Outside the Lines With Rap Genius - OTL 45: Michael Holman Excerpt #6 - Tone-Deaf Anchors lyrics

SameOldShawn: I wanted to ask something very specific about the Breakers and them blowing up. I was watching a TV news segment about the Breakers, and it was by and large flattering -- portraits of their personalities, interviews with their mothers, shots of them dancing on the street. But there was also a pretty racist element to a lot of the coverage. I think they called the dancing "ragged and naive" at one point Michael Holman: Was it one of those magazine shows? SOS: Yeah. So I was just curious about dealing with non-hip-hop audiences and how you dealt with the racial overtones or sometimes more explicit vibe in the coverage MH: I suppose it had a racist undertone or overtone to it. What you say instantly reminds me of -- this never happened overseas, but it definitely happened here. There were a number of times in which the New York City Breakers, who were a big part of the Beat Street film, when we went on a Beat Street tour, I can remember us doing news shows. We'd be on local news stations, like 5 o'clock news or whatever, and they'd need a little novelty news, and they'd have us on It happened so many times. I was shocked the first time it happened. One of the newscasters, who inevitably would be a white guy, youngish to middle aged; we would do a performance, they would interview us, and then inevitably he would try and breakdance. It's like, oh no, this is too painful. It was like, watch me try and do this, ha ha ha, and aren't I silly and funny? It's like, no no no, you're not supposed to do that. If you had some famous concert violinist on, would you then take the violin and make an idiot of yourself playing the violin? You wouldn't do that. But they would do that with the dancers, it was a major dis. And it happened three or four times On one hand, you couldn't refuse the exposure, you needed the exposure. On the other hand, that was the price of that exposure. What a**holes. We'd always stand and roll our eyes while they were doing that I can remember this happening too with DJs. I can remember TV things where Jazzy Jay would have to teach some news reporter how to scratch. It's kind of humiliating. I suppose it's racist, but it's tone-deaf in terms of cultural awareness, for sure