Odd Future & NPR \ Talk about a paradox…

Odd Future’s making it big. Frannie Kelly at NPR gives one of the best analyses of OFWGKTA so far, why they’re not as new as we think yet setting the game on fire:

“Rap’s always been a young man’s game. Tyler is roughly the same age as OutKast were when their first album dropped. Earl is about as old as LL Cool J was at the time of Radio,” says Nosnitsky. “Their subject matter is nothing new in hip-hop. I mean, Biggie used to rap about rape, Nas went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus. DMX opened his second album with the line ‘I got blood on my d—k because I f—-ed a corpse.’ Just about every rapper in the ’90s threw around the word ‘f——t’ liberally.”

…

It’s thrilling to hear him, to witness him teetering on the line between an insular tribe of hardcore fans and the rest of the world. It’s been a long time since rap has had someone this unknowable at center stage. It’s been a long time since rap fans have been encouraged, even activated, to be weird. And it’s been even longer since rap fans have felt part of the process.

Then, Martin Cizmar at the Phoenix Sun-Times reminds us just how bizarre it is for NPR to understand Tyler best:

Something about wealthy white yuppies laughing and smiling as black teenagers pour out their rage at an unfair world through hip-hop didn’t sit well with me. I get it, concerts are generally supposed to be fun affairs, but when music is that raw and angry and coming from a minorities there’s something unseemly about white people getting a big kick out of it. Odd Future’s showcase turned into something like a Pimp ‘N’ Ho party for the NPR set, and I wanted no part of it.

I was a little sick standing behind (edit: former as of this month) Los Angeles Times music critic Ann Powers — she knows next to nothing about hip-hop and mostly ignored it on her pages despite representing a city with an incredible scene, including this group — as she laughed and smiled, drinking everything in.

One of the Odd Future guys looking out at the bemused crowd put it best: “Ain’t Shit Funny.”

Shortly thereafter, they bounced, giving the crowd a big fuck-you and heading for the door.

The response from people like Powers? She gave a 10-second review of the show on NPR, calling the group “very insolent,” and saying, “I thought they needed to go to bed without their supper.”

Those are interesting words coming from a wealthy white lady who should, presumably, take this group as seriously as anyone considering she’s the big-time music critic at the daily newspaper serving their community. Maybe I’m being overly sensitive, but treating Tyler and his crew like “insolent” children or, worse, a joke, makes me queasy.