck D. can serenade his Uzi in art exactly because in the S. Bronx 'Uzi's' such a perfect metonym for irresistible force? For all the exciting formal innovations and transformations of rap, what's finally, for us, its most affecting quality is that it's the first pop genre to countenance a peculiarly modern American despair, one for which popular music, maybe any popular art, can no longer be a palliative—all the putative 'freedoms' such art invents and exploits and rips off and wastes finally resembling most closely, to-day, the prisoner's COMPLETE FREEDOM to beat his head on the cell wall just as much as he likes. Serious rap's the first music to begin creative work on the new, (post-) postmodern face the threat of economic inequality to American ideals is wearing: the dreadfully obvious one: viz., 'freedom' becomes not qualitative but quantitative, quantifiable, a cold logical function of where you are and what you have to exercise it on. For the unfree citizen, U.S. freedom now equals the very 'power' it invented itself against. Little wonder that in rap the constitutional watchwords of white public discourse detach, emptify, float: oh Jesus surely freedom can't be just the wherewithal to buy and display. If it is, then the whole country's been lied to by itself, and if the impending millennium turns out Millennial it'll be hard to fucking care. But if true freedom's still meant to be more than this, more than the Pursuit of Yuppiness, then these are some really pathetic, infuriating times—especially among the Marginal, on whom freedom's unjust absence has imposed the conviction that freedom's just presents.

Yr. staff posits that the rapper's is a Scene that has accepted—yea, reveres—the up-to-date values and symbols of a Supply Side prosperity, while rejecting, with a scorn not hard to fathom, what seem to remain the 'rules' for how the Marginal are supposed to improve their lot therein: viz., by studying hard, denying themselves, working hard, being patient, keeping that upper lip stiff in the face of what look like retractions of the last 'great society's' promises to them, denying themselves, working hard and slowly at the restricted number and salary of jobs available in/to their community; waiting, patiently, for the lucre of billion-dollar corporate tax breaks and Wall Street monté to trickle their way. We posit that, for serious rap, these Protestant patience- and work-ethic rules, the really nostalgia-crazed parts of Supply Side, just don't reconcile with the carrots, the enforced and rein-forced images of worth-now as wealth-now, of freedom as just power, of power as just the inclination and firepower to get what you decide you have coming to you. The Real American Way, no? ... Entitlement has always had a two-word response for Impediment.

Another pretty simple answer, from outside the window: even the best of rap has no 'vision' of anything beyond present discontent less because it's a black music than because it's a distinctively young one. Ours is a generation (late- or post-Boom) divorced from Time: we're taught to look to the 'innocent past' for signposts to value; to see the present as little more than a compendium of evils and past fuckups we have to borrow a couple trillion from the Japanese and throw an innocent-past party to forget; to see the future as a vague fairyland where the consequences of our dire present will by political wand-waving 'all work out,' or else as the grim, cinereous end-of-the-month day when the Visa charges we've been using to pay off our AmEx finally come due. And the time banditry has got to be specifically worse for the urban black young, since the only real 'past' that might summon its political pavlovs is that of a civil rights movement no one under 30 can recall, of a King and an X both murdered at rhetorical zenith, before the movements their words fashioned had barely begun transit. Because the past can be considered altered, falsified (for whites by Reagan, for blacks by the whites who ran the past) induction doesn't apply, and so no imaginative future can exist: at best it'll be more of the same. Today even the _fresh_est black music is no longer an 'escape' from the very conditions and tight borders that make it possible as music, or even an expression--since rap is, in the best and worst ways, just a mirror.