Great Rap Beefs in History: The Fondue Chapter

In a thought-provoking post for this blog about Nas and the National Symphony Orchestra, Kira asked, 'Are hip hop artists performing the politics of respectability in these spaces?'  This past weekend reinforced to me the fact that hip hop artists have obtained respectability, as evinced by the fact that they have entree into all kinds of 'venues' from which they were previously shut out.  Three examples will suffice:

1) Hip hop is all the freak over NPR: Yes, NPR.  The station that has long demarcated a certain higher level of radio culture--and is generally perceived as the choice for white, educated listeners, as this parody evinces: 



In the past week alone, I have listened to hip hop appearing on numerous shows, mostly in a contemplative or esteemed light.  There was the Radiolab segment discussed previously on this blog.  Jesse Thorn, on Bulleye, offered his take on Nas's Illmatic as the best hip hop album of all time.  A segment on Ask Me Another featured a version of $25 000 Pyramid involving hip hop songs, with actor/comedian Hannibal Buress providing the clues.  Evidently, NPR believes that its listeners are conversant with 'classic' hip hop, enough so that they will understand the clues of this game.  I think that NPR is correct here, but this is a bold statement about how completely hip hop has been absorbed into contemporary American culture.  Also, there is a very white rap of 'Rapper's Delight' here (at around 1:30).  The contestant even substitutes 'NPR' into one of the lines.  That's right.  There is now, theoretically, an NPR rap.

2) Hip hop at hockey: I attended Game 2 of the Tampa Bay Lightning versus the Montreal Canadiens on Friday night.  During the second intermission, as the zambonis were driving around the ice, they were accompanied by the start of Notorious B.I.G.'s 'Hypnotize.'  This is new, at least since 2011.

I cannot think of a single sport that is whiter than hockey.  When I was a kid, there would be, literally, one black player in the league at any given time, and that one guy was Grant Fuhr (there is a whole Wikipedia category for precisely this topic). 

 'Hockey music,' in my experience, tends to reflect this demographic.  Favorite styles include heavy metal (perhaps not surprisingly, this track gets played to start the third period at Lightning games) or dance music from the 90s.  Yes, it must be from the 90s.  Yes, it must be dance music.  You might be wondering what we listened to before that and the answer is organ music and Stompin' Tom Connors.  A great example that is even featured on the EA Sports 2011 NHL Game:

Biggie?  No.  I used to think that the fact you could hear hip hop anywhere was notable, but that was at bars and such.  Now that you hear it at hockey and on NPR, I am willing to declare that we have reached a new era of cultural saturation.

3) Terrible rap beefs on TSN: What is TSN?  The Sports Network.  It is the Canadian equivalent of ESPN.  And you won't  believe what Drake said this week on TSN about Jay-Z. At least, you shouldn't believe it, because it's pretty silly:

Drake claims that Jay-Z eats fondue.  From a plate.  If you can imagine.  I can't because I don't know, exactly, how you eat fondue from a plate.  It needs some kind of warming mechanism to keep it viscous, like the type traditionally placed under a fondue pot.

Let's take a moment here.  What does this even mean?  Supposedly, that Jay-Z is not keeping it real, because only fancy people eat fondue.  At least, this seems to be the general interpretation of this statement.  He has moved beyond bougie, to whatever class where you eat fondue off a plate on a regular basis.  Now, I am not, by any means, advocating a return to the violent outcomes of previous rapper beefs.  But when one side is accusing the other of fondue eating?  That seems like we have entered a new level of respectability, to go back to Kira's quote.  Drake made no claims against Jay-Z's ability to rap or produce or do all of that music stuff.  He just might be a little high-faluting for your average person.

Be sure to read this story on A.V. Club, which features some classic commentary on this particular beef.  Perhaps Alton Brown will weigh in for Team Jay-Z.  Perhaps Jay-Z will respond by besmirching poutine.  Perhaps those radio bleeps ('f******') really are bleeping out 'fondues.'  'Cheese rules everything around me.'  And let's not forget that Jay-Z has claimed in the past that he 'checks cheddar like a food inspector.'

Stay tuned for what shapes up to be the most mouth-watering rapper beef ever to go down.  Or at least one of the most respectable.

Oh Canada: inventing a tradition for a polite and clean nation

I grew up in a country that regularly featured propaganda videos in movies and on television to teach me about my culture and heritage.  No, I wasn't behind the Iron Curtain or in a place run by a dictator: this took place in Canada on a regular basis.  Government-supported films were created (by the National Film Board) to offer insights into what made us Canadians.  Why was this necessary?  Because Anglo Canadian culture was not particularly well defined, from what I recall.  Sure, we all had to read Canadian literature in school, but I didn't find that Canada had the same kinds of nation-defining events as America (and we are constantly comparing ourselves to America, even when we don't admit it).  There was no real equivalent to American Thanksgiving, for instance, which is a holiday steeped with rituals, formal and informal.  Canada Day had fireworks, but nothing on par with the Fourth of July.  In fact, growing up I think that many of us had the idea that Canada didn't really amount to all that much, in the world, but we were clean and polite.

[I think that this has shifted drastically, but that may have to wait for another post]

This is not to say that all Canadians were walking around with a lack of identity.  Some groups had defined themselves very well.  Take, for instance, French Canada, which had a slew of folk songs, literature, plays, and even television.  In fact, my favorite Canadian television show when I was growing up came from Quebec.  It was called Lance et compte, and it was basically the Canadian response to Dallas, only with hockey.  Yes, it was a primetime soap opera based around the fictional Quebec Nationals team (thinly veiled for the Quebec Nordiques, they even shared a logo), and it was phenomenal.  I remember scenes like one of the Soviet players defecting via the Canadian embassy in Paris.  This was engaging stuff when you were a young Canadian:

I will post more later about French Canadian identity, which is a fascinating and complex topic.  Jewish Canadian identity was also relatively well-defined, and in fact substituted somewhat for Canadian identity as a whole, at least in the realm of high school literature that we had to read.  The only Canadian book that I remember reading in school was Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1955), which I hated with the power of a thousand suns because I found the main character repugnant.  We were not given any context for his character and this may have been my first exposure to the concept of Jewishness as a potentially separate group within what we had been taught was a cohesive whole.  Perhaps more context would have improved my experience, but in the end, I gained little insight into what it was to be an Anglo Canadian, since Duddy was Jewish and in Montreal, which means he was subject to what is effectively an entirely different culture than my Anglo-Saxon Ontario upbringing.

(You might find it weird that we didn't read Margaret Atwood, who is possibly the most effective chronicler of Anglo Canadian life that I know, with Cat's Eye being her best work in this regard.  I do too.  Maybe she talked about sex or women or some other scary and uncomfortable subject, and therefore could not be included in the curriculum.  Why not Robertson Davies?  There were better options).

English Canada has a bad habit of stealing the culture of French Canada.  Today, you can find poutine hailed as a Canadian dish (French fries, gravy, and cheese curds, YUMMY YUM, even if it is a heart attack on a plate).  However, it's really from Quebec.  When I was growing up, you only found poutine in Quebec, never anywhere else.  To say that it represents Canada as a whole would be a little bit like if New Englanders suddenly appropriated barbeque as their own.  The South would, obviously, rise up, led by irate pit masters.  Canadians may be too polite to rise up, but certainly they take no issue with adopting French (or Canadian-Jewish) cultural icons as their own.  Even the folk songs that I remember from school were mostly from Quebec:

And one from Newfoundland:

I didn't feel any closer attachment to Newfoundland culture than I did to that of Quebec.  However, I do find it notable that I don't remember a single unique Ontario song from when I was growing up.

I should probably point out that I was part of a French immersion program, so I spent more time speaking and learning about French than many Canadian students.  However, I am fascinated with how much Quebec informs Canada's culture as a whole, and how strange the notion of an Anglo Canadian culture was.  This topic will be the subject of future 'Oh Canada' posts.