ODD FUTURE WOLF GANG KILL THEM ALL

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

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

um, i don't think that anyone here is saying precisely that. and the few times the discussion has swung in that direction, it's self-corrected pretty quickly, without the need for ridiculous hyperbole.

i wonder whether tyler's youth figures into the indulgence that some older and presumably wiser pundits seem to grant him

of course it does

i wonder whether tyler's youth figures into the indulgence that some older and presumably wiser pundits seem to grant him

Judging by this thread, YES! *resounds*

Yet another rap thread boiled down to deej asserting that everyone but him listens to the wrong hip hop or the right hip hop for the wrong reasons.

Its really hard not to read deej's posts as some weird assumption that anyone claiming to enjoy OFWGKTA automatically rejects "real rap".

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

― D40 (D-40), Thursday, May 12, 2011 8:44 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

come on, morals and aesthetics are the products of culture

i wonder whether tyler's youth figures into the indulgence that some older and presumably wiser pundits seem to grant him

of course it does

― lex pretend, Thursday, May 12, 2011 11:51 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

gonna be interesting in like 2 years when this is no longer a remotely valid "excuse"

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.

― the first rule of debate club (Edward III), Thursday, May 12, 2011 10:27 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

afaict this is what deej is responding to and imo it is the kind of mental backflip rationalization Edward was scolding other people for earlier, and ends up coming off pretty condescending about the unnamed masses of "other rappers"

gonna be interesting in like 2 years when this is no longer a remotely valid "excuse"

Fear not, someone younger will have come along to make you lot feel even more ancient and out of touch

gonna be interesting in like 2 years when this is no longer a remotely valid "excuse"

absolutely, as j0rdan pointed out earlier tyler's set himself up in a bit of a lose-lose position w/r/t his future career

xpost Right. Name those rappers and then we have a useful conversation. If Edward wants to say that Ice Cube or Sadat X's ideological homophobia (albeit only on isolated records, later recanted) bothers him more than Tyler's scattergun, shock-value abuse, I can go with that, but I don't know who this anonymous tough-guy rapper is meant to be.

I don't care what rap u do or don't like, just tire of hypocritical moral justifications built on logical fallacies

I don't know if people are making justifications of Tyler so much as drawing distinctions, which are valid. Just like there's a difference between a generic threat of violence and Method Man threatening to "keep feedin' you an feedin' you". (Not that it's an exact comparison but you know what I mean.)

just fyi for you guys who don't keep up w/sadat x & lord jamar they both still drop homophobic stuff on their (underrated & often completely great) records which nobody but me hears so it's kind of a non-issue

quite appropriate for this to just pop up in my twitter feed - great ann powers piece on these very questions (with ref to OF)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/05/12/136203968/irresponsible-listening-a-fans-confession

NORE's quick to throw out some homophobic shit too
http://www.theboombox.com/2009/07/14/n-o-r-e-to-perez-i-respect-gay-people-but-i-hate-f-s/

afaict this is what deej is responding to and imo it is the kind of mental backflip rationalization Edward was scolding other people for earlier, and ends up coming off pretty condescending about the unnamed masses of "other rappers"

well yeah I'll own that, it was just my clumsy way of working myself into this point

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

with the point being that I can think of examples of real hateful homophobia (albeit dated ones) in rap I just don't follow the shit closely enough anymore, in comparison with tyler (as a provocateur, not an auteur) who just knows what words are gonna piss ppl off and uses them to excess

I know there's a complicated relationship between hip-hop and prison/street culture and homosexuality, and I'm not saying all rappers are horrible homophobes, ok. plus I don't have to justify my liking of tyler or any other rapper, it's just music + words + shadows on the wall.

I'd actually much rather get back to talking about the music, sorry I contributed to the continuing thinkpiecification of this thread...

I don't care what rap u do or don't like, just tire of hypocritical moral justifications built on logical fallacies

that's reasonable, but i don't think there's a whole lot of that going on in this thread. i have moral qualms about tyler's misogyny - and, to a lesser extent, his "faggot" talk - but they're couched in an awareness of goblin's fundamental goofiness and triviality. he's not even trying to convince you that he's serious about any of it. the only thing he's sincere about are his hurt feelings.

for comparison's sake, i had similar qualms about NWA's "straight outta compton" back in 88. i found its glorification of violence repellent (and entertaining), especially in light of the fact that the group did seem to take their gangster cred fairly seriously. i loved that song to death back then and love it still, but the sense of moral vertigo it induces hasn't entirely disappeared.

fwiw, the sense that the violent bleakness of a song like "straight outta compton", for all its obvious cartoonishness, is reflective (to some degree) of lived experience does give it a political significance against which to calibrate one's "moral qualms." that kind of depth is way out of goblin's league.

yeah, I went through that too with NWA after dr dre assaulted dee barnes. here were guys who weren't just rapping about slapping women, they were in fact roughing them up irl.

in comparison, tyler threw a milkshake at somebody.

I don't understand what the purpose is with these comparisons.you say it's just about dielineating differences but it seems more like trying to minimize what tyler is doing.

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.

― Pop is superior to all other genres (DL), Thursday, May 12, 2011 10:27 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

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

― Pop is superior to all other genres (DL), Thursday, May 12, 2011 10:28 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

still tho don't let nubian off the hook, the five percent is not very welcoming to gays iirc

Do you guys want specific examples or not? Jesus.

I'm just saying I been through a lot of rap controversies and this seems like much ado about nothing

xp to deej

aw man i've always liked brand nubian

deej, some dude, and lex are being otm in this thread

dude, lex, your odd future thing is good. i like reading different responses to this stuff. its interesting. art should create debate more often.

esp some dude about how people are acting like all rapper say fag as much as tyler, it's just not true

slept on jam imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hANiwvYScS4

recently I saw some dude outside pissing on a car parked next to mine and then I felt bad about bothering him because I get pee shy sometimes and empathized with what he may feel if I started talking to him

so I didn't bother him, and then I got these flashbacks of this one time when I was completely wasted and outside and pissing on cars for no reason and I felt bad

aw man you shoulda said hi if you recognized me

you pissed on a car? worse than shake throwing imo

hey man it was MY car

we talked about some heavy shit today without grandstanding or snarkfest

I feel like this is a good model for ilm behavior

hey i'm not a role model!

what do you guys do when someone around says fag irl

I am non-confrontational, I just get like all "oh..." and have thoughts