Hhhhmmmm ... I dunno many white guys who listen to gangsta actually. Public Enemy, yeah, they were all into that when I was in high school - me too I gotta add - which was at least as weird, really, when you think about it: buncha white teens raving about Black Power tributes to Malcolm X. If I wanted an album by Paris ("Panther Power"), I needed look no further than the local indie record store or the library. But if I wanted some more down-to-earth stuff as well, I had to exchange tapes with this black kid two grades down. And when gangsta came along my "college radio"-type friends just logged off from hip-hop altogether, lost all interest. Guess the whole Nation of Islam militancy had a higher snob value than the low-down dirty brand of hip-hop. Well, no skin off my back. But whatever demographic Snood is talking about, it aint around me. I'm the only white guy I know who listens to Li'l Kim or Missy Elliott.
It's funny, cause the whole reason I was logging back on to A2K just now is cause I was listening to some tracks I d/l'd a while ago (and that I just made re-accessible by converting the format) - and they was some tracks that made me realise there's
nothing new about Li'l Kim's outrageous obscenities. Cause those tracks I'm listening to are from a CD called "Nasty 50's R & B", and they had me LOL much the same as Li'l Kim's track did. You ever listened to Dinah Washington's
Big Long Slidin' Thing? The Swallows
It Ain't the Meat? Julia Lee's
My Man Stands Out? Hey, I'd grinned from ear to ear about some Bessie Smith lyrics before, but this set takes the biscuit!
I came here to share 'em with ya, but alas, the Dinah Washington ones aint available online (and hers is the best). Searching for 'em however I did find these ones - and now
you tell me how Li'l Kim is somehow shamefully disrespecting musical tradition, or the mere representation of a gangsta-rap generation of blaxploitation ... for it was 1954 when Atlantic's hottest R&B group, the Clovers, sang:
"weeelll-- cocksuckin' Sammy git your mutherfuckin' Annie we're goin' downtown to the cocksuckers' ball"
Thats from
this fascinating article that I googled up while looking for Dinah's lyrics:
Quote:People began singing about sex as soon as they began singing. Dirty ballads, lewd couplets, poems, limericks, rhymes, drinking songs, all ripe with sex, have always been an important if shunned part of western culture, from the first broadside balladeers to the most current heavy metal acts. Much of this sort of thing made its way onto vinyl, especially during the early days of "race" and "hillbilly" (pre-WWII) records and during the golden age of R&B ('46-'56).
In fact, the writer points out, it was whenever black acts started attracting that white suburban audience Snood is talking about that their lyrics were cut down to a more sanitized style, and thus the rock 'n' roll of the fifties ended up way more restrained, lyrics-wise, than the blues singers of the twenties who had not needed to think about an uptight bourgeois audience's sensitivities ...
Fascinating stuff. Hey, as long as y'all let me mix my eclectic playlists with a dose of gangsta, a rolling bit of jungle, a sweet old jazz tune, a Paul Robeson lullaby, a sixties jingly-jangly guitar song and a guitar-crashing punk anthem, I'll leave the worrying about whats PC to you folks!
