monday mixtape bumaye
March 18th, 2013 by david brothers | Tags: big boi, iggy azalea, kitty prydeEight songs here, which should play in random order. The list:
-D’Angelo – How Does It feel – Voodoo
-Big Boi – She Hates Me feat. Kid CuDi – Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors
-Kitty – Smiledog.jpg – haha im sorry
-Iggy Azalea – Down South – Trap Gold
-J Cole – Lights Please – Cole World: The Sideline Story
-Fabolous – Louis Vuitton feat. J Cole – Soul Tape 2
-Jean Grae – Supa Love Acoustic – Dust Ruffle
-The Weeknd – High for This – Trilogy
Iggy Azalea sounds like she’s always one “Yeah~ho!” away from being Gangsta Boo. I think I like her voice over her production (generally Diplo, for the tape I linked), but it’s hard to not hear Chyna White or Diamond or Trina (especially Trina, “Down South” could easily be a Trina joint like “Look Back At Me”, which is as NSFW as it is incredible) when she raps. I got the same problem with A$AP Rocky, but Iggy’s nice enough that I haven’t given up. It’s this weird dissonance, I guess, where I hear one thing and instead of listening to that, I’m remembering something else.
I was talking out loud on Twitter the other day about white girl rappers. It’s real interesting to me, because a few have come up (or come to my attention — same thing) over the past few years. There’s a couple different types of white girl rappers, I feel like. There’s the Kreayshawn/Iggy Azalea route where you rep your whiteness as hard as you can, like a badge of honor or the point of a knife. Hence Kreayshawn repping White Girl Mob as hard as she can, and Iggy rapping about hanging out with “white bitches” and “black bitches” in a very black flow. There’s an “I double dog dare you to say something” in there.
Kitty, fka Kitty Pryde, is the other type. I described it as “Tee hee I’m white” on Twitter, I think, and it’s this self-aware awkwardness where she knows what you’re thinking but don’t really care. “You say, ‘This little white girl is ruinin’ hip hop’/I say, ‘Damn right!’ And take a lick of the Ring Pop,” right? There’s a tease in there. I like Kitty a lot, in part because she’s pretty good at being pretty funny.
White girls in rap is a real interesting subject for me. It’s different than white dudes, but I’m having a hard time finding people talking about why and how. There’s this whole cultural quagmire there, where we’re checking off several boxes and what results is… whatever this is. I’m really interested in the repping part of things, because being white is presumably as awesome as being black is, but racists screwed that up for white people in a big way. Fine lines, right?
“She Hates Me” is my favorite song on that Big Boi album. I love that version of Jean Greasy’s Supa Love.
–I like Tom Spurgeon’s thoughts on working for free. Personally, my “Should I work for free” flowchart goes “Are we related? Did I give you my phone number? Are we friends? Do I like you?” and if the answer to all of those is “no,” then you’re coughing up the cash. If the answer to any of those is “yes,” then I’ll think about how much effort it would take me, what you would get out of it, and how much more money you have than I do before I make a decision. Easy-peasy. (If I don’t like you, the answer’s always “no,” tho. Even if you’re willing to pay double.)
–This joke Sam Humphries found is absolutely savage.
–Chris Randle wrote about issues with the people who use Kickstarter and the culture of Kickstarter itself. It’s good.
-A reader named CC emailed me out of the blue the other day to talk about my review of Moto Hagio’s Heart of Thomas on ComicsAlliance. She said she took issue with it (!) and wrote a paper that in part addresses it (!!) and wanted to give me a headsup (!!!). I really wanted to know what she meant, and she was kind enough to email me back and give me an autopsy. It was really enlightening, and she picked up on my subconscious uncomfortableness with shoujo, which showed up in how I approached writing about the book. Looking at what I wrote and she said, my takeaway is that I made the mistake of approaching the book as an outsider, a looky-loo, instead of digging into what it meant to me, which I do with basically everything else. So I ended up unintentionally giving the book short shrift, something I was consciously trying to avoid. Life is weird. She’s posted the first part of her paper here, with the second to follow soon. I’m looking forward to it. You can find more of her writing here. She’s really smart, and I’m not just saying that because she caught me half-stepping.
–Sean Witzke invited me to take the place of Tucker Stone on the Travis Bickle on the Riviera podcast. I couldn’t make it, but Dr Racism should did. They talked about Out of the Past, Female Prisoner Scorpion 701, The Long Goodbye, and Stray Dog. Pretty good way to kill 90 minutes.
–I wrote about Garth Ennis’s approach to heroism in recent works.
–I watch a lot of Rocky & Bullwinkle. It’s all on Netflix, so you should, too.
NBA 2k13 is, as ever, game of the year.
I watched Children Who Chase Lost Voices
Open thread. What’re you reading/watching/hearing/enjoying?
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I’ve got a stack of books on my nightstand, waiting for me to make a decision. Continue with Ada? Finally get serious about The Fifty Year Sword? Reread Dhalgren? I’ve been slackin’ on my prose-readin’ lately.
Most of the rest is the same as last week. Ni No Kuni is trying too hard and I hope to get to a piece on it at some point soon, just like all the other ones I have due. Mostly just strapping in for a long few weeks at the day job and feeling at a loss because my own comic’s on break (not that I’m not still working on it).
@Patchworkearth: Man, yeah, my to-read stack… I didn’t buy hardly anything at ECCC (a couple used trades, a couple used manga, an underground comic), but that still makes my to-read too tall. I finally picked up Nausicaa again this weekend, if only because I like it and have been putting it off for stupid reasons (oh it’s too good I should read it all in a shot, etc).
After Nausicaa, I think, I’m going to read some Kickstarter rewards. I got PDFs for Johnny Wander and Carbon Grey to work through, I think. Looking forward to all of it.
What have I watched recently: My coworkers are really into Arrested Development, Psych, and Futurama, so I’ve been watching some of that. They made a drinking game for AD. I don’t drink, but watching them is pretty funny. I watched Hitchcock’s Spellbound this morning. The longer I think about the dream sequence, the more it interests me. Might watch Rebecca again. It’s good, but it’s strange to think it’s the only Hitchcock movie that won Best Picture. Watched The Maltese Falcon with couple of coworkers. Now they both want to laugh like Sydney Greenstreet. On the anime front, I watched Kino’s Journey over the weekend. Really loved that.
I haven’t read a book in a few weeks (last one was Love in the Time of Cholera, highly recommended), but my dad loaned me a bunch of books over the weekend. Mostly mysteries in specific historical settings, or thrillers. I’m curious about The Black Widowers, a series of mysteries written by Isaac Asimov, he’s my favorite sci-fi writer. That’ll be first.
I’ve been wrapping up a lot of XBox360 games recently, the best of which was probably Singularity. I thought I was burned out on FPS, but the horror and the time manipulation worked well together. I just started Alice: Madness Returns, hoping it’s going to be good. The Saboteur’s probably my favorite game going right now, but I’ve been working on that since last August.
Music-wise I’ve been on a big Townes Van Zandt kick. I think it might be the weather.
Still working through MyCareer in 2k13. The only two teams I want to play for are Brooklyn (ROC BOYS IN DA HOUSE TONIGHT) and Golden State, and neither are ever interested in me and I’m just like :frown:. Other than that I’ve been playing Ninja Gaiden Sigma on my Vita and goddamn that game is good. I’m playing it on hard to make sure I never get bored with it. Civilization V is a mainstay also when I want to listen to a podcast or audio book.
I only read a few comics and the only one I’m reading right now is Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. There really aren’t enough good things to say about it– it’s really that damn good. I’ve only seen a few artists handle facial expressions like Fiona does. I could read that entire series for her art alone.
I just finished House of Cards on Netflix, too. Kevin Spacey being a true sonbitch is the absolute best. Currently looking for a new show, might hop on Justified because you ALWAYS talk about it haha.
Oh and that new Justin Timberlake album is laaaame.
@david brothers:
Yeah. I feel like I don’t have time for anything anymore.
It’s cool that you’re enjoying Nausicaa. I remember reading something ages ago (did Jog link it? Don’t remember) that was, I think, one of the guys who did “Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga” talking about Tezuka & Miyazaki, and how Tezuka was amazing at comics but never really got his talents locked into animation, despite his success, and Miyazaki’s skill at animation not translating to skill at manga.
I sort of looked at my copies of Nausciaa at that point and saw what he meant. I LIKE Nausicaa, but they’re sorta TOO lush – the important stuff drowns in detail pretty often, and the panel-to-panel is a bit workmanlike for someone we think so highly of generally.
It was an interesting perspective, I thought. It didn’t cause me to enjoy the story any less, but I found it interesting to see it from that angle.