Spike Lee's Chi-raq

oh I see. what you wrote was this:

The interrupters doc that came out in 2011 made a little noise locally. But went from one article in TheRoot about Chicago Violence in early 2012 to an "epidemic" by summer.

so I pointed out that national news was specifically using the word "epidemic" three years before your start date. doing it a lot. the national media was aware of, and reporting on, the epidemic of violence in Chicago long before 2011. there was much more than "a little noise locally." you wrote:

People didn't think of chicago like that before then, or they thought of it the way they thought of any other city with "some rough parts."

I demonstrated that this is a false claim. where did I refer to you personally or your career bro? you're being wrong and it's just being shown to you, that's all.

i mean, deej's larger point -- that the claim 'whatever this movie does, it still tells people about a thing they don't know about' is not a good one -- is still valid, if anything even more valid

Before 2012, it was all about Chicago corruption and obama's socialist radical friends and leftist preachers. You can choose not to believe me, but again I witnessed this firsthand and I'm really not making it up!

you are, in fact, making this up, as date-limited searches of news will tell you within something like .03 seconds if you're actually interested!

xp it's true! deej is for sure known to make some good points, but "nobody was talking about Chicago gang violence before 2011" isn't one of them

Excuse me for not being as precise as I should have, but there was a demonstrable uptick in conversation about Chicago as a center for violence after the music popped up. I'm sorry if I in some way minimized the extent to which it had been covered previously--but I certainly never denied that it had been covered, I LIVE HERE, and I'm aware that it has been covered at a certain level for years, obviously. But it became a National Story that was referenced by politicians, in the president's state of the Union, on high profile shows like night line, in 2012 in a way it hadn't the previous year. This is true! And yes, in 2011 the coverage was not nearly as omnipresent. Pulling up an 09 article about a violence epidemic isn't disproving shit

But yes as Thomp points out this was a sidebar to the main point that doesn't really undercut the main thrust of what I'm saying at all

There's a long history of articles pointing to urban blight and violence and saying hey it's an epidemic, btw....you'll find some in 1909 never mind 2009... I maintain, though, that among the many peaks and valleys in the country paying particular attention to chicago's south side, 2012 was a year in which it reached a major saturation point.

Deej, do you know what the Christian Science Monitor is? Are you aware of its reputation? I ask because I don't understand your implication that it's not a noteworthy publication.

So your point is that, based on some anecdotal evidence and your gut feeling, national attention toward Chicago violence reached a saturation point long after its horrific peak, which was before you were even born? I know someone who did social work and mediation with Chicago gang members in the 70s and when I mentioned your thesis to him last week he chuckled, then made some indignant show of utterly complete dismissal. I wonder how his anecdotes stack up against yours.

And why is tracking and defining this narrative even important except to tie Chicago violence and this movie to your hobbyhorse slash meal ticket? How common is this claim that the movie Chi-raq, an arthouse movie in limited release, is informing the general public about Chicago, so much so that it must be repudiated?

I don't think this subject holds up well against all the folk wisdom and myth-making. When Lil Bibby tried to make a little corrective to what he felt were Spike Lee and the public's misconceptions, he made some of his own. Atlanta's murder rate, for example, is higher than Chicago's, and belittling the violence and terrorism of gang activity there makes him look less like a credible observer and more like an entertainer promoting his similarly-titled work

You have significant reading comprehension issues

Like half your post is refuted by my last post. Try again

Accusations of careerism in a fucking message board argument...like my whole asshole you goofy dumbass

*lick....lol like

I'm afraid your reasoning is too nuanced for me

See mattresslessness his post is a more accurate example of "disingenuousness" since ur looking

Sorry bro I don't think you've earned any more explanations! You're not arguing with what I said but w what you think I said and I have no interest in holding your hand for this

Good thing my dad doesn't work in Chicago city government! You'd be saying I was in rahm's pocket too

deej it's a really bad look, when a guy repeatedly proves you wrong, to just tell that guy to lick your asshole. it's the sort of thing that gets you banned, and then you whine and pick an all-caps display name, etc.

I had a longer thing but your thesis about when national news media began reporting on the increase in Chicago gang violence is just wrong, it's been proven wrong whether you moved to Chicago after college or not.

Deej: Lol @ citing the Christian Science monitor lmao

Bam: Deej, do you know what the Christian Science Monitor is? Are you aware of its reputation? I ask because I don't understand your implication that it's not a noteworthy publication.

Deej: You have significant reading comprehension issues

Me: what exactly is there about "LOL... LMAO" that evades Bam's comprehension? If you express yourself like a 12-year-old, or Lagoon, then you've got to expect people struggling to comprehend you.

Maybe by "last post" you meant that Sears Tower of text? I haven't read all of that yet. Skimmed it a bit. Trying to pace myself. Yesterday was chore day and go see a movie day and visit my girlfriend day. Let me catch up and then I'll toss your salad.

Chicago violence has been endemic/epidemic for years, obviously, as it is with just about any major city, with peaks and valleys of fretting on a national and local level. But I agree that it's only been in the past couple of years that Chicago has earned a more alarmist/sensationalized murder city sort of rep.

or Lagoon

thread now emitting shrapnel

He didn't prove me "wrong" you idiot! He's not even in the same argument

If I express myself like a twelve year old it's bc when I "write a Sears tower of text" I'm taking it on good faith that the person I'm talking to is going to engage with it instead of...well I can't tell if bam is trolling because he's actually stupid or if it's a more disingenuous kind of trolling, but fuck you if you expect me to explain to you how bibby is talking about the Atlanta *music industry* when he talks about how violence isn't as present there, or how using the Christian Science monitor as a barometer of the degree to which Chicago violence became a national story makes no sense. I answered genuinely and straightforwardly what I was talking about but clearly this is more about some perverse kind of point scoring in a game of captain save a revered east coast filmmaker

Josh in Chicago otm

Fwiw the whole point of saying that it reached a saturation point a couple of years ago was to say that it doesn't actually do anything just to bring awareness. Like in part I'm talking about the inefficacy of I.e. Rappers (and filmmakers) "raising the alarm" to create some kind of sustained change. If it didn't happen in 2012 it's not going to happen with a movie that (confusingly) bamcquern is now minimizing as an art house concern

It's Willis Tower guys.

http://cdn.ebaumsworld.com/thumbs/video/2227974/83008008.jpg

deej you're being either disingenuous or really thick - I used the CSM link, I would have thought obviously to anybody whose reading comprehension was up to speed, to point out that even publications as square and non-cutting edge as the Christian Science Monitor were writing about the rise in Chicago gang violence -- specifically about the rise, specifically about the same trends you are talking about and the same causes you and I and everybody else is aware of: not generally about violence, not any of the mischaracterization of the articles you're doing without checking the sources -- long before your posited point-of-origin-in-the-national-consciousness.

on the actual point, no, I don't imagine this film "raises awareness" really, specifically because people have been aware of this for years, even the squarest most mainstream publications knew no later than 2009, and were reporting on it. if it were hugely successful, there might be some "people with large amounts of money become aware and try to help," that's always the possibility with big mainstream exposure, but a version of Lysistrata in verse is not gonna be that movie no matter what.

but feel free to just sail the Pequod right back into the seas of ad hom, who can blame you, your actual point didn't hold up so it's what you've got left

C-. Spike's heart is in the right place, but I'll never watch this again and can't bring myself to direct anyone to it. Somehow this might translate better to theatre in a way, though that's impossible for a billion reasons.

In what universe is "squareness" of a publication a measure of the depth of media penetration in a story about urban blight? Academic sociology journals must be super out of touch

And the ad homs didn't enter this conversation until ppl started bringing my career into it u disingenuous sanctimonious motherfucker

Does Josh's post affirming what I said mean nothing to you? Do you only accept information that affirms your constant bias that I'm probably wrong about everything ?

Like I feel like I'm trying to chip away at a huge block of ice around your head to get you to understand my point it's very bizarre. Your argument has gone in circles so many times you're trying to argue the point I was making: people already knew about this problem so defending spike's film on "raising awareness" grounds is a flawed argument

have you seen it yet?

The thing about the 'raising awareness' argument is that afaict, Spike Lee never really expressed an interest in doing that?
So saying "This movie is bad at raising awareness of this problem!" at this point, seems to serve as a lazy stand-in for "This movie is exploitative!" -- perhaps because the latter would require a substantial engagement with it as a work of art, while the former thesis can be 'proved' by 1001 facts about things that are not Spike Lee's Chi-Raq

also: lol at accusing Spike Lee of 'getting it wrong' by making his movie be about two big old rival gangs (what is this, West Side Story???) instead of a bunch of decentralized nodes of corner violence... only to promptly turn around and shit on everyone outside of Chicago as 'outsiders' who can't possibly understand that this city has a unique and historically unprecedented culture of violence, & why it would not be susceptible to a thousand-year-old riff on male psychology (SPOILER ALERT: part of the 'meaning' of a work like Lysistrata is that macho cultures like this go extinct)

The thing about the 'raising awareness' argument is that afaict, Spike Lee never really expressed an interest in doing that?
So saying "This movie is bad at raising awareness of this problem!" at this point, seems to serve as a lazy stand-in for "This movie is exploitative!" -- perhaps because the latter would require a substantial engagement with it as a work of art, while the former thesis can be 'proved' by 1001 facts about things that are not Spike Lee's Chi-Raq

― bernard snowy, Monday, December 14, 2015 8:20 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dont know if you didn't follow this argument or what (lol) but—(although I'm pretty sure he did explicitly say this movie was about raising awareness?)—I was responding to someone in this thread who claimed that criticism of the film was unwarranted bc it was raising alarm bells

an example of the kinds of articles that did not exist in the onion prior to 2012 http://www.theonion.com/article/chicago-introduces-new-citywide-gun-sharing-statio-37797

in august 2012 the onion even PARODIED the rise in coverage of chicago violence/its associated music in this article http://www.theonion.com/article/hot-new-murder-craze-sweeps-chicago-29349

also: lol at accusing Spike Lee of 'getting it wrong' by making his movie be about two big old rival gangs (what is this, West Side Story???) instead of a bunch of decentralized nodes of corner violence... only to promptly turn around and shit on everyone outside of Chicago as 'outsiders' who can't possibly understand that this city has a unique and historically unprecedented culture of violence, & why it would not be susceptible to a thousand-year-old riff on male psychology (SPOILER ALERT: part of the 'meaning' of a work like Lysistrata is that macho cultures like this go extinct)

― bernard snowy, Monday, December 14, 2015 8:24 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

your isolation of this particular macho culture from the macho american culture writ large seems like not the kind of thing spike lee would agree with

I really have no interest in the headless ouroboros of attacking your right to criticize someone else's right to criticize the critics of a movie that, as far as I know, neither of us have seen.

But given your responses throughout this thread, both to other posters and to "the thing itself" (in the rare cases when you seem to be engaging with it), it seems fair to say that you have a lot invested in this narrative of "the media" suddenly getting hip to Chicago violence in the last ~5 years, turning their cameras on it, & exploiting it for their own gain.

Even if we accept this oversimplification as true -- & I do think you're onto something when you talk about e.g. Fox News treating Chicago as a punching bag to be wheeled out regularly in service of the black-on-black-crime 'issue' -- But why not assume that Spike Lee's film is ALSO aware of, and addressed to, the whole fucked-up national media conversation in the background, to which you seem intent on reducing it? Why are you so unwilling to give this particular work the benefit of the doubt? Do you react similarly when a 'controversial' mixtape comes out of Chicago? Or do you listen to it first?

This is an honest question. I know from things you've posted upthread that you are not blind to the ethical issues involving artistic treatment of urban crime, but I think you are being (wait for it) oversensitive here, in your inability to move beyond the knee-jerk defensive posturing of "This movie should have never been made!"

And now, just so you know that all of the above written in good faith, untainted by personal antipathy towards you, I will give that antipathy free rein in this last paragraph, by suggesting that this post upthread:

it's certainly not weird that a white chicagoan who has made a career policing and criticising what is and isn't real black culture might not be interested in seeing a movie that places some of the blame for the violence in chicago on white gentrifiers

― balls, Tuesday, December 8, 2015 10:42 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh, that last part was unnecessary and I already regret it -- also forgot to mention that in your last post, you are 100% right, and I had no intention to isolate the 'culture' either geographically (it's a Chicago problem!!) or demographically (it's a black youth problem!!) -- as Spike Lee said in the interview where he responded to Chance, it's an American film, a film about guns... which is of course why it could be, and originally was, set in a 'nondescript urban environment'

the last part wasn't as much out of line as it is off the mark, balls has zero idea what hes talking abt

i dont disagree with what you're saying but in my defense the context of this argument was ppl who were—despite not having seen the movie themselves—out of hand dismissive of the film's critics, as if it was impossible that the film could have been a bad idea bc art...i just wanted to set the scale to zero, and suggest that its possible the film could be bad from a political pov, and not just an artistic one

http://pitchfork.com/news/62564-chance-the-rapper-further-slams-spike-lees-chi-raq-sings-donny-hathaways-this-christmas/

During the chat with WGCI's Chicago Morning Takeover, Chance responded to Lee's claims that Chance is biased because his father works for the city's mayor.
"I mean, Spike Lee is saying that 'cause he's promoting a movie. He's trying to make more money," Chance said. "He got his little 15 million from Amazon and his other little bread from Lionsgate and made a movie that was not about Chicago but, you know what I'm saying, manipulated and used Chicago actors and Chicago scenery to push this movie."
He added, "It was an oversimplification of a bigger problem. He wasn't really focusing on the issues of Chicago, it wasn't really about Chicago. To me, it was about this age-old conversation of black on black violence, which is to me some Bill Cosby 'pull up your pants' stuff. I’m just not for it."
He also said, "I was trying to explain to people outside of Chicago that it was marketed to that this isn't a representation of us and we're not rockin' with it."
In the movie, Nick Cannon and Wesley Snipes play two rival gang leaders, whose competition guides a lot of the drama. "The reason why we’re dying isn’t because there's two head gangbangers that are into it," Chance said. "We’re dying because we all have PTSD, you know, post-traumatic stress disorder. Kids as young as seven, and younger than that, have seen people murdered in front of them. So that starts a paranoia in your mind that you're walking around with. When you're walking around and you feel like people are trying to kill you, you shoot when you get scared. That's a problem that even I have. That's a problem that a lot of people suffer. And I feel like he didn't address that. He made it seem like we’re doing it because of gang life, and because our male ego is being compromised when we don't fight. But that’s the smallest form of it."

ppl who were—despite not having seen the movie themselves—

an interesting demographic to consider in light of this thread, eh

Deej, I got around to finishing your post upthread. I respect what you say re contemporary gangsta rap's troubled relationships with the communities it comes from, although I didn't understand the fruits of their labor bit, because I'm not sure what the labor is you're speaking of and why it's sacrosanct.

I also get "Bobby Brady's hero" vibes from talk of teenage grassroots support of gangsta rappers. Like my students think El Chapo Guzman is a wonderfully rakish and wily robber baron who exudes romantic nihilism and buys houses for the poor, in addition to being an astute political thinker and borderline genius engineer, so I've seen enough reality-starved minds, at least in relation to pop culture heroes, to be unsure exactly what teenage support of popular culture really means.

I do agree that criticizing the politics of the movie is fair game; I just don't think a clear distinction has been made between Spike Lee's responsibility and e.g. Mozzy's responsibility, especially when you take into account the style, audience, and personas of the artists.

I still disagree with the Chicago/drill zeitgeist argument, though. 2012 was Chicago's peak for homicide victims (not murder rate). I think it's far more likely that news organizations chased the story of 500 victims in a year rather than the story of violent lyrical content in music. As in the heyday of golden era gangsta rap, violent lyrics make a nice distracting anti-puff piece to hang on real murder trends, but the story of drill is an old story.

NYC-bred friend who is a huge fan of Spike's early-mid period thought this horrible, all complaints on aesthetic grounds: shallow treatment of women, juvenile humor etc.

I wil lse it if NY ever stops clotting my life with unmissable revivals.

*will see

If I were to clumsily work yr notable ilx interest in the various papacies into a pun about unrevivable missals youd no doubt feel picked on so I shall refrain

no idea what you're talking about, sorry

I'm a lapsed Catholic who would like to kill God if he exists, btw

ok missals i get it, you irish and yr humor