Ignorance

nataliedee.com

I often find myself in this situation. And while I am aware it is impossible to like every song and every artist out there, I think it shows nothing but close-mindedness and (sometimes) racist and/or elitist tendencies to dismiss rap music and country music as dross in a white-man's music world of bands as crappy as Nickelback. "Rap has bad lyrics" is usually followed by an "But I like Eminem", which furthers my inkling that there are possible racist tendencies in play here. Give the ultra-violent homophobic rapper who happens to be white some critical acclaim! While I will say he has some talent, and I do like some of his songs, there is a plethora of other artists out there that you discredit totally. And more than enough of them are just as good if not better than Eminem. They're just not white.

Rap has bad lyrics? How about Nickelback's #1 hit, 'Photograph':

Look at this photograph/Every time I do it makes me laugh/How did our eyes get so red/and what the hell is on Joey's Head?

So inspiring, it was a #1 hit for weeks. Does anyone else get the image of George Orwell's proles in 1984 singing along to meaningless garbage? Sure, MIMS' hit, 'Why I'm Hot' produced even more nauseatingly bad lyrics... But my point is I don't discredit the entirety of rock/alternative music due to Nickelback. Get a grip, and have an open mind.

Take rap artist M.I.A. for example. Born in Sri Lanka to a Tamil rebel family, she had to flee as a child to London. Both influence her music, a slightly abrasive, unique blend of sounds with a distinct urban feel, and often a tinge of bollywood. In her song 20 Dollar, (a sweltering hot remix of the Pixies' 'Where is my mind') she spits these lyrics among other just as poignant and profoundly political criticisms:

Do you know the cost of A.K.'s up in Africa?/Twenty dollars ain't shit to you/But that's how much they are

Price of livin' in a shanty-town jus' seem to be high/but we still look fly/we still like T.I./Dancin as we shootin' up/ An' lootin' jus' to get by

I was born out of dirt like porn in a skirt/I was a little girl who made good with all I blurt

Yeah, perhaps you don't like rap because of the lyrics. Perhaps it is because you are too stupid to understand them. Or perhaps you discredit an entire genre because you don't want to understand it (See: Title of Post).

Well that was a rather elaborate rant... for an introduction. You may be asking 'what does this have to do with sports, sexuality, or politics?'.

Enter Mike Huckabee, stage left:

HUCKABEE: And the way it affects them is that we need to understand that violence and terror is significant when it happens in Pakistan, it’s more significant when it happens in our own cities, and it happens if people can slip across our border and we have no control over it.

Whoops, how did that script get in here. Whoa, that's no script, its an honest-to-god quote. And I thought this was bad.

I'm not so much worried about this guy being elected as I am the general view he stands for, and how popular it is today. Does America see the slaying of a western-educated (Harvard) female former-leader of a Muslim country as a springboard for fear mongering regarding the border? Do we have no sympathy, or is it a total lack of class? Is it more significant when it happens here than when it happens there, as Huckabee suggested?

This here/there logic needs to be put to rest. We all live in the same world, and we should pay close attention to what is going on around us. To understand what is going on, we need to educate ourselves on the world. This is just another case of dismissing a real moment to learn in favor of something stupid and fanciful. I hate the word, but thinking that illegal immigrants and gay people are the biggest threats to our freedom in the United States is either fanciful or just plain biased. I would like to think that perhaps with all of the other things going wrong, many citizens have adopted these beliefs solely to have someone to blame. No need to be informed if you have a neat and tidy logic for everything that is wrong.

Whenever I see someone pick on the weakest segments of American society (one can't even vote due to their status, yet try and tell me they aren't part of American society), I cringe at the millions of people who buy it. Churches do it to keep people in the pews, and politicians do it to keep people at the polls.

These same fear tactics have caused the most significant restrictions on civil rights and liberties since the segregation era. For you homophobic, xenophobic (immigrant-hating) types, this may be seen as a good thing, but the repression extends further, to even you. Our own phobias are destroying our foundations, leaving our society on the verge of collapse (in a purely metaphorical sense, I hope).

I think FDR's line resounds louder today, in a much more haunting way, than it did in the great depression:

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"