January 25, 2009

Watch and learn from a recovering geek monster

So I just looked at the Oscar nominations. I would have done so sooner, but that would require me giving a damn, which I just can’t make myself do. Eh, just never watched a lot of movies growing up, so it’s not something I do religiously like other people. The hype around the Oscars befuddles me, especially when everyone knows IT’S AN INDUSTRY AWARD SHOW, MEANING ASS KISSING FUELS THE VOTING AS MUCH, IF NOT MORE, THAN ANYTHING ARTISTIC. You people with Oscar pools are, essentially, betting on professional wrasslin’. Vegas doesn’t take best on wrasslin’, so you might not wanna bet on Oscar.

Anyway, I saw the nominees for Best Supporting Actor, and I saw the two best supporting performances I saw in theaters this past year — Heath Ledger as The Joker in “The Dark Knight” and Robert Downey Jr. as a white man playing a black man in blackface in “Tropic Thunder.”

I saw a lot of people were up in arms about Downey’s role before they even saw the film, reflexively upset with blackface.  Of course, most of those shortsighted people see Dave Chappelle dressed as a white man and see no problem.  We call those people “hypocrites.”

I don’t find blackface to be necessarily offensive.  I find cartoonish blackface to be offensive, and I think a lot of people have forgotten THAT is the problem.  One issue with a significant portion of the population is that, rather than figuring out why some of the things they used to do were racist, they just avoid the stuff all together.  Aside from being outright intellectually lazy, we’ve lost some great shit because people were too stupid to be able to try to push limits.

That’s right.  The issue here is being STUPID.  You can joke about anything you want if you have some clue of what you’re talking about.  That’s the key.  For when you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’ve got to go to defaults…and that’s when you get in trouble.

Why?  Because there are very, very few default jokes about black people that aren’t patently offensive.  The default is going to be the stereotype, right?  Well, go ahead and name one positive stereotype of black people that doesn’t involve athletics, music, and laying pipe.  I bet it’s harder than you think it is.

And, since so many people in this country don’t know a damn thing about black people, they can’t joke about them.  That’s fine with me.  You’re not supposed to joke about stuff if you don’t know what you’re talking about.  Sounds fair to you, right?

Blackface stuff like Al Jolson and the minstrel shows were problematic because the joke wasn’t on the stereotype.  The joke WAS the stereotype.  Hey, let’s laugh at how big and red black people’s lips are!  How funny is that?

Not so funny if you’re black and you’ve got big lips, I’d assume.  It’s even less funny if you’re black and don’t have big lips, by the way.

That isn’t close to what we had in “Tropic Thunder.”  The character was an Australian method actor playing a black soldier in a flick about Vietnam, but he was one of those guys that didn’t break character EVER.  So the whole time, there’s Robert Downey Jr. with an Afro, talking like an extra from Shaft.  Is the dude playing on stereotypes?  Of course…and that’s the point!  The joke is on the ridiculous idea that people have about black folks, that what they see on television gives them enough information to decide how black people are.  Twas a Chappellean move — laughing at how preposterous the dominant stereotype is, all while those that buy into it laugh at it like it’s real life, allowing the first set of laughers to laugh even harder (before crying).

The character, start to finish, was hilarious.  If you’ve ever hung around a poser, you understand the phenomenon they’re playing on in the movie.  Ben Stiller & Co. (gasp!) knew what they were talking about, so they could create an edgy character.  I applaud them, because it took a certain confidence to do that, and a serious mind to figure out how to pull it off.

Now, here’s why I’m not surprised Downey got a nomination — because to pull this off without some idiot crying racism without thinking for a second, you gotta put in an Oscar-worthy performance.  It has to be dead right at all points…and it was.

You tend to get it dead right when you know what you’re talking about, and recognize where not to go.

We’re about to hear more inappropriate stuff about black people in the next four years than we’ve heard in a quite a long time.  A lot of it will be from the morons that still can’t grasp that one of them is President.  But much of it will be from people that want to tell good-natured jokes about the President but are too stupid, ignorant and racist to understand they just can’t go there.

They can go there once they…learn something about black people!  First step, of course, is to recognize that, if you don’t know shit about black people, you don’t know shit about black people.  Nothing is nothing.  Dispose of all those things you thought you knew, that which you claim is “nothing,” then move from the ground up.

If you do that, I guarantee you’ll be able to have the kind of fun with black folks that black folks get to have with white people.  Though many wish they didn’t, black folks know an awful lot about white folks.  It’s just not the same in reverse.

Wouldn’t be so bad if people realized their lack of knowledge or, God forbid, actually cared enough to listen.  To those that don’t listen — play fair and don’t talk.

Or just step your game up.  Everyone wins if you do.

January 22, 2009

Pimpin or Simpin?

So I was listening to the boPod this morning, trying to put a little pep in the step before the show. “777-9311″ came on. As does just about anyone with a pulse, I claim “777-9311″ as my jam. Well, one of ‘em.

Anyway, I felt compelled for some reason to actually listen to the song. Hey man, there are few songs that flagrantly violate core principles and corollaries of The Code like this one.

Think about it…

1. Who’s that pressed about a phone number? So this song is written by Prince, performed by Morris Day…and you gotta hassle a chick for a number like that? Morris, why not cut straight to the chase and talk about your brass waterbed? Prince, shouldn’t you ask if you could…ummm, love the taste out of her mouth? “Can’t you see the agony I’m going through?” isn’t very becoming of the man that guided so many of us on how to spit this here game.

Then again…

2. Dude’s got the right idea. “I know I’m kind of fast, but I hate to waste time.” Really, why waste it? That’s pimpin’ right there.

Then again…

3. “I gots to be cooler than this cat you’re sitting with.” You better be bigger than dude, too. It reminds me of something poetic I once heard a dude in college say to a cat that started spittin to a woman he was speaking with at the time.

“Muthafucka, do you see me standing here?”

Simpin, all day long…but not as long as the hypothetical man sitting there that did nothing but get the cockeyed look. If he’d have knocked the perm out of Morris’ head, I bet the cops would have let it slide.

4. “Ain’t nothin’ worse than rejection.” Incorrect. Ain’t nothin’ worse than SIMPIN. Which, upon further review, is what’s going on here.

But I’ll still bump it. Every great soul singer was a simp and a half, pretty much. Save for James Brown. Even from the other side, I’m afraid to talk bad about the Godfather. He don’t know karate, after all.

January 22, 2009

So I went to Burger King last night…

…because I was too lazy to cook. Look at the window, and there’s a sign that says…

“25 cents for additional sauce.”

Now, I don’t order chicken from BK. However, I do think the BK folks should consider that such a mandate has great potential to interfere with someone’s ability to Have It His or Her Way. Economy even got the Burger King lying.

January 18, 2009

I might even drink it out of a paper bag

As many of you know, I don’t care too much of what people think.  I don’t say that as some statement of my defiance and refusal to fit into the outsider’s notion of who I am.  I’m saying that I refuse to pretend as though there are some things outsiders might assume about me that aren’t true.  

For example, I love fried chicken wings.  I even wrote a piece once about the day I refused to sweat what the white folks might think of me and tore into a bag of chicken wings right in front of them.  Grease on my face and all that shit.  If you’d have cut my cheek, I may have bled hot sauce.  

And you know what?  Those wings were good as hell.  I mean tender and tasty and all that.  And, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t mocked.  The folks were jealous because they didn’t have chicken wings.  Nothing wrong with loving chicken.  Everyone does where I’m from, and you know where I’m from — Earth.

So, as I was saying — I don’t care what you think.

I gots to get me one of these here bottles.

That’s right.  Obama’s got commemorative cognac.  It doesn’t get much smoother than that.

(Well, it does…Remy…but that’s neither here nor there.)

And if they had the Obama de Ville?  I’d be whippin’ it by Tuesday afternoon.

January 18, 2009

The Biggie Phenomenon

(First — my notification list has been acting up.  Check back for the last few entries, please.)

There’s something that, as a sometimes-but-forever music critic, that’s always fascinated me about Biggie Smalls — he’s rap deity, even though he’s only got one unequivocally classic record.  He’s as much a mixtape god as rap superstar, but he’s also Jimi Hendrix.  Like Jimi, he left an indelible mark on his artform in roughly three years.

Hendrix did it from ‘66-68.  Biggie did it from ‘94-97.  And, on a tangential point I won’t belabor, did you know Gilligan’s Island only came on for three seasons?  Syndication can shape your image of the past, can’t it?

I just came across an interesting look at Biggie at Slate.  I typically find the analysis of hip hop at sites like that to be dreadfully lacking, but there was a great point here — Biggie was the everyman rapper.  I’d never thought of it like that, but that’s absolutely true.

Nothing about Biggie said “star” except for the fact that he said he was a star.  All of us, at some point or another, have met some ugly dude that swore that he was pimpin’, swore up and down that he had girls badder than anything you’d ever seen, and told you he had pull with people and places that would blow your mind.  All of us have looked at that dude and laughed in our heads.

Then, on a Friday night where we didn’t have a thing to do, we saw that dude with a chick that it made absolutely no sense for him to have.  To those dudes, I have but one thing to say — salut, Don Corleone.

Biggie was that dude.  Presumably, he had that pull because he was just that dude.  What dude?  That dude, and I mean that in what is possibly the only way in which being “that dude” carries a positive connotation.

You can’t quite put your finger on it.  But it’s something.

Biggie’s rhymes aren’t that much different.  I mean, I could point to brilliant lyric after brilliant lyric and blow your mind, but I’m not exactly sure I could tell you why every part works.  They just do.  The turns of phrase are so natural but so amazing, the metaphors spot-on, and Biggie had the best sense for when to get it done simply and when to do it complexly, even when using the former on the front end of the bar an hitting the punch with the latter.  He just made rapping seem so easy, when anyone that’s every tried to do so little as record a verse knows it’s harder than penitentiary steel.

And with those easy raps, he made being The Man seem just as easy.  Seriously — if that fat, ugly motherfucker could run the club, there was no reason for anyone to be at the house playing Tecmo Bowl on Friday night.  I don’t care if you were having a tournament in the dorm or not.

Ask you what your interests are

who you be with?

things to make you smile

what number to dial?

you gon be here for a while?

I’m gon call my crew

you gon call your crew

we can rendezvous

at the bar around 2.

Just that easy.  Sometimes it is.  For some people, it’s that easy all the time.  It’s a talent, and it’s one that one would have a hard time explaining.

And it sounded that easy when he was braggadocio, gangster, mackin, introspective, or anything else.  Ice Cube’s word economy with Slick Rick’s gift for description, and all spit like he can’t understand why this is so hard for you to do.

Just wish he had more than one album I could play front-to-back.

January 12, 2009

So I was watching Law and Order the other night…

…and I saw little Kennard from The Wire. You probably know him as the sorry, disrespectful little snot nosed hopper that killed Omar. Or, you gleefully recall watching Michael beat him good and pulpy. Either way, he was on Law and Order.

Turns out he was playing a Haitian slave, brought to America to work for some rich white people. Wanna know what I thought when the police got him in the park and took him to the station, after they found out he was a slave? “I hope they send that little bastard to jail.”

The kid can’t be much more than 10. He’s a fictional character. But I promise, with everything in my soul, I was hoping they’d throw his lil’ ass in the tank with the grown men so he could see what it is to really be hard. Show ‘em how hard you are, lil’ hopper.

Well, it turned out he did kill someone, and he was sent to jail. At the end, he asked if he could go back to Haiti. Instead, they took him to jail. I smiled.

And I will watch it again, in search of that good feeling.

January 9, 2009

A long gone era in hip hop

As you can tell, it’s another exciting evening of show preparation here at the Estate. If you listen close, you can hear me playing the Kool and the Gang in the background.

Actually, it would be Bubba Sparxxx tonight. Bubba’s the oddest of cases. You’d think white folks would love another white rapper, right? Not this one, jack. All the people I know that hate Bubba are white. Yet they like the Black-Eyed Peas. I swear, I’ll never understand this race shit.

Anyway, Deliverance might be the most underrated album of this millennium (way up with it is Ray Cash’s “Cash on Delivery”). Love it to death so, even though it’s really morose, I decided to bump it tonight. Something hit me about the record.

There are no skits.

Thank goodness.

Straight up — there were a lot of great skits. Wyclef was the master, giving unequivocal classics on “The Score” and the entire series of ‘em on “The Carnival.” I could name a million of them (and may do a 25 list at some point).

But then, cats got a little out of hand. For an industry where being taken, shall we say, seriously is such a big deal, a whole bunch of dudes tried to be funny. Felt the need, in fact. It was kinda incongruous in most cases. And, often, the skits sucked.

That would be so bad if there were three or four of them per album.

But I can cruise through this here record and just hear songs. That’s pretty much SOP at this point. For some reason, skits went away and nobody really talked about it. Or, if they didn’t they didn’t talk about it with me, which would leave me feeling pretty left out. That’s not cool, hypothetically.

For some reason, that just crossed my mind.

January 8, 2009

You’ve probably seen this already…

…a young brother got it bad cuz he’s brown.  Damn.

January 3, 2009

Proper grammar? Overrated

Got an interesting e-mail today.  Of course, it came from someone that didn’t want to use his or her real name.  It typically goes like that.

Hey Bomani,

I think you have the most interesting take on sports of anyone at the station.  It is unfortunate that part of your style is terrible grammar.  Saying  “ain’t”  every now and then is ok but you say ” ain’t no” in practically every sentence. (?)

What’s the point?  Are you trying to appeal to a young demographic??    I don’t get it. 

I turn the station because you sound like a stereotype and you know what I am talking about.   ( Is it not cool to sound like you finished college?)

Disgusted in Orange County

I suppose I should start by saying thanks. From there, I kinda wonder how this kind listener doesn’t see the connection between his seemingly disparate points.

If I were being self-indulgent and literary, I’d say I sound like someone that lives between worlds but truly inhabits none but his own.  That’s only if I were that sort of guy, though.  Instead, I’ll just say I speak like I speak.

On my show, I talk with you the way I would talk with you if you were hanging out in my living room.  In my living room, the last thing I’m concerned with is whether nouns and verbs agree.  In private company, you have the advantage of doing things with language that allow you to deviate from the rules of grammar to convey a range of emotions.  If it sounds funny or cool, I can roll with it.  The spoken word allows unparalleled flexibility when it comes to making words pop.

And I use it.  Gonna use it ’til I use it up, in fact.  Check the archives of this blog if you don’t believe me.

The purpose of communication is not to follow rules, but to get thoughts, ideas and feelings across.  I could be wrong, but I think I take care of that on my shows.  If the grammar offends your sensibilities, I’d hate to hear what you think about some of the things I say.

Now, is it cool to sound like you didn’t go to college?  Well, it’s isn’t necessarily uncool, particularly if you didn’t go to college.  

Of course, I don’t sound like that.  I’m not sure it’s my place to say that, but I’m pretty sure I sound like I went to college no matter what I’m saying or talking about.  I started college the day I was born, and I’ve never really stopped going.  That’s the world I came from.

One thing I learned from college — and it’s something I learned from both those that did and didn’t attend school — intelligence doesn’t have a standardized sound.  What gets so many people fooled is thinking that sounding “polished” is the same as being smart.  It’s not.  That thinking is nothing but a con game, one that separates the washed and unwashed but does little else.

I’m smart.  I sound smart.  Why?  Because I’m smart and, when I talk, this is what smart sounds like.  Sounds different if I’m on a job interview or dealing with one of those fuckers at tech support, but it’s all smart.  I couldn’t hide it as a kid, so why try now?

The connection, you ask?  I have enough faith in my insights — or whatever the hell it is that I offer on the air — will shine through whatever diction I use.  You can say I don’t speak properly, but you can’t say I don’t speak clearly.  That you understand me is what’s most important (after not cussing, which really requires me a great deal of energy).  That you hear it as I think it comes next.  Whether or not you think I went to college is wayyyyy low on the list.

My shows are mine.  My house, if you will.  Anyone’s welcome to hang out.  The FCC might affect how I speak, but the opinions of an English teacher will not.

I leave you with a listener that seems to get my point.

Professor,

I just had to write in and comment on the e-mailer this AM and your response regarding the use of impactful grammar…

Einstein once said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that you really don’t understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.  In other words, part of any conversation is knowing your audience.  

Many of the students I work with are nursing majors who are in the front line (so to speak) in combating illness and injury.  One thing they must do is communicate with the patients and the family about what is going on…a skill that is not emphasized by the MDs themselves.  Different assignments in my courses have different goals in terms of communication levels.  Some papers and presentations are formal while others are not.  In fact my favorite assignment is what I call a ‘Grandmother Summary’ (I know…it needs a much better name).  Students have to write a short paper summarizing a particular topic as if they are talking to their grandmother.  I often get a better handle on just what the students have LEARNED as opposed to MEMORIZED with this assignment.

Long letter, but I do have a point (somewhere).  You know your audience and you speak TO us, not AT us.  I don’t always agree with your views but I love your shows because you support your views and do a tremendously entertaining job at presenting them.

Great work.

Kevin

January 1, 2009

I may laugh at this forever

NSFW. Not safe for mothers, really, but I think mine would appreciate the humor of it, if not the shock. Watch to the end, I promise. This is the greatest shutdown line ever.

Really, what do you say to that? Neither Kirk nor I could think of an appropriate response but, “dicks out my what?”

Wish I coulda said that to a caller on Wednesday.