Departments
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Week of 24 September 1999 |
Vol. III, No. 7 |
Feature
Article
Pappademas' hip-hop criticism a hot commodity
By Eric McHenry
At 22, Alex Pappademas is fast becoming one of the country's most salient music critics. In the second week of September, he made no fewer than three contributions to the Boston Phoenix and had the lead record review in Salon -- an online magazine that regularly turns for its music commentary to such authorities as Greil Marcus.
The writing of those four pieces was more mercifully spaced than their coincident publication suggests, Pappademas says. "That doesn't always happen." Still, it's a lot of copy, particularly given that it's all freelance scribbling Pappademas finds time for in the margins of his professional life. His full-time title is culture editor for the popular Web site student.com, a clearinghouse for news, features, and resources of interest to college students.
Pappademas studied in COM for four years but departed BU a few credits shy of his degree when professional opportunities became plentiful. In October of last year he began writing "Rapture," a weekly column on hip-hop music and culture, for the Phoenix. Having interned for student.com in the summer of '98, he was able to slide comfortably into the culture editor's slot when his predecessor left to become film critic for the San Francisco Examiner.
"It's a balancing act," Pappademas says of his various publishing projects. "It's worked out recently because things have been slow here at student.com, and that's allowed me to do more freelancing. But we just had a big financing deal go through, so things are going to be picking up."
Pappademas' love of bracing hip-hop criticism rivals his enthusiasm for the music itself. He has a particular affinity for writing that "challenges the artists, and sometimes makes fun of them," he says, citing Nelson George and Greg Tate as two of his models. Both wrote about hip-hop for the Village Voice in the 1980s.
"Nelson George was writing about the development of hip-hop as it was happening," says Pappademas. "To me that's much more interesting than any book written about it after the fact. He'd review a new Grandmaster Flash 12-inch record as it hit the streets. He and Tate were the ones who really made hip-hop criticism a viable specialty."
Good music, Pappademas adds, has contributed just as much to the development of his writer's sensibility as any writing. In the late 1980s, he recalls, the Long Island hip-hop trio De La Soul made a break from the tedious posturing of most rap music and blazed a second way. He remembers admiring the group's music for its sarcasm and edge.
"It was like a mix of punk rock and Mad magazine," Pappademas says. "Plus I loved the way it sounded -- the density of it. You had this record that just kept giving up these sounds that you hadn't noticed before -- quirky little samples of Archie Bunker and stuff like that."
With very few modifications, that characterization could apply to Pappademas' writing. His reviews are aggressively literate, occasionally sarcastic, and often dense. He's not afraid to reach for references so obscure or contextually removed from his subject that the piece acquires a free-associative, almost dreamlike quality. Readers of the Sept. 10-16 Phoenix, for example, learned that Christina Aguilera was "more hung up than a Backstreet Boys calendar." Moreover, Rahzel "spits the kind of beats Dallas-bounce maestro Eightball would burp up if he'd swallowed Doug E. Fresh." On the Arsonists' two-star album "As the World Burns," the sounds of "two lunchroom lyricists taking their mystery-meat heartburn out on each other . . . [give] way to a weird waltz-time throwdown with an intro that play[s] Wu-Tang Clan Orientalism as Jim Carrey slapstick." And B.G.'s single " 'Bling Bling'Š is named for the sound of jewels sparkling, which has to be some kind of landmark for visual onomatopoeia."
"I like my writing to reflect what the music sounds like," Pappademas says. "I think that's what good music criticism does.
"Of course," he adds quickly, "that can certainly backfire if you're trying too hard. I think some of the pieces I've written have been too dense, and I've used hip-hop slang too liberally. It does get in the way sometimes. I certainly see my own writing becoming less dense as I be come more confident about my ideas."