Driving around last
night, after picking my younger one up from school, we were en route to get
some groceries and Dominique Young Unique’s (DYU’s) “War Talk” popped on the
mix. My daughter was familiar with “War
Talk” as I’d introduced the video two years back. Car etiquette is ‘kept-real’ by a polite
system of musical rotation, wherein they get a tune, and then I get a
tune. And if this was going to be my
tune well then we would be turning ‘War Talk’ up.
My daughter’s tune had been “Wolf” by EXO. She and her older sister are infatuated with
this half Chinese, half Korean boy-band, most of whom look like lithe middle
school peers with eye liner. I tried to
suggest to my younger daughter, perhaps inappropriately, that if EXO met DYU on
stage, the prior would be forced to flee.
She pondered this.
“War Talk” is raw, and assuming you can discern her diction,
violent. It really has no business being
part of any young girl’s world. And yet.
. . In the first run before the chorus
she says the world “girl” in a rather mighty, convincing fashion, at least
seventeen times. I know my girls heard
that word “girl” over and over, and understood it, and the attitude rather than
understanding anything about “AK’s” and “glocks.” They felt her confrontational, contemporary
presence, even if they did not necessarily dig it. Still, yes, I have mixed feelings about drawing
attention to the song. https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=212586772095797
The chorus is rough, but intriguing.
War talk, war talk, war talk, war
talk,
All you motherfuckers just take a walk,
Get up on my block and you’ll feel
this glock.
Hmm. A latter day
“Master’s of War” a la “The Freewhelin’ Bob Dylan”? Is this a young, Tampa Florida teen’s
critique of mainstream media weighting of war coverage during prime time? Is she fed up with Obama’s lack of progress
in the Middle East? No. DYU is, of course, claiming her territory as
the baddest, the toughtest, who will slaughter all comers, in a tradition as
old as the Growling Tiger’s calypsos; as old as the blues itself.
The groove is porky-phat, there’ a nice distorted
power-chord guitar bit at the end and the way she rides up on the beat
throughout, is like some kind of young Olympic Gabby Douglas who could but
never does fall off. The confidence, the
timing, are sublime and speak to that thirty year promise that every generation
has a chance to step up and reinvent hip hop.
But the video of the song is what hooked me on Dominique Young Unique
when I first saw it. It has a homemade feel. She poses tough and that looks real. And then she collapses over laughing and that
looks real. She looks so much like so
many young African American ladies I taught in Brooklyn, for so many years, in
my twenties. It is hackneyed to say, but
I almost feel like I know her, or perhaps I knew her, once. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McpJr45KXsY
And this is what’s odd.
I want my girls to know her. Or
something of her and that she is happening right now. Her toughness, her vulgarity, her sexual
assertiveness all not withstanding. Me
and my girls, we read Maya Angelou together.
We play all kinds of Bessie Smith and Sarah Vaughan around the house and
I’ve made it my business to introduce them to Queen Latifah and M.C. Lyte. But it’s not the same. To grasp the importance of the African
American tradition to American and to world history, one can’t just look
back. Always, right now, someone
somewhere is tearing the tradition apart, ripping open the seams and you need
to understand where the electric current is grounded today in the present as
you consider all the remarkable, historical crests and troughs.
I would, certainly, be aghast if my nine year-old or my
twelve year-old began to swing her outstretched arm around singing “all you
motherfuckers just take a walk.” But gradually,
incrementally, I want them to understand that underground hip hop, that
underground punk, underground whatever is yet to be created, these are vital
forces, they are currencies of power, that spring up out of the American soil,
from soil everywhere and bludgeon modernity into this direction and that. Informed by race, informed by gender and
culture, underground music is one way to understand cool. And cool, that illusive shadow can be all the
more ineffable, all the more difficult to translate, or embrace from the
vantage of suburban Beijing.
I’m sure EXO mean well.
But I’m gonna throw my hat in the ring here. They aren’t cool. They are a product, produced by a no doubt
successful Korean hit-maker business that has extended the magic of Korean
soft-power from Seoul up into Japan with one half-Japanese and half-Korean band
and then done the same over to China, repeating the formula for the PRC. It’s brilliant. It’s profitable. It is very interesting from the perspective
of regional relations and even as it concerns the future of North East Asian
security. But my hat is still lying
there. The songs aren’t funky. The dances are weak. The band isn’t cool. (Thus spoke the 47 year-old white man.)
Yeah, yeah, who am I to judge. I know.
If I were 47 in the 1920’s I would have hated Duke Ellington. If I were 47 in 1964 I would have hated the
Beatles and 47 in 1977 and I’d have hated the Clash and the Pistols. I know, I know.
And yes, we can commence to throw plenty odd caveats
around. DYU’s subsequent songs mostly
suck to my ears. Here latest thing “Earthquake”
is plodding overproduced and seems neither young nor particularly unique. Like so many raw rappers she seems to have
matured into flashy irrelevance rather swiftly.
One more pop 虎头蛇尾[1] Her
first video probably cost $10K to make and I absolutely believe. I play it again, immediately. I want to know her. This latest bit where she and a bunch of
other costumed imbeciles pretend to be super heroes destroying Manhattan like
an . . . earthquake, probably cost $10M, wasn’t funky, wasn’t funny and I was
bored after fifteen seconds. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ30WRNXBZ8
Meanwhile EXO might have some soul, some real youth angst
buried under the make up. And maybe they
will toss off their managers and mature into something transcendent. It happens every once, in a very long
while. And yes, thank you very much; I
actually have bothered to translate some EXO lyrics. “Wolf” is about boys chasing irresistibly
cute girls around and evokes the lyrical nuance of the unfortunate Duran Duran
hit from which the IP may have been pinched: “Hungry Like the Wolf.” http://www.kpoplyrics.net/exo-wolf-lyrics-english-romanized.html
I feel
the sensation; I feel it at once.
I’ll take you in one mouthful like cheese.
I take in [your] scent, scrutinize [your] color
I’ll eat you up with more refine than [drinking] wine.
Ah, but the strength in my toenail weakens, so my appetite yeah is gone.
I’ll take you in one mouthful like cheese.
I take in [your] scent, scrutinize [your] color
I’ll eat you up with more refine than [drinking] wine.
Ah, but the strength in my toenail weakens, so my appetite yeah is gone.
To be fair, the EXO
song “Mama” is actually a dark, nihilistic confrontation with a mythical
mommy. (D.C. hardcore band Void, from
two posts back, might relate). I’ll
grant that it is complicated, lyrically.
I acknowledge, that listening across languages the burden is on me to
work even harder to understand what is being said. http://www.kpoplyrics.net/exo-k-mama-lyrics-english-romanized.html
Full of envy being that anonymous
mask
Even after seeing the end, you’re
still full with hunger
Are you satisfied now?
Wouldn’t we face our eyes anymore?
Wouldn’t we communicate? Wouldn’t
we love?
Tearing up to the reality that
hurts
Say MAMA if you can change it, say
MAMA
It is certainly not a formulaic approach to hit song-101,
like, say “Wolf.” But, peering back over, at yonder ring, my hat
is still lying there. The
tune itself, the groove, the mix, the attack, the diction, these don’t need any
translation. The tune isn’t funky. And “War Talk” is. And somehow or other, I want you two gals of
mine to understand the difference.
Kids should have time to be kids and not worry about some
old guys’ idea of cool or funky. But
cool, like “nutrition” is packed up and sold to kids around the world. And I think we need to weigh-in with some
guidance where we can as to the verities of “real”. Not easy. You meet some seductive, tricky characters, like
Legba there at the portal to “cool.”
Cool comes for a song, and then disappears for the next. Just ask DYU.
It is a dangerous force to confront.
All too soon you need an understanding of race politics and gender
politics and so many other criteria to chart your way and unless you’re careful
it can all quickly become rather uncool. But I
believe that cool is just as perilous force to be ignorant of, especially as
young international ladies who’ll have to figure out America, and the way all
its contradictory avenues of power work at home and around the world, sooner or
later.
In the mean time, I believe my daughter gets to pick the
next song.
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