“Times” Editor: Hip-Hop Is Just All Right With Us
Sam Sifton, the New York Times‘ culture editor, seems like a good guy, and not just because he responds to the queries in this week’s reader-reply survey in cool-teacher mode. (Reader John J. Condon: “What is your explanation for the downgrading of dance coverage by The New York Times? Is the paper dumbing it down?” Sifton’s reply: “Your letter bums me out, Mr. Condon.”) Among the topics discussed so far: Is classical coverage declining? (No way, dude! Classical is as relevant as ever!) Why is Paris Hilton covered in Arts and Leisure? (The people can’t get enough of her!) And our favorite, from none other than New Jersey assistant D.A. Peter G. O’Malley: You guys cover rap. What’s up with that?!?
Q. Why does The Times devote as much space as it does to covering rap and hip-hop? Indeed, one might ask why it gives any coverage at all, but I won’t go that far. It would seem that the audience for this type of ephemera is not generally likely to be reading The Times, though I have been wrong before.
More to the point: while rock criticism may have seemed like a silly venture when it started, considering the thinness of the material, it would seem like deconstructing Beethoven and Rilke when compared to analyzing the trite, repetitious, crude, and juvenile stuff that is the mass of hip-hop.
— Peter G. O’Malley, assistant U.S. attorney, District of New Jersey
A. Counselor! Don’t badger the witness! The Times covers hip-hop — and rap, and trip-hop, and rock, and cabaret, and folk metal and jazz and French electronica, and the whole pop music shebang — because it’s an art form. You may find some of it trite and repetitious, crude and juvenile, but it is. It may be that you’re just not listening hard enough.
Take as just one brief example, the rapper T.I.’s monster club hit “What You Know,” on his CD “King.” As Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The Times, T.I. used the song to set his raspy drawl against the sizzle and pop of a synthesizer track. The lyrics at first sound merely like a bunch of taunts, street-corner threats:
See all that attitude’s Unnecessary, dude. You never carry tools. Not even square — he cube.
Here’s Mr. Sanneh, explaining that: “Listeners transfixed by his entertaining interjections (‘O.K.?!’) and exaggerated pronunciation might easily have overlooked the rigorous poetic construction. But that’s a neat little quatrain: four lines, six syllables apiece, each building to a trisyllabic oblique rhyme. Somehow, T.I. delivers supertechnical raps without ever sounding as boring as that last sentence.”
Kids today, huh?
Not how I’d have put it–that would have been something closer to, “Because it’s outselling all the crap you listen to, jerk.” Oh wait–that’s not me, that’s my alter ego, M.A.T., talking. Never mind.
