Apparently not all is quiet in the indie music blog community. While our little white male (strangely homoerotic) power society here at vdov.net is living in peace with all creatures, there is an all out verbal war going on out there in the (to use a fun cliche) “blogosphere.”
The bouts go like this:
—- Julianne Shepherd writes a fairly lame review on Pitchfork on the new David Banner hip-hop album. She definitely arrives at the right conclusion, that the album is good, but there is the typical Pitchfork incredible “read in.” Her best line is “…to [Kanye] West’s affable swagger, Banner offers murky nuance, no flinching, and a not-always-friendly-sounding, hulking bark.” That is a solid analysis of the way Banner comes off. However, after that it is pretty much on autopilot. The main argument is that Banner has some flaws in the album but he makes up for it by being a personality to be reckoned with. Fine a decent, if lacking review.
—- Bob Hammond retorts on vdov.net favorite Rebel Jukebox. It is a pretty good response. I do question a little bit the idea of reviewing a review, but he adds plenty of his own two cents about what the album is about. It is also a bit out of the scope of music reviewing to go for the politics, but with something like feminism and hip-hop they kind of go hand in hand, so maybe it is worth pointing out.
—- Then the fun begins with Ms. Shepherd’s re-retort which is where things really go sideways on you especially if you were just looking for a good album review in the first place.
So I thought in the spirit of vdov.net I would take this thing and look at it from a logical basis (we love that here). To get it out in the open the purpose here is not to stroke Bob’s ego or give credence to Ms. Shepherd’s argument, but to look at how we went from reviewing a new hip hop album to comparing Bob to O’Reilly and how it seems that even at our tender age we find ourselves parroting the moronic non-sequiters that litter the TV political show circuit and talk radio sphere. Then from there get into what I think is the really fun stuff, such as how did all the feminist rhetoric get conmingled with sexually demeaning rap.
What I have come to expect from Pitchfork is solid critique and review of new music that doesn’t make it into the “bigtime.” What I am getting is a steadily increasing stream of quasi-sociologic intellectual pieces that have less to do with the album than they have to do with some real or imagined social construct in which the album was born. Shepherd’s review reads more like a sophomore sociology paper than a review from an experienced reviewer. I am not going to sit here and believe that music can be extricated from the social framework in which it was born, but at a certain point you stop reviewing music and start blogging about sociology/politics/feminism/whatever. From what I have read and from what I have listened to Shepherd’s review was decent but certainly lacking. I enjoyed Hammond’s response, although was still skeptical about reviewing a review, but thought it was a superior analysis. The real contention was that somewhere along the lines (this may have been Hammond’s fault) this became about feminism. Although Hammond’s main contention was the review, Shepherd’s response was definitely all about the politics.
So if the politics are the little wheel, the big wheel is the fact that no one seems to have picked up on. That is the essential irony that we apparently have one (maybe two) women who want to promote feminism staking their femenist space out on hip-hop by David Banner. Without completely attacking Shepherd’s work I wonder how she reconciles her feminism with the fact that she writes rap reviews. Even an implicit glorification of rap (an 8.4) of this type, seems to be so anti-femenist as to be counterproductive. Perhaps reducing the misogyny or outright sexual domination and exploitation of most rap is a way for Shepherd to remove its sting to feminism, I can’t say what her motivations are. So either Shepherd is so able to completely divorce her politics from her review (something she flatly denies in her response to Mr. Hammond “Firstly, I don’t know that political agendas are extricable from anything anyone writes, whether said agendas are admitted, implied, or inherent.”) or she is injecting her feminism into a review that affirms an album with innumerable references to the degredation of women, and I am not sure which is more strange. I am not sure that you can write a music review of a rap album while maintaining a feminist stance without removing your beliefs from the review and look purely at the music.
If you go by Shepherd’s logic (from her retort) you cannot seperate your political leanings from your writing, which is highly dubious. If she can’t seperate her politics and writing is she giving a tacit acceptance that it is ok to demean women (publicly no less… which harkens to her CMJ panelist comments) as long as you do it in the form of creative and well procuced rap? Is she saying that it is ok for black rappers to say whatever they want about their sexual conquests, desired or acted upon no matter how belittling to women, while somehow Bob Hammond is held to a higher standard and is denounced for even suggesting that her politics may have played a role in the way her review was written (I mean her politics are part of her writing by her own volition)? Her description of her victimization as a women (…catcalls or what have you, on a daily basis–every day, yes daily, uncomfortable, uninvited and invasive verbal reminders of the power structure and where i fit in it…) is highly ironic considering in the same document she defends the song “Play” from the album. While she may have very naive ideas about the beauty of David Banner’s desire to give a woman pleasure I think the rest of the album points to the fact that he is not looking to affirm women in any way. Do the “catcalls” and more overt sexual overtures in the album bother her or does she believe that Banner is talking to other women that she is not really concerned with?
So in short I think the best way to think about this would be… does David Banner feel bad about demeaning women… would he care about harassment recieved by Shepherd (or any women) from leering and sexually rude men… what would he think about Hammond and Shepherd duking it out on feminism over an album that pretty explicitly glorifies crime, misogyny, the objectification of women, and an entire culture constructed around an unequal basis for the gender relation (g’s and hoes).
This article appeared in “Business Week” and has already generated some heated discussion on slashdot.org. The basic issue is whether groups within the US should continue to manage the servers that make the internet what it is or whether some or all of that governance should be transferred to an international body possibly under the UN.
As you may know Col. Merriweather over at