Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:Yes, this vile cesspool of humanity also drinks beer, used hard drugs, has multiple divorces, has slept with many women outside the bonds of marriage, and advocates marijuana legalization. What is it about this man that is so different from The Game other than his cool mellow rifts, and the color of his skin?
Where are these attributes and personal values extolled, valorized, glorified, expressed, honored, lauded, and celebrated in his music? Where does Mr. Holdsworth venerate and lionize an entire cultural model grounded in those behaviors and attitudes? Where does Mr. Holdsworth call female critics of his music bitches? Where has Mr. Holdsworth expressed feeling threatened by a critic of his personal lifestyle choices because his personal lifestyle choices represent an entire sub-culture centered in those kinds of behaviors and values? Where has Mr. Holdsworth publicly blasphemed and mocked things sacred to others?
Here's another song I used to like that very well expresses what usually happens when a typical leftist paints himself into yet another corner:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHoPYLQvnQMWhat if, instead of Holdsworth, I had used as an example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-xRldjmfwgI saw DeJohnette at The Backdoor at SDSU in the late seventies when he was with New Directions in Jazz with John Abercrombie. He's a fantastic artist who exemplifies the open, free-from, improvisational modern jazz style I cam to love in my early youth.
He also happens to be black, and he was high as a kite when I saw him play that night. So then, does his being black absolve me from the innate original sin of being a Caucasion critic of welfare underclass culture and its values, attitudes, and social effects, or does his not being a choir boy in his personal life have some logical relation to what someone like Snoop Dog, The Game, DMX, or Ice Tea do publicly?
DeJohnette, after all, didn't write tunes glorifying an entire culture grounded in unwed motherhood, male sexual predation, machismo posturing, drug use, crime, and violence, anti-intellectualism, racism and racial paranoia, ethnic separatism, and misogyny. Nor about drug use, as far as I know.
Nor has Holdsworth.
In the same vein, groups like Kiss, Motley Crue, and Guns 'N Roses have long exemplified the same kinds of antinomian, anti-civilizational tendencies within the context of white, working class and middle class youth culture ("I wanna rock n' roll all night, and party every day...") and which exemplified a particular rationalization of the attitudes and value shifts of the late sixties.
Its all much of a piece, but each has its own sub-cultural emphasis and idiosyncrasies. The black redneck culture of the inner city underclass and the white, working class/middle class party hardy culture of the blue collar suburbs share certain similarities, but also diverge in the degree of expression of certain tendencies (primarily as to fundamental assumptions about the core legitimacy of the society's fundamental institutions and structure and the absence of a fixation on racial identity).
