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I had high hopes when I learned that Taylor Swift and T-Pain were performing together on last night's CMT Music Awards. Two of the most world's most appealing pop stars, mashing up hip-hop, country, and teenpop? A lil' bit of pedal steel, a lil' bit of Auto-Tune? I canceled dinner plans. I switched off the Mets game. And I put myself way out on a limb: I tweeted my excitement.
Bad move. Instead of a live performance, the CMT broadcast opened with a video, "Thug Story," in which T-Pain crooned auto-tune-swathed backing vocals while "T-Swift" flashed a diamond grill and rapped about knitting sweaters. It was, in other words, the latest—the millionth?—example of the White Folks Can't Rap novelty tune, that ubiquitous sketch comedy routine that hammers home a single punch line again and again: Check out this honky rapping—isn't that a riot?
Well, maybe it was in 1983. That was the year of "Rappin' Rodney," in which Rodney Dangerfield reeled off a series of borscht-encrusted one-liners over a thumping beat. Shortly thereafter, Doonsbury creator Garry Trudeau masterminded "Rap Master Ronnie," a mildly—very mildly—amusing spoof of President Reagan.
In other words, this joke is almost as old, and precisely as funny, as "Why did the chicken cross the road?" Yet it continues to get told and told again. Weird Al Yankovic has been working the white and nerdy hip-hop angle for at least a decade. Every time Saturday Night Live's writers are stuck, they disgorge a bit like "Palin Rap." ("My name is Sarah Palin/ You all know me/ Vice-prezzy nominee/ Of the GOP.") On YouTube, you can watch endless variations on the theme: white dudes rapping about Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, about their mopeds, about their inability to "keep a damn beat," about ultimate Frisbee, about organic produce, about Vermont. And the geeky white rapper gag isn't just sketch-comedy fodder; it's a career choice. MC Frontalot and MC Hawking (as in Stephen) are leading lights of nerdcore, a subgenre predicated on the inherent hilariousness of rap songs about Boba Fett.
If YouTube viewing statistics and viral blogging action are any measure, this one-note gag continues to elicit uproarious laughter, across the demographic spectrum. Has a hack comedy routine ever had such cachet? When nuclear physicists, Kanye West, and Karl Rove all agree on a joke, can we safely conclude the joke has lost some of its subversive oomph?
The truth is, "Thug Story" isn't just stale, it's outdated. There are plenty of white MCs these days, and very few are like Vanilla Ice, buffoons obsessed with gangsta authenticity. In fact, one of the best white rappers is a comedian. Andy Samberg has become a 21st-century Tom Lehrer by using hip-hop, his generation's musical lingua franca, as a launching pad for daffy comedy. Samberg's rap parodies flip the nerdcore punchline: They're affectionate genre spoofs, based on Samberg's rapping prowess, his ability to impersonate various hip-hop styles precisely. Listen to "Like a Boss," a spot-on sendup of Slim Thug's bombastic Houston hip-hop, and you'll hear a novel joke: a good white rapper sending up a good black one.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 11 a.m.)
No. 1: "iphone 3.0 release time"; No. 12: "iphone 3.0 update download"; No. 22: "when will iphone 3.0 be available"; No. 35: "ipod touch 3.0 update"; No. 43: "is iphone 3.0 out yet?"; No. 62: "apple 3.0"; etc. It seems an iPhone update comes out today? The iPhone OS 3.0 firmware update was announced back in March and features a number of small to substantial upgrades. Earlier this morning, the update had yet to appear on the Internet, with iPhone users apparently Googling away their frustration. A little after 1 p.m. ET, the update went live, though it remains to be seen whether Apple's servers can handle the influx.
No. 15: "Obama Kills Fly." In this case, a video is worth a thousand Googles:
No. 89 "Firebird Suite." If you haven't gathered as much already from Google's enigmatic front page, today is the birthday of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. (He would have been 127.) Although Google's home-page illustration alludes to the Russian-folklore-based Firebird Suite, the discordant Rite of Spring is perhaps Stravinsky's best-known work, both for its musical qualities and for the scandal it caused at its 1913 première. More recently, a film about Stravinsky's brief love affair with Coco Chanel closed this year's Cannes.
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It is now being widely reported that Sasha Baron Cohen's aerial assault on Eminem at Sunday's MTV Movie Awards was staged. This seemed obvious from the outset—no matter how well Eminem's post-addiction 12-stepping is going, it beggars belief that he could react to a prank of this nature with such Zen-like restraint. God knows, men have been pummeled by rappers' bodyguards for lesser offenses than a nationally televised tea-bagging.
And so we are left to contemplate an icky publicity stunt, designed to drum up business for Eminem's new album, Baron Cohen's forthcoming Bruno movie, and MTV itself. As the cable network, with palpable desperation, sought to replicate its past awards show succès de scandales—Howard Stern's Fartman flight from the rafters; Eminem's showdown with Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog—viewers were treated to the spectacle of two talented and presumably self-respecting artists publicly humiliating themselves in a witless shock-comedy sweat-act, complete with schwanz jokes that would have bombed at Grossinger's 60 years ago.
That Eminem and Baron-Cohen, who have both demonstrated comedic genius in the past, didn't recognize the banality of this gag (as Paris Hilton evidently did) speaks to the lengths to which celebrities will go in pursuit of viral-video success, which, these days, is the best promotion, the real fame. Forget the rapper and the comedian and all of the glittering A-listers on hand—the elephants in the room Sunday night were the dancing baby, the "Charlie bit me!" kid, and the Chocolate Rain dude. Of course, the way things are going, at next year's awards there will be actual elephants in the room, moving their bowels on Andy Samberg's head. LOL!
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