The Dave Matthews of This Africa Shit (Charlize Theron Song)

Anthony is a lot of things. Funny, Italian, studious, hard-working, genuine, my former RA and current closest (heterosexual) male friend, and as of going to Mozambique, skinny as shit. Anthony is also, unbeknownst to him until he gets my reply to his latest email, guest-blogging today as he dropped some gems/sacred treasures this morning on Akon, cultural imperialism/exportation through corporate hip-hop and its effect on third world peoples without access to the Passion of the Weiss, and more.

Right now I am listening to the only constant thing in my life, Akon, as the people who live next to me have the Mozambican habit of playing music again and again and again. Next to James Blunt and Orlando Bloom, I think Akon is someone I would like to wipe off this planet. Nothing would make me happier to see his face melted and the rest of his body just crumple to the ground. While that sounds pretty intense, I literally hear the same 5 tracks THE ENTIRE DAY from Akon. Mozambique has an interesting culture in which yes, they listen to singles, but they often have this mix cd's with songs that were never released or just album fodder and they listen to those songs INTENSELY. It's pretty amazing. It's like a country of B-Sides, something in which the irony hasn't escaped me. The more I am here the more I realize how purely African Akon is. Now I'm not lumping all African cultures together in any way shape or form as Senegal and Mozambique vary on many different levels. But in regards to third world (or "Developing Countries", which by the way isn't often true if you haven't noticed) is that the attitudes by men, in this case misogynistic and controlling, exist. This of course is one of the reasons why these countries fail in the first place as men typically have a sense of entitlement that makes it very hard for them to admit mistakes or acknowledge change is needed. Akon is a complete symbol of this as his music can be broken down into two categories:
1. Him talking to a girl, lyrics sounding like him trying to sweet talk
or hit on her
2. Him talking about guns and how tough he is

More than in America, where we are just inundated with bad boast-rap and R&B, the options are more limited here, which means the Akon's and Fifty Cents of the world are more closely scrutinized and observed as people scramble to translate the lyrics and then apply them to their own lives. You have no idea how badly the teenagers, especially the teenage males here, want to be a hip-hop star. Their style of dress makes them look like a white guy trying to impersonate Jamie Kennedy doing an impersonation of a back up crew member in a rap video and the way they treat women is akin to that of how people treat a new toy at Christmas, they want it want it want it, they get it, they play with it, they see a new toy, etc. While that attitude prevails across the world, as I said earlier it's magnified here because America means success, success means you must copy those actions of the successful, which means acting like and doing the things they do in their videos. it doesn't help that the people here have such little access to the outside world that they really believe, once again more intensely than Americans, that everything a rapper says is real. And why shouldn't they? Who will tell them no (other than me and other foreigners)? To them Yes, Fifty Cent really will shoot you if you cross him, Akon really has been involved in more gangland activities than the A&E Biography channel, and Ja-Rule is, well, still popular. The mixture of cultural values injected with modern materialism along with the lack of expediency of trying to climb out of poverty makes it hard enough here, but rappers really don't realize how much they are hurting the developing world. A big statement yes, but very real. Jay-Z and Fifty can set up 1,000 organizations and scholarships for black kids in the inner city, but it will never hold up if they continue what they do.

Ed. Note-The notion of personal responsibility in what sales-minded rap cliche-pushing artists put out seems like a tired point, but it might only be tired in terms of an American context. Anyone who has taken any from of Intro to Globalization or the like can tell you that with a separate cultural history and set of norms comes a unique tendency to be more negatively influenced by things that get checked in the US by the remnants of 60's liberalism. There's no feminist or gay establishment to buffer the bolstering or pre-existing male attitudes in the third world from images and lyrics that, sure a kid like me from bed-Stuy was always able to differentiate from, but someone in a besieged and pillaged continent still in efforts to rebuild following hundreds of years of being carved up, its social order razed and machinated to better represent European ideals, and a lingering destitution and dearth of education in some areas that would make it difficult to convince a kid that Jay-Z isn't secretly pushing kilos. There's an idea, and I saw this a little in Colombia, in the youth that you can just up and become Scarface and then retire lavishly or that emulation held no consequences. It's a dangerous sort of stubbornness and refusal to budge from norms that aren't necessarily conservative but are usually in opposition to stereotypical liberal, baby-eating/"fag enabling" leftism. Jay-Z can go fetch water, yeah, but as Dallas Penn posted last week, it doesn't quite make up for what he does, represents, and has purportedly done in the past and benefitted/benefits from to this day

Wisdom Body 101: The Tao of Dennis Coles

Men marryin’ men/Ill…- "Mighty Healthy"
Fuck what they say/Cuz we against the abortions –“Beat The Clock”
Do business with the Jews?/Never that!- "After The Smoke Is Clear"

The idea that you should hold a woman equal to a man is really fucking basic (no homo). No bleeding heart eyeroll-inducing feminist lectures, its just human courtesy. Sure there is a lot of typical macho bro shit that comes out the mouth of Wu members but these are 70’s babies, 90’s rap survivors and still a bunch of dudes from the projects of Staten Island and Brooklyn. What’s surprising is how backwards what the fuck came out his mouth was. You’d have to be terribly PC and sheltered to think that there aren’t women like that described in “Wildflower” and that being a male somehow neuters you from expressing derision or disappointment or out and out shitting on a woman with reason. If you accept the premise that people should be treated equally until shown otherwise then that goes without saying and makes invoking the "m" word a lot trickier and more up for discussion. The weird thing is that, you don’t have to be at all "feminist", “liberal” or “sex-positive” to draw ire with the Angela Yee interview comments.

I was half expecting him to go in on some practical reasoning or maybe even bring up how when he got diabetes he thought it was AIDS because he recklessly went raw with a lot of girls during Wu's heydey and wants to avoid another scare. But not some ole' style male supremacy shit. On general principle, that’s some 1950’s bullshit he’s saying, that, though perfectly in line with the Wu and, really, a classically royal/Victorian/pre liberation male notion of the Madonna/Whore complex and the worth of a virtuous woman versus one who is loose(d) (And creepily suggest that a lot of the WU kind of just want to find a girl just like their mom, who is consistently the highest revered figure in their depictions of women in song). Most reasonable people, like myself, are willing to allow a shitload of wiggle room in Ghost’s logic because A)We love him and B)It seems typical of what we’d expect to hear from a lot of people, rappers or not. The thing that’s jarring in his whole “I’m not going to wife up a chick I perceive to be a slore” steez is how low his number was. His base car loan pitch of “1 guy a month being too much” is pretty fucking ridiculous, if not insane. (And Nahright takes another L for cosigning that shit) It's reminiscent of Clerks and Chasing Amy, when Kevin Smith (“36 dicks!?”) effectively distilled male insecurity and hypocrisy about women.

There's cognitive distance between enjoying an acceptable level of shooting and drug selling and womanizing on record up until a certain point, illustrated by the interview. Wu always had a lot more going on in the songs, and usually the difference between typically negative content that bored intellectual essay-writing rap writers aim to defend to moralists (and really people who tend to not care about art in the first place) and what we tend to eschew comes down to that extra amount of detail or soul or insight or recontextualizing. The same was really dumb attempts at art from kids at my college would be torn-apart for being one-dimensional and obvious is why “C.R.E.A.M.” is transcendent and some LCD rapper breaking the fourth wall and hollering “I ROB NIGGAS/I ROB NIGGAS (HAAAAAAAAAAH!)” like a bad Wild n’ Out is equally shat on. No matter how fucked up some of the things Ghostface has said on wax, and there’s been a few, there was always this belief, at least in my head, that my view of him as an artist was thankfully unmarred by who he might actually be as a person.

Most of his interviews with mainstream (i.e. traditionally white) press outlets have had him seem wizened, a little ornery and pretty guarded while his interviews with hip-hop outlets always find him a bit more energetic and willing to delve into questions that he seems to always skirt and falsify when it’s the Onion or something. As someone both conscious and admittedly extremely liberal, I’ve found myself trying to doublethink the ongoing and bothersome clichés of rappers being heterosexist and (though there’s a lot more to hip-hop’s various takes on women than 1-hour VH1 rap docs would relay) misogynist. The truth is that most seemingly negative lyrics about women rarely bother me, not being a woman and rarely hearing a rapper suggest women are inferior and shouldn’t have rights, when they offer at least one reason for the song’s ire or criticism or dressing down. But I have frequently tried to justify all the “faggot” talk from rappers I admire, like Q-Tip, the assorted Native Tongues satellites (Talib, Mos, Common, etc). and others because when you enjoy an artist’s music, there’s still this lingering childlike notion that you want to like them as people also. I’ve maintained for years that I could give fuck all who a musician molested or peed on or raped or filmed peeing or shat on in a crowd or accidentally killed in a drunken car crash or forcefully annexed into German territory in the late 30’s.

Busta Rhymes is a piece of shit as a human being but he’s still got some classic material, which is and should be all that matters. It’s not even the banal “fuck faggots” steez a lot of guys still parrot. It’s the really vitriolic learned hatred of gays that I still see pop up on rap message boards and, as opposed to classical pre-90’s racism, doesn’t seem to be dying down with newer generations. Trick Tricks’s “ra-ra” Hutu-esque "cut the tall trees" call to arms last year was made more disturbing by the fact that so many people were agreeing with him. Luckily most instances of the utterance of "faggot" are in the normative "feminized male"/"bitchass nigga" sense and not actually addressing anyone who actually identifies as gay. But the feminine implication is still troublesome, and pretty inaccurate considering I could hop on the L to Canarsie right now and find chicks harder than most of the dudes I've ever met.

In general most of the guys who've said some reckless transgressive shit in interviews have been either smart enough or cajoled enough into keeping it out of their music to avoid hurting sales or drawing unnecessary Marshall Mathers LP-like negative attention to themselves. And as someone who grew up with such a morally complex art form to deal with and discuss you're so used to assorted coonery and general ignorance from mainstream rappers that it makes you almost proud to look at your favorite MC and not have to shake your head or cringe at some shit he said on a song. This Ghostface interview is sad not only because he said some questionable shit when I would've, as a fan, preferred him to've been mum or at least hold a more acceptably backwards view on the topic, but because its genuinely disheartening to know there's a 39-year-old grown man who believes this shit.

Ghost holds onto this outmoded "women v. hoes" taxonomy that, realistically, is probably more reasonable than most other American male's, but its still a denigration of one sort of female and honoring of one based on a rubric that probably doesn't allow any wiggle room to convince him that a woman can fuck 12 or more guys a year and not be any less valuable. Ghost lyrically treasures smart, strong, and faithful women, but falters on her sexual freedom. Although, considering the era in which the WU grew up, where they grew up, and the archaic lyrical inspirations of their music (Egypt/Kemet, Islam, Christianity), it makes sense that he wouldn't extol Sontag-isms. Especially Islam, which despite revisionist attempts is pretty fucking conservative. Just a shame that his "futuristic"-ness ends at his lyrics and fashion.

Remember when I long-dicked you and broke your ovary? Remember when I said you weren't equal because my questionable splinter religion said I was the embodiment of God and you're naturally subservient? Good times.