From The Man Who Brought You The Only Movie Worse Than Soul Plane

Alerted by the ever-vigilant Reggie Dennis to this today.

Ladies and Gentlemen, John Ridley, young auteur, has taken Chris Rock’s famous-but-obviously-ironic comedy routine seriously, and added his own fascist, classist, bougie spin.

And then he does something even more stunning:

Ridley posits the week-or-so that W left Condi and Colin’s in charge of the Big House during a minor diplomatic crisis as the apex of all African-American achievement.

Hey, he might be right. Maybe the building of the foundation of the entire American economy, American theatre, dance and musical culture, the American dialect, a huge body of literature, and a non-violent Civil Rights movement ain’t shit. Oh yeah, blood transfusions and peanut butter too.

I can say one thing, though: The zenith of Black achievement definitely wasn’t “Undercover Brother.”

I’m not going to say too much more about this. I’m just going to sit sort of on the sidelines, watch the shit storm, and listen to W.E.B. DuBois roll in his grave.

Pac, Me and Chi

Reviewed the new Tupac for the Post today.

Another uncreative, depressing dead rapper rehash.

At times, I can get a little mean in my reviews. Part of it, I think, is that when I do get some bandwidth in this crowded communications soup, I want my words to have some impact, even if it means a little hyperbole.

In fact, it reminds me of what an old friend of mine used to do with his own writing. Except when he tangled with Tupac, it was for real.

* * * * *

I met a lot of artists in the course of my two decades in the music business, but I never met Tupac Shakur.

I didn’t think much of him. When it became fashionable to compare him with Big, for instance, there was no question in my mind. One of them could rhyme, one couldn’t. My approach was that of an East Coast snob, for sure. It took me many years to really understand why people adored Tupac so, and why that worship has only increased since his death, dwarfing Big.

Ironically, the person who taught me the value and genius of Tupac was Chino XL.

Of course, Chino XL is probably best known for his celebrated beef with Tupac, having said some things about him on his first album that caused Tupac to fire back on the last song he released before his death, “Hit ‘Em Up.” So this requires some explaining.

Here’s what Chino said about Tupac. He said it on one of the last songs he recorded for “Here To Save You All,” a collaboration with Ras Kass called “Riiiot”:

“By this industry/ I’m trying not to get f**ked/ Like Tupac in jail.”

For the record, Chino has always maintained that what he meant by this line was that Tupac was “trying NOT to get f**ked” in jail, not that Tupac was “GETTING f**ked” in jail.

But anyway, the line is ambiguous, and knowing Chino’s mind state at the time, he probably didn’t give a f**k.

It was 1995. Chino XL was lyrically untouchable, in my opinion. Chino’s too. So it caused him no end of frustration that, after being signed for four years to Rick Rubin’s American Recordings, he had yet to make an impact. His stuff with Art of Origin got very little play. After his partner Kerri went AWOL, Chino had to record his own material on a shoestring. When Chino turned in the demo of “No Complex,” it was with no help from me.

As tired of fighting as I was — both with the label for resources and with Chino for a single — “No Complex” was one of those songs where something finally clicked. It was as if Chino XL coalesced suddenly into who he was meant to be: He found his voice, his image, his style in one fell swoop.

Chino was angry. Angry at me, angry at Rick, angry at Kerri, at Warner Bros., at radio DJs who wouldn’t play his stuff, at mediocre MCs who got on simply by being hype man to the next man. Not to say Chino hadn’t always possessed an acid tongue. This was, after all, the guy who said, while still with Art of Origin, “I’m throwin’ your sh*t out the window/Like Eric Clapton’s son.”

But “No Complex” was Chino’s last straw. Chino made a vow to himself: If no one is listening, he seemed to say, then f**k it, I am going to say what I want to say about anyone and anything. I will say the things that everybody thinks but are afraid to say. Anybody who has crossed me is going to get theirs, double. And in the small bandwidth that I have in this industry filled with so much bullsh*t, I will scream it at the top of my lungs so that, at the very least, I can emerge feeling like I’ve accomplished something for myself.

On the strength of “No Complex,” I got some money from Rick to fly Chino and his producer B-Wiz out to L.A. It was enough to keep them up in a cheap motel in Glendale, record the rest of the album on two ADAT machines in my apartment, and mix the tracks in a small studio in Hollywood. That became Chino’s first album, “Here To Save You All.”

“No Complex,” the first single, was an absolute non-stop tirade. Nobody had done anything so expansive, been so willing to make so many enemies. It was, I think, the hip-hop equivalent of a suicide bombing. The shrapnel went everywhere. I think it was King Tech, after hearing this song, who dubbed him “The King Of Ill-Lines and Punchlines.”

Still, getting Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown upset at you doesn’t carry with it quite the same consequences as hitting a guy who’s about to emerge from prison backed by the most notorious gangster in the music business.

I’m not sure when Tupac became aware of this one little line in Chino’s song. “Riiiot” was, after all, the #1 requested song on the Sway and King Tech Wake Up Show months before his album’s release in the spring of 1996. At some point, Sway interviewed Tupac for the show, and Tupac made it clear to Sway that Chino was fair game.

I am sure this was both blessing and curse for Chino XL. On the one hand, Chino had absolutely no beef with Tupac. Like I said, the lyric was written with haste, not with disrespect. On the other, Chino had been waiting for a chance to test his skills in the open, and now here it was. If Tupac wanted a fight, so be it.

Lyrically, it wasn’t going to be a contest. Chino and I got along, I think, because I had a mean streak too. We were in the car and the instrumental for Tupac’s “Dear Mama” came on. I started rapping, “Dear Mama/I wish I was born with two voices...” at which point Chino began coughing up a lung. It was a joke only Chino could have gotten, a play on the fact that Tupac always double tracked his vocals. The subtle implication being, of course, that he needed to.

But I think Chino understood that Tupac wasn’t an emcee, but a poet of certain eloquence. Because Chino had studied Tupac so well, because he respected him, liked him, he could begin to stockpile some lyrical weapons of mass destruction, should it ever come to that.

It became clear, though, that the fight wouldn’t be verbal. When we’d go places in California, we’d hear whispers as we entered a club, always some dude muttering “Tupac” under his breath. Chino, from what I recall, began to hear ominous threats from the Death Row camp. Then came “Hit Em Up,” the last song that Tupac released alive, where he followed up his “Chino XL, f**k you too” with the statement, “My .44 make sure all y’all kids don’t grow.”

Chino XL, father of three, took that shit very seriously, and proceeded to squash the sh*t with Tupac through some backchannel communication that was, and is, none of my business. To this day, Chino says that he and Pac had peaced things up before Pac’s death.

I think there was a part of Chino that missed being able to verbally joust with a worthy opponent. After all, he had saved up nearly a year’s worth of comeback rhymes that never saw the light of day, and that’s hard for an emcee to hold back. To his credit, Chino never recorded a response to “Hit Em Up.” The only time I ever heard of him let some slip was at a live performance at New York’s Wetlands in the fall of 1996, which began:

“Ni**a you ain’t never seeeeeeeeeen drama/
F**k you and your dope fieeeeeeeeeeend mama.”

A few days later, Tupac was shot in Vegas. I had flown back to Los Angeles, and remember, a few days later, the voice of Rick’s assistant echoing through the office.

“He’s dead,” she said.

I got the call a few hours later from Chino as he traveled by car from New York to Philly. He was crying.

“You know I loved that dude, Charnas,” he said. I told him that I did.

A few months later, we were in Vegas. The Makaveli album has just come out, and in the wee hours of the morning, when the rest of us went up to the hotel rooms to sleep, Chino stayed behind in the car to listen to the whole thing, alone.

In 1997, Chino narrowly escaped death when several gunmen shot through his SUV outside a house party in Jersey. There was some talk, I remember, of this coming from some of Pac’s people who didn’t know that shit had been squashed, and were looking for revenge. But I’m not sure if Chino even knows.

Are You Really That Surprised?

Very sad. But in a way, it makes perfect sense.

Seeing Michael Richards have his racial meltdown in the Laugh Factory, and then make things worse on Letterman was, to me, a case of chickens coming home to roost.

Don’t get me wrong: I love “Seinfeld,” adore Kramer’s character, and think that Michael Richards is a comedic genius.

But I harbor no illusions: The construct for “Seinfeld,” like so many other comic teleplays and films, is a monochromatic world where White People are central, and people of color — if they appear at all — are simply used as accessories, as added “color” for a scene.

When you think about “Seinfeld,” and you realize the only recurring Black characters were either there because they made our white heroes uncomfortable simply by being Black (like George’s nemesis Mr. Morgan at the Yankees); or to parody a Black celebrity (like Kramer’s erstwhile lawyer Jackie Chiles doing his best Johnnie Cochran), you get a peek inside the archaic white psyche. It’s a headspace where white people simply do not know how to deal with a world that is slowly become not their own. So they literally ignore it. “Seinfeld” is Ralph Ellison’s argument made visual.

Many of my friends live in this space. Many of your friends do too. They’re the white friends who giggle when hip-hop comes on, rather than bob their heads to it. It’s not that we can’t be friends with them. It’s just that we choose to live multiculturally and they don’t... either because they don’t know how, don’t want to, don’t have to, or they are afraid to.

When white folks are brought out of this space, they can have a number of reactions. Some take kindly to reality. Others snap.

I’m sure that Michael Richards doesn’t believe he is a racist. I’m sure, on an intellectual level, believes in equal rights for all. But we never find the truth until we get cornered. When Black folks are pushing his buttons, Richards’ response, apparently, is to tell Black people they have no right to push his buttons because they’re Black. That is the very definition of deep-seated, latent racism. Sorry.

Jerry Seinfeld’s reaction was encouraging. He still loves his friend, but made no excuses for him. Still, it’s a bit hypocritical: Seinfeld was the guy who created and reveled in that whitebread world. I live on the Upper West Side. (Ok, the Upper, Upper West Side). If I suddenly woke up one day and walked out into Seinfeld’s all-white fiction, I’d have to shoot myself.

I’d like to think about this someday as the death-knell for that kind of anachronism: Woody Allen, “Seinfeld,” “Friends.” Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. You had your day. Even Larry David, to a certain degree, left that monochromatic world when he graduated to “Curb.” Perhaps this will be a turning point to more multicultural, more race-conscious humor. That humor certainly is more uncomfortable for white people, less safe: from Chris Rock to Bernie Mack to Borat. But it’s humor that’s transformative because it has reality on its side.

Cultural Learnings

Saw the midnight show of “Borat” last night.

There’s an almost messianic fervor about this movie now. The Huffington Post has pre-hyped "Borat" so much, that some folks are scratching their heads:

“I wish to know why Borat deserves all the ads, pictures and articles here at Huffpo. I had never heard of him until I started being inundated with the above here. The overkill, the hype that reminds me of CBS and their touting of Couric as new anchor, have turned me off this guy completely. I guess I will never find out what makes him so fucking wonderful that the Huffpo has become ALL BORAT ALL THE TIME, because I am so turned off by the overkill here that I will not be seeing his movie. Please, give Borat a rest.

By: liberalfrombirth on October 30, 2006 at 10:35am

So why then is Borat’s first-coming being treated more like Jesus’s second?

It’s clear to me: In this climate, the politicians aren’t willing to take risks anymore. The only ones who dare to speak the Truth are the comedians: people like Chappelle, Colbert and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Yet it’s telling that Colbert and Cohen can only do that speaking behind their masks.

Colbert takes on the persona of the enemy in order to desecrate it: the rabid, thoughtless conservative talking-head.

Cohen, on the other hand, becomes the stereotypes that our enemies (and ourselves) secretly (or not-so-secretly) espouse in order to expose them: Bruno, the flaming Euro-fag. Ali G, the ignorant, illiterate ghetto bastard (as conservatives might see him) or the dumbed-down white wannabee wanksta (as p.c. progressives might).

And then there’s Borat, the anti-Semetic pseudo-Slav who manages to embody almost every backward, bigoted belief imaginable. There is a reason that the fictional Borat comes from non-fictional Kazakhstan: If America and Americans are the embodiment of civilization, sophistication and tolerance, then there must be some place that is the opposite of that. And Kazakhstan is on the opposite side of the world. It is, almost literally, the farthest place on Earth from us. Go any farther and you start coming back.

But the brilliance of Borat is that he destroys that conceit. Every time Borat gets an American to sing “Throw The Jew Down The Well,” or cheer at the suggestion that George Bush should “drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq,” he shows us who we really are.

We are him.

And that Kazakhs most likely do NOT harbor the sentiments of their counterfeit ambassador only makes Americans look worse.

Like Colbert’s comic incineration of Bush the Lesser at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Cohen’s road-trip through America in the person of Borat is one of the greatest, most fearless acts of patriotism I have ever witnessed. And Cohen’s not even American.

Sacha Baron Cohen does with comedy what I wish rappers would do with hip-hop: Take on the powerful and take no prisoners. “Borat” is scorched earth comedy, just like P.E. and N.W.A. used to be scorched earth music. Everyone who needed to be offended was.

“Borat,” like better hip-hop, becomes a Rorschach test for anyone who encounters it. If you’re a Jew and you’re offended by Borat’s anti-Semitism, the joke’s on you. If you’re a Jew, realize that Borat is just a character, and you’re still concerned about his impact among the goyim, the joke’s on you. If you’re one of the goyim and you’re laughing because you sympathize with Borat’s bigotry, the joke’s on you.

In the end, the only one left standing and smiling is Borat himself. Unlike most of us, he, at least, is on a journey to learn something.