Nik Cohn’s “The Trickster”

bun-u

Trumpet Police
I read this over the Christmas holiday and really liked it. It’s the story of Cohn, a middle-aged Ulsterman with a background in (mainly sixties) rock journalism, taking up residence in New Orleans’ projects in the late 90s and slowly immersing himself in the local bounce/rap scene…this culminates in him playing an executive producer role for some recordings and playing middleman between local rap acts and the mainstream music industry (this all taking place shortly before the events last summer).

It’s engagingly written though his hang-ups sometimes become tiresome. This kind of caused me to question whether this book was really written to celebrate the downtown “ward” communities – as it always seemed to be about Cohn and his acceptance into those communities than anything else. But it did illuminate for me the ‘rap game’ and the New Orleans version of it.

I’d never heard of Cohn before, which is perhaps surprising given he’s written almost 20 books or something – has anybody else read anything else worth a look it?
 

Lichen

Well-known member
My bro gave me "Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom" for xmas and I loved it.

It's cohn's 1967 round up of pop to that date.

Fast, furious and quite enlightening.


I've also read "Yes we have no" that concerns his encounters with marginal, disenfrachised types in the UK. (that's a very glib account of it, but I'm lazy).


"The Trickster" sounds good. I will try and read it.
 
S

simon silverdollar

Guest
yeah i read 'triksta' over xmas too. i thought it was good, although there's strangely little in it about why this music means so much to him.

and i agree that it may focus a little too much on cohn's own hang-ups, although it was good to read such an honest and self-questioning account of internalized racism.
 
I also read it over the holidays and thought it was very good. I think his hang-ups are an integral part of the book and made it more readable for me. I prefer it to Patrick Neate's "Where You're At", which is in a similar vein, but without the level of reflection I think is necessary to make the topic more engaging than simple description.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Wasn't he involved in Saturday Night Fever?
I haven't read Tricksta (is that right?) but I read an extract about a year or so ago in a magazine. It seemed like a story I'd read many times before in a different setting.
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
i wasn't terribly impressed. it's easy to rip through, really pacy and paints a credible and pretty accurate picture of the city but my main contention is that, like much of cohn's work, it's as much, if not more, about him as/than the subject at hand. i'd have liked to have heard more from KLC of Beats By The Pound, who I love as a producer, and who has some interesting stories to tell (was lucky enough to spend a bit of time chatting with him and mannie fresh thru work back in july) and i don't know why ice mike wasn't mentioned, either.

i know cohn's emphasis of his own role in the story doesn't stop it being a good book, but the sections on race/cross-cultural relations/being a white man in a black world made me cringe. it all struck me as very 60s cultstuds and missed the point that hip-hop is a crucial factor in breaking down barriers of race, especially in the southern states, and that we're now getting into the second generation of people brought up with hip-hop and that within these groups people of all races can now claim it to be their music, too, making the idea of "us" and "them" pretty much anathema.

led me to the conclusion that his whiteness wasn't the problem, rather his age.

cohn's view of race/place and the constant explicit and implicit "(white) guilty" pleas all rang a little hollow, too, especially when he then wonders aloud why bounce producers look at him like he's stupid when he asks them to use samples of things like the nortec collective. despite professing to love bounce, there was a real feeling that he was trying to "improve" it in a paternalistic, reithian "must educate these people" kinda way.

there was also an idea of trying to shoehorn bounce into his own idea of the city's musical hertitage via this process of adding elements to the productions etc. this struck me as pretty narrowminded and unneccessary as it absolutely does fit anyway, just more implicitly. especially on album's like soulja slim's the streets made me, the stories told, the vocal cadences etc are not entirely dissimilar from blues, the call and response aspects straight outta gospel... why reach when you can say that so categorically?

the thing that was really sad about the general story of waiting for bounce to break was that after atlanta blowing up, people have been looking to the south for new sounds lately, leading to houston finally earning its place on the map and elsewhere gaining attention. so if it weren't for the hurricane, the likelihood is that new orleans' time would have come naturally, anyway, without cohn pushing it. plenty of places have had self-sustaining scenes that function on a very regional basis that don't try to bust out nationally/internationally and actually don't want to anyway, but eventually do by default (cf houston, atlanta and now even baltimore). it seems to be a pretty organic process and it's a shame that events have conspired to deny new orleans this chance.

apart from the bit where cohn is talking about being in the crowd at the parade and falling under the spell of magnolia shorty's "monkey on a dick", i also don't think the music was described especially well. if you want to find out what the stuff sounds like, the cocaine blunts blog did a compilation called bounce for relief a while ago, which you should be able to get on a few filesharing services (if you do, please make a donation to hurricane relief because that was the original idea behind it) or hit me off list and i can sort you out with a comp of stuff featured in the book and a little more besides.

that may all sound pretty harsh, but i didn't hate it, i just had a few problems (and cohn has written a couple of my favourite books ever, so it's certainly not based on any antipathy toward him). among many other things, cohn is very, very good at writing people/events/music (cf things like his pj proby obsession) into history and he's achieved this for bounce. if it weren't cohn, there's no way this book would have been published to such fanfare and you'd certainly never have seen people like choppa and dj jubilee being discussed in the guardian weekend magazine or granta. also, it is very well written and is a good place to glean information/names/tracks to listen to if you're a complete novice, so don't anyone shy away from it on my account.
 
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D7_bohs

Well-known member
I read 'awopbopaloobopalopbamboom' when I was 14, back when there were about 10 books about rock and pop in the whole world; along with Charlie Gillett's 'the sound of the city' it saved me from prog rock. Wish there was something now I could recommend to 14 year olds to save them from Radiohead worship.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Great stuff Dave, but, errrrrr, maybe bung some link breaks in there? :eek:

My old old eyes had to cut and paste it into a Word file.

It was worth it tho. :cool:
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
i can see paragraph and line breaks??? is it maybe yr browser? i'm all confused and don't want to hurt anyone's eyes!
 

john eden

male pale and stale
stelfox said:
i can see paragraph and line breaks??? is it maybe yr browser? i'm all confused and don't want to hurt anyone's eyes!

I'll check it at home, but your post does have paras in.

Bun-u's original post has a line of white space between his paras, which makes it easier to read.

This has to win the prize for tedious derail of the week, no? :D
 
S

simon silverdollar

Guest
stelfox said:
cohn's view of race/place and the constant explicit and implicit "(white) guilty" pleas all rang a little hollow, too, especially when he then wonders aloud why bounce producers look at him like he's stupid when he asks them to use samples of things like the nortec collective. despite professing to love bounce, there was a real feeling that he was trying to "improve" it in a paternalistic, reithian "must educate these people" kinda way.

there was also an idea of trying to shoehorn bounce into his own idea of the city's musical hertitage via this process of adding elements to the productions etc. this struck me as pretty narrowminded and unneccessary as it absolutely does fit anyway, just more implicitly. especially on album's like soulja slim's the streets made me, the stories told, the vocal cadences etc are not entirely dissimilar from blues, the call and response aspects straight outta gospel... why reach when you can say that so categorically?

i agree that cohn's attempts to walk in to the studio full of experienced producers and MCs and tell them how to write a bounce hit did seem pretty arrogant and narrowminded, but to be fair to him the book does end with him acknowledging that the music got a lot better when he stopped trying to 'executive produce', and just let the musicians do what they felt.
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
yeah, agreed. i wouldn't say it was necessarily arrogance, more a lack of understanding of all the above coupled with a weirdly patronising worthiness. that attitude grated on me throughout, and that's pretty strange because cohn's whole musical worldview has always hinged around the concepts of the "real" and "authentic" (he pretty much believed rock died with the beatles), yet there he was trying to dilute something completely genuine and raw. the section about what hip-hop was and what it has become was pretty bizarre, too. actually reminded me of an extended version k-punk's views on hip-hop from last year and precisely what it was doing there, i'm not sure, other than making up space.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
looks like it was my turn to read this at christmas this year.

i did like it, but found myself cringing a great deal of the time.
 
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