Pop Culture Locket: In Defense Of Digging In The Crates 9.30.02
Posted by Iago Ali on 09.30.2002
Iago gets semi-serious in response to comments from a certain freak. Boy, does he get semi-serious. Also…Timberlake's latest conquest and Angie Martinez can't rhyme, Puerto Rican or not.
What I Got In Yo Locket
1. The Jump-Off: Angie Mar, Superstar
2. In Related News: Freakboy Made It A Hot Line, Iago Made It A Hot Song
3. And In Closing: Timberlake is Dating HER Now?
Everybody who's been complaining about my laissez-faire attitude towards this whole music thang should scroll on down to In Related News right now. I promised y'all I would get serious at some point. This week is some point.
The Jump-Off: Angie Mar, Superstar
I’m Puerto Rican. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that since I’ve been on 411. I get real excited when Puerto Rican folk are successful, especially in entertainment, since I’m sort of kind of in that field myself (in my other life). Problem is, a lot of the time I find that while it’s easy to be happy that folks are successful, it’s not always easy to be proud of them for the ways they became successful.
Take Angie Martinez. For those of you who don’t know, Angie has been the drive time DJ for New York’s biggest hip-hop station for a few years now. She’s a big, big star in NYC—if you have a hip-hop album that’s gonna be big here, you have to on Angie’s show to promote it. On the air, Angie’s great: personable, comfortable, knowledgeable, and cool with everyone. She held it down during the Nas/Jay-Z battle a few months back. As a DJ, she blows Funk Flex (who comes on after her) and everyone else on mainstream hip-hop radio out of the water.
Then she released an album.
Okay, she’s done songs before, and they weren’t bad. “Mi Amor” with Jay-z was a cute little neo-thug love song, and “Live at Jimmy’s” with the legendary Big Pun and a whole crew of Latins is actually a great track over an I-dare-you-not-to-dance merengue beat. I can understand why a record company thought giving her an album might be a good idea. Worked for Ludacris, right?
Good lord though—Angie cannot rhyme. She is god awful. That damn “If I Could Go” song (featuring a way too catchy hook sung by Little Mo and extra lyrics from Sacario, who sounds a little too much like Jay-Z) is a nightmare—just hooky enough to stay in your head, not hooky enough to block out the lyrics. Listen, I love Angie. As a DJ. As an MC—I’m sorry, ma, but I can’t go contigo.
(And for those longtime readers, yes, this is the Jennifer Lopez syndrome all over again.)
In Related News: Freakboy Made It A Hot Line, I Made It A Hot Song
The meat of this week’s column all stems from some comments made by my buddy Freakboy over in his X-Factor (a column, I might add, that bears more than a passing structural resemblance to this here Pop Culture Locket). Here are the opening lines of his column (everything in italics below) for all of you who don't want to click over:
People ask me why I'm down on hip-hop/rap/most pop. I give you this quote from Chad Hugo of the Neptunes (he's the one who isn't in all the videos):
"As a producer, you really want to dig in the crates and find that overlooked song, and try to flip it and make it hot."
Um, as a producer, shouldn't you really want to create something new? Nah. That might be original. The sad thing is that if a rock act made their living doing cover songs, they'd be laughed at. When a rapper does it, he's P. Diddy.
Now Freakboy and I go way back, so I feel comfortable in offering this firm disagreement: Freakboy, you ignorant sucka.
Hip-hop producers ARE creating something new. You're talking about an art form that's built on reinterpretation--you dig in the crate, you find something that you loved, you take the best part of it, and you create an entirely new thing from it. If you're good at it, folks can't even hardly identify what you took.
Great hip-hop songs use great samples--that's inherently what the genre is about. Don't forget that hip-hop started as dance music, as a way to extend the good, danceable parts of songs and eliminate the excess. What Chad is saying isn't that you find an old song and play it and rhyme over (like Diddy does occasionally); he's saying that you find the old stuff and make it new again.
And, since we've gone down this road, I'll bust some college boy theory for yo ass: hip-hop is the postmodern musical form, working in the traditions of collage and pastiche that have permeated our culture since the pop art boom began. The early hip-hop artists were in the vanguard of artists who realized that there is nothing new anymore, no stories that haven't been told, no creative ground that hasn't been broken at some point in human history--and they turned to technology to recompose and reinvent the old into something truly new.
Not to mention the fact that as dance music, hip-hop thrives on recognition and accessibility. It took a long time for the Neptunes to become superstar producers, because their songs sounded so different from what everyone was dancing to at the time. Nowadays, a DJ can debut any Neptunes beat at any club in America, and folks will fill the dance floor for it, because it’s recognizable and comfortable and safe to move to. Why do you think Justin Timberlake’s first single is Neptunes-produced? It’s so hip-hop fans get out and start shaking their asses before they realize “damn—this is that N*Sync dude that’s dating that fine Italian girl from Who’s The Boss? and Charmed.”
(We’ll come back to the lunacy of that last sentence during And In Closing.)
By the way, Freakstar, you're my boy and all, but you ain't exactly listening to Hendrix these days. Michelle Branch and Avril Lavigne and even Jon Bon aren't reinventing the wheel. A couple of chords and another song about how much you love someone who doesn't love you aren't really roads to new creativity. Those artists are working within the framework of their genre. So is Chad Hugo. You just happen to like their genre better than his.
You’re talking about creating something new — aren’t you digging The Strokes and The Vines and The This and The That? What new sonic landscapes are they creating? Okay, so technically a group like The Hives isn’t doing covers, but they’re still just playing Rolling Stones dress-up. And somehow, writing a second-rate knockoff of a past sound is more admirable than lifting the actual sound and building a whole new song around it?
Your complaint against hip-hop is akin to me writing "the fundamental problem with rock music is that everyone insists on playing guitars.
Shouldn't they be looking into new instruments, like the flugle horn?" It's a taste thing, more than anything, and it's completely valid. You’re still wrong, but the act of complaining remains valid.
In “Takeover,” Jay-Z talks about using a line from one of Nas’s songs in one of his own songs: “Yeah, I sampled your voice/you was using it wrong/you made it a hot line/I made it a hot song.” That’s the kind of thing Chad Hugo is referring to: you hear a bit of a song, you like this one part, but you know it could be a million times better in another context — so you create that new context. That’s hip-hop.
Come to think of it, that’s also what I just did to your column.
And In Closing: Timberlake is Dating HER Now?
Justin Timberlake is indeed rumored to be dating Ms. Alyssa Milano. I’m not a Timberlake fan, though I think N*Sync is a great pop group and he’s going to be a huge star. None of that matters. If all the rumors are true, the boy has dated/slept with Britney Spears (and he theoretically admitted to oral sex with her on the Star and Buckwild show here in NYC), Janet Jackson, and Alyssa Milano. I should have been a pop star.
Question of the month: Whose life would you rather lead: Justin Timberlake, Prince of Pop or Derek Jeter, Prince of New York? Think hard. We may devote a section of next week's column to this very topic.
Send your answers—along with comments on any of the above, your suggestions for Song of the Year, and any other goodness you got over to me at iagoali@hotmail.com.
Don't know what we're discussing next week, but if we're lucky, maybe Freakboy will make more inflammatory comments to get the old dander up. Or maybe this time it’ll be that
Matt Biscuiti dude. I’ll take all those fruit booties out. And that comment is not a Jeremy Shockey thing—it's a Stevie Ray thing. Act like you know.
Until then, as always, my name is Iago Ali, and yeah, I got yo locket, sucka.
