Blogging may be slow over the next couple of days, folks. I'm taking a few days off of work, in part because I'm celebrating (what feels like) a big birthday on Monday, and in part because I need a rest. But I will be around, so please don't stop coming by.
But for this morning, I was hoping some of you could help me figure out what to make of Slate pop critic Jonah Weiner. I've obviously vociferously disagreed with him in the past, but I tend to find his arguments intriguing even if I don't agree with them. And I was really interested in the interaction between this piece he wrote about Miley Cyrus's "Party In the USA" as an example of pop at its most corporate (the song was released as a promo for a clothing line) still finding a way to be successful, and this blog post, published on the same day, about corporate hip-hop's purism as a way of disagreeing with Ta-Nehisi's MF Doom piece.
I've got beef with both arguments. In the first case, Miley Cyrus's best single is not "Party in the USA" but her clever, sweet remake of "Sunglasses at Night," "See You Again." Okay, sure, the music came pre-recorded for her. But the chorus has two great things about it, first a line where she actually stutters the word "stuttered," and second, the lines "The next time we hang out / I will redeem myself / My heart, it can't rest 'til then / Oh I, I can't wait to see you again." Both make the song a perfect encapsulation of what a crush feels like at any age, complete with the cycle of exhilaration and recrimination.
And in the second, I don't think the argument that commercially successful purist rappers are grumpy with what the form's begun is an entirely adequate pushback against some of the things Ta-Nehisi finds so frustrating about the current hip-hop market. I think a better way to make the case for corporate rap would be to argue that it's what's provided the market strength for rap to get in intra-song conversations with pop and R&B singers. Whether it's "Knock You Down" or "Run This Town," it's mainstream rap that's been able to assert itself of being both commercially and popularly worthy of being in a back-and-forth with pop. The more idiosyncratic, original stuff will make its way into that conversation, and in fact collaborations like Gnarls Barkley have already started. But some of the big commercial rappers are going to open the door for more unusual collaborations.
I'm not actually trying to say that Weiner is wrong, of course. We're critics, and we're necessarily going to have different preferences and different frames of reference. All I'm saying is I'd be curious to learn more about his underlying cultural assumptions, his favorite music, in what order he started listening to different genres. As Ta-Nehisi, as I, as anyone who writes about this stuff is living proof of, "you are what you love." In other words: I want more, I want to know what Weiner thinks about the corporatization of popular music in general, and why he likes "Party in the USA" more than other Miley tunes, and what he thinks of Doom. I may still find myself arguing with him, but I am intrigued by the lens through which he sees the world.