jane dark's sugarhigh!

Go white boy go (+ Jon Caramanica)

Robert Christgau has bombed Jay Farrar (sometimes in his Son Volt guise) time and again, every time the Consumer Guide gets him in its sites. He gets down on Mr. Farrar for not being concrete enough; apparently, Bob (who never gave Pavement less than an A-) can't tell what the songs are about.

Hey, neither can I.

Of course, I know what Jewel songs are about, and I know what 50 Cent songs are about, and whoop-di-damn-do. Jay Farrar has a riverdeep baritone that makes me cream, but is that ever enough? He also chooses notes in an utterly distinctive way; if we are to accept that melancholy is a justifiable emotion in the first place, he does it right and then some. "Woke up in the West..." begins the best song on the latest product (and he does keep them coming; this one is the live disc Stone, Steel & Bright Lights); I'm not sure which West he means. The cowboy West? The not-the-East West? Or just barely across the time-line? After all, the song is called "Greenwich." When I understand the plot, I'll drop you a line. When I thnk it's a good poem, I'll hire a skywriter. When it stops filling my gray six-fifteen AMs with teary goodness, I will send Bob some gum.

Click on the link below to read the ruff ruggedness: Jon Caramanica's critical karaoke breakdown of Smoothe Da Hustler f/ Trigger Tha Gambler, "Broken Language," complete with stage directions! And photo!

Smoothe Da Hustler f/ Trigger Tha Gambler, "Broken Language"
Jon Caramanica

"Broken Language": The song I like so much I did what any self-respecting writer with some things to get off his chest and a desire to just loudly spit would: I named my blog after it.

In the Kanye West video for "Through The Wire," there's a great moment when a friend of his is making fun of how Kanye got famous, effectively, off of a car accident. Suggesting that he himself should also get into a crash in order to get some shine, he jokes, "Without a arm I spit! Without a arm I spit."
And I'm thinking: what ever happened to spitting? I don't mean rapping, in the sense that someone delivers a set of verses in time over a beat. But spitting. Lowdown, dirty, grimy, unrelenting rapping, impervious to the machinations and permutations of the beat

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Everybody, meet Smoothe Da Hustler (That first verse was his brother Trigger Tha Gambler.)
Hailing from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and a former running buddy of M.O.P., Smoothe isn't much more than a footnote to most. This song was the b-side to his first single, "Hustlin'," released on Profile in 1995 while he was spending some quality time behind bars.
"Broken Language" was a breakthrough largely because it was, in a sense, a step backwards. Smoothe and Trigger, who was at one point signed to Def Jam, used to try to one-up each other with witty turns of phrase, swapping lines back and forth as a way to keep each other on their lyrical toes.
Hip-hop was always prized for its narrative potential, but what's fantastic about this song is just how anti-narrative it is. There are almost no VERBS in the song, just a litany of increasingly odd roles to inhabit, positions to claim. Hip-hop is about loads of things, it's about bragging and arrogance, and it's about identity and locating oneself in what is sometimes hostile territory.
And how does one respond to those constraints? Maybe by adopting a position that sounds impregnable, or that's so outside of the traditional rap discourse that it stands out proudly.
For example, you could try becoming the "rugged picture poser"

It could be that, or it could be any of a number of increasingly bizarre roles Smoothe and Trigga inhabit in this track - "the slug to your mug tussler," "the body polluter," "the Egyptian spirit inviter," "the chicken tricker," "the chain, ring and bracelet flaunterer," or my personal favorite, "the -tologist without the derma."

I'm not trying to offer some explicit hierarchy of spitting vs rapping, but when I'm talking about "Broken Language," and moreover about the era of time it represents, what I think of is a time when rhyming qua rhyming was valued on its own terms.
So committed was Smoothe to the act of unmediated spitting that there's a picture of him rapping in a stairway cipher in the back of his CD tray. And in this song, he and his brother give what is effectively a child's game a certain degree of heft and urgency.
Smoothe's full-length album came out the next year, and that was probably the last time when merely an ability to just SPIT could get you a record deal.
Look at Lord Finesse, an incredible freestyler and one of hip-hop's true punchline kings, who hasn't had an album of original material out since that same year, 1996.
What happened? A lot of shit happened, but what really happened was the Puff.

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And sure, it's easy to malign Puffy, but that's what I'm about to do. What he did wasn't water hip-hop down, as many accuse him of, but by locating hip-hop so fiercely on the dancefloor, he fucked it up for all the rappers, all the spitters. Even for Loon, and that's a handsome dude.

One of the sadder things I've ever read in a hip-hop magazine came in a Source cover story on Puff Daddy back in 1999 or so. At one point, Puff's surrounded by all sorts of folks, and out of the mob emerges our man Smoothe Da Hustler. "I know you hear this from a lot of cats," he says to Puff, "But me and my brother, we got some shit." If I recall correctly, Puff gave him his cell number, but it was clear from the tone of the piece that Smoothe was something of a broken man, and that he'd probably never call.

Posted by jane at May 3, 2004 05:22 PM | TrackBack