uncoolmag:

He Ain’t Even Know It: On Rick Ross, Rap, and Responsibility

By Henry Adaso

[This story appears along with 43 pages of essays, criticism and music discussion in the debut issue of UNCOOL. Download it here.]

This was going to be a defense of Rick Ross. I was going to start with an anecdote—something that happened last fall. I was going to note the aesthetic streaks on the sky, or something poetic like that. It was, indeed, a day warm enough to whip out the trusty Old Smokey and slap some salmon on the grill. I was going to start there and veer off into what actually happened that day and how it led me to a revelation.

An old flame had called to shoot the feces about something. She asked what kind of trouble I was getting into that day. I confessed that I was about to grill some fish, and that I was doing so to the lush, avaricious tunes of Rick Ross. Barbecue and Rick Ross go together like frat parties and beer explosions.

“That’s one thing I don’t miss about you: Rick Ross,” said the voice on the other end. Ouch. 

Click through for a full article from our debut issue. 

uncoolmag:

[This is an except from UNCOOL #1: Guiltless Pleasures. Download the new issue to read the rest along with articles by Devon Maloney, Jamieson Cox, Harley Brown and many more.]

On March 15, 2013, David Greenwald, Simon Vozick-Levinson and Lindsay Zoladz (via Google Hangouts) gathered in Austin, Texas to discuss the future of snobbery at an SXSW panel. It went something like this.

David Greenwald: We live in a time when anyone with Internet has access to nearly any song that’s ever been recorded, thanks to YouTube and Spotify and other services. Yet people are still picking sides or pushing aside interesting art because reasons well beyond the music. What we’ll explore today is how artists and consumers are changing and the future of music snobbery. For the purposes of our discussion, let’s define a snob as someone who is more than just a nerd—it’s someone who imposes his or her taste on others. One reason for snobbery throughout history, I think, is the way music relates to identity and how our taste differentiates us from others. We’re probably all familiar with the High Fidelity image of the record store guy who hates Art Garfunkel, but one interesting wrinkle of the Twitter era is the rise of pop artist fan armies: Beliebers, Directioners, Swifties and so on, tweens and teens who think other artists are totally unacceptable—like cheering for the Yankees in L.A. We’ve always had rivalries, like the Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones, but it’s fair to say this takes it to a new level. 

Simon Vozick-Levinson: Yep. Pop stars by definition have always had fiercely loyal fan bases—but I think you’re right that today’s organized fan communities are different in some interesting ways. Just ask Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney, who got a dose of the Beliebers’ wrath earlier this year. His sin: Shrugging off a TMZ reporter’s random question about Justin Bieber’s exclusion from the Grammys (“I dunno, he’s rich, right?”). This was not O.K. Bieber joked on Twitter that Carney “should be slapped around haha,” and his fans went for it—bombarding the drummer with seriously enraged rhetoric and even death threats for days on end. I couldn’t help but flash back to the spring of 2010, when I made the mistake of writing a slightly snarky blog post about the first-week sales of My World 2.0 and was rewarded with a tweet from Justin himself (“Its [sic] sad that some adults need to try and bring people down”), followed by a predictable wave of furious tweets and emails from his supporters.

The Internet was a crucial ingredient in both incidents: 20 years ago, most of Bieber’s fans probably wouldn’t have heard of either offending remark, and even if they did, it would have taken way more effort to track down me and Carney and tell us how much we suck. Now it’s trivially easy for the most hardcore fans to mount concerted campaigns of verbal abuse against anyone who’s perceived as not sharing their taste. How dare we not love Justin as much as they do? I suppose you could argue that Carney and I are the snobs here, for making very mild fun of a pop star—but at a certain point, you have to wonder whether this absurdly aggressive brand of fandom isn’t its own form of snobbery.

David: On the other hand, one perception of the indie world is that it’s very snobby, when we might argue that it’s really just geeky and curious. Lindsay, do you think Pitchfork still has that snobby tag attached to it or has the site moved beyond that?

Lindsay Zoladz: Well, I’m obviously biased here, but I want to believe Pitchfork has moved past the whole “music snob” stereotype—and I think that the perception of our readers has moved past that, too. Now that the Internet gives listeners unlimited access to everything, we’re living in a moment where the person with the most cultural capital isn’t the (often myopic) “music snob” but instead the cultural omnivore, who listens to a little bit of everything. Even among people we’re labeling as music snobs, the whole stereotype of the person who listens to “everything but hip-hop & country” would probably be dismissed as unfairly judgmental. This shift has been happening for a while—the music critic Carl Wilson writes about it in his great 2007 book Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste—but I think the rise of social media has really accelerated it in the past few years. And you’re seeing a lot of publications respond to this shift.

David: Both Pitchfork and Rolling Stone have a certain coverage scope. Pitchfork might not do a cover story on Green Day, but Rolling Stone would be less likely to do a Q&A with Youth Lagoon. I saw Paramore play here in Austin a few nights ago and they were fantastic—I’d love to see their new album get Pitchfork notice. What’s the difference here between reader service and snobbery? Is there the danger of losing your identity by making coverage too broad?

Simon: This is an interesting one. No publication can cover everything. Resources are finite, and you have to draw the line somewhere. But I actually think both RS and Pitchfork do a good job of covering a really broad range of music, from chart-topping pop to indie gems. There are gaps, inevitably, and room to improve—but in my experience, we’re both staffed by people who recognize that there are all kinds of great music out there, and whether it’s “cool” shouldn’t be the only thing determining whether we pay attention to it.

David: There have been a few situations in recent months that have really shown modern snobbery on display. Simon, can you walk us through the Nicki Minaj “real hip-hop” incident?

Simon: Sure. I think of this story as a counterpart to the Belieber wars: there we saw a mob of zealous fans trying to enforce their taste on others, but of course individual high-level gatekeepers can be just as guilty of this behavior. Before proceeding, I want to say that I’m a fan of the Hot 97 morning show that Peter Rosenberg co-hosts with Cipha Sounds and K. Foxx. Funny guy, most mornings. But wow, did he embarrass himself on this one.

It happened at last year’s Summer Jam, the annual all-star hip-hop concert put on by Hot 97, the radio station where he works. Nicki Minaj was booked as the headliner, and Rosenberg took it upon himself to denounce her from the stage shortly before she was supposed to go on: “I know there are some chicks here waiting to sing ‘Starships’ later. I’m not talking to y’all right now—fuck that bullshit! I’m here to talk about real hip-hop shit.” (Nicki, understandably, backed out of the show after hearing this.)

Where to begin with this wrongheaded bluster? “Starships” is one of Nicki’s most poppy songs. It was a huge hit. To Peter Rosenberg, that means it’s not “real.” The gendered language he used—trying to force a false distinction between the “bullshit” that “chicks” listen to and the allegedly more authentic stuff he likes—just emphasizes how lame and outdated this way of experiencing music is. Are we really supposed to think that Nicki’s dance-pop songs somehow invalidate the ones where she’s rapping her ass off? Does she magically stop being a great MC when she dares to flex another creative muscle?

Rosenberg is free to dislike “Starships,” obviously, but belittling those who do like it in these particular terms raises red flags. Ultimately, it felt like he was nostalgic for a (possibly mythical) time when genres were more rigidly constructed. This just isn’t how people listen to music anymore—there are lots of us who love both Illmatic and Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, and it’s really O.K. I think that’s exactly why Rosenberg lashed out. It’s the move of an aesthetic conservative who is scared of progress.

Read the rest of this conversation in UNCOOL #1.

uncoolmag:

We made you a zine.

UNCOOL #1: Guiltless Pleasures is a 43-page .pdf about the ways music makes us feel bad — and sometimes, proud. It was designed by Traci Larson. Sam Alden did the cover art. Here’s what you’ll find inside:

* Punk Rock Princesses: A Case for Something Corporate by Devon Maloney
* Dangerously in Love: My Decade with Beyonce by Jamieson Cox
* Repeat Offenders: Pressing Play, Over and Over Again by Harley Brown
* Guiltless Pleasures: Imagining a Post-Snob World by David Greenwald, Simon Vozick-Levinson and Lindsay Zoladz
* Miss You Like Crazy: Canada’s Lost Boy Bands by Melody Lau
* He Ain’t Even Know It: On Rick Ross, Rap, and Responsibility by Henry Adaso
* I Don’t Wanna Come Back Down From This (Sound)Cloud by Taleen Kalenderian
* Why Bother? Talking To Myself About Weezer by Jillian Mapes

With the help of its readers, UNCOOL is a publication that pays its contributors. Thanks in advance for your support.  

DOWNLOAD UNCOOL #1: GUILTLESS PLEASURES.

I’ve been putting this together the last couple months and am very happy to have it out in the world. We made it for you. Let me know what you think. 

For those asking about our SXSW panel, it’s reenacted within. 

One reason to do a Kickstarter is that if it succeeds, it’s great, and if it doesn’t, no big deal. Neither Dan nor I could afford in our working lives to build a website for a year, build an audience, and then ask for money. I already did that with Rawkblog during the height of its popularity: didn’t work. So we wanted to present readers with a subscription-based product from the beginning so it wouldn’t be a surprise. The whole point was to pay writers from Day 1, and since a few other sites had been successful on Kickstarter, we took the gamble.

On “branding”: I’ve run my blog(s) for 8 years. My hope was that a high percentage of longtime Rawkblog followers would pitch in and followers of our other writers would, too. It was a risk but not a totally unrealistic one. If Rawkblog had 10,000 RSS followers or 20,000 instead of 1,500, maybe the % who helped would’ve been enough. I have no idea! Nobody does. We’re all trying to figure this out.

On advertising: we had trouble communicating why this was important, and I’m sorry about that. We were not anti-ads because of “selling out” or whatever. Ads are an erratic business model dependent on a constantly shifting marketplace, even when you hit your pageview targets — targets which we were never going to hit with one article a week. The subscriber model looked more stable and liberating from a content perspective. Especially on our scale, advertising and pageview targets lend themselves toward lots of cheap content instead of a little expensive content, which is the kind we were interested in producing. I understand why readers didn’t care about this, but it’s what made the most sense for our goals. 

Hindsight is 20/20. Two months ago, we were clearing $1,000 a day. If we started our campaign on a Monday instead of a Thursday, maybe momentum takes off, people see us hit 25% and they feel better about contributing — there’s a reason projects that hit the 50% mark usually make it. It’s done now. On to the next. 

Your money is going to go directly to great music writers covering the stuff they’re passionate about, making for writing we think you’ll be passionate about. Give our work so far a look and please, please consider giving $5 or $12 or whatever you’d like. We’re not perfect, but we promise to listen to you — not corporations — and publish work you can be proud of as we try to build an open-minded, reader-supported business model. Support us on Kickstarter now.  

We’re a few thousand subscribers away. It’s not an insane number. But like Kanye West once said, we need you right now.