Sausage Mahoney.

Rectum? It Nearly Killed Him!

I'm too low for lowbrow; I prefer the no-brow.

Bullshit Moose

It will come as no surprise to my eight regular readers that I am no fan of this asshole.  Over the past week, in response to Russia's excursion into South Ossetia, John McCain has taken the opportunity to try on the big cowboy hat, and his mouth is working overtime to write checks his ass palpably can't cash, all but pledging to put American lives on the line to defend Georgia against Russian aggression.  But what you see is what you get.  McCain is reflexively bellicose; he was just as aggressive as our current President in pursuing recreational war after September 11.  I don't think we can credit McCain's improved standing in the polls solely to this flurry of tough talk.  Barack Obama, though admirably genteel, has basically driven his campaign through a hedge by the side of the road into the tomater patch, from where he's watching the national political conversation pass by and disappear down the road.  But there's no question McCain feels better and more confident, and plays better to the electorate, when he can repeatedly mention his reluctance to discuss the fact he was once a prisoner of war, and on that basis pretend he has some core competence in military strategy.  Why wouldn't he, since no one's allowed to call him on it?  Last month, Wes Clark, who is an actual military strategist with actual recent experience leading American troops in a combat zone, was excommunicated from Face the Nation for suggesting that being shot down over Vietnam and imprisoned by the Viet Cong did not, of itself, qualify McCain for the presidency.

So I'm a little confused by Bob Herbert's column today, which takes issue with McCain's stump-speech applause line that he is a "Teddy Roosevelt Republican."  Herbert seems to think this is false because McCain's campaign is largely run by prominent lobbyists and the candidate himself believes our greatest domestic priority is offshore oil drilling, whereas Roosevelt fought Standard Oil and saved pelicans off the Florida coast.  As often happens with Herbert, the column is full of good intentions but ends up tangential to the real issue.  In the sense most relevant to both our current political discourse and the modern Republican Party that is about to crown him their Presidential nominee, McCain is absolutely a Roosevelt Republican.  Just like TR was, McCain is a macho, bullying loudmouth who believes America is an empire and there is glory in subjugating other nations through force.  Whatever problems he may have with other traditionally Republican constituencies—and, let's not kid ourselves, he will not have many come November 4—he is beloved by the GOP national-security apparatus for exactly that reason.

Like most of you, the first thing I learned about Teddy Roosevelt was that he spoke softly but carried a big stick—either that or the thing about the teddy bear.  Embedded though it is in our common narrative, there is little or no truth to this claim.  Roosevelt spoke as loudly as humanly possible at all times about whatever subject interested him, whether or not he knew anything about it.  Mostly it all came back to an exploration of the wonders of himself.  But it is no longer 1904.  Back then, however intemperate its President, however juvenile his self-concept, the United States had a pretty big stick, and Europe, Asia, the Middle East were oceans away.  Our great-grandparents could avoid the other great powers of the day and concentrate on imposing their will throughout Latin America, against countries that had real trouble fighting back.  Not so much anymore.  All good post-structuralists know that power is at its most fragile when it must be exercised; the past eight years have shown definitively to the entire world that the United States cannot remake even a single, mid-sized foreign nation in its image through military force.  Today our big stick is broken into pieces across Iraq and Afghanistan.  John McCain is so busy picturing himself sitting in the big chair, he can't tell the difference.

I Will Not Fall for the Okey-Doke

So the best rapper alive (no, not that fool) has a hot new album out.  Critical response has been predictably tepid, focusing on the alleged lameness of the beats and the emcee's supposed self-contradictions.  I'm not having it.  You can say what you want about Nasir Jones's determination to choose backing tracks that do not unduly distract from his rhyming—I can't front, I've joined that chorus on occasion and still would love to see Nas respond to some truly forward-thinking production—but to fixate on that is to miss the point.  I buy my ticket because the man is the nicest on the mic.

Hip-hop is, and always has been, about more than just the voice of the emcee, but it would take a fool not to recognize the pendulum has swung a long way from the days when deejays like Eric B. and Jazzy Jeff got top billing over rappers, even legendary ones.  There's a reason for that, too.  Beats may speak louder than words from time to time, but humans conceive, articulate, and process thoughts through language.  The voice of the poet will always slice through the even the most compelling wall of funky sound, even more so when it's speaking truth.  Give me superlative vocal ID, sound concepts, diverse vocabulary, credent similes and metaphors, verbal dexterity, flow, attitude, brains, and a sense of adventure, and I will take it, no matter what beat the lyrics are spit over.  Nas has all of this in spades, so it doesn't bother me that his new Untitled is probably his most anodyne set of beats yet.  If anything, that just brings focus and coherence.  Compared to Hip Hop Is Dead, which felt overstuffed with manufactured choruses and unproductive guest shots, Untitled is a model of economy.  Nas is the rare hip-hop artist that bows, at least somewhat, to the convention of rock-era album structure.  Illmatic was just nine songs, and even if his subsequent joints have been a little longer, he's never been a big fan of skits, remixes, or posse cuts.  You can call that selfish, but the man knows what he does well.  Bravehearts aside, he's always seemed like the type of fellow who wouldn't want to join any club that would have him as a member.

But complaints about boring-ass loops have been secondary to questions about the emcee's motives.  Many of you probably know that Nas originally intended to call the record Nigger.  Eventually he was persuaded otherwise, as he recounts on the cranky, defensive lead single "Hero."  (Props to Nasir for suggesting he has a peer-level relationship with Billy Joel.)  I don't want to wade unnecessarily into a minefield here, but I don't think Nas was trying to explore any area with the original title that others haven't surveyed before in various contexts.  A couple years ago Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote a book with the same title, which caused a micro-furor but was largely reviewed respectfully.  And nobody freaked out when A Tribe Called Quest released this song, even though it basically just posed a question and then shrugged at the possible implications.

I am sure Nas was happy the title attracted media attention; the guy is a capitalist, and he did call his previous album Hip Hop Is Dead, which didn't exactly discourage press coverage.  It's fair to suggest he's flirting with getting a rep as a content-free provocateur and in the process obscuring his undeniable mic skills.  But critics need to see the other side, too.  You can't listen to Untitled without admitting that, in his own episodic way, Nas is trying to confront something serious here.  I'll leave it up to someone else to decide whether his ambitions are serious enough to justify using America's most famous racial slur as a title.  But it seems to me like many people have used the title controversy as an excuse not to engage with the album's content.

I can tell you what I take from Untitled, and it provides a definitive answer, at least for me, to charges that Nas is cynically exploiting racial issues.  Some people see hypocrisy in the fact that Nas doesn't maintain a consistent personality—let alone a continuous, sustained take on Race in America—throughout the record.  I'm happy to concede the multiplicity of perspectives.  Sometimes he plays the revolutionary, sometimes the thug; he talks about how much he loves weed, champagne, diamonds, and pussy, then he calls out his Caucasian fans for mistaking their enjoyment of black music for a meaningful understanding of black culture.  He rails against stereotypes when they're used as weapons; he chuckles to himself as he admits he embraces the power they can offer.  After castigating mass media for its unexamined institutional racism, he concedes he relies on that same media to distribute his message.

What I can't concede is that these multiplicities undermine the power of the record.  They are the power of the record.  It's like that old Gandhi quote: "It is not my aim to be consistent with what I have said, but to be consistent with the truth as it reveals itself to me."  It seems to me Nas's ultimate goal is to show (not tell) exactly why racial slurs and stereotypes should be unacceptable to thinking people: they reduce rich individual complexities to demeaning generalities.  In reality, each of us contains multitudes of conflicting impulses.  Nas is a militant and a baller, a burnout and a scholar; and so are you.  Untitled is not just about the various facets of Nasir Jones; it's the emcee's take on the glories and flaws of his community and culture, the achievements and the self-sabotage, the defiance and the submission, the shit people do each day to get by.  Fundamentally, it's about the way slurs and stereotypes demean, define, and diminish the people they purport to describe, and how, in return, those people struggle against, embrace, and even find power in those words and concepts.  It's really not such a complicated idea.  If you didn't pick that up, listen again to the erstwhile title track "N.I.*.*.E.R.," with its travelogue and its pep-talk chorus: "We are the slave and the master/What you lookin' for?/You the question and the answer."  Sometimes you're a prisoner of the past; sometimes you're in control of your present and future, but ultimately you are an individual at war with yourself.  Whatever group you belong to.

This is not to say Nas is lyrically above criticism.  As always, he's morose and self-pitying.  He benefited substantially from living in the era of the digital download, because leaked pre-release versions of the album included some tracks that were kinda wack.  Recently the rapper NYOil has been raising a ruckus about Nas being "one of the most overrated emcees ever."  Now, I don't begrudge anybody the right to battle Nas over content,* but I obviously disagree and would point out that it doesn't sound like Oil has listened to too much Nas over the years.  Even so, I think Oil had the better of this argument about "Be a Nigga Too," and I'm glad it didn't make Untitled's final cut.  Sometimes Nas is provacative without thinking things through.  By now you've undoubtedly dimissed me as an apologist, but I think even that can be a blessing: it allows him to be multiple things to multiple people, probe different sides of various issues, question himself and answer those questions and answer those questions again in a different way once his perspective shifts.  Basically he's open to new shit and doesn't live by dogma, and guys like that are always going to reverse field from time to time.  But like they say, foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.  Would you really like it better if he was 100% on a consistent message, like Chuck D on Nation of Millions?  Don't you think that would get a little airless after about three songs?

* I'm going to bite Joe Posnanski and do a long asterisked footnote here.  It irritates me when hip-hop critics review a record without bothering to engage with the emcee(s).  It reminds me of sportswriters who hate sports and the athletes who play them.  I know that it's easier to talk about which old soul songs get looped.  I'm thinking in particular of this review by this individual "Ian Cohen," which, after offering the usual bitches about duff beats, accuses Nas of cynicism—his 2010 record will be called McCain Killa (good one!)—and then proceeds to dismiss the record on the basis of cherry-picked lyrics he has not thought about.  Rest assured that no emcee comes up with winners every time out.  Nas is no exception.  But Cohen reduces each song to a cartoon; he seizes on the fleeting UFO reference on the one-world chillout "We're Not Alone," as if that's what the song's about or renders its actual message mere bong resin.  Worse, he quotes a lyric from the Fox News fuck-you "Sly Fox" ("The Fox has a bushy tail/And Bush tells lies/And Fox trots/So I don't know what's real") and asserts it "essentially means nothing."  Now, I'm not going to claim this is the best rhyme I've ever heard, but it's pretty obvious what Nasir is on about.  Fox News is the propaganda arm of the Republican party; it was founded by the man who helped get the first President Bush elected; its commentators often move to positions in the GOP power structure and vice versa.  Although these connections are sometimes shadowy and hard to document, they're real ("The Fox has a bushy tail"); the network responds to the needs of the GOP ("Bush tells lies/And Fox trots"); and the result is that the truth is consistently obscured ("I don't know what's real").  See, that's not so hard.  All you need to do is read the words and think about them.  Also lost in Cohen's review is the thoroughly ripped third verse of that same tune:

They say I'm all about murder, murder and kill, kill
But what about Grindhouse and Kill Bill?
What about Cheney and Halliburton?
The backdoor deals on oil fields?
How is Nas the most violent person?
Y'all don't know talent if it hit you
Bringin' up my criminal possession charges with a pistol
I use Viacom as my firearm to let the lyrics split you
Who do you rely upon?
To shoot shells at Leviathan
I'm dealin' with the higher form
Fuck if you care how I write a poem
Only fox that I love was the red one
Only black man that Fox love is in jail or a dead one
Redrum, political bedlam
Don't let the hype enter your eyes and eardrum
Murdoch own Fox, not A-Team with Baracus
And he hate Barack 'cause he march with the marchers

So in conclusion and in summary: Take that, yo.  It's not like that's the best verse on the record, either.

Nas is happy to shock you if you're looking to be shocked; that's a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff.  (On "Y'all My Ni**az," he both takes the easy way out and neatly summarizes an important hip-hop First Principle: "If it offends you, it's meant to, it's that simple.")  But he's actually trying to engage a complicated question.  What would you have him do instead?  Lots of critics have unfavorably compared Untitled to Tha Carter III.  I'm not mad at you if you agree; I also dig Lil Wayne.  Dwayne Carter is an outstanding rapper with tremendous vocal ID and force of personality; he's funny and can be substantive too, when he feels like it.  But why are critics (and not just white hipster ones) so much more comfortable listening to Weezy F Baby emote about his promethazine addiction, doing lady cops in the backs of squad cars, and Al Sharpton's similarity to Don King than hearing Esco meticulously dissect present-day reality?  Wait, don't answer that.