I wanted to like more of the rap here, but I became very tired. Everything was either about acquiring material goods (which includes women), or, alternately, about how all other rap is about acquiring material goods.
Wow, I thought, the rap he sampled is navel-gazing recursiveness like so much of blogging. I read on:
On hearing my nth predictable song about how hip-hop is predictable, it struck me that I was witnessing individuals engaged in a formalist exercise where the form itself is the only appropriate lyrical subject; thus rap is, in some ways, the blogging of music. (This is happening to “indie rock” in the Strokes/Killers/Libertines mold, as well.)
The best of it all is Akala, a grime artist from Britain, particularly when he delivers the line in his song “Electro Livin” (not included here, but from the same album) “We are sad for things we cannot have/But we are not sad for Baghdad.” It reads as political naivete but he performs it with redeeming authority.
David Isenberg had Howard Levy and Chris Seibold playing during breaks between speakers and panels at Freedom to Connect this week. I have a lot to share about my experience of this years gathering of “net heads” inside the beltway. Heath Row blogged most of it with almost verbatim transcriptive objectivity. Suw Charman did her bit for the live blogging cause as well. Over the next few weeks, as time permits, I’ll try to pull some of my thoughts into English and share them here.
Challenger Michael Gableman ousted incumbent Justice Louis Butler in yesterday’s Wisconsin state Supreme Court election, but the real winner was the special interests. Interest groups spent more than $4 million in an effort to control the state Supreme Court, out-gunning the candidates by a huge margin and dictating the debate from the beginning of the campaign to the end.
In what CBS News charitably called a “cheesy way” to decide who sits on the state’s highest court, the election produced a new justice who one longtime court watcher labeled “unfit for any office.”
Flash of synchronicity… I’ve just started reading Grisham’s new legal potboiler, “The Appeal.” I hope there’s a happy ending.
