Ich bin ein playa-hata
Aug. 23rd, 2005 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarkagesThe 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.
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.
