black metal, gangster rap, transgression + (organic) intellectuals

so this very clearly isn't topical or anything (despite the ongoing intermittent output of academic papers + discussion surrounding black metal) but lately I have for whatever reason been listening to much gangster rap from its halycon days, i.e. the first half of the 90s, and I was thinking about this the other day.

here's a paper from 1999 that is essentially a semantic overview of rap up to that point, with a specific focus on gangster rap. many of the insights + critiques rather predictable, as is the ultimate conclusion (favoring consciousness, specifically of the street variety, over gangster ignorance) tho perhaps not as much as they were 12 years ago. and tbf it's much more nuanced + considered than your average mass media hysteria, or true school denunciation (i.e. Okayplayer or whatever) for that matter. here's a more recent paper on Peste Noire, who are kind of a crit theorist's wet dream as far as extreme political + aesthetic stances, depth of thought, internal contradictions + so on (Sale Famine kind of comes across like Euronymous, albeit much smarter + more mature yet still with that same propensity for wild, extreme statements). the latter is considerably drier + more academic in tone but both papers not only mention but are actually focused around the organic intellectualism of their subjects.

I'm not so interested in the actual academic output on these musics which is, I mean...whatever it usually is when critical theory is seriously applied to a pop culture topic, i.e. a few genuine, unexpected insights mixed in with a -lot- of highly verbose silliness, many reference to Frankfurt School/French post-structuralists/etc and so on. I'm more curious about what draws these academic bros to this stuff...something about a perfect blending point of transgression + extremism, pop culture, cultural + subcultural coding that is highly difficult for outsiders (such as academics) to decipher + thus intriguing, violence (especially in the art imitating life imitating art loop that screams out for pomo conjecturing), and a bunch of other things I'm sure. certainly there's a highly weird element of fetishism that's more akin to certain kinds of journalism. specifically I'm thinking of sportswriters in the way that they often mythologize - sometimes in very creepy ways - the athletes they write about*. in this case academics fetishizing the outlaw element + violence + extreme positions (or inn rap's case hypermasculinity/misogyny) that they are simultaneously denouncing or at the very least ambivalent about. the whole element of the educated professional valuing something for its very ignorance, a point one could also make about a great deal of more academic nuum journalism, the notion that something loses value by being/becoming self-aware. where this celebration of "organic intellectualism" comes in, a term that to me implies the academy trained intellectual professional simultaneously celebrating/condescending with the label (s)he has him/herself applied . I'm kind of just rambling at this point so I'll stop maybe other people will be able to say interesting things more concisely. maybe it can be boiled down to yet another iteration of middle-class guilt I dunno...

this would almost certainly would have made more sense as a blog post but I'm too busy/lazy to maintain a blog + I reckon message boards offer a considerably better chance of actual discussion. maybe no one will write anything back + it will be one of those lonely thread starters that just withers on the internet vine which would be ok but I reckon there are enough actual intellectuals around here who are also into black metal and/or rap to say some interesting things...

*didn't Baudrillard write that one thing about sports + watching sports + media coverage of sports and all the different layers of simulation + removal therein? not that I've actually read it but maybe someone else has.

I guess what I'm saying is this stuff functions almost as a strange corollary to actually liking something. beyond just the impulse for critical theorists + other types of humanities academies to apply whatever it is they do to other things in life. it's like this distancing but not for reasons people usually apply distancing mechanisms (i.e. for self-defense). the inevitably uneasy interaction with the actual subject themselves if such an interaction ever actually occurs, in either of the above musics or on in early 00s grime for a closer to home example maybe. the also weird mixed feelings tendency to embrace/reject when one of the organic intellectuals - not a professional intellectual like Kode9 or the guy from Liturgy - proves to be quite self-aware (I'm thinking of those long Blackdown interviews with Burial from 2005 or so when he would just go back + cite nuum history chapter + verse) altho quite a lot of them are which is another weird thing like I said about fetishization + imposition of the organic label that it supposes these dudes aren't highly self-aware, a very dubious assumption in any culture as self-referential as that of black metal or especially rap, which is just about the most goddamn self-referential thing ever.

but I am rambling again I think. just thinking out loud really.

anyway it's a chance to have a thread that's not just another YT dump. not that there's anything wrong with that. so long as it doesn't become just a bunch of hyperlinks to papers on black metal in prominent pomo academic journals (whatever those are, I have no idea).

unsurprisingly I'm not the first dude to make this connection. 2 of the first 10 hits that come up when one G's "gangster rap black metal".

"unholy black metal + hardcore gangsta rap" - I dunno if the death row/bad boy beef was quite is quite as central to rap + attendant mythology as burzum/euronymous is to black metal, if only b/c rap was/is a much bigger world with more things going on. tho otoh maybe it is. some of the other comparisons are kinda facile as well - a couple church burnings are a looong way, in just about every way, from the major role gangbanging, hustling, etc have played in certain segments of rap (for one dudes aren't exactly financing their bedroom BM demos w/$ earned putting Christians to the sword), and equating the minority status of an ideological pov w/skin color is beyond absurd. but I like the specificness of song comparisons, tho I doubt rob darken is the biggest N.W.A fan (tho Fenriz just might be). and the obvious points about nihilism + extreme posturing. bonus points for the Conan title.

quietus chimes in - even better title (cheap but effective). really interesting points about the similarities in economic rebellion (or at least against the image of wealth, tho rap was always about conspicuous consumption, tho I guess you could say even that is a rebellion against both poverty + bourgeois levelheadedness), maybe not surprisingly made by an outsider to both cultures. also about the musical similarities - to bring in Screw again maybe vocal extremity as well tho of a different kind - and so on. obligatory Liturgy/Celeste/etc reference. tidbit about the Ulver guys + Necrobutcher headnodding to Zomby is hilarious. you could say all those surviving BM dudes have reached the respectability that age inevitably brings i.e. Snoop (especially Fenriz, to bring that guy up again), like the villain guy said in Chinatown about when you get old...

I do this once every 6 months, cop that luka style you know. I think the last time was when we had that thread on 1993-1994 happy jungle. that worked out good. it's the insomnia tho. this is the kind of thing I think about tho when I'm waiting in freight elevators to deliver packages to law firms in their offices in skyscrapers in downtown Chicago. that happens a lot when you're a bike messenger. probably I should think about something more productive but it's tough. you have to fight the banality, you know.

does anyone else remember when horrorcore was going to be the next big thing? like a bunch of it was bubbling in the underground (early 3-6 + Esham + whatever), RZA was doing Gravediggaz on the side, tons of dudes had that gothic kind of art image going (or maybe it was just that one Cypress Hill record), and Big L was rapping about being the devil's son + everything. tho it was kind of more cartoonish, like Venom instead of Burzum. I imagine it's pretty hard to take all the occult/evil business very seriously in the midst of actual violence and material hardship (can you imagine black metal getting over in detroit? I certainly can't). maybe black metal guys need to start doing more ridebys on each other with their horses and swords - sorry that's probably in poor taste.

alright now I'm done for real.

paolo said:

BM is probably the whitest music that there is.

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well yes + no, despite that being a well-accepted trope. yes in all the obvious ways. no in that all the basic gtr-bass-drums structures, leaving aside synth-only dark ambient etc side of things, ultimately come from rock + roll e.g. largely from black people ("Negroid" as Vikernes would so charmingly put it). also while the great majority of BM bands are still white European or European-American guys there are + have been a sizeable number of Asian, Latino, etc BM projects from Sigh to Xibalba to say nothing of the questionable "whiteness" of, say, all the pioneers of the Greek scene. or even the conflict between Northern European + Slavonic, or other kinds, of whiteness. but that's a whole other discussion about ethnicity and identity, whiteness as a social construct and so on. musically essentially it's rock music stripped of all the groove (the "blackness") but it's hardly unique in that. hardcore punk (not to mention grindcore, origin of many BM sonic tropes), gabber/hardcore techno, no wave skronk can all be said to do a similar thing aesthetically and/or sonically.

Slothrop said:

The gothic design thing is still around in a lot of urban fashion, isn't it?

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I don't really pay attention to fashion design so I wouldn't know but it sounds plausible. it's still present in rap but it's a pretty minor current, at one point in the 90s it seemed like horrorcore might be the next big thing after gangster rap (instead of the whole Puffy shiny suits speedboats etc) like when Bone Thugs were at the peak of their fame dabbling in the occult, all the abovementioned things, the Geto Boys had that vibe a lot...I'm pretty sure Noz did a big post about obscure horrorcore a few years ago that talked a bit about this. perhaps akin to darkside jungle except rap's actual darkside equivalent was 36 Chambers, The Infamous, rawer unpolished Biggie, etc. hard + rugged rather than dark, the dark stuff was more of a cartoon in rap.

Ransbeeck said:

So what you're saying is that the people who don't originate from the subculture that brought forward the music don't actually enjoy the music, but rather enjoy learning about the lifestyle of said subculture?

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that absolutely not what I'm saying, no. what you're talking about is pretty much what made rap the dominant popular music of the 90s + to a lesser extent 00s and now instead of a niche market for homegrown audiences + white enthusiasts (like reggae) - suburban or in your case European teenagers, exotification, shock rock, etc. what I'm talking about is more like certain white journalists going to Jamaica at the height of roots or early dancehall to try to understand the music better by also understanding its cultural context, only with an academic rather than a journalistic distancing of researcher from subject. fans make no claims to objectivity, academics do, or at least the attempt. granted that academics tend to mostly be white, middle-class etc but they generally make some kind of effort to understand what they're writing about (like anthropologists doing field work). I'm not really talking just about BM or gangster rap or any single music form anyway, or about both of those but also about cultural criticism in general. if I was better read I could probably come up with similar examples from outside music, like hype of outsider art or coverage of more extreme performance art (like Actionism or something) but I'm not so I can't. it's true I'm just kind of thinking out loud so it's not the clearest. also if you wrote a bunch of semi-cryptic posts in Flemish I'd likely be confused.

I have to go to work anyway.

that black metal theory blog is where I originally saw the Peste Noire essay. like I said I'm not really very interested in the actual academic output which is like 99.99% of that stuff meant solely for other academics or aspiring academics versed in the same authors, lingo + so on. more why this is the music being chosen by academics to quantify with all their critical forms. I guess working towards some kind of vague notion about recuperation in terms of cultural rather than political transgression (Ice Cube's transition from Amerikkka's Most Wanted to Tyler Perry-esque sitcoms) and the role of academic professionals or other trained intellectuals in that recuperation.