Searching for photos of mixtape studios, I was surprised to find the following image on the Morrow County Police Department homepage:
The City of Morrow Police Department has partnered with the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office and assembled a joint task force geared at proactively combating narcotics and vice related crime in the City of Morrow and Clayton County.
The Unit will be recognized by the Recording Industry Association of America with a gold record for their seizures of pirated music.
Drug scales, illegal gambling, hiphop mixtapes, handguns, fake Nikes, happy endings: one of these things is not like the other!
This is the same vice squad that acted on behalf of the RIAA in 2007, raided DJ Drama’s studio, and treated the artists like criminals. Remember this painful demonstration of ignorance and racism?
I am too angry and it is too late for me to write coherently about this but I had to share my discovery.
Every summer, some friends and I gather in a harbor town way up the coast of Maine. There is a tough little Aiwa boombox in the kitchen of our house with AM/FM/shortwave radio and a cassette deck. For the last few years, I’ve made mixtapes for the visit.
Here is the 2008 Maine Mix. Vinyl to tape to Audacity. It’s good for cooking, cleaning, maxing, and relaxing.
(Side A)
3rd World - “Now That We Found Love”
Lionel Ritchie - “All Night Long (All Night)”
Idris Muhammad - “Could Heaven Ever Be Like This”
Earth, Wind, and Fire - “Let’s Groove”
Field Mob ft. Ciara - “So What”
Paula Abdul - “Straight Up (HouseMix)”
Limahl - “Neverending Story (Club Mix)”
Mariah Carey - “Butterfly (Def ‘B’ Fly Mix)”
(Side B)
Dreams Unlimited - “Deep In You (Deep Love Mix)”
Enrique Inglesias - “Escape (Giorgio Moroder & Fernando Garibay Club Mix”
Real McCoy - White Label
Adonis & The Acid Slaves - “House Will Never Die”
Maurice - “This Is Acid”
Ecstacy - “This Is My House (Maxi Version)”
Dan Hartman - “Relight My Fire (Ballroom Records Special Edit)”
Total spur-of-the-moment thing so tracks get cut off at the ends of the sides. Raw! That’s how we do.
“By ‘ghetto’, I mean we’re going to make this thing as easy as possible. […] You can’t get no more ‘ghetto’ than to tape it up with Dilated People stickers.” — MooT BooXLe.
Coates describes the use of “ghetto” at Howard University to identify class differences (many of them regional) among Black students. In his post, he goes on to ponder the existence of an equivalent White word. Since then, many pixels have been spilled on terms like “white trash” so I’m backing up the horse a bit to consider “ghetto” in the mouths of White people like BooXLe above.
I learned the meaning of “ghetto” in somewhat similar circumstances as Coates though it seems that I learned the less-fully-featured (White?) version. During my time at Assumption College, my classmates frequently used “ghetto” in same way as BooXLe. The adjective was applied both derisively to poorly-made objects and in appreciation of low-cost repairs and hacks.
While students at Howard probably used “ghetto” in the same ways that I just described, I realize that the Assumption students almost always referred to objects, rarely to people. For them, “ghetto”-ness is production value, not character or class. In the spirit of my alma mater, allow me a few assumptions here: perhaps the students of Howard were reacting to experiences and a culture in which Blackness and “ghetto”-ness are often confused, merged, blended, and muddled. The (White) students of Assumption restricted the domain of “ghetto”-ness to the inanimate because they weren’t concerned with “ghetto”-ness seeping into their own identities.
The upshot is an objectification of the “ghetto” signifiers hinted at by Coates and embodied by the partygoers occupying the first hit for “ghetto party” on Google. Ouch.
(In a curious corruption of slang, I also hear the adjective extended downward from “ghetto” to “ghetto fabulous.” For example, if I were driving a moped held together with USPS tape, someone might say, “That’s a ghetto fabulous ride.” This seems to contradict the meaning of “ghetto fabulous” as I learned it from Mary way back when.)
Thrown around without consciousness to the racial implications of the word, “ghetto” fits in alongside a long list of racially charged terms that have lost their bite. Ever taken a ride in the Paddy wagon? (Oh ye Irish! So drunk and quarrelsome!) Or been gypped in a negotiation. (¿Cómo se traduce ESO al castellano?) While the origins of these terms is disputed, their racial connotation is hardly on the minds of anyone speaking them aloud in 2008.
Which brings us to today’s White Life moment.
Last week, I had the good fortune of attending a Sox game with some old friends. We planned to meet in front of the Cask and Flagon, a sports bar near from Fenway Park. I arrived early and the day was beautiful, so I leaned up against a pole and watched Red Sox Nation in all its glory swarm down Brookline Ave.
Shortly, I realized that I was standing at the unofficial crossroads for the local ticket trade. Each scalper periodically returned to my patch of pavement to talk shit, compare notes with other scalpers, and occasionally make a deal. Information and tickets changed hands fluidly between scalpers to the benefit of the network.
For example, a young man and two boys approached a scalper a few feet to my left looking for three adjacent bleacher seats. The scalper couldn’t satisfy them so they walked on. Less than five minutes later, another scalper came by complaining that he couldn’t move four adjacent bleacher seats he’d been carrying for an hour. A trade was brokered on the spot and the first scalper took off through the crowd after the lost sale.
Watching all this go down through the shade of my ray-bans, I saw people grinding hard for their cash. Fortunes rose and fell in the space of a single concrete slab. One dude purchased some tickets for 30$, turned around, tried to sell them for 80$ and sealed the deal at 60$. When his John was gone, he turned to me and cough/laughed, “Heh. You always gotta try to Jew em, y’know? Always gotta try!”
This month, dj Rizzla and I will shamelessly indulge our obsession with hi-nrg rave / dancehall hybrid tracks. Some call it “trancehall”, others say “dance tune”. It’s basically all I want to dance to lately.
The party jumps at 9:30pm and goes to 1am at the Milky Way, 403 Centre St. Jamaica Plain. As always, this party is GRATIS == NO COVER!
And this song is just owning my world, period, full stop.
BOSTON: TAKE THE PARTY TRAIN, DEPARTING 12:45pm FROM SOUTH STATION! CALL ME / TEXT ME : 774 573 0356 IF YOU WANT TO BE ON MY CAR FOR THE RIDE DOWN!!! I’LL BRING SNACKS!
BE A PART OF HISTORY! WE ARE TAPING THIS LIVE FOR SNOW GHOST TV AND INTERNET ARCHIVE.ORGANISM!
TXTmob demonstrated the efficacy (and weaknesses) of SMS/text messaging as a communication tool for coordinating direct action during the 2004 RNC. This weekend, I’ve been following the Cold Snap legal team’s twitter feed. Chilling updates like these have been coming in all day:
Mass arrests on Jackson & 9th, including Democracy Now! journalists Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddou, Nicole Salazar.
2 minutes ago from web
Girl seriously injured by car at 12th and Wabasha. Cops do nothing. In other news, Metro Transit resumes bus service into downtown St. Paul.
34 minutes ago from web
Person tased on 7th & Roberts.
40 minutes ago from web
Cops blocking all northern bridges over highway, moving systematically to wall folks into SE and kellogg park. Cops moving down Chestnut.
41 minutes ago from web
The Uptake just broadcast a live video of mass arrest from a mobile phone:
Regardless of your political affiliation, the extraordinary gulf between the mainstream and civic media is troubling. Consider the blog-style reporting from CNN (Thanks, Andrew):
“Police Sunday saw little disruption prior to a Republican National Convention greatly scaled back due to Hurricane Gustav.”
– Convention security plan going well, police say, 59 minutes ago
Bumming? Me too.
Grip this: The Wizard of Gaz recently dropped a breaky club track titled Now is the time!. An anthem for the Obama set. I love how it revives the forgotten deep house tradition of blending dance music with snippets of speeches and sermons. House is a feeling. Now is the time.
Months ago, I remember several unfunny boobs all stressed out that the Obama campaign would be the end of comedy because satirizing Obama could be offensive to some audiences. All I heard was, “wahhh wahh wahhhh but it will be HARD! wahh wahh wahh”
I shouldn’t talk though because I don’t know the first thing about stand-up. For real. I’m like that guy who has the 2 rap CDs that came free from Columbia House and throws them on when he wants to get “urban” at a pool party. That said, I can’t seriously do White Life without talking about comedy. Many of the bizarre things I hope to recount here are couched inside of humor. Jokes provide space to explore difference and tackle the strange, dirty, and uncomfortable topics that inevitably pop up when we live among other people. Yet they can also be miserably degrading, alienating, and offensive.
Curiously, the person who posted the only clip of Michael Colyar titled it, “Is this joke racist?” Several viewers post responses in the comments for the video. Seems I’m not the only one struggling with the ephemeral tango of comedy and difference.
Althought I am obviously a tenderfoot Potter Stewart when it comes to explaining my reactions to blue humor, allow me to recount an unpleasant experience regarding racist Obama jokes.
After stuffing myself at a cookout, I sat on my hosts’ back porch with a group of friends and family of a variety of ages. Though people have different ethnic backgrounds, we’re all white. We’re sipping drinks, picking at cookies, and trading jokes and stories. One friend, who I’ve just met a few hours prior, offers to tell the “scariest joke in the world.” It goes like this,
Knock, knock.
- Who’s there?
Eyes yore
- Eyes yore who?
Ise your new president.
Classic White Life moment: the racist joke. This one is particularly bad, though. And by that I mean, it is a terrible joke - a groaner. Everyone at the table voiced disapproval and several were clearly taken aback by the racial connotations but no one (including myself) would interrupt the party vibe by calling out the teller. The weakness of the humor allowed people to reject the joke without confronting the teller if they felt offended. (Full disclosure, when I heard the punch line, I looked down at my plate with a half-smile and shook my head saying, “That is not a good joke. That is not a good joke.”)
The interesting part of the exchange was that the younger kids on the porch didn’t understand the joke because that characterization of African-American slang (”I’s a whatever…”) is so outdated that they do not recognize it! Various adults at the table stumbled over each other to try to explain the joke without either endorsing it nor making the teller look bad. “Well… you know, it’s about Obama and … - BUT! it is not a good joke… it’s bad…” To explain the joke revives a dying stereotype while not explaining the joke stymies racial curiosity.
The majority of the group clearly did not approve of the racist joke yet no one verbalized their disagreement. My reason is that I was the youngest adult at the table and I was just meeting some of these folks for the first time. I didn’t want to challenge someone and create an awkward situation to ruin the time for everyone else. Of course, I sat there much more quietly and less engaged following the joke than I had been prior. Did other people at the table feel the same way?
