Monday, December 8th, 2003

Writing A Book, Part 1

WRITING A BOOK, PART 1

OK, now I’m realizing I’ve been holding out on yall w/regards to the book-writing thing. So let me go there, and do this shit. It’ll be kinda be like therapy for me and maybe it’ll help a lot of yall to get your own asses in gear.

Diversion: I’ll admit straight up that I have pretty strong opinions about this (e.g. this Da Capo-foot-in-my-mouth-but-still-happily-bird-flipping-cuz-what’s-more-hip-hop-than-talking-shit episode). The idea of representing is still like religion to me. Most of what’s getting out there on hip-hop in book form (and in canonized form) is still crap and written by non-hip-hop-gen heads. (That’s changing, but this is another post for another time.)

My thing is that the faster we can all get our shit out there, the happier I am in general. Then we get to a different set of problems, but at this point, we won’t be there until early 2005.

Back to the plotline.

First the basics on the book:

It’s called Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (duh) A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. “A” being the most active word in the title.

It traces the emergence of the hip-hop generation from roughly 1968 (and before that, in the Bronx) to 2000-2001. The book wasn’t meant to be a strictly music book. I wanted to write about graf and b-boying and DJing and activism and geography and the War on Youth and Public Enemy and Jesse Jackson and the Nation and etc. etc.

Main thing is I figured I couldn’t really write about C. Delores Tucker without writing about gang peace treaties, and vice versa, couldn’t talk about Herc without talking about Marley and couldn’t talk about Marley without talking about cultural capitalism and globalization and couldn’t talk about globalization without talking about localism.

That’s kinda the way my head is wired. Undisciplined, as the academics might say. And maybe the whole thing is a little loose. Hopefully Monique, my editor, will let me know soon.

Anyway, so the book opens from hip-hop and moves through culture and politics and all kinds of stuff as a way of getting a handle on who we be. But instead of doing it academic-style (read: unreadable), I wanted to make it accessible. I settled on writing it in a twisted narrative nonfiction format.

I took a lot of inspiration from Brian Cross, whose whole idea for It’s Not About A Salary was basically: Fuck all these folks who want to come in and speak for hip-hop headz, they can do it themselves. I think that’s the same motivation behind Yes Yes Y’all.

But at the same time, with oral histories you often lose the context. You get wrapped up in the details of the stories and sometimes gloss over the Big Themes and glide past the Big Questions.

I love Bakari’s book–and here’s why–but I’m more a history nerd these days so I wanted to go left in a different way. Plus my homies wouldn’t read it if it were a series of Jeff rants. And bottom line, hip-hop history is gotdamn interesting!

There are so many twists and turns and ironies and tragedies and victories and drama that I often wonder why there aren’t more hip-hop history nerds. If you read the books that are out there on hip-hop, they all reference the same two books for hip-hop history–Toop and Hager. Those books have deservedly become the Old Testament of hip-hop history, but for anyone who’s actually done a little bit of work–ask Fabel or Jay Smooth or Cheryl Aldave or Reggie Dennis, the list goes on–there’s a helluva lot of ground that hasn’t been covered by those two books. Again another rant for another time.

So in the end, I kinda took a Lorax approach. Collect the stories and put together a roughly chronological narrative that has an arc and a purpose. And down with the Once-lers!

OK so what was I trying to do in this post? Oh yeah, I was gonna talk about how this all began.

So it was the end of 1997, we had this big SoleSides pow-wow up in Lake Tahoe. Lateef’s mom had a cabin that we could rent and we were s’posed to be talking about how to blow the shit up more in 98. Truth was, we were all dead broke and exhausted, for a lot of ironic and tragic reasons I don’t need to get into, and maybe no one more than I.

It was kind of symbolic. Everyone was already there the day I drove up to Tahoe in my tiny little Honda Civic, right into the worst blizzard of the season. I fucked up in trying to put the chains on myself and tore up the outside of the car and got soaked in the snow. It’s bumper to bumper at the summit and I’ve been driving 8 hours, I’m freezing and tired and I rear-end a pickup. By the time I got to the cabin, the front hood was about three feet high and rising (Honda bumpers are literally made of fucking styrofoam), the anti-freeze had completely leaked out, and I was froze to the bone.

That night, after a long hot shower and dinner, we sat down for a meeting. They said that they had come up earlier, talked it out, and decided to shut down the label. I was shocked. But it made perfect sense. In fact, ending SoleSides liberated me. I mean, I sucked as a label manager. My only experience to qualify me as a indie label manager was that I had led a bunch of protests at Berkeley during the 80s, knew community organizing theory, and been a college radio DJ for about 7 years. That was all good until the late 90s, when hip-hop got to be big biz. I had definitely reached the outer limits of my abilities. If I had any talent, it was in writing and shit. And I hadn’t begun to explore the outer limits of my abilities there no way.

So a couple days later, I got a tow truck to take my car back to the Bay and sat in the cab and on the long ride back I thought about the whole SoleSides experience and everything. The only logical conclusion was go for what I knew, to ease myself back into writing, and to imagine something bigger than I’d ever done. The book came out of that.

The thing that I realized in writing the book–especially the last 5 months of putting together the first draft–is that every morning I was standing at the outer limits of my abilities. It was like I was outside the comfort zone as soon as I fired up the computer. That was exactly where I wanted to be, but it was also the scariest thing in the world.

Now I realize that lots of people will think the book sucks, probably including some whose opinion really matters to me, but I’m pretty content knowing that there wasn’t much more I could do at this point in my life. So if I’m destined to be the Matt Doherty of hip-hop books, it’s all good.

Right now Monique is going through 700 freaking pages. I don’t envy her. But I await her machete cuts with no worries at all. It is what it is. My car is intact. I can pay for diapers and mortgage. Praise Herc and Bam and hip-hop.

OK, back to the deadlines. More down the line when I feel like it…

posted by @ 8:29 am | 0 Comments

Saturday, December 6th, 2003

Damn. That panel was FI-YAH! Thanks to everyone who came out, all the folks who took the class, and to all the panelists. Most of all thanks to Media Alliance and Kristina Rizga for putting this all together. The bad news is that I don’t have any time to transcribe the hotness (if anyone wants to, I’m down to talk). The good news is that it came off so nice we’re talking about doing a longer class in the late spring.

posted by @ 9:15 pm | 0 Comments

Friday, December 5th, 2003

Sam Chennault and Oliver Wang are having a really interesting glass-half-full/half-empty discussion about the state of music journalism inspired this Miami Herald article by Evelyn McDonnell of Rock She Wrote fameand the Da Capo thing. Also check Jay Smooth’s blog for more commentary on the topic. Come on out to the panel on Saturday. It’s gonna be pretty timely.

posted by @ 1:13 pm | 0 Comments

Friday, December 5th, 2003

IF YOU’RE NOT A TERRORIST WE’LL STILL SCREW YOU

Muslim chaplain and Army Captain James Yee is free and out of Guantanamo, but the he Feds are charging him with adultery and possession of pornography–just to mess with his family and prevent him from becoming a cause celebre.

From the article (buried far from the front page): “Captain Yee’s supporters say the government has charged him with adultery and keeping pornography — a fairly unusual move by the military justice system — to save face and trump up what has always been a weak case.

“He was defamed and smeared and accused of being a spy,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington advocacy group whose Seattle chapter was in close contact with Captain Yee’s relatives during his detainment. “Then all of sudden, they’re not even sorry. They’re saying, `You can go now, and for good measure we’ll throw in a few charges to further damage your reputation.’ It’s a very suspicious scenario that developed.”

Military officials would not comment on the accusations by Captain Yee’s supporters, saying the proceeding starting at Fort Benning on Monday, to determine whether Captain Yee should face a court martial or whether the charges should be dropped, would answer any questions. ”

My money is that the charges get dropped. Quietly. With no comment.

posted by @ 11:34 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, December 4th, 2003

If you’re in the Bay Area and you wanna talk music journalism, or–whoa–even pitch the top local music editors, I’m holding them captive in a room on Saturday for 3 hours. Bring yourself, your wallet, your pitch, and a couple-three opinions.

Panel: So You Wanna be a Music Journalist?

Moderated by Jeff Chang

Saturday December 6th, 10am – 12:30pm

ATA, 992 Valencia at 21st Street., SF

$5 Members, $10 Non-Members

Sign up here.

Get inside the heads of actual flesh-and-blood Bay Area

music and arts editors. Hear insider advice from working

music journalists.

You won’t want to miss this opportunity to meet folks

who actually do this day in and day out. Come to this

panel armed with your story ideas and pitches.

Panelists:

J.H. Tompkins, Arts Editor, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Tomas Palermo, Editor, XLR8R Magazine

Joel Schalit, Associate Editor, Punk Planet Magazine

Oliver Wang, Contributing Editor, URB Magazine

Eric Arnold, Music Columnist, East Bay Express

Todd Inoue, Music Editor, San Jose Metro

Kimberly Chun, Music Editor, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Hot to death right? Be there, homie.

posted by @ 5:08 pm | 0 Comments

Thursday, December 4th, 2003

Bad news travels fast but since I’ve been book-making I’m the last to know. So now…

Bronfman owns Warner.

Vanguarde is dead. (Just when Selwyn was about to turn around Savoy. Now Liz needs a job too.)

Arnold’s about to obliterate health and human services.

I have a new Medicare bill to pay, and then to bequeath to my kids.

Productivity is up, as well as the murder rates. Jobs, meanwhile, are still down. Way down. (See first two, that is, three for that matter.)

Bush’s polls are up.

Cal’s losing to scrub teams.

There’s more but I’m not supposed to say.

At least we know Cal will turn around. Maybe I can hope some of the other things will too. Aiya. Happy birthday JZ.

posted by @ 5:01 pm | 0 Comments

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2003

Quote of the week comes from Rob Sheffield on this RollingStone.com review of Missy Elliott’s This Is Not A Test!. “Her fifth album, This Is Not a Test!, hits new levels of bananas-osity. She jumps so far off the heezy, she lands right on another heezy.” Somebody say ouch!

posted by @ 2:08 pm | 0 Comments

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2003

HIGH ON HIS OWN SUPPLY

In case yall missed this over the holiday weekend, here’s

the best article on Jay-Z ever. It’s by the brilliant Elizabeth Mendez Berry, a Latina born in Colombia, raised in Toronto, now living in NYC, late of Vibe now at Honey. In that brief bio are at least three strikes against being included in Da Capo’s Best Music Writing of 2004, but I’m supposed to be off that topic. Sorry. Peep it and pass it on.

posted by @ 11:46 am | 0 Comments

Monday, December 1st, 2003

Geezus. So I haven’t blogged in a minute. Trying to avoid bad news this past weekend. Very satisfied after the holiday meals, the Q.T. with the kids, and the Outkast appearance on VH1’s Big Thing last night.

Also spent some time reading about John Lennon and Yoko Ono. And I’m looking back at these posts and realizing I’ve been tough on old white males recently. Look, the ones who married into my family can take it. Hell they get it from their kids on a daily basis! But I know some of you can’t. So here’s an article on Bix Beiderbecke. See? I can be nice.

More on the weird business of developing a marketing plan for yourself as an author later this week.

posted by @ 3:57 pm | 0 Comments

Wednesday, November 19th, 2003

WHOSE BEST MUSIC WRITING?

WHOSE BEST MUSIC WRITING?

While we’re on the topic of music journalism and canon-making, may I rant for a second? Ah fuck it, it’s my blog I’ll rant if I like.

I’ve been going back through Da Capo’s so-called Best Music Writing of Year 200x. (I believe I bought the first one back in 2000, and have either borrowed the rest from the library or bought them used. That’s my little form of protest. No royalties for the monkeys. I don’t pay for brand new Charles Murray or Dinesh D’Souza books either.)

It’s not hard to notice what’s going on.

All the book editors have been guest edited by old white males. (Only Jonathan Lethem has been under 40.) Most of the pieces selected have been written by white males. Many of the pieces have been about dead or nearly dead or pretty somnabulent white males.

(Full disclosure: my piece on go-go for Vibe didn’t make the cut for the 2002 edition. Who cares. I don’t need no stinking badges. As some white guy once said, gimme truth!)

If you read the Da Capo series to find out what the best music journalism is about and who the best music journalists are, you would have to believe that rock is still dominant, that rap is still a marginal genre, and that women and folks of color just don’t make the highest tier of best music journalists. In other words, you’d be still sucking in the 70s. If Ward Connerly were a rock critic, his best-of anthologies might look like this.

In fact, I’d wager unscientifically that most of the pieces in these books on the subject of hip-hop are not by hip-hop journalists or even hip-hop generation journalists, and are not from hip-hop magazines. Hell I could be wrong. But I doubt it. Undeniably many of the articles on hip-hop are by old white males.

Look, I don’t think old white males can’t write about hip-hop. I’m not that petty-nationalist. But if by excluding all but less than a handful of selections from hip-hop journalism in four years you are telling me only old white males can write well about hip-hop? Let’s talk.

Take this piece by Nik Cohn in the 2002 edition.

Nik Cohn is best known as the guy who fabricated the story about the Italian disco stallion in Brooklyn and saw it turned into Saturday Night Fever, for which he earned a nice payday. Proving that if you are a white male journalist and you make up a story, you may be more likely to end up in Hollywood (see also Steve Glass) than back at ya mama’s crib (see Jayson Blair).

And that if you keep at it long enough you even get celebrated as a Respected Music Journalist. Proving that music journalism is an oxymoron by itself. It’s never about facts, it’s about myths.

But back to the story–which is advertised on the back cover blurb in these words: “Nik Cohn infiltrates the New Orleans rap scene”…not you kid I, as Yoda would say. Let’s leave aside for a moment the discussion of “infiltration” and age and race and rap and audience, shall we? That could take a while. And get to the story.

Nik Cohn is prone to writing lines like, “Soljas lived and died by the G-Code”, and sections like, “They seemed like nice girls, well behaved. They talked about their nails, and boys, and Destiny’s Child, and boys. Then Choppa came on the stage, and the girls flew into the gym. ‘If you like your pussy ate, say Aaaahh,’ Choppa said. And all the nice girls went, ‘Aaaahh.'”

This from a guy whose bio reads, “Nik Cohn was born in London in 1946…”

Nik Cohn also writes sentences like this: “Calliope niggas made the St. Thomas look like church.”

Now stylistically, the lack of attribution and all that can be seen as artful. You know, the omniscient narrator blah blah blah. In this case, omniscient narration can also be seen as total bullshit.

This is not a debate about whether or not Nik Cohn has the right to write what he wants. The question is about his authority and the use of the voice. Nik Cohn substituting his own voice for the voice of his interview subject–if his subject did indeed say that and Nik Cohn did not invent his subject–is the perfect way of describing what’s wrong with the white man’s burden approach to these anthologies.

I mean, “Calliope niggas”, please. Tell me Nik Cohn is omnisciently walking around the Calliope projects with that sentence dropping out of his month, let alone the St. Thomas projects. This is a guy whose bio ends, “He now lives in Shelter Island, New York.”

Who is he writing for? The Granta audience. And now you, too, consumer of “the year’s best writing on rock, pop, jazz, country & more”. (You didn’t miss it, hip-hop is in the “& more” section.)

As badly and as often as I bemoan the state of hip-hop journalism, it’s nice to get a slap upside the head like this once in a while.

Hip-hop journalism is nowhere near as bad as the state of music journalism, which apparently is still stuck in the same old racist, rockist canon-making. Geezus, it feels like the late 80s and we’re fighting to have women and people of color included in the curriculum all over again.

Shall I dig my old picket signs out of the garage? Call up Jesse Jackson? Chant “Hey hey ho ho greying white rock critics have got to go”?

So to all the old white guys at Da Capo and to you future old white guy guest editors–read David Tompkins, Kris Ex, Harry Allen, Sylvia Chan, Jessica Hopper, Jon Caramanica, Tony Green, Elliott Wilson, Hua Hsu, Gabe Alvarez, Cristina Veran, Rob Kenner, Joseph Patel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tonya Pendleton, Sacha Jenkins-shit you want more? There’s plenty more. Read about broken beat, dub, reggae, mbalax, salsa, Tejano, Latin rock, afrobeat, kiho’alu, qawwali. Your readers do. Your heroes do. Hell, you’re behind the curve.

You could also invest next year in Raquel Cepeda’s anthology collecting some of the best hip-hop journalism of the last two or so decades called And It Don’t Stop (not from your press, I note). A beginning corrective which may unleash some Columbus-style discoveries in your offices but then again probably not.

Get it? No?

Let me put it like this: If Lester Fucking Bangs was still alive, he’d probably be mentoring a young girl of color from New Orleans who grew up with Juvie, Jubilee, marches, merengue, magnums, samba, second line, the Sex Pistols, and the housing authority police. She wouldn’t need to make anything up.

And if you didn’t hear her, it would be all your loss.

posted by @ 11:48 pm | 0 Comments



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