Men Giving Birth is Hip

This blog is for
the man.

Women, get the dish pans out and start scrubbing. Mind ya’ business.

(Woman, I know you like it when I talk to you like that because you’ve always craved a man in your bed rather then an emasculated little boy.)

 “Hip’s central romance, the myth of reinvention, is a quintessential male fantasy.

It allows birth without the womb.”

(Leland 87)

Picture this.

You’re a man living in America between the decades of the two World Wars.

What do you have?

Dehumanizing Work. Smothering Woman. Kids.

That bowl of pressure

Is a crimp in your masculinity.

With no destination

Escape on the open road

Is your promise for growth and enlightenment.

The answer is

A hard-boiled hero:

“Big shoulders, strong chin, smart lip, big pistol, and a taut gift of gab.”(Leland 90)

The private eye:

“…an independent operator, unmarried, childless, and motherless.

He cowed neither to women nor to work.

He did not suffer an employer;

...he gained the upper hand by walking away from a check

…he cut a sexual swath

but did not have any attachments or obligations

…he gained advantage by walking away from hot nookie.” (Leland 90)

The Big Sleep (1946)

“film noir traded on the hip premise that language means more than it says, and that silence communicates more than words.” (Leland 102)

Rage.

It was displaced for a while.

When it is Hip

it becomes productive, articulate, and edifying—not repressed.

“Slaves encoded their rage in language and art—cool on the surface, hot below.”

“..Pulp writers packaged violence in choppy, kinetic prose.

 It was contained rather than masked.”

(Leland 91)

“I used my knee on his face. It hurt my knee.  He didn’t tell me whether it hurt his face. While he was still groaning I knocked him cold with the sap.”

 Raymond Chandler

Farewell My Lovely (1940)

http://vinpulp.blogspot.com/2009/01/farewell-my-lovely-by-raymond-chandler.html

Now that we’re all men now,

Let’s talk about the fertile grounds of

L.A. and the West Coast.

Pulp and Film Noire.

How would you like to lay one down and honor a place that has

the “biggest, baddest, sickest, ugliest, most sex-saturated, unformulaic, most pervasively evil, profound fucking crime novels of all time.”

Thank you James Ellroy

For that sympathetic tribute.

Eventually the open road runs out and

The coast is

The place to contemplate failure.

 California is a state full of dark, violent outcasts, drifters, and grifters

Who ran out of room to run.

A pulp hero is born.

He didn’t rely on East coast bohemia or intelligentsia.

They were civilized and primitive.

A western outlaw, detective, but not a criminal or exactly law-abiding.

Los Angeles

Its first building was the jail.

The cities chief product was fantasy.

There was an absence of history.

Violent surrealism replaced myths.

Torn between the luster and decay

“I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. 

It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. 

But the colored lights fooled you. 

The lights were wonderful. 

There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights.”

Robert Chandler

Arrival in L.A.

1912

 

In a city without history, hard-boiled detectives did not have

 mothers, wives, steady girlfriends, or children.

 “It was a cliché of the genre to have nothing to lose, neither future nor past.”

 (Leland 101)

Hip is detachment

                                                                       

                                                          Scene from Lady Killer (1933)

“The threat to hip is not women but domesticity.”

(Leland 101)

“Like the motherless detectives, rappers were their own invention; in the absence of roots, they invented their own names and surrogate families. They were outsiders’ outsiders.”

(Leland 108)

NWA 

 Fuck Tha Police + Lyrics

"Evolution is the solution!"

 Vince Russo

NWA

“Hip is not the ability to talk like Marlowe or Ice-T, or to sulk like Bogart…

(that’s) missing half the message. 

Hip is the ability

to hear both meaning in their voices,

to catch the undertones complicating the plainest prose.”

 (Leland 110)

http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Hip-History-Mr-John-Leland/?isbn=9780060528188


AND FINALLY...SOME DESSERT

Tupac
"How Do You Want It"

Just by looking at this video one would assume it is only about sexing the ladies up right.
But the lyrics reveal the ambivalent voice of the blues.
Hardship with transendence.

LYRICS
How do you want it? How does it feel?
Comin up as a nigga in the cash game
livin in the fast lane; I'm for real
How do you want it? How do you feel?
Comin up as a nigga in the cash game
livin in the fast lane; I'm for real
[Verse One: 2Pac]

Love the way you activate your hips and push your ass out
Got a nigga wantin it so bad I'm bout to pass out
Wanna dig you, and I can't even lie about it
Baby just alleviate your clothes, time to fly up out it
Catch you at a club, oh shit you got me fiendin
Body talkin shit to me but I can't comprehend the meaning
Now if you wanna roll with me, then here's your chance
Doin eighty on the freeway, police catch me if you can
Forgive me i'm a rider, still I'm just a simple man
All I want is money, fuck the fame I'm a simple man
Mr. International, playa with the passport
Just like Aladdin bitch, get you anything you ask for
It's either him or me -- champagne, Hennessey
A favorite of my homies when we floss, on our enemies
Witness as we creep to a low speed, peep what a hoe need
Puff some mo' weed, funk, ya don't need
Approachin hoochies with a passion, been a long day
But I've been driven by attraction in a strong way
Your body is bangin baby I love it when you flaunt it
Time to give it to daddy nigga now tell me how you want it
(Tell me how you want it! La-dy, yeahhhyeah)

[Chorus]

[Verse Two: 2Pac]

Tell me is it cool to fuck?
Did you think I come to talk am I a fool or what?
Positions on the floor it's like erotic, ironic
cause I'm somewhat psychotic
I'm hittin switches on bitches like I been fixed with hydraulics
Up and down like a roller coaster, I'm up inside ya
I ain't quittin til the show is over, cause I'ma rider
In and out just like a robbery, I'll probably be a freak
and let you get on top of me, get her rockin these
Nights full of Alize, a livin legend
You ain't heard about these niggaz play these Cali days
Delores Tucker, youse a motherfucker
Instead of tryin to help a nigga you destroy a brother
Worse than the others -- Bill Clinton, Mr. Bob Dole
You're too old to understand the way the game is told
You're lame so I gotta hit you with the hot facts
Want some on lease? I'm makin millions, niggaz top that
They wanna censor me; they'd rather see me in a cell
livin in hell -- only a few of us'll live to tell
Now everybody talkin bout us I could give a fuck
I'd be the first one to bomb and cuss
Nigga tell me how you want it

[Chorus]

[Verse Three: 2Pac]

Raised as a youth, tell the truth I got the scoop
on how to get a bulletproof, because I jumped from the roof
before I was a teenager, mobile phone, SkyPager
Game rules, I'm livin major -- my adversaries
is lookin worried, they paranoid of gettin buried
One of us gon' see the cemetary
My only hope to survive if I wish to stay alive
Gettin high, see the demons in my eyes, before I die
I wanna live my life and ball, make a couple million
And then I'm chillin fade em all, these taxes
got me crossed up and people tryin to sue me
Media is in my business and they actin like they know me
Hahaha, but I'ma mash out, peel out
I'm with it quick I'se quick to whip that fuckin steel out
Yeah nigga it's some new shit so better get up on it
When ya see me tell a nigga how ya want it
How do you want it?

[Chorus 2X]

[2Pac]
How you want it?
Yeah my nigga Johnny J
Yeah, we out

[Chorus]

[2Pac]
Tell me

[Chorus]

[2Pac]
Cash game, livin in the fast lane, I'm for real

That is hip.