Hey the Fader! Status Ain't Hood got a digital camera now! Stop bellyaching!

TTC
Knitting Factory
September 29, 2005

It's not a bad thing, necessarily. I'm not even sure why it bothers me. I mean, it's a good thing that white hipster kids listen to rap. I moved up to New York from a town where plenty of the hipster kids are dimly aware that rap exists, where I still hear the same Neutral Milk Hotel album at every goddam barbecue (they're starting to finally embrace Baltimore club, though, so that's something). I love the whole Hollertronix aesthetic, I love M.I.A. and Fannypack, I love hearing DJs going from the Cure to Young Buck like it was nothing. And if hipster kids like rap music, then why shouldn't hipster kids have their own hipster-kid-rap groups? It makes sense; rap makes up a huge chunk of popular culture, and these kids have a right to this culture as anyone else. There's even something refreshing about Plastic Little or Spank Rock, how they approach rap completely from the outside, just as something to have some fun with. It's not like Aesop Rock or Little Brother or something where the people who like them insist that they're the truest, greatest manifestations of the hip-hop tradition or whatever; no one has ever tried to tell me that Spank Rock is a better rapper than Jay-Z or Scarface. And groups like this use dinky little electro-bleep beats because they don't have expensive studios or name producers at their disposal, and these beats they're making are fun and functional enough.

So it's not the dilettantism that bothers me. I'm a dilettante. We're all dilettantes. It might be the only honest way to consume music in 2005, when thousands of albums come out every week and it's entirely impossible for any one person to stay on top of everything. You can love rap without having an encyclopedic knowledge of Pete Rock or whatever. And I don't think it's the lack of sincerity. The Diplomats aren't exactly sincere all the time. Neither is DJ Quik or Atmosphere or Field Mob or Paul Wall or Kanye. Rap is funny, and just about everyone who makes the music or loves the music has fun with it sometimes. It's a good thing.

And that's where TTC comes in. TTC is a rap group from Paris, and judging by last night's show, they're a French version of Plastic Little. Three of the group's four members are white, and they rap over the same dinky Casio beats that American hipster-rap groups use. The group's apparent leader is Cuizinier, a tall Federlinian dude with a three-day beard and a XXXL T-shirt and a fitted cap that still has the shiny sticker on the brim. Their DJ, unfortunately named Orgasmic the Toxicologist, wears enormous sunglasses and runs through perfunctory, halfassed scratch routines and throws on DJ Assault tracks so the other dudes in the group can pull girls up for onstage freaklines. Cuizinier and Tido (the one nonwhite member) seem to at least attempt straight rapping, but Teki, the fat beady-eyed bald guy in the group, seems bent on transforming himself into a human caricature, squeezing out his verses in an obnoxiously high-pitched nasal leer like Curly from the Three Stooges, taking off his shirt and doing butt-dances. They sample "I Like to Move It" and rap in French and yell for the crowd to put its motherfucking hands up in cute broken English. Their cheap little electro-beats are pretty good, as is their stage show; they hit all their lines with precision and mostly avoid yelling all over each other's verses.

They might be huge pop stars in France, but I doubt it; they seem more likely to be the sort of group that's a hipster curio all over the world, a gift from God to cultural studies undergrads writing thesis papers about the globalization of pop culture. (Every review of their album that I've read has used the word "crunk," which is ridiculous.) At the Knitting Factory last night, they drew a hipster crowd who danced the whole time and cheered when Teki took off his shirt and generally acted like they were in on the joke. And maybe that's what bothered me. I can't imagine anyone ever caring deeply about TTC, not even the people in the group. The whole thing seemed to just be an elaborate joke for people who think rap is funny. And these people aren't wrong, but there's much, much more to it than that.

"I've heard that New Yorkers are very hard to please," yelled an adorably heavy-accented Teki at one point. Seems to me that he was misinformed.

Stream: "Dans Le Club" video

Some guy waves a tambourine as Status Ain't Hood's first foray into digital photography proves disastrous

Black Mountain + Blood Meridian + Ladyhawk
Mercury Lounge
September 27, 2005

The people in Black Mountain are fuckups. They wander around drunk between songs and yell at individual people in the crowd and have big beards and announced from the stage that they'd missed the Hold Steady record release party that they were booked to play a couple of months ago because, um, they forgot. Their instruments had been stolen the night before, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if someone had just left the van unlocked. They also kept inviting all the jokers from the opening bands and the sizable contingent of drunk Canadian people in the crowd onstage to play tambourines and stuff. Near the end of the set, some guy standing near me announced that he was leaving "on principle" if they grabbed anyone else and told them to play maracas. Mere minutes later, they grabbed someone else and told them to play maracas. The guy, true to his word, stormed out.

The guy who left was a chump because Black Mountain is awesome. Their self-titled album is a precariously towering pile of sexy-blooz-vamp cliches hammered over each other and stretched out like taffy until the whole thing becomes a dense, druggy fog of sex-moans and gospel howls and choogle riffs and ghostly organs and ominous gutpunch basslines and spaghetti-western flourishes and (especially) big, big riffs. It's like someone took all the nice things everyone said about Comets on Fire and Dungen last year and suddenly made them actually come true: a band that turns tired classic-rock source material into a monumental haze of droned-out bliss.

Black Mountain is a fucking beast of an album, but it wasn't at all certain that they'd be able to pull it off live. That's partly because the album is a total studio work, all its armies of guitars layered gorgeously, heavily dependent on dudes like the squawky saxophone player who wasn't on tour with them. It's also partly because the drunken-Canadian contingent, which I swear to God was like half the crowd, would've been happy with whatever. They made a lot of noise for openers Ladyhawk, even though that band plays goofy, sloppy, ambling riff-rock that sounds like Jets to Brazil if you close your eyes, and even though the bass player looks like Weird Al Yankovic with a big beard, which is not a good look.

They also made a lot of noise for Blood Meridian, a band that shares a couple of members with Black Mountain (I understand that Canadian bands like to do that) and plays pretty good surgey crashey road-trip emo-folk-AOR, somewhere between let's say Bright Eyes and Social Distortion. They unsurprisingly lost it a bit when they veered into country territory, but they stayed good when they stuck to lightly psychedelic throb and occasionally toyed around with rockabilly. Frontman Matt Camirand, who also churns out heavily fuzzed-up basslines in Black Mountain, perfectly inhabits every scuzzy backwoods rawk troubadour stereotype right down to the gutterpunk tattoos on his hands, and it was fun to see them invite all the Vancouver heads onstage to sing along on the last song, but they didn't explode my world or anything.

But the Vancouver contingent was into those bands and thoroughly amped to see Black Mountain (I'm pretty sure they started moshing a couple of times), so the band probably didn't need to work all that hard. And they didn't seem to be working hard; they staggered around all drunk between songs, and frontman Stephen McBean kept wandering to the back of the stage every time he played a solo. But holy shit, they sounded incredible, vamps building into roars, evil synths blaring out over everything, monstrous metal riffs occasionally ripping through the fog. "Don't Run Our Hearts Around" and "Druganaut" had a steamrolling headbanger stomp that kept up even through the spaced-out quiet parts, and "No Hits" built from forebodingly perfect horror-movie atmospherics into a damaged roar over what felt like hours (in the good way). The closing "No Satisfaction" turned into an ecstatic gang-shout singalong and sent everyone out reeling. This was laser-eyed behemoth shit, and if they wanted to tell people to play maracas, that was OK with me.

Voice review: Frank Kogan on Black Mountain's Black Mountain

The Hold Steady trying to get drunk enough to face all those little high school fuckers

Last night, Pitchfork News dropped the bomb that next month the Hold Steady, the band behind what may be Status Ain't Hood's favorite album of the year thus far, would be playing a show at the Littleton High School gym in Littleton, Colorado as part of a program for kids having trouble making the transition from middle school to high school. This seemed pretty awesome, and so Status Ain't Hood had to get at Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn to figure out what the fuck was up with that.

So you're playing at a high school in Colorado?

Yeah, this guy e-mailed us, and he came our music through the piece that NPR did on us. He bought the CD and brought it in and started using it to teach these kids he had something about, like, literary allusions, that kind of thing. All the correspondence has been with him, but apparently the kids have taken to it, and he saw that we were coming and we had a day off before, and so he just asked us to come by. They're having a lot of fun with it. I actually told Pitchfork that they're having a Hold Steady look-alike contest, which is pretty rad.

So that's definitely happening?

Yeah, that's what he said, unless he was making it up. Franz, our keyboard player, has that handlebar mustache, and I predict a lot of entries with him. I think you could do something glasses-based for Tad or me, but after that it gets a little tricky.

So a lot of drawn-on handlebar mustaches?

I'm guessing. I'm hoping that the Hold Steady look-alike contest is on the same day because I want to see that. Hopefully there will be photos.

So you're not going out to Colorado specifically for this thing?

No, we're on tour. We have a show that same night in Denver in a real bar.

Is the show going to be anticlimactic after that?

I hope it's a different type of show. I hope it's a different vibe. It'll be interesting to see because you have to figure that these kids' parents are more likely to be our age, or maybe five years older than us, ten years older than us, but more likely to be into the music we're playing than they probably are. You know what I mean? Kids today just seem to like hip-hop now. I'm not sure they like rock, do they?

I don't know.

I mean Staind and stuff like that, but that's not really, I don't know.

So are you anticipating a skeptical audience, then?

Maybe! You always wonder, if the teacher's really into it. But I think it's really cool. I actually think, and I'm guessing you can relate, most people we know can relate, that there is a really comfort in music. These kids are at-risk.

Yeah, this is a high school for kids...

It's a program within a high school, I think. It's at-risk kids, and it's junior high age. It's the kids who, I think, are having a hard time transitioning from junior high to high school, and it's at-risk kids, ESL, etc. I think there's an English as a second language element to some of it. [Laughing] I think it's going to be really great; I'm really looking forward to it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Littleton is where the Columbine massacre happened, isn't it?

Yes, it was, and I just realized that yesterday; it hadn't come up to me. That's an interesting side story as well, in that God knows if this program was created in the wake of that or something like that. Maybe we'll know more about that when we get there. Columbine High School was in Littleton; I wonder if they closed that school or if it's still around. Maybe they renamed it or something like that. There is something really interesting about that. But I think it's really exciting; there is a positivity in rock and roll that I think reflects.

Are you going to be playing an acoustic set like the one at CMJ?

Yeah, we've been doing that at those kind of things, things like radio stations and in-stores, for a couple of reasons. One, if there's not a PA that's adequate it's not going to sound like shit. Number two, it usually happens around a real show that we're going to play, and there's a lot of equipment and all that. And number three, it somehow keeps our head in the game. It's easier to focus on doing something on the fly because we don't rehearse for those things. I think we're going to do that because I don't think the school has a sound system that's going to allow us to play right.

And also, one thing I was noticing at the CMJ show is that you can hear your lyrics a whole lot more clearly.

Well, sure. The lyrics drive it a little more. It is kind of cool for turning on new people who might not be able to hear it when we play live. It'll be a different audience!

The Hold Steady will be playing at Maxwell's on Friday.
Download: "Your Little Hoodrat Friend"
Download: "The Swish"

Voice feature: Joe Gross on the Hold Steady

Since people liked the VMAs thing, it's time for another one. Believe I'll keep doing these things every time there's a music-related televised event until the Voice fires me or I forget to pay my cable bill. I'm not entirely sure what the point of the VH-1 Hip-Hop Honors is. How are the honorees chosen? Do people vote on them like with the Baseball Hall of Fame? Are they chosen based on who they can get to show up to the induction ceremony like the WWE Hall of Fame? Do they think they're really finding the most important people in rap history to honor with this thing, or are these just the people they thought were famous enough to put on TV and still capable of putting on an entertaining-enough show when they're thrown out onstage? And does any of this diminish the pleasure of seeing these old guys on TV again, thrilled that people remember them, doing their best to live up to their former selves. No, probably not.

The thing about Hip-Hop Honors is that its aims are different from those of the VMAs. It's not about dazzle; it's (I think) about credibility. VH-1 isn't really trying to educate the world about rap music, though it may actually end up doing that, at least for a few people. It's trying to prove itself an authority, entertaining and still being relevant. It's not an easy line to walk; they could easily end up doing something perfunctory and insulting or boring and sepia-toned if they stray too far in either direction. But there was basically nothing risible about Hip-Hop Honors, and I'm happy that they're going to be doing this every year.

8:40: Apparently there's a pre-show, and I've already missed most of it. MC Lyte is interviewing Kwame, Dana Dane, and Greg Nice on a gold carpet. A bad sign: VH-1 has had three days since the taping to fact-check, and they still spelled Kwame's name Quame on the on-screen graphic.

8:45: Lyte interviews LL Cool J, who is rocking his circa-1985 look (warmup suit, fat gold chain) and looking awesome.

8:47: Lyte keeps asking people if they notice the gold carpet, which is getting old fast.

8:54: Aww shit, you know it's a big night if Jason Kidd and Omarosa are there!

8:56: David Banner and Fat Joe, in sort of a touching moment, talk about their Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, somehow managing to do it in a way that doesn't seem overly self-promotional.

8:57: In a pre-prison interview with Fab 5 Freddy, Lil Kim wears way too much makeup.

9:00: The first of many black-and-white skits where hosts Russell Simmons and the Reverend Run squabble entertainingly. Run is wearing that stupid priest collar again. Their onstage introduction is a clip from Krush Groove, which means this show's intro is already roughly one million percent better than last year's cracked-out Vivica Fox danceathon, even if Run is really just here to plug his reality show.

9:09: Russell Simmons trips over his words for the first time. I get the feeling that would keep happening if these guys kept appearing onstage. But no: this is the last we'll see of them for an hour and fifty-five minutes.

9:10: Nelly is dressed like old-school LL and doing "I'm Bad." It's cute! Ciara is also there for some reason. They do "Doin It." If you only have time to do pieces of four LL songs, maybe "Doin It" should maybe get the axe.

9:14: LL does "Mama Said Knock You Out," which, I mean, is awesome.

9:19: I can't decide if the VH-1 promo where some white guy reads the "Doin It" lyrics over plinky classy piano is an affectionate rib on rap music or if it just means that they really never took it seriously at all. Either way, it doesn't really seem like they should be doing this right here. (And if there was ever any doubt that VH-1 expects a mostly white audience for this thing, this commercial break should dispel it. We see a Get Rich or Die Tryin' ad, a sneaker commercial with Run and Rush, and a whole lot of white people.)

9:24: Ice-T in Ice-T video clip: "You're never going to hear anything from Ice-T that's corny or soft or pop." My girlfriend: "Dude, you're on SVU!" Still, it's really cool to see them recognizing someone who's not one of the canonical New York guys, and Ice absolutely deserves it. I'm still not holding my breath for Too Short or the Geto Boys getting honors next year, though.

9:27: I guess it was a no-brainer to get Snoop to come out and do "6 'N the Mornin'." Still, meh. Ice just murders him, running out in all black with a bandana over his face, still sounding amazing.

9:29: Don Magic Juan is onstage. Someone needs to not let Don Magic Juan onstage ever again. Seriously, they don't let Farnsworth Bentley onstage at stuff like this anymore, do they?

9:36: Spike Lee hasn't significantly changed the way he dresses in nineteen years, which is pretty impressive. He's toned it down a little, but he's still rocking a vertical-stripe button-up with the top button buttoned in 2005.

9:39: A really cool video clip on this history of the Furious Five, with a Cowboy tribute and everything.

9:44: Grandmaster Flash does a fun-if-pointless DJ routine with Jazzy Jeff and Kid Capri.

9:45: Furious Five performance! I'm impressed that they managed to get all these guys back together; I thought they'd hated each other for years. Cowboy is confusingly replaced with Fat Joe. Melle Mel is scarily diesel, like he's spent the last twenty-two years lifting weights without taking any breaks to eat or sleep or, um, practice rapping. But the only one who has really aged badly is Kid Creole, who has weird thinning hair and bugged-out eyes. The set holds together pretty well until everyone gets a bit sloppy on "The Message" (which includes an absolutely unnecessary "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" interpolation).

9:57: In their video package, Salt-N-Pepa mention Hurby "Luv Bug" Azor without bringing up the whole controlling-and-exploitative-svengali thing (though, to be fair, they had like two minutes to present their entire history). I wonder if he's watching this.

10:00: This performance is the first time Salt-N-Pepa have performed in seven years, the first time that the original members of En Vogue have performed together in ten years, and the first time all seven of them have ever performed together onstage. That's all quite impressive; it's almost a shame that all this is just happening so VH-1 can show them performing a pretty good rap song from eleven years ago. En Vogue looks and sounds amazing, Salt-N-Pepa look good in a sort of attractive-teacher way, and the Roots sound pretty great playing this. But "Whatta Man" and that's it? No "Push It"?

10:11: Nia Long and, for some reason, Anthony Anderson introduce Boyz N the Hood. Were Ice Cube and Cuba Gooding really too busy?

10:14: John Singleton appears to be made out of rocks.

10:16: All night, they've shown video packages and then followed them immediately with live performances. Now there's a weird moment when the Boyz N the Hood video package ends, everyone waits for a performance to start, and then the "Milkshake" beat comes in. (They're cutting to a commercial, but it's still pretty funny.)

10:22: Turtle from Entourage is onstage? Is he going to introduce Saigon? No. No, he's going to introduce Kanye.

10:24: Kanye is doing "Gold Digger" on a glass riser in the middle of the crowd, and I love it when people do that. He's also rocking a spectacularly ugly sweater, doing that dance where he jerks backwards, and running out of breath one verse in.

10:28: VH-1 runs a big promo to introduce Swann, the winner of their freestyle contest, all leading up to Swann spitting an unbelievably lame one bar. Thanks, Swann!

10:37: Big Daddy Kane tribute! VH-1 sort of proved that they're for real by honoring Kane here. He hasn't been in any movies or had any recent hits; he's just one of the greatest rappers of all time, and apparently that's enough. T.I.'s accent is way too thick for him to hit all the precise lines on "Smooth Operator," but he seems totally amped to be onstage. Black Thought attacks "Set It Off" really hard and still somehow looks boring. Common struggles hard to keep up with the "Raw" beat, but he does manage an impressive backspin. Kane looks a little tired and heavy, but he just wrecks "Warm It Up, Kane" absolutely destroying everyone onstage with him and then running through a beautifully flawless dance routine with Scoob and Scrap (though Noz says it's not Scrap). It would've been classy if Jay-Z showed up, but he doesn't. I flaked out on Kane's show at BB King's on Thursday night because I was tired, and apparently I fucked up badly.

10:42: Inevitable Diddy appearance.

10:44: Genuinely touching Biggie tribute video; rappers still sound truly awed when they talk about him. Nas says something about a remix of "Gimme the Loot" that he was supposed to be on, and that's the first I've heard of that.

10:53: The idea of a Biggie tribute with Faith Evans and Lil Cease and Kanye and Ludacris sounds just terrible, but it ends up coming together really well. Faith and a gospel choir sing her part of Jay-Z's a dream, Luda sounds amped and doesn't fuck up on the "Juicy" verse, and Kanye comes out dressed as Biggie (with the cane and everything) to do "Hypnotize," which is pretty funny. Only Lil Cease really blows it, all huffy and out of breath on "One More Chance." I wonder if Lil Kim would've agreed to the pre-show interview if she knew Cease was going to be on this. Biggie's son looks eerily like him, grinning and high-fiving Diddy in a weirdly familial and nice end to a show that turned out way better than I expected.

The Fugees, performing at the VMAs that year when Dennis Miller hosted

The story up until now, which you probably already know: unheralded New Jersey boho-rap trio makes a great album in 1996, cover of "Killing Me Softly" with no rapping on it becomes soccer-mom favorite, album sells one kajillion copies, group becomes totally famous. Crew leader guy makes a pretty good solo album. Girl in the group who sang rapless "Killing Me Softly" cover has a baby. Girl makes great soul album with only a little bit of rapping and no help from dudes in the group, blows the fuck up even more, wins like 82 Grammys. Girl's album soon revealed to be about married crew leader guy, with whom she had fucked-up manipulative affair. Crew leader guy produces hit song for crew hypeman guy. Crew hypeman guy's album bricks. Crew leader guy produces album by young mixtape hype who is supposed to take over rap, includes dis song against established rap star. Album is terrible and bricks. Crew leader guy makes unbelievably shitty sophomore album, which includes guest appearances from The Rock and Kenny Rogers. Crew hypeman guy makes a movie. Movie bricks. Girl falls under the influence of shadowy cult-leader minister guy and retreats further and further from the spotlight. Girl makes double-disc MTV Unplugged album with no rapping and a whole lot of weirdly condescending and impenetrable nonmusical ranting. Crew leader guy makes a bunch of unbelievably lame records. Crew leader guy plays a lot of shows for white fratkids (like this one) where he does backflips and plays guitar behind his head and covers a bunch of Bob Marley songs and generally makes an ass of himself. Girl, apparently crazy, becomes recluse. Crew hypeman guy disappears; nobody notices. Trio shockingly reunites at Dave Chappelle Block Party show and then again at BET Awards. Trio goes into studio to make new music for the first time since 1996 album.

That brings us up to this past weekend, when "Take It Easy," the first single from the new Fugees album, leaked. You don't need me to tell you that this is an event. Lauryn, of course, is widely believed to totally hate Wyclef for perfectly understandable reasons. More importantly, a Fugees reunion means new verses from Lauryn, one of the greatest rappers of all time (seriously), someone we never thought we'd get to hear rap again. And this new Fugees album is their first since The Score, one of the great rap classics of the mid-90s. So "Take It Easy" is a really big deal. It's also completely weak.

Here's what we get:

The beat: A brittle clinky thing, little guitar plinks and synth buzzes, totally outdated like something the Trackmasters would've done in 1999. Also, there are some weird gurgley bass noises underneath that don't really match up with the rest of the track.

The hook: Essentially nonexistent. Wyclef tells us to take it easy a bunch of times. Includes warnings that we should tell our goons to take it easy and that here comes the rocket launcher. Also includes some woman (not Lauryn) moaning, "Ay, papi." Completely ass.

Lauryn: Two verses! She's all over the beat with this new poetry-slam too-many-syllables style, but she sounds totally hard and heated. My girlfriend says she sounds annoyed, like she can't believe she's doing this shit again, but then she's all over the rest of the track yelling hypeman ad-libs, so it seems like she's happy to finally be rapping again. Her voice is awesome. I can't really figure out what she's talking about ("Responsibility, polity / To survive economically / Some people do it comically / Future freedom equality"?), and her voice is mixed too low, but it's really, really good to hear her rapping again.

Wyclef: Stupid muttery fake-confident verse with words that usually don't even rhyme. Actually says the line: "I ain't rhyme in a minute, but y'all ain't catch up / And that ain't blood on ya shirt, man, it's ketchup" (with Lauryn gleefully yelling along in the background to the "it's ketchup" part like it was a devastating dis or something). Also: "That dog sniffing in the back ain't Lassie." And: "I'd rather kill myself, become a ghost, and write for myself." And: "I flow for the thugs, gypsies, and hippies." Wyclef's verse on "Take It Easy" may be the single worst verse of the year, at least on a high-profile rap single, at least until the Pras verse comes in.

Pras: Just stunningly bad. "Been in LA, few flicks, few millions / Back with the Fugees, Foo Fighting for a few billioins." Even without the Foo Fighting thing, he really shouldn't brag about his film career when his best role was as the villain's henchman in Mystery Men. References "Ghetto Superstar" more than seven years after the fact. Blurts way off the track like a semi-retarted DMX.

Also: "Take It Easy" is nearly six minutes long, and it ends in a minute and a half of Wyclef guitar noodling. Turns out that a Fugees reunion wasn't really what anyone was waiting for; we just wanted Lauryn to start rapping again. Maybe we'll get another Lauryn solo album someday.

Stream: "Take It Easy"

Voice review: Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, Sia Michel, dream hampton, Greg Tate, and Jane Dark on Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

Paul Wall. Um. Yeah.

Paul Wall is the first-ever famous white rapper who doesn't talk about being white, who makes no attempt to engage with his contradictory position (white guy selling black culture to probably mostly white people). I make this point in a Pitchfork review that hasn't dropped yet, but let me expand in it here: if you'd never seen a picture of him, you wouldn't know he was white. His voice is a deep Southern roll rather than the nasal jackhammer flow that most white rappers have. On The People's Champ, currently sitting at #1 on the Billboard charts after knocking off Kanye, he doesn't make a single reference to his pale skin or middle-class background or backpack-dork background (the Texas underground equivalent of backpack-dork, anyway). He talks about college, but only in the context of picking up girls on Blackplanet.com. My girlfriend made the point that the grainy quality of his album-art photos might be intended to make him look Latino. He's the only white face in the "Still Tippin'" and "Sittin' Sidewayz" videos, and he doesn't seem to think there's a single thing weird about that. In an interview at Allhiphop.com, he had this to say:

There's bigotry and there's a little hatred and racism but you especially see it from the older people who come from older generations, but we live in the MTV generation where race isn't an issue. If you make it an issue, then it's an issue. But it's not an issue, especially in Houston. I see it more up North and in the East, and even in the West where there's a lot of separatism and a lot of division and there's a divide amongst the races but you don't see that in Houston. We're American. We respect you for who you are or whatever you are we respect that but above and beyond all other things we're human.

This is a pretty shocking and even ignorant thing to say (especially the "Race isn't an issue" part), either the most self-aware or least self-aware stance a white rapper has ever taken. Paul is a smart guy, and he must at least have some inkling that his race is at least part of what landed him on a major label and at #1. So his racial silence could be a too-easy way of ducking a question he must've heard a million times, a conscious plan to deflect any white-minstrelsy barbs before they happen.

White rappers have been around for more than twenty years, of course, and they've been pushed by record labels since people first figured out that you could make money on rap. But everyone who's risen to a certain level has found some way to address his position. A quick and incomplete history (excluding rap-rock bands and indieground backpackers who were only playing to white kids and guys like Alchemist and Scott Storch who are really just producers even if Alchemist sometimes raps):

The Beastie Boys: Classic-rock samples, rock songs, the guy from Slayer playing a solo, total lack of street-reportage songs, general insincere pop-culture humping. And two of the three of them rapped in exaggerated nasal Three Stooges bleats. When they got older, they started dropping dorm-room Buddhism into all their shit and doing a zine, and that's all pretty white-people stuff too, but they weren't really rappers by this point.

3rd Bass: MC Serch's exaggeratedly spazzed-out whiteguy dancing, dissing Vanilla Ice, "must've been a white guy who started all that." Also, Serch later played one of the Mau-Maus in Bamboozled.

Vanilla Ice: Used the word "Vanilla" in his name, concocted elaborately fake Miami thug-life background.

House of Pain: Wore a lot of green, had a shamrock in their logo, shot videos in Irish pubs, and generally devoted their entire careers to fulfilling Irish knucklehead stereotypes, possibly based on the idea that Irish and white might be incrementally different enough that they wouldn't look like buffoons. May have inspired the forgotten but fascinating Italian-American rap group Lordz of Brooklyn, who released one pretty great album in 1995 and I guess were on the Warped Tour this year. Also, Everlast made three boring sepia-toned acoustic-blues-rap albums, and DJ Lethal joined Limp Bizkit.

Young Black Teenagers: Called themselves the Young Black Teenagers.

Eminem: Jesus, I could write a book. Dyed his hair platinum blonde, mentioned Nine Inch Nails in the first line of his first single, sampled Aerosmith, constantly noted in his lyrics that he wouldn't be remotely as popular if he was black, did the hook to Sticky Fingaz' "What If I Was White," a million other things. Eminem is basically the most racially self-tortured pop star ever.

Bubba Sparxxx: Rode a pig in his first video, made a country-rap album.

Lil Wyte: Is named Lil Wyte, makes constant references to being the "only cracker good enough to be down with the 6."

(If I'm forgetting anyone, leave a comment.)

After all that insanity, Paul Wall can probably be forgiven for wanting people to forget that he's white. But these guys are all much more famous than they would be if they weren't white, and they're also easy targets for ridicule as a result. There's too much here for one blog post, so I'll leave it at this: Riff Raff recently wrote: "At least everyone under 26 has experienced rap not as an exclusively black thing, but as a pop thing." And he's right. But that doesn't mean that the role of the white rapper is all of a sudden not racially fraught. As Paul Wall gets more and more famous, he's eventually going to have to say something about the effect that his race has had on his career. He can't go on talking about purple drank and platinum grills forever, can he?

Voice feature: Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond on the marketing of white rappers who white consumers

Cage doing raps

Cage
Bowery Ballroom
September 21, 2005

When Atmosphere and Aesop Rock and Sage Francis play outside New York, they all draw pretty much the same crowds. Maybe a few extra crust-punk kids will turn out for Sage, and maybe a few more sorority girls for Atmosphere, but it's mostly all the same white kids in baseball caps and Nike dunks who form breakdance circles to De La Soul between sets and drive back out to the suburbs afterwards. So it's been interesting to move to New York and see all the different fractured indie-rap audiences showing up to see their guys and nobody else. There was just about no audience crossover between last weekend's Rhymesayers showcase and last night's Cage record release party at the Bowery Ballroom. The Bowery Ballroom crowd had none of the frattiness of the Rhymesayers audience. Instead, it was almost entirely scary tatted-up Brooklyn hard-rock white kids with neckbeards and thin gold chains and maybe two gold teeth. I used to see pictures of guys just like this in the liner notes of New York hardcore compilations when I was in high school; I like these guys. These might've been the thugged-out white kids whose love affair with punk rock ended when everything got all emo a few years ago, who needed to turn somewhere else to find jagged knucklehead thrills. And if Cage's Dead Kennedys shirt didn't drive the point home, the brief but hectic circle pit that erupted during the show-closing Weathermen posse cut "Left It to Us" sure did.

Cage has always been a good match for these guys, a demented shock-rap cherub with strong rap credentials (almost signed by Pete Nice, dissed on the first Eminem album) and a baroquely horrific life story (abusive father and uncle and stepfather, fucked-up teenage mental institution stay, drug addiction). When I interviewed Cage a few weeks ago, he told me that he used to name drugs in his songs just so that people would come to his shows and bring him those drugs. And so nothing in Cage's career history really predicts his new album Hell's Winter, a furious and heartfelt dive into his own depression and its causes. Cage keeps his demonic swagger (and at times stays kinda stupid, like on the two songs that mention Suicide Girls), but he also comes dangerously close to maturity, especially on a song like "Stripes," which directly addresses his father. Hell's Winter almost works as a rap companion piece to my favorite album of the year, the Mountain Goats' harrowing child-abuse memoir The Sunset Tree.

Hell's Winter is a truly powerful work, but it might not be the sort of thing you can recreate onstage when you're standing in front of all these knuckleheads and your hypeman's name is Yak Ballz. So Cage mostly didn't. He ran through a few horror-rap oldies and a few of the dumbest Hell's Winter tracks before touching any of the deeply personal stuff. That personal stuff, when he did it, was strong and riveting, even with the venue's sound system swallowing up all the bass and space in these tracks and all the kids yelling for Cage's 1997 single "Agent Orange" (sample lyric: "Get high, run up in ya crib and fuck ya moms backwards.") And Cage still clearly loves doing his older tracks; you can tell by the crazy goblin gleam in his eye when he's talking about mayhem. And so it didn't seem inappropriate when El-P charged out onstage halfway through the evening to hijack the set, as I imagine he does at just about every New York Def Jux show. With El and Yak and Aesop Rock filling the stage, this night was never going to be an onstage exorcism of Cage's personal demons. It was a fun indie-rap show with a lot of dudes yelling, nothing more.

If it wasn't for this guy, there would be no bald guys in Supersystem (courtesy of Flickr)

Supersystem
Knitting Factory
September 20, 2005

Legend has it that over this past CMJ weekend, a bunch of Pitchfork staffers got together and argued over one important question: who'd been to the worst El Guapo show. El Guapo was maybe the worst band in the history of DC post-hardcore (which is saying something), a relentlessly pretentious art-wank machine with the annoying habit of landing on bills with much, much better bands. El Guapo kicked around DC for years and released four albums, two of them on Dischord. Then they added the drummer from Orthrelm, changed their name to Supersystem, left Dischord, signed with Touch & Go, and started making dancepunk. Now all of a sudden they're amazing, and their "debut" album Always Never Again is maybe the most underrated of the year. I have no idea how shit like this happens; I just report on it.

Always Never Again is a fucking monster, the best dancepunk album this side of the Rapture's Echoes. It's got that band's sense of wire-edge drama, where the beats are like blood pounding in your head when you're walking through a strange abandoned neighborhood by yourself at four in the morning rather than some bullet-train-to-ecstasy thing. But Supersystem also has a pretty amazing range of weapons in its arsenal: Dick Dale Middle-Eastern surf guitars, diwali handclaps, Detroit techno buzz-clanks, roiling Burundi drums, Iron Maiden fired-up helium wails, dings, whooshes, death-rattles, and probably a ton of stuff I haven't even picked out yet. They also have the sense of vein-popping rigor and commitment that you hear in bands that grew up on DC punk, the sense that the fate of the world demands on how hard they can sing this next chorus. But for some reason the association that comes up hardest for me is the Prodigy circa "Breathe," that kicking, screaming heavy creepiness. (Oh, and the album's last song is one of the best freak-folk jams of the year.)

If they have all the force of the Rapture on record, they don't have much of it onstage. Opening the final New York show of fellow DC punk travelers Q and Not U at the Knitting Factory last night, they were too tentative, mumbling lyrics rather than howling them, giggling over fuckups like they indie-rock schlubs they really are. Three of the four members were stuck behind shelves of keyboards or drums, and only the hawk-faced bassist (the one who keeps the band in compliance with the unwritten DC punk rule that each band must have at least one prematurely balding member) had any room to kick up some dirt. The vocals were mixed way too low; songs like "Born Into the World" could've been world-destroying stompers but came out timid and emaciated. Still, the songs had enough gas in their tanks to blow the headliners off the stage. Q and Not U made a similar disco move in the last year of its existence, but it wore its newfound funk awkwardly, like Billy Corgan when he first shaved his head and started rocking silver spacepants after years of thrift-store shagginess. Next to them, Supersystem looked like the soldiers of the future, like people who were born banging out shattering beats. It was like all El Guapo's years of intense shittiness had never happened, and I, for one, am willing to pretend that they didn't.

Stream: "Born Into the World"
Stream: "Everybody Sings"

Riff Raff on Q and Not U coming soon

Jay-Z thinking about maybe dissing this kid

You probably already know the details: Jay-Z went on Power 105 last week to announce he'd be doing a show at Continental Airlines Arena on October 27, and that the theme to the show would be "I Declare War." Apparently, Jay is mad at a few people, and he's going to go at them onstage the way he did at Summer Jam in 2001. He told former Battle Dome announcer and famous goofy dancer Ed Lover: "I gotta put 'em in the choke hold, the Boston Crab. I gotta smash a couple people. Everybody better make up and be my friend." He'll do a second show in Philadelphia, and there are plenty of rumors flying around that he'll have a new record out by the end of the year and maybe a tour as well. Status Ain't Hood will hopefully be covering the New Jersey show, but in the meantime, everyone is wondering who Jay will attack. Allhiphop Rumors ran a column a few days ago evaluating Jay's likely targets: Game, Jim Jones, Dame Dash, 50 Cent, etc. But Status Ain't Hood is here to focus on the lesser targets, the longshots, the guys who Jay might go after just to wake everyone else up. The list:

Young Gunz. We all know Jay isn't going to dis Memphis Bleek, no matter how many shitty albums he drops. The guy had a verse on Reasonable Doubt, so he's been around since the beginning of Jay's career, and Jay even somewhat creepily announced on the "Diamonds" remix that Bleek was in his will. If Jay was going to drop Bleek, he would've done it by now. But the Young Gunz? Jay signs these guys to the Roc, releases two albums, sticks with them through legal problems, convinces them not to break up, keeps them around even after the Roc-A-Fella/Dash Music Group split, and the best they can do is Brothers From Another? Is there anyone who thinks that Jay finds this album to be acceptable?

Sage Francis. On this bearded slam-poet dork's last tour, he broke out Jay's "99 Problems" instrumental and said some dumb stuff about "I like 99 rappers but Jay-Z ain't one." We know Jay listens to backpack-rap because he keeps throwing shout-outs to losers like Talib Kweli and the Roots, so it's not entirely impossible that Jay would've somehow got wind of Sage's dumbshit disses. And it would be fun to see Jay completely crush Sage under his boot while thousands of people sit around scratching their heads wondering who Jay is talking about.

Kenyon Martin. Jay joined the group of investors who bought the New Jersey Nets, and then K-Mart bolted for the Denver Nuggets the first chance he got, even though Jay wore a Martin Nets jersey in Fade to Black and everything.

The Bravery. These guys have been talking a gang of shit about Jay's favorite band the Killers. It's time to put a stop to that.

Suge Knight. Suge is just getting sent to jail and signing Petey Pablo and shooting himself in the leg; he's right there. It must drive Jay nuts. There must be some part of him that wants to dis Suge just to see what would happen, like when you're a teenager at a punk show and you just feel this overwhelming urge to slap a skinhead just because.

Little Brother. Jay probably wouldn't want to do it, but he could completely end indie-rap just by letting everyone know how full of shit Little Brother is. Wouldn't that be amazing? It would be like Rawkus Records had never existed.

Cassidy. "He made it a hot line. I made it a hot song."

David Banner. Kanye goes and talks about George Bush on TV and gets the most mainstream recognition he's ever had, even after the Time cover and everything. Then Banner goes and organizes a giant benefit concert and drives food and supplies down to flooded areas on his damn tour bus. How is Kanye supposed to compete with that?

Animal Collective. Because Animal Collective fucking blows.

Voice feature: Elizabeth Mendez Berry's ridiculously great article about Jay-Z

Hey, another picture of a rapper that I jacked from the Fader

CMJ home base at Lincoln Center was a big, ridiculous clubhouse, college-radio kids loose in the big city trying to grab as many free XM Satellite Radio stickers as possible and maybe even get to meet George Clinton! So the bands that played at the CMJ daystage (or the ones I saw, anyway) seemed like clubhouse bands, background music for kids grabbing free shit. It took a band like the Hold Steady, everyone's favorite damaged-Catholic fake bar-rockers and Village Voice cover stars, to turn that into something like an advantage. THS unplugged, an absolutely ridiculous proposition for a band known for explosive blooz guitar solos and for a singer who can't get through a show without yelling until his face is Northsix-curtain red. It was a joke, yeah, and it was funny: everyone sitting on the floor, drums played with brushes, bass player Gaven Polivka on shaker instead of bass. But it actually sounded pretty great. For once, the lyrics and keyboard didn't drown in the rest of the band's choogling roar, and Craig Finn was relaxed and at home onstage, a far cry from the psychotic math-teacher he is at night.

Download: "Your Little Hoodrat Friend"

If the Hold Steady is a fake bar band, I'll take fake bar-rock over the real thing any day. Last year, the New York Times' Kelefa Sanneh wrote an article praising the living hell out of Dr. Dog, which is why I ended up at the Mercury Lounge on Friday night, showing up just in time to hear Sanneh telling the keyboard player that they're his favorite band (seriously). Sanneh is one of the best critics working today, prolific and insightful and broad-minded. But holy Jesus is he wrong about Dr. Dog. Dr. Dog is fucking terrible. The band plays laid-back hacky-sack bar-rock, but it's pretentiously wacky bar-rock; they don't ever allow themselves to work up a decent groove before launching into some ka-razy time change, the bass player doing ahhahhahh hooting and the guy who looks like Tom Petty hopping around in a circle like an asshole and singing something about "grandpa washing dishes." Every busted little guitar riff sounds like an 11-year-old trying to teach himself to play "Purple Haze." I imagine this is what Little Feat sounds like, which is why I've never listened to Little Feat. (To be fair, the last song they played, the one that went "dewy dewy duh pah pah," was I guess OK.)

Download: "ABCs"
Download: "Adeline"

Over at the Irving Plaza Rhymesayers showcase, I Self Divine was bringing the low-intensity indie-rap boilerplate: Bush is bad, I deal with everyday things everyday, that sort of thing. And he did the things that indie-rappers do: yelling all over the beat, staying everywhere except on top of it. The crowd, full of white kids desperate not to look clueless, screamed on cue, but I'm guessing that not too many of them rushed the merch table when he got done to cop his sort-of-OK album. Next up, Blueprint fared better, rapping over "Top Billin'" and "Billie Jean," filling the stage by his damn self, and doing good things for trucker hats and cargo shorts. But Blueprint's jokey low-key set was no match for the righteous wrath of albino Muslim monster Brother Ali, glowing with sweat two songs in and throwing words like knives. Ali raised my hackles for a minute when he said something about "These underground cats with dirty sneakers are going up up up up up while them motherfuckers with all the pretty shit are falling flat on they asses because of the fact that we about the music." (I'm pretty sure Kanye wears immaculate sneakers, you know?) But all was forgiven when Ali just ripped through a heartwrenching a cappella about single-fatherhood and then transitioned right into a joyous singalong on "Forest Whitaker." Ali's label boss had a tough act to follow, and at first he didn't look up to the job. Atmosphere has been touring as Slug and a live band for a minute, and I caught a revelatory Baltimore show a few months ago (I wrote about it here). But Slug seemed almost too confident at Irving, coming off like a lounge singer over the band's watery funk arrangements. The great songs ("Always Coming Back Home to You," "The Woman With the Tattooed Hands") still sounded great, but there was something off-putting about Slug's exaggerated confessional swagger and the way he kept telling people to smile. He seemed creepy. Things got better when the band took a break and Atmosphere's reclusive other half, the producer Ant, came to the stage to DJ. It's not entirely clear why Ant doesn't tour with the group; he's certainly comfortable onstage, pulling out deft little tricks like throwing the piano-rolling beat of Scarface's "On My Block" under "Like Today." Slug stepped right up too, burning through a reworking of Public Enemy "Don't Believe the Hype," changing it so it was about people talking shit about him on messageboards. It was like he all of a sudden remembered that he was doing a rap show.

Stream: I Self Divine's "Ice Cold"
Stream: Blueprint's "Boom Box"

Another rap show: I didn't have to leave my hood to see Bun B at the CMJ-unaffiliated Hollertronix party at Southpaw. Bun's set was crisp and efficient like the best hits-only rap shows, and it was over in half an hour. But it was a pretty amazing half-hour, almost all guest appearances, "Big Pimpin'" of course but also "Three Kings" and "Give Me That" and "Purple Rain" and "I Ain't Heard of That" and "Grand Finale" and "Rep Yo City" and "Sippin' on Some Syrup," the sort of stuff that led Government Names to do this, only a couple of UGK tracks thrown in there. Bun has as much presence onstage as he does on record, standing tall at the middle of the stage, rapping up at the ceiling, voice tired but strong. Hollertronix themselves continued with their Ipod-Shuffle-like capacity to know exactly what I want to hear before I know it. They tend to play all the same stuff (though I lost five bucks when I bet Sean Fennessey that they'd go from "B.O.B." into "Deceptacon"), and sometimes they fuck up on beatmatching, but their aesthetic is still just about perfect, everything I want to hear in one DJ set. When DJ Assault came on for a million-year-long version of "Ass N Titties," it was time for me to stagger home and start cross-training for next year's CMJ.

Stream: Bun B's "Draped Up"

More CMJ coverage at Riff Raff