In which I defend the Beastie Boys’ hip-hop honor

Earlier today, Friend of the Blog Matt Zeitlin tweeted that Latoya Peterson — at her Jezebel digs — made some crack at the Beastie Boys.  And since the Beastie Boys are — hands down — one of my favorite bands, I decided to head over and see exactly what she said.  In the midst of a post about electro-pop star Ke$ha and her hip-hopish song “Tik Tok,” Peterson excerpts Ke$ha and writes this:

Ke$ha does have some links to hip-hop: she sang the hook on Flo Rida’s “Right Round.” But even Ke$ha herself denies that she’s a rapper in the article:

“I love the Beastie Boys – that’s probably why ‘TiK ToK’ happened,” Ke$ha said. “Rap in general has never been my steez, but I like it.”

So why the rush to lump Ke$ha in with the less-than-luminous ranks of rappers whose main selling point was their skin color and a gimmicky hook?

The Beastie Boys have been called a lot of things over the course of their decades long career: frat rappers, practical jokers, socially conscious, and hip-hop purists.  But you simply can’t be a popular music critic and credibly say that the Beastie Boys were “less-than-luminous” and relied on their whiteness and a “gimmicky hook” to sell records.

There are two critical differences between the Beastie Boys and say, Vanilla Ice.  The first, and probably most important, is that the Beastie Boys can actually rap.  I challenge Peterson, and anyone else for that matter, to listen to the Beasties’ initial trio of albums — License to Ill, Paul’s Boutique, and Check Your Head — and tell me that Adrock, MCA and Mike D were bereft of talent.  The Beastie Boys weren’t just good at their craft, they were pathbreaking: Paul’s Boutique is widely held as one of the finest hip-hop albums ever produced, and if you give it a listen, you’ll see why (I wrote a brief review of the Paul’s Boutique reissue for Campus Progress a few months back, which you can find here).

The second critical difference between the Beastie Boys and Vanilla Ice — and the thing they have in common with shorter-lived acts like 3rd Bass — is that the Beastie Boys weren’t so much appropriating black music as they were trying to be a part of black culture.  There’s a reason why older black rappers tend to have a fair amount of respect for the Beasties (so much so that they’ll appear on Beastie mixtapes and offer up awesome covers in their absence), and that’s because the Beasties have always been explicit about the debt they owe to Def Jam and its stable of artists and producers. Unlike Asher Roth — who actively tried to shy away from black rappers — the Beasties have always understood themselves as acting within hip-hop and not outside of it.  Frankly, to casually dismiss the Beastie Boys and lump them in with folks like Vanilla Ice does a huge disservice to the group and their deserved place within hip-hop’s history.

John Kerry: Still Right After All of These Years

The Republican freakout over the underpants bomber has prompted a lot of good commentary about the extent to which we as a nation should actually worry about terrorism.  Which, incidentally, reminds me of a New York Times piece — written by Matt Bai and published on the eve of the 2004 election — which tried to explain and offer context to John Kerry’s views on terrorism and our “war” against it.  Kerry’s stance wasn’t particularly fashionable, and it probably cost him the election, but it’s worth repeating (and repeating and repeating):

When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. ”We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” Kerry said. ”As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

Here’s Bai’s conclusion:

One can infer from this that if Kerry were able to speak less guardedly, in a less treacherous atmosphere than a political campaign, he might say, as some of his advisers do, that we are not in an actual war on terror. Wars are fought between states or between factions vying for control of a state; Al Qaeda and its many offspring are neither. If Kerry’s foreign-policy frame is correct, then law enforcement probably is the most important, though not the only, strategy you can employ against such forces, who need passports and bank accounts and weapons in order to survive and flourish. Such a theory suggests that, in our grief and fury, we have overrated the military threat posed by Al Qaeda, paradoxically elevating what was essentially a criminal enterprise, albeit a devastatingly sophisticated and global one, into the ideological successor to Hitler and Stalin — and thus conferring on the jihadists a kind of stature that might actually work in their favor, enabling them to attract more donations and more recruits.

For further reading, here’s Adam Serwer making a similar point at The Root.

Apropos of Allison Samuels and interracial dating

One of the most frustrating things about intra-race conversations around interracial dating, and particularly dating between black men and white women, is that there is this pervasive belief that it is impossible to both be a “proud” black person and date “outside the race.”  Or put another way, black people with non-black partners are often accused of betraying the “black family unit” or are portrayed as somehow running away from their “blackness.”  Which, you know, is total bullshit.  The straightforward explanation for why there is more interracial dating is that more black people belong to the middle and upper middle class, and more black people have grown up in areas where blacks are not the majority.  On the whole, there is simply less cultural and economic distance between blacks and whites.  And since you’re most likely to date people who are cultural similar and geographically close, it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that interracial dating is on the rise.

Now, admittedly, Samuels focuses most of her piece on interracial dating between black men and white women, and I don’t have much of an explanation for why more black men date and marry white women than the reverse.  But as Ta-Nehisi Coates noted, it’s worth pointing out that even with the marked rise in interracial dating and interracial marriages, the vast majority of black men are married to black women.  If roughly 8 percent of black men are married to non-black women, then 92 percent of black men are married to black women.  As far as I can tell, black men still very much want to date and marry black women.

As a final note, you can count me as one of the many people tired of the “black women are having trouble getting married” stories that seem to pop up every month or so.  It’s not just that they all seem to rest on two, horribly flawed assumptions — all black women are heterosexual and want to get married — but that they ignore the painful fact that dating is hard.  Meeting people is hard.  And turning a casual relationship into something lasting and meaningful is incredibly difficult, regardless of who you are or where you’re from.  Black women are in the same boat as everyone else, and it’s deeply unfair (as well as a little problematic) to single them out for problems that all of us face.

File this Under: Inappropriate Historical Analogies

I know this shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but the Nuge is an idiot:

“I think that Barack Hussein Obama should be put in jail. It is clear that Barack Hussein Obama is a communist. Mao Tse Tung lives and his name is Barack Hussein Obama. This country should be ashamed. I wanna throw up.”

A quick observation: for as much as right-wingers like to play freedom fighter and throw around the word totalitarianism like a twelve-sided die, it’s really clear that  as an actual historial phenomena, totalitarianism means absolutely nothing to them.  Anyone with a modicum of respect for the tens of millions of lives lost during Mao Zedong’s decades-long control of China would at least hesitate before using his name as a point of reference in criticizing a U.S. president.  But that would be expecting a bit much of right-wingers like Ted Nugent* or the National Review’s Andy McCarthy, who name-drops totalitarian dictators on a fairly regular basis in his barely coherent — but always entertaining — “columns.”

The simple fact is that the constant comparison of President Obama to Mao, Stalin and Hitler is deeply offensive; hundreds of millions of people suffered and died under totalitarian regimes, and it does a gross disservice to their memory to trivialize their deaths by using “totalitarianism” as a blunt criticism for moderate, incremental domestic policy you happen not to like.

*Also, as Digby pointed out, shouldn’t he be getting the Dixie Chicks treatment or something, you know, for criticizing the president abroad.

Pundits as Scared Children

Spencer Ackerman:

And did I ever want a strongman on 9/11. Dave is right to express it the way he does. That yearning is pre-political — a complex, primal, fearful, emotional scream. To sum it up in a word: terror. You’ll do anything to stop being terrorized, side with anyone, put aside any principle, go along with anything. It’s terrifying. Pure in its simplicity. Sometimes when I think back to how incomprehensibly afraid I was I shudder that Bush could have actually gotten away with so much more than he did.

Spencer’s right, we should be very  thankful that George W. Bush wasn’t willing to expend the political and institutional capital to further dismantle our constitutional protections and expand his program of domestic surveillance and torture. That said, if Bush had taken the taken the opportunity he certainly wouldn’t have found any resistance from the pundit class. One of Digby’s recent posts reminds me of the disturbing fact that most of the pundit class is utterly desperate for a daddy figure to protect them from terrorists and every other thing that disturbs their dreams.  Here, for instance, is Chris Matthews practically begging someone to tuck him in and protect him from the scary terrorists:

Matthews: You know what when we get on an airplane, we give up all kinds of checks we don’t do by just walking down the street. I think we give up a certain amount of rights just getting on an airplane and I think you’ve got to recognize that your safety is tied up with everyone else on that plane’s safety and anybody else that gets hit on that plane. You don’t own the right to be on that plane because you’re getting on an airplane so you do have to yield some civil rights…And by the way, Cliff, you know it and I know it, they’re going to get smarter and smarter and sooner or later they’re going to get all kinds of people to do their dirty work for them. They’re the enemy. They’re going to use any means they can to get us. They’re out to kill us. Let’s be as smart as they are because they are already smart.

Digby rightly makes fun of this little performance, but I think it’s worth pointing out that this is really quite dangerous. The fact is that we are pretty much completely reliant on the mainstream media to uncover government abuse and executive overreach.  And we are especially reliant on pundits to move that information into the public consciousness. With pundits constantly asking the government to “protect us” with more and greater restrictions, I wonder what kind of impact they’re having on the average American, and whether we’re essentially being primed to accept (another) authoritarian-ish daddy figure.

Portrait of the Jihadist as a Young Cosmopolitan

With regards to the Christmas pants bomber (not to be confused with this guy), Josh Marshall writes:

The Times has run-down of what is known so far about Umar Farouk Abdulmtallab. Most you likely already know. Son of a wealthy, Nigerian banker who’d studied engineering in London. His turn toward intense involvement with Islam, if not yet toward militant extremism, apparently began in High School Yet one close friend from those years says they used to listen to music together, watch videos and play basketball. Classmate Charles Anaman said Abdulmutallab was very into studying history and particularly into hip-hop music.

It’s always a little surreal hearing how would-be suicide terrorists, seemingly so alien to our world, were in many ways very much a part of it. But it actually seems of a piece with many others in this group — the commonality is just how cosmopolitan most of them seem to be. Often wealthy, sometimes extremely so, educated in the West and even imbued with iconically American popular culture.

This fact — that extremists often come from fairly cosmopolitian backgrounds — is one of those things that hasn’t quite quite penetrated the mainstream consciousness, if only because it is completely at odds with what we expect a jihadist to be.  When most people think “Islamic terrorist,” their minds wander to the traditional portrait of “jihadist as impoverished, bitter Third-World denizen.”  It’s why “ending global poverty” is always on those lists of “thing we can do to stop terrorism.” Telling someone that terrorists are more likely to come from wealthy, well-connected families is like telling someone that drug users are more likely to be white and not-impoverished than they are to be black and poor.  It simply goes counter to everything we’ve been told.  That said, it makes a lot of sense.

If you think of fundamentalist Islam as an explicit reaction against pluralism, it shouldn’t come as much of a shock to learn that the most fervent believers are also the ones that come from the most diverse backgrounds.  Cosmopolitan environments are hotbeds of pluralism (religious pluralism in particular), and with monotheistic traditions with strong truth claims like Islam and Christianity  this can pose a bit of a problem.  When you’re faced with many people practicing an infinite number of variations on what is supposed to be a straightforward and “pure” faith, your only real choices are to reject the faith altogether or to buckle down on what you believe to be the purist version of that faith. Combine that with the normal restlessness of youth, a sense of rootlessness and readily available targets, and you have the beginnings of an extremist.

And above all else, thou shalt spite the liberals

At the risk of sounding really uncharitable, I think a big part of the reason for why conservatives get a pass from neoliberal Economist-types on their economic illiteracy (as skillfully noted by longtime Friend of the Blog Matt Zeitlin) is simply they are both opposed to the idea of doing anything to protect workers from the pain of global capitalism.  In their eyes, efforts to protect workers from the backhand of free trade are an affront to the proper order of things; “workers don’t produce, and thus don’t deserve the spoils of the global economy.”  Insofar that liberals abuse economics, it is usually to argue in favor of pro-worker policies that are anathema to the neo-liberal crowd, and deserving of regular attacks.  By contrast, its easy to ignore economic illiteracy — even gross economic illiteracy — when it’s coming from someone who shares your goals, if only nominally.

Better Institutions: Andy Stern edition

Ezra Klein has been conducting (fantastic) interviews with legislators and activists on the problem of the filibuster and what we can do to turn the Senate into a functional legislative body.  The best of the bunch, I think, is his interview with Andy Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union.  I’ve always known that Stern was a smart guy, but in the interview with Klein, he offers as clear a diagnosis of the problem that I’ve seen from anyone in mainstream circles:

Democrats have failed to create a normative set of behaviors. They rely on rules when they should really act like a party. The fact that they have to change the rules because they cant act collectively is sad. Everyone gets to be the general when they feel their will or their issue or their point of view trumps everyone else’s.

Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, everybody held up their vote for the purpose of gaining personal leverage. Now, appropriately, Harry Reid has to say this is the nature of legislation. But I never thought the nature was making compromises on rules rather than substance. This was ‘I’ll use the rule of 60 to gain substantive advantage.’ The idea was not that democrats get 60 so everyone can be king or queen for a day. Everyone has been empowered. Why shouldn’t Kent Conrad say that he won’t raise the debt ceiling unless he gets his commission? It’s the culture we’ve created. When we reward inappropriate behavior, we breed more inappropriate behavior.

This gets to the heart of it.  As I was saying a few days ago, the central problem is that we incentivize all of the wrong behavior.  Fixing or eliminating the filibuster is an important part of solving this problem, but it’s certainly not the only part, which is why I’m glad to see that Stern (and Klein for that matter) are hammering on the sheer depth of our institutional dysfunction.

If we want better legislation, we need better institutions

Amanda Marcotte is probably right to say that wonks and activists will forget about the “Great Public Option Debate” come February of next year, but her answer to the question of “how do we get better legislation” is a little off the mark:

If we want better legislation, we need better politicians.  And if you think health care is a daunting task, then fighting for better politicians is going to defeat your patience at every turn.  The netroots has only been around for like 6 or 7 years, and only really been a player for 4.  Taking over a party takes longer than that, and that’s all there is to it.  I think there’s a tendency to fight for scorched earth tactics designed to get a lot of results in a very short period of time, and a defeatism when that doesn’t work.

For someone who describes herself as having radical politics, this is actually a really conservative approach to the broader problems we’re facing.  As many others have noted, the problem isn’t so much that our politicians are petty, small-minded and unwilling to make hard choices (though, that’s true too), but that we have institutions that incentivize the worst kind of half-measures, incrementalism and congressional diva-ism.  Indeed, what’s so problematic about our current arrangement is that it offers zero incentives for responsible behavior, and greatly awards selfishness, obstructionism, and sociopathic indifference to human suffering.

Truth be told, I would vastly prefer to live in the world Marcotte describes, since at least then we’d only have to worry about electing decent people to office.  As it stands, even the most principled and responsible legislators aren’t immune from the perverse incentive structure of Congress, which is why institutional reform ought to be the central, long-term concern for reformers across the ideological landscape.  As long as we maintain our barriers to large-scale change and continue to incentivize irresponsible behavior, it really doesn’t matter what kind of people we elect.

The Stupidest Thing I’ve Read All Day (Also, why does anyone still listen to Grover Norquist?)

This is, without a doubt, the dumbest single thing I’ve read today (unsurprisingly, it comes from the National Review):

I have always said that the word bipartisan has a very scary meaning in Washington, D.C. Here is more evidence: Faced with a massive amount of federal debt and future spending that is about to explode, Sens. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.) and Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) decided that instead of cutting spending and forcing the bloated government to slim down, they would introduce legislation creating a bipartisan task force that would try to cut down the deficit.

How fiscally responsible! But why not just cut spending? Spending is the problem. The deficit is just the result of overspending. As Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform explained, “Despite the appearance of protection for taxpayers, this commission would guarantee a net tax increase in its proposal. Every Democrat on the commission would insist on tax increases to ‘balance’ spending cuts in the recommendation.” [Emphasis mine]

First, quoting Grover Norquist for anything is grounds for immediate expulsion from “the reality-based community.” Second, it’s been established many times over that the vast majority of the short-term deficit is a direct product of the financial collapse and resulting stimulus measures, and the vast majority of the long-term deficit is a direct product of the previous eight years of Republican mismanagement.  To the right is a graph from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities which illustrates the point.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan plus the Bush tax cuts are responsible for well over half of the current deficit projection and close to two-thirds of the long-term deficit projection.  The appropriate solution, really, isn’t to cut spending — and to echo a point Bruce Bartlett has repeatedly made, where exactly would you cut spending? — it’s to end the wars, repeal the Bush tax cuts, and increase taxes in anticipation of greater health care and Social Security spending down the road.

Of course, the kind of nonsense you see in the quoted post wouldn’t be a problem if Grover Norquist didn’t represent the mainstream of the Republican Party.  But he does.  As it stands, there isn’t a single Republican, or at least one with national ambitions, that would endorse a tax increase for the purpose of improving our long-term fiscal outlook, even if even if tax increases absolutely necessary to avoid bankruptcy.  What’s more, the GOP is politically committed to opposing significant defense cuts (defense spending eats up the majority of overall discretionary spending) and ideologically committed to categorical support for revenue-killing policies like tax cuts, particularly those directed towards the wealthiest Americans.  And all of this is compounded by the fact that our dysfunctional institutions give Republicans enough power to scuttle any attempt at raising taxes.

For those of us genuinely concerned with ensuring that the United States is fiscally viable over the long-term, this isn’t the most pleasant situation to be in.