\\\asher roth week continues: to be young, rapping, and white

Last night I listened to hot 97 and live tweeted a taping of an Asher Roth interview with Peter Rosenburg that got extremely awkward when Rosenburg asked Roth why he doesn't "pound it out" after shows, as in why he hangs out with his boys smoking tree instead of hitting on girls. Then they talked about how white people that like rap hate on other white people that like rap. They really got some angst out on the air. I felt for them. Being famous white males is like totez, wack. There's so much white on white hate in hip-hop. White people need to stick together more is something I've been saying since the beginning of time. Who else said something like that? Grand Wizard Dragon.... (Oh, forget it.) After complaining about how difficult it is to be white in the hip-hop game, Rosenburg played 2 Chester French songs and 3 Eminem songs. (I'm not joking.) One of them was that "i am whatever you say i am" song from like 6 years ago that's filled with more angst. Then Rosenburg bigged up the show he's presenting at the Gramercy Theatre: Peter Rosenburg Presents Chester French and Asher Roth. This show can only be rivaled by the Columbia University show with Vampire Weekend and Talib Kweli.

Last week there was a great article on the idiot in the New York Times and now I'm going to share some of my favorite lines from that article with you:

"I have to embrace this role of ‘Asher Roth’ now," he said the following morning in the hotel’s empty restaurant, wearing the same white T-shirt and grayish jeans as the night before and straining a bit after just a few hours’ sleep. "If I continue to behave this way, sure, people are going to love me, but I’m going to be run down into the ground."
(What is the role of Asher Roth? 'I have to embrace this role of playing video games?' 'I have to embrace this role of being plucked out of my mediocre college by a music executive that wanted to be a rapper but couldn't and will now vicariously live through me while using his connections to get people like Luda to pretend they give a shit about me and respect me on youtube videos?' 'I have to embrace this god awful role of smoking tons of pot?' I mean, Andrew W.K. - that dudes got a tough role to embrace. He wrote like 90 songs about partying. And then 30 more that weren't good.)

"I have no real gimmick," he said, shrugging.
(Nope, no gimmick here.)

"Raised by a father who is the executive director of a design firm and an herbalist-astrologer-yoga-teacher mother, he’s unfailingly affable, with a bit of Ferris Bueller-style naughtiness thrown in."
(Did I really need another reason to hate on dude. HERBALIST-ASTROLOGER-YOGA-TEACHER... aka my favorite people in the world.)

"he would walk around his family’s home in Morrisville, Pa. — a racially mixed town of about 10,000 a half-hour northeast of Philadelphia — and rap for long stretches of time, a practice his father took to calling 'rap Tourette’s.'"
(This is his executive director father likening his passion for hip-hop to a neuropsychiatric disorder.)

"Culturally, Em was almost a black guy. My background is more stereotypically white."
(Not even gonna...)

"Listen more closely, and there are deeper differences at play: the working class versus the middle class, the abandoned versus the nurtured, the outsider versus the assimilated."
(I have a lingering suspicion that all three of these things are not at play upon listening closely. In fact, I bet NONE of these three things are at play upon listening closely.)

"I’m naïve in my thinking in the sense of race," he said. "I have this whole wishful-thinking way about me."
(You said it, dog)

"He practices yoga. Many around Mr. Roth describe him as a hippie."

(Again, not even gonna...)

"I’d be like, I’m going to go over here with my college kids and just be who I am. But hip-hop is now that too, and we have to come to terms with the fact that hip-hop is so Morrisville, P-A, now."
(I actually do not have to come terms with the fact that hip-hop is so Morrisville, P-A, now. If I did actually have to do that, I'd go out samurai style.)

I've talked about Asher's "naive thinking in the sense of race" and the gem he dropped on the A Millie Remix he did [[["you know the world's gone mad/ when blacks wear plaid"]]] before but Leif stopped by our myspace with a present and an excuse to bring it up again:

EVERYONE: THIS PHOTO IS INDICATIVE OF THE WORLD GOING MAD.