Four Things: Two about Rap, and Two about the Past vs. the Present

1. In the midst of an okay piece on T.I. (profoundly weakened by its super-lame attempt to analyze a stupid verse from "What You Know" using the vocabulary of old-fashioned poetry), Kelefa Sanneh makes a good point succinctly:

   All this split-personality stuff is patently absurd..., though evidently it’s a common enough response to the impossible demands of hip-hop, which more or less requires its stars — even, or especially, the veterans — to say ridiculous things, and mean them.

2. An example of a problem with certain rap lines: in "Gangsta Grillz" (on In My Mind (The Prequel)), Pharrell says, describing the exterior of (I think) the Magic City strip club in Atlanta, "So many Phantoms the parking lot look like a graveyard." Now, the Phantom is a luxury car. Its name means "ghost." Ghosts hang around in graveyards (I guess). But a parking lot full of cars whose name means "ghost" does not look any more like a graveyard than a regular parking lot does (okay maybe a little bit but not much!). "So many friends of mine whom I refer to as 'dog' the club looked like a veterinarian's office." "So many Beatles the studio looked like Keyhole's bed because Keyhole's bed has a lot of bugs (beetles) on it."

   But how am I going to explain all of this to Pharrell? It's not that I think he's too dumb too understand; I just don't think he's a very good listener.

3. The Iraqi boy band Unknown to No One (you have, by definition, heard of it), apparently still exists, but now it's based in the UK. I think I first read about these guys in a Sunday Telegraph article (linked to somewhere or other), which I just now re-dug up on LexisNexis. March 9, 2003 -- war just 11 days away. And even in this puff piece, we find a warning: "Given the fears that an American-led invasion could ignite a bloody civil war in Iraq, Unknown To No One is an impressively harmonious ethnic mix. Art Haroutunian and Shant Zawar are Armenian Christians; Nadeem Hamid and Hassan Ali, a 21-year-old biology student, are Arab Muslims, while Diyar Diler, also 21 and an English student, is a Kurd. When they are not rehearsing, the singers -- who all speak good English -- meet in Baghdad's popular coffee shops and video game arcades. They are opposed to war, but prefer not to discuss politics." Wise.

4. A year ago (I really need to clear out my "blog ideas" file one of these days), Defamer dropped a post with the title "Paris Hilton Plunges World into Black Hole of Meaninglessness," linking to a Sun interview in which Paris said:

   “Simple Life is a reality show and people might assume it’s real. But it’s fake.

   “All reality shows are fake basically. When you have a camera on you, you are not going to act yourself.

   “So before I started the show I thought I’d make a character like the movies Legally Blonde and Clueless mixed together, with a rich girl all-in-one.

   “Even my voice is different and the way I dress is different from me in real life. It’s a character I like to play. I think it’s carefree and happy. The public think they know me but they really don’t.”

   So when Paris told Barbara Walters, "I used to act dumb. That act is no longer cute," everyone shouldn't have scoffed. There's a paper trail. I really do think that it was more or less (more? less? that's the issue) an act all along.