Got to love my editor for making that the title of this thing I wrote about who else, but that’s ok because I stand by the idea behind it. First one thing, an excerpt,

The first big beneficiaries of the internet seemed to be mostly white, mostly Canadian: that is, geographically remote, but racially homogenous with what I’d call the prevailing notion of what’s popular and salable. The last few years have seen rappers like the Clipse and Lil Wayne entirely revivify their careers by plying the mixtape trade on the internet. YouTube, clearly, has had a lot to do with Soulja Boy feeling comfortable claiming he bought a $55 million plane. Tumblr and hype-centric, high-volume blogs like Fader and Complex opened a path for Odd Future and Kreayshawn to mug on mesozoic MTV. What makes Das Racist different than Soulja bragging about his number of Facebook fans or Kreayshawn getting signed off the strength of one massive YouTube video? Not to be too reductive or question begging, but Das Racist is different because they’re not kids. To bring it back to Jay, they’re more “I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man” than the others, and they are so despite not being as crassly commercial as their internet brethren.

If I wanted to get a little Free Darko on it, I’d say DR are part of a internet-music dialectic, starting with your state-funded, educated white Canadians, then your college-drop out, west coast rappers, to your midwest liberal arts brown person diaspora business-rappers. I’d say they represent everything that thrills, excites, and interests me about music. And I’d mention that there are a lot of good things that are not funny — like Louie or modern dance — and how there are a lot of good things that are funny — like Werner Herzog — and that you shouldn’t necessarily hold it against something for being good and funny. I think and have always thought DR were pretty serious, but they get a little consigned to the role of fool or jester because funny people of color, ones who jokes about race, always have their humor emphasized at the expense of their message (cf Dave Chappelle and maybe even Ken Jeong).

Other topics mentioned include the use of allusive distance as an act of aggression (silence, exile, and cunning, remember artists???) and the way racial epithets get stacked upon each other like German words.