The Damon Albarn Appreciation Society is an ongoing series of focused observations, conversations, and thoughts about music. This is the sixteenth. This is something I wrote in a burst just after getting off a plane about Goodie MOb’s “The Experience.” It’s… freestyled, for lack of a better term, in that I started with the idea of writing about the song and my reaction to it and let the essay go where it wanted to go. I dunno if it works, but I’m gonna let it ride because that seems like the right decision to make right now.

Minutes from previous meetings of the Society: The Beatles – “Eleanor Rigby”, Tupac – Makaveli, Blur – 13 (with Graeme McMillan), Blur – Think Tank (with Graeme McMillan), Black Thought x Rakim: “Hip-Hop, you the love of my life”, Wu-Tang Clan – Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), On why I buy vinyl sometimes, on songs about places, Mellowhype’s Blackendwhite, a general post on punk, a snapshot of what I’m listening to, on Black Thought blacking out on “75 Bars”, how I got into The Roots, on Betty Wright and strong songs, on screw music

I don’t know where I’m going with this one. I just got off a plane and this song came up on shuffle, and I felt like I should write about it. Follow along and hopefully we’ll get somewhere interesting. Strictly rough copy.

I wish I could say I remember the first time I heard Goodie MOb’s “The Experience,” off that Still Standing album. It’d make for a nice and neat story, a life-changing event that I could point to like the first time I saw Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. But I don’t remember the first time I heard it. I do have fond memories of going through the liner notes of my uncle’s CD. I’m not from Atlanta. I’m from a hour or so south of Atlanta, the country. I didn’t think it was the country growing up, I thought it was a real-deal city. So seeing those liner notes was interesting, because it was like peeking into another neighborhood. There was a slang dictionary in there, I think, that explained some of the real specific stuff that the Dungeon Family used to shout out, like SWATs or whatever. As a kid, I didn’t even get that the song “Inshallah” was specifically a Muslim thing, even though — on another song — Cee-Lo at one point says “I’m Islam, and we don’t want no bad blood, but it is some, it is some.”

But “The Experience” is a thunderclap to me, even nowadays. It’s just Cee-Lo Goodie’s voice, a light melody, and various versions of the word nigger for a couple minutes. It’s the sort of thing that the Dungeon made their stock in trade, another good example of which would be the Big Rube interludes on other Dungeon records. The Dungeon Family worked because they mixed knowledge with raw raps. And this song is the epitome of that for me.

I don’t know the actual accepted term for it, but there’s this thing I think about a lot that I call useful fictions. They’re things like the idea that black people come from a lineage of kings and queens in Africa. Basically, they’re like… they’re cheat codes. Imagine that living in America is like being in a race. One entrant in the race is forbidden from racing for hundreds of years, but is the guy who has to clean the track and paint the lines. When the officials finally let this guy into the race, they make him start half a mile back. When the guy finally sues and gets the right to start from the same starting line as everyone else, they sabotage his shoes and pretend like nothing is wrong.

This has a debilitating effect on morale. It destroys egos and families. The men and women trade abuse out of frustration, parents pass it on down to their children, and the children grow up with that poison in their system. And on it goes, on down the generations, until we hit today. Or maybe not today. I can’t speak to the current status quo. But I’m an ’80s baby, and I can guarantee you that things were a little sour growing up, both in terms of blatant racism and things like basic access to things that could make your life better, from education to living in a neighborhood that doesn’t suck.

So these useful fictions are cheat codes because they let you get a leg up. They serve as a tonic that acts against the poison that’s force-fed to black babies as soon as they’re old enough to talk. When I was growing up, black history was the guy who invented the peanut, the guy who got shot and had a dream, the angry black devil, the lady who ran the underground railroad, slavery, and Dred Scott. That was about it. Black history was a tale of misery and hate, with our contributions to the country either minimized or ignored completely.

The rest of history class was positively triumphant in comparison. Rome. England. Magna Carta. Greatest Generation. George Washington. Inventing lightning. Betsy Ross. “Look how awesome we are!” all day every day. Never mind the state-sponsored terrorism and hate crimes or slave labor or whatever. That was… not excused, exactly, but nobody looks at slaveholders like people today look at Nazis.

So those useful fictions are important. If your history is stolen from you, you have to invent one of your own. And if you’re going to invent one, it might as well be a good one. Kings and queens. Little Richard inventing every single aspect of rock’n’roll. Whatever whatever. I get it. And, more importantly, I greatly appreciated it.

In “The Experience,” Cee-Lo says a lot of silly stuff, but it’s not about the truth, really. It’s about grabbing somebody by the neck and making sure they pay attention. It’s about getting somebody to do better because they need to do better. I love the part when Cee-Lo says “She looked deeply into my eyes and said, ‘Brother, don’t you know? You complain about being black, when they mad ’cause they can’t be black no more.'” It’s laughable, because as near as I can tell, being white is awesome. No racist is sitting in her shack like “Ugh I wish I looked like Iman.” Please. I guess maybe if she’s more of a David Bowie stan than a racist, but that’s a big if.

But it’s a useful fiction, because it speaks to the idea that black people are more than they are. More than poverty, more than hate, more than fear, more than niggers. It speaks to the idea that the black man is the original man, a valuable part of history, and something to be not just respected, but jealous of. It puts that idea in your head, and the truth of it is entirely beside the point. It’s something that you have to embrace just to keep your head above water. It’s a life raft. “This isn’t all there is. We are more than this.”

If you put a gun to my head and told me to pick a favorite bit from this song, it’d probably be: “Since then a nigga done got grown, had a little bitty of nigga of my own/ should’ve known I couldn’t show ‘im no better than I was shown.” It’s such a sad statement, and the “should’ve known” puts it clearly in the past tense, like mistakes have been made. And it’s absolutely true. If you don’t know better, whether your knowing is composed of useful fictions or the actual incredible history of black people, you can’t do better. You need that knowledge or optimism or whatever to make things work, to crawl your way out of the muck. And it’s generational. If I can’t do better, then what is my son supposed to do? What am I supposed to teach him? Each generation improves on the next one, but no generation is perfect. I inherited some poison, despite my family’s best efforts, and because of them in some cases. It takes a long time to work that out of your body.

I’m appreciative of every single useful fiction people told me as a kid that convinced me I had worth before I knew the real story of that worth. I would much rather have a lie that helps me that I have to exorcise later than one that weighs down my shoulders. One of those is training wheels. The other is a thin wire stretched across a hallway. I love every rap song about how dope it is to be young, rich, and black. I love every t-shirt that says “DANGER: EDUCATED BLACK MAN.” I love every single thing that showed me that I had something to aspire to, and that I could (thus far at least) do something like make my own way in the world.

“The Experience” was really valuable to me growing up. It’s still valuable, even, but I’ve moved past some specific aspects of it. Like how “When in actuality, the fact is you ain’t a nigger because you black. You a nigger ’cause of how you act” is just old poison in a new, self-hating form, for example. But as a song, as something someone wrote and performed and pressed to disc, I’m deeply appreciative of it. It runs through my head every couple of weeks. It’s extremely resonant, on par with Blur’s “No Distance Left To Run” or “She Said She Said” by The Beatles or Tupac’s “Dear Mama” and “So Many Tears.”

There’s just something about it that crawls up inside your guts and makes room for itself. It’s kind of a mirror, in that it forces you to stop and look at what you think and why. I think a lot, not all but definitely a lot, of great songs, books, movies, poems, and whatever else make you do that. You make some type of connection with the content that goes beyond shaking your butt or nodding your head. That’s where favorite songs and anthems come from.

That’s probably why I keep coming back to “The Experience.” My racial identity, how I think about race, whatever whatever, evolves constantly. Listening to this song puts me in mind of a time when I thought differently, even if it was just a couple years ago, and makes me recognize whatever strides, or lack thereof, that I’ve made. I can’t passively listen to it.

-I’m slowly getting into Michael DeForge’s work. It’s weird and a little out of my wheelhouse of cusswords and violence comix, but I like how creepy and weird and John K his style gets sometimes. He’s put Kid Mafia #1 online for free, asking only that if you read and enjoy it, you kick him fifty cents via Paypal. I read it, I liked it, and I paypaled him fifty cents in Canadian dollars. If you like it, you should do the same.

I like this idea, and I hope more cats who produce minicomics start doing this. I’m not much for paper books and totally fine with making it rain via Paypal. Hopefully you are, too!

–I did a podcast with Chris Eckert from Funnybook Babylon about our comic book origins. I really like this photoset he made for the chat, which really says it all:

Is it any wonder my taste in comics turned out like it did? That Batman cover is crazy, though. I also spill the beans on the time I had a nightmare about Terry Kavanaugh, which is one of the stupidest things that has ever happened to me. We talk a lot about Image comics, too. I guess I hadn’t realized how fundamental their stuff was for/to me until this chat, so it was nice to look back and sort of reconcile what I like now with what I liked then.

-Michael Peterson and Kevin Czapiewski have launched Project Ballad, a webcomic about a girl named Kendra Price, RPGs, and maybe… video games?? Start reading it here. It’ll update Monday-Wednesday-Friday from here on out. You should read it. I am.

-I watched Lena Dunham’s Girls, but I don’t really have a thinkpiece in me like the rest of the internet. I hated it, basically, because the experiences and people I watched on TV were so completely and utterly alien to my experiences. Like, magic, kung fu? I can buy that. Asking my mother for eleven hundred bucks a month to pay my rent while I douchebag around town? My mom would die laughing and then haunt me for the rest of my life, telling me to get a job in between ghostly guffaws. So yeah: not for me.

-I watched Frederic Jardin’s Sleepless Night the other night. I liked it a lot. It’s this tight little crime thriller about a cop who robs the wrong guy and gets his son kidnapped. Most of it takes place in one building, there are several factions, and I love love loved that the violence was so awkward and off-putting. Tomer Sisley as Vincent is not playing Jason Statham as Jason Statham, as the fight scene in the kitchen proves. He’s just a cop, rather than a supercop. Also there are father/son issues, and I’m a sucker for those, not to mention gunfights and action.

A lot of Sleepless Night takes place in a nightclub, but it never dragged the movie down like every other nightclub scene does for me.

Sleepless Night reminded me about Fred Cavayé’s Point Blank because… well, they’re both in the same genre, French, and pretty good. Point Blank shakes out a little differently. Samuel is a regular dude, a nurse, put into a tough situation. He sucks a a lot of things, but the movie livens things up by teaming him up with a hardened criminal. That doesn’t mean that you won’t see cross on double cross on triple cross over the course of the movie, though. Gilles Lellouche is perfect as the desperate regular dude, and Roschdy Zem gets a good turn as a gangster. There’s a scene in an apartment that was tremendous, really great writing, action, and film-making.

-My man Sean Witzke put me onto Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, which is a… some type of band. Rock? Noise? Whatever. I really like “Hoshi Neko,” but the entire album is pretty good.

I don’t really have the frame of reference to describe it in proper terms, I guess, so I’m going to copy & paste from their blog:

YT//ST was founded in late 2007 by performance artists alaska B and Ruby Kato Attwood, born from the ashes of the late Lesbian Fight Club. Armed with mixed-race identities, mad illustration skills and a whole pile of home-brew junk electronics, alaska and Ruby wrote and performed the first mini ‘Noh-Wave’ Opera, ‘YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN I’ in April 2008. YT//ST continued to perform short homebrewed operas, eventually forming a network of Asian and Indigenous artists through collaboration and formed the current YT//ST collective.

They have this weird multi-disciplinary sound, sort of dissonant but appealing at the same time. The vocals sound like they’re coming in from a distance, or through a filter, and instruments sound like they fade in and out of the mix as needed. I dunno, I could keep putting words that don’t quite fit on it or you can listen to “Hoshi Neko” and “Reverse Crystal//Murder of a Spider” and hear exactly what I mean. I bought the album and it was more than worth my time.

–This guy Boulet is so good. I love this strip about childhood dreams, too.

-Philip Bond is still drawing spacegirls.

-Faith Erin Hicks is great. I think she’s super interesting as a person, going by her essays on making a living in comics & animation and whatnot, and of course she’s scary talented. She’s got a Tumblr now, which includes this great picture of Liz Sherman from BPRD:

I really really like this. Liz’s bored expression, which extends to the lazily arcing cigarette smoke, is pitch-perfect. Even the lazy posture, starting from her bent left leg on up. But, and maybe this is weird, my favorite part is Hicks’s signature. “feh.” is the best signature since Walt Simonson’s dinosaur. Someone should do one of those knock-down, drag-out, ultra-long, “here are all of my opinions on every subject ever” interviews with Hicks. I bet it’d be a great read.

–Powerhouse blogger Kate Dacey is curating a Manga Movable Feast on Viz Signature, which may well be the best comics imprint since the glory days of Wildstorm. The MMF is a collection of reviews, criticism, and just content in general, all on the subject of Viz Sig’s fantastic catalog. I’m not sure if I’ll have time to contribute this time (my motivation for everything these days is on approximately a negative thousand million, but it’ll pass. I’ve been working on this simple post since Wednesday, ha ha), but I did pick Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond Vizbig 9 and Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka as part of my best of 2010, and I still like this look at Inoue’s writing. I’m down for another Vagabond reread, actually. Maybe that’ll be this summer’s big series of posts? Inouefest, 2012. In-No-Way-Fest 2012. Anyway! Go, read! Kate’s list of 7 essential books is pretty good.

-I’m probably going to pre-order the super deluxe funcrusher plus monster package of El-P’s Cancer 4 Cure (that title!!!!!) and Killer Mike’s RAP Music. I love those guys, and dropping 85 bones on their work doesn’t seem like a huge extravagance. I’ll have to wait to see how next payday shakes out, though. I definitely want the vinyl of both. I just have to make sure the math makes sense. It may be smarter to just order Cancer 4 Cure and R.A.P. Music on vinyl separately, though. I don’t necessarily need the instrumentals or poster.

-Paul Jenkins and Humberto Ramos have a kickstarter going for their book Fairy Quest. Here’s a video:

And a widget:

I like these guys, especially when they work together. I’m going to kick some cash their way come payday, too.

-Here’s a couple STS videos I liked. I like how regular the video for “Good Intentions” is. It’s just a bunch of guys hanging out and doing things. It fits the theme of STS’s Goldrush, too, which is laid back flips of established songs. And STS is a spitter, too. Always a treat to hear a new verse.

-Tucker’s Comics of the Weak is still the best post every week. He’s got Jog and Abhay backing him up this week, plus Nate Bulmer, so maybe you should get down or lay down. Also, I vote you don’t get to make the Holocaust into a pithy comeback in your stupid fight comics. Been there, done that.

-Next week: I’ve got my uzi back, you dudes is wack, face it, the Wu is back (hopefully, but if the Celtics beat the Hawks on Sunday, I may spiral back into the Pit of Depression)

I moved to Madrid, Spain in the middle of spring in 2000. I was sixteen, I’d recently broken my thumb (playing video games, of all things), and I was suddenly transported from Georgia, where I’d lived off and on forever, to another continent where I didn’t speak the language and knew no one.

It was strange. I made friends, thanks to meeting people in the embassy. I went to a school with Americans and Spaniards, too, so adjusting was a daily process. I ended up picking up conversational Spanish pretty quickly — I found Frank Miller’s 300, of all things, in a grocery store and learned Spanish alongside it — so my social life wasn’t too bad. One thing that brought my group of friends together, and kept us together, was music.

We all had slightly different tastes in music. I was hard on my backpacker tip at the time, while secretly making way for music from Georgia. We all liked rap, though, from OutKast to the Kottonmouth Kings. We learned to breakdance together, some of us having better luck than others (read: not me) and went out to rap clubs on weekends. The jam was Kingston, because they played mostly rap and R&B stuff. It wasn’t upscale enough for the girls, I guess, so we’d also go to Capital (Capi), which played different music depending on what floor you were on. (There was another club we’d go to regularly, but I don’t remember the name of it. It played techno, though, and one night I fell asleep on a couch there.)

I met one of my best friends from high school, James, because he wanted to borrow my Jurassic 5 CD and wouldn’t give up when I put him off. Later, when the homey Nick was being honored for something (I forget what–I think we were all acting in a play?) we pulled our shirts off, twisted ’em round our hands, spun them like helicopters, and yelled “Raise up!” Why? ’cause he was from North Carolina. And we all loved this:

It was like that, man. Music was something we listened to, absorbed, and expressed ourselves through, whether via awkward, halting freestyles or turning songs into personal anthems. It felt good. It felt right.

There’s something amazing about music. I went to Spain and one of the first things I heard on the radio was an uncensored Tupac song. I think it was “Letter to the President,” but I’m not 100%. I heard a bunch of Spanish rap. Friends put me onto cats like Frank T and 7 Notas, 7 Colores. I branched out into French and German rap like DJ Tomekk (that one via his GZA collab, “Ich Lebe Fur Hip-Hop”). Today, in 2012, I’ve own a few hundred songs and maybe a dozen albums in languages I don’t speak. Graeme McMillan put me onto Camille, a french singer, and I think Sean Witzke was the guy who showed me Charlotte Gainsbourg first, who sometimes sings in French. But past that, I’ve got Yoko Kanno, Yuji Ohno, The +2s, that one Miho Hatori album she did with a Brazilian guy, a different Miho Hatori album… I’ve got a lot.

I don’t understand a lot of it. But that doesn’t matter. The music just turns me on. It doesn’t matter where it came from or who did it. The only thing that matters is if it knocks. If it’s hot, it’s hot. And if it’s hot — and this is the important bit so pay attention — there’s somebody else out there who likes it, and you can talk to them.

That’s the part that kills me every time. When you meet somebody who is into what you’re into, or knows what you’re into, and you just chop it up for a while. They reveal crazy connections between songs, like how I’m pretty sure that there’s a way you can crossfade from David Bowie’s “Rock’n’Roll Suicide” directly into Saul Williams’s “Black History Month” and have a transcendental moment as you bridge Ziggy Stardust to Niggy Tardust. You trade trivia and lists and you bond. You talk about how the piano (pianoing? piano playing? piano riff?) that opens Kanye West’s “Runaway” is the loneliest thing ever. You can bond over a lot of things, but music seems to be that one thing that works better than anything else. And it’s amazing.

Crunchyroll is streaming Kids on the Slope. Here’s a trailer. Don’t worry about the Japanese text. Just let the visuals and sound wash over you.

I didn’t know a lot about Kids on the Slope before I watched the first episode. I did know that it is based on a josei manga I’ve never read by Yuki Kodama. I knew that Shinichiro Watanabe directed it, and that the show features music production by Yoko Kanno. I know that it takes place in the ’60s in Japan, and features jazz as a major aspect of the setting. I like the director and music producer a lot, mainly due to Cowboy Bebop, so I was already on the hook.

It turns out this show is really good, and uses music in a really familiar and comforting way. Kaoru Nishimi arrives in small town Japan friendless, nervous and depressed. Sentaro Kawabuchi is feared by the other students because he’s a big brawling jerk. Ritsuko Mukae is Sentaro’s childhood friend, and is really the only one who likes him. Kaoru plays classical piano. Sentaro plays jazz and is a killer drummer.

There’s a scene in the first episode where Kaoru watches Sentaro play drums. He covers one ear at first, trying to shut out the noise. Then he pulls his hand down. Then he loosens up. And then he listens. It’s this hugely powerful moment, and you watch this epiphany we’ve all had happen behind his eyes. He tries to play some jazz on piano, almost immediately, and Sentaro is like “Nah son. That’s not jazz. That’s got no swing.” The two characters are set at odds immediately. Kaoru plays classical music and is pretty strait-laced. Sentaro is a big bruiser and plays jazz, so he understands the importance of improvisation. You have to feel the music, rather than replicating it.

Kaoru has to descend into darkness in order to hear the jazz. There’s this tiny room below Ritsuko’s record shop. I like this, because it presents jazz, and the relationships that will undoubtedly follow, as something special. It’s top shelf, rather than just being a regular old thing you trip over.

I think that’s how we all feel about our favorite type of music. Our favorite music is revelatory, whether about the world or ourselves, in addition to being something that you can bounce to. In the case of Kids on the Slope, jazz represents freedom. Freedom from constraints, from conformity, from depression, from anxiety. Freedom to enjoy life. There’s something raw in jazz that Kaoru doesn’t get out of classical music.

I liked this cartoon a lot. The animation has this strange 3D quality to it that makes regular people look a little more exciting than they normally would in such a simple coming of age story. It’s very pretty, but in a very natural way. There’s no glamour in the characters, but the music scenes have this swing to them that I find really attractive. Sentaro is introduced not by face or cool pose, but by how he drums with two sticks on his way to school. His drumming is great, and there’s a palpable difference between his piano playing, which came across as earnest but inexpert, and Kaoru’s, which is talented, but stiff.

I also love the added texture that jazz brings to the series. Jazz is a black art form, or at least it started that way. But Japan is several thousand miles away from the birthplace of jazz. Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue gets a visual shout-out in one scene, lurking behind Kaoru’s head like the most obvious and menacing foreshadowing ever. That’s 1959. Kids on the Slope takes place in summer, 1966. In the US, 1966 was President Johnson sending more American boys off to die for no good reason, The Beatles playing their last live performance, and the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense by Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale.

I don’t expect Kids on the Slope to reflect any of that, but there’s such a cross-cultural thing going on (black and American to Japan and Japanese) that it makes considering the context really interesting. I keep a set of black anti-war songs on my iPod, I think the bulk of which were recorded between ’66 and ’72, so that period is one that I’m extremely curious about. I’ve never seen it from this point of view before, and that has an attraction in and of itself.

I don’t know jazz like I know other types of music, and this is going to be an education for me, too. I know the greats or whatever, I guess, but that’s not knowing jazz. That’s just knowing somebody else’s top ten list. The centerpiece for the first episode is Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ “Moanin’.” I wasn’t familiar with it before I watched the show, and they don’t really play the entire thing, but I like it a lot.

I really like the idea of watching Kaoru open up as he dives into jazz. It’s clearly not going to be finished by episode two, and I think the ongoing transformation is going to be fascinating. I’m hooked, basically. It’s intensely relatable, well-written, and the music stuff is, as expected, fantastic. There’s something so nice about discovering something new and finding that it’s not only extremely emotionally resonant, but well done and educational, too. And yeah, it worked: I’m going to start listening to a lot more jazz.

You can see the official site here, or stream it on Crunchyroll.

Let “Moanin'” play while you go about your biz online. It’s nine minutes long, but so good. It sounds like sunshine feels. You can’t help but bop to it.

Here’s some stuff I think you should throw money at or read or hear or kiss that I haven’t had a chance to write about in detail just yet but probably will in the future:

–Jack Kirby: Here’s a Jack Kirby youtube I liked:

I never thought of the Silver Surfer as a fallen angel before, but that’s good. I like that a lot.

–Carbon Grey: The Carbon Grey kickstarter is still going. I wrote about it here, and here’s the direct link. They need 40k, and they’re currently sitting at 32.5. Help out if you can!

–The Zaucer of Zilk: I haven’t gotten a chance to go and pick up my comics in over a month because of reasons, but I’m really, really looking forward to this. It starts (started?) in 2000 AD prog 1775, but CBR has posted the entire first chapter. It’s everything I expected it to be. Brendan McCarthy is great, and I love how he manages to make the drab psychedelic and the psychedelic into, I dunno, psychedelic plus? Just look at the thumbnails on the CBR page. They build to a fever pitch, like a dam breaking in slow motion except WHOOPS the dam was holding back a rainbow. I like Al Ewing, too. I haven’t read a lot of his work, but he did this nuts Judge Dredd choose your own adventure thing in prog 2012 that took me like three entire days to read, and I appreciate that in a writer. He created Zombo with Henry Flint, too, so he’s definitely got that mean sense of humor I like to see in my comics. My only expectations for Zaucer of Zilk is that it’s gonna be like nothing else in comics. Judging by the preview, I think they’re on the right track.

Actually, I just looked at my pull list or whatever, and I should have progs 1765, 1767, 1768, 1769, 1771, and 1770 (in that order) waiting for me. Who in the world is in charge of shipping those comics? And why are they like a full month behind in the US? Confusing. You may not be able to buy this yet, but if you can, do so. Comics!

-This video for Odd Future’s “Oldie” is fantastic, the most rappity-rapping thing I’ve seen in ages.

There’s something so pure about this video. It’s a bunch of friends having fun, and there’s always gonna be something magical about a gang of rappers spitting directly to the camera without any speedboats or video chicks gyrating. Also Frank Ocean has got that understated cool that works so well for him.

“Bumping oldies on my cellular phone” is so good, and so is Earl’s line about “crunchy black cats in a taxi,” but Tyler kills it with this:

This is for the niggas in the suburbs
And the white kids with nigga friends who say the n-word
And the ones that got called weird, fag, bitch, nerd
’cause you was into jazz, kitty cats, and Steven Spielberg
They say we ain’t actin’ right
Always try to turn our fuckin’ color into black and white
But they’ll never change ’em, never understand ’em
Radical’s my anthem, turn my fucking amps up!
So instead of critiquing and bitchin’, bein’ mad as fuck
Just admit, not only are we talented, we’re rad as fuck

The Of Tape Vol. 2, and I’m digging it. Mellowhype’s “50” is the crunkest song since whenever the last Waka Flocka banger dropped, and makes me want that Numbers album even more. Hodgy and Domo are all over the album, and Mike G gets it in, too. Hodgy is still probably my favorite lyricist in the crew, and he shows some nice range. Domo’s Under the Influence mixtape is extra dope, so you should cop that, too. Lotta OFWGKTA bangers out there now. Golf Wang.

–Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo: I wrote a thing about Stan Sakai’s lettering for ComicsAlliance and he showed up in the comments to thank me. That was pretty cool.

-Oh yeah, I took a month off from CA because… I don’t know, but I did. I’m writing there again, so y’all can resubscribe. I know you missed me.

–Alabaster: Wolves: This comic by Caitlín R Kiernan, Steve Lieber, and Rachelle Rosenberg is pretty dope. I wrote about the dialogue and art for CA. I like it. It’s on Dark Horse digital.

–Heart: I don’t think I ever mentioned it except in passing, but I was a big fan of Blair Butler, Kevin Mellon, and Crank!’s Heart. Sports comics are all too rare, and this is a good example of how they should work. The team stuck the landing. I wanted to throw this out there in case I get distracted again. It’ll cost you like eight bucks right now for the digital copies.

–Alpha Princess Garou Shoujo: My shoujo broujo Sloane made a comic about a wolfgirl. It’s pretty good. You should read it. “100% tooth & nail comix by sloane.” Magical Girl Wolf Pack Cute Them All, bang bang bang

–Esperanza Spalding: I really, really like Esperanza Spalding. Her Radio Music Society is a really good album. Very easy to listen to, catchy, intelligent, and plenty of other adjectives that all basically mean “I like this, you should listen to it.” I liked Chamber Music Society, too, but I think Radio Music Society is legitimately a step forward. Different, but very good. Here’s “Radio Song”:

–I Am Not David Bowie, But We Have The Same Initials: I’ve been listening to Ziggy Stardust, Diamond Dogs, and Station to Station. I’m pretty sure those three are my favorite (no rank) Bowie records. I’ve been fiending for some Bowie karaoke (Bowieoke?) but I’m hilariously broke so it’ll have to wait.

–Sourpuss Blvd: This is cute, and congrats to the winners, but I can’t help but feel some type of way since the artists here are making more money off the back of the Avengers movie than Jack Kirby’s family will ever see. Maybe that’s an obnoxious thing to say and now I’m That Guy, the sophomore who just discovered social injustice or philosophy or something and won’t shut up about it, but whatever. I don’t care. Marvel has screwed a lot of people, and I think that once we’re talking about billion dollar box offices or whatever, it’s worth pointing out that they could do much, much better than they do. “Hey Jack, we’ll dedicate comics to you all day, everyday, but when it comes to actually giving you what you deserve… haha, sorry bro, the lawyers won’t let us. It’s the Mouse. You know how it is. King!”

Anyway. Comics!

It’s hard to come up with a solid working definition of event comics. Is Blackest Night an event or a crossover? Is there a difference? What about Civil War? House of M? Kree-Skrull War? Some people look at event comics, whatever definition of event comics they subscribe to, as a cheap cash-in, a waste of time, or everything that’s wrong with comics. My personal definition is a little nebulous, but it boils down to event comics being those comics where big action goes to get bigger. It’s where you go to see people you’re familiar with come out of their comfort zone (or ongoing series) and do big things. When properly executed, event comics are great. When done poorly, they suck. That’s true of anything, though.

When trying to define my idea of event comics, I came up with a pretty apt comparison. Event comics are the posse cuts of comic books. Posse cuts are an integral part of rap these days. You gather up three or more emcees and tell them to get to work. DJ Khaled has made a career out of creating innumerable posse cuts, and classics like A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario,” Noreaga’s “Banned From TV,” and Cool Breeze’s “Watch for the Hook” still go hard years or decades after they came out.

Noreaga’s “Banned From TV” is a classic example of a posse cut. He enlisted Big Pun, Cam’Ron, Nature, and The LOX for the first full song on his NORE tape. The only thing all of them have in common is that they’re all New York rappers who were buzzing hard at the time or known for being reliable spitters. “Banned From TV” is the rap equivalent of the NBA All-Star Game. You might not want to see Derrick Rose play with Carmelo, Dwight Howard, LeBron, and Dwyane Wade all the time, but once a year? It’s a treat. It’s usually a hot mess — but it’s a treat.

This is true of “Banned From TV” as well. Big Pun is undeniably the nicest rapper on the track, but everyone who showed up is more than capable of acquitting themselves well. And yet, it’s unassuming and underrated Nature that steals the show with the very first verse. Even if you were a Nature stan back in the day, this probably came as a huge and pleasant surprise.

There’s always someone who blacks out on a posse cut and steals the show. Nicki Minaj absolutely won Kanye West’s “Monster,” out-rapping three of the hottest rappers in the game with a lopsided flow. Busta Rhymes did it on A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario.” TI’s smash hit “Swagger Like Us” showed us that he could out-perform Lil Wayne at the height of his Best Rapper Alive period. Posse cuts are guaranteed to be full of surprises, and that’s what makes them so delightful.

Divorced of any intent beyond just making a cool song, posse cuts are essentially artist showcases. You listen to posse cuts because you want to see how these people work together and so you can pick sides once the track’s done. Who has the best verse of Wu-Tang’s “Triumph?” (It goes Ghost, then GZA, and then Meth.) What about Cool Breeze’s “Watch For The Hook?” (Gipp Goodie.) Or Khaled’s “Holla At Me” (Paul Wall, or maybe Rick Ross.) and “We Takin Over” (It’s TI, and then Weezy a close second.)?

I wouldn’t buy an album of just posse cuts (sorry Khaled), but they serve a valuable purpose, and a lot of their appeal is shared in event comics. On the most basic level, they’re cash-ins. People will check on an event if someone they like is in it, just like you’d listen to a posse cut if your pet rapper is featured. It increases your potential audience. Events and posse cuts also tend to be light in content. You’ll rarely hear a posse cut about pain or love. It’s always just a chance to have someone really go in.

It’s true in comics, too. You’re not going to find a heart-breaking work of outstanding emotional resonance in an event comic. At best, some character you have an irrational affection for might die and you get a little weepy like a cry-cry. But really, you’re buying those comics because you want to see Spider-Man punch Doctor Doom or Superman light up whatever forgettable arch-villains Wonder Woman has.

When I think of the relatively few event comics that I’ve enjoyed, they’ve been high on action and maybe a solid medium on melodrama. X-Cutioner’s Song was a fun ride because you ended up with the three baddest X-Men at the time — Cable, Bishop, and Wolverine — fighting, teaming up, and then battling bad guys. The stakes were high, every character got a chance to talk about the focused totality of her psychic powers or smoke cigarettes in the dark, and I finished the book pleased that I saw a sufficient number of cool scenes for my money.

I asked Twitter what their favorite song on Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is the other day. I got a lot of answers, most of ’em good, but the one that caught me the most was from my friend EC. She said this:

Runaway. At the end of the day, when Kanye feels like a douchebag, he needs a hug from Donda, but she’s gone. 🙁

A close second, and I mean painfully close, was this from Ray:

AllOfTheLights. Peak of his maximalism, sonically. But ponders depths of being minmal in life. Take together w/Power which is flip

These two comments unlocked something in my head. It’s dangerous to try to psychoanalyze somebody through their music, but Kanye paints a really interesting picture. He’s a regular dude with new money pretensions. Success is a goal in and of itself, and I think that goes a long way toward explaining why his sound is so different on each of his albums.

Kanye’s the picture of the regular dude who is good at something but feel he isn’t recognized enough for that fact. It’s not arrogance or egomania so much as having the confidence you need to make it. It’s about not getting what you’re due, whether or not anybody else agrees. I bet most creative people, whether they’re gainfully employed or just scribble erotic fanfiction in their dorm rooms when their roomie isn’t around, feel the same. If you don’t feel like you’re any good, then nobody else will, either.

At the heart of that creative drive is a sense of inferiority. What if you aren’t as good as you think you are, what if people hate you, or what if you are that good, but no one notices. And Kanye thinks he’s very good. So good, in fact, that he’ll drop an album like 808s and Heartbreak, which I thought was punishingly average, or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a thirteen track album with six songs that approach or beat six minutes. That’s confidence, to me, because Kanye could’ve just made a bunch of College Dropouts and seen plenty of success instead. So I’d be willing to put cash money toward the idea that Kanye’s sense of inferiority is tremendous. He’s got to out-do himself every single time.

EC and Ray hit on what that regular dude style is so attractive, though. “Runaway” humanizes a champion when you realize what the song’s about. And Ray’s point about “All of the Lights” being the peak of his maximalism but being about mundane things is the perfect complement to that. It elevates the common man to where we think Kanye is, that point where life is majestic and exciting.

It’s such a subtle, unconscious thing, but it clicks so hard with me. My favorite Kanye song, or at least one of them, is “Mama’s Boyfriend,” which he has yet to officially release, and probably won’t since some scrub bootlegged it and threw a beat on top of it. It’s about growing up with a single mom and watching how men treat her, and then growing up to do the same thing to women even though he swore he’d do better. “I never liked you niggas,” goes the chorus, “who knew one day I’d be just like you niggas?” It’s about trying to protect your mother and then becoming the man you used to hate. There’s too much there for me to grab onto.

It’s kind of a sad song, in a way. It’s about cycles and inevitability and growing up black and poor with just your mom. It’s about a lot of things. I do like how it’s plain that it’s the man at fault in both instances, though. The kid is bitter and suspicious of newcomers to his family. The man loves a lady and wants his kid to like, or at least tolerate, him. The mother is immaculate in both verses.

I like that a lot. There’s a depth to Kanye that I feel like a lot of people miss because they don’t look past “I’ma let you finish” and “George W Bush doesn’t care about black people.” He knows about being the man of the house at a young age, heartbreak, confidence, perseverance, making the same mistakes over and over, and being a douchebag.

I forget what I said my favorite song off that album is. It’s changed by this point anyway. At the moment though, just after midnight on 03/21, it’s the 9-minute version of “Runaway.” No, wait–it’s that version of “Runaway” that he played on SNL, with the clusterbomb of live samples, painful snares, and Pusha mixed way too low for the track.

The Damon Albarn Appreciation Society is an ongoing series of focused observations, conversations, and thoughts about music. This is the fifteenth. I realized I had a lot of screw music in the official rotation. It’s a type of music I like a lot, but find it hard to articulate why. There’s a good reason for that, I think. I keep going to a few key words, though–it sounds evil, it sounds wrong, it sounds off, it sounds abstract, it sounds sideways, it sounds like Hell… it sounds great. It’s just that whenever those monks get around to updating the Ars Goetia, they’ll have to add a footnote that King Paimon is the patron demon of screw music.

Minutes from previous meetings of the Society: The Beatles – “Eleanor Rigby”, Tupac – Makaveli, Blur – 13 (with Graeme McMillan), Blur – Think Tank (with Graeme McMillan), Black Thought x Rakim: “Hip-Hop, you the love of my life”, Wu-Tang Clan – Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), On why I buy vinyl sometimes, on songs about places, Mellowhype’s Blackendwhite, a general post on punk, a snapshot of what I’m listening to, on Black Thought blacking out on “75 Bars”, how I got into The Roots, on Betty Wright and strong songs

Press play on this joint while you read.

I’ve been thinking about writing about chopped and screwed music for a while now. This cat named Heath Caring created a C&S version of the Drive soundtrack and it came on my radar a little bit ago. I’ve been regularly spinning it ever since. The problem is that the appeal of screw music is such a weird and specific thing. Screw music is post-modernism stacked on the already pomo origins of rap. I’ve been mulling it over for days, trying to find an angle of attack, but it’s a slippery subject.

My man Ray, a dude who has put me onto a lot of good screw, recently said this while spotlighting a new screw mix:

I’ve come to realize, trying to explain chopped and screwed music to people makes you sound like you’re fucking insane. The idea of slowing down music and making it skip on purpose isn’t the easiest thing for heads to imagine. That’s why instead of explaining what the music actually sounds like it’s best to describe the feeling screw gives you. Sometimes you feel like you’re being dragged through a black hole where time and space are being warped. Other times screw feels like you’re at a dope pool party but you spent the entire affair chillin’ out at the bottom of the pool listening to the DJ do work.

And that’s it right there. It’s about the music, but it’s not. It’s about how it feels. Listening to screw, whether you’re sober or high, is like listening to regular music, sure. There’s a beat, and you can bop to it. You might could even do a slowed down version of the wop to it if you had the right song, and I mean the wop that your parents used to do when they hit up house parties, not the wack dance that swept youtube a few years back. But screw music is… it’s like abstracted rap. Not abstract, like Q-Tip or Aes Rock. Abstracted. Taking a thing and making it different. It’s psychedelia for people who were raised on Three 6 Mafia and UGK instead of The Beatles.

But it’s real hard to explain what screw music sounds like to people who can’t parse the idea that DJ Mr. Rogers’s chopped and screwed version of Drake’s “Say What’s Real” sounds like the feeling you get when you walk into a black mass in the basement of the club by accident and realize that the chief anti-priest is your ex-girlfriend. The way the harmonious melody in the background is slowed down changes its sound from a generic triumphant rap orchestra into a funeral dirge, Drake’s voice goes lower and he’s enunciating clearly, but the track keeps skipping and hopping and stripping all the smooth charm out his voice. That feels different from “I like how John Lennon sings this song because you can hear the hurt in his heart” to me.

I’ve been describing that screwed version of the Drive soundtrack to other people as evil, like a house party in Hell in the ’80s where all the coke’s run out. Kavinsky’s “Nightcall” turns into something else entirely when the upbeat synth-pop gives way to a voice that moans and groans the words out and the synths are stretched to the breaking point. It sounds slow, is the thing. It sounds wrong, and I mean wrong in the sense of what it feels like to come into your house and realize something is out of place, but not being able to figure out what that out of place thing is or who could have been in there but you. “Nightcall” turns into the musical equivalent of a gross leer, and you can’t do anything but let it wash over you.

The wildest part of the mix to me is the point when Kendrick Lamar’s “ADHD” rolls in. I didn’t even realize that it had faded in on my first listen, because it’s slipped in there so smoothly and the song sounds so different. There’s a great thematic link between Drive and Lamar’s Section.80, but the screwed “ADHD” tripped me out. It fits so well, and the Clipse joint that comes after is tremendous.

It sounds so full, like it’s just overflowing out of your speakers. It sounds like something you want to bang so loud on your speakers that your neighbors spontaneously shatter into dust from the bass. Like a… like a sustained earthquake, or something. It rolls over you and makes you feel trapped. Claustrophobic. The lyrics twist and turn uglier than they might be at first glance when they’re this slow.

This specific example of screw music is like the most comfortable uncomfortable situation ever, like the tail end of what happens when you screw up and eat an entire hash brownie, not realizing you only needed half to get right. It feels like that last hour or so of being over-high for thirteen hours straight, when you’re done panicking and you know you’re way too high, but man the couch feels too good right now and you feel so relaxed and life is so nice that it’s all to the good.

I like this Lil Sprite mix Ray hooked up, too. It’s called Cocaine Pentagrams, which makes it incredible from jump. Sean Witzke was on Twitter talking about how it made him think of David Bowie’s Station to Station, and I hadn’t made that connection, but it’s dead on. Station to Station is an incredibly funky album, and one of my favorite Bowie joints. He was so coked out while working on it that he doesn’t even remember doing it.

At the forefront of my mind was Andre 3000 beginning a verse “I came into this world high as a bird from second-hand cocaine powder” and ending another “They call it horny because it’s devilish, now see, we dead wrong.” on ATLiens. Bowie is just the icing (provided by Freeway Ricky Ross and the CIA) on the cake, the missing puzzle piece that pulls it all together. Just from the start, Cocaine Pentagrams is ill, and that’s without even hearing a single word. It’s evocative. It’s the precursor to an experience.

It’s not just about slowing down a song or getting high and turning on an mp3. It’s an experience that’s different from how I regularly listen to music. I try to really listen when I’m playing songs, but with screw music, I just go with it and see what happens. I do a lot of writing to screw music. It just sorta sits at the back of your head, infecting your subconscious until you’re through. It’s music that’s easy to absorb when you aren’t thinking too hard about it.

Hot97’s Peter Rosenberg has recently spoken up against rap songs that glorify drunk driving. He had a brother who was a victim of a drunk driver, and he’s honest about the fact that the death of his brother fuels his crusade.

I’ve been thinking about Rosenberg’s quest a lot, especially after watching this interview he did with Kendrick Lamar (I came to Section.80 late, but it’s definitely one of the better releases from last year) and Schoolboy Q:

Rosenberg’s mission is interesting to me, in part because drunk driving is, without minimizing the tragedy inherent in drunk driving, one of the least of rap’s sins. I’ve implicitly or explicitly cosigned murder, rape, selling crack, homophobia, and the promotion of violence against judges, correctional officers, district attorneys, probation officers, the family of victims, witnesses, and snitching ass hoes. When I walk around singing along to Jay’s “Blue Magic,” I’m explicitly supporting the actions of a dude who actually sold drugs and made his fortune talking about how well he sold drugs.

“Blame Reagan for making me into a monster” is a hot line that’s easy to flip into other contexts. It’s about all of us ’80s babies, sure, but it’s also Jay-Z blaming Reaganomics for pushing him so far into poverty or hardship that he felt licensed to deal poison, poison that was provided in part by the United States government. And I mean, sure, he had his reasons. It’s like something from a Tupac song: “‘I made a G today’ But you made it in a sleazy way/ sellin’ crack to the kids/ “I gotta get paid!”/ Well hey, but that’s the way it is.” But it’s still gross, isn’t it?

And then there’s that deeper, personal level. There’s cocaine in my family history, and it’s definitely the one drug I hold in contempt above any other one. I don’t hang with people who use it, I’ve got no plans to try it, whatever whatever. So why am I so cool with the Clipse? Why is the most common expression of what I think of as black superhero music almost exclusively drug-dealing music?

Jeezy’s (aka Snow aka Snowman aka Mr 17.5) “All White Everything” with Yo Gotti is a banger. I love it when Jeezy flips a concept like that. He’s not lyrical, but he’s charming enough to sell it. Shawty Redd’s beat is on point, too, with triumphant trumpets, that scattered-sounding drum loop that seduces you into head nodding unconsciously.

But you’re a fool if you think the white he’s talking about is just sexy white girls and sexy white Lambos. He’s talking coke. It’s a celebration of what coke money gets you (even if crack isn’t as lucrative as it used to be at its peak, but that’s another conversation). I have every reason not to be down with this song, but I haven’t rejected it.

I re-listened to DMX’s listenable albums the other day. It’s Dark And Hell Is Hot still holds up surprisingly well, but it made me realize how often Dark Man X talks about rape. He wants to rape you, your wife, your mans and them in jail, and if you got a daughter older than fifteen, he’ll “take her on the living-room floor, right there in fronta you.” He talks about rape all the time. DMX is objectively the best dude to step into Tupac’s shoes after his death (or “objectively the best Tupac dick rider,” depending on how charitable you are), but he’s missing that social consciousness that informed all of Tupac’s work. Tupac understood how playing a specific role allows you to reach more people with your message. DMX is just playing a role.

And there’s the violence, too. I love David Banner’s “Treat Me Like.” It’s good bang your head music, the hook is on point, and Jadakiss comes correct, as always. Jada:

I don’t like to promise shit, but we gon’ bring the drama, kid
Just tell me who I gotta slap and where they mama live
Yet and still, real recognize real, and whoever don’t get recognized get killed
Too many soldiers to jeopardize in the field
I got throwaway niggas ready to die, and they will
Jason as a youth, I turned into Satan in the booth
First nigga with Daytons on the coupe, unh
I could drive, but a boss get driven
So I’m shotgun, higher than the cost of living
My seat back, my gear black, my heat black
Deserve whatever you got comin’, so keep that
Now all you do is turn the lights off and drive by slow, I’ma turn his life off
And I’m good long as he bleeding
Nann nigga never play me long as I’m breathing, WHAT

As far as murda muzik goes, Jada’s verse on “Treat Me Like” is tops. It might even be my favorite Jada verse. I can do it off the top, or at least I could at one point. That back/black/black/that sequence is incredible. But at its heart, Jada is talking about killing somebody, right? How can I justify celebrating that?

(Correction: “So I could never hate on another brother/ God is great, the devil is a motherfucker” is probably my favorite couple of bars from Jadakiss, but that verse, as a whole, wins out.)

Or Killer Mike on Chamillionaire’s “Southern Takeover”:

It’s the Mister Four-Fifth toter
Cooking coke with baking soda
Dub roller, pro smoker, wood gripper, pistol whip a
Monkey nigga, if he figure
Fuckin with my figures makes him richer, he should know
Insteada it’ll make him deader
than a mummy fuckin with my money
Get yo mummy snatched right outta sunday school
On a bright and sunny Sunday, this ain’t funny
I ain’t jokin bout my coke and package come up shorter
Might kidnap yo wife and daughter
Bury them down deep in Georgia

right before Pastor Troy drops another heat rock on the same joint:

Okay, y’all know me, it’s PT, well I hunt and all of that
Black on black, with black tint, I can’t help but represent
Not content, I want more, who the fuck you take me for?
Studio rap is not the forté, drop my top and bust my AK
‘No more play in GA,’ yeah, that’s a classic
Ridin in a Classic, toting me and blasting
Send em to the casket, send em to the morgue
Slap me a nigga cause I’m motherfuckin bored”

The beat drops out at “Slap me a nigga ’cause I’m motherfucking bored,” making it that exact line you wanna yell out when you’re listening to this joint. It’s instinctual. It’s dope, in spite of (or maybe because of) what it’s about.

I don’t even know if I have a point, beyond “Rap is messed up and I’m drowning in compromise because I like a lot of stuff my mom would be mad at.” I’m a smart dude, fairly well-read, and while I wouldn’t call myself socially conscious, I’m definitely not an idiot. This post isn’t an exorcism or a big announcement that I’m done listening to rap. That’s stupid. I’m just… aware of the contradictions and thinking my way through them. I’m thinking out loud.

I was talking to a friend the other month about how conflicted I was about the fact that I have bigger issues with artists who buy into liquor companies (Puffy and Ciroc, Luda and Conjour) and then pitch them in music videos, but not with dudes who actually, literally sold drugs and are now getting rich off that fact. I didn’t even come close to having an answer, beyond one act being normalized for me and the other being new.

But I see where Rosenberg is coming from. He’s a smart guy, and he’s clearly put a lot of thought into his position. I can’t begrudge him that at all, and I respect what he’s doing. I think it’s totally worth quizzing artists on lyrical content. Some will have answers. Some won’t. It’s a conversation worth having. It’s worth having a conversation about every aspect of rap. “Why” matters. I like that he’s doing this, and welcome the thoughts he’s spurred, even if it leads directly to the inevitable realization that I’m sitting in a moral quagmire.

I’m listening to Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly as I write this. It’s an explicitly anti-drug album from a movie about pimping and drugs. Superfly made me think of another question: why should I hold rap music to a different standard than film? Is there a real difference between Ready to Die and King of New York? Between Reservoir Dogs and “Reservoir Dogs”? I feel like there isn’t, and if there is, there shouldn’t be.

I did this Q&A thing on Tumblr the other day, probably because I was both bored and felt starved for attention. It was neat. I liked this question below a lot, so I’m going to repost it here and expand on my answer some:

Anonymous asked: Had you ever posted anything about Mos Def’s “Rock’N’Roll” from Blackstar?

I haven’t. I listen to Black On Both Sides every couple of months, and I’m always happy that it’s aged so well. “Umi Says” is as weird as anything Blu has done, “Mathematics” is still fire, and “Mr. Nigga” still goes in.

I loved “Rock ‘n’ Roll” in high school, mostly because it preaches a point of view I was really fond of. I feel like a lot of my time growing up and figuring out who I am wasn’t about taking a position so much as taking a position opposite from another position. The idea that rock was stolen from black people was an attractive and emotionally valuable one when discovering what being black is all about (which I’ve learned is mostly your white friends going “What do you mean you never listened to The Beatles growing up?! How is that possible?!” and cops looking at you funny).

“Rock’n’Roll” is not just about how rock music was stolen, but how modern rock sucks and classic black music is better. “You may dig on the Rolling Stones, but they could never ever rock like Nina Simone.” “Elvis Presley ain’t got no soul, Little Richard is rock and roll!” I was all about that back then. Stealing back the culture, maybe, or demanding to be heard by being as strident as possible. One part attention-getting spite to one part sincerity.

Now that I’m grown, I still like the song a whole lot. I can and still do sing along with the whole joint, even. Mos’s flow is great and unbalanced, the beat goes, the Bar-Kays sample sounds so much like “Nautilus” at first listen it isn’t even funny, and I’ll never not love that Mobb Deep sample. The difference between now and then is that I disagree with parts of it now. I think he’s pretty much correct when talking about who gave birth to what and who’s specifically iller than who, but the main position of the song, the white versus black thing, doesn’t work for me any more. I mean, I understand nuance now, for one thing, and know a little more about rock history. I’m also less concerned with proving the worth of what I choose to enjoy or the lack of worth of something someone else likes.

The song still bangs, though. The transition from slow flow lazy raps to bang your head clatter is a good one. It’s only now that I’m older that I can appreciate what the progression the music takes from blues to punk rock represents and the seamless switch, if there is one, from punk to rap between “Get your punk ass up!” and “Company — MOVE!” on through “Rock and roll for the black people.”

I get the song better now, if that makes sense, as a statement, than I did when I believed the statement behind it. I probably actually like it better now that I disagree with that tiny bit of it.

It’s still not the best Mos Def song with the word “rock” in it, though. That would be “Body Rock” off that Lyricist Lounge Vol 1:

Tash basically steals the show (“but I’m doper than sherm, plus the way I put it down could burn the perm off Big Worm” yooooo), but Mos gets it in with that “Barkin that you want a bout, but son you know the comeabout.”

I tripped over a reference to the video for El-P’s “Time Won’t Tell” off his Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3, directed by Shan Nicholson, by accident the other day and thought to myself, “Oh, it’s my favorite video from last year.” I don’t know when I decided that, or if I’d ever been consciously aware of that fact before now, but it’s true. I watch a lot of music videos, and this is the one this year that grabbed me the most.

Part of it is El-P’s production. El is easily the best at making sinister sounding tracks. A lot of classic songs sound like impending violence, like somebody’s about to get his whole head bust outside of the club. El-P makes joints that sound like the beginning of Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia or the cityscapes from Blade Runner or Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira look. They sound like impending doom on a level far beyond DMX barking in your ear about how you didn’t ride, so you must wanna die arf arf arf.

It’s the way the bass pulses and buzzes under the track, and just how dirty and dusty everything sounds. It sounds processed, but like it was fed through a meat grinder, not Pro Tools. The drums are messy, there’s a throbbing horn infesting the middle part of the track, and a wail that hints at something horrible. And then, at 2:10, the track takes a breath and comes back majestic.

Nicholson’s direction clinches the deal, though. The beginning is a tour, as we follow this kid around town and check out foreclosed homes, decrepit section 8 homes, the presence of authority figures as something to fear, and generally just life in the projects. It feels lonely, because this kid never interacts with anyone and looks uncomfortable around the people he does run into. The long shots of him walking alone push that loneliness even further, begging you to extrapolate a little.

He walks past four kids who then follow him around town and the suspense kicks up. The first thought to come to mind was one of danger, of kids who goose step over innocence. He grabs the mattress, the kids follow, and you know something bad is going to happen. And then it doesn’t, it’s just some kids playing together and having a good time. The first kid has something dope and the other kids appreciate it.

And jeez, man, I can relate. Boy, can I relate. We’re trained to think of other humans as possible threats. You stand real close to the ATM, you ignore strangers in public, you don’t wear short skirts, you practice defensive driving, you don’t make eye contact in the street, you get told to stay away from that white girl, you wonder if that guy is really talking about monkeys or if he’s just dog-whistling, you push forward on the sidewalk with your head down and dare people to not get out of your way, you sign a pre-nup when you get married, and your heart skips a beat when you hear footsteps behind you on a dark night, all because “what if something happened???”

I know what it’s like to be a lonely, skinny black kid. I went to two elementary schools, four middle schools, and three high schools. The longest time I spent in one house after elementary school was my last two years of high school. I’ve been the new guy, the guy who doesn’t get to hang because he wasn’t there when the group formed. I’ve been the guy who didn’t want the new guy in the crew.

But sometimes you connect to other people off the back of stupid things like comic books or music or jumping on a mattress out where the factories used to be and just vibe and things are wonderful. I remember as a kid, there was this big mound of red clay that the neighborhood boys would use as a bike ramp. I never did it–the thought of going in the air on my bike terrified me, and I’d had a bad bike wreck shortly after moving in–but we would hang out and that would be our sun. I have other memories–the woods between our school and our hood or the filthy creek near the dumpster where we found a gang of playboys or the youth center on base–where the “we” involved is different every time.

It’s nice when people actually connect with each other, no matter the catalyst. This video is as good a depiction of what it looks and feels and sounds like to let other people in as you’ll ever see.