La Vie n'est que des putes et d'argent

ok. I screwed up. Jeff, the guy with the office next to mine pointed out something important: David Brooks didn't say that rap music caused the riots just because it's angry, but because it is also nihilistic and hedonistic, romanticizing violence and pooh-poohing cultural institutions. Since the guy with the office next to mine is my only reader, I take what he says very seriously. So I guess my experiment should have included some more nihilistic/hedonistic/violent stuff. I don't have time to conduct a new experiment just now, but I promise to you, my dear reader (that's you, Jeff!), that I have successfully listened to Leon Payne, Mission of Burma, NWA, The Doors, and Merle Haggard without rioting.

Ok--so one last thought on David Brooks before I let this topic drop forever. How hilarious is this passage:

This is a reminder that for all the talk about American cultural hegemony, American countercultural hegemony has always been more powerful. America's rebellious countercultural heroes exert more influence around the world than the clean establishment images from Disney and McDonald's. This is our final insult to the anti-Americans; we define how to be anti- American, and the foreigners who attack us are reduced to borrowing our own cliches.

Dear Mr. Brooks. What kind of dickweed really thinks that rap is counterculture? Rap music, ALL major label music, is in the business of making money, and nothing's more American than that. As one of those presidents said (I think he also said that we could eat cake): the business of America is business.

And that the foreigners who attack us are all hopped up on 50 Cent and Ice Cube??? Bitch, please.

Feemus will now cease to discuss David Brooks. Happy, Jeff?

Kanye West Still Doesn’t Care About French People

So…I am still thinking about that David Brooks column. Now, I know it is a colossal waste of time thinking about David Brooks, but the heart wants what it wants. My heart apparently wants to think about David Brooks. Stupid heart.

In my last posting on the subject, I critiqued the liberal response to the conservative nonsense: liberals want to defend rap by declaring that it is great art, and it therefore immune to criticism on political grounds. This is the same argument that lets us read T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, despite their anti-Semitism and fascist leanings, with a clear conscience. It's ART.

Now, some rap is great art. But not in any higher proportion than any other form. And it is still worthy of defense.

So why can't liberals defend it unless it is genuine, certifiable, capital-letterable Art?

They have to suck politics out of the defense, because the politics make them deeply uncomfortable. Liberals, like conservatives, are deeply uncomfortable seeing angry black people. Vocal angry black people. It’s a reminder that there is something to be pissed off about.

Now, liberals will allow that blacks can, even should, be angry about specific injustices (especially if they use the experience to make ART), but the problems start when the anger is diffuse, when it moves from "I am angry about the poll tax," to "I am pissed off at the world." But that is what popular youth music has been about for a couple of generations, now. Black and white.

And black (or brown) people are not to be trusted in proximity to anger, because they can't be trusted to differentiate between affect and action. And music is all about affect.

I have been conducting an experiment. I am listening to the angriest music I could find, just to see if it made me feel all riot-y. I listened to:

Cheater Slicks
Billy Bragg
Corrosion of Conformity
Phil Ochs
Agent Orange
Pete Seeger
Public Enemy
D.I. (Seth should shitcan his Deathcab obsession and listen to these guys--connect with his roots)
The Beach Boys (no one can convince me that "Surfer Girl" isn't just overflowing with rage)

And guess what? I STILL don't feel like rioting. I wonder why?

Part of it, I guess, is that I had a big lunch and I read somewhere once that you should always wait an hour after eating before lighting cars on fire.

It may also be that I have a job, a home, and hope for my future.

That's not to say that music doesn't have an profound influence on people's attitudes and behaviors. Some Dean Martin got mixed in with the above, and I did feel like getting drunk. And then I got drunk.

And Heaven knows I'm miserable now.

Reply to Original Post

goal post; post-partum; post mortem; post hoc ergo propter hoc; Postum; Post-Its; posterior; a posteriori; kiss the post; post-boy; postdiluvian; signpost; compost; Post Toastie-Ohs; post office; post-prandial; ex post facto; poster; post hole; bed-post; riposte; whipping-post; post and beam construction; post haste; postdate; postpone; postlapsarian; postcoital; postman; postman (he always rings twice)

Kanye West Doesn't Care About French People

By now, we all know that rap music is responsible for global warming (or it would be if global warming weren't just a myth).

Is there any havoc the American Negro can't wreak when he puts his mind to it?

David Brooks has been- rightly so - getting a lot of flak for his NY Times piece in which he writes that the two role models available to young Musims are Osama bin Laden and Tupac Shakur. Tupac?

Brooks's column is easy to bash, if for no other reason than that it feels risibly out of date. I remember the '80s, when listening to 2 Live Crew was thought to cause folks to spontaneously gang rape nuns. Or at least white joggers in Central Park. That controversy was remarkable for how easily it confused liberals.

Liberals, as usual, let conservatives set the terms of the debate. In the 2 Live Crew to-do, liberal feminists joined with conservatives to vilify As Nasty as They Want to Be and Skip Gates felt the need to claim that it was a brilliant album in order to defend the group. Maybe he really believed that it's a brilliant album. Maybe.

Liberals are confused again. A lot of the critiques of Brooks's piece are taking the same line: French rap is great art. Some of it surely is (French rap doesn't get much play in the Feemus household, so we are taking it on faith), but is that the point? Are the only two legitimate choices for minority expression 1. to be uplifting and constructive or 2. to be great art? What a lot of horseshit. "White" music is never put to such a test. It can be offensive and mediocre. Now that's freedom.

Gotta go--I've got a stack of G.G. Allin records to play.

Strauss 101: There is No Lie So Outrageous that it Shouldn't be Told

Presidential adivsor Stephen Hadley has this to say:
"Allegations now that the President somehow manipulated intelligence, somehow misled the American people, are flat wrong."

The Bush Administration--with good reason--is so conviced we aren't paying attention that the lies are getting more and more transparently false. Who's going to notice? The people who think Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are the same guy? Probably not.

Hadley's statement proceeds under the cynical assumption that the bigger the lie, the greater the chance that it will be believed. And no one wants to call the bluff. It's like Celebrity Poker Showdown with real lives at stake. Now that's great television.