”Worst beef ever”. Nicki Minaj vs. Peter Rosenberg

[youknowyouknow]

DocMcCoy said:youknowyouknow said: an awareness of the gap between "boom bap" and the chud music that nicki minaj makes




Yeah, because nobody's ever attempted to do that before.




ROSENBERG SHOULD BE CALLED DJ MOSES CAUSE DUDE JUST DIVIDED THE LAND OF RAP IN TWO: BROKEN BASS AMPS & WORD UP MAGAZINE ON ONE SIDE & TWITTER FEEDS SPREAD IN ORANGE CHICKEN SAUCE ON THE OTHER.

 

[SIRUS]

without all the hype, minaj has, at most, all the talent of a mediocre underground mc from the 90's/erly 00's. which is what she was pre-ymcb

 

[batmon]

SIRUS said:without all the hype, minaj has, at most, all the talent of a mediocre underground mc from the 90's/erly 00's. which is what she was pre-ymcb




Wait...she was in the game in the 90s?


I thought she was relatively new?


And dont tell me she was battling cats throughout the tri-state area before she had a mixtape.








oops...RIF.

 

[rootlesscosmo]

staxwax said:


For what its worth - every time this issue comes up (conservative heads hating on sold the fuck out pop rap) - and it seems to be coming up more and more - the divide is being touted as conservatism versus innovation by holier than thou onlookers like Jon Caramanica - and let the chips fall where ever the fuck they may in the great boombap vs swag wars of the 'teens, but that is some BULLSHIT. There is no motherfucking innovation or advancement in rendering any genre of music completely unrecognizable and indistinguishable from any other bland mainstream pop crud.










yes.





I had to laugh when I read the NYT piece, talmbout "denying the artform the wide tent it deserves" or whatever such nonsense. you can't widen a tent indefinitely. at some point it's no longer a tent. and while Rosenberg may not be the herb who I necessarily trust to decide where that threshold lies, the threshold nonetheless exists (and for my money I'll take Rosenberg's delineation over the NYT's; as big as a herb as Rosenberg is, at least he likes mostly the same rap music I do).





you gotta draw the line somewhere. pop isn't rap. and wack is wack.

 

[rootlesscosmo]

batmon said:


To me this is a beef between two questionable muthafuckas.




no doubt. I don't think anyone argues with this.

 

[Almond]

batmon saidoes anyone here consider Nicki a good mc?





To me this is a beef between two questionable muthafuckas.




What makes a good MC? She's a talented vocalist and a great stage performer. She's got the kids riled up. If that's what it takes, then yeah, good MC.





Let's not forget that Nicki's under Young Money's art direction. I would have been more surprised to see Weezy sign her as an independent, take-care-of-myself sista act with braids. Is Nicki bubblegum because she just likes the color pink? Or is it just the most effective way for a female rapper to gain mainstream success at this moment in time? Maybe the "real heads" made it too hard for Nicki sans neon to make it, so now we've got the white Rosenberg harshing on a girl from Harlem for not holding up his standards of hip-hop orthodoxy.

 

[Almond]

.

 

[bassie]

I think this captures it well:





"Notably, Ms. Minaj was one of the most technically gifted rappers on the bill, though her skill is a weapon she deploys selectively, not abuses."





She is technically solid and I don't think this pop phaff is all she's capable of; I think it's her calculated decision to make this type of music...or to make her money off this type of music anyway. It's the Lady Gaga thing - talented regular gal making straight use of her tool and then realizing she can flex a little weird, have a fuckload of fun and make about the same amount of cash. Al Yankovic comes to mind as well.

 

[bassie]

And between Rabin and this week's good old days asshurt, I recall James' post:





"When people horn about how much music has changed and how far it's fallen, they're usually--whether they realize it or not--nostalgic for some past version of themselves or some past version of the world. It's been my experience that the more content a person is with their current self and current circumstances, the less likely they are to have a problem with current music."

 

[batmon]

Almond said:batmon saidoes anyone here consider Nicki a good mc?





To me this is a beef between two questionable muthafuckas.




What makes a good MC? She's a talented vocalist and a great stage performer. She's got the kids riled up. If that's what it takes, then yeah, good MC.




So MC Hammer is a good mc by your standards?





I dont have to explain this shit.

 

[DjWillderness]

nicki went pop and make a wack song. rosenberg called her out on it. he's totally right. i would say the exact same thing.

 

[DjWillderness]

nicki went pop and make a wack song. rosenberg called her out on it. he's totally right. i would say the exact same thing.

 

[SIRUS]

she was never going to pop off in this incarnation.

 

[staxwax]

Worst part in that nyt article is where he insinuates music journo and dj rosenberg should not question minaj' artistic direction because hes white and shes black.

 

[mannybolone]

staxwax said:Worst part in that nyt article is where he insinuates music journo and dj rosenberg should not question minaj' artistic direction because hes white and shes black.




I'm not sure what you read but that's not how the following statement reads to me:





"The idea that art and commerce are at odds is a remnant of an old culture war: dogma presented as forward-thinking but really just protecting an outmoded status quo, leading to the unusual and very modern spectacle of a white man deriding a black woman for insufficiently upholding hip-hop values."





One could quibble about whether this unusual or not (I don't think it is, actually). It may not be particularly modern either - I'm sure one can find examples of this going back a ways. But if the suggestion is that there's something notable about how race plays out, I think that's a fair observation to point out.

 

[staxwax]

the unusual and very modern spectacle of a white man deriding a black woman for insufficiently upholding hip-hop values

I'm sorry but its hard to read this any other way - the implication is pretty blatant.

 

[DocMcCoy]

rootlesscosmo said:staxwax said:you gotta draw the line somewhere. pop isn't rap.




That's debatable. In many respects pop is rap nowadays, and has been for some time, no matter how much people want to treat that old Tribe lyric as one of the 10 Commandments. Of course, that isn't the whole picture - it never is - but still some folks are acting as if rap's domination of the landscape of popular music is a terrible cultural betrayal of blahblahblah, and that the extent to which this does or doesn't bother you is somehow a measure of you as a human being. But does any of this invalidate whatever music you or I or anyone else happen to think is good and/or important? No. So what are the complainers really complaining about? What happened to "my world don't stop"?

wack is wack.

OK, fine. But is anyone really calling Starships a rap record? Seriously? Or is the idea of a pop record made by a rapper that hard for some of them to get to grips with? I mean, I can take or leave Nicki Minaj on the whole. She doesn't offend me though, and besides I don't think I've heard Starships more than twice tops, but this is some bullshit - people getting upset about how something they don't like happens to be popular. It's like getting angry over Justin Bieber.





Effectively, what you have here are people with marginal (i.e., underground) tastes complaining that their tastes are still considered marginal and don't dominate the mainstream and blahblahblah shit is fucked up yo yadayadayada. Because, if that isn't the case, then why do they even give a fuck whether someone like Nicki Minaj does rap, pop, free jazz or black metal? What difference does it make to them? I wonder if, in between arrogating the right to decide what music people should or shouldn't like, it ever occurs to someone like Rosenberg that it's only thanks to the Nicki Minaj's of this world that he's able to assert his supposedly superior taste - "I only like that real shit" - in the first place. Because, if all that "fake shit" got washed away, what would he use as a yardstick then?

 

[DocMcCoy]

staxwax said:

the unusual and very modern spectacle of a white man deriding a black woman for insufficiently upholding hip-hop values

I'm sorry but its hard to read this any other way - the implication is pretty blatant.




I'd say that "self-appointed (white male) gatekeeper of idiomatically black art form attacks black female practitioner of aforesaid artform for not being 'black' enough" is as close to a Cliffs Notes version of it as we're going to get for the time being. Unless there's a more nuanced way of reading it which has got past me, in which case the floor is yours.

 

[staxwax]

I'd say an established and respected music journalist is free to voice their opinion on an artists output without race cards being pulled, or assertions that a critics personal taste disallows them to voice their opinion on the musical direction of a style or artist. Its a valid opinion.


It has nothing to do with being black or white, mainstream or underground. If you want to inject pop sensibilities into a specific musical genre, you can get called on it by critics. Refusing to perform, pulling the race card or demanding apologies because someone dares critique you is ridiculous.

 

[white_tea]

staxwax said:

the unusual and very modern spectacle of a white man deriding a black woman for insufficiently upholding hip-hop values

I'm sorry but its hard to read this any other way - the implication is pretty blatant.




I thought it was a salient point, and succinct. Dude is good enough to tip his cap to the recent Onion-Rabin debate.





Here's the thing: Maybe DJ has a point. But the big summer fest, where the big rap pop act should be playing, is not the venue for that debate.