Candyfoot Ultrasound

“Yeah, I answer your question before you ask it.  That’s me–anticipatory Laura-Marie!” I told Ming.

I’ve decided to do OG graffiti embroidery.  My name is Candyfoot Lionized Ultrasound.  Candyfoot for short.  But the Ultrasound part is good for the rapping I also do.  A friend and I are collaborating on a song that’s half-done.

Supercute supplemental family member Bunny Littlehop Peace-Lai always wants to help.

Debussy

Yesterday Ming was listening to Clare de Lune, from the previous blog post.  He is the kind of guy who needs explosions in movies, and upbeat music.  Narcolepsy means he is always looking for energy–something to help him stay awake.

I watched him listening to Richter’s 1977 Austrian performance of Clare de Lune, eyes half-closed, and started telling him what I imagined his thoughts to be.  “This is boring,” I said, in a silly voice, pretending to be him.  “I’m going to fall asleep!  How can you listen to such music!  Why is this good?”

He was laughing at my accuracy.  Yes, we have been friends ten years now, and together for nine.  I know his mind very well.  I can almost talk his part and my part.  But he does surprise me sometimes, which I love.

gorgeous

Then I switched more to my regular self.  “I’ll tell you why this music is good–it’s gorgeous!  It’s subtle, it’s nuanced, and it’s fucking beautiful!”

Yeah, it’s got schmaltz, but it’s also kind of transcendent.  I have to admit.  I feel the sublime otherworldly swell underneath, sometimes.

“Maybe I could play you the Twilight version.  Maybe you’d like it better!” I teased.  We were laughing and being silly.  But maybe there was an edge, that this music came to me by way of my ex-husband, who was white, went to good schools, and came from money.

This piano music is not from the urban neighborhood where Ming and I live now in Las Vegas, or where Ming came from, or where I came from at all.  Stuff about class, whiteness, and family pain swirled all together, with the swells of sound.

serious

“What do you think?” I asked a few minutes later, serious.

“It’s beautiful!” Ming said.

“Yeah, it’s not bad the first time.  But after 50 or so times, it starts to grow on you.”

rap

On the other hand, this Oakland, California rapper Kreayshawn makes music more related to where Ming comes from, East Bay.

I love her attitude in this song, and the Arby’s part.  I love different voices woven together, in hiphop songs.  So we can hear many different people speak, including street language, lotsa slang, sparkling vernacular.  Not just middle class, conventionally educated people.

Language in hiphop like “bitches” and the n word can be risky because many more powerful people hear those words as disrespectful.  But I love the deep respect of listening to the actual everyday language of vast swaths of less privileged people.  So refreshingly different from a sanitized, corporate language of fake, middle class exploitation.

Well, I want a Master’s degree in hiphop by women.  I’m already writing my thesis on Awkwafina.  It will be called Queering The Semi-Reliable Narrator: Rapper Persona, Hard Gender, and Sexually Transgressive Asianness in the Work of Supergenius Awkwafina.

Where will Laura-Marie as Candyfoot Ultrasound be situated in this lady rapper milieu?  To the side.  An indy’s indy, doing a crazy, fat, low-budget zinester version of rap.  Candyfoot Ultrasound is idiosyncratic, to be sure.  But I will share with you the first finished song.