Word: hip-hop
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...phrasemaking and surplus rhetoric but a real gift for connecting centuries-old developments in American life to the endlessly evolving postures we call "hip." In the sensual ecstasies of Walt Whitman and the individualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson he finds hip's literary underpinnings. He maps the spiritual connections between the bleak machismo of West Coast--detective fiction and the desperado postures of L.A. gangsta rap. He points out the lines that connect hip-hop, with its audience of white suburban boys, to 19th century minstrel shows, in which whites in blackface strutted racial clichés before applauding white ticket...
...PROBLEM WITH BEING FAMOUS for defying expectations is that eventually you can defy expectations only by not defying expectations. Which may explain why after nine albums and at least four career incarnations--presumptive one-hit wonder, exuberant hip-hop star, inscrutable avant-gardist and heartbroken folkie--Beck has decided it's time to give up the shape shifting. "In the past I spent a lot of time rejecting sounds that were similar to what I'd come up with before just to purposefully try to get away from anything familiar," says Beck, phoning from a Los Angeles recording studio...
...typical nightclub from New York. As we approached the front of the line, a woman with a clipboard scanned our outfits. “C’est bon.” As we made our way into the pseudo-cavern, I felt the pumping beats of the aged hip-hop. We were already pretty buzzed when I tried to get the DJ to play “Hey Ya!”—to no avail. We bought one drink each before we realized why a cool club like this has no cover (they?...
...latest work, a self-titled album featuring a hip-hop potpourri of spoken word and rap, dismisses the feminine mystique that has pervaded all his previous efforts, including his first album, Amethyst Rock Star, and an earlier epic poem, “she.” Williams begins the new disc with what could only be described as a startling reclamation of his masculinity. “I ain’t got proper diction for the makings of a thug,” he tell us, not quite ironically, “though I grew up in the ghetto...
...what a brilliant artist he can be with the probing words and beat of “Black Stacey,” one of many melodic tracks on the album. And in “Telegram,” Williams puts forth a cunning observation: “Hip-hop is lying on the side of the road, half-dead to itself, blood scrawled over its mangled flesh, like jazz.” It’s all the more surprising, then, that Williams has chosen to align himself with such a dead genre...