Without: JACKIE WILSON...

Doggin Around
Lonely Teardrops
A Woman, A Lover, A Friend
No Pity (In the Naked City)
Baby Workout
Am I the Man
Reet Petite
I'll Be Satisfied

...there would be no ELVIS...

Hound Dog
Suspicious Minds
Hard Headed Woman
Jailhouse Rock
Wooden Heart

...and without Elvis there would be no Johnny Cash, no Bob Dylan, no Micheal Jackson, no Prince, no LL Cool J, no Usher, no Chris Brown, no Kanye West.

I love race-passing. And class-passing. And really any kind of passing. Because I think that whatever actions or choices "passing" entails by definition help nullify the divisive, ugly classifications of ethnicity, class, gender, etc., that pre-date the passing in question.

Race passing makes me especially happy because, as a one-time anthropology minor, I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that race does not exist outside of abstract conception. There is no biological basis for race and our continued use of it as a species is not only ignorant, prejudiced, detrimental, and corrosive, it's just inaccurate, just wrong. And since all I want is for everyone I know to be right all the time, I thought you should know.

Obviously this isn't just a hip hop thing. Take Ernst Lubitsch films for class, take Sascha Baron Cohen for culture, race, ethnicity, and sexuality; take pretty much any celebrity with a reality show for class; take Cate Blanchet as Bob Dylan for gender. But okay, in hip hop take DJ Drama, Juelz Santana, DJ Kahled, Fat Joe, the list goes on.

So I'll be doing Without Wednesday (in keeping with the alliterative segment theme) to broaden your horizons. Because people think hip hop is a race thing, a social thing, a class thing and the current state of hip hop (hello congress!) leads me to believe that people are forgetting that art is always all of those things and a whole lot more. Whether or not the art is avant guarde, underground, commercially successful, high brow, low brow, or critically hailed.

Here's how it's gonna go down: 1) I start with someone you've maybe never heard of and show you a picture and give you some great mp3s. Then I'll 2) follow up with a person or people who I think was actually greatly influenced by the first person even though everyone on the planet's heard of the second person and not the first (and give you some mp3s to mount my argument). 3,4, 5 and beyond) and finish with a person or people relevant to a discussion of contemporary hip hop that should be obvious enough by the time I'm done that I don't even have to give you mp3s (but I prolly will because we're all about cooperation here at Whatever).

Hopefully the W/oWs will feed off of each other as I do more and more of them. My hope is that they'll build a larger, more expansive, bush-like web of musical evolution through history by intersecting the narrower linear progressions we continue to seek out. I just hope you're prepared to get your shit educated and your mind blown. I'll give you till Wednesday to ready yourselves. Get into some clean underwear while you're at it.