kool keith
Kool Keith - Today Slate runs an article about Dan Nakamura, giving him credit for the sounds of practically everything cool today, including three of my favorites, Kool Keith, Handsome Boy Modeling School and Deltron 3030.
Unfortunatley, I think we are seeing the beginning of a myth creation. Kool Keith was releasing thematic albums long before Nakamura, even changing his name to match whichever theme he was pursuing.
It’s nice that Nakamura is capable of keeping a theme across multiple tracks, but no way can you say that this was a major contribution to artists who have been doing this all along. Slate’s article is internally inconsistent, giving Nakamura credit for the sounds of various underground artists, while openly admitting that Nakamura only worked on particular releases. In fact, they begin the article citing Nakamura as being affiliated with Beck, but later argue that (paraphrased) “Beck’s next album will be cool because it will use Nakamura, instead of all of the other people Beck has used in the past.” Slate can’t have it both ways — is Nakamura cool because he does Beck, or is Beck cool because he uses Nakamura? With two legs of the three-legged stool gone, let’s look at the other leg that holds up the Slate article. The author maintains that Nakamura is as unpredictable as Beck, but the new album will be cool, because Nakamura generates so much buzz. That’s really interesting, since I would normally consider “buzz” to be an article in Slate or a mention on MTV, both of which Nakamura is scoring. But it sure seems strange to have Slate running an article saying “Nakamura is so cool because even Slate is doing an article on him.” The article contradicts itself further, by simultaneously claiming that Nakamura’s sound is eclectic and unpredictable and then claiming to give a good description of the Nakamura sound. The best I can tell from the Slate description and sound clips, the “Nakamura sound” is exactly like the “Roots Manuva” sound.
It’s true that there is a new sound in hip-hop today that is distinct from the minimalism of “The Roots” or the drum-n-bass sounds that have permeated so much R&B today. But I think the “new sounds” in hip-hop today are still evolving, and sure as heck don’t come from Nakamura. I think the sounds that Slate attributes to Nakamura are evolving from many styles, including old Luke Skywalker, Aux 88 “boogie bass”, Kool Keith, and the “dirty south” sounds. I’m predicting that the next Beck album won’t sound like the future of hip-hop, because Beck isn’t driving hip-hops evolution, and neither is Nakamura. But if the Slate article is any indication, Nakamura is going to get credit for everything cool that happens in music for the next ten years. Dirty meme flows and chaos in complex systems are too much for the mass media to comprehend.
Speaking of mass media, check out Village Voice’s review of southern rappers Po’ White Trash.
The article was a joke. The really disturbing thing is how many people wrote to Village Voice complaining (and a few supportive). It’s not even a good joke; the internal inconsistencies in this article made the Slate article look like a fortress. When I first read it, I thought “only a retarded person or a satirist could have written this.” But I also thought that the readers of the Village Voice were known for being sophisticated. And when you think about it, there isn’t really much difference between the two examples of journalism, except that the Slate author obviously takes himself seriously and isn’t being intentionally satirical.