LA WEEKLY and "Black Music"

LA Weekly had a mega-genre music piece this week entitled How Shit Be: Freestyle riffs & ruminations on black music and pop culture at the dawn of 2007

MISSED OPPORTUNITY AT JAMES BROWN’S FUNERAL: After Michael Jackson exchanged dap and hair-care tips with Al Sharpton and baby-mama war tales with Jesse Jackson, he leaned over Mr. Brown’s coffin to pay giggly respect. At that point, you wished the Godfather would’ve thrust up an arm, horror-flick style, grabbed Michael by the throat and demanded, “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!”
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ARTIST OF THE YEAR: Ms. Peachez (“Fry That Chicken”). Shortly before NYOIL threw his grenade, YouTube saw fit to make a star of bow-legged, transgender Southern rapper Ms. Peachez. The video for her song “Fry That Chicken” looks like a low-budget short as directed by D.W. Griffith: a ghetto-country, she-male mammy plays chicken-frying pied piper to a troupe of pickaninnies. On paper? Brilliant. The possibility for scathing subversiveness is infinite.

Again, the Web was (and continues to be) a battleground for heated debate: Was it just good-natured fun or reheated cooning? Gender-fucking triumph? (Uh, no on that.)

Ms. Peachez’ shtick is almost performance art — a knowing embrace of stereotypes, a dead-on replication of rap’s state-of-2006 beats. It’s also an unabashed celebration of things many black folk still have shame around: Southern-ness, countriness, faggotry and ingenuity born of poverty. It’s also the embodiment of the galling simple-mindedness that defines current hip-hop. Ms. Peachez’ shit would easily fit in on most rap stations and video shows, because unconscious self-parody has become a building block of black pop culture.

As stupid as “Fry That Chicken” is, it’s complicated. This video, a hodgepodge of cultural pride and internalized racist stereotypes — all set to mama-said-make-you-dance beats — speaks volumes about how shit be right now. That’s how fucked up both hip-hop and black America are. (And, yes, NYOIL calls out Ms. Peachez in his video too, which is sublime synchronicity.)

Watching a passionate debate like this take place outside academia or music-critic circle jerks was like finding the faintest pulse in a body you’d assumed dead.


CD TITLE OF THE YEAR:Hip-Hop Is Dead, by Nas (Def Jam).


QUOTE OF THE YEAR NO. 1: “Of course hip-hop cannot be dead. Nas was warning us. One of the best ways to warn a culture is to shock it. I think Nas shocked hip-hop culture by declaring its death. By declaring its death, it means that it will live now.”

—KRS-One, in an interview with AllHipHop.com