Reply To: JoCo in the Media
@Craig: I agree and I disagree… I’m annoyed at the writer’s attempt at a point, but I feel like she treats JoCo more fairly than a lot of the other artists, even if there she’s being pretty misleading.
Just to lay out the writer’s argument:
– With so many artists, performers, etc., on the Internet, it’s hard to stand out.
– One way to stand out is to do something that goes viral.
– A lot of people have gone viral by recording ironic covers of popular songs (and specifically, white people covering “urban-radio” music — odd euphemism, that, but maybe that’s the accepted term now?).
I think I’m actually with her up to that point. And it is true that “Baby Got Back” was JoCo’s first viral hit, and in my opinion, it doesn’t even get enough credit for how important it was in helping “Thing a Week” take off. If she’d tried to talk about that, I would’ve agreed with her, but I can see how it would’ve taken too much space / distracted from the focus of the post. But what she wrote does seem to be kind of an attempt to describe the same thing, albeit rather hamfistedly.
If I were a fan of any of the other musicians she mentions (and for the most part I’m unfamiliar), I’d take a lot more offense. I’m not actually going to write up my criticisms because I’m feeling too lazy to treat the racial component of her argument with the proper nuance or whatnot, but I will add that having seen that one video, I think the girl in Karmin seems a lot more likely to be “painfully mugging” not because she doesn’t like rap but because rapping that fast is hard. Or would that be too obvious?