In celebration of 35 years on your FM dial (and 60 years of being a radio station), WRCT is taking over the Shadow Lounge and AVA on Saturday, April 11 from 9p-2a.  The event features 10 WRCT DJ’s between the two venues, plus some chiller tunes being spun in the Blue Room.  We hope you’ll come out to drink, dance, and celebrate with us.

Tonight, I spun the clickwheel of my iPod until “Ride Around Shining” by Clipse came up. Upon its release, the song and the album that housed it sparked a debate among the Internet cognoscenti about its ethics, or lack thereof.

Was Hell Hath No Fury a nuanced treatment of the drug trade’s moral complexities or a raw glorification of crack and the cash that came of it?

I never really took a side in that argument — the ruthlessness of the production transfixed me more than the cold-hearted consumerism of the lyrics.

Returning to the song, nearly two years later, it seems unsettlingly prescient. It’s as if Clipse knew, in the summer of ’07, that the housing bubble was overdue for bursting, and that the economy, a year and a half down the road, would be stumbling and desperate, like a crack addict caught in Virginia Beach traffic (of two kinds). “All I wanna do is ride around shinin’ while I can afford it” — did they know?

Listening to the song today, it’s hard to say if the cloud of detuned piano that hovers over the minimal beat presages collapses or confirms it.

Is that miasma of notes the tremor that says “earthquake,” or the dust of crushed concrete settling after disaster has already come? Are Clipse a pair of fortunetellers or funeral directors?

The song, like its creators, seems caught between violent scenes. Virginia Beach rappers aren’t dirty South and they aren’t New York. They’re coastal, smooth, but never as glib as Snoop and Dre.

They wouldn’t fit in Los Angeles. They rap in suspension, with the devil-may-care edge of a parolee speeding past the police station in a stolen convertible.

A decade that started with a hyped crisis that never materialized (Y2K) is ending with an economic crisis borne of over-hyped material (toxic securities).

For this author, “Ride Around Shining” is the anthem that captures the spirit of those two endpoints, as it cruises on a vaporous chassis, grille gleaming, right between them.

-Split Foster

Dear Arthur Russell,

Let’s pretend it didn’t happen. That it just… didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good documentary and all. I enjoyed the whole thing — the flannel, the fluorescence, the frustration. Your parents and boyfriend are adorable and the clips of you playing guitar in that puffy winter jacket — black and white bliss, my man. But I’d rather wipe the mnemonic slate clean.

Let’s pretend that I’ve never known anything about you, that my first and last encounters with you are Another Thought spinning humbly in the dark. That I know nothing of your beatnik exodus from Iowa, nothing of your camaraderie with Allen Ginsburg, nothing of your disco prowess, nothing of AIDS, nothing of nothing. That all I know, not just of you, but of the whole world, is this supine posture — lying face up — is this cello echoing and squealing into the shadows, is your voice lilting and reverberant, sure as soft cotton on bleeding skin.

Let’s pretend that there is a city even Italo Calvino, the famous writer, hasn’t conjured, one where your lyrics are law, where your melodies are weather, where your atmospheres are public housing policy, where your four-track is the key to the courthouse. Let’s pretend I’m bedding down in the tenement of your sadness and hope. Let’s pretend the headline of the “Russell Daily Register” says “Lucky cloud in your sky, Brother.”

Let’s pretend I still listen to music more than I catalog it. “The birth of the moment is never ending.” Let’s pretend I believe that because it’s you saying it, singing it in loops of noise. Voltaire said that the only things too stupid to be said are sung. I want to be stupid with you.

Let’s pretend it’s the ghosts who have to believe in us for us to be real. Let’s pretend it’s you listening to me. Let’s pretend it’s you reading this letter, you smoothing the creases of this with your palms, you smearing newsprint into the whorls on your fingertips.

This is how we walk on the moon.

-Split Foster