Pharmaceutical rhyming

After 500 odd words of disgusted tirading over David Hadju's clueless depiction of Fall Out Boy in The New Republic, I suppose I ought to point out some really excellent music criticism when I see it. Even though I'm not much of a gangster rap fan (I tend to prefer—surprise!—nerdy, literate hip hop of the Anticon and Def Jux variety), Jonah Weiner’s Slate piece on the underground rebirth of drug-dealin’ rhymesters Clipse is just all sorts of fun. Providing a good introduction to the culture of the mixtape as well as a spot on description of the ever more theatrical, luxurious drift of the rapping-hood persona, he delivers well-written, insightful commentary that informs and entertains without any of the pretentious hipster bluster that weighs down so much of the criticism at Pitchfork.

Check out this bit on Clipse’s total obsession with dealer-rhymes:

Malice's promise is that Clipse, through sheer volume and detail of drug talk, can rehabilitate rap by reconnecting gangsta signifiers—shopworn, depleted, and theatricalized—to their pungent, gritty signifieds. Or, as Malice puts it elsewhere, cheekily alluding to hours spent cooking crack on a stovetop: "Sold a million plus/ and still I'm in the kitchen like I'm Wolfgang Puck."

And later, on the guile-laden persona the rhyme and drug mavens adopt:

Clipse breaks rank with rappers like the Notorious B.I.G., who justified drug dealing as a means to feed his daughter, or 50 Cent, who sees it as one in a limited set of career options open to black youth, or Kanye West, who identified it as a complicated sort of political violence on his recent song "Crack Music." On Cheap, Clipse refuse to explain, romanticize, or "humanize" the dealer's lifestyle. They are unabashed, calculating villains. "It's only logic, I'm all about a profit," Malice raps. In this way, Clipse leave those of us whose neighborhoods haven't been ravaged by crack to sit in the stench of our own voyeuristic enjoyment.

Weiner perfectly details the theatricality, the performance, and the character-building that so often goes into a successful rap act. Acts like these pick up where the flaming guitar and face paint rockers of the 1970s left off, only instead of selling hyped up devil worship, which would simply come off as silly these days, they pass themselves off as something far more customized to enrage our modern sensibility of evil: inner city crime lords. Rap and its various electronic, pop, and hip-hop offshoots, have become the dominant styles of American music precisely because its practitioners have managed to upgrade the larger the life braggadocio that used to mark successful rock acts.

This leads me to believe that, with few exceptions, rock will quickly become to my generation what jazz is our parents’: Not forgotten, and still loved and played by many, often with great skill, but with only a minor presence in the pop culture scene. Already, admitting you listen to indie rock, which is where all the really interesting rock thrives, gives you a slight air of intellectual prissiness, as well as a bit of cultured cool. I predict it won’t be long before the final death knell of rock as a youth movement arrives: regular indie rock nights on NPR.