The Raven

Sunday, September 29, 2002

Word Up

Flashback to 1977: At the intersection of Telegraph Avenue and Durant in Berkeley, two youngbloods dressed flamboyantly in zoot suits and fedoras are exchanging rhymed verse:

Purple hat: I'm bad, I'm cool, I'm a sex machine. I'm the baddest super-rapper that there ever has been.
Brown hat: I'm stylin', profilin', and all the whilin', I'm smilin'..."

I didn't know it at the time, but I was watching a game called the "dozens" that would soon evolve into today's rap music. This genre has always been fluid, and an offshoot called freestyling that fuses rap and the dozens is starting to draw attention.

Four or five young men are cupping their hands over their mouths and breathing loudly, using their lips as a makeshift rhythm section to spit out a funky tempo. The onlookers nod their heads and sway their hips, and the couple in the center is smiling. Their words come out somewhere between speech and song, their intonation punctuated by rhyming phrases.

The content of freestyling, according to this article, tends to focus on social issues like "drugs, poverty, disease, and violence." Call it street punditry. Here's the part that drew my attention:

The talent required presents a challenge many have not found in school or at home. In a desire to master the verbal art, teens will start by reading dictionaries, then move on to newspapers, and then novels and poetry.

Anything that promotes both literacy and the pursuit of social justice earns my encouragement and respect. This is far better than the glorification of criminality and misogynism that has marked so much of hip-hop culture, and the exposure to poetry and literature is likely to convey many of the benefits of a liberal arts education.

5:15:33 PM

Be Here Now

Remember the incident recently where a Boston doctor stepped out of surgery for 20 minutes to hit the bank? Joyce Slochower, a psychologist, has delved into the science of distraction and determined that the relentless pressue to multitask is endangering our ability to focus on one item to the exclusion of all else.

"Another colleague learned that her patient's previous therapist regularly ate dinner during their face-to-face sessions, until one day the patient exploded with the comment, `What is this, a freaking picnic?'"

Slochower's hypothesis is that we are increasingly forced to commit to a large number of demands on our time, and to compensate for this we "steal" small moments for ourselves when we think we can get away with it. The Raven says to brace yourself for an oncoming barrage of books with titles like, "Focus on the Now," and "One Thing at a Time."

In Loco Veritas

Some reporters from the Washington Post hit a bunch of college campuses and surveyed students on their opinions regarding U.S. foreign policy. A sample comment:

"You can't just start a war because you think something might happen," said Jennifer Rooke, a 20-year-old junior majoring in marketing and international business.

Lots more in the article, but by and large the students seem fairly reasonable and appear to have moved away from the MBA-mandated alignment with conservative politics that cost America an entire generation during the Reagan and Bush years. Intellectual conservatism is defensible. Blind alliance to a doctrine is the abdication of an important responsibility.

Here They Come Again

We've spoken about guerilla advertising before. The problem for advertisers is the troublesome 21 to 35 set who are kinda jaded about things and don't respond well to traditional approaches. National Narrowcasting Network of Memphis has come up with the bright idea of installing video screens next to "wash basins" in the metropolitan Atlanta area's trendy nightclubs and drinking establishments. We put wash basins in quotes because let's face it, that isn't a euphemism for "sink." Ad director Scott Marticke explains:

"Generation Y is extremely tough to reach," Marticke said. "They don't read magazines or newspapers, and they don't watch television. They are out doing things, or they are on the Internet.

And they spend a lot of time in bars and nightclubs standing around with their wangs in their hands. Glad you guys figured that out—but you could have asked us first and saved a lot of time.

Here's a fun statistic from the story: Before, you had to see an ad 3 times for it to "sink in," but now it can take up to 10 viewings before it sticks. That means we are learning to resist. Keep fighting.

The Evil Breed

For some time now, college programs have been focusing on suppressed voices, lost stories, hidden histories, forbidden narratives, squelched biographies, and silenced viewpoints. The idea is that a dominant male hierarchy brushed 'em all off the table because they were a threat to the patriarchical hegemony representing the status quo. Yeah, it sounds a bit stretched here, too, but this kind of thing really nets the grant money. Turns out Channa Newman has been having some success teaching a course titled, "Wealthy White Males" at Point Park College. She sees WWMs as a minority group, which they are; however, as you'd expect, she's not going to go easy on them.

On the class's first night, she placed on the overhead projector an illustration of a 16th century French king surrounded by a white male inner circle plus a dog. She then flashed a photo of a bill signing in Washington in which the participants, save one woman, all were white males.

As her students chuckled, she declared: "What do we see 400 years later? The dog has been replaced by a female."

One supposes that's a sort of progress. But seriously, it's good that our universities and colleges are free to explore any issue that seems attractive. As long as people are thinking critically and not being punished for doing so, there's hope for us yet.

9:17:03 AM