THANK YOU! I find this article quite enlightening. I think my favorite point was about Universal Music Group--I had realized that 50 Cent and Kanye West are distributed by the same corporation, but hadn’t really thought of its implications (beyond 50 Cent’s idiocy when declaring Kanye’s record company had doctored his sales figures). I also was interested in how the word “nigger” could replace “rapper” in how many whites describe and construct “good” and “bad” rappers.

The dichotomy of which you speak in hip hop seems to be present in many forms--not just in the “good vs. bad” debate but also in similar positions as “authentic/real vs. artificial/fake” and so forth. Moreover, I think that often the “good vs. bad” debate is reflected in the discourse on much popular music of a musical paradigm involving race: the artists constructed as “good” are the ones viewed as possessing positive qualities constructed as white. Think, for instance, how much of the popular political rock artists of the 1960s and ‘70s were white, and how Marvin Gaye is viewed as “exceptional” among black artists of the time (at least on Motown) BECAUSE “What’s Going On” incorporated political themes. (The truth, however, is that black music had incorporated politics long before Gaye OR Bob Dylan.) By the same token, think of many canonized white artists being described differently. I was able to think of a few dichotomies in how music by black and white artists are constructed in the dominant (white) discourse on popular music:

white music=polished, trained, rational/purposeful, melodic, high-brow/sophisticated
black music = raw, untrained, “soulful"/intuitive/emotional/improvised, rhythmic, vernacular

Perhaps it’ll take a long time to sort out these dichotomies, along with many others. But this article does a great job analyzing the construction of “good vs. bad"--the characterizations of artists and the flaws in such characterizations.

Comment by Josh from IN — October 29, 2007 @ 7:41 am

Bravo, sir.

Comment by Alex from Seattle — October 30, 2007 @ 2:23 pm