Mark Lee hosts as he, Peter Fenzel, John Perich, Ryan Sheely, and Matthew Wrather (what what?!) go through some listener feedback, pick on the host, talk racial normativity, and engage in an epic rap battle on the merits of Kanye.
Tell us what you think! Email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401. If you haven’t yet, take the very short survey! And… spread the overthinking by forwarding this episode to a friend.
Re: creativity in (e.g.) Mozart’s instrumental works vs creativity in pop-music performance: How is playing Mozart less creative than performing the latest hit single on stage? In either case, the material is already written, the audience knows it and expects it to sound a certain way. The live interpretation of any pre-written score, with dynamics/phrasing/tempo/etc., is an exercise in creativity. If, at a concert, a guitarist plays a different solo than the studio version, or Nas adds a new verse to a song, that’s the same as when a classical performer chooses a different cadenza to play.
Now, @Lee and @Perich, you might argue that those works that are explicitly demanding of improvisation – such as traditional blues/jazz, or Phish-style jam-band pieces, or freestyle rap – require more creativity to perform than classical music. But what most people don’t know is that whenever Mozart played a keyboard concerto, he improvised his own cadenzas. The historian Robert Levin is one of several pianists who try to recapitulate this aspect of Mozart’s own performance. It’s just frickin’ hard for most people to improvise something on the keyboard with the same melodic and harmonic intricacy as what Mozart wrote; so most performers devote their energy to playing cadenzas that are written in advance.
Re: racial normativity in hip-hop and opera: @Lee, you act like you’ve never seen a white person before; and @Fenzel, um, Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, Roberta Alexander, and Morris Robinson are on the phone. And Stokes could surely name more (if he weren’t off in nuptial-land. Congrats!)
Along those lines, I agree with Fenzel’s point that folks can in fact understand and identify with music from another culture, and that race should not render a song off-limits at karaoke. Would you keep Nate Dogg from performing “Here Comes the Sun”, or Paul McCartney from performing “Regulate”? Why should “Born to Run” be sole property of the Jersey-born working class, and off-limits for, say, Bill Gates’s children?
Then there’s the question of whether, by performing a song at karaoke, one endorses the content of the song. I happen to think that the answer is no. But even if so, well, what makes hip-hop so “unsavory”? If a girl sings “Goodbye Earl”, or if I sing “I Shot the Sheriff” or “F— the Police”, how are those any different from one another? What makes hip-hop more “unsavory”? How is bragging about selling drugs any different from bragging about doing drugs (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) or going on drug-fueled spousal murders (“Cocaine Blues”)?
Re: quantifying flow, I agree with Fenzel and Sheely that different listeners will be moved by different metrical gestures; if Perich likes traditional poetic flow like Shakespeare’s, he probably also likes Tupac’s, as they both tend to strict iambic meter. Look at the first few songs from my recently-shuffled Tupac playlist. Keep Ya Head Up, I Get Around, All About U, I Ain’t Mad At Cha – all are classic iambic; there’s the occasional dactylic song like Life Goes On or mixed song like Hit ‘Em Up, but even then, the meter is pretty simple. As it happens, I particularly enjoy artists who write in many different or unconventional meters (Soundgarden’s “Superunknown” is a masterpiece), and I happen to like hip-hop artists who change their flow by the verse. Perhaps this explains why I’m so fond of Jay-Z – listen to “Reasonable Doubt” and name two songs where he uses the same meter.
I should amend my first paragraph. I meant to write:
How is playing Mozart less creative than performing the latest hit single on stage? In either case, the material is already written, the audience knows it and expects it to sound a certain way. The live interpretation of any pre-written score, with dynamics/phrasing/tempo/etc., is an equivalent exercise in creativity, whether the score is classical or pop. As an extension: if, at a concert, a guitarist plays a different solo than the studio version, that’s the same as when a classical performer chooses a different cadenza to play. Or if Nas adds a new verse to a song, that’s the same as playing a more elaborate cadenza.
@Rob,
I agree with most of what you wrote, but I wanted to clarify – I didn’t intend to say that black people aren’t expected to be in operas, or that I’d be really surprised to see a bunch of black people performing in an opera, but I do think black opera singers are somewhat unusual – at least moreso than in other genres of music.
Sort of like if you went to see a high school play and most of the cast were redheads. It’s unusual. Not what you’d expect, based on what you know about population distribution.
But there’s not much that’s normative about that.
Re: Creativity. I think what went unsaid during this podcast relates to the arguments about “art” (and therefore artistry) in general in the last one. There is a level of creativity somewhat lost when a person goes onstage to perform Mozart versus their own song, and that is because of where the piece came from. Yes, a classical performance could have a different cadenza or interpretation of phrasing and dynamics (a good example for this is Bach, since there were only notes on his original sheet music- compare Zuil Bailey’s version of the “Prelude” to the Cello Suites to that of YoYo Ma: they slur and swell quite differently), but this does not change the fact that the original source was not the performer, but the composer. In the case of a pop performance, that improvised and different guitar solo in the middle of a live concert is being done by the original artist- and the entire song is. So I’m not saying performing classical music isn’t creative, but that it’s creative in a different way with, perhaps, a lower threshold. So, similarly (and to relate it to last week), a person doing a cover of another person’s song on American Idol is doing their own interpretation, yes, but that song itself isn’t their own, so there is a limit to that creativity that is lesser to that of someone performing an original song of their own.
Rob, thanks for your comments. To clarify a couple of things: when I was talking about “unsavory behavior” in rap songs, I didn’t mean to imply that rap songs were the only form of music that advance “unsavory behavior” as a positive or desirable thing. Clearly there’s plenty of rock music that does the same, and I would hold it to the same standard as rap.
Also, I wish improvisation were a bigger part of modern classical musical performance and instruction. I think I would have stuck with the cello longer if I had been able to improvise my own cadenzas. Instead, I quit in junior year of high school for (no surprise) the electric guitar.
A reminder to our listeners: please fill this comment thread with examples of Lil’ Wayne songs that would change my opinion of him. The best of the best songs. Do it!
I love how this episode has occasioned a hasty set of disclaimers and clarifications. That, in my view, is the mark of good Internet media.
Sorry, guys, didn’t mean to sound so confrontational up there… =)
@Gab, you make excellent points about the distinction between composer and performer, and I agree entirely. Also thanks for raising the example of Bach, whose stuff can be played a million different ways.
@Perich, I don’t know any of Wayne’s stuff yet, mostly because I haven’t had the chance to acquire his albums through, uh, through “means.” But I too would be interested in particular recommendations of the audience…
P.S. @Fenzel, because you asked in the podcast:
u claim 2 b a playa but i f—-d ur wife !!!!1!11!one
This was definitely one of the most entertaining OTI podcasts in recent memory. For my money, the only thing better than pop culture scrutiny is racially-charged pop culture scrutiny. Perhaps next week you can talk about Hollywood’s depiction of terrorism?
And Fenzel, in the words of Egon Spangler, “Your mother.”
As much as I hate on Lil’ Wayne, I did like his Fenzel diss track:
yo, it’s the lil’ weezy, it’s the baller from the eighties
busting out the bolt-cutters to unlock all the Yalies
’cause all my jackets are trippin’, all my ho’s is strippin’
and when I see Pistol Pete he’ll get a pistol-whippin’
uh, I’m not psycho, uh, I’m emphatic
driving up to Boston with a semi-automatic
telling all the snitches that I’m lookin’ for Fenzel
run him over on Mass Ave with my mad Benz-o
stay offa my stage or you-a get some rages
cracking open yo chest like Cosby’s picture pages
got the diamonds with gloss, got the ladies in floss
smoke you like a island monster, son, you just got lost
I’m producing three mixes for each one of your essays
you try to flee to Mexico and I’m like como, ese?
cooking up the rock up in the skull of your brainpan
leave you lock up in the box as if your name was Rain Man.
WHAT.
UH OHHHHHHHHHH
So I tried to post this comment yesterday morning, and for some reason it didn’t work (perhaps it was the links), so here is my second try at providing a few Lil’ Wayne recommendations.
I think the song that best showcases Lil’ Wayne’s skills as a rapper is Dr. Carter, one of the mid-album cuts off of Tha Carter III. This song is cool because he takes a beat that you would expect to hear MF Doom rapping over and totally owns it.
I think another song that does a good job of showcasing Wayne’s skill as a lyricist and rapper is
Georgia Bush, off of the Dedication 2 Mixtape. A lot of his best mixtape songs work because he not only jacks the the beat from a current single (in this case “Georgia” by Field Mob and Ludacris) but he also mimics the flow of the original rapper, while at the same time increasing the complexity of the wordplay substantially. Not only does he do this particularly well on this song, but he also subjects the causes and effects of the Bush administration’s (non)response to Hurricane Katrina to a level of scrutiny it definitely deserves.
If these are some of the Lil’ Wayne songs that you’ve already heard (and disliked), try some of these:
Shooter
Dedication 2
We Takin’ Ova (Remix)
Dough Is What I Got
Mr. Carter
Sheely,
I’ve listened to “Dr. Carter,” “Georgia Bush” and “Shooter.” While they’re all decent, I don’t see what merits the Greatest Rapper Alive title in any of them.
I can think of better “here’s what’s wrong with MCs today” tracks than “Dr. Carter” – for instance, YGMoff of Atmosphere’s mix tape “Strictly Leakage.”
I can think of better call-outs of politicians than “Georgia Bush” – for instance, Immortal Technique’s Point of No Return.
Lil’ Wayne isn’t bad – I just don’t understand what makes him the “Best Rapper Alive.”
Lil Wayne is not that great in terms of the content of his lyrics, but I think his “flow” is perhaps the best.