![]() made it to the final four, and even though he was way too thuggish in attitude for me to easily get behind him, he's got a really interesting flow. from Okinawa, R-Shitei from Osaka, and Jag-Me, from northern Honshu. The three guys who stood out to me and my crew were D.D.S. I would probably have done just about the same, considering the stress of the setup, as well as the payoff - a bunch of nice equipment and a check for Y100,000 - something like $12,000. I'm not sure he'll come up with much of an album, but he did win my heart when, completely overcome by his victory, he broke down crying. I was honestly not super hype about the outcome - the winner was Shinpeita, who seems like pretty much a straight battle MC, pretty forceful but not graceful. I had some camera issues, but this should give at least some idea of the pomp and circumstance: Then there were two rounds of judgment - one by audience applause, occasionally measured by an overhead sound meter, and one by a panel of judges, whose picks were again projected on the huge overhead screen, using an NFL-style animation. The MCs then traded rhymes for four rounds of 16 bars each, with mics that descended from the three-story ceiling. Five DJs were lined up along the back of the stage, and at the beginning of each round the MC who had drawn or earned the red side of the stage selected from two or three tracks offered by the various DJs. The competition itself was amazingly rigorous. Each of the MCs was introduced by his own three-minute biographical 'trailer' video, of very polished production, projected on a huge screen behind the elevated stage. The red side was also referred to as the 'senpai' or senior position, one of the many ways that traditional familial/workplace hierarchy surfaces in Japanese hip hop. The stage was spectacularly lit, divided between blue on the left and red on the right. The location, Club Citta, is a huge box that was holding, I would guess, about 1500 fans. It was held in Kawasaki, maybe an hour outside of Tokyo, apparently for reasons of accessibility. As a non-native Japanese speaker, many of the punchlines and wordplay passed me by, but the scale and sophistication of the event itself was truly stunning. ![]() This year's final winner was Shinpeita, from Tokyo (represent!). It was the culmination of a yearlong process that selects 16 regional champs from Hokkaido to Okinawa, with long battles in each region. Saturday night was the final of the 2010 round of the annual UMB - the Ultimate MC Battle, Japan's unified freestyle title. New UMB Champion 晋平太 (Shinpeita) breaks down. Inevitably, most of these "interventions" have come up short, turning the word into self-important ash in its users' mouths.īut is the picture of critical theory's impact implied by the term "intervention" even the one we should be committed to? That is, it implies that one believes one's own work should - perhaps even that it will - have the kind of deep, short-term social impact that Butler's did. Those who have come since have generally hoped for a similarly spectacular, direct impact - but the inconvenient truth is that claiming to be making an "intervention" is more a quantitative than a qualitative claim. ![]() Her work actually did end up being this sort of abrupt interruption, becoming a touchstone for a politicized feminism that then went out and did some very direct things with it. I'm willing to bet that Judith Butler was the single greatest force in spreading the term around, and as in most such cases, she remains one of a very few whose use of it can be defended. ![]() Of course, in theoretical usage, the "intervention" is usually against a linguistic convention, a social practice, or a pattern of thought that the critic thinks is harmful - but the word is intended nonetheless to convey that sense of immediacy, urgency, and engagement. To intervene implies to stop something in progress - to leap to the defense of a battered spouse, or to shove a child out of the way of an oncoming bus. Why? In a nutshell, it implies a vision of the critical theorist as an activist which, I think, simultaneously inflates and undercuts the stakes of the project. "Intervention" was in common usage in academia before it became an MTV-sanctioned watchword for the dramatized fight against addiction, but even without that post-facto reappropriation (there's a word for another day), this is one of the most annoying terms in the critical theory lexicon. "Woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end.As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification." - Judith Butler, Gender Trouble ![]()
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