A Baaaaaad Mother

This is an example of something rare: good academic writing.

From Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York (Oxford, 2009), by Joseph G. Schloss

"B-boying began with the break, the part of a song where all instruments except the rhythm section fall silent and the groove is distilled to its most fundamental elements. In the 1970s, when kids began throwing rebel street parties in the Bronx, people from different neighborhoods came together for the first time since the gangs had taken over, and there was one thing they all agreed on: the break was an opportunity. It was a moment on a record that was so powerful that it could actually overpower day-to-day reality and become an environment unto itself. The power of the break was so evident that DJ Kool Herc even began to play two copies of the same record on separate turntables, repeating the break over and over again, giving the dancers more time to showcase their most devastating moves. Before long, Herc and other pioneering deejays like Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash were playing nothing but breaks. And the dancers responded by creating a new dance form that was nothing but devastating moves: b-boying. Some even began dropping to the ground and spinning around. Hip-hop music and b-boying were born as twins, and their mother was the break."

Dorf on Music

It seems like we might be going into a rockism rant, doesn't it? That was my reaction, at least, to Jody Rosen's column on Slate discussing the fact that NPR seems to be incredibly attached to music by white artists, at least as evidenced by All Songs Considered's list of Best Music of 2009 (So Far). The exceptions to NPR's taste for music by white artists is music by black artists which fit the rubric of DORF, standing for:

Dead
Old
Retro
Foreign

Basically, what Rosen is pointing out is that you can't expect to hear much contemporary black popular music on NPR nor should you expect to see it on NPR-sponsored "best of" lists. The black music that NPR does tend to play will be by someone like Tracy Chapman, Solomon Burke, or Youssou N'Dour. This is certainly true, and Rosen picks out a good acronym that describes a phenomenon that, as he discusses, is prevalent not just at NPR but in music festival programs, your neighborhood Starbucks (what's the plural of Starbucks, by the way?), and the mainstream press in general. I'm not sure that this is something to be lamented or made fun of--as I think Rosen is at least hinting at doing. I think it's just something to be understood. NPR isn't going to be playing Lil Wayne. Hot 97 probably isn't going to be playing Grizzly Bear.*

Now that we've got that cleared up, we can watch "Dorf on Golf."



*There may be a future post on Grizzly Bear, too.