LEARN CHINESE: THE SEQUEL - MORE ON JIN

Back to Jin for a moment: thanks to everyone who's emailed me responses to my earlier blog entry about Jin. What's strange though is that, in two of the cases, people complained that it seemed petty of me to complain about the sexual imagery in Jin's video considering that such hackneyed displays of flesh and cleavage are practically mandated in the BET Handbook for Video Production. That to me, isn't much of an excuse, let alone explanation. My point and maybe I didn't state this plainly enough, is that Jin's attempt an instigating some kind of fundamental shift in racial perception is done partially at the expense of women.

This of course, is not new. I point it out in Jin's video because the hypocrisy is so fucking apparent, I think it'd be wack NOT to point out that Jin wants to kill off the Chinese take-out boy stereotype but he's still pimping out women as nothing more than tits and ass? Color me contrary but contradictions like that are too glaring to ignore.

In any case, that was the smallest criticism I had in the whole piece and I find it interesting that people commented on that and had nothing at all to say about the rest of my post, namely about how Jin's attempt to thuggitize Chinatown needs to be problematized.

And in case it's not clear (and it's not), I do do hope Jin blows up. His success is theorized to be the rising tide that'd lift all the other boats of Asian American rappers out there trying to get a foot in the door. But shit, as an Asian dood myself, it's sort of hard NOT to want to comment on Jin. If you can't respect that your whole perspective is wack.

By the way, the voice behind Dieselnation pointed out that I failed to actually give an opinion about the song itself though really, I think that's a little besides the point. "Learn Chinese" could be dumb wack (which it isn't) and the video could still be fascinating. Likewise, the song could be off-the-meter hot (which it isn't) and that still doesn't make a huge difference in how I'd approach talking about the Jin-man. For the record, Jin was right: he's not Eminem, he's not Jigga-man, especially when it comes to flow and lyrical complexity. I'm not mad at 'Clef's beat, though in this day and age, do we really need to hear yet another use of James Brown's "Blind Man Can See It"? I mean, Lord Finesse and Das Efx already killed that sample ten years back...