I’m a rapper, and I just have to be honest, once you get to a certain point — I’m a fan of hardcore rap. Sometimes I like stupid gangsta rap, and I know at a certain age it doesn’t match. I want the raw rap. At a certain age your life changes, at that point you become something else. And I never want to be the uncle or grandfather kind of guy, so I’ll just have to shift my qualities elsewhere, find something else to do.

That’s the ever dapper rapper, Andre 3000 of OutKast in an interview with The Fader.

Hip-hop is now old enough to have a generation gap. I’m fascinated by it as my friends and I get older and find ourselves listening to Sirius XM’s Backspin instead of its hip-hop channel.

Most rappers were in their teens or 20s when they released their first album. And now our icons — Run DMC, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, LL Cool J, Big Daddy Kane, Jay-Z, etc. — are not just grown-ass men, but middle-aged men. Our rap heroes are now the minivan demographic. What?

And that’s true of its audience as well. We are grown ups now. Some of us even have good jobs. What do you rap about when life is not hard? What do you rap about when you’re too old to be in the club every night? What do you rap about when you’re no longer selling drugs because music pays more? What do you rap about when you are a married dude with kids? Does that even work as material?

That bastion of middle aged smarty-art culture known as NPR waxes nostalgic for Nas’ Illmatic, and in some ways, that feels like an indicator of hip-hop’s cool.

The Hispanic population grew in almost every corner of the United States over the past decade, roughly equally in predominantly black and predominantly white neighborhoods. The typical African-American resides in a neighborhood that is 14 percent Hispanic, only slightly higher than the figure for the population as a whole. … Instead, the dominant trend in predominantly black neighborhoods nationwide has been population loss. Particularly in the formerly hyper-segregated cities of the Northeast and Midwest, ghetto neighborhoods have witnessed profound population declines, as former residents decamp for the suburbs or for the rapidly growing cities of the Sun Belt—where segregation is generally very low.

So desegregation is not caused by whites and Latinos moving into predominantly black neighborhoods. It’s due to black folks having access to jobs and credit and moving to predominantly non-black neighborhoods.

At least that’s my understanding of the Manhattan Institute’s report THE END OF THE SEGREGATED CENTURY: Racial Separation in America’s Neighborhoods, 1890-2010. [Via Ebony Magazine, which has been unexpectedly awesome lately.

I focus as a director on the moment in front of me. I focus on this scene and making it the best it can be. I’m working with a community of artists—a cinematographer, art director, the editor, lighting crew and the actors. So in that moment, nothing else matters except let’s make this scene the best scene possible. You focus on the scene in front of you and don’t worry about the end or what people are going to say or think because you’ll never escape the “gaze,“ and you’ll never get to your true self.

That’s Dee Rees, director of the very excellent coming-of-age / coming-out movie, Pariah, in an interview with Ebony magazine.

It’s true of movie-making and true of life.

We don’t know how to build a general-purpose computer that is capable of running any program except for some program that we don’t like, is prohibited by law, or which loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware: a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user’s knowledge, or over the objection of the computer’s owner. Digital rights management always converges on malware.

In an effort to stamp out piracy, we are stamping out legitimate fair-use rights, and accepting invasions of privacy by corporations in a way that also happens to dovetail nicely with the intelligence gathering goals of governments everywhere.

I don’t mean to sound too much like a conspiracy theory-loving whack job here. But the fact is that the same software that enables corporations to manage their intellectual property or make a profit on targeted advertising also makes it easier to spy on citizens. I’ll refer you to Evgeny Morozov’s enlightening, yet sobering book on this very subject, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (of which I have read about half thus far).

[h/t: Ben Ramsey]

For a discussion about why “Other” is problematic as a category, see Sarah Dopp’s piece from November, 2010 “Gender is a Text Field” (Diaspora, backstory, and context). She’s much smarter than I am about gender and identity, so I’ll point you there.

I, however, question the need to ask for a user’s gender at all. As Munroe said in his Google+ post:

They also (obviously) want to know more about you so they can serve ads; advertisers care about gender. But again, that’s no reason to make gender public.

Identity is a multi-faceted thing. One part of a person’s identity may well be subsumed or tempered by another aspect of it. Aside from perhaps personals ads, is there a reason to collect it at all?

By demographics, I am a married, college-educated, employed, black woman in my mid-30s. Those demographic datapoints suggest that I would care about working mother issues, Tyler Perry, and church. Ads served to me based on those assumptions, however, would miss their target. I am a child-free atheist and quite intent on remaining so. And no, I don’t like Tyler Perry.

About the only thing a gender field tells you is whether a person identifies as male, female, or neither. But if advertisers insist that they need to know gender so they can misfire ads, I propose using either or both of the following strategies:

• Make gender a text field and use taxonomy or heuristics to guess gender
• Provide a preferred pronoun field

Make gender a text field and use taxonomy or heuristics to guess gender

It’s a simple idea: put a text input field in the user interface. Users can enter what they wish. Then using a list of something gendered — male and female words (“dude” / “dudette”), names, perhaps closest connections — we can guess at the gender of the user in question.

Of course, this approach is problematic in that it is imprecise. Techie and tomboyish women may be misidentified as male. But I suspect such misidentification would actually make ads more relevant to those women.

Provide a preferred pronoun field

Even better: let the user set the pronoun he or she or ze or zir prefers. This settles questions such as those faced by xkcd where a bot or user interface needs to be grammatically correct. But it is not necessarily a definitive statment about gender.

And again: give users the option to make that data public, private, or leave it out altogether.

(Via The Mary Sue)

*Google has changed this (or will soon).

I am tired of people having this debate about the relative impact of pejorative words on their target minority group. If injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, then the relative power of an antigay gay slur is irrelevant, it is simply a threat to human dignity, and that should appall us all.

That’s black and gay former NBA player John Amaechi in his New York Times blog post about Kobe Bryant and the other f-word (“faggot”). The whole post is excellent, but this paragraph jumped out at me.

But this isn’t about sex positivity. Look at the terms of the bet. How can any three men ever determine what “all women” like? At the moment that this becomes about generalizing female sexual practices under one banner, it no longer becomes about women, but about men’s idea and projection of who they would like us to be. Moreover, clearly Jay, Nas, and TJ the DJ are having a Lil Wayne moment, RE: they just “wanna fuck every girl in the world.” Because that’s the only way they could reasonably determine the truth of their statements.

That’s from crunktastic of the Crunk Feminist Collective in her post Why Jay Electronica Can Go Choke On His Own Words.

It seems the Baracka Flocka Flames controversy has heated up since the October 26 publication of Prez N the Hood: A Hip-Hop Parody Stirs Up Issues in the New York Times (video below; article requires log-in).

America’s foremost old cranky black man, Stanley Crouch, had nothing nice to say about Baracka Flocka Flames in his recent column for TheRoot.com. He dismissed the video as ‘minstrelsy.’

That shouldn’t surprise you, of course. According to Crouch, anything hip-hop — even if it’s satirical or in parody form — is What’s Wrong With Negroes. Rather than rebut Crouch myself, I will point you to Bomani Jones’ post Stanley Crouch, I think I’m on to you….

Now I am one who thinks Baracka Flocka Flames’ “Head of the State,” is f#cking hilarious, bordering on brilliant. Part of the humor for me is that I imagine the Obamas are Grade-A sh#t-talkers behind closed doors. You see glimpses of this sense of humor when President Obama speaks. You saw it when Michelle Obama was cracking on her husband’s dirty sock habits. So I can totally see Barack Obama making off color jokes along these lines for sheer sh#ts and giggles.* Plus, James Davis does a killer job of imitating Obama’s diction, making every utterance of “nigga,” downright funny. But that’s not the only humor I see inreason I love this piece.

“Head of the State,” for those who don’t closely follow hip-hop, is based on Waka Flocka Flame‘s “Hard in the Paint.”

Yeah.

Let’s just say that if Stanley Crouch titled his next column “Waka Flocka Flame is What’s Wrong With Negroes,” I will heartily co-sign. Waka Flocka Flame not only has a stupid-a## name, but he has also said he’s in it for the money, not the craft. And if we’re talking about topical content, <ebonics>this n*gga just stay ig’nant</ebonics>. This video, as Jones points out, fits much more closely with Crouch’s idea of minstrelsy, or the performance of stereotype for commercial gain.

“Head of the State” plays off the imagery and lyrics of “Hard in the Paint,” and by doing so, I think it becomes a multi-layered, satirical critique of class and race stereotypes and hip-hop video tropes.

Let’s think about this: Barack Obama was largely raised in Kansas. He not only attended college, but has degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law — two Ivy League universities. Michelle Obama is similarly educated. So the idea of BHO unironically thug posing and rapping about his “main bitch,” and having his “own SK” is absurd. It is completely, utterly, and absolutely absurd.

And that absurdity makes “Head of the State” uncomfortable for the thinking viewer.

My second and third reactions were “Wow, this is rife with stereotypes, innit?” and “Sh*t, the tea baggers will have a field day with this.” And I suspect much of the criticism of “Head of the State,” from Crouch and others is related to W.W.W.P.T. — “What Will White People Think?” As Jones wrote, the truth is that, for better or worse, the mass media is America’s only introduction to black people.

But if you believe it’s plausible that a middle-class raised, currently upper-class, highly-educated black man, particularly the president of the United States would be chilling on the front steps of an abandoned house in a dangerous neighborhood, smoking Newports and dancing with a bottle of Smirnoff while surrounded by persons of questionable repute, I must ask who clings more tightly to the black-man-as-thug stereotype — you or Baracka Flocka?

And that’s why I love this “Head of the State,” video. It sticks a finger square in the eye of fake thug rappers who pimp gangster imagery for profit. And it sticks a finger in the eye of those who see Ivy League educated black people in the White House and manage to reduce them — and by extension all of us — to a narrow, negative stereotype.

Related:

Jay Smooth’s Raw Footage “I Forgot He Was Black.”

*Okay, raise your hand if an inappropriate HNIC joke has crossed your mind January 20, 2009.

The show appealed to my belief that art only got better once the boundaries between high and low culture were relaxed, most famously by Andy Warhol, then by countless others. It also satisfied my hunger to try new things; my demons that demand I dance naked in public; and my desire to see if art criticism is supple and porous enough to be practiced on a wider stage–even if this stage distorted that practice.

Art critic Jerry Saltz, one of the judges on Bravo’s Work of Art, writes about why he did the show, and how it changed him as a critic.

Big Freedia and Galactic at the Fillmore from Big Freedia on Vimeo.

As far back as the ’40s and ’50s, it was a really popular thing. Gay performers have been celebrated forever in New Orleans black culture. Not to mention that in New Orleans there’s the tradition of masking, mummers, carnival, all the weird identity inversion. There’s just something in the culture that’s a lot more lax about gender identity and fanciness. I don’t want to say that the black community in New Orleans is much more accepting of the average, run-of-the-mill gay Joe. But they’re definitely much more accepting of gay people who get up and perform their gayness on a stage.

And:

When Freedia or Nobby’s singing superaggressive, sexual lyrics about bad boyfriends or whatever, there’s something about being able to be the ‘I’ in the sentence. That’s not to say that women can’t like the more misogynistic music too. I like it — some of it’s good music. But it’s tough to sing along about bitches and hos when you’re a girl. When you identify with Freedia, you’re the agent of all this aggressive sexuality instead of its object.

So says writer Alison Fensterstock in New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap in the New York Times Magazine. The piece is about New Orleans bounce, and its variant known as “sissy bounce,” a term that Fensterstock reluctantly takes credit for coining.

So we have queer men as a vehicle for heterosexual women to express aggressive sexuality in the way heterosexual male rappers do. And we have queer men being unabashedly queer for predominantly heterosexual audiences. What does that say, if anything, about the gender politics of bounce and (cisgendered) women?

(Read through to the end for a hypothesis.)

We often talk about how stories change the world, but we should also see how the world of identity politics affects the way stories are being circulated, read and reviewed.

Writer Elif Shafak in her TED talk The Politics of Fiction (embedded below). Shafak was prosecuted for her novel about a family’s women set against the Turkish-Armenian conflict. A nice compliment to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk The Danger of a Single Story.

I attended a screening of 41st & Central last night, as part of the National Black Arts Festival. It’s a quite moving documentary about the rise of the Los Angeles branch of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, especially its founder, Bunchy Carter.

Filmmaker Gregory Everett did a marvelous job of contextualizing the movement as an outgrowth of westward black migration to escape Jim Crow, a response to white brutality towards these newcomers, and resistance of Gestapo-like LAPD police tactics.

I don’t think Everett used as critical an eye as he could have, however. I suspect that’s because of his proximity to the subject matter. Everett is a Los Angeles native, and his father, with whom he didn’t have much of a relationship, was an active Panther. His reverence and awe is palpable.

That lack of distance made the film better in some ways; I doubt the interviews would have been as intimate otherwise. But I think it caused Everett to leave a few questions unasked, unanswered, or under-examined namely: age, gender, and the criminal histories and ties of its membership.

That’s what struck me most about the Black Panther Party while watching this documentary: the leadership’s youth, its gender, and its relationship to Los Angeles street gangs.

Bunchy Carter was 27 when he was killed. Huey P. Newton was 24 when he founded the Black Panther Party. Many of the members who had been killed, were between 17 and 23. These were young men — emphasis on young.

And these were young men — emphasis on men. Although three women figured prominently in this documentary (Elaine Brown, Ericka Huggins, and Eldridge Cleaver’s ex-wife Kathleen), the Panther’s leadership was male. The only time women were explicitly mentioned in the documentary were as people — along with children — to be protected. Most photos of the Black Panthers were of black men wearing all black, sometimes holding weapons.

I suspect this gendering of the movement was tied to the fact that its founders were young men with criminal and gang histories. Bunchy Carter, for example, was part of the Slausons street gang, and founded a breakaway faction known as the Renegade Slausons before founding the Los Angeles chapter of the Panthers. Minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, had served time for assault with intent to kill. Huey P. Newton, who founded the main branch of the party in Oakland, was also an ex-convict.

Young men tend towards knuckleheadedness in our society. Being a knucklehead will bring you in more frequent contact with cops. Being a known, repeated knucklehead will get yo’ ass whupped by the police every single time. Mind you, to merely get your ass whupped by LAPD was to get off lucky.*

Black Panther Party members had more experience with the penal system. They were more likely to encounter the police, and therefore more likely to be brutalized by them. While several interviewees mentioned the gang history and conviction histories of party members, neither they nor Everett examined the problems this may have caused for party acceptance and growth. And the gendering of the party’s leadership was not mentioned, nor were reasons for it discussed in the documentary.

In fact, the gendering of black liberation movements was significant, problematic, and could indded have caused a rift in the movement had CoIntelPro not beat them to it. Black women were starting to question this male domination of leadership, and fight for full male privilege. For example, the Combahee River Collective Statement, released in 1973, articulates a black feminist critique that explicitly names black male sexism as a barrier to female participation in these movements. Again: it’s a question that wasn’t asked or answered by the documentary, despite three women being featured in it.

Despite my quibbles, I would recommend seeing the film if you can. It captures the passions and reasons behind a little-known corner of the movement.

* I can’t overstate the brutality of the Los Angeles Police Department at the time. Chief William H. Parker had recruited officers from the Jim Crow south. Between 1968 and 1969 (according to this documentary) at least two-dozen black people were killed under questionable circumstances. Several had been shot in the back while running away. Panther member Wayne Pharr recounted a story in the movie about getting beat up by the LAPD. He said they kept telling him to run, but he wouldn’t. At the time, running was a justifiable reason for shooting a suspect.

Obviously we went through a period where models reflected the Twiggy phenomenon, but that didn’t have much to do with what actually was attractive to the opposite sex.

Hugh Hefner just gave me the giggles with this quote from an interview with Deborah Solomon in the New York Times. In it, Solomon asserts that the voluptuous Playboy model body type is passé as a beauty standard — and Hef disputes it, leading to the choice quote above.

And so, in the revised entry for rock included in the O.E.D.’s June 2010 update, Melle Mel trumps Big Bank Hank as the earliest known M.C. to “rock the mic.” Though fresh evidence could always push the usage back even further, there’s a certain justice to setting the record straight, more than three decades after the fact. Historical lexicography? It rocks.

From Ben Zimmer’s July 5 piece in the New York Times, On Language: When Did We First ‘Rock the Mic’?.

Zimmer takes a look at the use of “rock” as a verb as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, and particularly it’s use in hip-hop.