I am a huge Radiolab fan but this episode was disappointing. The Minaj story felt very superficial. It was obvious this was way out of Jad and Robert's wheelhouse. And I always cringe whenever someone says that there's no American music that wasn't co-opted by white people. While that is mostly true, it totally ignores country music which whether you like it or not, is a pretty significant genre.

The United Nations badgers nations into signing drug war treaties and than threatens the US when Colorado legalizes Marijuana. I can see this being an example of the Feds using a treaty to supercede a State law.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/11/12/marijuana-meddle-un-official-rips-us-states-over-legal-pot-policies/

It's painfully obvious that Jessica O'Neill and others like her have never heard of Rosenberg before and automatically assumed he's an interloper just because he's white. Well, I know who he is and respect him for his knowledge and passion, which I could have sworn were made clear in the segment. Ironic how some people who complain the loudest about racial stereotyping don't think twice about stereotyping caucasians. Besides, Rosenberg's Jewish so it's not like he doesn't know what it's like to be an outsider. And no, I'm not an Eminem fan.

That said, though, this whole episode was something of a disappointment. Not much exploration into the science of things, which I'd been led to believe Radiolab was all about. If they were trying to stretch themselves I can appreciate that, but I think they might have torn something.

I LOVE Radiolab!! Some of the topics discussed on this show have opened my eyes to much of the hidden world around me and intrigued my curiosity regarding subjects I had never thought twice about. However, the segment on Rosenberg was atrocious and exists as a severe digression from the quality programming Radiolab typically delivers. If I wanted to know about the Nikki and Rosenberg feud I would be watching TMZ or listening to the drivel broadcast daily on the HOT97 morning show. I am severely disappointed that you guys chose to do this segment. It is by far the worst Radiolab piece ever released. Please revert back to your old ways like when Lulu was a producer.

Only thing I disagree with is the idea that Nikki Minaj is talented... other than that this was a very interesting episode.

The hip hop story was interesting (very interesting), but I wonder if the producers also asked Nicki Minaj if she wanted to be interviewed. She probably had other things to do, but just having Rosenberg on seems a little bit skewed and I feel like there was a bit of a white focus to the hour.

Frank Zappa: "Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny." My observations: Any fringe music genre will persist and grow in two opposing directions. First, it will grow edgier, pushing the boundaries in it's underground realm. Second, it will grow towards homogeneity. The edge will continue to thrive in it's realm and the homogenous will get absorbed into the mass consciousness. This is natural and not a bad thing. Sometimes the homogenized product leads a listener, or group of listeners, to explore the roots and then the cutting edge of the sound, which is ideal. This I believe. P.S. This post was inspired by the Rosenberg vs. Nicki Minaj debate, as told to me by Radiolab. (Great show, by the way).

I never thought about how open the Constitution is to interpretation before. It's interesting how the country functions despite a multitude of interpretations of the Constitution.

The Rosenberg piece gets into the "White expert" problem. For one thing, to say rap has gotten poppified, and to say that the Starship song is sold out, isn't exactly a deep bit of cultural exegesis. That said, it's clear that Minaj (like most well-known Black artists) is responding to the economics of the music industry, because White kids have always had the disposable income to be the taste-makers in this country. One could argue, that insofar as Hip-Hop is a major cultural force, it no longer responds to the logic of Black cultural development. Artists come up through authentic channels because "realness" and "credibility" are still the primary commodities being sold to suburban White kids, but once they get that stamp of "otherness" which can only come from Blackness or being approved by Blackness (See: Eminem) then they're free to "crossover." The White expert problem arises because White people want to enter Black culture and have credibility in spite of being inexorably tied to their Whiteness. In other words, to be White is to be "in" to be Black is to be "out" or "other" White people want to enter our "outness" despite the fact that they can't shake their "in-ness" nor can we achieve it. Hence why Minaj (despite their apparent conciliation) said that Rosenberg criticizing her "felt wrong." Rosenberg's a White man, with all that entails and the wages that pays, attacking a women who's Black, with all that that takes out of you, no matter how successful you are. This is why I'm not terribly comfortable with him being a "gatekeeper." One, White people have a tendency, in my experience, of never being able to enter another cultural space without arrogating expertness to themselves.(Because part of being White is being entitled to authority vis a vis non-Whites. Two, the academic/knowledge based understanding of a culture is different from the cultural experience of one's own culture. While I don't have nearly the knowledge base Rosenberg does, my relationship to the music (as it has originated and exists for the time being) is different than his, it speaks to me differently, because I live everyday with the experience of being one of the 40 million "nobodies" that the music spoke too before it was a multibillion dollar industry, when it was just "ghetto trash" and "jungle music." The hip-hop consciousness is my consciousness because the history and experience which produced that consciousness is my history and experience. Not because I went to a record store one day. But, as long he's stating the obvious, I'm not gonna criticize.

@Jessica - You're not the only person who questioned the so-called journalistic integrity of this piece; too little was made of a deeply nuanced context. The weak effort to glance at the inherent racism and misogyny only served to highlight a lazy attempt at dialogue. It was like looking at the skeleton of a body but nothing else, and overall a disappointing segment.

@Jessica - it's racist to think that only black people have a stake in a musical genre. Rosenberg celebrates it loudly and unabashed. He's VERY aware of the foundations. His being white doesn't matter. He knows the material and the history better than just about anyone. He's a hip-hop historian.

Am I the only one who finds it incredibly problematic that a white man has deigned himself as a "gatekeeper" as to what is and is not hip hop? Why have Jad and Robert not questioned or problematized this a lot more? Rosenberg has to tread lightly, because when he as a white man slams black people for not being "authentic" enough, he has the weight of history and hundreds of years of racism behind him - it is more than a teenager having a "feeling" that they identify with hip hop. This needed to be much more heavily questioned and explored.