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Monday, August 06, 2007
WHAT A JOB
Devin the Dude feat. Snoop and Andre 3000
Waiting to Inhale
Rap A Lot : 2007
[Buy it]
Devin the Dude's Waiting to Inhale is one of my very favorite rap albums of the year - it's simply among the best-sounding, with its moist, spacy funk, which is ideally suited to the Houston-based rapper's laid-back, infinitely supple vernacular. It's a summery record. It contains skits that are genuinely funny - Devin calling local music stores posing as a producer with a bunch of rappers in the studio, affecting a hick drawl, and asking if he can come over and rent "the boom." "They need a boom per bar," he says. "I don't think they're gonna leave without it." And Devin's effortless charisma is virtually unmatched in rap - as a persona, he's up there with Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy; the kind of guy who fills up the room. Waiting to Inhale, for all its seamlessness, sounds remarkably casual and vibrant. One gets the impression that Devin behind the microphone and Devin in everyday life are differentiated only by the presence of the mike.
It's also one of the most morally troubling rap albums I've heard this year, although its misogynistic content is no more vile than it is on many other rap records I enjoy with less compunction. The reason why this is gets at the complex moral contract many of us (i.e. people who listen to mainstream rap and take it seriously) enter into when we choose to overlook language and sentiments from rappers that we would castigate indie bands for.
Why do I like Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit," while Ben Folds' version of the same song makes me want to barf? This might not be an ideal example, because there are mitigating factors: I think Ben Folds is kind of terrible, especially on this hokey cover, and I also have a deep-seated disdain for ironic covers, especially when the animating force at work in them is the idea that it's automatically funny for white, suburban performers to cover gangster rap songs - it strikes me as terribly condescending, forcing the songs' original authors into a sort of passive minstrelsy.
When we (i.e. again, people who take mainstream rap seriously as an idiom but don't share its politics) suspend moral judgement vis-a-vis rap, another element at play - and since obviously I have no idea what it's like to be a "black person" who likes mainstream rap while diverging from its ideology, I'm speaking here as a "white person" - another element at play is plain old white guilt. It's the feeling of having no right to pass any sort of judgement on a culture that emerged from the history of black oppression, and to regard this music in a purely anthropological sense. Or, more insidiously, it's the fear of passing judgement on rap, the fear that we'll get ourselves into sticky moral binds and find out things about ourselves we'd rather not know. Better to apologize for conspicuous consumption in rap, which we utterly despise in white people, as the history of black oppression in America sublimated and reborn as an understandable desire for surfeit after a long span of institutionalized deprivation. Better to regard misogyny, homophobia, and sociopathic behavior as genre tropes, no different from post-punk's "angular guitars" or dance-punk's cowbells, than as animate social forces - immutable genre components that can be riffed on and tweaked, hollow of actual significance, atmospherically pervasive. Better to interpret negative social ideals in rap music as reportage, documentary; as dispatches from the thrumming heart of social injustice - something ugly with which one is complicit, and from which one has a responsibility not to flinch.
None of this resolves into an easy answer or comfortable moral position. To the extent that we must pay heed to disenfranchised voices, we must also be wary of the corporate appropriation of these voices, of the record industry's funneling of toxic material into a neverending revenue stream. What does it mean to speak truth about the failures of American societal structure when speaking that truth has become immensely profitable? At what point are we no longer listening to genuine voices, instead engaging in a commercial construct where negative black stereotypes are perpetuated for profit? As always, the imposition of commerce on what is essentially a folk idiom presents unsolveable ontological dilemmas. For myself, I find mainstream rap to be on of the most sonically vibrant genres unfolding today, and I'm predisposed toward moral constructs that keep me off-balance - I'm content to keep listening as new vectors of understanding emerge and ramify.
But despite all my mystification as to my contract with mainstream rap, I have a better understanding of why, sometimes, a rap record that expresses sentiments no more or less vile than many others will pierce through this metaphysical veil and trouble me (and many of my peers, apparently) in a less passive, more convulsive manner. It has everything to do with the rapper's persona. The last song I remember achieving this feat - breaking through many rap fans' complacent relationship with the genre and producing genuine, widespread ire, despite the fact that the song's content was fairly typical - was the Yin Yang Twins' "The Whisper Song." In this case, it was a matter of delivery. While plenty of rap songs contain sexual innuendoes that border on threats, the whispers in which the Twins delivered theirs made all the difference. You could practically feel the hot breath on your ear, and a variety of prominent female critics (and a healthy portion of males) lashed out at the song's predatorial nature. It was an issue of proximity - "Bitches Ain't Shit" is a cultural relic, a snapshot from the near-past, but "The Whisper Song" was an atmosphere that settled all around you. Its space-invading prosody made its vileness impossible to ignore. Of course, it was also a huge hit, and many of the people who called it out for misogyny admitted that it was a really dope, innovative song. Here the ongoing clash between aesthetics and morality comes into play, but this post is already getting pretty bloated, so we'll save that for another day.
In Devin's case, the misogynistic songs (of which there are many on Waiting to Inhale) were, once again, made to seem more vile, more unforgivable, because of their context. Look at it this way - Young Jeezy is not a person. He's an imago, a superhero, a golem, a construct. A rapper who, as the story goes, made a fortune selling crack (but never using, and disdainful of users at that), then funneled his money and his experiences into a blockbusting rap career that repeatedly assures us that it is not art, not fantasy, but another hustle, another way to make money. He is the seamy underbelly of the American dream - the rags to riches story, the take-no-prisoners, survival of the fittest ideology - come to its darkest, most terrifying fruition. Jeezy emobodies American ideals in the same way that corrupt politicians and CEOs do, and as such, he seems beyond rebuke - more cautionary parable and heavy-handed metaphor than man.
But Devin is different - his whole persona revolves around being utterly human, utterly ordinary. A fun-loving guy who's fun to be around, a nice guy who doesn't paint himself as a superhero, who sometimes loses the girl, who expresses sentimentality, who is clever and funny and a bit goofy. Jeezy, in short, is a concept; Devin is, like he says, just a dude. And so when he writes a song about a fat girl who used to be fly, or a terrible synth ballad/murder fantasy like Eminem's "Stan" without the sensitivity, or generally treats all women like prostitutes, it stings us - we feel a bit betrayed. Because this guy is like us - an everyman with money problems, who doesn't shoot people or pretend to shoot people or sell drugs or seem to emanate in any way from an experience that is drastically foreign from our own. But I keep listening, sometimes gritting my teeth or skipping certain songs altogether, because it sounds so damn good. "I like Devin the Dude," Bill Callahan (nee Smog), another guy whose music often saddles the line between sonic vibrancy and moral complication, told me in a recent interview. "There's a vitality to his music. That's all I'd ask of anyone."
The song I've posted today, however, is one of Devin's best, as he turns his attention away from whatever bitch he's skeeting on at the moment for a working man's doggedly celebratory lament. In doing so, he paints himself in a much more sympathetic light, letting all his love of music and likeability shine through. Here's a guy talking about the travails of his everyday life as a recording artist, exasperated and in love with the process at once, and the resultant song displays every inch of this embattled passion. Snoop, bless his heart, even sounds good here, his almost parodically generic lyrics sounding fresh in context, and galvanized by the spirit of bonhomie that suffuses the track. And Outkast's Andre shows up just in time to drop one of his best verses in ages, perhaps the finest rap verse of the year, both for its ridiculously assured phrasing, astonishing gnomic control, and its continutaion of Devin's meta-rap first verse, all of which makes for a song that's deeply humane, intimate, personal - life-sized, no more or less. The underlying message of the song is that "we don't do it for the money," a sentiment familiar to undie rap, where there is little money to be had at any rate, but almost alien to the modern mainstream, with its unquestioned capitalist collaboration. And the assurance that Devin doesn't do it for the money, in turn, makes his morally bankrupt assertions on other songs all the more disturbing - if this record really stems from such conviction, then we have to assume that Devin's misogyny isn't a construct or unquestioned received wisdom, but what he truly believes. And that's hard to swallow. But let's end on a positive note, with a verbatim transcript of Andre's stunning verse:
We work nights, we some vampires
Niggas gather round the beat like a campfire
Singin' folk songs, but not no Kumbaya my Lord
You download it for free, we get charged back for it
I know you're saying, they won't know they won't miss it
Besides, I ain't a thief, they won't pay me a visit
So if I come to your job, take your corn on the cob
And take a couple kernels off it that would be alright with you
Hell no! Yeah, exactamundo
But we just keep recording and it ain't to get no condo
And Candy Bentley fanny with no panties in Miami
And that cute lil' chick named Tammy
that you took to the Grammys
See we do it for that boy that graduated
That looked you in your eyes real tough and said 'preciate it
And that he wouldn'ta made it
if it wasn't for your CD number 9
And he's standing with his baby momma Kiki and she cryin' talking 'bout
That they used to get high to me in high school
And they used to make love to me in college
Then they told me 'bout they first date, listenin' to my tunes
And how he, like to finger nail polish
I say hate to cut you off but I gotta go
I wish you could tell me more but I'm off to the studio, gotta write tonight
"Hey, can you put us in your raps?" I don't see why not
Devin it's the Dude, you gon' probably hear him talking 'boutLabels: brian, rap
posted by Brian
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