THINKING ABOUT DIPSET, TOM SNYDER, CAB CALLOWAY

1.
Why didn't Dipset ever have a white guy?  Not counting Mizzle.  For a group that was such a carefully constructed visual spectacle, they could have done a lot with a token Caucasoid placed in outlandish outfits and incongruous scenarios.

2.
Lost in most remembrances of the great Tom Snyder and Iggy Pop tête-à-tête, where a haggard Iggy describes himself, cogently, as a Dionysian artist, is the curious list of artists Iggy names as influences: Sun Ra and Howlin' Wolf are easily reconciled, Cab Calloway and Fats Waller less so. I took the liberty of transcribing the exchange.

SNYDER: The people that you're talking about could be described - in a one-word label again - as being conventional.

IGGY: No, they weren't at the time.  

SNYDER: But everything evolves, when you look back--

IGGY: They got conventional this year, but back then...back then they were sort of sleazy.

SNYDER: Indeed. As they say: jazz is rap.

IGGY:  Come on, man, not that again.  That's the bad cliche of bad cliches.  Only people who don't actually listen to rap or jazz say that.

SNYDER: I like eating creamed corn and apple pie at the State Fair.

IGGY:  And the worst is when people try to draw a straight line from Coltrane to LL Cool J as if the association somehow elevates the form.  Coltrane was working in the high art tradition. The analogy does not follow, no matter what Q-Tip tells you.

SNYDER: We had a goat when I was a kid, I named it Honus.  We were chums.  Do you want to touch my hair?  I like to make it look like a helmet.

IGGY:  But that's not to say there's no connection. The traceable connections just don't fall into the whole "because improvisation" agenda these ponytails want it to.  How about, I don't know, the stuff that actually has lyrics?  "Minnie The Moocher" is about this skeezer named Minnie who's fucking some junkie, and eventually golddigs her way to a townhouse and a diamond whip with platinum wheels.  It's like "Maria Maria" for the Geritol set.  Even Pac had to get on the remix. [simulates air horn noises]

SNYDER:  I have bad thoughts about my neighbor.

IGGY:  And Fats Waller was a funny fat guy, sort of a Harlemite Biz Markie but less talented.   Cab and Fats had songs for the smokers, too.

SNYDER:  I forgot to wear underwear today.  Nipple clamps.

IGGY:  I've had enough of this, you doe-eyed dairy farmer. I got something fo yo stinkin ass, ooooh I got somethin fo yo stinkin ass!  MY FOOT: in yo ass!   MY FIST: in yo face!  MY KNEE: in yo ribs!  MY, uh, FINGER: in yo eyyyyyyye!  Dipset, bitch.

Iggy pulls syringe from pants, stabs Snyder in jugular.   Syringe fills with blood.  Iggy drinks some and shoots the rest at camera lens.  Blood drips until entire frame is tinted red.

SNYDER [offscreen]:  Nyyaaaahhh! 

IGGY:  You nitwit! [slapping noise]

SNYDER:   Whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop!

A SMALL STEP TOWARD BREAKING THE COLOR BARRIER

I like to think I'm an open minded guy.  Outside of rap, I like everything from John Mayer to Jason Mraz.  But despite that, I've always been a vicious racist when it concerns rap music's mayonnaise coalition.  In the contemporary "smells like wet dog" scene, A-Wax is the only devil I can get behind (nullus), and even then he had to put out a record as perfect as "Maury Dance" to overcome my intolerance.  Can you blame me? Whiteface stooges like Machine Gun Kelly and Asher Roth have set their people back at least 15 years. By co-signing that, I'm co-signing hate :(.

This kid Pouya appears to be of Caucasian extraction (con sabor latino), but the eyeball test is not conclusive proof of Pouya's T.R.I.B.E.  Maybe he got 1/128th of aborigine like Sista Azalea does.  In his favor, he looks like the kind of creep who cleans up used paper towels in a porno theater.  He is also associated with the remnants of Raider Klan, a crew that typically rubbed me the wrong way.  In most cases they seemed to take the reblog aspect of Tumblrcore a little too seriously, but maybe that's what happens when your leader plays out his complacency of influence on record.  If we talkin nadir, their druggy sub-Based sketches are on some "Let me tell you about my mushroom trip" hippie shit.   Cocaine raps are the only drug raps for me.

His South Side Slugs mixtape is a mixed bag of familiar associations run thru a bedroom filter: quotations of trap bangers, Raider Klan generica, obligatory nihilism.  A skinny white nerd making any form of rap music is something I am predisposed to hating, but I fucks with "Suicidal Thoughts In The Back Of The Cadillac," cause it strays from the usual '90s Memphis/Based God axis that so much Raider Klan material revolves around.  The raps aren't quite there yet, consisting mainly of the Bone Thuggery and Lordly Infamy one would expect, but the songwriting makes this'un stand above the others.  It's the kind of hook-driven country-blues rap that the James Vances and Raymond Belknaps of today might blast as they blow off their heads. Catch me in the hoopdie bumpin this n tattooing disembodied E cups on my arm with a stick 'n' poke.

WHITE HISTORY MONTH: WERE RECORD CONTRACTS A CRACKER JACK PRIZE IN THE '90s?

Post Malone, WhoLovesMakonnen, dominated two-week content cycle in early February with his blasphemous single "White Iverson."  I don't know where this Dirty Sanchez'd gremlin-dwarf gets off comparing himself to one of the baddest players to ever finesse the parquet, but I'll address those concerns at the next community board meeting.  But this ain't about his musical accomplishments or the fact that he's bitin the ironic durag-chic of A.R.E. Weapons, the Suicide of the gentrification era.  I bring him up for the persistent rumor attaching him to one of rap's two famous T.I.s.  Nepotism and insider privilege make the world go round, so here's a couple of names from a forgotten corridor of pale rap history.

Whooliganz, comprised of a young Alchemist and Scott Caan, were the Beverly Hills charity cases in Cypress Hill's Soul Assassins collective.  Wisely dropping the name Mudfoot, the lil w-word with the dopey grin would go on to produce some pretty good material with Prodigy.  The future New Age Danno went by the name Mad Skillz at the time, which means he can probably claim OG status over rap's favorite novelty historian.

In 1994, boxing analyst Max Kellerman and his late brother Sam dropped a single called "Young Man Rumble" on Ruff House.  Moderately better than Whooliganz, it's an of-the-era Wu-Tang/Onyx homage with, of course, a boxing theme.  Remember this got the video treatment at a time when Jay-Z was still scheduling Big Daddy Kane's pre-Playgirl waxing appointments.

Now I be hobnobbin with the rich and infamous, so I know how this shit can go.  Young Hamilton goes to school with a couple of Doogie Howsers who do that rapping thing, and Papa Viacom sees an opportunity to purchase a new Cambodian child-slave.  So was it their proximity to money and influence that allowed these kids to live out their rap dreams, or were labels just throwin money at any young Caucasian with large pants and basic rhyme structure?  Hip-hop and the monied class been strange bedfellows ever since Raymond totally porked the gallerist ho in Wild Style.