Crow posted:

okay on the real tho, i have some pretty big problems with this song. you guys might not pay any attention internet rap drama, but if you do it'll be pretty obvious that banner's "white girl call us nigga" line is a reference to the use of the word by east oakland rapper vanessa reece a.k.a. v-nasty. there is of course a very real degree to which we should take banner seriously here, but frankly i think it approaches the situation completely uncritically. banner might think so, but i don't think it's as simple as a white girl saying the n-word - it's the child of a vietnamese immigrant raised in a low income and majority black neighbourhood, and an active member of the thriving east oakland rap community, using the n-word. i'm not saying this justifies her use of the word at all, but i think it raises the question of why we are taking the word of david banner, someone with no connection at all to oakland, as a political authority on this problem instead of a member of her own community? when someone like mistah f.a.b., who is by now a bay area institution (and dedicated social activist) lends his support, i'm not sure that we can't recognize him as a more legitimate authority.

i think banner speaking like this is symptomatic of the huge degree of deterritorialization rap has experienced thanks to the internet. rather than the collection of autonomous creative communities separated by regional divisions that hip-hop is and always has been, it's too easy to see it as an amorphous mass of mp3s and worldstar videos. the fundamental disconnect banner has to the regional scene this song is basically a passive-agressive attack on is most obvious when he talks about oscar grant: "let a white cop shoot a black kid, you'll see a few tweets that's it" "a black kid dead made nobody mad". like, what the fuck? no mention here of early rallies attended by the youths of oakland that developed into violent protests and were the victim of intensive police crackdowns, the solidarity groups that picketed every day of the mehserle trial, the shutting down of the bart station, the longshoremen union that that shut down bay area ports, the continued rallying and solidarity carried out by the occupy oakland group - actions all overwhelmingly carried out by the community of oakland youths banner attacks. he thinks it made nobody mad? what right does he have to belittle this activism and this community?

blinkandwheeze posted:

Crow posted:

okay on the real tho, i have some pretty big problems with this song. you guys might not pay any attention internet rap drama, but if you do it'll be pretty obvious that banner's "white girl call us nigga" line is a reference to the use of the word by east oakland rapper vanessa reece a.k.a. v-nasty. there is of course a very real degree to which we should take banner seriously here, but frankly i think it approaches the situation completely uncritically. banner might think so, but i don't think it's as simple as a white girl saying the n-word - it's the child of a vietnamese immigrant raised in a low income and majority black neighbourhood, and an active member of the thriving east oakland rap community, using the n-word. i'm not saying this justifies her use of the word at all, but i think it raises the question of why we are taking the word of david banner, someone with no connection at all to oakland, as a political authority on this problem instead of a member of her own community? when someone like mistah f.a.b., who is by now a bay area institution (and dedicated social activist) lends his support, i'm not sure that we can't recognize him as a more legitimate authority.

i think banner speaking like this is symptomatic of the huge degree of deterritorialization rap has experienced thanks to the internet. rather than the collection of autonomous creative communities separated by regional divisions that hip-hop is and always has been, it's too easy to see it as an amorphous mass of mp3s and worldstar videos. the fundamental disconnect banner has to the regional scene this song is basically a passive-agressive attack on is most obvious when he talks about oscar grant: "let a white cop shoot a black kid, you'll see a few tweets that's it" "a black kid dead made nobody mad". like, what the fuck? no mention here of early rallies attended by the youths of oakland that developed into violent protests and were the victim of intensive police crackdowns, the solidarity groups that picketed every day of the mehserle trial, the shutting down of the bart station, the longshoremen union that that shut down bay area ports, the continued rallying and solidarity carried out by the occupy oakland group - actions all overwhelmingly carried out by the community of oakland youths banner attacks. he thinks it made nobody mad? what right does he have to belittle this activism and this community?

you know, i gave it some thought, and I think Banner has some 'proletarian memory' as MSH would say, but his lifestyle is divorced from his people and community. hes got this liberal view going on, as if anybody that's anybody is the white national media, and not the besieged community. i mean look at the video itself, it's the london riots that started over a black kid being shot, of course people were mad, but the corporate media wasnt, and there wasnt a 'national uproar'. zizek is right when he says peoples that are not nourished by the order do not have an obligation to behave ethically under it (ITS RIGHT TO REBEL, MODS).


but david banner behaves ethically under the order, he puts sexy ladies in his video, even though he seems to dismiss that sort of attitude in his lyrics, it functions the same nonetheless (compare to Dead Prez' Hip Hop which has like the first five seconds of ass & then completely subverts the premise). so then he transforms into this liberal bourgeois subject, with just the weapon of outrage and not much else, no mention of a different world struggling to be born (the community), nothin. we dont play in mississippi

babyfinland posted:
I think the problem of deterritorialization you raise is a good one, but I think you misinterpret Banner. He's asserting his own regional politics against the intrusion of alien ones, which is fine, isn't it? He's not exactly attacking v-nasty (gotta admit I'm unfamiliar with her and this whole thing, I don't listen to much music anymore) but once again urging (regional) solidarity.

I like Banner a whole lot even though some of his material is extremely misogynist

i'm not sure it's as simple as that. the thrill of the song is that it's shaped by this intertextuality where he references explicitly the music he is critiquing (altho not going as far as actually naming names), obviously most notably with the titular chant. what i think is problematic is that what banner references are almost exclusively the product of a specific regional scene, post-hyphy bay area rap. the ad-libs of "swag" "woop" "cook" peppered throughout the track are all drawn from berkeley based rapper lil b, the previously mentioned v-nasty diss is invoked repeatedly and despite the footage in the video the only specific political event he mentions is the shooting of oscar grant.

if banner is asserting his own regional politics against alien ones, i think he's doing it in an extremely reactionary way. when he invokes his city it's in a negative light, he isn't proposing mississippi as an alternative community, there are no gestures of solidarity towards his own scene. what i find most problematic is that he attributes the failings of his own community to the alien influence of this bay area culture, a culture that is insular and autonomous to the degree that i don't think banner has any right or responsibility to act as an authority on - i think it's only the process of deterritorialization that allows him to, and it's only this process that lets him see an isolated cultural community as responsible for the failings of his own.

but yeah, when he's not being a weird old dude about the STATE OF CONTEMPORARY RAP and shit i don't have a problem with banner

blinkandwheeze posted:
what i find most problematic is that he attributes the failings of his own community to the alien influence of this bay area culture, a culture that is insular and autonomous to the degree that i don't think banner has any right or responsibility to act as an authority on

hold on, isnt it precisely here that delineates the contradiction between the city and the countryside? even jackson, mississippi is like 150k people