---

See more posts by Dave Bry

3 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

30 comments

What she didn’t know would eventually hurt her. By 1997, Lin had signed three additional record deals, but "Rebel Soul" remained her only full-length album. She had sat through countless meetings with A&R executives, publicists and producers, attempting to convince them all that she could sell records, that the music she wanted to produce was both meaningful and marketable to the public. She had written and recorded enough songs to fill multiple albums, but label after label told her that they “couldn’t hear the single.” Lin got more frustrated with each meeting. She couldn’t understand the industry and her place in it. “I’m like, wait a minute: you signed me, so why don’t you just trust me?” Lin said. “Just trust me. I am hip hop! I live this.”

By 1997, Lin said, she felt she’d had enough. Her longtime friend and mentor MC Lyte had encouraged her to continue over the years, even coordinating a record deal with Columbia’s Ruffhouse Records that eventually went sour like the rest of them, and she tried to convince Lin to stay in the game. “[Lyte’s] like, ‘fuck that, we gon’ get you another record deal,’” Lin recalled. “And at that point I’m like, fuck, I’m a fuckin’ artist, Lyte. I know that I gotta live, I got a son to raise, but this shit is hurting my soul.”

For a few years, Lin withdrew herself from the record industry and stopped recording music; she focused on raising her son Myles and spent some time writing. Those years were, in her words, the “darkest” of her life. “It was painful,” Lin said. “It was so painful for me, man; it was like being a ballerina and losing your fucking feet. I was so angry.”

Nicki Minaj's "Pink Friday" arrived just before this Thanksgiving. It could be difficult for anyone who is not a black female rapper (including me, a white female home-recording wannabe rapper) to understand that this is remarkable, and something to be celebrated, but I think Lin Que’s story provides some context. Minaj didn’t just release her first major album, she released the album that Lin Que—and a lot of other female rappers—once refused to record.

About a year ago, I sent a message on MySpace to Minaj. At the time, it wasn’t such a preposterous idea that I might hear back from her. She hadn’t debuted on top-ten radio yet and she certainly didn’t have an hour-long documentary special on MTV. I was writing my undergraduate thesis on female rappers, I explained, and I wondered if she’d agree to an interview. She had dropped most of her mixtapes by then, and I’d listened to "Beam Me Up, Scotty" all summer. On the cover, Minaj was wearing a Wonder Woman outfit and on one of the album’s more reflective songs, “Can Anybody Hear Me,” she declared, “in the Nick of time, it just dawned on me/I am Nicki Minaj, and it’s all on me.” Later in the verse she explained the duty: “I came to save a thing called female rap.” Nicki was well on her ascent, thanks to “Scotty,” great talent and a Young Money contract, and I never heard back from the MySpace message.

On that same song, Minaj rapped about just how complicated the task she was setting out for herself might be: “But when it rains, it pours for real/Def Jam said I’m no Lauryn Hill/Can’t rap and sing on the same CD/The public won’t get it, they got A.D.D.”

In "Pink Friday," she sings and raps on the same track anyway, with varying success. About half of the album is consistently pop; the remaining songs are New York hip-hop featuring a distinctly New York flow. But those pop songs are unapologetically soft and sappy, even emotional. Judging by the album’s reception so far, it’s clear that fans respond to Minaj when she is Nicki Minaj, Nicki Lewinski, Nicki the Ninja, Nicki the Boss, Nicki the Harajuku Barbie or Roman Zolanski. We haven’t really been introduced to a character setting for the Minaj who raps, “I am not a girl that can ever be defined/I am not fly, I am levitation/I represent an entire generation,” as she does on "Pink Friday." The raw emotion stuff is new—and strangely unsettling. Minaj’s fans like her raw, unsentimental personas, perhaps purely for their aesthetic quality. Plus when she’s Roman, she just sounds really dope.

But what’s most interesting (and even inspiring) to me about the reaction to "Pink Friday" thus far is this sense that Minaj is selling herself short on this album. This means not only that we’ve developed expectations for Minaj’s lyrical skill, but that they’re seriously high expectations that Minaj herself set for us by being a skilled rapper with the most refreshing and unpredictable delivery since Eminem, her partner on “Roman’s Revenge.” We expect her not only to be good, but to be better than, more honest than, and more creative than other rappers out today—male or female. We want from her that “oh-shit” moment, as in that verse on Kanye’s “Monster,” when you hear a line or a full sixteen and you cover your mouth in disbelief and awe. But we want that from Minaj on every song.

This is remarkable. Just over a year ago, I interviewed the DC-based rapper RA the MC, who is one of the best freestylers in the DMV. She has a new mixtape, "Victory Lap," due out today. “Hip hop fans really don’t have expectations of female MCs,” she told me at the time of our interview. RA is used to the "oh-shit" moment. She sees it at every one of her shows. I emailed her the other day to see if she thinks that sense has changed, and she said yes. “Nicki raised the bar with 'Pink Friday,'” she wrote. “People expect female rappers to come correct now.”

A component of that shift, I think, is that over the past year, Minaj has not positioned herself as a rapper from Queens; she has written herself as a female rapper. For Minaj, it’s not so much where she’s from but who she is, and that moves from being “a bad bitch, a cunt,” to “a girl that can never be defined.” Her latest album makes no more than a handful of references to her childhood and to Queens. She tells stories, but none of them are really about growing up in Jamaica, attending LaGuardia High School or dealing with her father’s drug problems. Her stories are, in essence, about being a woman in hip hop. Maybe the best woman in hip hop.

This is also remarkable. In 2009, Adam Bradley released a book called Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop. I was disappointed—though not exactly surprised— to find that in discussing the future of “rap’s true lyrical innovators” and “the future of rap’s poetry,” Bradley never mentions female emcees. He wrote that the next great original emcee “not only will… likely be rapping about different things from everyone else, [but will also] be using different words to do it” and lauds white male rappers Eminem and Asher Roth for doing just that.

But what is fresher in hip hop than a female’s perspective in rhyme? What male rapper can deliver a line like “Instantaneous, combustion when I’m bustin’ these raps/And the estrogen I spit will make your muscles collapse,” as LA’s AthenA has done, or, “I’m strivin’ to be one of the best, period/Not just one of the best with breasts and a period,” as Detroit emcee Invincible did in her 2008 song “Looongawaited”? Or consider Jean Grae’s line, “But n—-s is quick to turn they back on spitters with clits/Hit ‘em with this, ridiculous phrase flow that exits my lips/Hey yo, I mean my face, though,” in 2002’s “Knock.” Men who rap can’t say these rhymes.

In "Pink Friday," Minaj even takes it to another level, simultaneously appropriating and mocking male braggadocio with the line, “And if I had a dick, I’d pull it out and piss on ‘em.” It’s unfair to say that Minaj is working with “a blank canvas,” as Jonah Weiner did a year ago—that ignores a very long history of women who have contributed to the hip hop narrative—but it is true that female emcees have a really exciting chance to craft a hip hop narrative that generally lacks their perspectives.

Instead, Minaj is putting in the time with this album so that she, and others, can eventually add more to that canvas. (In a sense, it’s already expanding: Lil’ Kim released a Minaj dis track, “Black Friday,” last week, and Baltimore’s Keys got her start with a YouTube dis last spring.) In a recent interview, someone asked her if the track “Your Love” would have made it onto "Pink Friday" had it not been leaked. “No,” she said immediately. “Definitely no.” This suggests, of course, that Minaj has limited control over what songs went on "Pink Friday." The track “Dear Old Nicki” takes this even further. It’s an open love letter to the Nicki who never had a record deal. In the track, she accepts equal responsibility alongside “the media” for her evolution since she signed with Young Money in August 2009.

There are a lot of female rappers out there who once walked away from record deals or chose not to pursue them because they felt it would compromise their artistic integrity. Lin Que is just one example. I think that if any of them had released mass-market albums, they would have contained songs similar to “Dear Old Nicki.” I find this, and “Dear Old Nicki” itself, to be very sad. Minaj suggests that to get where she is now, she had no choice but to leave the Old Nicki, the Jamaica Queens Nicki, behind. I believe her. “You never switched it up, you played the same part/But I needed to grow, and I needed to know/were there some things inside of me that I needed to show?” Right before the hook, she says, “I just deaded you, left you in all black/But dear old Nicki, please call back.” In the second verse, she attributes that blame to “the media.” “They just deaded you,” she says.

"Pink Friday" has some great tracks, but a lot of it sounds like a new Nicki that even the old Nicki’s not so comfortable with. I hope that with this album, Nicki plays by the rules so that she, and others, can eventually break them. On her opening track, “I’m the Best,” Minaj raps, “got two bones to pick, I’m a only choose one/it might get addressed on the second album.” Those who aren’t feeling, say, “Last Chance,” her bubblegum collaboration with Natasha Bedingfield, should retain the hope that the second issue is reviving the Old Nicki. Depending on your perspective, this is either an unforgivable sell-out or a necessary sacrifice.

For her part, Lin Que finally released her second full album, "GODspeed," in 2007—seventeen years after "Rebel Soul." It was self-released and self-produced. I asked her to describe what that creative process was, and without hesitating she said, “it was projectile vomit. I realized that now that I’ve taken everything I’ve learned from the industry, I can finally do what I wanna do.”

That’s the perspective that’s easier to ignore when listening to "Pink Friday." It’s really hard for women who rap to sign a major deal, and it’s even harder for them to then say exactly what they want to say and get away with it. On “Dear Old Nicki,” Minaj asks, “did I chase the glitz and glamor, money, fame, and power?/‘cause if so that will forever go down my lamest hour.” It may be advisable to hear “lamest” and think “bravest,” because there are a lot of women out there who rap, some arguably better than Minaj, and they usually never hit the public eardrum. Minaj may not truly be “the best bitch doing it,” as she puts in “I’m the Best,” but for now, she’s the best one willing to do it.

Emma Carmichael is a writer (okay, intern) in New York.

---

See more posts by Emma Carmichael

28 comments

He knows that in today's media climate, if you're going to embrace being famous, privacy and quiet self-reflection are privileges almost impossibly hard to maintain. So he doesn't try. This is a different tack than that taken by a Jay-Z, who says, "I'm so cool, you'll never know the real me." Or a Lady Gaga, who suggests "everything is artifice, there is no real me." Instead he says "there is very much a real me, and I'm not cool enough to keep it hidden, so here it is, all the time." (How exhausting this must be!) He throws everything out there, exposing himself over various platforms in some kind of exhibitionist reality star performance art thing. Emoting, emoting, emoting, joking sometimes, taking himself extremely seriously others, completely unafraid to try new things, opening himself to his audience in ways sometimes off-putting, sometimes endearing, but very rarely boring, he stays beating commenters and pundits to the punch, and backing it up with music that, whether or not it's to one's liking, is hard to experience as anything other than bold and adventurous and, yes, artistic. So here's to Kanye, showing everyone how to be a pop star in the 21st Century.

---

See more posts by Dave Bry

17 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

27 comments

In other Kanye remix news, a new version of the great "Power" single has just come out. It features an introductory verse from Jay-Z and an unfortunate reinterpolation of the original chorus, replacing the wonderful vocal snippet from King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man," with a clunky, much less wonderful recording of the phrase, "No one man should have all that power..." But then it breaks, and switches to a new beat that samples Snap's "I Got The Power," and Kanye's new verses are passionate and exciting. He's doing really good right now.

---

See more posts by Dave Bry

7 comments

But, and this is a bold claim, Weezer's new song is worse than Nickelback's new single. You may think this is a pretty unfair comparison, Nickelback being the Chernobyl of pop music and all, but if you listen closely they're incredibly similar songs. Here's the Nickelback song in question, "This Afternoon".

Lyrics:

Weezer: "Memories" has pretty Weezer 3.0 lyrics, lots of reference and shallow emotion. The first noticeable standout is "playing hacky sack when Audioslave was still Rage." And of course, who can excuse the sheer kiddie-pool-depth of the chorus, "Memories make me want to go back there, back there. I want to be there again." Well, that's some Radiohead-level shit right there.

Nickelback: "This Afternoon" offers a similar level of lyrical mastery with lines like "Looking like another Bob Marley day / hitting from the bong like a diesel train" and "Down on the corner in a seedy bar jukebox cranking out the CCR." Oh, and every single line in the song ends with the phrase "this afternoon."

WINNER: Nickelback, because if you listen to the lyrics the ratio of cultural touchstones to actual human emotion is lower than Weezer's.

Musical Arrangement:

Weezer: Similar Weezer fare, punchy verses, a catchy repetitive chorus, a quiet, sparkly bridge. The only real problem is that the chorus is also almost identical to the lead line in The Stroke's "12:51," so that's kind of a problem, sort of.

Nickelback: White people reggae mixed with country music.

WINNER: Weezer, because nearly anything in the entire world is better than a country song about smoking weed.

Relevance:

Weezer: See, this is a problem, because it's tough to imagine the typical Weezer fan in 2010. Maybe it's a very easy-going Gen X'er. A man in the IT field who wears sandals often and remembers how good Pinkerton was. Maybe he listens to the radio with their kids driving to little league and feel comforted by a familiar voice when Weezer's on the radio. And we do mean "he." But again, it's a bit mysterious.

Nickelback: Most of the the southwest and midwest of America... and anywhere cars or sporting goods are sold. Also sports bars.

WINNER: Nickelback, because the first rule of pop music is that you're writing for demographics and Nickelback knows their demographic shockingly well.

---

See more posts by Ryan Broderick

19 comments

Naturally, they're looking to expand globally.

"The era of imitating the West is over. Now we export Japanese culture," said proud AKB48 creator/producer/svengali Yasushi Akimoto earlier this year. In addition to arranging a U.S. release for the group's latest album, he told the Yomiuri Shimbun he's entertaining offers to build similar girl groups in Thailand, China, Taiwan and Italy.

Many people in Japan consider Akimoto to be a musical genius. In actuality, he's a marketing genius using a straightforward formula: teenage girls, modified schoolgirl uniforms, and dance routines that evoke both innocence and availability. It's the happy Lolita aesthetic, which either totally squicks you out or makes you a really big fan of Japanese pop culture.

Akimoto started AKB48 in 2005 with the concept "idols you can meet." The original target audience was the young, male, anime-obsessed otakus, who might otherwise be spending their money getting foot massages in one of Akihabara's numerous cosplay cafes. Soon, AKBOta, as the superfans came to be called, were lining up outside the group's theater to catch daily performances.

AKB48 is so popular in Tokyo it has spawned offshoots: SKE48, based in Nagoya, and and, most recently, NMB48 in Osaka. There's also SDN48, a more adult-oriented group where all the girls are 20+. (The girls in AKB proper range from 15 to 24, with most of the girls being in their late teens.)

The group is divided into teams A, K, and B, with team captains presiding over each. Fans vote on who will be the "front" girls. Beyond that, the elements are simple: syrupy pop music, face-time with fans (handshaking events are part of AKB48 duties), and pretty young girls. Busloads of them.

Mr. Akimoto's real genius is knowing the power of numbers. Keeping the group big is important. In addition to making promotional duties a breeze, it prevents individual members from becoming too famous and, thus, inaccessible or... perhaps, more importantly, irreplaceable. AKB48 may be the biggest female pop act in Japan, but-except for a few standout names-most of its members are only vaguely well-known. The girls also "graduate" as they age, or can be shuffled between teams or even sent back to the "research student" farm leagues, meaning, for most members, the ride won't last much longer than high school. This Menudo-style endless churning of talent makes AKB48 the antithesis of other manufactured girl groups like, say, the Spice Girls, where-at some point-freshness is traded for nostalgia or, as Liz Lemon would say, members insist on clinging to youth and fame with their Gollum arms.

AKB48 members are also expected to cultivate extremely clean, girl-next-door images. This is in keeping with Japan's ideal of the seijun-ha aidoru, or "pure idol." In Japan, teen pop idols are expected to project an image of sweetness, positivity, and-most importantly-extreme purity. (We're talking the kind of just-floated-in-on-a-cotton-candy-cloud level of sweetness and purity that, comparatively, makes Dakota Fanning look like a foulmouthed little slag.)

AKB48 members may pose in bikinis for fan magazines, or wrestle in lingerie in the occasional music video, but on their individual blogs, members switch to kid-sister mode, acting even younger than their stated ages, clutching teddy bears in webcam photos and breathlessly pledging to work harder for the fans.

Of course, as AKB48 members start to age and the alumni pool builds, it's getting harder to keep everyone on-message.

Last month, fanblogs declared a state of "net turmoil" over the news that 22-year-old Rina Nakanishi, a recent Team A graduate, had changed her name to Riko Yamaguchi, shaved two years off her age, and launched a new career in AV, or porn.

"Really, AV!? wrote one fan on a Japanese blog. "Looking back at her time in AKB48, the image gap is so shocking. Even more than the other girls, she seemed so serious. " Another expressed familial concern over Rina's well-known lower back problems during her time with AKB48, worrying that her new line of work might exacerbate the issue.

Over on 2chan, (the Japanese big brother to 4chan) the otaku set ogled topless photos of Rina-turned-Riko, and engaged in a debate about whether or not she would use condoms in her debut, and how that decision would affect what remained of her AKB idol purity.

A few English fanblogs took a more cynical view, seeming to think that porn was a logical career move, seeing as Rina had already successfully cultivated a fanbase with lust in their hearts. One noted, with disgust, that Rina was receiving more attention now than she ever had as a squeaky-clean cog in the AKB machine: "The prospect of watching her squealing with feigned pleasure nude is unsurprisingly rather more enticing to idol fans than watching her squealing with feigned pleasure whilst bouncing around an Akihabara stage."

Paige Ferrari lives in Tokyo.

---

See more posts by Paige Ferrari

13 comments

It's really hard to take Eurovision seriously (haha I know, this sentence should stop here) when this is the first and last place and they're actually not that different.

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

18 comments