Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer - DMX
I listened to DMX’s X Gon’ Give It To Ya something like a hundred times one spring after being struck by the intensity of its beat in a Deadpool trailer. I hungered for more songs like this, and asked a friend if he could recommend anything like it, and he said, “other DMX songs, maybe”. It’s a unique style. After he died of an overdose in 2021, Hanif Abdurraqib, one of my favourite music writers, tweeted: “DMX was also, plainly, a very good rapper. One who was impossible to push around on a beat. So many of those Swizz tracks were almost designed to overpower rappers, and X would take them apart. Tear them down to the foundation.”
I guess I write the above to convince you that I’m sharing this song with sincerely, though part of its appeal is the strange contrast of such a rough voice saying Rudolph, the same way Bob Dylan’s The First Noël appeals to me in part because his gravelly voice challenges my idea of what the song is meant to sound like.
At the same time, I notice I have cultivated a music taste where I like just enough rap to feel I have not been unfairly dismissive (and possibly racist) towards the genre, while not really being conversant with it. My friend Sean made the same observation about his own music taste in response to a tangential remark in an old Joseph Heath post, Absent-mindedness as dominance behaviour:
Pierre Bourdieu used to complain about what he called the “ideology of natural taste” in the domain of aesthetics. People treat their own “taste” as though it were merely a given, a fact about them, or something dictated by the world. And yet this taste just happens to coincide – miraculously! – with their precise class position and status ambitions.
Bourdieu showed up recently on Dynomight, another of my favourite blogs*. Apparently his argument is that taste predicts economic class, and thus learning appropriate tastes is necessary to achieve the (to borrow a real professional-managerial class term) “culture fit” necessary to be hired for upper class jobs. You follow these incentives mostly unconsciously, though occasionally you blunder into a class you don’t know well and feel suddenly uncertain of how you’re supposed to act and what you’re supposed to like.
(I remember once visiting my Nana’s neighbours and feeling I had not been adequately warned; I knew that they owned a grand piano, because they sometimes hosted classical concerts for the local series organised by John, but I hadn’t realized there would be medieval-looking handwoven tapestries on the walls, nor that we’d be served tea in cups edged with gold, and a voice in my head hissed you should not have worn jeans, what are you doing here muddying this antique sofa with your normal clothes through much of a pleasant visit. See also Learning the Elite Class for a blog-post-length vignettes of navigating class anxiety.)
I like that music taste is a less anxious part of my life than it once was. I feel like I’m mostly able to just enjoy things that I enjoy (including DMX doing Rudolph!) but I acknowledge that the things I happen to encounter on my wanderings through the internet and other cultural sources are very socially constrained and very correlated with the class status of my upbringing and adult life.
Trying to be both sincere and self-aware,
- Tessa
* Consider reading Things to argue about over the holidays instead of politics out loud this Christmas break!