You're a good person, you really are. You care deeply about the underprivileged; you are aware. You went to Vassar, or Wesleyan, or Wellesley. You know your Plath and Angelou, your Naomis (Wolf and Klein), perhaps even Laura Mulvey. The right's brazen usurpation of power and their subsequent crusades send you into paroxysms of anger. The time has come to share your compassion, your outrage, your unique insight. Too bad you lack even a modicum of the talent required to put your musings into any form other than a weblog. Ahh, but you can make them rhyme. Sort of.
"I'm a vegetarian/ Humanitarian/ Imaginarian [sic]/ I'm a Libertarian/ The country's getting ugly and there's more in store/ But don't blame me 'cause I voted for Gore."
Holy shit, it finally happened. Welcome to hip-hop as a vessel for smug, middlebrow liberal condescension. Meet Northern State: a merry troika of young Long Islanders who rap about Bush and Fast Food Nation on their debut mini-album, Dying in Stereo. But first-- since I'm going to be tackling the doubly touchy subject of white female artists working in a black male milieu-- I'll need to lay down some ground rules. First: for the purposes of this review, there is no such thing as "white" or "black" hip-hop. We'll use class definitions instead. Second: For the sake of my inbox, let's dispense with the girl factor-- the crew's gender matters only because it triggers 99% of the praise that's heaped on them (and I swear, people, somewhere out there is a group of girls even more talented than underground hip-hop's current leading lady, Jean Grae), and allows wanting critics an opportunity to finally champion somebody as the antidote to rap's misogyny, as if a group of haughty correctives from suburbia could somehow trump-- or even start a meaningful dialogue with-- the inner city.
Armed with the weakest flow in town, squeaky Amy Fisher accents, and a stultifying, wrongheaded sense of entitlement, Hesta Prynn and pals have created what must be the most heinous hip-hop release since MC Skat Kat went solo. Clearly children of privilege, Northern State commit the terrible fallacy of co-opting street argot-- something that grad-school rappers like MC Paul Barman and Princess Superstar, whatever their shortcomings, wisely avoid. Dying in Stereo is peppered with yo's and aight's delivered in a giddy yet suspiciously ironic fashion; the falseness is soul-rending. Northern State sound like suburban brats playing with Ghetto Barbies.
It's even more worrying, then, that Dying in Stereo displays no knowledge of hip-hop history whatsoever. Judging from the evidence presented, Northern State base their understanding of the genre entirely on the Beastie Boys. Their collective sound mimics the Beasties' dynamic (the high-voiced one, the low-voiced one and the raspy too-many-Marlboro-Lights one), down to their tendency to rap in the familiar cadences that overstress the last syllable (you know: "I'll rock this party like a de-bu-TANTE!").
It's rare that an album is rendered fully unsalvageable halfway through the first verse of the opening track, but that is precisely what happens on "A Thousand Words", when one of these Long Island lolitas utters, "I'm lean/ I'm mean/ I'm clean/ I'm not 17." (There goes a good excuse; the crew are in their 20s.) Disturbingly, Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, exhibiting distinctly lecherous tendencies in his old age, hailed the track's money line (that one about voting for Gore) as a gem. It ought to be said that most of the glowing critical ink lavished on Northern State squirts from Christgau's pen: Voice coverage aside, it was he who gave the trio's home demo a four-star review in Rolling Stone, setting them firmly on track to a recent deal with Columbia.
Beatwise, the album is bland and fey, with no low-end or hooks to speak of. The third track, "At the Party", distinguishes itself by trying on a sort of Fisher-Price metal riff, then abruptly abandoning it. The lyrical nadir, however, has yet to be reached: Save your projectile vomit for the penultimate song, "All the Same", in which Northern State deign to explain their mission:
"All we can do is try/ To speak for the people who haven't any voices/ And feel for the women who haven't any choices."
The group's bravery is duly noted-- all that pro-life hip-hop's gotta go!-- but the fact that Northern State believe themselves to be in the business of empowerment is unconscionable. Juvenile, simpering, weak, preachy, pointless and accidentally snooty, Dying in Stereo is about as empowering as Legally Blonde 2, and half as clever.
