No one's a yuppie because everyone's a yuppie, a consummate consumer, for U.S. purposes, today. Even—you will not leave this sampler unconvinced—that unlikeliest of markets, black recording artists on the leading edge of the pop explosion called rap: yuppiness right out their dactylic assonance, shouting at the tops of their trochee'd rhymes across an impenetrable emptiness that they are there, here, here-and-now: like Us in their self-conscious difference, their congregation at the altar of electronic Self; with Us in their alien hate; at the deepest level one with the yuppie U.S.

Serious rap's a musical movement that seems to revile whites as a group of Establishment and simply to ignore their possibility as distinct individuals—the Great White Male is rap's Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy. The music's paranoia, together with its hermetic racial context, maybe helps explain why it appears just as vibrant and impassioned as it does alien and scary, to us, from outside.

[...] how sex and violence and yuppie toys represent perfectly the urban black lifedrive to late-80s American glory. (This latter many older blacks despise as less dull than just a disgusting recidivism to a pre-King/Malcolm vision, like your kid pawning your Purple Heart to buy rubbers and gin.)

[...] Rap's highly self- and history-conscious unfamiliarity, its image of inaccessbility to established markets or truly teeming-mass appeal, is often reduced by critics to the kind of 'surly musical hostility' that, like Punk's, quickly loses its novelty for those outside, can become for Us like little more than looking at something poisonous in a tightly closed jar.

Except who exactly sealed the lid, this time? The mainstream record reviewer? He's but Market's bitchy mistress. The Market itself--Us? But everything the white rock listener pays to enjoy is black-begotten. [...]

[...] A stereotype [...] is just a false synecdoche, a token of the conceptualizer's ignorance or laziness, not of some certain distorted features' representative power. [...]

[...] It's way too easy for the pale to hurry across the deck, past the thick, light-wobbling window, and not once hear rap as anything but the weird anthemic march of one Other'd nation, marginalized and yet trapped in our own metropolitan center, a nation that cannot secede and may not assimilate and is thus driven still deeper inside, evincing all the brute anger and resentment we'd legitimate as political were it not anger with nothing visible else to it, no positive diode, none of the King-like 'vision' we've come to expect from any change that does not yield rubble. As an ever more conservative body politic and media audience, We are being conditioned, in an equation both sides of which may be unconscious, to see today's urban black world not as a demimonde shadowing but more and more as a cancer metastasizing inside our own, our few glimpses of anything like a 'real black world' coming just in statistics and mix radio and political shibboleths [...]

... Well except most of it turned out to be lame hype, these shivered images we'd all formed reading about rap and posses, listening to Ice T's war raps, Public Enemy's prolegomena to any future uprising. [...]

[...] 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 [...]

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
[...]