Nina Gordon's Straight Outta Compton

L

Loki

Well-known member
been reading a fair amount about Nina Gordon's cover of NWA's Straight Outta Compton in the blogs recently, most of which seems to fall into three camps: 1) it's full of fun n frolics or 2) pastiche/irony/postmodernism is dead... 3) Nina's use of the word nigger is racist bile.

it's the 3rd i'd like to bring to the table... i've read a few blogs suggesting she should either 1)never have covered this song or 2) she should have changed the words (i'm assuming they generally mean the N words - people seem alright about allusions to incest with your female parent)

now number 2) seems absurd... surely changing the words is taking the song even further out of it's cultural context? which leaves me to consider number 1) should she be allowed to cover it as a white gal? is she committing some awful gaff ?

i don't know... seems to me that music / words etc ought not to be sacred because that seems to lead to badness of Rushdian proportions but then I've also rooted through all the old Orwellian / Wittgenstein 'Language is Powerlessness' arguments and come to no great conclusion...

some people seem to think that Nina's cover is the aural equivalent of Gollywogging or the Black and White Minstrel Soul but i'm not convinced that this kind of appropriation is any different from the wholesale 'ambient' sampling of Sufi Prayer (i'm thinking of how it's used in Natural Born Killers, for example), aboriginal chants, native american pipe motifs etc etc... i mean do people think that Trent Reznor was taking the piss out of Sufis?

Is another culture's music able to be used to an effect other than that which it was intended? even a comedy one? I have a tendency to think anything goes but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise...

And what about Kid 606's cover? Has anyone had a go at that?

Vanilla Ice?
 
M

mms

sometimes
Loki said:
been reading a fair amount about Nina Gordon's cover of NWA's Straight Outta Compton in the blogs recently, most of which seems to fall into three camps: 1) it's full of fun n frolics or 2) pastiche/irony/postmodernism is dead... 3) Nina's use of the word nigger is racist bile.

it's the 3rd i'd like to bring to the table... i've read a few blogs suggesting she should either 1)never have covered this song or 2) she should have changed the words (i'm assuming they generally mean the N words - people seem alright about allusions to incest with your female parent)

now number 2) seems absurd... surely changing the words is taking the song even further out of it's cultural context? which leaves me to consider number 1) should she be allowed to cover it as a white gal? is she committing some awful gaff ?

i don't know... seems to me that music / words etc ought not to be sacred because that seems to lead to badness of Rushdian proportions but then I've also rooted through all the old Orwellian / Wittgenstein 'Language is Powerlessness' arguments and come to no great conclusion...

some people seem to think that Nina's cover is the aural equivalent of Gollywogging or the Black and White Minstrel Soul but i'm not convinced that this kind of appropriation is any different from the wholesale 'ambient' sampling of Sufi Prayer (i'm thinking of how it's used in Natural Born Killers, for example), aboriginal chants, native american pipe motifs etc etc... i mean do people think that Trent Reznor was taking the piss out of Sufis?

Is another culture's music able to be used to an effect other than that which it was intended? even a comedy one? I have a tendency to think anything goes but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise...

And what about Kid 606's cover? Has anyone had a go at that?

Vanilla Ice?
Click to expand...

i haven't heard this, is she a white girl and what kinda style is it?
it just sounds a bit shit to me really rather than races.


i read a really good essay about the appropriation of qwali music, esp nusrat fateh ali khan and how one of his tracks got passed thru the machinations of soundtrack to commercial use to remixing etc.
it was very cool, from a postmodern culture book i think, which is a shame.

the kid 606 is just dsping the org track to shit and looping stuff, etc, there was a whole album of that stuff by all these silly fkrs who do that stuff.

I'm glad he's got over that shrug shouldered gesturing, the stuff with dancehall and mc's especially makes more sense.
 
L

Loki

Well-known member
she is a white girl and it's in a kinda trad country style... maybe that's what's bugging people...
 
M

mms

sometimes
Loki said:
she is a white girl and it's in a kinda trad country style... maybe that's what's bugging people...
Click to expand...


it sounds clueless twatism to me.
obviously the test would be a month in compton or some time at crenshaw high
 
hint

hint

party record with a siren
exactly - I always thought of the track as pretty pantomime to begin with... all of NWA, in fact...

Ice Cube!
is not for the pop charts!
 
M

Melchior

Taking History Too Far
I thought it was supposed to be a bit fo a joke, like the Dynamite Hack cover of Boyz in da Hood.

I mean really, aren't people taking this a bit seriously?
 
M

MiltonParker

Well-known member
it's a silly little mp3 posted to her website, and people getting _too_ offended probably have a lot of time on their hands.

if it does rankle, it's not simply because she's kept the N word -- it's because she's pronouncing it with the hard R at the end. she may not know that this is a ugly faux pas. if the word has been successfully/safely taken back by rappers, one of the reasons why is because the word has been changed in a tiny, crucial way, both in spelling and pronunciation.

if you say it the 'old' way then the word brings out the old, ugly connotations. so you don't say it the old way, at least not without getting looked at funny / getting the shit beaten out of you.
 
B

boy better know

I'm Serious
MiltonParker said:
so you don't say it the old way, at least not without getting looked at funny / getting the shit beaten out of you.
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2Face says it the old way ("Who's That Niggerrrr?") though.

but yeah, people are taking this song far too seriously. it is a nonentity. it's a joke which isn't funny, pleasant to listen to, or original. why is such a fuss being made over it?
 
P

puretokyo

Mercury Blues
I'll preface this by saying that - after downloading the song, I read the rest of this thread and was totally turned off. I was on the edge of deleting the track and I decided to give it a listen; after a few seconds of groaning, it started to work and by the time it was done I had concluded that it was truly a genius and fabulous piece of music.

Its fundamental achievements are thus -

1. Throwing into stark relief the horrific violence and casual offensiveness of the Straight Outta Compton lyrics. This surprised me - I generally listen to the song at least once a week and I guess I'm completely numbed (or just conditioned by the grinding beats and blasting horns) to the lyrics. This track really isolates and emphasises their content by removing any sense of braggadocio or machismo.

2. Demonstrating the facile nature of much songwriting and emotion-wringing country/rock. She sounds as genuine as more or less anyone else in this style of easy-country/adult/pop - all the while claiming to be a 'crazy motherfucker named ice cube'.
 
J

Jesse D Serrins

Well-known member
puretokyo said:
a genius and fabulous piece of music.

This track really isolates and emphasises their content by removing any sense of braggadocio or machismo.

2. Demonstrating the facile nature of much songwriting and emotion-wringing country/rock. She sounds as genuine as more or less anyone else in this style of easy-country/adult/pop - all the while claiming to be a 'crazy motherfucker named ice cube'.
Click to expand...

This didn't pop up on my cultural radar outside this forum, so I'm not taking it too seriously, don't worry. But first off, a number of years ago some white boy Dave Matthews wanna be band did a similar thing to Gin and Juice, made it a party "anthem" that geeky white people could listen to without feeling uncomfortable, or like they could all have a laugh at how white they were. But really it's more like unjustly reclaiming that which had been justly reclaimed. The aggressiveness of the song- instead of dealing with the social implications of that, you just turn it back into something you can deal with. It doesn't matter so much when it's just a little blip, a little free download. But read from Tricia Rose why emasculating male rappers in this way is not that cool.
 
D

Diaz

Well-known member
I don't like post here ever or have much to say in general, except that cover jesse speaks of isn't Dave Matthews (or Phish, or Ween) covering Gin and Juice, it's a Texas bluegrass band called the Gourds, that bluegrass is full of motherfuckers as tough (or narrow-minded or rude or sad but enlightened or real and generally pretty much the same) as hiphop and that neither snoop nor the gourds thought of it as a joke, it's a party song, and there's a diff.
 
P

puretokyo

Mercury Blues
Jesse D Serrins said:
But really it's more like unjustly reclaiming that which had been justly reclaimed. The aggressiveness of the song- instead of dealing with the social implications of that, you just turn it back into something you can deal with. It doesn't matter so much when it's just a little blip, a little free download. But read from Tricia Rose why emasculating male rappers in this way is not that cool.
Click to expand...

Of course, it would be an act of racist emasculation to take away these mens' justified anger and their attempt to draw themselves up above the morass of their social situation viz. Eazy in 'Boyz',

"Dumb ho said something that made me mad/
she said something that I couldn't believe /
so I grabbed the stupid bitch by her nappy ass weave/
she started talkin' shit wouldn't you know/
so I reached back like a pimp and slapped the ho".

In fact my point was quite the opposite to that you seem to have understood from my post. In my understanding of this track, this Gordon person has, quite accidentally I assume, come up with something special not by 'reclaiming' but almost the opposite - by stripping away the aural aggression and the cultural background of 'justly reclaimed'... something (what was it exactly that NWA 'justly reclaimed'? Righteous anger? Violence? Misogyny? Incredible rapping and production skills and visionary cultural positioning?) and just letting the lyrical content speak out.

Rather than 'turning it back into something you can deal with', to me this song does the opposite - by removing the context it foregrounds the content and gives that content more impact - because rather that just letting it slide with the general aural violence and anger of '89 hiphop, you are forced to deal with the lyrical concepts and conceits in their own right. Where the NWA is 'something you can deal with' easily, this rendition is more troubling. That is its strength.

Please note, my Eazy-E tshirt is my second favourite and I wear it all the time.
 
J

Jesse D Serrins

Well-known member
Yes, my bad, I definitely misread:

puretokyo said:
1. Throwing into stark relief the horrific violence and casual offensiveness of the Straight Outta Compton lyrics. This surprised me - I generally listen to the song at least once a week and I guess I'm completely numbed (or just conditioned by the grinding beats and blasting horns) to the lyrics. This track really isolates and emphasises their content by removing any sense of braggadocio or machismo.
Click to expand...

Diaz mentions that I was off in placing that Gin and Juice cover- the context in which I heard that, I always felt that the same people that were playing it were generally pretty supportive of status quo and ultimately were gonna add to growing social stratification, so it always bugged me that rap was just this party music and the source of a fantasy, basically just perpetuating stereotypes in this way, etc. And a lot of the same people were fairly representative of the Dave Matthews contingent. But that's fair enough. It's true, I didn't really have an awareness of where it came from. So I meant no offense, points well taken.
 
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puretokyo

Mercury Blues
No worries mate, look as if we're on the same page :D

That said, I do remember hearing an awful lounge-style cover of gin and juice, probably by that Richard Cheese guy. I'm quaking in revulsion as I type.
 
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