Weighing in on Vazquez vs. Frere-Jones

New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones recently penned a column called “Wrapping Up” about the “aging out” of hip hop. It has gotten a lot of responses, one of which interestingly enough is from my buddies Das Racist (though I will be focusing on Vic’s non-haiku portion of the response) with sensationalist headline “Das Racist to Sasha Frere-Jones: “Stop trying to kill rap”(which Frere-Jones linked on his New Yorker blog). Despite the overstatement of this headline, with which I have almost no doubt that Vic nor Hima had much to do, the response is prefaced with “I have to say I probably wouldn’t be wasting my time writing this if I didn’t think it would be a good publicity look for my band,” a statement much in line with what Jon Caramanica has described in the New York Times as the “shambolic” aesthetic of Das Racist. But publicity stunt or not, I wanted to take Vic’s critique seriously and hope that my comments below will not sour our friendship (nor our project LONG HAIR DON’T CARE).

Now, onto the meat of what I believe the debate to be centered on…

Here’s what I read to be the crux of Vic’s main complaint against Frere-Jones:

I’m not saying he’s consciously and intentionally trying to assert his superiority. I’m just trying to point out that his language is typical of that (white) journalistic voice which presupposes the (white) journalist’s authority.

He goes on with this line of attack, suggesting that Frere-Jones exemplifies a kind of general tendency in music journalism, in which music (read: white)  critics exercise their journalistic authority to make claims about that which is outside the scope of their knowledge or experience. In this case, it is Frere-Jones claiming in his article that hip hop is dead in 2009, not 2006 as Nas had suggested. Thus, Vic finds Frere-Jones’ attempt at periodization to be tinged with, the word I keep thinking of,  paternalism, which I will flesh out in a second.

But first, let’s see what Frere-Jones’ periodization attempt consists of, and what objections Vic raises. FJ proposes

that hip-hop is no longer the avant-garde, or even the timekeeper, for pop music. Hip-hop has relinquished the controls and splintered into a variety of forms. The top spot is not a particularly safe perch, and every vital genre eventually finds shelter lower down, with an organic audience, or moves horizontally into combination with other, sturdier forms.

So the claim is in fact a bi-level one. On the one hand, he is suggesting that hip hop is no longer at the cutting edge of pop music. This is a claim that I find to be reasonable enough. Many critics feel this way though not all agree on the significance of it. For some, this is a sign of hip hop “growing up” and an inevitable consequence of becoming American pop music itself. But there is an added layer to FJ’s claim, that hip hop has also “found shelter,” as he puts it, in other musical forms. In turn, he goes on to put some meat on the bone by looking at the new Jay-Z album, Kanye West’s recent tour, and the club smash of the year Kid Cudi’s “Day n’ Nite,” suggesting that these three are considered hip hop more so by “rapping” than by sonic aesthetic.

It is in the engagement with this particular attempt at periodization that I believe Vic’s response to be most sharp. Vic suggests that if Frere-Jones thought periodization to be such a “dicey proposition,” why even go through with it? I agree, as readers of this blog well know, I frequently go after periodizer par excellence, at least in the realm of cultural theory, Frederic Jameson. Though Vic does not say it so, I believe his critique to be resonant with a kind of historiographical approach made famous by Michel Foucault–genealogy, an approach for which I have great sympathy. Vic writes,

Concepts like “periods” and even “genre” are loose collections of tropes that have no inherent meaning but rather contextual meanings that are only useful to the extent to which they can help organize texts. The point at which they actually serve to define texts is when they can enter a lens of scrutiny so intense as to render them meaningless.

I agree wholeheartedly. Vic is pointing out, if you can indulge my academic-ese, that there must be a clear distinction between an heuristic, an analytical tool, and what one believes to be actually existing in the world. When one takes that analytic tool, in this case “the period,” as somehow easily reflected in the world, then it becomes simply a matter of taste and/or opinion. This would be, what us hokey intellectuals call, an “empirical question.” And for good measure, Vic raises great points about Frere-Jones formulation of what “hip hop” is characterized by, offering up what I believe to be the most shrewd point in Vic’s response regarding the merits of the difference between “swing” and “thump.”

But sprinkled throughout this part of Vic’s response, there seems to also be a tension, a double-bind that Vic spins himself into as he constructs his argument. While he rightly takes Frere-Jones to task for reifying “hip hop” as some kind of self-contained, pure form, Vic also goes on to somehow construct a “hip hop lineage” and also defends against Frere-Jones’ charge that it is dying. So alongside such genealogical statements such as…

From the griots to the dozens to the beats to Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War” to The Last Poets to Bob Dylan to the Modern Lovers to Yellowman to the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s “Give It Away Now,” to the Butthole Surfer’s “Pepper,” to Vybz Kartel… these are all arguably rap depending on how you how one chooses one’s criteria. Rap (nor anything else) needs not necessarily be viewed in terms of origins or boundaries, births or deaths. Genre is a construction whose analytical use is primarily economic in nature. The study of genre is largely the study of marketing.

…are statements like

Kanye and Jay-Z made popular rap albums in a solid and relatively inarguable hip-hop tradition a few years back and now they are experimenting more. It seems they didn’t ”relinquish the controls,” (whatever that means) so much as they just decided to make weird, experimental, explicitly genre-bending albums (which isn’t necessarily a surprising or new thing in rap — Andre 3000, Q-Tip, and Common made similar moves with varying degrees of success years ago) and these weird, experimental, explicitly genre-bending albums made a lot of money and seem to be pretty popular with the kids.

It seems to me that Vic can be accused of wavering on the very thing he is accusing Frere-Jones of, that is, a definitional rigidity in positing of such a thing as “hip hop” as genre. I feel that Vic could have made his point stronger by denouncing the entire notion that “hip hop” was and is a self-contained entity, and then jettison it as something to defend. Further, I think Vic and Frere-Jones to be arguing the similar points, in that, hip hop, whatever it is, cannot be said to be identifiable. What on blogs, music criticism and news media is referred to in the deployment of the term “hip hop” is, at best, a floating signifier. Here, along with Vic, I believe this to be a positive development whereas Frere-Jones clearly expresses some grief.

However, it seems that Vic dithers a bit due to a kind of fallback notion of the “black experience” which he relies on not only in this particular response but also in the email that he refers to regarding another piece by Frere-Jones on Arcade Fire. (Sidenote: Come on Vic, Arcade Fire is really white.) In other words, I believe that Vic’s formulation of blackness in specific reference to hip hop to be analogous to what Vic accuses Frere-Jones’ conceptualization of “hip hop” as genre to be, and unfortunately falls into a kind of soft-essentialism of identity politics. By critiquing Frere-Jones for pulling a “white man speaks authoritatively on black culture” move and accusing him of such sentiments as “Nice try, Nas, but leave it to the professional (white, college-educated) music journalist to make sweeping statements about (black, ghetto-originated) music,” I believe Vic undermines the shrewd analysis that makes up most of his response. By framing his argument this way, I think it gives the reader a false sense of what Vic ultimately goes on to suggest, which is not so much a “white man, don’t speak out of your place” argument, but something else altogether.

If indeed, Vic was “just trying to point out that his language is typical of that (white) journalistic voice which presupposes the (white) journalist’s authority,” could we not, in turn, ask him if he would’ve felt better if another writer for the New Yorker, say, Kelefa Sanneh, would have written the piece? If he did wish to investigate the paternalism of the white critic, I think he could have addressed the issues of power, authority and cultural capital more directly by looking at why Frere-Jones is given the status of “expert” in the first place. I think Vic assumes he does, but I would ask, With whom does Frere-Jones have this “expert-status”? It must be for those of us who are educated enough and with access to the New Yorker, the utter embodiment of American white, upper middle-class cultural elitism. (If you don’t buy this, then I suggest you go to a session of the New Yorker Festival and see for yourself. I tried but the tickets are too expensive.) I believe Vic to also overstate Frere-Jones’ importance among those Vic sees himself as defending from Frere-Jones’ racial paternalism. To put it differently, can we be sure that if I run across the street to the bodega and ask everyone hanging out in front if they knew who Sasha Frere-Jones was, that many would? If they did, would they give a f*ck about what Frere-Jones said about “Blueprint 3″? I’m not so sure. Further, what is the motivation behind this response (beyond the publicity for Das Racist, which is a worthy reason as any other)? Is it to guilt Frere-Jones? If so, then is that too not an instance of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment, or “slave morality,” in which the slave accepts moral superiority for social, economic and political subjugation?

In sum, I ultimately agree with my buddy Vic in every aspect of his response but I wonder whether what he says he’ll do is ultimately what he does, most successfully at least, in his piece.