Minseltry

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

i get in trouble when I talk about this sort of thing, but i wanted to know what others thought. Esp. Jibbs Do Your Chains Hang Low, but other places, is there a reworking of 19th century corking up in popular music, and if so, what exactly happened? Why now? (i mean Tosches and Lee both wrote books about this 5 years ago, why not then?)


an article about recent problems in novelty hip hop

Comments

[koganbot]

Suspect the conflict is more class here than race - "class" not being a simple concept, of course. Anyway, the piece you linked seemed like a refined version of a temper tantrum, middle-class quasi-intelligentsia embarrassed by the down-home cousins, wants to blame the man. But it was good for one thing: I'd never heard "Fry That Chicken," and it's better than either "Chain Hang Low" or "Chicken Noodle Soup."

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

what about the connections b/w turkey in the straw and does yr chain hang low, though?

[koganbot]

What about 'em? It's just a melody in popular culture that everyone knows and that's spent the last couple of decades as a kids' chant. I mean, The Star Spangled Banner began life as a drinking song about a prostitute. The question is what the song does now! If the argument is that showing your chains is akin to minstrelsy because it reinforces white comic stereotypes of blacks (that's an exceedingly tenuous argument, I think, but it's not one I've never heard), that's one thing, but to say, "This is how the tune was used 150 years ago," is simply irrelevant. (Btw, I really don't know that much about minstrelsy, but "white comic stereotypes of black" is probably way way way oversimplified; e.g., there were black minstrels as well as white, black audiences for it as well as white, white performers - Jolsen, for instance - who took black music and his own music very seriously, probably considered both to be art. Etc.)

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

shorter ans. = find something without a dirty past

[koganbot]

????Whom is this addressed to? Why should St. Louis rappers give a fuck about the past of some playground chant they transformed into a hit single????

In the Tub

[koganbot]

Here's the vid for Ms. Peachez followup single, "In the Tub". And here's the song that started it all, "Fry That Chicken."