Welcome to STG, Eef. I downloaded 'Bitches Ain't Shit' after seeing Ben in Leicester last year - cool version. Must confess that four of us only went to the BFF show to see your fine support slot, but he was really good, too, and judging from the fanatical fans who sold the show out, Ben's doing pretty well without our buying all of his discs. Looking forward to your second solo album. Come back to Nottingham soon.

To preface: I have absolutely no a priori opinion about Ben Folds or his music. In fact, I have never even heard anything he has done other than that song that was a radio hit about 10 years ago, "Brick."

With respect, I think you're way off base here, so much so that it's hard to tell if you're serious. Firstly, to sum up a love of American black music as the simple result of shame and guilt and privilege is just plain ole baffling. Leaving aside the various questions that need answers (which black music? funk? soul? hip hop? blues? jazz? all of it? and which white people are you talking about? and what about the contributions of whites and other races to the music that is typically considered "black music"? does that complicate things? it should.), what's missing from the equation is the possibility that people might just enjoy something because they like it. Because it adds something to their world that they haven't found elsewhere. Or maybe just because they really like the way Common flows. None of this, of course, denies what you're saying about guilt and shame, but to attribute everything to it is to oversimplify things.

As for the cover in question, I really don't hear a humble tribute to an oppressed people and their co-opted culture. Maybe that's just my ears, but it's not as if he's covering Curtis Mayfield or Marvin Gaye. Rap music (not all of it, but I think this at least holds for Dr. Dre and most of the artists who were prominent in the East Coast-West Coast feud of the early and mid-90's) is often time and place specific. You could get into a long discussion about the musicological origins of that element of the music, but let's just say that in the case of Dr. Dre it was largely for cred. He's from the streets, he's from Compton, he's hard, et cetera and so forth. Ben Folds, not so much. That's not exactly a problem in and of itself, except that knowing that he is not all of these things makes it difficult to take him seriously--and I would contend that this is not the problem of the listener but the problem of the artist. Listening to him sing about ho's and bitches and niggas and the streets makes me cringe. He might not be smiling as he's singing, and therefore thankfully not as obviously ironic (and stupid) as it could have been, but it's still somehow, well, gross. A more humble tribute might have been to engage the always amazing music behind Dre's work rather than the lyrics, which I do not think can be recreated sincerely, or at least not in this case. My reaction, I think, has less to do with obsessing over surfaces than it does with having a deep respect for where an artist--a person--comes from.

That said, it's a very pretty arrangement.

-Andy

as a librarian, i'm bothered by the dewey decimal comment. i'm pretty sure that comment doesn't make sense, but still...

Andy, you've missed the point of G-Funk in the first place. Something like Dr Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" is a cartoon, a colourful exaggeration. Based on truth, maybe, evoking a particular time and place - read up on the crack cocaine epidemic that hit urban black areas in the late 80s/early 90s - but still a cartoon.

In Folds' hands, "Bitches Ain't Shit" is initially funny because of the juxtaposition between the black slang and the serious white boy ballad style Folds puts the lyrics in (see Jonathan Coulton's "Baby Got Back" for a similar trick). But what makes the version worth listening to more than once is that Folds' version focuses ones' attention on the songwriting aspects of "Bitches Ain't Shit", on the way the rhymes and rhythms flow together. In Folds' hands - someone who often clearly sings from the point of view of characters, Randy Newman-style - the artfulness of the song and the way the setting is built is clearer, at least to honky white ears like mine.

Though Dre might sound like a cartoon to honky white ears like yours, I can assure you that there were many, many people who took it much more seriously than you. I'm not thinking of myself here (honestly it had and has little effect on my life); specifically I'm just thinking back to what the hip-hop world was like before the deaths of Pac and Big. Divided, and with fatal consequences.

That's not to say that there isn't a cartoonish element to such inflated self-hyping and misogyny, but I disagree with your assessment on the whole. I have nothing to back up my opinion--no books written or special degrees from hip-hop U.--except for the fact that I've been loving hip-hop through good times and bad for almost twenty years.

-Andy

god i hate that ben folds song. satire/parody? eh

Hi Andy,

I don't deny that a lot of people took that stuff seriously - obviously shit hit the fan like you mention. Maybe cartoon was the wrong word. I just meant that there's a theatrical aspect to something like The Chronic, that it's artfully constructed storytelling and songwriting. I was just trying to argue that Folds' version emphasises that aspect of the song, especially to white ears assuming that anything with a prominent beat is not art but dance music.

tim.

I love that Folds' cover. I think there's a huge difference here between Folds' reinterpretation then, say, Dynamite Hack's cover of "Boyz N' the Hood". Where DH played it up all casual and silly, as if to say we're white suburban kids taking another song and singing it in the laziest, most laid-back style to send it up; I've often felt that Folds took this one completely seriously. Instead of focusing on playing up the "hilarity" of a white boy saying "bitches" and "niggas", his focus is on the heartbreak of the situation, especially in the verse about him going to jail and coming out finding his girl's been unfaithful. To me, the whole point of Folds' cover seemed to be that heartbreak is universal, whether it's white/black, rich/poor, indie rock piano player/dope MC.