Category: Uncategorized

j dilla, r.i.p.

Sad news: Jay Dee, a.k.a. J Dilla, is dead at 32. He had a rare blood disease and lupus. His latest album, the very good Donuts, was just released last week.
I got to know about him via Jaylib, his collab with Madlib. “Champion Sound” is aces, and “McNasty Filth,” while lyrically lowbrow (Jay Dee could make beats, but the man was not much as a rapper) kicked major dancefloor ass. But he’s worked with just about everybody in the Hip-Hop-Liked-By-Grad-Student-White-Boys subgenre (A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Slum Village, The Roots, Common, etc.)
Hear some more of his stuff on his Myspace page. (Try “Two Can Win” [bouncy hip-hop that would fit on a “Blueprint”-era Jay-Z disc], “Anti-American Graffiti” [smooth psych for backpackers], and “Don’t Cry” [updated Marvin Gaye soul] to get an idea of his range.)

mf doom is a god among men

I was all ready to blow up when I saw the headline on this Village Voice review: “MF Doom: Worst Rapper Ever?”
MF Doom is a god among men. I mean, there’s Madvillainy, one of the best hip-hop records of the 2000s, but there’s also the freakier Viktor Vaughn sides, the snack-food concept album, the Ghostface collaboration (available on a file-sharing network near you), and a thousand more.
And, of course, the Danger Doom album, which was to my mind the most accessible great hip-hop album of recent times. The beats (by DJ Danger Mouse) are so bright and shiny and fun that I have trouble imagining anyone not liking it. (Four tracks here, “Sofa King” and “Old School” especially.) Then again, I underestimate some people’s hatred of hip-hop all the time.
And dude, the man wears a metal mask whenever he’s in public. That’s awesome.
Anyway, upon further reading, that Village Voice article gives Doom his due. He’s “muttering fascinatingly free-associative non-sequitur rhymes, and crafting disorienting beats from chopped-up shards of quiet storm and hotel-lounge jazz…These days, he’s just about the only thing in underground rap worth anyone’s attention.” And: “MF Doom is a great rapper, an enigmatic master of persona shifts and weird transitions; he turns traditional battle-rap into an exercise in sidelong expressionism and internal-rhyme virtuosity…his under-the-breath all-tangent flow is compellingly mysterious, especially when paired with swirling low-fi beats.” But the writer claims Doom sucks live. And I don’t doubt it: His music is, as he writes, best on headphones, and beyond the mask, Doom on stage is just a chubby guy standing still.
And it does seem strange that the great Big Daddy Kane was reduced to opening for Doom. No surprise that Kane apparently put on a great show. Last I heard from him was his guest on Prince Paul’s A Prince Among Thieves.
Two random side notes:
– An MP3 of Dealership’s “Tetsuo,” the one song most likely to cause me to play airdrums.
– I’m going to SXSW again this year, No. 5 in a row. If you’re going too, let me know.

blacks and hiv/aids

On the great list of crabwalk.com hobbyhorses — somewhere below the deity of Dean Smith and mid-’90s Canadian indie rock, but above West Coast rapper Madlib and the evils of the brokerage industry — lies the media’s reporting on AIDS.
Here I write about a misguided attempt to say the elderly are increasingly infected; here I write about a misguided attempt to tie heterosexual anal sex to high viral rates; here I write about how increasing condom use might not be the most effective way to stem the African epidemic.
The problems with all these stories is that they’re well-intentioned — but willing to let those good intentions cloud the facts. People my age remember, in the late 1980s, being told that by the time we were all adults, a quarter or a third of Americans would be dead of AIDS. (Oprah famously said in 1987 that 1 in 5 heterosexuals could be dead within three years.)
The people who told us that were well-intentioned — they wanted people to think of HIV/AIDS as a disease that extends beyond gays and IV drug users, and they played up the Ryan Whites of the world and exaggerated the ease of transmission to accomplish that goal. I support those good intentions, but oppose cooking the numbers to do it.
Anyway, here’s today’s example. CNN.com front-page headline: “HIV hitting blacks harder.” Stop a moment and think about what you expect this story to say.
Then be surprised when you actually read the story and see this:
“[CDC scientist Tonji] Durant and colleagues found that the rate of HIV diagnosis fell by 6.8 percent annually among black women and 4.4 percent annually among black men between 2001 and 2004. The HIV diagnosis rate even fell by 9.7 percent every year on average among black male users of injected drugs, the CDC study found.”
Look at those numbers! That’s a 20 percent drop over three years in women, and a 12.6 percent drop among men. Hell, that’s even a 26.4 percent drop among one of the highest-risk groups out there, black male IV drug users!
So how does this turn into “HIV hitting blacks harder”? The headline writer can probably get out of jail free by saying HIV is hitting blacks harder than other American racial categories — whites, Hispanics, Asians, etc. But that’s (a) clearly not the impression the headline gives and (b) not news, since infection rates for blacks have been higher than other races since the 1980s. Clearly, the headline is intended to imply things are getting worse for blacks, when the opposite is thankfully true.
I wonder if this headline was written by the same person at CNN.com who wrote my previous headline bete noire, “HIV cases increasingly older and straighter,” atop a story that (a) didn’t deal with the straight/gay issue at all and (b) did not support the “older” thesis one iota.
One final note: The CDC study this story is based on isn’t new — it came out in November.

garden of eden in new guinea

How cool is this?
(Sorry, wish I had something more interesting to say than “How cool is this?” My answer, for the record, is “like, totally cool.”)
I was just thinking yesterday about what a shame it was that the age of exploration is essentially over. I was reading this fine piece in CJR — which, by the way, sums up my aspirations for a travel-writing/reportage mish-mash eerily well — and thinking how unfortunate it was that, not only are there no more spots on the map marked “Unknown,” every square inch of earth now has a Lonely Planet volume to match. But apparently I was just being self-centered and short-sighted. Shocking, I know!
(Sidenote: The area described, the Foja mountains in Papua New Guinea, are not completely unexplored. Jared Diamond — of Guns, Germs & Steel fame — actually did a lot of work there in the 1970s and seemed to find the same sort of Edenic environment: “No European had previously set foot in this vast range, and no native people inhabit it. The animals were entirely tame, birds of paradise displaying to Diamond within metres of his face, while undescribed kinds of tree-kangaroos stared at him as he walked by.” Compare that to the CNN article linked above. I wonder if this is as new as the scientists might have us believe.)

vive le quebec libre

Video of Charles de Gaulle’s famous “Vive le Quebec libre” speech from 1967. The speech came during the Montreal World’s Fair, Expo 67, and came when Quebecois separatism was just gaining momentum. De Gaulle, in town for the fair, went to the the balcony of city hall and, before a hyped-up crowd of thousands, started making trouble.
He made a number of insupportable statements — like obliquely comparing English Canada to Nazi Germany — and generally built a fantasy of a Greater France ready for global conquest. (France was feeling particularly frisky in 1967, having recently dropped out of NATO’s military command and expelled all foreign troops from the country. It had already gone nuclear, and it was a few months away from developing the H-bomb without American assistance. De Gaulle was in the middle of what he called “la politique de grandeur,” an attempt to make France a strong, independent force on the global stage.)
The speech is shockingly aggressive, really, and whatever one thinks of their merits, de Gaulle’s speech — and especially the crowd’s reaction — gives you chills. It feels like a rebel leader about to order a storming of the capital, not boring old Canada. The applause lines kill — particularly at the 5:50 mark, when he unexpectedly (at least to English Canada) follows up a “Vive le Quebec!” with a “Vive le Quebec…libre!”
A transcript is here, in the original French and an English translation, so you can follow along.
De Gaulle’s remarks were not spontaneous. Rather than fly into English Canada, he’d spent a week crossing the Atlantic on a French warship so his point of arrival could be Quebec City. Before leaving, he’d told his son-in-law: “I will hit hard. Hell will happen, but it has to be done. It’s the last occasion to repent for France’s cowardice.” (Meaning France’s cowardice in giving up Quebec to the Brits in 1763. De Gaulle was nothing if not historically-minded.) After the speech, he said: “Of course, I could, like many others, get away from [making trouble] by uttering some courtesies or diplomatic sidesteps. But when one is General de Gaulle, one does not get away with those kind of expedients. What I did, I had to do it.”
Of course, it’s the height of diplomatic rudeness to put on this kind of show in someone else’s country, particularly a NATO ally. Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson — a Nobel Prize-winning, immigration-loving, peacekeeper-inventing badass in his own right — told de Gaulle to, in essence, fuck off, saying “Canadians do not need to be liberated.” De Gaulle was chased out of the country and told never to come back. He didn’t.
Perhaps the best rebuke came from Pauline Vanier, wife of Canada’s governor general. Upon seeing de Gaulle after the speech, she pressed a scrap of paper in his hand. Its message, in its entirety: “1940.” She might have written “Juno Beach” instead, but the point was made.
More on the Gaullist politics of grandeur here.

happy 100th, startlegram

They may be the competition, of a sort, but happy 100th birthday to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. (Or, as everyone in media circles calls it, the Startlegram.) Amon Carter, the paper’s grandaddy, built quite a legacy for himself and his city, from the museum that bears his name to his positioning of Fort Worth as the de facto capital of a big swath of the American southwest. And his intense hatred of Dallas always had a nifty populist edge; his slogan for Fort Worth was “Where the West Begins,” and his corollary for Dallas was “Where the East Peters Out.” (Legend has it Carter always took food with him when business took him to Dallas for the day, so he wouldn’t have to spend any money there.)