Sasha Frere-Jones on OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, abbreviated as SB/TLB: “Is SB/TLB worth buying? Hell, it's OutKast. It's better than anything else on your desk. Is it too long? It's two CDs, so you already knew it was too long. Those are the easy questions. ¶ SB/TLB pivots on the much harder question of "good behavior" proposed by "Ms. Jackson." African-American culture has a lot of voltage running through this cable. Thanks to hip-hop, the idea of blackness is now inseparable for many people from an idea of realness that equals cynicism, criminal fantasies, and enthused capitalism. The number of Hummers in the video and the gallons of blood in the rhymes are still metrics of credibility.”
Outkast
My brain just decided to turn itself off, so, even though the essay itself is not finished, here's a brief post-essay-writing linkdump.
- I note the apparent age structure of BloggerCon, and a thoughtful reply. Still, the chances of my forking over $500 would have increased if there was a seminar entitled something like "How the Kids Are Using Blogging As An Unintentionally Self-Imposed Cock Block".
- Kelefa Sanneh: “It was starting to seem clear that Outkast was the greatest hip-hop group of all time — more versatile than Run-DMC, more unpredictable than Public Enemy, more resilient than N.W.A., more consistent than the Wu-Tang Clan.” Oh, come on, it's hard not to be more consistent than the Wu-Tang Clan.
- Jeff Howe: “Maybe Prince can afford to cast his label aside and go directly to the fans. But he did so only after becoming a household name. The vast majority of musicians will never find an audience large enough to let them quit their day jobs without a staff of marketing and promotions people who know how to book a tour, make a video and get their CDs into stores”.
- Myself, three hours ago: “It is refreshing, however, to see an article in which the word "slut" retains its original pejoritive sense rather than being embraced or re-appropriated to serve a political (or sexual) agenda.” I'm just terribly pleased with the way that sentence looks.
