« OGIC: Laugh, cry, repeat | Main | OGIC: Terry Teachout, call your office »
August 31, 2004
OGIC: 50 Tracks, revisited
Lots of good feedback on last week's link to CBC's "50 Tracks," much of it focused on the hip-hop. Quoth the 'Fesser, "I bemoan the Clashlessness of the CBC list, and would toss 4 back, and ask the dealer for 4 new to go with Public Enemy as my hole card." Musician extraordinaire and FOOGIC Kenneth Burns is more inclined to praise the panel for what they got right; one senses his expectations for this sort of exercise have been sanded down to a bare sliver: "The CBC is rightly taking pains to have its 80s ranking include hip-hop. It's an essential 80s pop genre, but it's routinely ignored in at least the more fatuous remembrances of the decade. I'm thinking especially of 80s radio stations, which mostly play 'Come On Eileen.'"And don't forget its 70s roots, writes Andrew Lindemann Malone, who blogs at Spam-o-matic:
I'm not sure what you'd knock off in the 1970s to make room for it (oh, wait, I am sure--the Joni Mitchell joint), but "Flashlight" was not only the apex of the genius of George Clinton and Parliament but of 1970s funk, and you can't get to two hip-hop songs in the 1980s without funk in the 1970s.
Speaking of which, I was surprised to see "The Message" on there. Not that I dispute its quality--if "Rapper's Delight" and "The Breaks" were the first hip-hop hits, "The Message" was the first song that indicated that hip-hop could address the world around it from a unique perspective. But if you're talking essentiality, "Fight the Power" would seem to have a greater claim than "The Message," since it also addresses itself to the inequities of society but does so with a flurry of samples and genuinely dislocating beat that act as musical analogues to Chuck D's exhortations-something "The Message"'s undeniably seductive dance-floor beat just can't boast.
No luck on this reader's well-defended 90s prediction, however:
I'm going to confine myself, regarding the nineties, to speculating that Dr. Dre's "Nuthin' but a G Thang" will represent hip-hop on that honor roll. For better or worse, this was the song that had white kids all over the 'burbs wanting to pimp their rides and mack their hoes; it's the purest expression of G-funk, and G-funk was what brought hip-hop into the limelight. Whether this was a good way for white America to view black America, from a distance and through a fantasy, is something for the sociologists, not the musicologists, to debate.
The 90s selections, as well the ten listener-elected songs that round out the 50 (i.e., the back door through which the 'Fesser's Clash slips in), can be viewed here. Note, please, that the OGIC pick, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"--low-hanging fruit though it admittedly is--sits atop the 90s in all its obviousness, essential enough to stymie the instinctive obscurantism of not one, not two, not even three, but four rock-critics-with-a-soapbox!
UPDATE: Andrew Lindemann Malone has further thoughts on the 90s list here.
Posted August 31, 2004 2:50 AM
