At the risk of picking on the esteemed journalists of the New York Times, I’m afraid I may be picking up on the inkling of a disturbing trend: When it comes to hip-hop, reporters at the Grey Lady have been coming across as pretty clueless. In a story today examining the brash style of Michael Steele, the newly-elected chairman of the Republican Party, Adam Nagourney, one of the best political writers in the country, made the egregious error of attributing a quote by Steele as a reference to a song by country artist Toby Keith, when in fact, the line in the Keith song references a 1987 tune by rapper Kool Moe Dee. Nagourney, apparently, got an earful from his audience:
“It’s going to be an honor to spar with him,” he said, before throwing down the gauntlet to Mr. Obama with a quotation from, apparently, an in-your-face late-1980’s rap song by Kool Moe Dee: “How ya like me now?” (Confession: A certain reporter initially suggested that Mr. Steele was invoking the country star Toby Keith, a reference that was convincingly challenged in a barrage of e-mail messages from readers.)
Now, I would not fault Nagourney for this minor slip-up. Certain touchstone phrases of hip-hop get picked up and re-used by artists so much it can be hard to know who initially coined an expression. I thought “How ya like me now” was from a Wu-Tang Clan song whose lyrics and title are not, er, appropriate for this blog. But a much worse error was made by Times Film Critic A.O. Scott in his review of the recent biography of rapper Biggie Smalls, “Notorious.” Scott concludes his review like this:
The film’s tag line could be one of Biggie Smalls’s riddling, irresistible refrains: If you don’t know, now you know.
Now just about anyone with a perfunctory knowledge of hip-hop knows that that line is the “riddling, irresistable” refrain of one of Biggie’s biggest hits, “Juicy.” Though I haven’t seen the film, I’m pretty sure that song is featured prominently, because it’s a kind of autobiography detailing how Biggie became who he was – it’s also probably among the best hip-hop songs ever recorded. From here on out I simply can’t trust the New York Times when it comes to hip-hop. It may not be the biggest problem facing newspapers these days, but I’m not letting them off the hook for it either.