Ras Kass

Is Apollo Brown sending a sharp dart at America with his Drink Irish?

Is Apollo Brown sending a sharp dart at America with his Drink Irish?None of Ras Kass's songs were anything like this one. We can start our hypothesis with that. We can go two ways with this one. Raise our hands in the air like we just don't care and pretend that everything that most rappers presumably submit to(drugs, fornication, crime, violence) is cool, or we can raise an eyebrow and see that what Apollo Brown is saying with that Hook is that nothing American is really American. If we go down this second path, then Apollo Brown is a genius: he took the "melting pot" metaphor(you take races, nationalities, different sexes, different orientations, different religions, backgrounds, political views, and put them in a pot, melt them down into one compound that critic Israel Zangwill named America), and turned it into a cool hip-hop anthem. Let's not forget, the melting pot metaphor was used to refer to the many numbered immigrants that populated America in the 19th century. Nowadays, multiculturalism is better described by terms like mosaic, or salad box: you have a lot of ingredients, but you can still see them, compared to the melting pot, where heterogeneous characters ended up being homogeneous characters. Our point is, what Apollo Brown figured out is that post-modernity can easily be looked at with the same eye as Israel Zangwill did pre-modernity. Nothing is stable, all is governed by centrifugal ideals (and you can barely call them ideals). Everyone wants what everybody else has, nobody seems to sit down and consolidate something specific for the whole community.

Furthermore, we find the fact that Apollo Brown chooses to appear firsthand among the actual singers of a song he produced a bit suspicious. He doesn't do that on all occasions. He's purposely trying to gather the masses in, because he knows that we give more credit to names, rather than to actual good music. Many of us concede that a song is good because of the resonance of a name. He wants everyone aligned for this big game of charades, where he's telling us, Americans, how nothing that we claim is ours, and nothing that we want, is actually ours. Take 'One Nation' out the Pledge of Allegiance, and you have Apollo Brown's message.

This song may as well be that hair gripping, liquor pouring song that it appears to be, but take a look at any Apollo Brown produced artists, and you'll see nothing of the sort. Just calm, intellectual songs, about change and about how wasteful a life like the one invoked in this song really is. The ambiguity of this song, again, works like a charm for us. You can take it both ways. It's your call.

<iframe width="400" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vEnrvQNfjqE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>