Bobby Digitals, Please Stand Up

In 1998, Wu-Tang member RZA released the first Bobby Digital series of CDs. The main character is a black urban globetrotting gangsta lover.

Via love and sex relationships, hip hop music gets European American and African romance tracks (Slow Grind Italian, Slow Grind French, Slow Grind African, Love Jones) mixed in with the usual hard-hitting tracks that the Wu tribe is known for. As people say in Europe, relationships are the best way to pick up a new language.

About the same time, I took on an international job. It was funny, I often reflect, to find myself in the business lounge at Frankfurt International Airport or Hong Kong, sipping wine, headphoned to RZA As Bobby Digital In Stereo on full tilt and with my fingers meticulously editing XML code that is accessing a financial back-office database. I am dressed like a roller-blader or nutty professor. Suits all around me.

Hip Hop International
During one such trip, I remember running into members of a Maori Hip Hop band. The Maori, for those who don’t know, are the largest indigenous New Zealand tribe. And for every bit of progressive political success with regards to integrating their language and tradition into white society, there are political forces in New Zealand getting wet over stripping it all away. Anyway, the Maori rapper I spoke with was quite enthusiastic, having come back from performing in New York and meeting with globally-aware Wu members.

Unfortunately, some of the loyalty toward the Wu which I witness in Sweden, Hungary and New Zealand, is not burgeoning any longer, stateside. It seems that pop culture elites, whatever that is, and industry execs, can't see value in putting such rappers on a soda or software commercial. I mean, when you go to marketing or MBA programs, its the death of your entrepreneurial skills. You are taught to divide society into 4 or five slices of some analytical pie. That is how big money thinks. What I say to big money is this: "if you getting your skills from a thesis seven years old, your inspiration is old, yo." But that is OK, it gives some opportunity for the rest of us.

As anyone talking to a psychology/sociology/communications/criminology student thinking they got it all figure out, has witnessed, such thinking is boring and suffocating. Similarly, the muli-layered nature of Hip Hop can not be plotted on a bell curve. Nor can the intelligence of individuals, the society that they participate in, and their ever-evolving nature, ever be contained in a single formula. But, business bullshit aside, fans are also to blame. This deserves future analysis on this blog, when I can have a think about how "street credibility" opinions are not always so credible to pay mind time to.

So, for whatever reason, fans, vis-a-vis industry to some extent, stop supporting mind-opening projects and rap experiments. The rappers, it seems, when their minds go as big as great architects (Gaudi), painters (Delacroix), (Siqueiros) or composers (Mozart) need to rely on future awareness and intellect to revisit them. And that is fine and dandy, too.

But these same projects are primed and mature enough to receive voice in sophisticated publications. For example, I have not come across anyone praising RZA for mixing anime/japination cartoon imagery with Blaxploitation film allusions outside of the Internet. Big ups to JR Valery's hip hop discourse on this theme.

It Is Over When You Stop Wanting To Be Understood
Another beautiful act is Domestic Violence, which is also on this album. Notice, I intentionally did not call it a song.

In this track, there is a “fight to end all fights.” The verbal onslaught that comes when a relationship is at the first step of the end stage of the end phase, but still has issues of attachment and expectation.

It is the sort of argument that reminds me of what my friend Zeljko, of Yamamoto Group, once said: It is nice to imagine a calm, peaceful understanding break up, after years of marriage between two reasonable, mature and respectful people. Unfortunately, the final steps of the break-up process never unfold in that way we imagine. I once found myself at the wrong site of a cracked wine bottle, and getting stopped by the boys with a breathilizer on the same night. I had only a few sips of wine and was exiting to save a traumatic experience from being witnessed by the little ones. Not violent, not a drinker nor a drinker-and-driver. But there I was, needing to explain my situation: an American in Central Europe. Shit.

Back to the track. Both man and woman hurl insults about the deepest part of what they hate in each other. Behind it, of course, they are unfurling unexplored terrain within themselves - their true needs, - the part of their lives that they are each responsible for, but not for the other person, for themselves.

To be true to their own image of what they want to have in a relationship. Cut into this diatribe and chaos is a third element, an educated close friend of the pair is on the phone, with the phone off the hook, bearing witness to the mayhem we never show the world outside the home-in-shambles, even after we have experienced it. And he is pleading for healthy calm. But it sounds like he does not want calm for calm's sake. Or peace for the tranquility of the couple. He going for his, ... probably a business need.

If anyone wants to join forces on a project to take Bobby Digital concepts further, please contact me for some ideas.