I often of late have contemplated upon the changes the
internet at surface level has gone through in recent years. There are a slew of
corporate chain sites that share something which claims to be information in a
fast food or even slower fast food (think Chipotle) way, and pretend it is
great. Additionally, social media (specifically Facebook) has become gatekeeper
for dissemination of these outlets, and the insidious algorithms are tweaked so
that your corporate chains show up first. There, or course, has been the
rallying meme of FAKE NEWS since this past election cycle, about obvious
bullshit, but even the not obvious bullshit has certain level of bullshit to
it. Our stream of consciousness has been dammed, in order to flow through the
desire channels (or so it seems to me).
This homogenization (or pasteurization, or sterilization, or
white-ification, or – as I used at first – gentrification) results in “trending”
minutiae as well as trending opinions on popular culture. Bits of consumer
culture are immediately proclaimed as genius in order to A) not be late in
giving something props, as if you are not in touch with shit, and B) because
our bar has been lowered. (I realize all this sounds vaguely angry old man
waving at you memebots to get off my lawn; I understand this, and acknowledge
it. That does not invalidate all my points though.)
What this has led to is somewhat shitty sources being
considered authorities on cultural matters. Very likely, this is nothing new,
and has always been the case. Capitalism desires you buy shit, while it’s new,
and the newness in fact increases the value in your emotional response. As soon
as you have purchased cultural items, their value diminishes, and the proper
forms of media you are trained to pay attention to are involved in timely
rollout of hot takes about these items while they are being offered newly. It
is a crescendo of trickery means to keep capitalism capital.
An example of this (perhaps) false authority is Pitchfork,
self-proclaimed the important hot taker of musical opines in this digital era
of our based-lord 2017. However, for me, a grown ass man deeply steeped in
traditional hip hop, Pitchfork has always mostly been a shit hot-taker of hip
hop opines. However, this leads to some self-doubt on having alternative
opinions (which I used to do as part of a wack ass crew called the Xpert
Whiteboyz, who ironically enough were not wholly “white”) due to the persistent
presence within hip hop opinion havers and aficionados to always out-show and
prove each other over who is most motherfucking down by utilizing crab-in-a-barrel
psychology and shitting on other opines. I don’t want to do that necessarily.
So I had the stupid idea to just take the top 9 hip hop
albums on Pitchfork’s year end albums of the year list for the past 9 years,
and do a simple process of elimination reviewing thing, to travel back through
recent times, and attempt a pseudo-scientific deduction of what was hot, and
what was not. The first problem I ran into though is other than the most recent
year, most years there have not even been 9 hip hop albums on the Pitchfork
year end list. So I tinkered with that, and went further back in their
authoritative archives as slots became available. This eventually took me all
the way back to their 2004 year end list, in order to get 81 albums.
I guess I should explain the reviewing process, and why it
is 81. One thing that seems to be missing from normal reviewing process is
battle aspect – how does shit compare to other shit. But if you have simple
one-on-one battles, you might get two pieces of shit, and then one piece of
shit is falsely proclaimed as “good” simply because both are shit. So I went
with three-at-a-time battle reviews. (Of course all three could be shit, but
mathematically your odds of total shit are greatly reduced by the jump from two
to three.) Thus we have a 3-way dance of albums, which I have very uncleverly
called Hip Hop Trios. Having 81 albums means the following:
- First round – 81 albums (in 27 3-way battles) are reduced to 27.
- Second round – 27 albums (in 9 3-way battles) are reduced to 9.
- Penultimate round – 9 albums reduced to 3.
- Final round – 3 reduced to 1 grand champion.
Yes, it is ridiculous, and not really necessary even
slightly, but it gives me something to do during my commutes to the
soul-sucking job which ruins my general satisfaction with life, because the
reviewing process I’ve arbitrarily decided upon requires me to listen to all
three albums, in order, beginning to end, two times through, so that after
first round of listening to all three, I can verify my hot takes with second
round of listening. I think in frantic desire to have immediate opinions a lot
of time, people have reviews up five minutes after they downloaded some shit,
without even having absorbed the album, probably not even having listened to it
all the way through fully. We pre-program ourselves to be ahead-of-the-curve.
So that is what this will be. I’ve got my stupid list of 81
albums, and will start them in chronological order, and slowly do this shit
over the course of the next few weeks. It is dumb and unnecessary, and
unpolished and not sterilized, but that is what the internet should be in my
opinion.
Ending note: I will be applying the Xpert WhiteboY’Z
personal brand tag to all this bullshit, because that is what we used to call
our dumb groupthink list, and it still applies. Though I do not consider myself
an expert in anything (who could be if they are being truly honest with
themselves?), certainly people will assume that title is being applied to
yourself when reading the dumb opinionz4u the internet is so famous for. Also,
I try not to perpetuate whiteness in my life, as ultimately it is a social
construct yes, that would be great to move away from at some point in our
shared human history; but it is also a very real social construct that defines
many many things in our physical existence, and I do benefit from the
application of “white male” being put on me from that system. I can put on a Van
Heusen button-up shirt from the Goodwill and look the part enough to trick
these devils into trusting me (which generally means exploiting me). However, coming
from shithole roots, where white dudes in certain not necessarily entirely
white circles would often get referred to as “whiteboy”, that part of the
branded phrase feels better, because no self-respecting upstanding (lolol)
white male would ever call himself “whiteboy” willingly. It is a trash culture
term of endearment, and ultimately I prefer trash culture to pop culture. And
though it is a played out term at this point, I guess I am hoping to do this “for
the culture”.
Thus ends your introduction to another ridiculous project.
First three-way review (aka Hip Hop Trio) goes up tomorrow evening. Likely it
will not register within the algorithms, but that is okay. Trash culture shall
always fill the gaps, and we are cockroaches as well as gut flora, and as
empires die, their sterilization processes become untenable, and we get brief
moments of glory where we take over, where the wretched get to pretend we control
the earth, before the shineface devils reclaim their self-ordained dominion.
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