"I was in a bad position, and they preyed on me, bro. They were chasing the money."

Said Boosie BadAzz, quoted in "Boosie Lobbied for a Trump Pardon. It Never Came. He Wants a Refund. The Southern rapper paid $600,000 to two right-wing operatives. Now, they’re in a dispute over a contract the rapper believes entitles him to at least half his money back" (NYT).

Jake Tapper looks supremely woeful as he labors to help us with Marco Rubio's 90s hip-hop references.

The pain in Jake Tapper‘s face is priceless-he really feels the need to let you know that Marco Rubio used hip-hop references 🤣 pic.twitter.com/gOHjK6g1Hj

— Karli Bonne’ 🇺🇸 (@KarluskaP) May 7, 2026

"I think that rock has been purposely dialed down in the culture.... All I know is I saw the gravity shift...."

"This gets wizard behind the curtain, right? Somebody's going to say, 'Well, how do you know who was the wizard behind the curtain?' All I know is I saw the gravity shift. Okay? If you were at MTV or around MTV in 1997–98, suddenly they decided rock was out—right when rock was still very, very high up—and it was replaced by rap. They immediately changed their standards and practices. Things that weren't allowed were suddenly allowed; people were waving guns. Okay, so some people assert that the CIA was involved in all that—again, above my pay grade—but I saw it happen. I did witness it happen. And of course great music came out of it. So it's not like a barren wasteland where something was pushed in to replace something else. Qualitative things and great artists came in, but there was this overt shift. I saw it happen. And then now... rap seems to be waning in terms of its cultural influence. Pop is completely dominant. Rock is probably the most dominant ticket-selling thing in the Western world, and yet there's almost no representation of rock in culture. So why do we have that schism? I think they purposely dialed down the ability of rock stars to have a voice in the culture...."

Says Billy Corgan:

"Do you think it’s a good idea to bring a 1-year-old baby to a concert where the decibels are this f–king high? That baby doesn’t even know what it’s doing here."

"Next time, protect their ears or something. For real. It’s heavy. It’s your responsibility. You’re waving them around like they’re a toy.. That baby doesn’t want to be there, for real. I’m telling you with all love and respect, now that I’m a father… would never bring them to a concert. For the next time, be a bit more aware."

Said Maluma, quoted in "Rapper Maluma stops concert to scold mom for ‘irresponsible’ act with her baby" (NY Post).

I couldn’t understand Kendrick Lamar’s words but it seemed like a statement of anger against America — not really the "meaning" of the Super Bowl, whatever that's supposed to be.

Kendrick literally protested, and taunted America in front of the president during America’s biggest sports event. Chefs kiss. pic.twitter.com/5xmcQsIuuu

— Joy De’Angela (@joydeangela) February 10, 2025

Was this a metaphor? Divide the nation with rap music or something? I don’t get it. What was the assignment?

— 😵‍💫 (@Joshdr) February 10, 2025

"Don't ask me nothin' about nothin' – I just might tell you the truth."

Sang Timothée Chalamet, on "SNL" last night, where he was the host, in a bunch of skits, and also performed, in his Bob Dylan persona, as the musical guest.

There were 3 songs — "Outlaw Blues" and, surprisingly "Three Angels"...

... and "Tomorrow Is a Long Time"...

What did you think? It's very hard for me to judge... other than that I was delighted that "Three Angels" was chosen and disappointed that the sound wasn't balanced properly in the end of the song and we lost Timmy's voice. But does anyone hear the music they play, does anyone even try?

I'm interested in the fashion interpretation of Bob's famous polka dots. Bob's were a shirt. Timmy's — same size and color — were a hoodie. The shift from shirt to hoodie sheds light on the choice to do "Three Angels." It's a rap song.

ADDED: I haven't been able to force myself to go see Chalamet's movie yet, so I don't know how close these performances last night are to his embodiment of Bob in the movie. In a Reddit discussion, the top comment is: "Actually credit for Timmy for not doing Bob, I much more appreciate a Dylan cover that's not trying to be Bob and that rendition of Three Angels sounded fresh." 

"Searching, nonlinear, placid-but-itchy songs are his apparent medium now, but retreat is his real art..."

"Can someone who was once so present find meaning in absence?"

From a review, in the NYT, of "Dreams Once Buried Beneath the Dungeon Floor Slowly Sprout Into Undying Gardens" by André 3000.

He was a member of the duo Outkast and "one of the most innovative rappers ever," but Outkast has not put out a recording in almost 20 years, and this new album has no rapping or even any words at all. It's purely instrumental, and the instruments are, it says here, "a digital wind instrument, a Maya flute and others of wood and bamboo." 

At that last link, there's a quote from André saying that when he was 25, he thought, "I don’t want to be a 40-year-old rapper" and he still agreed with that. That quote is from 2014. He's also quoted saying now, "In my mind, I really would like to make a rap album. So maybe that happens one day, but I got to find a way to say what I want to say in an interesting way that’s appealing to me at this age." He's 48.

"It seems Ice Cube has become quite the conservative media darling lately, sitting down with not just Carlson, but Joe Rogan and Piers Morgan as well."

"He’s joining a long list of rappers – Kanye West, Da Baby, Kodak Black, Lil Pump – who have all put themselves in dangerous proximity to conservative politicians even as rightwing populism threatens to destroy their communities.... So what do these rappers have in common with rightwingers who wouldn’t otherwise touch them with a 10ft pole? Shared values. In discussions about money, gender identity, public health and a variety of social issues, rappers and rightwingers have a lot more in common than you’d immediately think. Many people from both groups share hypermasculinity, conservative Christian values, and a distrust of social institutions (justified or not); and on this common ground sits a messy and dangerous alliance full of people who ordinarily would hate each other, but have come together to make vulnerable people their enemy...."

Writes Tayo Bero in "Why are Black rappers aligning themselves with the right? Ice Cube has joined a long list of rappers who have cuddled up with conservative pundits and politicians" (The Guardian).

"During Tuesday’s testimony, [Megan Thee Stallion] described the rap game as a 'boy’s club' and said she knew she would be hated because she was 'telling on one y’all’s friend.'"

From "‘Going through torture’: Megan Thee Stallion testifies against Tory Lanez/Rapper takes stand in case against Canadian-born musician, emotionally recounting night when she was shot" (The Guardian).

The Texas-born rapper, whose real name is Megan Pete... described how the attack left her with constant pain in her feet and said the reliving the incident in the public eye had been “torture.”

“I don’t wanna be on this Earth,” Pete said at one point during a daylong testimony. “I wish he woulda shot and killed me if I knew I would go through this torture.”...

"Robert 'Bobby' E. Crimo III... performed as a rapper who went by the name 'Awake,' whose recent music videos included depictions of mass murder."

"Crimo’s most recent video posted to YouTube showed him in the aftermath of a school shooting. It ends with Crimo draping himself in an American flag.... Crimo had his own Discord server, where fans and people who knew him would chat. The community featured a politics board filled with nihilistic political memes. The most recent post before the shooting, which was posted in March, was a picture of Budd Dwyer, the Pennsylvania state treasurer who shot and killed himself on live television in the late 1980s, along with the caption 'I wish politicians still gave speeches like this.'... Crimo didn’t frequently post about major political figures on his websites, except for two posts about former President Donald Trump. A video posted to Crimo’s YouTube page on Jan. 2, 2021, appears to show Crimo among a throng of protesters cheering for Trump’s presidential motorcade outside an airport. Crimo flips the phone’s orientation to reveal his face at the end of the video. Crimo is also seen draped in a Trump flag in a June 27, 2021, post on Twitter. The post is captioned with only the word 'spam.'"

 
From "Highland Park shooting person of interest left online trail of violent imagery/Social media profiles show he performed as a rapper who went by the name 'Awake,' whose recent music videos included depictions of mass murder" (NBC News).

"The day after his mother died in 1977, Barthes began writing reflections of her death on small strips of paper. The collection of 330 cards..."

"... was published... as 'Mourning Diary.'... Note by note, he attempted to record and make sense of his mother’s passing in a collection of reflections accumulated into a postulation of a book. In one of his earliest entries, he notes how after someone dies, the future itself gives way to a sort of unhinged manufacturing of time he refers to as 'futuromania.'"

From "A memoir of loss, in encyclopedia entries/When my mother died, I struggled to untangle grief, time and memory" by Kristin Keane (WaPo).

Her memoir is called "An Encyclopedia of Bending Time." I would rule out reading any author who puts words together like this: "a collection of reflections accumulated into a postulation." It's close to the way rap music sounds to me, except for "accumulated." Try again, with "accumulation," and you might achieve something with intentional rhymomania.

The revenge of Uncle Fluffy.

This is another piece in the NYT about Will Smith — it's by Melena Ryzik, Nicole Sperling and Matt Stevens — and I think it's worth reading, because it raises the more general problem of what happens to a person who chooses the strategy of niceness:

From his start as a goofy, G-rated rapper and sitcom star through his carefully managed rise as a blockbuster action hero, Will Smith has spent decades radiating boundless likability. But his amiable image was something of a facade, he wrote in his memoir, noting that a therapist had nicknamed his nice guy persona “Uncle Fluffy.”...

Mr. Smith wrote that he had another, less public, side: “the General,” a punisher who emerged when joviality didn’t get the job done. “When the General shows up, people are shocked and confused,” he wrote in “Will,” his 2021 memoir. “It was sweetness, sweetness, sweetness and then sour, sour, sourness.”

I'm interested in the wages of niceness. You can try to be nice, but if it's a strategy — a means to an end — it's only going to work until you snap or — even if you never snap — it can fail because other people perceive you as phony or because they may rely on you to keep up the niceness charade while they proceed to take advantage of you more and more.  

Remember the "Queen of Nice"? Who was that? Rosie O'Donnell? Ellen DeGeneres? Neither of them turned out to be very nice, and maybe deploying the "nice" persona made them even less nice than they'd have been if they'd gone ahead and been straightforward. And yet, where would they be if they hadn't played "nice"? Where would Will Smith be? Would he have been a big success in rap music if he hadn't taken the "goofy, G-rated" lane?

But most of that NYT article is about how he's hurt his family's brand, which was "rooted in his seemingly-authentic congeniality":

For several years, a growing branch of Smith family enterprises has adeptly delivered reality-style revelation and emotional intimacy across an expanding number of platforms. Beyond Mr. Smith’s acting career and his introspective, best-selling memoir, there is the popular “Red Table Talk” show on Facebook Watch, in which Ms. Pinkett Smith, their daughter, Willow, and Jada’s mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris, hold forth on everything from racial identity to workout routines to the Smiths’ unconventional marriage....

How they sold that "unconventional marriage" as part of a "goofy, G-rated" "congeniality," I don't know. I haven't been watching. I'm surprised by what counts as wholesome and mainstream sexuality these days.  

“I think most people would give him the benefit of the doubt,” said [Jonathan] Murray, a co-founder of the production company Bunim Murray, which pioneered reality TV. “But it really will rest on whether we believe that he is authentically dealing with this.”

There's that word "authentic" again — used, again, not to mean actual authenticity, but the perception of  authenticity. It's  "seemingly-authentic" and "whether we believe" we're seeing authenticity. The authenticity can be completely phony baloney, but the question is, are we — the idiots on the sofa — buying it?

"And together, their righteous music created all kinds of tacit friction with the accusations of racism currently being leveled at today’s NFL..."

"... from the league’s silencing of quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s public stand against racist policing to coach Brian Flores’s recent lawsuit against the league for its allegedly discriminatory hiring practices. Not so tacit: Dre’s foregrounding of rap music as a truth-to-power speaking mechanism and a rebuke of the American police violence that continues to disproportionately end so many Black lives across this broken country of ours."

Writes Chris Richards in "Dr. Dre delivered the Super Bowl halftime show rap music deserves/Today’s most popular idiom of American music was long overdue for this kind of celebration" (WaPo).

Tacit friction....

"Righteous music" creates "tacit friction" — "all kinds of tacit friction" — friction against "accusations of racism." What point is being made (if any)? The fact that rap artists performed at the Super Bowl somehow counters all the various arguments that there is racism within the business of football? 

If that's Richards's point I'm not impressed. Of course, the business of football likes to put the most famous and popular artists out there on its big Super Bowl half-time stage. They want credit for that, presumably, but I wouldn't give any. Do they get demerits? Eh. Why? So what can you say? You can say it creates all kinds of tacit friction. In which case, why say anything?

Speaking of not saying anything, I couldn't hear the words. Rarely can you understand the words from the performers at Super Bowl half-time, but it's a special problem with rap, which depends so heavily on its words. But I know the material performed is very famous, so much of the audience knows the words and heard it just fine.

And anyway, as I was just saying yesterday, here, "My personal policy is to skip every song as soon as the 'n-word' comes up." And by "comes up," I mean, I hear it. I never did.

"We pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music [with] displaying of guns, violence. We allow this to stay on the sites."

"We are alarmed by the use of social media to really over-proliferate this violence in our communities. This is contributing to the violence that we are seeing all over the country. It one of the rivers we have to dam."

Said NY Mayor Eric Adams, quoted in "Eric Adams urges social media to ban ‘drill’ rap videos for promoting violence" (NY Post).

There are so many songs about violence, often sung from the point of view of a murderer. Indeed, the second one that sprang to my mind was from the sanctimonious promoter of censorship, Neil Young:

 

I don't know rap. Never heard of "drill rap" before just now. So I have no rap-focused opinion. But I oppose censorship, and I understand art well enough to make the distinction between the writer and the story told.

Down by the river I shot my baby/Down by the river/Dead, ooh/Shot her dead, ooh....

And what was the first song Althouse thought of? 

"I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms—but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers."

"According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.... The new music market is actually shrinking.... [T]he 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It was twice that rate just three years ago.... [T]he current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police. I saw it myself last week at a retail store, where the youngster at the cash register was singing along with Sting on 'Message in a Bottle' (a hit from 1979) as it blasted on the radio. A few days earlier, I had a similar experience at a local diner, where the entire staff was under thirty but every song more than forty years old. I asked my server: 'Why are you playing this old music?'

"The moral price of life in a fallen world was not a thought exercise for Simmons [DMX], who died this past April of a cocaine-induced heart attack."

"Born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1970, he was the only son of Arnett Simmons and Joe Barker. Barker left, leaving Simmons — a teenager — to raise her child alone in Yonkers. She struggled with how to raise a Black son amid the poverty of the School Street projects, and subjected him to outrageous abuse. In a 2019 interview with GQ, Simmons recounted being beaten so badly by Arnett that she knocked his teeth out; he was 6 years old. The mistreatment cloaked his life in almost total, grinding fear.... The abuse begot criminal and antisocial behavior — Simmons once stabbed another kid in the face with a pencil — which in turn triggered more abuse. One summer, trying to discipline Simmons, Arnett locked him in his bedroom for months. He was allowed to leave only for bathroom breaks. In 1983, Arnett effectively severed their relationship when she took him to the Children’s Village group home on the pretense that they were just visiting. It was a trick: She left him there. 'Right then and there... I learned to just put away, conceal, bury whatever bothered me. End of story. I think another side of me was born right there, that enabled me to protect myself.'"

From "DMX/His music seethed with aggression and the kind of pain Black men rarely get to air in public" in "The Lives They Lived" — the NYT collection of essays about people who died last year.

"Michelle Obama said that it was 'the best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen,' an observation that put Michelangelo, Mozart and Miles Davis in their place."

"There have been a few detractors but most have been confined to isolated pockets of social media, like guerrilla fighters facing overwhelming odds. What is it that generates so much excitement?... [W]hatever [Hamilton]’s true merits, it has at least bridged the ever-growing gap between Broadway and popular song. Think of it, if you like, as Les Mis for the beatbox generation. Just as the Boublil and Schönberg celebration of life on the Parisian barricades goes overboard with the bombast, so Miranda’s narrative bludgeons you with facts. The one obvious problem is that the rap lyrics are at the same time mundane and relentlessly dense.... The effect is sometimes numbing: imagine if Cole Porter, who had a more nimble grasp of language, wrote nothing but list songs. We’d be bored."

From "Hamilton review — Facts aren’t music to everyone’s ears" by Clive Davis (London Times).

"Hamilton" is reopening in London after the lockdown, so this is a reassessment from Davis. If you want to get into the subject of how people in England respond to an American telling of the Revolution, you'll have to go back to reviews written in 2017. So don't wonder about why Davis isn't doing that. 

He's mostly bellyaching about rap, and I thought the complaint "rap lyrics are at the same time mundane and relentlessly dense" was worth thinking about. I don't listen to enough rap to have a valid opinion, but I do find it offputting because it demands a lot work out of the listener. You have to pay attention... though I always resort to looking up the lyrics and reading them if there are ever lyrics I want to be familiar with, as occasionally happens.

But what is this category of songs called "list songs" — "imagine if Cole Porter... wrote nothing but list songs"? I'd never heard of this, but there's a Wikipedia article:

"In the week since Lil Nas X released the provocative, pointedly homoerotic 'Industry Baby' music video and North Carolina rapper DaBaby regaled a Miami Rolling Loud audience with a vile quip about gay sex..."

"... and AIDS between songs, conversations about homosexuality and homophobia in hip-hop that have been percolating all year have come to a head..... It’s been illuminating watching masks come off and hearing what people think these two stories say about the state of hip-hop.... The message in the many twists this dialogue has taken is that a lot of people who claim credit for being open-minded also maintain that they deserve the right to object to some of the avenues of expression favored by the queer people they purport to have no problem with. It’s acceptance with a caveat: You can be gay, bi, trans, pan, nonbinary, what have you, so long as you don’t make too much noise about it. If you coddle hip-hop’s cisgendered, heteronormative core, you can cook. If you show too much queer attraction and self-expression, people get uncomfortable. The illusion of respect for our differences erodes. Acceptance is conditional upon giving the masses something to relate to.... More and more of us are taking up the language of the privileged but aggrieved, of people who see the slightest request for consideration as an attack on their personal freedoms.... A lot of people want things to stay the way they used to be and seem unable to grasp that the way things were required marginalized people to suck it up and live as second-class citizens in a country clearly built for someone else...."

From "I Don’t See an End to This" by Craig Jenkins (NY Magazine).

Here's the video — "Industrial Baby" — celebrating prison sex. I could only watch about a quarter of it because I turn off any recording immediately if I hear the "n-word." 

The "vile quip" was: "If you didn’t show up today with HIV, AIDS, or any of them deadly sexually transmitted diseases, that’ll make you die in two to three weeks, then put your cell-phone lighter up.... Fellas, if you ain’t sucking dick in the parking lot, put your cell-phone lighter up."

FROM THE EMAIL: J writes: "For some reason, very young children love Lil Nas. I find it disturbing." J links to the video below, and I don't see how you can wonder what the reason is. The kids are loving the very cute and catchy song "Old Town Road," which isn't about prison sex. It's just about riding a horse:

UPDATE: "DaBaby Pulled From Lollapalooza Lineup After Homophobic Comments" (NY Magazines):

“Lollapalooza was founded on diversity, inclusivity, respect, and love. With that in mind, DaBaby will no longer be performing at Grant Park tonight.”

He did make a mild effort at apology — basically the ultimate in nonapology — "My apologies for being me."

"Whenever someone wants to play down the importance of vocal virtuosity, Bob Dylan is Exhibit A: a brilliant croaker..."

"... who makes you feel sorry for all those hacks content to simply carry a tune. But for precisely that reason, Mr. Dylan isn't really a bad singer. He's got an unconventional voice, to be sure... but he's too idiosyncratic, too rock 'n' roll. A great bad singer must never give up on goodness. Perhaps Mr. West knows how preposterous he sounds, but he's still singing the best he can. I'd propose that the father of modern bad singing is Biz Markie, the rapper best known for the classic anti-love song 'Just a Friend,' from 1989. His bellowed plea -- wildly out of tune, and totally unforgettable -- sounded like something concocted after a day of romantic disappointments and a night of heavy drinking: 'Oh baby, you/ You got what I need/ But you say he's just a friend.' With each repetition of the chorus, he sounded funnier and more unhinged."

That's from "The Sweet Sounds Of Really Bad Singing" by Kelefa Sanneh, published in the NYT on January 18, 2004. That was 4 days after this blog began, but somehow I didn't catch it and blog it at the time. I'm reading it today because it's linked in what is — I'm sad to say — an obituary: "Biz Markie, Hip-Hop’s ‘Just a Friend’ Clown Prince, Dies at 57/An innovative yet proudly goofy rapper, he had an unlikely crossover hit with a tune that led one critic to call him (favorably) 'the father of modern bad singing'" (NYT). 

This is a wonderfully catchy song, and the terrible singing is part of what make it catchy and fun. If you watched MTV back in 1989 — as I did — this will surely resonate. Skip ahead to 1:33 to get right to the singing, but start at the beginning for spoken-word cheesy comedy and a story told in slow-paced rap: 

 

From the obituary: 

Biz Markie has said he was never supposed to be the vocalist handling those notes. “I asked people to sing the part, and nobody showed up at the studio,” he explained later, “so I did it myself.”

Perfect! How beautiful when things go wrong and the end result is far superior than if everything had worked out as planned.

"I can hear the hurt and frustration over colorism, of feeling still unseen in the feedback. I hear that without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive..."

".... of the community we wanted so much to represent with pride and joy. In trying to paint a mosaic of this community, we fell short. I’m truly sorry. I’m learning from the feedback, I thank you for raising it, and I’m listening.” 

Tweets Lin-Manuel Miranda, quoted in "Lin-Manuel Miranda Addresses Lack of Afro-Latino Representation in ‘In the Heights’: ‘We Fell Short’" (Variety). 

Here's the criticism that caused him to go straight to apology mode:

DAMN DAMN DAMN THIS IS PAINFUL pic.twitter.com/A4TOwYwHlb

— numa perrier (@missnuma) June 13, 2021

By the way, that's an interesting use of the word "extractive" — "without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive." Is that a new usage? The OED has the adjective "extractive," but in the sense of "extractive industries" — like the coal industry, where a resource is extracted. 

Miranda does not want to have merely extracted material from the community — Washington Heights in NYC. He wants to represent it. To extract is to treat the people like an inanimate resource — like, say, coal. He wants to treat people like people, not things. But you may question whether matching the colors of the actors to the colors of the people in the neighborhood is the way to treat people like people.