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!

BATTLE RAP REVISIONISM: SKITZO GOT ROBBED, BUT WE STILL BANGIN HIS SHIT IN THE 1-5!

Forget about Cassidy and Freeway, the best rap battle of the '00s was Jin vs. Skitzo!  This was back in the days of Jin's Freestyle Friday reign of terror on 106 & Park, before he won the Ruff Ryders deal and got his Charlie Chan on with "Learn Chinese."  Jin had his 15 minutes and we ain't gonna debate the politics of his brief media blitz. Nah, we here to shed light on a rapper who, at least by Judges Mannie & Baby's reckoning, lost the rap battle, but whose subsequent contributions to the game won the rap war!

Now I loved when Jin compared his dingaling to dumplings and an egg roll, but like Chinatown in July, something don't smell right in this particular instance of corporatized battle rap fury.  Word to God, only thing Jin won that day were sartorial points for his baby blue sweatsuit and matching hat combo.  Skitzo ethered the god with lines like, "You fake Eminem / You should be on the Tampax Tour with Free, cause you act feminem!"  I thought duke was steppin outta line and dissin the host with that zinger, but Free thanks him for the acknowledgement when he's done.  I guess she was out on tour slangin da bloodclot at the time?  He then says he got naked pictures of Jin's sister, gettin his Carrot Top on like a true showman and pullin out the ill censored pin-up that look like it was printed in a high school computer lab circa 1997.  But yo, the coup de grace is when he channels Radio Raheem and asks, "What you wanna do / Battle me, or sell me dollar batteries?" pullin out a Duracell 9 Volt to complete the hip-hop/prop comedy cipher.

Jin will go down in history as the Wat Misaka of rap, but Skitzo went on to produce extensively for Cam and Dipset, including none other than the certifiable, undeniable, mad styleful classic "Get 'Em Girls."  Now he back behind the mic gettin his Rap Game Billy Joel on under the Rod Rhaspy alias, playing pianos in the Uptown outdoors like Jones and his mans in the "Purple City Byrdgang" video.

BONUS JOINT: Skitzo recounts his road to Freestyle Friday fame, and Jin catching feelings, around the 5 minute mark.

RICH GANG AND THE RAP CULTURE WAR: IT'S MORE THAN TIGHT PANTS!

Seems 2014 was the year of RICH GANG with all these crit hoez bending over to get spit roasted by RICH HOMIE QUAN and YOUNG THUG, but why exactly did they become such a cause célèbre?  It seemed to go beyond music, a get with it or get left behind ultimatum on the future direction of rap.  Da Yung Turkz drew a line in the sand, tellin old heads to get with the program or fuck off - a flip of the bird to the conservative coalition, with RICH GANG as the extended middle finger.

Other day I was posted on the corner suckin on a chili dog with my lil homie, just bumping some OG MELLENCAMP and passin a Kool back and forth.  Exhaling the mentholated essence, my patna tells me QUAN is a hipster rapper, totally changing my perspective of his standing in the rap universe.  I felt like 18th century headz pobably did when Galileo dropped his Origin of the Species mixtape talkin bout we evolved from Magilla Gorilla.  It's true, but not in the sense SHABAZZ PALACES or YUNG LEAN are - hipsters like em, but they ain't the sole or primary audience.

Full disclosure: me and the lil homie dipped the Kool in the wet up, so by now I was seein diagrams of the stars like my man Saint Francis Drake when he discovered that Pluto was actually just a cartoon dog.  I thought back to the Culture Wars of '04, when Kelefa Sanneh hit em up with that rockist dis track and Pitchfork realized rap was about more than white dreadlocks and dudes in Che shirts.

Surprising many, hipsters rallied around DIPSET.  CAM's Purple Haze was especially galvanizing.  The choice was understandable if unexpected: THE DIPS pillaged '80s cheese in an ironic way, but they kicked a kind of diddy-boppin Harlem flyness that was new without being drastically removed from East Coast classicism.  They were charismatic, absurd, and visually outlandish, comin off like a hood take on the garish-fabulous David La Chapelle schtick.   It was a radical departure from the rappers presented themselves, and their contribution to rap aesthetics still hasn't been appreciated properly.

These days RICH GANG occupies the same role.  YOUNG THUG and RHQ kick two styles of raps that are equally controversial and relevant.  QUAN is one of the more visible practitioners of the ATL strain of melodic rapping, a particularly troubling development for OGs who see it as the end of straight rappity-rappin.  Everyone knows THUGGA is a weirdo and that's nothin new in hip-hop, but the way he's acting out that eccentricity is.   We had cats like DEL and SHOCK G who made some noise in the mainstream, but at the end of the day they were cult figures standing on the sidelines of the mainstream ball.  On the other hand, LIL B is too much of a self-contained concern, and the underground freaks don't count for quinoa.  WAYNE and ANDRE are the closest antecedents to YOUNG THUG, but WAYNE's weirdness declined once he became a pop star and got off the drugs.  ANDRE is more about kickin knowledge, with a style that owes more to SOULS OF MISCHIEF than KILO ALI.

Where ANDRE was workin in the mainstream and critiquing it at the same time, YOUNG THUG accepts convention only to bend it out of shape.  If he's critiquing anything, it's only implicit.  This could just be a byproduct of the times they came up - 'KAST laid the groundwork for Atlanta rap on an international scale, so there wasn't yet an established idea of what it was "supposed to be" - but ANDRE is an outlier within hip-hop and in pop culture at large.  His subversion is undisguised; THUG is doing something subtler.

On top of that THUG occasionally puts on a skirt, so of course hipsters gonna rally around this shit!  Ol' hatin ass LORD JAMAR would call them beta males (or worse), and what are hipsters if not beta males (or worse)?  It's cool, good music is good music, but let's hope they don't start pandering to the new audience or gettin high on themselves cause that's how you end up with an Idlewild.  I'll accept some Speakerboxxx/The Love Below self-indulgence, but first they gotta drop their ATLiens.

DIPSET NOSTALGIA IS THE BITTEREST OF ALL

Let's take it back to '05.  DIPSET was on everybody's lips (no homo).  Viewin da whole movement thru retrospective goggles, DIPSET's greatest contribution may have been its injection of controversy back into hip-hop.  They got under everyone's skin: conservatives jizzed they pants over the giddy, amoral spectacle that was central to DIPSET's aesthetic, so unabashedly tasteless they basically delievered a VERY SPECIAL EPISODE directly into the hands and Nielsen ratings of the O'Reillys and Riveras of the world.  The loathsome creatures known as REAL HIP-HOP HEADS was always bitchin bout DIPSET cause they strayed too far from NY orthodoxy and most certainly wasn't on no "artistic" or "conscience" bullsheeit.  There was even some noise about white hipsters fetishizing DIPSET's exotic blackness, quasi-racistly, in certain rap circles.  Dayum!

I just thought it was all fun.  They were the Macho Man Randy Savages of rap.  I was 15 and felt on top of da world every time HELL RELL or 40 CAL came up on the CD changer.  But those days have long passed.  In-fighting and splintering factions threw a wrench in the gears of the purple DIPSET tank just as it was threatening to roll over the whole industry.  The tacky pink party came to an end, the hangers-on hung up their purple mink coats and went home.  All subsequent DIPSET related releases have lacked the elan of the original era.  Some cats like JUELZ SANTANA just disappeared.  The long-rumored I CAN'T FEEL MY FACE with LIL WAYNE never materialized; while WAYNE became a corny skateboarding pop star, SANTANA languished without an album in some kind of record label purgatory.

But never fear!  SANTANA is back wit a new mixtape, GOD WILL'N.  And it's very much a 2013 rap mixtape; SANTANA makes sure we know this on the corny "Blog That" ("Just put a picture up on Instagram / Now I'm in the kitchen whippin insta-grams!").  It's not bad, either--essentially what you'd expect SANTANA to be doing in 2013.  But it also means the DIPSET garishness we all love so much is almost entirely gone. 

Obviously we can't (and shouldn't) expect an artist to remain the same forever.  That's stagnation.  But within SANTANA's transition lies a message on life: appreciate what you have before it fades.  One day you're living it up in a delirious orgy of rap cliche, the next you're scrounging the darkest corners of the Internet for FREEKEY ZEKEY b-sides.