Ich bin ein playa-hata

[thedarkages]

The use of refined critical discourse to discuss rap music has become the sine qua non of bon ton. It is bad enough that the New Yorker now has Sasha Frère-Jones opining on the felicities of the genre, but this month's Gourmet has a lexicon of rap terms whose signifiers are all food items.

The upper-crust has always had a fascination with the demi-monde -- take the "bohemians" in La Bohème -- and this is simply an updated version taken to its logical extreme. Critical distance, however, is not unlike ironic distance, which hopes to master what it truly cannot. "Anthropologizing" or "orientalizing" the language is only a shade removed from Rassenkunde.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Is there some connotation of Rassenkunde i'm missing, or do you disapprove of ethnology?

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Are you trolling for the Godwin effect, or do you honestly not know that this was the word that refers to Nazi theories of racial superiority?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I honestly didn't know. A Google search revealed German studies of the Ainu.

It's all part of the same picture.

[thedarkages]

It's funny. The reason the Germans studied the Ainu in the 1930s was so that they could have an ideological basis for alliance with Japan. How, when you believe that the Aryan race is the only race worth having, do you ally yourself with short, black-haired Asians? Answer: you declare them an "Ungemischte Rasse," a pure people with antecedents tracing their way back to the Ainu.

Of course, this theory was full of baloney, and the alliance with Japan a matter of convenience.

Re: It's all part of the same picture.

[thedarkages]

One addition to the picture. The German racial scientists conducting the studies believed that the Ainu were Caucasians. More wishful thinking.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Even Wikipedia shows nothing for Rassenkunde.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Demi-monde? Hell naw. Ain't nothing but a G thang, baby.

Heh,

[thedarkages]

If I asked you for a "translation," that would obviate the point of my post.