now i, like many other stridently white young males, enjoy a good ol' fashioned slab of hometown hip-hop now and then. however unlike many of the aforementioned stridently white young males, my taste in hip-hop tends to run towards the cheerlessly esoteric, problematically white end of the ledger. for example soft atlas by 13 & god (mediafire. why anyone uses zshare is truly beyond me), a collaboration between a german synth-pop group and a collective of canadian improv rap poets, is my idea of an almost perfect hip-hop song. but that possibly turgid example of arthouse hip-hop doesn't mean that i don't know how to get down with the kids when required. i can dance. i can get funky. i can, and do, recite the entirety of boom! shake the room by jazzy jeff and the fresh prince. no matter how inappropriate the occasion. hell, i don't come to the block party, i am the block party!
whatever that means. something to do with lego?
yeah. something like that. so, shit-hop. because once you get over the shootings and misogyny and what not, hip-hop is, in the words of the great tobias funke, ripe for parody. two small offerings:
first to flight of the conchords, two musical comics of new zealand extraction who now have a rather nifty showon HBO in the states, which our house has recently been getting amorously involved with. being musically inclined, they occasionally sing songs. one of them was a little bit hip-hop.
and second, i recently ran across this small scene from the late 80s masterpiece teen witch, a snippet which (ha!) someone described as being the moment in which (ha?) hip-hop died. i'd like to throw into the murderous bargain its wholesale slaughter of perms, hats, pushbikes, the colour pink, singlets, vests, sidekicks, witches the word 'funky' and that awesome tough guy arm-folding thing you used to be able to do where you leaned back and used your top hand to clasp your shoulder. man. they're so hardcore. and white. like me.
