Blue Scholars recently issued a declaration rejecting Seattle hiphop’s current fascination with all things outer space and reaffirming the duo of MC Geologic and DJ Sabzi’s commitment to reality. The declaration came in the form of an odd tune called “Paul Valéry.” It’s odd because its namesake, Valéry, has no currency in what Large Professor called “the hiphop nation.” Machiavelli? He is in the house. Socrates? He is in the house. Shakespeare? He has been in the house for sure. But an almost forgotten figure of French modernism? What is he doing in the house? He is in the house for his famous quote “The future isn’t what it used to be,” which Blue Scholars have made their salvo for an attack on one of the signature features of the new and current wave of local hiphop—a wave that recently celebrated its arrival at the Crocodile with the Go! Machine festival. That feature is what the British/Nigerian critic Kodwo Eshun calls “sonic fiction”—the musical form of science fiction.
“Rejecting today’s ubiquitous emphasis on black sound’s necessary ethical allegiance to the street,” writes Eshun, “[sonic fiction] opens up… the secret life of forms, the discontinuum of AfroDiasporic Futurism… It moves through the explosive forces which technology ignites in us, the temporal architecture of inner space, audiosocial space…” In short, sonic fiction is not about reality, but about robots, space travel, space ships, galaxies, moon bases, aliens, alien abduction, and laser beams (“…is so hot”). This kind of fantastic stuff is currently the hot stuff for a number of hiphop crews in our town. It’s all over the music of THEESatisfaction (“Moonday School [Intergalactic Church]”), Helladope (Return to Planet Rock), Spaceman (“Starship”), and Khingz (From Slaveships to Spaceships).
Blue Scholars, the leaders of a school of hiphop that emerged in 2005 and the reigning kings of the underground (they recently sold out two shows and added a third at the Showbox at the Market), have decided enough is enough—it’s time to leave the futuristic planet rock and get back down to Earth on the third rock from the sun: “Cancel your plans to Uranus, you asshole/And come back to Earth where the rest of us work.” Now, those are fighting words, and they are by no means ambiguous. Much in the way Gil Scot-Heron denounced NASA and the space race with his 1970 poem “Whitey on the Moon” (“I can’t pay no doctor bill/But whitey’s on the moon”), Geo is directly denouncing a school of rappers whose heads are in the stars. “Do you really want to ride/Shotgun in my spaceship/On this pimped-out journey through the sky… Hope you ain’t afraid of heights… on this interplanetary flight,” rap THEESatisfaction on Helladope’s super funky (and super pleasurable) “Cosmic Voyage.” These are the kind of journeys Blue Scholars want to cancel.
But before I closely examine the meaning and implication of “Paul Valéry,” I want to make a clear distinction between the “real-izm” (as DJ Le Gooster called it) Blue Scholars represent and the kind that Eshun had in mind when he wrote More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction in 1998. Blue Scholars are about the realities of poverty, exploitation, state control, and working-class blues. What Eshun had in mind (“keeping it real, representing, staying true to the game”) was about the dangerous streets, tough corners, drive-by shootings, drug dealers, thug niggaz, “crosstown beef,” and “feeling closer to god in a tight situation.” This reality has nothing to do with the more authentic reality of making ends meet, looking for a job, and raising noisy children. However, both Eshun and Blue Scholars reject the street-realism. This is where they meet (“Paul Valéry” also attacks the thug tradition that stems from Tupac—those rappers are “chumps”) and also where they depart—Eshun to the celestial, Blue Scholars to the diurnal.
Blue Scholars’ reputation is for capturing the very ordinariness of oppression. It is not about the 10 rules of crack game but the dull fact of keeping a dumb job, not about bullets flying but the common addiction to booze. Indeed, the duo’s greatest track, “La Botella,” which is on their most important contribution to the canon of local hiphop, The Long March (though released in 2005, that record is still growing on me), perfectly captures the monotony of just boozing at a bar: “And another one, and another one, and another one, and another one.” You just do not get more real than that, and that kind of real has been the duo’s bread and butter.
I and other critics have often marked Blue Scholars’ self-titled 2004 album as the point at which an old form of local hiphop came to an end and a new one began. But I think it’s fair to include in that turning point another album that was also released in 2004, namely the Gift of Gab’s 4th Dimensional Rocketships Going Up. Though Gab is from the Bay Area, this splendid work of sonic fiction was produced in Seattle by Jake One and Vitamin D, two eminent figures in all of the waves that have come our way. One track, Jake One’s “The Ride of Your Life,” is designed to sound like a rocket launching from a NASA base—we hear the fire, the smoke, the ship shooting up the atmosphere, escaping gravity, and entering the weightlessness of space. Another track, Vitamin D’s “Stardust,” takes us from Earth to the deepest and chillest parts of the universe. By 2009, all systems were Go! for Seattle’s space program.
But this new direction was not exactly new to hiphop. Since the early 1980s, space was the place for crews like the Soulsonic Force and Newcleus, and the entire modern hiphop project arguably began as an exploration of deep space in Rakim’s “Follow the Leader” (a track that many, myself included, consider to be the highest achievement in all of hiphop). Rakim took a heady concoction of Islam, Afrocentrism, and ghetto enlightenment to the furthest parts of the universe. “Let’s travel at magnificent speeds around the universe,” rapped Rakim in 1987. “The Earth gets further and further away/Planets as small as balls of clay… Astray into the Milky Way, world’s out of sight/As far as the eye can see, not even a satellite.” This is the kind of space travel that THEESatisfaction and Helladope (the leaders of the now wave) are pushing—not the apolitical, decadent escapism that Blue Scholars reject, but a deliberate reformulation of reality, an alternative language for the experience of the city, lights of the city, and movement about the city.
What Blue Scholars fail to see with “Paul Valéry” is that this form of space travel is still very much about the planet Earth. When Khingz calls himself “the black Han Solo,” he is using a popular culture code to explain or express his urban mode. So the problem Blue Scholars have with space is more a matter of aesthetics than politics. The Beacon Hill Marxists want to hold a clear mirror to reality; the Beacon Hill futurists prefer to hold a distorted (or funny) mirror to the same reality. In one mirror, we see the corporate power of the Columbia Tower; in the other mirror, we see something that looks like the Death Star. It’s the same thing, but different ways of reflecting. 
Vitamin D, Blue Scholars, and Macklemore are Seattle hip-hop’s best! we need more like them!
hella dope sucks, dyme def is lame, they both are space cadets out of touch with REAL LIFE!!!
oh yea… space aged ain’t new, they jacked it from OUTKAST…. ATLiens (1996)
I will never forget watching Bishop-I from Oldominion eat Geologic up at the Bumbershoot freestyle battle of 2001. Those were good times!
oh Charles. LOL
I’m from space
what is this can o wermz
What a timely article, given that there will be a talk about this exact subject at the Pop Conference at EMP next week (http://www.empsfm.org/education/index.as…
Jerome Dotson
Hip-Hop Layerings
Friday, April 16, 2010, 10:45 – 12:45
Abstract:
“”Embrace the Martian”: Hip Hop, Outer Space, and Post-Gangster Subjectivity”
Hip hop in outer space? Step aside Sun Ra and Parliament…today’s MC’s have designs on Mars. Exploring the music of Lil Wayne, Kid Cudi and emerging Houston MC Darian, this paper seeks to understand the significance outer space holds for promoting post-gangster subjectivities in modern hip hop. Rappers become aliens as a way of embracing alterity; they can avoid convention by promoting their oddness.
Lil Wayne kinda reminds me of ET.
I am disgusted when people say to me, “Seattle doesn’t really have a hiphop scene.” Where does this ignorance come from? Here we have two different creative approaches to address the political and social problems that surround us. But! still, some Seattleites disavow the works of Blue Scholars, Helladope, to name a few, as being representative of our city. Own it Seattle, before they actually take off for outer space and leave us with nothing to show.
When Khingz says, “They say, Yes you gon’ die here. I say, No, I’m gon’ fly here,” how is that not powerful and inspirational?
DOT GOV FOR THREE !!!
space age goes back to the funk obsession with space – you can see it in parliament/funkadelic.
“When Khingz calls himself “the black Han Solo,” he is using a popular culture code to explain or express his urban mode…. It’s the same thing, but different ways of reflecting.”
The point is that that this “way of reflecting” is limited and severely compromised from the start. I would like to hear from Mudede just what he thinks can be reflected this way.
so basicaly now their telling white/asian kids how black kids should or should not express themselves….
Let’s not forget Blondie’s ‘Rapture’ (1981), the first rap-influenced single to reach number one on the US Billboard Chart. And what is she mostly rapping about….?
“Go out
to
the parking lot
And you get in your car
and drive real far
And you drive all night
and then you see a light
And it comes right down
and lands on the ground
And out
comes
the man from Mars
And you try to run
but he’s got a gun
And he shoots you dead
and he eats your head
then you’re in the man from Mars
You go out at night
eatin’ cars
You eat Cadillacs
Lincolns too
Mercuries and Subaru
And you don’t stop…”
U guys for real? U wanna diss on part of one of the illest crews in the 206? And these privy hip hop heavyweights who wanna start something even though I know that they’re working for peanuts? Want war? Its on!
positive vibrations sent out to this thread. it ends here.
peace.
Damn, I thought Blue Scholars were friends with all of these emcee’s they’re taking shots at. Are y’all mad cause your time has came & went? Y’all were SEMI-good in 2004!!!
lets be clear. NO where on here does geo or sabz say they are taking shots at us. That is mudede’s interpretation. Media out lets in Seattle have a strange tendency to attempt to place different movements in our city’s hip hop scene against each other. They did it with massline and sport n life. than mass line and dime def. and now its massline and the whole next crop of cats. Also No one is under any obligation to like ho we decide to get down. None of us need or look for blue scholar approval of our music. and very few of you give them yours.instead of making this into a beef situation lets recognize it for what it is. A journalist opinion of a song that he wrote up probably with out even consulting the people who made it. Also look at it this way. NO one in they’re right or wrong mind would ever diss space, dyme def, cloud nice collective, thee sat and me in one song (except hans millionaire whose name doesn’t even sound like real life) that’s suicide. Lets not let our scene kill its self over little innuendos.
“Getting.” The sampled phrase is “Getting closer to God in a tight situation.” Not that it matters in the whole scheme of things, but if you’re going to act like you know everything, you should get the quotes right.
What was your goal in writing this article? It seems like another article about Charles Mudede.
The author does get the function of space/utopian imagery correct: “this form of space travel is still very much about the planet Earth.” So while acknowledging the enormous potential of this genre to critique and reflect imperfect conditions in our own everyday lives, Mudede falls short in his attempt to situation Geo and Sabzi against the space-hop movement. Perhaps it would have been beneficial to consult the Blue Scholars’ own commentary on the Paul Valery track as it was released.
if u trace the lineage, all these artists and groups bit off the flow of an obscure early 90’s rapper Me Phi Me
To the author of this piece. You failed to do your research on this topic. There is extensive materials written on this subject within Black culture and you failed to point out that the cosmos serves as a vessel for liberation. Robin Kelley’s “Freedom Dreams” is a good start to understand why Black music took a turn into the stars. Good luck!
Let’s not forget about Specs, Seattle’s Original Space Neighbor!
check out L.A.C.O.S.A on myspace..those guys might be onto something..i saw them in concert opening for 88 keys and kidz in the hall..they kinda mix that mainstream sound with some conscience hip hop..and theyre from seattle
man this shit(article) is lame…all these artists are expressing what they have seen and been through in their lives and this no talent “writer” sounds like he just wants to start some shit. it’s all dope music just listen and chill.
I love helladope and Blue Scholars can fucking suck it. Why on earth would one style of hip-hop in this city feel the need to disparage the other when there is room for both? It’s like the Paramount ragging on 5th Avenue Theater for only playing musicals, or Reggie Watts hating on The Bad Things. The Scholars need to quit acting like they’re everyone’s dad.
@12 FTW. P-Funk was in this before these kids were born. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothership_…