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The Tris McCall Report

Critics Poll 2003 -- The Singles

 

On top of the world, in a Bentley.

 

The Outkast and white hipsters:

In December, my surmise was that Speakerboxxx/Love Below would win our album poll comfortably; around Christmas, I was joking that we should cancel the vote and just name Outkast the winner, thereby saving the trouble of tabulation. Since ATLiens gave them their initial traction with hipsters, Outkast has done increasingly well on the poll; they'd won both the album and single categories in 2000, and have effectively replaced The Roots (who replaced Public Enemy) as the token rap act in the field.

In the heyday of rec.music.hip-hop, some of the more prescient commentators would argue that there was no such thing as real white rap fan. White people were outside the culture, and they approached rap records as artifacts rather than pieces of an ongoing dialogue. No matter how much a white guy might claim to love hip-hop, he loved it only as a set of disconnected objects for purchase and formal evaluation. I thought at the time that this might have been an extreme position, but as the years have gone by and the gap between white hipster music and contemporary hip-hop continues to widen, it begins to make more sense. Certainly what a hipster hears when he drops the metaphorical needle on a rap album is not what a hip-hop head hears.

It has become increasingly difficult for hipsters (or anybody else) to compare a rap album to an indie rock album. There are two entirely dissimilar and contradictory production cultures operating; both of which are driven by consumer demand, but which generate completely different effects. The white hipster band, confronted by downloading culture that may or may not wipe out the LP album format altogether, valorizes records that aim toward an internal cohesion, perfection -- seamless transitions, meticulous detail, a nostalgic reverence for coherence, consistency, timelessness. The rapper, working with an audience with a different relationship to file-sharing, takes the value-added approach: more mixes, extra content, twenty tracks by a twenty different producers, guest appearances, collage, deliberate unevenness. Consequently, as hip-hop albums have become increasingly sprawling, the indie rock album has gotten shorter, more and more hermetically-sealed against outside influence.

From the perspective of white hipsters with what we'll call Shins values, recent rap albums appear to be increasingly unfocused. If you yourself have Shins values (I know I do), this creates the dangerous illusion that hip-hop is getting worse. In the fourteen years we've been doing this poll, the number of rap records mentioned has steadily dwindled. In 2003, it's nothing but a trickle: Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is the only hip-hop album in the top 50. That only half of the double record can be called hip-hop is convincing enough; still, the most common critique heard among hipsters with Shins values is: "it's too long!"

Surely it is too long. But so is War & Peace, and I don't think anybody is nudging Tolstoy out of the canon. The Outkast have made a career out of emptying their stankiest back pockets onto the two inch tape, and if that doesn't make for a perfect little thirty-five minute experience wrapped neatly in a bowtie, it opens the possibility of an associative richness that no indie rocker can match. Nonetheless, it's difficult for hipsters raised on Shins values to overlook the load of crapola in the second half of Love Below -- the bizarre drum n' bass experiments, the tuneless singing, the pure silliness. As a consequence, Outkast failed to win our Critics Poll this year. Nonetheless, while few hipsters had the stomach to put this sprawling, chaotic mess atop their year-end albums list, voters found another opportunity to express their appreciation (or, depending on how you see it, their unrepentant tokenism.)

Hey Ya! mania

While hip-hop has evaporated from album ballots, it's cropped up like toadstools after a rainstorm on hipster singles lists. In recent years it has not at all uncommon to recieve a Critics Poll ballot containing ten indie rock albums complemented by ten radio hip-hop singles. This tendency reached a frightening apex on the 2003 poll, as everybody in America voted for "Hey Ya!". The groundswell in support of the Andre Benjamin lead single seems to have risen from a national hive mind; an army of booty-swinging zombies lending sugar and shaking it like... well, you know. In the fourteen-year history of the poll, no single has come anywhere near dominating the list as did "Hey Ya!"

Guilt? Overcompensation? Some of you seemed to think so. "Liking Outkast", wrote Anna Howe on her rap-free ballot, "mollifies white hipsters' anxiety that they're racist (or that they'll get exposed as racists) -- hence, despite an outrageous degree of nonsense, this group rakes in love from all". Another respondent, himself a tabulator for another well-known hipster poll, put it this way: "Then there's all the ballots I entered which featured 9 albums I never heard of, plus Outkast. Yes, we know: some of your best friends are Top 40". Even those who failed to place "Hey Ya" atop their singles chart found some way to list it; the track also recieved considerable support for worst song of the year, mostly by those who considered it overplayed and over-referenced. "If I hear the word 'Polaroid' one more time", wrote Peter Nguyen, "I am going to choke somebody."

Got it just don't get it by the numbers:

"Hey Ya!" recieved 355 points, shattering the prior record like McGwire, and leaving all competition in its wake. To put it in perspective, its nearest rival failed to garner even a third as many points. A staggering 70% of all respondents listed "Hey Ya!", including eight of you who filled out entire album charts but failed to mention another single. "Hey Ya!" was mentioned on four times as many ballots as was the number two single, and accumulated more points than the second, third, and fourth place singles combined. Most remarkably, Benjamin's "Hey Ya!" thumped Antawn Patton's "Way You Move"; the Big Boi single from Speakerboxxx turned up on only two ballots. One of them was mine.

The Outkast and white hipsters (reprise):

Why do certain rappers capture hipster attention while other equally popular emcees are entirely ignored? Say you're a rapper trying to cross over; you recognize that positive reviews in hipster publications will guarantee college radio play and year-end "best of" sales. How do you get that acceptance?

As I see it, there are three ways, each with their drawbacks.

Method # 1. Incorporate some white man angst into the writing and production. White pop critics enjoy angst. A rapper who is angsty, like Tariq Trotter from The Roots, will be compared favorably to the spectre of "bling bling" and "playa" emcees, and called more "real". The review will hem and haw, but will always boil down to this: "rappers talk about keeping it real, with their mansions and yachts, but what is really real is the angst we personally feel, and Tariq Trotter (only the reviewer won't know his name) expresses that angst in hard-hitting songs like X".

The problem here is that hip-hop and white man angst are an uncomfortable fit. At its essence hip-hop is very braggadocious, and usually humorous, often joyous. If you try to shoehorn angst into conventional hip-hop form, you will end up with a record that feels superficially "important", but is a chore to sit through.

Method # 2. Feign toward explicit political significance. Hipster listeners love to hear songs decrying racism, for instance. It makes them feel very enlightened to sit there and listen to an emcee take that tough stand against prejudice. The problem here is that an emcee following this prescription will will eventually lose his black audience, because black hip-hop heads, on the whole, have never been feeling explicitly political rap. (KRS-ONE is an important exception that I won't go into here; he's an extreme outlier).

P.E. ended the day Ice Cube said "do I look like a motherfucking role model?" After that, rapping about positivity and political upliftment looked like pandering to white approval.

Method #3. Indulge in formal experimentation and be as off-the-wall as you can. Sophisticated whites love zany negroes. This is the route Outkast has taken. For every hardcore hip-hop head who rejected Stankonia and parts of Aquemini because of his sneaking suspicion that the bugged-out production and funny voices and foreva eva were an attempt to catch the ears of white critics, three or four hipster record fetishists were ready to take their seat on the ATL bandwagon.

There's probably some truth to the hardcore suspicion, but I will give Benjamin and Patton a pass. They call themselves Outkast for a reason -- they are weird guys. To some degree they have always stood outside hip-hop culture, commenting from the sidelines.

Okay, let's go. Same as yesterday: artist, song, points:

Hmpf. After all that controversy, Liz Phair comes in a single point ahead of Avril Lavigne.

Justin Timberlake also picked up 32 points for "Senorita", extending his inexplicable appeal into the singles charts. Votes for The Darkness were also split -- "Get Your Hands Off My Woman" and, um, one of their others gathered support

Tomorrow, we'll go through the single-answer categories. On Friday I'll post the answer ke-, er, my own ballot.

Take a look at the album results.

Take a look at the miscellany.

 

lend me some sugar, i am your neighbor