ACROSS
1 *Dejected
5 *Sledding spot
10 *Waterloo
14 Enclosed in
15 Electrical
component
16 Seaman’s
direction
17 9-Down sensors
18 Midwestern tribe
19 Show
appreciation, in a
way
20 “You shall hear
more __ morning”:
“Measure for
Measure”
21 Shows a
preference
22 Amethyst source
23 Prognosticate
25 Struggling engine
sound
27 Me.-to-Fla.
highway
28 Freudian subject
30 ’60s radical gp.
31 *Data transfer
32 Crockett’s
Waterloo
34 Annoyed
moviegoer’s
shout ... or what’s
needed to make
sense of the
answers to
starred clues
39 Onetime Silly
String maker
40 *Faster way to fly
43 Seafarer
46 Bygone dentifrice
48 “Twelfth Night”
servant
49 Deserve credit,
perhaps
51 “Yes”
53 Ancient Iranians
54 Thing on a bob
55 “__ guy walks
into ... “
56 Actress Russell
57 Dinnertime
attraction
59 __ stick: incense
60 Rare blood type,
briefly
61 Memento
62 Fifi’s BFF
63 *1964 Grammy-
winning rock ’n’
roll song
64 *Decrease
65 *Musical starting
point
DOWN
1 “Watch out!”
2 Spanish sherry
3 Rush hour
timesaver,
hopefully
4 QB’s stats
5 Feel one’s way
6 Took it easy
7 “Fate is so
cruel!”
8 Peer of Trygve
and Kofi
9 Looker?
10 Aspect
11 Metes out
12 Bygone pump
word
13 Middle Ages
colony
residents
21 Sugar suffix
22 Marx of lesser
repute
24 Provide, as with
talent
25 Lifestyle
magazine
26 Host noted for a
1960 on-air
resignation
29 Was loquacious
33 Classic military
text by Carl von
Clausewitz
35 Legislative VIPs
36 Touristy
viticultural valley
37 Indecisive
comment
38 Hardly
fascinating
41 Capital of Cyprus
42 Statistical matrix,
e.g.
43 Cruise
partnership
nickname
44 L’Oréal
competitor
45 Altered, as a
map
47 Mental
wherewithal
48 GI grub
50 Wield power
52 Endangered
Sumatran
54 Mythical
troublemaker
57 Compact Cadillac
sedan
58 Dustup
59 Hook relative
By Jeffrey Wechsler
©2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
09/18/15
09/18/15
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
RELEASE DATE– Friday, September 18, 2015
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
xwordeditor@aol.com
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Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
I
spend a lot of time listen-
ing to hip hop, and I also
spend a lot of time studying
neo-Hegelian philosophy. If you
peruse my Twitter, you’ll see
that the majority of my tweets
are about the
dialectics of
the Based
God, which
is what hap-
pens when
you gradually
mold your
subconscious
into a trendy
melange of
Slavoj Žižek
one-liners
and Young Thug noises. On my
about.me page, I describe myself
as a “SoundCloud philosopher,”
which, depending on your poli-
tics, makes me either the worst
kind of pretentious asshole
imaginable or a “cool” guy. I pre-
fer the latter approach, but I’m
also someone who prides himself
on being the only person at this
University who has ever made it
necessary for someone to actu-
ally say the words “Shut the fuck
up about commodity fetishism,
we’re trying to play 2K.”
So, more often than not, I find
myself desperately clinging to an
absurd middle ground between
cultures and vocabularies that, at
first glance, seem diametrically
opposed to one another. When
hearing
Chief
Keef’s
song
“3Hunna,” for example, my first
inclination after muttering “bang
bang” to myself is to read the
track as a radical nihilist anthem
exploring the impossible subject
position of a person trapped on
the horizonless fringe of global
capital, as a cry for help from a
young man who realizes that even
if he manages to upgrade from
“three hunna” to “six hunna”
he’ll never find his way out of O
block, a realization so pessimistic
that he ends the song with the
self-negating gesture of shouting
“Fuck my birthday, bitch, I need
more cake.” On the other hand, I
realize that a sentence combining
the phrases “horizonless fringe
of global capital” and “Fuck my
birthday bitch” looks a lot like a
dadaist word salad, which gives
you a sense of what it’s like to
be inside my head on any given
Thursday.
But as ridiculous as it might
seem — and I hope you can excuse
my obscene narcissism here — I
think the inner workings of my
mind say something important
about hip hop’s cultural status
today. Like rock music in the 1950s
and ’60s, hip hop has become the
music of modern youth, which is
to say that it provides the cultural
vocabulary through which we
narrate our experience of the
world. It serves as the soundtrack
for our parties, our relationships,
our ever-changing personalities
and
our
developing
political
consciousness, and it does so in
a way that’s considerably more
accommodating of racial diversity
and technological innovation than
rock music ever was. Importantly,
however, through its celebration
of African American culture and
the Black experience, hip hop also
creates an intriguing challenge
for the western philosophical
tradition:
how
to
develop
a
vocabulary capable of articulating
the struggle of a community
whose historical marginalization
has been conducted on a linguistic
and philosophical level as much as
on a physical one.
Put another way, self-styled
young assholes intellectuals like
me who grew up reading Sartre
and
Nietzsche
with
Outkast
and Kanye West playing in the
background are reaching the
point of entry into institutional
academia, convinced of the moral
necessity of addressing the social
ills hip hop illustrates with its
often grim realism and working
to find a vocabulary with enough
intellectual rigour to go toe-to-toe
with Kant and Hegel and enough
social awareness to hear the pain
behind the Migos flow.
And, perhaps unsurprisingly,
there
already
a
number
of
academics studying and writing
about hip hop in English and
Cultural
Studies
departments
across the country. A few notable
scholars on the subject include
Adam Bradley at the University
of Colorado, Elaine Richardson
at Ohio State and Gwendolyn
Pough at Syracuse University,
all of whom have spent years
laying the groundwork for and
developing critical studies of hip
hop culture, drawing on the work
of previous cultural theorists and
philosophers as diverse as Amiri
Baraka, Pierre Bourdieu, bell
hooks and Mikhail Bakhtin. They
and the myriad other musicians,
critics and researchers turning
their minds and talents towards
the rigorous examination of hip
hop’s place in modern society are
doing essential work, both for
hip hop itself and the academic
disciplines
benefiting
from
a
radical reexamination of their
theoretical models and massive
expansion of their source material.
An interesting development in
recent years, however, is seeing
hip hop’s experience in academia
make its way back into the music.
An intellectual approach to hip
hop, in a way, predates the music
itself — Gil Scott-Heron, often
considered the godfather of rap,
held a Master’s degree in Creative
Writing from Johns Hopkins
University and approached his
music and poetry with a political
sensibility
informed
by
the
work of Langston Hughes and
Malcolm X, among others. The
first hip hop artists immediately
grasped onto that brand of erudite
social awareness — Public Enemy
frontman Chuck D describes
Scott-Heron as “the manifestation
of the modern world” — and
reached a peak of stylistic diversity
in the mid-to-late ’90s in the work
HIP HOP COLUMN
College Hip Hop:
From Kant to Kanye
ALBUM REVIEW
Jay Rock’s ‘90059’ is
solid, traditional rap
By SHAYAN SHAFII
Daily Arts Writer
“I be that n***a they call Jay
Rock / I’m a rapper.” In a time
where the phrase “I’m not a rapper,
I’m an artist” is
all too common,
Jay Rock is com-
fortable in his
own skin. When
Kanye
West
made the cover
of Time maga-
zine this year,
A$AP
Rocky
took to Twitter
to announce that the cover made
him “proud to be a rapper,” while
his last album also distanced him-
self from the genre. Chance the
Rapper and Kendrick Lamar have
made crossover projects into funk
and jazz, and Tyler, the Creator
wants to be a film director … Even
Drake transcends hip hop every
now and then to remind us that he
can also be a new-wave R&B artist.
But make no mistake, Jay Rock
is a “rapper” in the most tradi-
tional sense, and 90059 is a “rap
album.” He’s not a technical word-
smith of the Kendrick Lamar ilk,
a conspiratorial psychonaut in the
form of Ab-Soul, or a bucket hat-
donning party-boy like Schoolboy
Q, and there’s nothing wrong with
that. Most known for a verse on
a song that isn’t even his, Rock is
carried through 90059 by a level of
honesty that makes even the most
boring artists (yes you, J. Cole)
worth listening to.
Though the album does have
its fair share of fillers and audio
sandpaper, Jay Rock at least
presents himself as a regu-
lar dude. More specifically, he
takes pride in maintaining a
level of authenticity of keep-it-
real-ness that makes hip-hop
as much sport as art; the video
for “Parental Advisory” even
includes shots of him bench-
pressing in his front yard. While
it’s unfair to ask an artist to fit
your arbitrary model of “enter-
taining,” the least they can do is
provide some sort of transpar-
ency in answering who they are
and where they’re from behind
the mic. 90059 sees Jay Rock at
his best when he lets his guard
down to let us know the impor-
tance of keeping your guard up
in South Central LA.
He wastes no time on “Neces-
sary” where the hook sees him
murmur, “You gotta do what
you got to just get over the hill
/ When you live in America,
either kill or be killed.” The
production on “Easy Bake” fea-
tures the types of shrill string
accompaniment
that
West
Coast vets like Dr. Dre would be
proud of, the type that could be
used in an IMAX feature film.
It’s a shame, however, because
the song is packed with the type
of played out rappity-raps you’d
expect from a high-schooler: we
get it, you started from the bot-
tom and now you’re cool on the
Internet.
Fortunately, Rock stops him-
self five minutes into “Easy
Bake” (perhaps a few minutes
too late), mid-sentence, to cut
into one of the standout tracks,
“Gumbo.” It’s everything that
screams contemporary West
Coast rap rolled into a track
that I can only imagine would
knock in a ’64 Impala. While
the song does have some rather
generic “I’m real” bars, Rock
interestingly opens up about his
hood vantage point. “Keep my
chin down, nose clean, and my
guard up / Charged up, cause
this ghetto got me scarred up.”
Key word being “scarred.” The
sensation of being left physi-
cally and emotionally wounded
by your neighborhood is not
new to rap music, and if any-
thing, it’s something that’s been
consistent with contemporary
art made by young black men
in America. However, the wide-
spread nature of gang violence
and racial tension shouldn’t
diminish the value of this man’s
individual expression.
Enter “Money Trees Deuce”:
the culmination of Jay Rock’s
black experience as well as his
position as underdog in the Black
Hippy collective. The title itself
is an allusion to the song that we
all know him from … is this his
attempt at taking the spotlight?
Is it Jay Rock’s turn? Though
90059 unfortunately has a lot
of forgettable tracks, he really
hits the nail on the head with
this one. If you only get to listen
to one song, this is the one you
need to hear. He sets the stage
with horns ominously bringing
in the track, and at this point
in the music video he’s already
running from police.
“Gotta get it, ain’t no options
out here / Her n***a just killed
my partner out here” is about
as cold and explicit as you could
ask for. You might be inclined
to think, “Yeah, we’ve heard it
before” when you hear a rap-
per talk about dead homies, but
this isn’t Ricky from “Boyz n the
Hood.” These are real tales from
a real person from a real place.
Yes, Jay Rock can be unimagi-
native and boring; he is “just a
rapper” and 90059 is “just a rap
album,” but it’s still important to
give his stories the respect they
deserve. After all, rap music has
always been about giving voice to
the voiceless.
B
90059
Jay Rock
Top Dawg
Entertainment
TOP DAWG ENTERTAINMENT
More like Middle Dawg, amirite?
of a range of MCs and collectives
from Queen Latifah, Mos Def (now
Yasiin Bey) and Common to 2Pac,
Digable Planets and The Roots.
The tradition continued into
the new millennium, carried on
by many of the same musicians
who were making political rap
in the ’90s. But in the mid-2000s
hip hop artists began to question
the culture assembled around
their music in profound ways,
and encounters with academia
often helped to inspire that self-
critique.
Kanye
West’s
debut
album The College Dropout is
perhaps the best documentation of
this phenomenon, and while just
about everyone acknowledges that
it was one of the biggest watershed
moments in the history of hip hop,
most people find it so hard to look
past Kanye’s egotism that they
can’t see lines like “Sittin’ in the
hood like community colleges /
This dope money here is Lil’ Trey’s
scholarship” off of “We Don’t
Care” or “The concept of school
seems so securr / Sophomore,
three yurrs, she ain’t picked a
carurr / She like, fuck it, I’ll just
stay down here and do hair” from
“All Falls Down” for what they are:
a stunning portrait of the Black
collegiate experience at the end of
the 20th century.
You can trace the influence
of The College Dropout — an
illustration of what happens
when promises about status-
conferring education run up
against the inescapable demands
of
the
same
socioeconomic
hardship college is meant to
address — straight through to
the work of some of the most
famous and explicitly political
rappers doing it today, including
Lupe Fiasco, J. Cole, Kendrick
Lamar and Chance the Rapper.
Equally
important,
however,
Kanye made it possible for a hip
hop artist to talk about academia
and the collegiate experience,
mostly to criticize the university
system and question its status as
a pipeline to African American
liberation (you can hear echoes
of this critique every time a Black
person who “acts right,” like UVA
student Martese Johnson, finds
themselves subjected to racial
profiling and warrantless police
violence). But beyond critique,
this new subject area gave birth
to any number of student-rappers
(of various races) who began
using hip hop to talk about what
it’s like to be a college student
— think Asher Roth (West
Chester University), Das Racist
(Wesleyan University) and every
dude with a SoundCloud who
lives on your floor in East Quad
(myself included). I guarantee
you that every single one of them
spent years of their life debating
whether to start wearing shutter
shades as part of their daily
ensemble.
And as soon as college kids
started rapping about skipping
class to smoke weed, the rap game
only needed a short theoretical
jump to get dudes like me,
whose idea of a fun time involves
reading Walter Benjamin essays,
spitting about the finer points of
continental philosophy. Which
brings us to the current final
form of college rap: Milo.
Born
Rory
Ferreira
in
Kenosha, Wisconsin, Milo is
without question the most hyper-
intellectual rapper to ever do
it. In interviews, he weighs the
pros and cons of a deontological
moral stance and throws around
Schopenhauer quotes in the
same way Waka Flocka throws
around
“Brick
Squad!”s.
He
made an album entirely out of
America samples, titles songs
with things like “Gaudeamus
igitur (For Kang Min-Gyu),” had
one of his lyrics published by the
Johns Hopkins University Press
and has the distinction of being
the only rapper to have ever
released a track that includes
an explanation of the Kantian
notion of the Sublime (with
reference to Kim Kardashian’s
ass, no less).
But beyond appealing to the
pedantic
philosophile
living
inside my head, however, I find
Milo
incredibly
fascinating
because he seems to have found
a way to bridge the gap between
Kant
and
Kanye,
between
the technical jargon used in
American academic circles and
the cultural vocabulary available
to the rest of hip hop’s MC roster.
He’s occupying the sort of middle
ground Kanye inhabited in 2004
— the kind of fertile territory
that can produce major cultural
shifts, provided that an artist
with the right blend of vision
and stubbornness makes their
way onto the field. Depending
on how things go, Milo and like-
minded artists (and there are
a few, including Hellfyre Club
labelmates Open Mike Eagle
and Busdriver and Kool A.D. of
Das Racist) could produce a new
type of musical avant-garde: art
rap with the kind of enlightened
pessimism and semi-ironic pop
culture reference that makes
critics and people who like to
think of themselves as “cultured”
get googly eyes and start shelling
out cash.
DePollo is terribly sorry for
reminding everyone about Asher
Roth. To demand a personal letter of
apology, email adepollo@umich.edu.
Student-rappers
began using
hip hop to talk
about college.
“Shut the
fuck up about
commodity
fetishism.”
ADAM
DEPOLLO