Reified and Refined

shitty:

oldtobegin:

Thank u based god.

This is my text; I sent it to Jess Monday night. Now that its containing Tumblr post has blown up I’d like to expand a little on what I said.

I’m old for a Lil B fan. That sucks to write and it’s the first time I’ve had to about an artist, but I turn 30 this month and I saw full well how emptied-out the 21+ section at the show was; I’m under no misgivings about B’s demographic. The context this gives me, though, is seventeen full years of concerts and hundreds of artists who I’ve seen perform on stage for a willing crowd. I’m blessed enough to have started early by catching the first Foo Fighters tour and I’m proud of myself for forcing myself to catch B’s first-ever Boston show instead of succumbing to the comfort of my house, stove, XBox and cat. (If this sounds lame as fuck to you, you aren’t wrong, but you’ll sympathize with it much more the first time you work a 60-hour week or get a vacation request denied.)

As a result, I’ve seen plenty of shows where performers and I shared the same progressive beliefs. On top of having huge Ani DiFranco and Tori Amos phases in high school I also frequented an an all-ages non-profit venue almost too perfect to be real, so I was no stranger to stage-to-crowd (or crowd-to-stage) proselytizing about social justice, sexual equality, or grassroots activism. That all this could come to a kid who grew up in the middle of a pine forest in the middle of nowhere is something I am grateful for constantly. Constantly.

I’ve also loved rap music for nearly two-thirds of my life (thanks to Jam’n 94.5’s unimaginably powerful broadcast antenna), and a large part of that deep and true love has involved navigating the shoals of how I regard human beings versus how the narrators of some of those songs talk about regarding human beings. (I’m sure I don’t need to go into how my feelings about feminism differ from those of, say, the narrator in a Too $hort song.) Sometimes my interaction with rap needs involve the separation of the spirit of a song from its letter, or the willful separation of a text from its extratextual content, or what have you. It is certainly not the only genre with which I need do this, but I do it a lot.

I don’t think it’s an artist’s job to educate his or her audience, even if the art is problematic. The exegetic nature of lyrics are integral to the power of lyrical music, and the hermeneutics of determining authorial intent are made more thrilling by how intimate an art form music is. (Smog’s “I Break Horses” is a great example of both.) I wouldn’t trade that for anything, no matter how many OFWGKTAs and Varg Vikerneses this life grants me (and how many arguments I have about them). I love that “You Oughta Know” is about Dave Coulier, but I loved “You Oughta Know” itself more when it was about a someone. And since artists themselves are naturally recalcitrant to make bare what they’ve already put forward in a song, even (and perhaps especially) when that song isn’t about much in particular, I have been long since accustomed to the fact that when I am spoken to, rather than sung to, from a stage, it’ll be not to have something revealed, but to have something underlined.

Like most Lil B songs, “Violate that Bitch” gets more interesting the more you pay attention to it, but on the surface it’s a fun song with a cool beat and a hook about mouth-fucking someone else’s girlfriend. The consensuality of this act is not mentioned. He says a bunch of other shit in the song too — that his nuts look like raisins, that he looks like a lesbian, that (if you’re reading the same lyrics site I am) he’s going to give your girlfriend “an iPad dick” — but I think it’s fair to say that the force of a chorus will always overpower the nuance of a verse. So to see B stop rapping that song outright—not even picking it back up afterwards, which stunned me—in order to clarify what he’d only briefly and clumsily hinted at in its Youtube video’s description field; that it was a song about physical and ferocious but necessarily consensual intercourse; that, further, it dealt with a complicated and hard-to-elucidate facet of human sexuality, rather than promoted a brute-forcing through that complication; that we should put our drinks down and actually flip off sexual offenders, which really does sound silly on paper but, when taken in context as part of the mélange of performative acts asked of the audience at a good show, felt meaningful; I can’t tell you how it was to be there. No other performer has ever asked me to trust them like that, and I have seen no other performer assume that their audience would readily accept that challenge.

“Vans,” on the other hand, is a terrific song about sneakers.

Swifty(who is the best), on how to like problematic art in the best way, and also on those beautiful rare occasions when potentially problematic art transcends itself.

(via lastyearsfad)