Made a blizzard when she blew her nose (i.e. she did voluminous amounts of cocaine)

Here’s my only real bid:

I move bricks like Stevie Nicks moves moms/Weepin’ through “Landslide” on the five o’ clock freeride

(i.e. on the regular and without the expenditure of much effort)

Okay and I’m out the game.

I don’t know why the Clipse album should even be any of my business except that I too am white and enjoy blogging. But I’ve been listening to it a lot lately, so I need to break from the lean comedy of my s.a.d. catalog to throw a few words into the wind. As rappers, I like Clipse fine. I also acknowledge that I’m woefully underqualified to talk about rap, though I have no problem listening to it as it is frequently in English and concerning a variety of topics situated within the oft-blogged-about “human drama.”

What weirds me out about Clipse isn’t who they are or what they do, but how they’re read. Clipse’s loudest champions are still basically huddled under a more glamorized umbrella of that fucking brilliant, pithy, look-at-yall’s-selves, top-10 GQ note (CLIPSE WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU DIGEST FOOD). This was, I remember, something of an issue when We Got it 4 Cheap came out: kinda brilliant white kids playing the scattered apologist or philosophizing on behalf of the guns. (Make no mistake: I adored Nick for it, because I think when you scratch the lolz, he’s more morally engaged than most.)

A lot of people seem to want to hang isms on Clipse. Philosophical rubrics slide easily into validations. Because otherwise, we’d have to own up to our morbid fascination with RUTHLESSNESS (to wit: “An unforgivable mean streak powers this album” [Pitchfork]; “As they rap about drug deals and money stacks, Malice and Pusha T wield lucidity like a weapon; you get the discomfiting feeling that they know exactly what they’re doing.” [the Times]; “Fury becomes less about retribution than business: the business of sneering, vicious, infectious, professional hip-hop. Global. Capital-first. Emotionless. They never look back.” [Stylus]).

And really, a lot of this press has bullied them into an image that I think they don’t fully project. What I hear on Hell Hath No Fury isn’t the sound of two cold hustlas with the world by its dick, but scraps vying for a seat at the edge of society, knowing that the very thing that brought them there—trap, the game, whatever the hell people that don’t do it like to call it—will always keep them at the door. The hook in “Dirty Money” is whispered out of shame. Apologies are made to their families. “Hello New World” is very “slingers of the world unite,” but loaded down with fear and totally without Marx’s bravado—“Funny how my neighbors think I’m not where I’m s’posed to be/They think I’m cuter in jail,” so shine on or whatever, and don’t worry about starting that IRA because the pound always puts bad dogs down. They don’t even seem half-proud of their shit; it’s all panic-of-acquisition.

It’s not that Clipse aren’t smart enough to debase human compassion, but nihilism (by any name) is an agonizingly far stretch. Really, I only tasted metal once—the lyric about turning girls into liars. But other than that, Clipse’s paranoia commands more of my pathos than the world—the one they’re supposedly ruining, devouring—does.

So, sum is—and there’s no way I’m going to really step out with the word “racist,” but—I feel like everyone’s making them out to be boogiemen because it helps keep the picture, ahem, greyscale. The last thing we need to do is figure out why a bunch of pale college kids are enthralled with the hyperbolic villainy of some black folk, especially when said villainy has clearly come with deep psychological bruises.

(NOTE: I *do* know that K. Sanneh, who wrote that NYT review, is not white. Okay. I’m just assessing trends in rhetoric.)