Come Back Nicki, Come Back

About a week ago, I had an argument with some friends about Nicki Minaj and her relative quality as a musician. Most of them thought little of Ms. Minaj's work, particularly the type of self-consciously vacuous pop music she currently seems most interested in purveying, in the manner of 2010's Pink Friday and its upcoming sequel Roman Reloaded. I maintained that, despite Pink Friday's rather feeble attempts at inoffensive pop-rap ("pap") crossovers, Nicki Minaj was once a rapper of great promise. Scratch that: at one point a few years ago she was a rapper of insane promise, poised to become listed among the best emcees on popular radio. Of course much has already been said about Nicki's chameleonic rapping style, how it encompasses a range of different personality and sexuality types, what it says about gender in hip-hop, etc. I wasn't particularly interested in rehashing any of that material, but I did want to make the point that Ms. Minaj once possessed devastating rhyming skill, even if her MO had been compromised ever since she started releasing albums proper. A few days later, one of my friends emailed me, asking to recommend a specific Minaj mixtape, since I had evangelized her early mixtape appearances so stridently. I replied and sent: check out Beam Me Up Scotty. My friend, never predisposed toward liking Nicki before, loved it, and immediately asked for further suggestions. He had no idea, from what he had seen on TV and heard on the radio, that Nicki Minaj could actually rap.

Of course, there are legions of Nicki fans, hip-hop heads and music critics (especially those who self-describe as "poptimist") who disagree. Maura Johnston maintains that Pink Friday holds up better than Kanye's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The platinum success of Friday and its attendant "controversial" Grammy performance and multiple nominations prove that there are obviously a lot of people who love the modern Nicki of "Super Bass" and "Right Thru Me." In this year's Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll, "Super Bass" was voted the third best single of 2011. Pink Friday was culturally significant to the point where non-music writers got on the Minaj train: check out this piece from The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf, where he calls Pink Friday "catchy" and expresses his love of the song's "poppy hook, the pleasing cadence of the rap."* Of course there are things to admire about Nicki's persona, her relatively lucid (for hip-hop) stance against gay-bashing, her forthrightness in calling out her abusive father, etc. I wouldn't deny any of that. But this still doesn't change anything about her music post-Friday, which is the sound of compelling artistry and wordplay being focus-grouped to oblivion.

The love for "Super Bass" particularly rankles me. As someone with a deep, abiding love for awesome bass tones, "Super" fails to measure up. The song's chintzy synth claps and pretuned chorus register with no impact, like the opposite of bass. The song is pure air syrup, and has about as much content as that implies--to me, its sonic architecture is the opposite of what hip-hop is supposed to be about. Pink Friday is rife with tracks like that, though--some where Nicki opts to sing autotuned pop hooks, others where she opts to rap, but poorly, and always about the same vacuous nonsense in that stunted, self-conscious style that Kanye made very popular. Call me an old man, but I just wasn't onboard with all the artistics concessions major label Nicki seemed willing, even eager to make, and Roman Reloaded looks to be more of the same:

"Stupid Hoe" is getting the usual good-to-great reviews from pop critics, which puzzles me: how can anyone look at this and say that Nicki has grown at all, as an artist or a rapper? There are the bottom-feeding lyrics--celebrity-baiting fluff about how "I'm Angelina, you Jennifer," rhyming "Roman Zolanski" with "Roman Polanski," etc. The beat, meanwhile, is more or less a slight variation on "Itty Bitty Piggy"from Beam Me Up Scotty, except with extra bloops and more goofy voices. Everything in this song has been done a hundred times by better artists, including Nicki herself.

When Nicki Minaj first came on the scene, she sounded smart and vital. I likely first heard her on "Can't Stop Won't Stop," a track from Lil Wayne's 2007 mixtape-opus Da Drought 3. Her rapping is serviceable on that track--she must have been really, really young at that point--but I didn't pay much attention then. I hate to admit this, but she didn't seem like anything worth paying attention to, other than as one of Young Money's token female rappers (the other one at the time was Shanell). It wasn't until Wayne's 2009 mixtape No Ceilings that I was really taken with one of her verses, via Weezy's take on Beyonce's "Sweet Dreams." Everyone speaks highly of Minaj's mammoth verse in "Monster," a strong example of how her voice sort of mutates from a hard bark to coy, youthful innocence and back in a manner of seconds. But Nicki was already doing that sort of thing very well in 2009:

Nicki's verse in "Sweet Dreams" is arguably superior to "Monster." Or at least it is longer, heavier on actual content, more dense and allusive in its wordplay, etc. The "balloon boy" line might elicit a groan now but back then it seemed insanely well-placed--No Ceilings came out literally a week at most after that "balloon boy" incident happened.

The Nicki Minaj of No Ceilings and Beam Me Up Scotty was thoughtful, inventive and quick-witted. She wasn't concerned with pandering to a global audience or prettying up her message with autotune pop hooks. No, she wasn't a perfect rapper: even then, she fell in the unfortunate trap that is constant beefing with female emcees (as if there can only be one, like Highlander), and like David Bowie she falsely claimed to be bisexual as a way of generating attention. And some of her other mixtapes, like Playtime Is Over, are obviously highly-influenced by the likes of Biggie, but of course that is a path many great rappers start on. The point is, or was rather, that Nicki's personality was once incidental to her skill as a performer. Nowadays, things are quite different. Nicki has less in common with Weezy and more in common with Lady Gaga, who pioneered her own brand of innocuously familiar goo-goo synth music that merely backgrounds the main parts of her show, which are, in descending order of importance, the absurd outfits and creepy, slightly refracted takes on celebrity diva behavior. By that same token, Nicki Minaj is now enough of a marquee player to merit her own brightly-colored Hype Williams videos with absurd costumes, and the focus is now Nicki's mugging for the camera, all those bleeps and bloops, and the epic amounts of cash that are generated thereof. Call this as un-poptimist as you want, but that's not hip-hop to me, and it doesn't yield interesting music, only focused-group commodity bundles disguised under the banner of a "musical experience." The whole enterprise stinks of a business culture superimposed on our own that cares nothing for music qua music.

Unfortunately, this issue is larger than Nicki Minaj, and it speaks to larger trends in sanitized pop radio. Nicki's Young Money-mate Drake is another example of an artist who shows promise at first, puts out a few pretty-good mixtapes, then becomes simultaneously famous, signed to a major label, and no longer interesting musically. Drake's rapping gets a bad rep in some places, but I find it hard to deny a mixtape like So Far Gone, which has a really dynamic, warm sound courtesy his collaborator Boi-1da. But his two major label releases, Thank Me Later and Take Care, are somehow two of the most boring hip-hop albums ever released. Something happened when he made the switch. All over the pop radio board, rappers are choosing to go in this direction. These type of sonic concessions to a broad, unnecessary standard of pablum extend all the way to, if you will, the top--count me as among those perplexed and disheartened by Watch the Throne's unchallenged success.

This is why, as is often the case, the best hip-hop being made these days seems to be coming from everywhere except the pop radio spectrum, broad as that is. There isn't anything wrong with making music that sounds big and universal and popular, but this is music made without the courage of its convictions--it hopes to be popular through bland familiarity, through repetition of the same dumb phrases. People rag on the likes of Odd Future for violating basic decency and proper rap decorum, in part of course because there's no subjects music critics like rehashing every few years more than the propriety of certain hip-hop (and always hip-hop) lyrics. But I would honestly listen to Odd Future at their worst (Goblin, say) than sit through the large majority of Watch the Throne, which is an album that seems possessed by little more than the empty moneymaking qua moneymaking ambitions of its two kingmakers. At least I will be liable to hear something new, a snatch of unexpected gnarly noise, maybe, or a motif that weaves in unexpected directions. A skillful flow means nothing when it is wedded to the same tired words and an overfamiliar beat. There are a lot of rappers right now on the fringes of stardom who are making music in their bedrooms that sounds nothing like what came before. The question is, when they in turn become popular celebrities, will they be subordinated into the system as well? I'd rather have a heinous, rape-n-murder obsessed Tyler, the Creator than a Tyler, the Creator motivated by radio dictates. No matter how unkind it might sometimes sound to our ears, it's better than not noticing we are listening at all.

I worry about the insurgent rappers and their impending success, and wonder if yet another possibly transformative moment in popular music will be co-opted by MTV and robbed of its capacity for political change, like punk and grunge. I wonder, for instance, about A$AP Rocky, whose mixtape was on my Top 10 last year, and who has lately been the subject of an insane $3 million bidding war, which landed him at Sony/RCA. Hopefully his major label debut won't sound like Pink Friday, a repurposed set of already overfamiliar autotuned dross, but like a continuation of the expansive cosmic beats and laconic delivery that made LiveLoveA$AP so enjoyable. Honestly, though, the odds aren't looking amazingly good. Is there any way for alternative rap cultures to make their way into the mainstream without sacrificing at least part of what made their music interesting in the first place? In theory, they should be able to do this easily. So what, or who, is stopping them? And what must we do in turn to stop them?

*Usually I am an admirer of Conor's lucid, rational reporting, but he lost me at that point.

UPDATE: This recently unearthed early video is a good example of how different (and better) Nicki Minaj used to be, pre-fame and goofy voices:

2011 in 3000: André Benjamin's Year In Guest Verses

2011 was André 3000's most active year since 2006--not that he ever disappeared completely. In this extra-stank Critical Beatdown, your hosts take you through 2011 in 3000. 

"Dedication To My Ex (Miss That)," Lloyd feat. Lil Wayne and André 3000
NS: I love the exuberant buoyancy of this jam in full, and Andre's verse is just the virtuosic icing on the cake. There are some rappers--Kurupt and Styles P come to mind--who are uniquely capable of going hard on an extended metaphor for bar after bar, and Dre demonstrates that same type of focused dynamism here, wedding Lloyd's basic thesis (hint--he says it in the chorus) to some amusingly lucid car metaphors. Favorite line: "What, why so quiet?/Hate that all our memories happen in a Hyatt?" I think that's what the kids today call an "epic burn." 5/5

AM: Lloyd's retro-soul joint features negligible ad-libs from Weezy, along with a lead vocal that you will likely regard has either humorously pained or horrifyingly sexist. The tune is colorful edging on chintzy. André's verse stands out, of course. But his rap, ostensibly about the same lady Lloyd's worked up over, is minor André--this ex isn't as vivid as Sasha Thumper or Ms. Jackson. 4/5

"I Do," Young Jeezy feat Jay-Z and André 3000
NS: How many rappers out there can follow Jay-Z with reliably superior wordplay? Whereas Jay's verbiage rarely ventures outside the confines of normative hip-hop posturing, Dre breaks into an almost expressionistic sing-rap, more a tangle of feelings and associations than straightahead storytelling, in the best imagistic tradition. Surreal stuff, and I am fascinated by how he keeps talking into the outro about his hypothetically "nerdy" future daughter. 4/5

AM: This one first made the rounds pre-2011 as an uncompleted André track. The subject matter--and soul-soaked beat--inspires comparisons to a certain earth-shatteringly good Dre guest verse, but so be it: 3000 is at that level here. Insane technical control, with the vocal and lyrical flights of fancy that make him so compelling. That he clearly did this all in one take--listen for his breathing--makes "I Do" even more amazing. 5/5

"The Real Her," Drake feat. Lil Wayne and André 3000
NS: Take Care put me to sleep, and the mottled non-beat of "The Real Her" is fairly indicative of that album's lugubrious tendencies. Even Lil Wayne fails to rise above the material, which makes the transition to the Andre verse at 4:14 all the more unexpected. The drab tonelessness of Drake's autotuned meanderings gives way to a 3000's day-glo nightmare of insomniac thrillseekers and backstabbing strippers, tinged with a David Lynch sense of creeping, formless dread. Odd modifiers like "quote-on-quote bad bitches" stick to the mind, emblematic of the throwaway rhetorical flourishes that make a 3000 verse so distinctive. For a closer lyrical analysis, I highly recommend this article. 5/5

AM: Rapping in stop-start bursts that mimic the beat's pitch bending, Dre runs laps around the competition. Wayne is lazy but engaging, but that's 2011 Model Weezy F for you. And Drake makes us suffer through not one but two of his verses. Though it ends on an uncharacteristically venomous note, 3000 is the reason I've made it through this overlong track so many times. 4.5/5

"Interlude," Lil Wayne feat. Tech N9ne and André 3000
NS: 3 Stacks and Tech N9Ne make a not-surprisingly good tag team. This highlight of Tha Carter IV doesn't even feature Lil Wayne, but with such regal musings from messrs. 3000 and N9ne, who even needs "the greatest rapper alive"? Beautiful bits of elevated wordplay worm their way through 3 Stacks' short verse--"Today I feel electric gray, I hope tomorrow neon black," he begins, like a fashion terrorist from the future, going on to condense everything from the stars in Cairo "like marbles" to another classic 3000 trope--philosophic musings in "wild party" settings. No one else in rap writes with such sensitivity to the depth and evocative flexibility of language than Andre 3000, and this is another verse that proves it. 5/5

AM: A Carter IV track that features no contribution from Lil Wayne, and a fierce verse from Tech N9ne. 3000 rarely raps on beats as abrasive as this one, but his brief contribution is ace--hard, but weird too. 4/5

"Party," Beyoncé feat. André 3000

NS: Though he doesn't always care to show it, Andre 3000 can be a blisteringly fast rapper, making him well-suited to the high-BPM party stylings of Beyonce's 4 (I assume--haven't actually heard the album in full). Note on this verse how Dre manages to pull the trick of sounding subdued and frenzied at the same time--I imagine it takes years for a rapper to develop such a careful modulation of pitch and tone. In this case the content is secondary to the rhythms, although "in the food court, eatin' our gyro" sticks out for some reason. 4/5

AM: This song pulses like an MJ/Quincy Jones track, albeit at a BPM that's far too slow. At least for Beyoncé, who sounds like she's holding back. André, on the other hand, spends half his verse in an effortless doubletime. In his minute, he tries on flows like he does garish outfits, each one fitting him impeccably. 5/5

"Sleazy Remix 2.0 (Get Sleazier)," Ke$ha feat. Wiz Khalifa, André 3000, T.I. and Lil Wayne
NS: The Andre verse here is identical to Ke$ha's last "Sleazy (Remix)" released in January (for those masochists at home keeping track of Dre/Ke$ha collabs). It doesn't have the rhapsodic emotional buildup of his other 2011 verses, particularly once Dre starts repping "this crazy lady named Kesha," but the first part of the verse is a vivid, if brief exploration of one of 3000's most senescent themes--childhood fascination with adult marital discontent. Fascinating stuff, but Ke$ha is still the worst. 2.5/5

AM: Dre's verse appears on a couple remixes of Ke$ha's song. His verse is alright--he imagines rolling around in his Benz with Ke$ha, after mining more heartfelt territory--but less inspired than most of this list. On the December remix, Lil Wayne crosses paths with André for the fourth time, upstaging him for the first. 3.5/5

"Play The Guitar," B.O.B. feat. André 3000
NS: The beat (produced by 3000 himself) lacks impact, and B.o.B. gets everything off to a slow start, but 3 Stacks' tribute to his own six-string travails is touching and relatable for anyone who has ever been a novice guitarist. Dre may have come to the six-string as an adult, but he clearly understands the instrument's elemental force with lines like "if you're mad at dad or mum/you can grab an instrum." 3.5/5

AM: Well, it’s no “Gasoline Dreams.” B.O.B., who is apparently still a working musician, helms this cartoonish joint. He cedes much of the track to Dré, who spits a goofy verse about playing guitar on top of a Church’s Chicken, and respecting your parents (not the fist time he’s sounded that note in 2011). Not a career highlight by any means, but even when 3000 isn’t great, he’s never on autopilot. 3.5/5

Expect some more OutKast-related writing on this blog in the near future. Until then, savor this evidence, from 1994, of Dre's prodigious freestyling skills.

Thomas Chatterton Williams: America's New Worst Music Critic

Let's start out with the obvious: The Wall Street Journal editorial page, like its partner in quo-maintaining The Washington Post, doesn't often feature unadulterated Obama praise (or even checkered praise, at this point). As well it shouldn't, I guess--a healthy skepticism of those in power was once a critical component of American journalism, a long, long time ago. But a funny thing happens after weeks of running one editorial after another poking away at our president's supposed character deficiencies and deeply-held radical views. Vibrant, legitimate criticism leads to slightly more suspect criticism, which leads further down the rabbit hole into articles like "President Obama's 'Rap Palate'" (note the "rap palate" in scare quotes--scary!) by Thomas Chatterton Williams. The points raised by Mr. Williams are about the opposite of what anyone would call a "reasoned, rational political argument." I would call it "bitching for the sake of bitching/traffic."

Williams is responding to Jann Wenner's latest long-form "interview" (this time the scare quotes are justified) with President Obama in Rolling Stone. Wenner's panegyric intimations lie more toward using RS as a soapbox to insist how hip Democratic politicians can be, and the results are at least as embarrassing as the John Kerry interview in 2004. The difference is that in addition to questions about what Obama thinks of Bono or Bob Dylan, the subject turns, temporarily, to hip-hop. Says the B-Boy-In-Chief:

Thanks to Reggie [Love, the president's personal aide], my rap palate has greatly improved. Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated, but now I've got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some other stuff, but I would not claim to be an expert. Malia and Sasha are now getting old enough to where they start hipping me to things. Music is still a great source of joy and occasional solace in the midst of what can be some difficult days.

Obama also mentioned being a big fan of Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, the Rolling Stones, and classical opera ("There are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need"), but his comments about rap being acceptable and even fun to listen to were what got the Fox Nation's goat (though Obama had noted even before he was president that he was a big Jay-Z fan). And then Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of the memoir Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture, became so appalled by the mere mention of Lil Wayne in the Oval Office that he started his column thusly:

What's on President Obama's iPod? A wide range, he told Rolling Stone magazine last week, from the jazz of John Coltrane to the ballads of Maria Callas. And more: "My rap palate has greatly improved," Mr. Obama noted. "Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated, but now I've got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some other stuff, but I would not claim to be an expert."

Expert or not, that's the wrong message for the president to be sending black America.

The "wrong message": being passingly familiar with one of the dominant forms of African-American music, which is somehow insulting to the character of all African-Americans. The subtext: yes, Obama is indeed a Scary Black Man. Continue:

Does Mr. Obama like Lil Wayne's "Lil Duffle Bag Boy"? In that song, the rapper implores young black men to "go and get their money" through round-the-clock drug hustling. And with Lil Wayne, it's not just an act: The rapper is currently serving a one-year term on Rikers Island after being caught in New York with drugs and guns stashed in his Louis Vuitton overnighter.

Mr. Williams happens to be correct about Lil Wayne serving at Rikers, but I have no idea why he chose as his example a song that a) is by Playaz Circle, and only features Lil Wayne, b) is called "Duffle Bag Boy" (no "Lil") and c) being about drug-running, has no connection to the weapons charge that landed him in jail. Let's be clear: by "drugs and guns," Mr. Williams is trying to imply a great deal more than one (1) .40 caliber pistol that was registered to his manager and happened to be in a bag close to his person. Hell, let's be crystal: Mr. Williams is trying to imply that any black man who goes to jail is never to be trusted or admired again, even if he has served his time, even if he seems repentant about the issue, even if he's on suicide watch--never mind that. Jail! Drugs! Guns! Hippity-Hop!

Lil Wayne is emblematic of a hip-hop culture that is ignorant, misogynistic, casually criminal and often violent. A self-described gangster, he is a modern-day minstrel who embodies the most virulent racist stereotypes that generations of blacks have fought to overcome. His music is a vigorous endorsement of the pathologies that still haunt and cripple far too many in the black underclass.

I understand and sympathize with the argument that hip-hop artists are given a free pass when it comes to issues of misogyny, casual homophobia, violence and general gangsta cliches. Modern pop radio is partially responsible for generally spurning lyrical and musical innovation in exchange for vacuous celebrity self-worship and lazy, repeatable innuendo. It remains in my mind of the utmost importance for music journalists to develop new modes of critical vocabulary when it comes to the discussion of hip-hop, to avoid endless valorization in terms of "flow" and "skill" when many popular rappers assert themselves as brands as opposed to musicians.

But calling Lil Wayne a "modern-day minstrel," with no qualifications, is beyond the pale. In order to believe something like that, you need to buy in, heavily, to these "virulent racist stereotypes," as if black hip-hop fans lack the agency to appreciate the music without buying into the lifestyle. A clue can be found in his last sentence: "His music is a vigorous endorsement of the pathologies that still haunt and cripple far too many in the black underclass." This makes perfect sense, if you believe that these "pathologies" are inherent in black people and entirely the fault of a monolithic underclass. Never mind institutionalized racism and the pitiful job prospects of post-industrial America: if only popular musicians would stop talking about bitches and hos, all those nagging pathologies would stay nice and dormant.

Thus President Obama has conveyed his taste for the rapper behind lyrics like:

Put that white widow weed in the cigar and puff

look, ma, I'm trying to make a porno starring us

well not just us, a couple foreign sluts

Naming thuggish rappers might make Mr. Obama seem relatable and cool to a generation of Americans under the sway of hip-hop culture, but it sends a harmful message—especially when, in black America, some 70% of babies are born out of wedlock.

Why not stop there? Obama has also conveyed his taste for (and therefore must endorse everything ever said by) the artists behind the following:

White girls, they're pretty funny
Sometimes they drive me mad
Black girls just wanna get fucked all night
I just don't have that much jam
Chinese girls are so gentle
They're really such a tease
You never know what they're cockin'
Inside those silky sleeves.

Or

She takes, just like a woman
She makes love, just like a woman
And she aches, just like a woman
But she breaks, just like a little girl

Racism. Misogyny. And how can he admire a woman who shacked up with Aristotle Onassis when so many black children are born out of wedlock? Miles Davis and John Coltrane were both addicted to heroin--does Obama believe casual drug use is okay for musicians? I'm just asking, yo! you decide.

(I would have loved to witness Mr. Williams' Google search for rap lyrics terrifying enough to alarm the boomers but also excerptable in a major newspaper).

The article goes on to quote similarly suspect lyrics from Jay-Z (Nas gets the shaft, due to space restrictions I guess), who is described by Mr. Williams as a "rapper and unrepentant ex-drug dealer" who has "been photographed sitting in Mr. Obama's chair in the White House Situation Room." This of course begs the question: "What president would ever let Marilyn Manson drop by the White House? Is Jay-Z any better?"

Good question. Would Mr. Williams be writing about it? Obviously not, because of course Marilyn Manson does not represent the pathologies of "white culture" in the way that Lil Wayne and Jay-Z, being official representatives of their race, do. Also, it's 2010.

I've known a few ex-drug dealers, some of whom remain unrepentant, and I can tell you that neither they nor Marilyn Manson have committed anything close to the sorts of heinous activities perpetrated by certain Washington lobbyists and Wall Street bankers in the last couple years. Not even close. These are the power players that are invited to the White House on a daily basis. In order to believe that Jay-Z's White House visit represents a lowering of Presidential standards, you must honestly be convinced that African-Americans who once dealt drugs aren't fit to grace the same halls as Jack Abramoff and Bernard Kerik, to say nothing of the actual war criminals who once occupied significant portions of our Executive branch. It requires turning a specific kind of blind eye--a kind that would have to be inured to all the horrors brought about by exporting American culture--with the exception of black people rhyming, over beats.

Williams, by the way, is black, not that such a fact would change my consideration of his essential cluelessness regarding rap music and race. Check out his absurd bio:

Like many young men in America, Thomas Chatterton Williams grew up in awe of Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and the parade of bling-bedecked rap stars he saw on Black Entertainment Television. Williams emulated their lifestyle - sporting chains and expensive designer clothes purchased for him by his girlfriends, who were themselves little more than accessories to Williams.

Williams' bio is candid about the fact that he used to be a pretty big asshole. Judging by this description, I agree: he was a prick. Treating women like "accessories" is, yes, a bad thing. Young Mr. Williams really does sound emblematic of everything terrible in hip-hop culture. Myself, I generally stop paying attention whenever cultural conservatives start to say "I used to have so many girlfriends," before going on to lament modern sexual permissiveness, but let's continue.

In LOSING MY COOL: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture (The Penguin Press; May 2010; $24.95), Williams describes how he managed to juggle these two disparate lifestyles--"keeping it real" in his friends' eyes and studying for the SATs under his father's strict tutelage. Pappy grew up in the segregated South and hid in closets so he could read Aesop and Plato.

Being able to "keep it real" while simultaneously studying for one's SATS--it kind of is like the segregated South! Especially given Young Williams' father had to deal with the pernicious influence of Tupac's famous anthem "Plato and Aesop Iz Gay (Don't Ever Read That Shit)" or Biggie's "Make Sure To Treat Your Multiple Girlfriends Like Accessories (Make Them Buy Your Clothes Also)."

Well, I kid. Having not read Losing My Cool, I can't know for sure, but I'm sure the message is that if you're a young black man, if you manage to make it through high school without the demon Hip-Hop turning you to a life of drug-dealing and ho-abusing, you may one day use all the knowledge acquired from reading 15,000 books to selectively quote scary rap lyrics you've obviously never heard before, in the interest of making sure a public figure can never again exercise his or her aesthetic judgment when it comes to personal music preferences. Or alternately, I guess you can listen to all types of music, even if the subject matter is sometimes troubling, and focus on more important issues than whether or not a particular artist makes your race look clean and law-abiding. Maybe then you could be president, and not a tiresome moralizer who is obviously uncomfortable with how much of an asshole he used to be as a teenager. It isn't the demon Hip-Hop, Thomas: It's YOU.

YOU had a hard time treating women with respect. YOU were the one who decided the general takeaway message from hip-hop was wearing designer clothes and huge, ungainly chains. And then, when you must have realized what a ridiculous cliche your life had become, instead of choosing a more enlightened path YOU decided to latch onto another polarizing cliche, that rap music was the thing keeping you down all along. For every example you can bring up of lyrics that "diminish blacks," I can provide three or four counter-examples. Others could probably provide a lot more. Hell, I can show you stories of legit, card-carrying African-Americans who have indeed been empowered by a particular rap song, as have I to a certain degree.

Here's one: