shield your eyes

“Plenty of times you won’t know what to think—I sure don’t, but what I’m trying to do now is keep thinking. Not turn away from what’s inside, when it creeps out at the beckoning of something I ought to hate.

“If it disturbs me, I go forward with it,” French says of her creative process.

That’s what we need to do, too. Deal with it.”

- Ann Powers “In Defense of Nasty Art.” [via 1000TimesYes]

It’s easy to lose your mind when you’re having fun. I’m sure a lot of the kids at Monday’s Odd Future show—sweating, their hands in the air, joking and tweeting and snapping Twitpics with their friends—were screaming violent lyrics about raping women without realizing what they were celebrating. If they did, most didn’t give it a second thought. That’s easy to do when there are mostly dudes in the room.

So let’s give the Voice’s Zach Baron a lot of credit for starting a new conversation in this debate that has been going on for decades: why do critics—and all of us, really—disassociate from lyrics that violate our personal politics in defense of art, freedom of expression and downright enjoyment? In other words, why do we sometimes “like the things that repel us?”

It’s an easy question to ignore. There are guilty, murky feelings swirling around it and serious issues like race, class and privilege at work. In an Internet environment where everyone would rather click through slideshows of puppy pictures, nobody wants to talk about it, especially when they feel like their personal taste is threatened (just look at the comments thread under Zach’s post).

The debate has been brought up over the years without much resolved. But that’s the point: the issue does not have to be brought up in order to be “resolved,” but to be confronted.

Matthew Perpetua wrote some good thoughts:

I don’t think anyone is surprised that this blatant, intentional misogyny exists in rap music. It’s nothing new. But that’s the problem — that it doesn’t go away, that it seems to only get worse and worse, and you have new artists like these kids who come into rap with the apparent mentality that in a way this is what rap is for, an outlet for this reprehensible acting-out bullshit. It does seem like people are singling them out, but you know, pretty much every record with hateful content should be called out for it. Critics and fans reinforce this behavior by being silent.

So let’s simmer in this for a minute. Still with me?

I was with Zach until the last two paragraphs.

What artists like Odd Future—or Dennis Cooper, or Jean Genet—do, maybe, is venture where other people won’t and there start considering all sorts of human behavior we would prefer not to think of as possible. But it is possible. And more to the point, it reads as novelty, to the ear and to the critical mind—at last, something new, something that is not an indie-rocker strumming an electric guitar or an unimaginative rapper talking about a Maybach he doesn’t actually own. It’s not so much how it’s different—although that does matter, too—but that it’s different. We sort the ethics out, after the fact.

And when we do? Well, I don’t know, exactly. Odd Future’s lyrics are offensive to moral people however you slice it—whether you defend their creative imperative, note they don’t actually do this stuff, or give them credit for making their audience confront a whole range of things about the way humans are that they’d rather not contemplate.

As the smart and quick Sady already wrote, you’re privileged if you can discuss rape and violence and anti-gay slurs as if they exist in a dark, secret corner of humanity, and they aren’t something that people deal with every day. In fact, rape culture is mainstream culture (even 30 Rock makes rape jokes these days). Odd Future are not so avant-garde or underground in that sense.

But they are fascinating. They are a crew of characters spinning a fiction. It’s no wonder Shep’s Fader description of the group begins with a construction of their fantasy world to explain who they are:

If the rappers in Odd Future were indicative of California’s social climate, the West Coast would be currently experiencing a miniature apocalypse, complete with grocery store looting and armed survivalist militias, plus tons of drugs and skateboarding. A crew comprised of Tyler, the Creator (comma=[sic]), Domo Genesis, Earl Sweatshirt and Hodgy Beats, their music is deathly illustrative of the end of the road, some of the evilest rap since Gravediggaz waxed casually about murder and mortuaries. It would almost be the resurgence of horrorcore—the thesis line on Tyler’s “Splatter” is somebody tell Satan that I want my fucking swag back—if they weren’t so young (aged 16-20) and concurrently emo, fully open about their depression even as they talk about demonic possession. They are also really, really talented.

They are also very, very old school in some ways. Kimberle Crenshaw wrote a fantastic essay, on 2 Live Crew’s 1990 arrest and legal case based on their obscene lyrics. In the piece, she writes that groups like Odd Future might be fulfilling a “fantasy of the social outlaw.”

Against an historical backdrop that prominently features the image of the Black male as social outlaw, gangsta’ rap might be read as a subversive form of opposition that aims to challenge social convention precisely by becoming the very social outlaw that society has proscribed. For this reason, their lyrics might even be read as political, and if they are political they are not obscene.

I doubt these kids are thinking about politics. Odd Future might actually be giving people what they want. These words, “rape” and “fa——,” are part of a lexicon of power. Odd Future can use them to shock and awe and also seduce. Rape, the act itself, is about power and domination. Perhaps these words appeal to a deep, maybe unconscious, part of a certain kind of person (like, say, some white, male, middle-class music critics) who enjoy the general subject matter (power, domination, control), although they usually hear about it in lighter terms (rap skills, Maybachs, swag swag swag).

Sprinkle these words in clever lines; put them over a well-produced beat; give a young, charismatic teenager with an I-don’t-give-a-fuck-attitude license to spit them without consequence and otherwise respectable people will enjoy it while being fully aware of how wrong it is. “In other words, the visceral pleasure outweighs the intellectual outrage,” as Rawkblog’s David Greenwald wrote. “Enjoyment does not require a complete embrace of love or hate, either, a binary critics are quick to turn to (because it makes their own work more exciting, which is both tempting and pays the bills).”

I’m not immune to these seductions. I don’t know how to navigate my identity as a feminist, while also liking groups like The Diplomats. I was dancing to some of their misogynistic raps at Southpaw last Saturday while at a party I love, put on by people I love, surrounded by people I love. The last thing I was feeling was political. I was having a blast. I was losing my mind.

Maybe that’s why I like the music so much.

Most of the time I try to be aware of lyrics in the music I buy and like. I’m not a Misfits fan for many of the reasons addressed here. I outwardly protest against bands who have sexual assaulters as members. I have also had screaming fights with good friends over their pejorative use of the word “rape” in everyday conversations. I believe in the power of words and don’t dismiss them. I wish more did the same.

Trying to bring these kinds of conversations into the mainstream, and not just on feminist blogs, or at the bar, or on Tumblr, or in rant-y emails, is hard work. I’m grateful a “dude in the room” started thinking about all this murky business and actually wrote something about it. I wish more female and male and transgender music critics would throw wrenches into the hype machines based on these kinds of discussions. Not to sound like a human resources department, but I wish there were more female music critics getting published online and in print in general!

We need more people, including fans, to take this stuff seriously and approach it thoughtfully.

It’s uncomfortable, but I think it’s worth it to sit with some of Odd Future’s lyrics and be disgusted. I hope some of you are. It’s a good thing. Do you feel it? We’re still human.