At The Tippler, a New York City bar located behind an inconspicuous door under the Chelsea Market, a patron described as a Saudi billionaire spent $60,000 on a special, limited production, extra-large bottle of Armand de Brignac (aka Ace of Spades) champagne. (A standard size, retail bottle of Armand de Brignac Brut Gold sells for about $350, but it may be found for about $250). While this purchase was the most expensive bottle of champagne ever sold by the club, and perhaps the most expensive sold in New York City, the expenditure pales in comparison with a double Nebuchadnezzar or Melchizedek (30 liters) bottle of Midas Armand de Brignac champagne that a “financier” bought for 125,000 British pounds in the Playground nightclub located at the Liverpool Hilton Hotel. The “financier’s” total bar bill for the evening was 204,000 British pounds including an 18,500 British pound service charge. The “financier” reportedly also bought forty standard bottles of Armand de Brignac for single women that were in the bar.

The Melchizedek, “gold-plated” bottle weighted about one hundred pounds, and it had to be carried to the “financier” by two servers. The “financier” has been described as being in his twenties, perhaps a foreign exchange trader. The club DJ played dramatic, iconic music from the science fiction film 2001, A Space Odyssey as the bottle moved to the table. After the cork was popped, glasses of champagne were distributed to everyone that was in the VIP area of the club. People in the room were described as having a great time as they toasted the “financier.” One report noted that although the financier arrived with about ten of his friends, after the cork was popped, the party attracted a large number of beautiful women.

Was his status affirmed? Did this elicit envy?  Did some feel less worthy? The young “financier” out conspicuously and invidiously spent U. S. gambler and businessman Don Johnson who ran up a tab of about 168,000 British pounds in June of 2011 at the One4One nightclub in London’s Park Lane. Johnson is frequently referred to as the ‘champagne king” because of his extravagant purchases of champagne. Johnson’s splash included paying 120,000 British pounds for a 30-litre Midas bottle of Armand de Brignac.

The Cattier family’s Armand de Brignac is an artisanal champagne which has been recognized as one of the best in the world. It is a popular choice of the rich and famous. Its penetration into popular culture was aided by images of a gold finished bottle appearing in a 2006 music video by rap artist Jay-Z, Show Me What You Got, a song from his album Kingdom Come. The images in it begin with Jay-Z sitting in an exotic fast car with racer Dale Earnhardt, Jr. challenging race car driver Danica Patrick sitting in another dream machine to show him what she’s got. The rest of the video includes: a race on the winding roads of Monaco and Monte Carlo, glamorous women on high performance speed boats, and a silver carrying case being opened by Jay-Z and offered to a beautiful opponent at a card table at what appears to be Le Casino Royal to reveal a shiny, gold bottle of Armand de Brignac. These are fantasy scenes that some people dream about.  In my view, the images at the casino are much more tantalizing than the casino actually is. The story of the marketing breakthrough featuring Jay-Z appeared in the Wall Street Journal. 

What Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption” and “invidious consumption” work because many of us are voyeurs. We enjoy peering into the lavish lives of the rich and famous, and complain about their outrageous behaviors. Some spend lavishly to reaffirm a superior social status. Others spend lavishly to make others feel envy, and perhaps diminish the self-worth of some people. And yes, perhaps some just enjoy their flamboyant consumption practices.

Yet, if all we did was focus on the conspicuous and invidious consumption aspects which make many of us uneasy, we would miss out on the economic impacts, and fascinating aspects of artisanal champagne making. The economics at the point of consumption are obvious. Numerous people work in the distribution of the product and at the club where they derive their livelihoods. Hopefully, some of the staff at the club benefited from the 18,540.80 British pounds service charge on the Playground bill. I’m not sure what the gratuity was. The patrons at the Playground helped the club cover its expenses and pay its taxes. The VAT tax included in the bill appears to be 30,901.33 British pounds. Many profited.

And then there is the artisanal craft: Armand de Brignac Brut Gold (aka Ace of Spades) champagne is one of the cuvées of the Cattier family which has owned vineyards in the Champagne village of Chigay Les Roses since 1763. Maison Cattier house is independently owned and operated by family members. It began making its own champagne in 1918, and acquired Clos du Moulin in 1951. Maison Cattier sells about a million bottles of a variety of well-regarded cuvées and a champagne based spirit in seventy countries. Armand de Brignac, its most prestigious champagne, is crafted in relatively small quantities each year. Jean-Jacques Cattier is the resident connoisseur and oenologist who oversees the creation of Armand de Brignac supported by eight others. His son Alexandre Cattier is also an oenologist and helps run the business. The name of the champagne has its origins in the 1950’s. It was inspired by a character (de Brignac) in a novel that Jean-Jacques Cattier’s mother was reading at the time. Cattier entered into a brand marketing partnership arrangement in 2006 with New York importer and distributor Brett Berish’s Sovereign Brands. The distinctive Armand de Brignac bottle has a unique shape, is custom plated and polished to achieve its unique gold appearance. It is identified with handcrafted and stamped pewter labels one of which features a graphic representation of an ace of spades. The design was inspired by fashion designer André Courrèges. The Arabesque ace of spades symbol is part of the French monarchy’s insignia. Each standard bottle is placed in a black lacquered wood gift box lined with velvet and fitted with a metallic authentication plate. Jean-Jacques Cattier believes that three words capture the essence of Armand de Brignac: exclusivity, tradition and excellence.

Pinot Meunier, Pinot Noir, and Chardonnay grapes are carefully selected from vineyards in three of France’s most famous terroirs of the Marne department in the Champagne region, including Montagne de Reims, Vallée de la Marne and Côte de Blancs. During a few weeks generally in late September of early October, premier and grand crux grapes are selected from the best villages and picked by hand. The juice is slowly extracted using a high quality, traditional hand press. The first fermentation with yeast converts the natural sugars in the juice into alcohol and wine. Only a fraction of the first pressing is used to make the multi-variety blend. For each bottling, three distinct vintages from outstanding harvest years are blended, and fermented a second time in each bottle. The blend is hand bottled and sealed for aging on traditional wooden racks in chalk cellars that are 30 meters deep. This allows it to age at an evenly cool temperature.  Each bottle is aged slightly inclined neck down for at least three years. Near the end of the aging process, each bottle is riddled, slightly shaken and turned each day for a month. Afterwards, the sediment is disgorged. Then, a special aged liqueur de dosage made from reserve wine and a very small amount of sugar is added. Each bottle is corked, sealed and dressed with its distinctive labels by hand.  The bottles are rested for at least six more months. Each bottle contains about 250 million bubbles. The largest sizes such as the Midas bottles are special, limited productions. Handling them is extremely difficult due to the pressure from the champagne. Significant advances in glass making had to be developed before the 30 liter bottle could be offered.

Conspicuous and invidious consumption, yes, but there is also the craftsmanship, which, as Richard Sennett has explored, is an important social good.  I admire the artisans that are involved throughout the entire champagne making process. Only a few of the special editions of the Midas Armand de Brignac Brut Gold are associated with the conspicuous and invidious consumption.  Many more of the standard sized bottles, less extravagant but still expensive bottles are consumed by a broader public. I’ve never sampled Armand de Brignac, but I admit that it might be nice to sample a glass.

Eminem’s rise from the rubble is well known. A shy white boy from East Detroit, Eminem was trailer park trash raised by a single mother who was often too high to mother. He regularly changed schools, repeated the ninth grade three times and was constantly bullied. By retreating inward — he read the dictionary and riffed rhymes at the floor — Marshal Mathers (M&M) found his way around ridicule and attack.

Like most rappers, words were Eminem’s weapon and escape. Unlike most rappers, however, Eminem is white. He stands out like a sore thumb. The lyrics that express his deep sense of isolation and vulnerability otherwise absent from rap are twice born — first, he uses rap to talk about growing up “white trash, broke and always poor” and second, he is a white dude in a nearly all black art form, and he believes he is isolated, rejected and often singled out because of the color of his skin.

Eminem does boast but what he brags about having, and having in spades, is unbeatable talent. His linguistic prowess is undeniable, but what separates him is not really his skill — I am not here to say who the best rapper is, though most claim the title — it is what he uses his skill to express: anxiety, timidity, envy and rage. When Eminem digresses on the many shades of depression, he extends rap’s emotional range beyond its hyper-macho comfort zone.

On the debut album 8 Mile, in “Lose Yourself,” Eminem says he cannot:

Stay in one spot, another day of monotony

Has gotten to me, to the point I’m like a snail I’ve got

To formulate a plot, or end up in jail or shot

Success is my only motherfuckin’option, failure’s not

Mom I love you, but this trailer’s got to go

I cannot grow old in Salem’s Lot

So here I go it’s my shot, feet fail me not

This may be the only opportunity that I got

The stanzas stack tricky syncopations, bury rhymes mid-sentence and trade on illusions of life outside of “Salem’s Lot.” But the young punk trapped in a dead-end life agonizes over his cowardice — he fears undermining self sabotage (feet fail me not) and rues that this may be it, his only shot.

The writing is airtight. Even the seeming throw-away “motherfuckin’” has meaning.  Eminem is terrified of repeating his mother’s blighted fate.

All three Eminem songs on the first album are about performance anxiety (listen to “Run Rabbit Run” with lyrics below). He says he is “nervous,” and, continuing to speak of himself in the third person, describes his feelings as follows “his arms are heavy,” and his “palms are sweaty” and reassures himself “I got all the ingredients/ all I need is the courage.” Ultimately, he triumphs and his talent rips and reigns.

Eminem is white trash. His whiteness alienates him. He writes: “But I’m still white, sometimes I just hate life/ Somethin ain’t right, hit the brake lights.” Being white is a source of despair, or hating life, and makes him feel off, like something is not right.

On The Slim Shady LP, race is introduced in the title with Slim Shady, Eminem’s nickname. Slim refers to his frame and shady to his color. The resonance of the word shady goes beyond the obvious double entendre into the limbo Eminem feels because shady, in so far as it connotes neither white nor black, conjures up a racial purgatory. Eminem raps a charged anomie:

Some people only see that I’m white, ignoring skill

Cause I stand out like a green hat with a orange bill

But I don’t get pissed, y’all don’t see through the mist

How the fuck can I be white

I don’t even exist

I get a clean shave, bathe, go to a rave

Die from an overdose and dig myself up out of my grave

My middle finger won’t go down, how do I wave?

And this is how I’m supposed to teach kids how to behave?

Initially, Eminem’s verbal agility went unnoticed. His color made him a target, a sitting duck. Not at home in his skin — “How the fuck can I be white” he feels invisible, non-existent. Anger becomes indifference, and finally he proves resilient: “dig(ging) myself out of my grave.”

Eminem feels isolated, and I take this very seriously, but it would be unfair of me not to note that, once his skill was noted, major talents threw their weight behind him, from Jay Z to 50 Cent. Throughout his battle with drugs, black rappers have been there to help him, to the extent that anyone can help someone who wrestles with addiction. And, Eminem has collaborated with most major rap artists and gets many of his beats from his creative partner Dr Dre.

The Slim Shady LP is nearly all rage, with songs about robbery, murder and rape. In his perversion of the outlaw love story “Bonnie and Clyde 97,” Eminem riffs about murdering his wife and dumping her body. He flees the law with his daughter, who he shields from the crime as he details it in, by turns, deadpan and lavish rhyme. Fantasies this dark usually remain buried, scenting a way out of the corners of our consciousness in our dreams. For Eminem, however, dreams this dark — he wrote the song when he was angry with his wife — are the stuff of art.

Murderous rage shares the stage with suicidal desire. Consider the opening lines of the first tune: “since age 12, I felt like I was someone else because I hung my original self from the top bunk with a belt.” In his dance number with the crassly loaded title “Cum on Everybody” (get down tonight), he sings “I tried suicide once and I’ll try it again/that’s why I always write songs where I die in the end” — and then the suicidal urge flips to indifference “but I don’t give a fuck/like my middle finger was stuck” and returns to suicide later in the song, “if you ever see a video for this shit/ I’ll probably be dressed up like a mummy with my wrists slit.” And he confesses he wants “to murder all the rich rappers that I’m jealous of.” With breathless rhymes, Eminem’s songs oscillate between tales of murder and imaginings of suicide.

The mobile home was no home. Eminem was white trash, tossed out and left to rot. He articulates his feelings of apathy, rejection and being stuck:

I’m tired of jobs startin off at five fifty an hour

then this boss wonders why I’m smartin off

I’m tired of being fired everytime I fart and cough

Tired of having to work as a gas station clerk

for this jerk breathing down my neck driving me bezerk

I’m tired of using plastic silverware

Tired of working in Building Square

Tired of not being a millionaire….

The repetition of the word tired mimics tedium. The first line alone has five short is — in fact, the entire stanza has several short is of the first person singular — most lines, grouped in twos or threes, house several internal rhymes — startin and smartin or off and cough— or work, clerk, jerk, beserk. Eminem’s scabby reality is figured metonymically. Using plastic silverware, working at Builder’s Square and working as a gas station clerk serve as glib verbal shorthand for lower-middle class drudgery.

We know how the story ends. Eminem scribbled and spit his way out of hell. Yet he never seemed less lonely. He prayed “god understand,” rapped his rage and finally tried to fill or kill the void with enough drugs to land him in the hospital once and re-hab twice.

His second act, which we treat in the next post, opens like the first. With a Phoenix-like rise from the ashes, Eminem dropped Relapse, wherein he raps about his not very macho cry for help and his painful struggle for sobriety. Relapse returns us to (it relapses) the heart of the skittish and skinny misfit.

In The Atlantic, several prominent music critics reviewed “Watch the Throne,” the fabulous collaboration between Kanye West and Jay Z. Again, critics are angry about the subject matter. The song “That’s My Bitch” met with this reaction — it is the only song where Jay sings about B, and in the song, he does not adequately sing the praises of monogamy. First, he does more than sing about B (his wife, Beyoncé Knowles) — he enters her, as a black woman, into the pantheon of women men dream about (like Marilyn Monroe) and second, yes, he is “crass” and “protective” because he is saying, with cheek and guile, “that’s my girl.”

A host of questions ensue. Do we really associate musical maturity with our image of a monogamous family man? Do we ask our artists to promote social constraints, or do we want our art to articulate fantasy and felt experience? Does the egregiously simple image of maturity= monogamy play on a host of stereotypes about black men — not being monogamous, leaving their families, etc. and even if these stereotypes are partially true — is it the place of music and its’ critics to address them?

Jay Z has assumed enormous social responsibility. He openly discusses his early years dealing crack, cautioning young people not to do it by saying “you will end up in jail or dead.” He is philanthropic. Must we ask that his music, his fantasy, his creativity — his art — be as pedestrian and unambiguous as his politics?

Here is another loopy bit from the monogamy-happy review — another reviewer decided that the rapper in a steady marriage (Jay) sounded happier than the rapper who has yet to wed (Kanye). Huh? I have gone back repeatedly in search of this happiness (because the reviewer does not ground the comment) and for the life of me I cannot figure out what the hell she means — they both sound happy — at the top of their games.

***

Two years ago, young Jeezy and Jay sang a euphoric song about Obama, wherein they brag about their diamonds and lambos. Another critic for The Atlantic was offended by their lack of sensitivity to the recession. Again, an odd content based criticism that seems designed to avoid the song as a song. What is left out of the review is central to the song’s power and political relevance. The song goes from bling to racially charged politics and celebratory verse:

My president is black, in fact, he’s half white, so even in a racist mind, he’s half right, if you have a racist mind, you be light, my president is black, but is  house is all WHITE, Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk, Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could run, Barack Obama ran so all the children could fly, So Ima spread my wings and you can meet me in the sky.

The opening is noise — or boys being boys — then the song takes off, veering into rap’s real home, the tortured story of race in America.

***

Rap is forever political.

Back to Reagan’s America.  Rodney King was mercilessly beaten beyond repair by white cops. The cops walked and riots ensued — blacks destroyed their own neighborhood in fits of impotent rage as ghetto birds (helicopters) hovered above the scene. N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police” was an artistic retort to the King beating — in the tune, the tables are turned and the rappers restage the courtroom drama with themselves in charge. The real issue — racist cops and racial profiling — are put on trial.

The album dropped in 1988 — and from Reagan to Bush and early Clinton, little changed. In 1995, OJ was acquitted.  Whites were horrified and blacks were thrilled. Finally, a black man got away with murder. The reaction to OJ’s acquittal reveals that, in 1995, race relations were as tense as ever and blacks still felt held under the spell of the Rodney King travesty.

During the 80s and 90s, racial profiling on the highways was out of control. Blacks coined the phrase “driving while black” to nab the violation they routinely committed. Jay’s “99 Problems and the Bitch Ain’t One” is a complex tale wherein some black guys are driving on the highway (with drugs in the car, locked in the glove compartment and the trunk) and the cops pull them over for no reason, or “doing 55 in a 54” — an absurdity. As the story unfolds, the guys running drugs assert their rights and the cops call the canine unit and while waiting for the “bitches” to come, the cops get another call so they have to release the guys running drugs. Both sides are in the wrong, but we are not on the side of the police; we are on the side of the guys being harassed.

L’il Wayne spins a tawdry melody of power and its reversal, wherein a female cop pulls him over but wants him to “fuck the police.” (The music video is below.) His allusion to N.W.A. is completed in the lyrics with a shout-out to Rodney King. He writes of the lady cop: ” I make her wear nothing but handcuffs & heels/ And I beat it like a cop/ Rodney King baby yeah I beat it like a cop…” — it is a sexy play on fucking power, and before we see it as too simple, the video features Wayne tied up, in a submissive position while the officer does her thing — she, too, beats it like a cop.

We are in the here and now and the issue of police brutality and racial profiling are alive and kicking. “Watch the Throne” has a song about black on black murder “Murder to Excellence” with lyrics that decry “314 soldiers dies in Iraq; 509 died in Chicago,” and also celebrates blackness: “it is all black, I love us.”   The tune “Who Gon Stop Me” reaches back into imagery of whippings (“black strap, you know what that is for”….). Frank Ocean opens “Made in America” with a lush melody that puts rappers in the context of Martin and Malcom. The rap punctuating Ocean’s ribbony voice addresses coming up, dealing, bad manners learned on the streets and driving hummers.

It makes no sense to discuss songs about police brutality as mature or immature. I cannot see how addressing black on black murder is something an artist grows into or out of — we won’t say anything real if we attack the question of maturity from this angle.

Some rappers talk more about bitches than others but none of the rappers who are winning Grammys have failed to grow. The question of maturity, it seems, is radically complex because we need to start with an interrogation of what we mean by maturity.

Let’s end with an example. Kanye went to New Orleans with other black musicians. On live TV he went off-script — typical Kanye — and said “Bush does not care about black people.” If this line were in his music, would we call it immature? (It more or less is when he sings about making his son Republican so everyone will know “that he love white people.”) And, outside of his music, in the realm of politics, was it immature or was it mature? Is it childlike or is it adult to call a racist a racist?

Rap began — Chuck D nailed it — as news from the streets. Rap riffed ghetto life, syncopated in hard rhymes and dense metaphor the raw reality of the ghetto. In Ronald Reagan’s America, blacks in the ghettos from Harlem to Bed Stuy to South Central formed what George Bataille called the heterogeneous element of society — or the unassimable byproduct of a culture, born of that culture, upon which the culture rests. In plain English, rap was the art of the dispossessed, and as the art of the dispossessed, it tells us the truth of the trickle-down economic era from the mouths of those who were held far beneath the place where the trickle dried up.

Rap began as a linguistic pissing contest — and it has been always more than news. It is also poetry, entertainment and resistance. As news, it is largely unwelcome. As poetry, it is mad rich and ripping angry. As entertainment, the joke is always right-on the money, and as resistance, it is unbeatable because, instead of setting the ghetto on fire, it creates from the ashes — the shit and the garbage — the nothing, going nowhere despair of the reviled and the forgotten.

Much has been made of rap then and rap now. Rap, the argument goes, has been mainstreamed, even atomized. In this process, it has lost its political edge and anger. At the same time, critics ask rappers to grow up, to mature, to stop singing about bitches and hoes. Unsurprisingly, these tendencies contradict each other — and instead of choosing between the two lines of thinking, we note that the paradoxical attitude is a way of still not knowing quite what to do with rap.

Consider two themes that still dominate rap — swagger (and all that comes with it) and brutality. Rap still deals in race and racism, and, I believe, its critical reception is still racist. Mainstream reviews tend to focus on the content (the lyrics) and to turn on the implied assumption that art is not the place for unapologetic black rage.

From the outset, critics railed against rap’s filthy fury. In 1990, 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty as They Wanna Be became the first album to be deemed legally obscene. Critics took issue with what they called “self-assertion” and “anger” and suggested that this music that “boiled up” from the streets should be sent back to from where it came, left to speak to itself. Defenders of rap quickly spat back — anger and self-assertion are not bad things. And the moral outrage directed at rap would be better fired at the institutions and attitudes that create the conditions of the ghetto in the first place. And there was praise, even pure admiration, for some of rap’s most talented musicians. A critic from Rolling Stone described Biggie Smalls’s gifts thus: “he paints a sonic picture so vibrant that you’re transported right to the scene.”

Both sides were right. Early rap (most of Biggie’s tunes, even) bragged about banging bitches and hoes — and if rape was not glorified, the question of consent seemed irrelevant next to the pleasure celebrated.  But the vivid beat hypnotized.

Two things matter here. First, rap is not more misogynistic than a lot of rock and roll. Before you protest, go back and listen to the Rolling Stones’ “Stray Cat Blues” — remember she is 15, the issue of consent is neither here nor there, and the pleasure is lauded and flaunted — all to a beat that we move with, that we dig. Second, as Jay Z observed, rap has been a young man’s game and the challenge now is to mature it, to fit the music and the lyrics to life after 40. I believe rappers have done that — but they still sound angry and we don’t know how to square the anger with the maturity. Maturity later in another post, for now we turn to rap as art.

Rap is art and art qua does not reduce to the reality it represents. The assertion that “rap music is rape music” should be denied thus:  rap is music; it is sounds and words; it is not and cannot be rape. Even if rappers freestyle about rape, they are not raping. Once we lose this distinction, we extinguish art, lock up fantasy and kill the imagination. The irony cannot be overstated — we have guys from the streets who could have turned to real rape, drugs, dealing (and yes, some dealt and do plenty of drugs) — guys that could have gone criminal, becoming real gangstas and instead they used their vicious and fertile imaginations to crawl out from under the desert dry thug life.

The criticism of an affectation becomes a stand-in for thinking through the complicated reality presented in the music and how that reality relates to the music. Do critics really want to dictate musical content?   Are there places art should not go? And when rappers fantasize about their sexual prowess and insatiable women, remember early rap is the fantasy of the powerless and even when the musicians blew up, they carry the legacy of the ghetto in their bones and in their rhymes. Is the criticism “grow up” a real response or a gross oversimplification?

And consider real maturation: note something about the rap world that has not been noted. In less than one generation rap went from being a murderous game to a genre of music. This is an incredible shift — in response to the turf wars that killed Biggie and Tupac, Sean Combs responded by saying into a microphone for the world to hear, there is enough room for everyone. The killing stopped — to refuse to return like with like is the hallmark of (much more than) maturity. It’s a model for change (I hesitate to use the word revolution) — a model for the creation of something truly new.