{"id":159969,"date":"2022-06-02T16:44:05","date_gmt":"2022-06-02T20:44:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=159969"},"modified":"2022-06-08T15:11:05","modified_gmt":"2022-06-08T19:11:05","slug":"on-de-la-soul-and-elif-batuman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/06\/02\/on-de-la-soul-and-elif-batuman\/","title":{"rendered":"On De La Soul and Elif Batuman"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

A still from De La Soul\u2019<\/span>s music video<\/a> for \u201c<\/span>Stakes is High.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

I wanted to recommend a different song this week, but it seemed like every news story, headline, and push notification I encountered kept nudging my consciousness into some area within my brain that contains lyrics about firearms, some mental storage locker I rarely open: \u201cI gets down like brothers are found ducking from bullets \/ Gun control means using both hands in my land, where it\u2019s all about the cautious living.\u201d Kelvin Mercer, aka Posdnuos, rapped those lines on De La Soul\u2019s 1996 single <\/span>\u201cStakes Is High.\u201d<\/span><\/a> The eponymous album, <\/span>Stakes Is High,<\/span><\/i> was a kind of rebuke against the first glimmers of hip-hop\u2019s big money \u201cshiny suit\u201d era and the hackneyed materialism and narrative clich\u00e9s that came to be associated with it. Posdnuos and his partners Dave \u201cTrugoy the Dove\u201d Jolicoeur and Vincent \u201cMaseo\u201d Mason, were tired of mafioso rap, \u201cvideo vixens,\u201d weed talk, brags about luxury gear. Dave\u2019s verse, a list of the things that make him unwell, cleverly flips what it means to be \u201cill\u201d in the hip-hop sense:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m sick of bitches shaking asses\u00a0<\/span><\/i>
\nI\u2019m sick of talking about blunts<\/span><\/i>
\nSick of Versace glasses<\/span><\/i>
\nSick of slang<\/span><\/i>
\nSick of half-assed award shows<\/span><\/i>
\nSick of name-brand clothes\u00a0<\/span><\/i>
\nSick of R&B bitches over bullshit tracks\u00a0<\/span><\/i>
\nCocaine and crack which brings sickness to blacks\u00a0<\/span><\/i>
\nSick of swole-head rappers with they sickening raps\u00a0<\/span><\/i>
\nClappers and gats making the whole sick world collapse\u00a0<\/span><\/i>
\nThe facts are getting sick, even sicker perhaps<\/span><\/i>
\nI stick a bush to make a bundle to escape the synapse<\/span><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although Dave\u2019s delivery is fierce, this litany of mid-nineties rap\u2019s most overdone iconographies has a lulling effect; as flashy as it is, the music he calls out in that list is thematically listless, of no real consequence. It\u2019s all about the minutiae of the moment, the micro-timeline of rap stardom. There is no consideration of the future. On this song, De La Soul considers a more expansive timeline: the fate of meteors, the trajectory of bullets, but also the lifelines of children. The <\/span>Stakes is High <\/span><\/i>album cover is a black-and-white photo of a group of kids: the kind of gathering Kathy Fish references in her flash fiction story <\/span>\u201cCollective Nouns for Humans in the Wild\u201d<\/span><\/a> (2017), which has been recirculating after the Uvalde massacre\u2014\u201cHumans in the wild, gathered and feeling good, previously an <\/span>exhilaration<\/span><\/i>, now: <\/span>a target <\/span><\/i>\u2026 A group of schoolchildren is a <\/span>target<\/span><\/i>.\u201d The <\/span>song\u2019s music video<\/span><\/a> illustrates the perplexing apathy of the grown-up world: the trio vacillate between performing the song with brio and hanging out lethargically, letting the external world dictate their energy levels. Except for a mural in the background of one scene and a couple shots of a school bus, there are no images of children in the clip; it features adult angst and malaise.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The video is framed by the group\u2019s appearance as guests on <\/span>The<\/span><\/i> Maury Povich Show<\/span><\/i>. They\u2019re there to discuss how much rap music \u201cdictates real life,\u201d and vice versa, ways \u201cto keep it real.\u201d Shots of Povich posing questions to them on a studio set are intercut with clips in which the men carry out everyday tasks: folding laundry, cutting grass, raking leaves, buffing a car, washing the dishes, falling asleep with a newspaper in hand, playing basketball with friends. American daytime talk shows, especially those that aired in the nineties, often showcased the country\u2019s worst fears, or otherwise the most provocative topics in the national discourse. Rap was one of them, but so was white supremacy and domestic terrorism; <\/span>Stakes Is High<\/span><\/i> was released just fifteen months after the Oklahoma City bombing. By appearing on this faux-episode, De La Soul commented on their public perception while also situating themselves as participants in the spectacle, and as possible consumers of it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This music video presents the kind of melancholy known to those familiar with the daytime TV bloc: court shows, commercials for class-action lawsuits, accident lawyers, and structured settlements. If De La Soul were at home during the daytime in 1996, as this video suggests, they probably watched a lot of Maury. Chronically consuming that programming\u2014much of it about litigation and justice denied\u2014can leave you enervated; in the video, the men appear as though drugged on downers. Their movements are frequently lackadaisical; even as they rap, with urgency, about the destabilizing nature of living in a violent world, they seem out of it. They traipse through a soccer field as Posdnuos relays a harrowing image of suicide: \u201cPeople go through pain and still don\u2019t gain positive contact \/ Just like my main man who got others cleaning up his physical influence \/ His mind got congested, he got the nine and blew it.\u201d At the end of the sequence, Dave claps his feet together. Are we in a musical, or some other space of suspended disbelief (or belief)? A scene in which Dave rides a mechanical bull in Times Square further emphasizes the dissonance between what viewers see and what they hear. Against a J Dilla loop of Ahmad Jamal\u2019s anthemic \u201cSwahililand,\u201d an epic jazz composition marked by escalating conga patter and the drama of a stabbing piano and horn riff, De La Soul play smoothed-out soothsayers, anesthetized by media and life\u2019s recurring brutality. But that\u2019s the point: stakes are high, and many people are higher, or else checked out, like the napping, newspaper-holding Maseo, who is, one can infer, both literally and figuratively tired of the news. How utterly devastating that, in the era of shootings at nail salons, grocery stores, and schools, \u201cGun control means using both hands in my land\u201d is as true as it ever was, wherever in our land you might be.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Niela Orr, contributing editor<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the start of Elif Batuman\u2019s <\/span>Either\/Or<\/a>,<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>the narrator asks a simple question: <\/span>What is \u201cgood\u201d fiction?<\/span><\/i> Selin, a sophomore in college and aspiring writer who has just enrolled in her first-ever philosophy class, spends the book looking for an answer. Although she doesn\u2019t find one, Batuman herself does: if <\/span>Either\/Or<\/span><\/i> itself<\/span> is<\/span><\/i> indeed \u201cgood,\u201d then good fiction, perhaps, is what gives us a new, formally-determined awareness through which to perceive our lives. In this novel\u2014the sequel to her debut, The Idiot\u2014<\/em>Batuman captures life in its shape as a chance encounter. Plot points mingle in surprising ways with Selin\u2019s interiority\u2014her attendance at a literary party leads directly into her thoughts on Kierkegaard\u2019s<\/span>\u00a0Seducer\u2019s Diary<\/span><\/i>; from there, she considers her parents\u2019 failed marriage and the socioeconomic status of her roommates. This sense of randomness is mirrored by the book\u2019s larger arc, which leads us, through instances of supposed happenstance, from one romantic misencounter to the next, in Cambridge, then in Turkey. With a wry wink at the reader, Selin begins the semester by picking up a copy of Kierkegaard\u2019s <\/span>Either\/Or <\/span><\/i>for a course titled merely \u201cChance;\u201d throughout the book, Batuman foregrounds the metafictional nature of a novel which links contingency and craft, life and literature. Selin notes that Balzac once called chance \u201cthe greatest novelist in the world.\u201d In its radically random-seeming structure, <\/span>Either\/Or <\/span><\/i>is a novel so artfully composed that it serves as an answer to the troubling question with which Selin follows her reference to Balzac: \u201cHow was one to be so artful that the end product seemed to be free of art?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Camille Jacobson, business manager<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, we rewatch the music video for \u201cStakes is High\u201d and consider the role of chance in \u201cEither\/Or.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[443,431,68445,10852],"class_list":["post-159969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review","tag-de-la-soul","tag-elif-batuman","tag-gun-violence","tag-kierkegaard"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn De La Soul and Elif Batuman by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"June 2, 2022 \u2013 This week, we rewatch the music video for \u201cStakes is High\u201d and consider the role of chance in \u201cEither\/Or.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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