Kreayshawn - Bumpin’ Bumpin’ from Aris Jerome on Vimeo.

What’s happening is this kind of nutty inside-out approach to authenticity, wherein, White Girl Mob because they’re from Oakland, are assumed to be hood and therefore, more worthy of saying “nigga” than white girls from let’s just say, Beverly Hills. As a construct, that doesn’t work because we accept that all black people can say “nigga” without informing you of where they’re from beforehand. To repeat something I said about witch-house group Salem (who practice their own kind of lower middle class black appropriation): It’s never been about authenticity.

This is a good way to look at it. Maybe, because, for instance I didn’t really understand Soderberg’s Salem argument until I read his essay a few times, and even then it didn’t make a lot of sense to me until I thought about it w/r/t Kreayshawn.

Salem is a band that has authenticity for miles, to appropriate a phrase. And in fact, I was out running the other day listening to King Night, getting mad as I’m wont when running, and I kept getting madder that Salem got plowed under and OF rose up precisely because, you know, Salem actually might have too much authenticity viewed from a certain angle, and their getting shit on by music writers seems pretty fucking funny now that we have OF, right? Because Salem > OF w/r/t authenticity. No contest. No context.

It’d/s been my druthers to defend Kreayshawn to myself. For a few reasons.

• She’s not that terrible of a rapper, especially when you consider such rap luminaries as Lil B and Soulja Boy, both of whom are
  • Not bad rappers even though they’re bad at rapping, and
  • Especially championed by many, including me.
• So if she’s not a bad rapper relative to her milieu, it seemed like a lot of what I thought I was seeing was just misogynstic, an analog to (and, here it gets a little mindbending) but (in this way only) unrelated to the ‘You Have To Rap Twice As Good If You’re A White Rapper’ line of thinking.
  • Eg, since she’s not an amazing rapper like Nicki, she’s just some stupid girl trying to be a rapper.
  • Eg, my point being that there are lots of terrible rappers ‘whom we like,’ and they just happen to be men.
  • So, misogyny.
• Kreayshawn also embodies that style-over-substance (eg, supra) rap vein, and
  • I had the phrase *”Bumpin’ bumpin. Dance words. Bumpin’” trapped in my head for a whole weekend,
  • which is all you can ask of pop rap stupidity, right?

On the other hand, she raps about running up in your house and killing your mom, dad, sister, brother, girlfriend, dog (which all even Wayne was self-aware enough to call “fucked up,” remember that?) but then she says she’ll put your cat in her bag because she likes cats so much. So her raps are kind of like Tumblr posts. Which, look at this thing, here are not really that great. And she’s terrible at rapping, and also at writing. That song “Bumpin Bumpin,” while very catchy, uses about fourteen words in total. Also, there’s a ‘gun cocking’ sound effect inexplicably set toward the beginning. I don’t like guns (I’m one of those people), and rap’s superfluous gun stuff kind of sours me.

On the other hand, to paraphrase John Darnielle, the best writing occurs when it seems like no writing is taking place, and maybe there is none taking place, but the part at the beginning where she’s like “Can I spend the night at your house” might be kind of stupid and playing-down to her age, but it seems kind of extremely genuine, too. And the way (even though she rhymes it with “elephant”) she says “elegant” is really affecting. Like you can tell Kreayshawn went and found her coolest thrift store shit (the shit she could afford to buy) and is wearing it, and looks like a total freak, but feels like she looks awesome. And naturally, you can see how she’d write a song like “Gucci Gucci” after this song, because duh. And now “Gucci Gucci” seems pretty relevant, as well.

But to paraphrase Lil B, these are just my thoughts.