-10 for misunderstanding music.

You know rap (or any other musical form) is dead when people start telling artists what they should rap about. The mere idea that music, like television, is merely a medium for sale to the highest bidder (or loftiest goal) independent or indeed in spite of its writers, composers and artists, is how we get the dumbing down – the consumerification – of art.

It’s how we get the remake of Fame, a whitewashed, watered down, safe version of a better movie. It’s as if the producers cynically believe people can’t deal with reality and thus try to put on the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia and moral righteousness as much as they can in order to make it palatable to people not in the mood to be challenged or… motherfucker. That’s what it is, isn’t it?

Also, this. Tennis player gets a bad call in the middle of a big match, loses shit. No story. What, she’s Black? STORY!

Says AIG, “We’ll give half back.”

“Okay,” says America, “we’ll only beat you half to death.”

Have these people no shame?

With that aside out of the way, I noted a weird confluence of gamer diatribes about race, what with Ben Croshaw’s social commentary on 50 Cent’s second computer game, and Shamus Young’s refutation that Resident Evil 5 has racial overtones. Both have sort of a hard-hitting tell-all motif that immediately become muddled by their tittering comments boards’ nervous glee at having landed a blow on overzealous political correctness.

Why nervous? Because they’re all one-upping each other about why X or Y is providing a good or bad model for Blacks or why A or B is or isn’t offensive to Blacks, but they’re not really getting any Black input. The online gamer demographic is largely white and middle class, and so the rather voluminous debates take on a vaguely scandalous tone, as if they’re getting away with something. In a sense, they are: They’re confirming their convictions through repeating one another. But that, still, muddles the topic at hand. Read the rest of this entry »

So sayeth R-FS* Michele Bachmann to GOP leader Michael Steele.

Some good may come of this. For starters, Republicans may once and for all kill gangster-inflected hiphop.

*Flyover State