BTW, i’m a big fan of Mr Lil Wayne Weezy’s Ja-fakin’ accent. more!

y’all heard weezy’s Da Drought 3? in a funnily pertinent twist of the ol’ lemon, he flows in a fake jamaican accent over the song in question. i think this provides a nice converse to what you describe, ashe posessing as opposed to ashe sought and hiding.

re: the mims song in all this, i think what jace describes holds true for most southern rap, too. especially (surprise!) houston rap. so many people write off the lyrics as dumb, but there’s so much more to it than that. it sounds (/is?) stupid, but all it takes to understand this effect is to listen to music about running around trying to make money at all hours, while you’re running around town in a place you don’t know with no job, trying to make money at all hours. the fact that we’re talking about different scales/extremes here, and that their prophecies are often self-fulfilling, really illustrate this point. y’know, in the same way that lame-ass emo lyrics actually make that sex-symbol skaterdude a total puss.

definitely some danger there, but not necessarily a loss in magic or identity; rather, a change, perhaps an accretion of meaning, new magic for new interpreters.

i do think benjamin (/ taussig) is rather, er, illuminating in this regard — that is, w/r/t magic, aura, and the “task of translation.”

& i agree about the “need” to do this sort of translating for oneself, long as we maintain some vigilance about the problems and pitfalls and power relations inherent to the enterprise.

thx for the thoughts!

i think staff notation is just another theoretical tool, just like analytical text. for me it’s a language which i understand, and although it has it’s pitfalls, as long as you are aware of them and of the system’s limitations as a whole, it’s efficient and convenient.

i was just trying to make a point that there’s no harm in using different tools and languages in order to get a deeper understanding of something which can appear, on the surface, to defy definition. (from one perspective)

maybe the danger is that by notating or analysing something you appropriate it into a system and culture which is totally alien to it, thereby losing the magic and robbing it of its own identity.

but i hope it would be more the case that you described:

“an act of translation/explication that….despite surface simplicity or, if u will, turdidity–it withstands and bolsters such theoretical tools”

and actually i would have quite a real need to do this!

translations are extremely useful but they never replace the original.

that sort of endeavor sounds to me more akin to the villagevoice analysis, tho it depends on why you’d be involved in such an act of translation/explication & what’s the point: showing what’s amazing/magic about the subject/object in question and how–despite surface simplicity or, if u will, turdidity–it withstands and bolsters such theoretical tools (which offer us another perspective on it), or simply belittling it from “above”?