EAllusion wrote: But for now, those musical culture's relationship with poverty helps explain the content.
That claim won't stand up to historical or empirical scrutiny, but, again, no matter. Its the orthodox leftist catechism, and that's all the really counts.
People write what they know. We can understand that without agreeing with the message. You can find a story interesting without agreeing with the narrator.
Harlem in the 1930s was no more dangerous for either a white or black resident or club-hopper than in any other part of New York. Poverty itself has little, if anything to do with gansta culture and cultural artifacts.
Oh? Feel free to point to me your repeated complaints about "country music" culture.
I'm a bit dubious that there is anything like a "country-western" culture among whites in the same sense that there is a "thug" or underclass culture, and its glorification and parroting among people well outside that socioeconomic sphere, among the black population.
There is, of course, a white redneck culture that looks, in many ways, much like urban black redneck culture, but any particular example of country-western music doesn't necessarily represent that culture at all, depending on the artist and musical style.
It doesn't exist because it isn't a concern of yours and conservative media doesn't harp on it like it does "hip hop" culture in the most obvious race-baiting, "kids these days..." appeal to older white demographics one can imagine.
Again you make crystal clear that, like most leftists, you have no more understanding - hermetically sealed as most liberals are in their own highly self-selected and buffered intellectual world - regarding the main currents of contemporary conservative thought than does my dog.
I suspect that a part of the reason for what you think you perceive here is that the social pathologies extolled in country-western music are not a part of a highly visible body of social pathology that exists in
grossly disproportionate degree in listeners of country music and wearers of western style clothing and who speak with a southern accent, as is the case with the glorification of underclass culture in Hip-Hop and Rap.
My complaint was about your focus on one to the neglect of the other. Your post was actually filled with racial stereotyping where "hip hop" acts as a simple replacement for "black" in negative cultural attitudes.
This is simply ideological posturing and moral prating now, not critical argumentation. Once you realize you can't (or won't) deal in a philosophically substantive manner with the subject, you retreat to the classic leftist tactic of moral grandstanding and the psychologizing of motives, finding, in good Freudian fashion, "racial stereotyping" in intellectual critique of certain cultural attributes of a specific sub-group of people, who you clearly believe to be untouchable, philosophically.
To be logically consistent, however, you're going to have to extend your criticisms to Star Parker, Shelby Steel, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Robert Woodson, Ward Connerly, Alan Keys, Ken Hamblin, Larry Elders, Clarance Thomas, Allen West, Thomas Chatterton Williams etc., etc.
Now, don't be shy, E. Go ahead and pull out the next race card from the bottom of your deck. Its labeled the "Uncle Thomas Sowell" card.
Go ahead, E. I know this ideological game well.
Well, Good. You've already lost the argument, so perhaps the rest is just "mopping up."
You might as well(have said "watermelon eaters" and got huffy when anyone saw racial overtones to the comment. If your too obtuse to recognize the parallels and how the media you consume is influenced by them, that's your problem.
You're ranting E., having already descended, at the outset, to the classic moral self-congratulatory tropes and self-satisfied grandstanding that passes for philosophical argumentation and intellectual seriousness among the Anointed.
There is, of course, room for cultural criticism of the content of much of popular rap/hip-hop music that can be done without such problems, but you're too ignorant to offer it.
They're only "problems" from within a particular ideological framework, a framework that is complicit in both the creation and maintenance of those very social pathologies, and hardly only among American blacks.
Heh. You've never heard that song?
Uh...no. Should I have? I was born and raised in the West, not the South, and was never interested in such music, and never have been.
That kind of blows a hole in your claims to deep, deep study of certain cultural issues that you try to trot out to underwrite your opinions. Awesome, Mr. Autodidact.
OK E. Right...whatever. You're not lucid, E. Splash some cold water on your face and come back into the arena of ideas sober.
Jazz faced literally the exact same stereotyping as a low-brow, low-class musical form encouraging and celebrating immoral, criminal behavior that hip-hop does today. Of course, it is and was associated with some of that, but there's much more to it than that. It's only overtime that Jazz gradually was adopted into mainstream culture and obtained artistic respectability. Of course, that happened quite some time ago. It's no coincidence that both Jazz and Hip-Hop developed initially in predominantly black circles where racial stereotyping influenced the cultural attitudes towards them.
Its also quite clear that none of this is anything but your own ad hoc speculations on the matter, intended to keep your ideological train of the tracks. It's true that Jazz was originally thought of a low-brow and unrefined, in some circles. However, by the early 40s it had become the core of the entire Big Band movement and matured in its own right among both blacks and whites, generally. Secondly, there was no "thug" culture among blacks at that time that celebrated anti-civilizational attitudes and values and no statistically significant differences in social pathology between blacks and whites. The Game wouldn't have been tolerated for 2 seconds among the vast majority of either urban or rural blacks, pre-1960s, anymore than you could have found
Hustler being sold at a local 7-11 at the time.
Thirdly, although blacks were, unlike today, overwhelmingly poor, thought of as second-class citizens, and were the victims of real, pervasive racism and discrimination, there was no underclass among blacks generally as we understand that term post-1960s, and no entire sub-culture generated from and supportive and justificational of that demographic group. Nor, unlike the last forty years or so, were their many white liberal intellectuals like yourself around to excuse, justify, applaud, and pay obeisance to that culture and its cultural productions.
Hip-hop is newer, though old enough now to also be gradually be introduced into canonical artforms just the same as Jazz before it. This isn't 1982. At the end of the day, there's a lot of room for what one can do with beats and a certain style of vocal delivery just the same as jazz arrangements. You're just too old to see that.
You're a sanctimonious boor, E. I mean, really, a sanctimonious leftist boor. I was around and remember one of the first rap songs to get any major airplay in the late seventies, Frankie Smith's Double Dutch Bus, and I thought it was a cute piece (especially the Popeye voice imitation). I liked M.C. Hammer's stuff, and have listened to some other rap that I did not find offensive. I'm still not big on the musical style itself, but that's a matter of taste, not of philsophical critique.
You're a fantastic example, E., of why most intellectually mature adults in this society simply roll their eyes and walk away anymore from leftists when they start to talk, as very few intellectually mature and truly educated adults wish to be talked down to by smug, sanctimonious moral prigs as if they were children and told they're uneducated dunces when, in point of fact, they probably moved beyond the average liberal intellectually before they were out of their teens.
So why aren't you complaining about the legacy of "Jazz culture" Droopy?
Because it has no particular cultural legacy outside of its own contribution to the fund of the world's great music. Tell me what social pathologies are either spawned or given justification by
Good Bye Pork Pie Hat?
Further, I mentioned pop music in general and grunge and various forms of heavy metal in a previous post, and all of these genres are associated almost solely with middle class and working class white society. Why no acknowledgement of that, E? Would that take the wind out of your multiculturalist sails? I've been highly critical of much white popular music and culture in the past, over many years, in fact. Why no acknowledgement of that?
As to Country music, my disdain for it, and much of the culture it represents has always been so, well, acute, that I've never paid much attention to it at all. Sorry if I'm no expert on Conway Twitty and Brooks and Dunn.
