The 'Das Racist' Connection

At first I was pretty resistant to the idea of new rap. Isn't the golden era over? Okay I'm being facetious. Being aware of the continuum of things is necessary to any complete reading of the thing in its present sense, though. So I'm not against the idea of new rap. Wu Tang and Jurassic 5 are pretty much legendary, but also over, and everybody knows the Tribe broke up because they simply could not handle Fred Durst's insane delivery and flow. 1999 was a mean time.

Speaking of insane shit, there's a group going by the name of Das Racist. Their first two releases are widely available and open to interpretation and debate. I highly recommend at least 18 of the tracks you can get immediately and with little hassle. Obviously their name is rap nominative taken to the next level, so you owe it to yourself to be educated about this matter.

DR are all about a sort of absurdist neo-hip hop. Some of their rhymes are weak and papery like soggy cardboard, but often they make up for this with great imitative production and delivery, as if they're... Wait

The lyrics range from A+ to 'meh', but the A+ moments are worth it and surprisingly consistent. Allusions fly around to everything, a kind of postmodern reference machine set to nice beats with a persistently and agonizingly self-aware (one might even say 'pseudo-hipsterian') angle. If you have lived at all in the past couple of decades there are name-drops waiting for you. Some are even humorous, which is great. The track 'Nutmeg', from their first release, starts out as of the best Ghostface homages I've ever heard.

Othertimes they're kicking it about corporations, the racism inherent in society; celebrities, weed, other drugs, themselves, parties, even franchise restaurants. I may just be ignorant but I have caught no G. Bush references, so, while there is the temptation to call them pure joke rappers, they at least are not taking the path of least resistance. Of course Obama is name-dropped.

On the other hand, they are an elaboration of something about their time. From the hyper-allusive, brand aware, irony-deficient lyrics, to the casual genre-hopping, Das Racist evoke the image of a multicultural goof troop on the coolest street corner in town, jocosely fooling around with a band of elite-level-hipness groupies and some production equipment they stole from MF Doom and LCD Soundsystem.

But there really is ultimately something fresh about DR's lyrics, that cannot be explained without audio reference. I could try posting lyrics, but seriously, now: I already posted a pretty swell hyperlink reference.

Internetting Et Cetera

I want this blog to succeed but I also always want to throw a few curses into it. Then again when you curse and swear you alienate a certain amount of the population who have neither a sense of humour nor a sense of opprobrium. I mean a proper sense of opprobrium, which means not writing off the vulgar for the simple reason that it makes you uncomfortable. Some opprobrium is rightfully shunned, and other types are funny. I have no examples but a good fart joke goes a long way to settling who understands humour and who is afraid of scatology.

A while ago I read something by Douglas Coupland, in a newspaper (a good liberal intellectual paper, and yes I read newspapers), in which he describes "The Red Queen's Blog"  as a concept that, the more someone 'races onto one's blog to assert one's uniqueness, the more generic one becomes'. I am paraphrasing somewhat, but that's what he means. This is an important statement but Coupland is becoming a bit derivative.

In other news, well you no doubt know your own news, so I don't have to write about that. I just celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving for the umpteenth time, and it gets a bit better each year even as the weather gets crazier. I almost got hit by lightning, to the point where I heard it sizzle the raindrops around me. That's my bit of personal revelation for today's post.

Coupland's blog post in the newspaper was important to read. It was titled "The Radical Pessimist's Guide to the Next Ten Years" and covered a range of important things that are worth considering even if you don't believe in pessimism or the future. Maybe I'll delve into it and post some more things here, assuming that's not a form of intellectual piracy (but how could it be when I acknowledge that it's Coupland's). Basically it was all 'bout the depersonalization and alienation and internetization of our so-called era. I wonder if Coupland has a twitter account? I will research this...

I did promise some dwellings on the Best Things of the Internet and I mean to follow through on that, even though it happened a year ago or more. The first thing I'll list is "Web of Trust" or WoT, at this link, which you can click/see for yourself.
 The important thing is that you can type in any website address into the bar on the WoT site and then it will show you how the internet feels about that page. A lot of bad pages are given good ratings, probably because the bad page operators are ganking the WoT site, but the comments usually are balanced out with truthful and concerned internet judgements. If you enjoy finding new sites or free video of whatever (which is illegal and shouldn't be done) and try to keep your computer in good condition, this site is pretty useful. Of course you could install script blockers and security software, but that takes more work than copying and pasting an web-address into a website to tell you if it's trustworthy. 


Spoiler alert: most websites are pretty shady.