ODD FUTURE WOLF GANG KILL THEM ALL

i specifically said tyler's misogyny bothered me more than his homophobia. the misogyny i'm "okay" with tends not to be based around violence or rape: the word "bitch" is far more normalised, and perhaps it shouldn't be, but i'd say it has actually been successfully reclaimed by women, in and out of hip-hop, as a potentially positive word. way more than faggot, at any rate. so it's not an exact parallel. as for objectification, it's yet another situation and the problem is culture-wide really - i don't really have a problem with objectification in individual pop/rap/whatever songs

so maybe we need to talk about desensitization

haha ok so NOW instead of talking about how desensitized young rappers throw around offensive words, you want to shift the conversation to listeners being so desensitized by OF's rape jokes and homophobic slurs that they're desensitized to OF saying "bitch"? fascinating, man, fascinating.

thanks for making up an argument for me, have fun with that straw man there

lex do you think the word "faggot" could get reclaimed?

I love how this thread is pretty much people talking across each other rather than to each other, but I guess thats pretty much ilx in a nutshell.

w/r/t "bitch", i can't think of a female rapper who doesn't use it as a positive term to describe herself and her female crew. one of the most prominent feminist publications around right now is called bitch. maybe 99% of all women i know use it. it's obviously completely different when a str8 male rapper uses it but even then i'm struck by how much it's used in a value-neutral sense, and often as the equivalent of "n*gga" - ie vicious slurs just used as substitutes for "men" and "women"

maybe "faggot" can be reclaimed but not by str8 dudes using it as a pejorative, which - whatever tyler's motivation - us the same ol' same ol'

that was just my best guess of whatever the hell "so maybe we need to talk about desensitization" meant, sorry

'Because I Got Uruk Hai'

― PG Harpy (Doran), Thursday, 12 May 2011 14:24 (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

'Me, My Elf And I'

― PG Harpy (Doran), Thursday, 12 May 2011 14:26 (28 minutes ago) Bookmark

Shadrach, Neshach, Wendigo.

I'd rather talk about desensitization in the macro sense - like going back to my point about rap songs not having any curses in them -> gangsta rap, constant use of bitch -> now everybody shrugs. maybe this just the way reclamation works in the 21st century?

and I'm not excusing his use of it but I don't think tyler's ever called a gay man a faggot, it provides something of a remove from its sluriness for me, whereas your run-of-the-mill misogynistic tough-guy rapper wouldn't think twice about calling a gay man a faggot. there's no lines here like eazy e's (selfhating?) "this is one faggot that I had to hurt".

underrated seems troubled by tyler's irl use of faggot but I'm guessing a lot of rappers call women bitches irl.

I dunno maybe irl they're all like "bitch? never! that would violate my code of literary license m'lady let me get the door for you"

I don't think tyler's ever called a gay man a faggot, it provides something of a remove from its sluriness for me, whereas your run-of-the-mill misogynistic tough-guy rapper wouldn't think twice about calling a gay man a faggot

at least give us an example of a tough-guy rapper amidst all these hazy hypotheticals

guy who uses the F-word on record, in interviews and on twitter 10 times as much as any "run-of-the-mill misogynistic tough-guy rapper" i can think of but it's all good because you know in your heart of hearts he wouldn't say it when it REALLY matters and they totally would

good thing our culture's desensitization to vulgarity is coupled with the massive sense of entitlement necessary to expect artists to be role models.

lex no shots fired but:

which is why the "it's just a word that 4chan kids use to piss off old squares" argument is so dumb, because it's a word that signifies old squares and old bigots to me, and using it so much just makes tyler seem totally regressive and like an old square himself.

w/r/t "bitch", i can't think of a female rapper who doesn't use it as a positive term to describe herself and her female crew. one of the most prominent feminist publications around right now is called bitch. maybe 99% of all women i know use it. it's obviously completely different when a str8 male rapper uses it but even then i'm struck by how much it's used in a value-neutral sense, and often as the equivalent of "n*gga" - ie vicious slurs just used as substitutes for "men" and "women"

this is an interesting argument, but...

there's a vast world of difference between women (and specifically, the women behind a feminist magazine) reclaiming the word "bitch" for their own use, and men using that language to aggressively degrade and threaten women. it's loosely comparable to the difference between people of color reclaiming racist language for their own purposes, and socially empowered whites using it in the form of hate speech.

this is precisely the problem with tyler's use of the word "faggot". if he were gay himself, then it would probably be much less objectionable. just as if he were a woman, his seeming misogyny might be less overwhelmingly offensive.

yeah i agree completely, hence "it's obviously completely different when a str8 male rapper uses it"

good thing our culture's desensitization to vulgarity is coupled with the massive sense of entitlement necessary to expect artists to be role models.

would say that there's some wiggle room between expecting artists to be "role models" and attaching moral weight to language

hence "it's obviously completely different when a str8 male rapper uses it"

fair enough. i read more equivocation than you intended into that paragraph and your prior post ("the word "bitch" is far more normalised, and perhaps it shouldn't be, but...")

no slam intended, all apologies

Seems reasonable to accept that artists/rappers/rockstars can say whatever they want, express themselves however they see fit, and if it bothers me too much I won't pay them any more attention. Maybe people who are offended by Tyler's language are just announcing that fact, but it sounds an awful lot like they want him to change what language he uses. If I invited Tyler over for dinner and he tried to rape and murder the other guests, or just called them bitches and faggots, I'd be perturbed, but I doubt it'd go down that way. Demanding people to behave in their art is like expecting myself to behave in my dreams.

some dude, you got me, all my examples of homophobia in rap are pretty rusty, if you think the problem was solved I can stand down

If I invited Tyler over for dinner and he tried to rape and murder the other guests, or just called them bitches and faggots, I'd be perturbed

lol

http://www.amazon.com/Hip-Hop-Homophobes-TowardsGays-Perpetuated-AgainstHomosexuality/dp/0595475418

Can't believe people are still pulling this straw rapper homophobe who really means it to contrast with tyler so they feel less guilty about putting up with his offensiveness while degenerating rap as a whole for not living up to their demanding standards for ethics

Can't believe the wikipedia page for "faggot" has a fagbug

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2008-09-27_Fagbug_in_Durham.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2008-09-27_Fagbug_in_Durham.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/2008-09-27_Fagbug_in_Durham.jpg

want to see Lil B driving that in his next video

LOL OTM

would you be as sanguine about the fundamental harmlessness of language if tyler were making virulently racist jokes? perhaps you would, but a lot of people wouldn't. we all draw our lines somewhere, even in choosing not to draw any lines at all, and that's okay.

anyway, i'm not trying to censor tyler. i bought the record, and on some level i like it, though in trying to settle my ethical qualms about my relationship to it, i'm finding myself more rather than less unsettled as time goes by. i agree that everybody should be able to say whatever they like, and that there's a weird quality of juvenile triviality to tyler's calculated provocations that renders them oddly toothless and sometimes even endearing.

at the same time, i think it's perfectly appropriate to calmly express moral squeamishness when you experience it.

see my fagbug shining

that last to kerm, in response to this:

Seems reasonable to accept that artists/rappers/rockstars can say whatever they want, express themselves however they see fit, and if it bothers me too much I won't pay them any more attention.

some dude, you got me, all my examples of homophobia in rap are pretty rusty, if you think the problem was solved I can stand down

― the first rule of debate club (Edward III), Thursday, May 12, 2011 10:47 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

of course it wasn't "solved," but I mean Rick Ross or 50 Cent or T.I. or Kanye might say the F-word on record once every couple years, and I can give you specific examples BECAUSE each time caused at least a minor uproar in the media or online. obviously saying it now and again isn't intrinsically "better" or more excusable than saying it 14 times in one album and a bazillion other times in interviews and tweets, but it's definitely in kind of a different category.

the last mainstream rapper i can remember using the F-word anywhere near as much as Tyler does was in waning years of DMX's career, when his sanity and sobriety was generally in question and it was just one more reason for audiences in general to kind of cautiously back away from the hateful lunatic he was becoming

I guess I'm making a distinction between folks who actively hate gay ppl, think they are god's abomination or just second-class citizens or whatever, (I remember reading pretty hateful shit in interviews back in the day and yeah I got no specifics besides lol buju banton), and folks who think 'faggot' is just some shit you call somebody like 'asshole'

there's a rude ignorance in the latter and an actual real danger in the former

maybe that distinction is some bullshit on my part but it's similar to some ppl's thoughts on varg itt

[tyler] doesn't give a shit what it signifies to you because you're an old square. this stuff folds in on itself like a tesseract but even so, you gotta dig that you, as a critic for a newspaper, are old establishment to a nineteen year old and what you consider to be representative of dumbfuck regressive square society don't mean shit to a kid raised on teletubbies

― beefaroni merchant, part-time fish tank bitch. (forksclovetofu), Thursday, May 12, 2011 7:36 AM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark

: forks on tyler's use of the word "faggot," in response to lex's suggestion that such use makes tyler, "seem totally regressive and like an old square himself."

forks OTM. tyler's homophobic slurs don't cause me to picture him as a gross old bigot. instead, they make me think that he's a lot younger than i am, and that his culture and mine don't always see eye to eye. thus all my objections to his speech come couched in an awareness of my own lol u r old-ness. which makes tyler's stance a neat trick: anyone who's got a problem is just too dumb or serious or old-fashioned to really get it.

perhaps this is part of why some who might otherwise be repelled by the apparent misogyny (myself included, tbph) are so quick to forgive tyler his youthful indiscretions. we don't want to feel as though we've become "the old guard."

I don't think language is harmless. I just said if it offended me I'd stop patronizing it, *as opposed to* expecting the artist to change or expecting everyone to be offended by the same things.

I think the ethical qualms emerge for each listener individually. How the art influences the listener's behavior, whether you start using the same language, whether you listen to the artist in mixed company. Yes I understand that language and themes in popular culture can be absorbed by that culture, for better or for worse.. But my position is that an artist has no obligation to clean up their art out of concern for the children or whatever.

And, again, expressing moral squeamishness about it is totally within our rights ("Maybe people who are offended by Tyler's language are just announcing that fact,").. it's the often implied demand for the artist to change that I take issue with.. This seems to happen way more with rappers than any other form of creative expression. There's plenty of violence and vulgarity in film and tv and even other genres of music, and it gets "frowned upon" by the usual normals/old squares/local news anchors, but rarely is it framed as a demand for change the way it is with rap.

I'm making a distinction between folks who actively hate gay ppl, think they are god's abomination or just second-class citizens or whatever ... and folks who think 'faggot' is just some shit you call somebody like 'asshole'

there's a rude ignorance in the latter and an actual real danger in the former

maybe that distinction is some bullshit on my part but it's similar to some ppl's thoughts on varg itt

― the first rule of debate club (Edward III), Thursday, May 12, 2011 8:12 AM (45 seconds ago) Bookmark

this. i'm more likely to chalk tyler's "faggot" talk up to dumb-kid rudeness than to real bigotry, but as i said yesterday, the question's by no means settled.

it's not settled, but a) he's straight up said he doesn't hate gay ppl, b) there's a gay person in his crew, and c) he rhymes about putting on panties and dancing around the house

so I'd be kinda surprised if he turned out to be some hateful gaybasher, less surprised if he came out of the closet in 5 years or so

lots of white people say "I'm not racist" immediately before saying the N-word fyi

xpost to Edward III - Sadat X's line in Brand Nubian's Punks Jump Up is the classic eg of deeply felt homophobia in hip hop

Though I can freak, fly, flow, fuck up a faggot.
Don’t understand their ways I ain’t down with gays.

Though according to Wikipedia, the version on The Very Best of Brand Nubian drops those lines.

that's v true

xxp

There's plenty of violence and vulgarity in film and tv and even other genres of music, and it gets "frowned upon" by the usual normals/old squares/local news anchors, but rarely is it framed as a demand for change the way it is with rap.

not so sure about this. it's partly a product of the popularity of the genre/media in question. like, there were plenty of direct calls for censorship of music of all sorts (including but hardly limited to rap, often focusing specifically on heavy metal) back in the 80s. now that metal's no longer the pop force it was, such demands have died down. strong and sometimes legislative objections to violent video game content, however, go on to this day. tbph, i rarely hear sincere public demands for the censorship of rap music.

you say, "it's the often implied demand for the artist to change that I take issue with." okay, but how do we register our discomfort with certain sorts of speech without at least implying that we wish the speaker were saying something else? there's a difference, after all, between saying that something offends us and calling for it to be banned outright.

we don't want to feel as though we've become "the old guard."

This is a bit pathetic, isn't it?

... more in the original sense than the later sense, but both apply to some degree

the backflips you guys do to justify listening to something so obviously hateful while maintaining your moral superiority over 'regular rap' is breathtaking to behold

If you would just admit its more about cultural and aesthetic differences rather than some kind of moral stand it'd be a lot more bearable

Yeah ok the video game violence point is legit... so maybe it's just the ebb an flow of what's popular and offensive.

okay, but how do we register our discomfort with certain sorts of speech without at least implying that we wish the speaker were saying something else?

You say you don't like the speech and go listen to something else? I guess I'm approaching hairsplitting territory, but my standard frame of criticism isn't usually "artist X should be less Y, for me to care."

while maintaining your moral superiority over 'regular rap'

Who is doing this?

The people claiming everything tyler does is some kind of considered auteur affect while the rest of the genre is full of regressive gay hating neanderthals

This is a bit pathetic, isn't it?

of course it is. i wonder whether tyler's youth figures into the indulgence that some older and presumably wiser pundits seem to grant him. since i can't parse my own motivations with 100% percent accuracy, i didn't want to excuse myself from this criticism.

if you're talking about me deej I've been listening to and defending rap to ppl for almost 30 years so don't give me that shit