Why I love NPR
So I'm hauling all my worldly goods down to Tennessee and scanning around to find the local NPR station, somewhere in northern Kentucky. It's after dinner, and I hit Fresh Air. And what are they doing? Terry Gross is doing a week-long History of Hip-Hop. It was, in a word, amazing.
They were all -- as near as I could tell -- archive interviews, but they were great. Daryl McDaniels from Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Will Smith, De La Soul, Ice Cube: they were all there. (No Beastie Boys, but that's cool. They were always white men working in a mostly black idiom. It would have been easy to bring them on as "safe", but safe in a racist way. Although the B-Boys are great in their own right, in the past they have gotten some exposure from an establishment that found them more palatable than a Black group. But NPR got it right.) It was great hearing Terry press Chuck D on whether the S1Ws (from Public Enemy) were carrying real machine guns or not. And the interview with Ice-T was maybe the best -- I have a new respect for him and his work.
If you missed it (it was the end of August, and I haven't blogged in a while), here are the links: ch-check it out!
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Brooklyn!
They were all -- as near as I could tell -- archive interviews, but they were great. Daryl McDaniels from Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Will Smith, De La Soul, Ice Cube: they were all there. (No Beastie Boys, but that's cool. They were always white men working in a mostly black idiom. It would have been easy to bring them on as "safe", but safe in a racist way. Although the B-Boys are great in their own right, in the past they have gotten some exposure from an establishment that found them more palatable than a Black group. But NPR got it right.) It was great hearing Terry press Chuck D on whether the S1Ws (from Public Enemy) were carrying real machine guns or not. And the interview with Ice-T was maybe the best -- I have a new respect for him and his work.
If you missed it (it was the end of August, and I haven't blogged in a while), here are the links: ch-check it out!
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Brooklyn!
posted by Jason at 8:00 PM
3 Comments:
The shows with Ice Cube and Ice T were the best. Especially when Terry asked Ice Cube if the emphasis was on the Ice or the Cube.
Definitely excited for the props given by NPR on this. But must admit I squirm as I listen to Terry talk with Chuck D in her prim, ultra-white way. I appreciate her good liberal self, but some of her questions are just dumb.
P: Yeah, I loved that too -- the question totally caught him off guard.
M: Yeah, I thought that Terry and Chuck D had the most disconnect of all the interviews. But, really, Terry is a prim, white liberal and I'm not sure how else she could have interviewed Chuck or anyone. I give her a nod just for doing the feature, rather than some more obviously white/liberal/establishment/whatever thing. And for her to come out and pretend like she was ghetto or something -- just for this week of (prerecorded) interviews -- would have been risible and sub-professional. But, yeah, she didn't get it in some ways ("Uh, why don't you want to answer whether the S1Ws had real machine guns?").
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