Jalylah Burrell

Hello, Babar

Seattle-bred, Brooklyn-based cultural critic Jalylah Burrell riffs on anything and everything.

Jay-Z: Infantilized Player

Posted 09/20/2007 at 10:08 AM | 1 comment/s

133857__jay-z_l
According to the Grey Lady, Shawn Carter will continue to do what he does best, that is, instantiate ignorance through deftly spun yarns of selling yayo buttressed by his mythologized and much drawn upon Bed-stuy biography and swallowed whole thanks to an Ace of Spades overtopped Riedel flute of cultural currency. Fake is indeed the new real.

The Philadelphia police commissioner has resorted to begging lay men (the gender politics of this are troubling) to patrol that venerable city's Black blood-soaked streets while Jay-Z, a Black man of at least 37 years of age and still far from grown (money in the bank and bespoke Boateng don't make the man mature) communicates genocidal silence on the issue of crippling crime in Black communities to the New York Times, reporting on his November album's tie-in to Frank Lucas biopic American Gangster:

Echoing the "stop snitchin' " campaign among some hip-hop fans and artists, however, Jay-Z hastened to dissociate himself from Mr. Lucas's decision to cooperate with the authorities to get a more lenient sentence.
"Me, I believe you choose your path and you walk your path, and whatever happens you got to accept it," Jay-Z said.

In "No Hook," a song on the new album, he says:

Please don't compare me to other rappers. Compare me to trappers.

I'm more Frank Lucas than Ludacris. And Lude is my dude, I ain't trying to dis.

Just like Frank Lucas is cool, but I ain't tryin' to snitch.

I'm-a follow the rules, no matter how much time I'm-a get.

I'm-a live and die with the decisions that I'm-a pick.

That there are few voices of reason in this contemporary moment--with so many Black pundits too afraid of being labeled bourgeois (therefore irrelevant) by bundle-stacking rappers to critically engage the widespread foolishness without blanketing all hip hop culture coonery in the process--is disheartening and debilitating to the health of Black public culture.

Furthermore, how can you sing the same sorry song, variations on, "I push rhymes like weight," to borrow from Cube, and still captivate the critics and citizenry?

de.licio.us digg Furl Reddit YahooMyWeb