TA-NEHISI COATES GIVES UP ON RAP, GETS UP ON ROCK

no middle ground?
Saw this on Time Magazine's online site: Ta-Nehisi Coates writes an autobiographical essay about how he, as a black man, has felt estranged from today's hip-hop yet has felt, at times, torn with the racial expectations of what he's supposed to listen to. In the end, Coates learns to put down his 50 Cent and embrace Radiohead instead, with no contradiction.

I'll be honest - I have a great deal of respect for Coates as a writer - always have - and I think he's tackling an important issue here. However, I always wince when I see someone open up an essay with: "In the spring of 2004, I quit hip-hop. It wasn't the first time."

It's not for me to judge - my relationship to hip-hop is informed by race but not the same way that Coates, as a Black man, has to negotiate it. This said, hip-hop has proven to be such a dynamic and mercurial music that it's hard to imagine that what we hear today will be what tomorrow sounds like. "Quitting" an entire musical genre seems like a drastic step to get over a temporary estrangement (unless of course, it's not temporary). Some pull quotes:

"...that spring when I walked into a bar with 50 Cent and Fabolous pumping at maximum volume, it felt like an audio beat down--everything I ever hated about hip-hop blaring at me in all its nihilistic glory. I left with an equally black and dismayed friend. This was absurd--two black men in their late 20s acting like two white women in their early 70s. We could not close the night on that depressing thought, so we headed to another party, where the DJ deftly mixed the White Stripes and Eurythmics. We sat down. We ordered from the top shelf."

"...the night I traded 50 Cent for Jack White, I knew something fundamental had changed, that the Soul Train had pulled into its final stop. When I went home that night, it was all devastatingly clear to me. I'd fallen for white music."

"I was a black-music nerd, for sure out of love but also out of a need to find some common ground with my own. I never explored beyond that, mostly because the kids in my neighborhood believed the words white and music to be antithetical."

"The fact is that white music made me understand how black I really was. I realized that I was connected by experience and history, connected in a way that didn't require recitations of Big Daddy Kane. But more freeing was the simple sense of disconnection--the ability to listen to White Music the way white kids must have listened to jazz, soul or hip-hop."

--O.W.