The Tris McCall Report
Calendar, June 5 - June 7
Short one this week, but topical: we're looking at young white urbanites using ethnic signifiers for the amusement of audiences. Yeah, yeah, I know, that's the history of rock and roll.
Thursday, June 5
Golem @ Luxx, 9 PM (with Matt Turk & Les Sans Culottes)
About ten years ago, there existed a fake world music act called 3 Mustaphas 3. Six guys, probably from somewhere in Brooklyn or Brixton, with bad Eastern European accents, fezzes, the whole nine. They put out a few records with Shanachie, played some uproarious shows, and returned, ostensibly to their pre-existing punk bands. This was in the days before world music was heavy industry, back when Johnny Clegg & Savuka's records were packaged like crap Fulton Street demos, before armchair ethnomusicologists began to insist on versimilitude. Since then, there have been at least two serious klezmer revivals in NYC alone, and a punk-gypsy crossover that has found its most commercial expression in the redactive music of System Of A Down. There have been some clowns along the way, but for the most part, these guys have been serious; almost solemn, burdened with the weight of ethnic and cultural responsibility. I don't like dilettantes any more than the next guy, but at some point we've lost the pure glee of banging influences against each other like mischevous kids in a pantry. I don't mean to suggest that Golem -- fittingly named after the Hebrew Frankenstein-monster -- lacks authenticity, but by foregrounding sex and silliness in their klezmer/gypsy hybrid, they're much less a museum piece than a rootless cosmo travelling party. And they're not afraid to get rough, so to speak, with their influences. They are such good musicians that their recontextualizations almost always work, and when they don't, well, it's still pretty funny. Honorary Mustaphas all, these six kids.
Battlestar America @ Luna Lounge, 8:30 (with The Younghans & Fort Bragg)
Hip-hop is a different story, though. From DJ Wack MC to Malibu's Most Wanted, white kids have raided their trust funds attempting to mock rap convention through nasty satires of their own. I remember when I used to be up in arms about this; scanning back pages of local weeklies trying to find white emcee parodists to shake my fist at. There hasn't been a shortage over the past decade, but a funny thing happened on the way to the crossover: none of those "critiques" really took, and most of the artists making them vanished. Meanwhile, hip-hop continued to be the dominant American popular music. Turns out Jay-Z didn't really need my protection or outrage on his behalf. So these days, when I see a bunch of white college kids emceeing onstage, whether cheekily or not, I read it as a tribute, since that's the way it is recieved. Hip-hop is really not at risk from the experiments of dabblers. Battlestar America is a group of good-natured experimentalists who play "country rap" with manifest enthusiasm for both forms and expertise in neither. It's OK, the same thing could be said about Rednexx and "Cotton Eyed Joe". The Battlestar certainly aren't the first bunch of writers to point out the connection between Johnny Cash's nihilism and g-rap, but making the point through a hoedown version of "How I Could Just Kill A Man" is a hell of a lot more fun than reading it in the Voice. You'd be forgiven if you found something thesis-like about this act, but hey, a good collegiate term paper is always worth examination. And do you really want to be the sort of person who denies yourself the obvious pleasure of a big beat version of "9 to 5" on theoretical grounds?
Friday, June 6
Baby Dayliner @ The Mercury Lounge, 11 PM (with Satellite Kid, Jason Liebman, Laura Thomas, & Xavier Rudd)
Baby D's hip-hop credentials are far more legit -- he's worked with Def Jux artists, all of whom have the gritty authenticity of Essenes (and come out of their caves about as often). When he performs songs like "Sha" or "Hoodlums In The Hit Parade", it often takes new listeners aback to hear familar rap phrases coming out of the mouth of a guy who looks -- and occasionally dresses -- remarkably like Kevin Bacon in Diner. Some reconcile the cognitive dissonance by figuring that the Baby D act is strict parody; he's grinning through phrases like "raise our guns to the sky" or "Crystal Bombay is what I piss", and we're invited to laugh along with him. But of course that isn't it: pure mockery is aesthetically unsustainable, and Baby D isn't mocking anybody, anyway. He might be a little self-conscious up there, this undisguised white man running through resolutely black phrases, but his redeployment of the language he hears on the records he loves is motivated by a desire to emulate them, not to point out their silliness. Hip-hop may not be his culture, but its artifacts and records made enough of an impact on Baby Dayliner to form his consciousness, and it would be completely dishonest of his art not to reflect that back. The Wu-Tang Clan aren't actually karate masters, you know, they borrowed all those motifs from the movies that made them feel manly. Half of radio hip-hop tropes are imported from Godfather movies and bad sportscasters. Cultural production is part nostalgic bedroom imaginings, and part osmosis. Baby Dayliner imagined himself a rap star, and now he is, but his cultural osmosis has kept him in firmly anchored in the indie rock subculture, and probably to stay. That he's ours ought to reflect well on us -- our creativity and flexibility, and willingness to incorporate the best elements from other genres.
Saturday, June 7
El-P @ Irving Plaza, 8 PM (with RJD2, Aesop Rock, SA Smash, Rob Sonic, C Ray Walz & Cannibal Ox)
As house emcee to an audience that doesn't really know much about hip-hop, Baby Dayliner isn't alone. In the history of the subculture, there have only been about four white artists who've made legitimate contributions: Rick Rubin, Adam Horowitz, Marshall Mathers, and El-Producto. Arguably, Mathers wouldn't even exist were it not for El-P, who, with Company Flow, broke most of the ground that Eminem would later revisit on the Slim Shady LP and elsewhere. By introducing cinematic white-man angst into hip-hop, El-Producto opened the gates to the dark-night-of-the-soul narratives and kitchen-sink melodrama that are Mathers's stock in trade. The inevitable result of El-P's innovation is histrionic crap like "Lose Yourself", but I can't blame Company Flow for Eminem's excesses any more than I hold Joni Mitchell responsible for Jewel. In El-Producto's unvierse, angst rides shotgun beside paranoia. Government corruption, population control, and dystopian societies straight out of Philip Dick are conflated with personality conflicts, power struggles, and domestic abuse. Articulate and pugnatious, El-P never lets his evident self-doubt and introspection stop the forward momentum of his stories. He's a much better emcee than Mathers or Horowitz -- and probably the most consistently talented Caucasian rhymer in the history of the form. At Irving Plaza, he'll apparently be backed up by the entire Def Jux crew; let's hope it doesn't degenerate into one of those notorious hip-hop fiascos where everybody has a microphone and they're all hollering at once.
Just for the ill communication of it, check out last week's calendar.
Even when you e-mail me nothing, it's a brilliant use of negative space.