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It's another of my popular, audience-grabbing walls of text! This time with a content warning for violence against women, transphobia, racism and racist lyrics, and cultural analysis. You won't be able to put it down! ('Cause it's not a physical object! HA!)
---------------------------
One of the CDs I grabbed for my trip to Posi's place yesterday was The Beatles'* Rubber Soul. One song on that album ("In My Life") reminisces about all the "places and things" and "friends and lovers" the singer has known through his life; how he will always hold them in great affection even as he loves his current partner more than any of them. I love the recognition that there is room in the heart for tender feelings that stretch beyond a single person and a single time. It's really sweet.
Another song ("Run For Your Life") threatens violence against the narrator's partner, telling her she'd "better run for your life if you can little girl," and he'd rather see her dead than with another man. Musical whiplash in one album!
I thought about the context of those two songs as part of the same greater creative work, and what I know about the time that created them, and similar contemporary music (see Jimi Hendrix singing "Hey Joe",), and in the end I could only think to myself, "culture is really complicated."
(And that's not the only such instance in the Beatles' oeuvre. Whenever I hear a snippet of the Beatles' "Getting Better", I think of Lennon singing:
"I used to be cruel to my woman
I beat her and kept her apart
From the things that she loved
Man I was mean
But I'm changing my scene
And I'm doing the best that I can."
But it still worked wonderfully for a GE advertising campaign a while ago because it's such a happy, upbeat, classic song, right!?)
Anyway, this morning, listening to a David Byrne album on the way to work, I heard "Now I'm Your Mom," a potentially offensive song from the perspective of a trans woman, and thought about Lou Reed.
A few months ago at work, Lou Reed came up as a topic of conversation between myself and two co-workers. I think we were talking about Walk on the Wild Side because it had come up in a public to-do about potential transphobia in its mention of Holly Woodlawn:
---
"Holly came from Miami F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she..."
---
The song was played at a college-related event and some students felt this was inappropriate because it minimized and/or ridiculed the process of gender transitioning. But Reed, and probably the bulk of listeners who understood the context, saw the whole song as a love letter to the weirdos and freaks of New York in general, and the acquaintances of Andy Warhol in particular. “Paul Morrissey made me a star," said Woodlawn, "but Lou Reed made me immortal.”
Because it's relevant, one coworker, 1, is a Black woman. As we talked about "Walk on the Wild Side," the other coworker, 2, clearly felt awkward about explaining why Walk on the Wild Side was racially insensitive. I personally didn't feel like a line referring to "colored girls" singing was out of line as a historical reference, so I quoted the line for 1 so she wasn't sitting in information limbo while we tiptoed around it. Later, when just 1 and I were talking, she pointed me at lyrics she'd found when reading up on Lou Reed. From I Wanna Be Black:
----
"I want to be black
Have natural rhythm
Shoot twenty feet of jism..."
"Have a girlfriend named Samantha
And have a stable of foxy whores..."
---
And that's leaving out a lot of other lines that would be, to put it mildly, inappropriate in a present-day context.
I think I said something like "Wow. That's really not ok." Because there wasn't really anything else to be said about that at that point. How do you understand and respond to something like that? Later, I looked around the internet to get an understanding of the context and to help me relate the song to the artist and his thoughts and intentions. I'm not going to try to contextualize it here because it's still rather outside my experience and understanding.
Sometimes people's reactions to problematic behavior on the part of content creators means is to believe that all of the content produced by that creator is indelibly stained by their thoughts and words and must be forever shunned. (Of course forever is a short time these days, but that's a tangent.) Whose work could we actually appreciate then, other than perhaps Fred Rogers?
I think there are things that shouldn't be part of the popular culture of TV, radio, and other such media. Things like Walk on the Wild Side and - another piece of media I haven't touched on here - Baby It's Cold Outside for instance. For a significant portion of people who hear them, they exist outside of their context and, in that way, are perfectly legitimate targets of serious criticism**. I still think they can be consciously enjoyed without inherently accepting racism or domestic violence.
Is such media categorically different from Reed's "I Wanna Be Black" or the Beatles "Run For Your Life"? If so, what differentiates them? If not, where is the line between 'acceptable in context' and 'simply unacceptable?'
And lastly, should I just shut the hell up and enjoy music? I guess that question is basically moot though. It's funny how strongly a question I was asked elsewhere on Facebook recently has stuck with me lately.
"Why do you care so much about this?"
How could I not? How could I *possibly* not?
--Footnotes
*I almost feel like Beatles albums don't even need to be introduced as such because everyone knows the names, but that's never really been true, and becomes less so as time passes.
**Meaning is created from, and exists entirely in, context. See the use of the word queer, for instance. If a song is felt to be misogynist or racist, then in a very real and important way, it *is*. To say otherwise; to say "if you knew the context you'd understand and your opinion is not valid" is a form of cultural elitism. But it's not *always* misogynist or racist. Or always *and* not always? Some kind of quantum state of...what? Problematicness? Culture is hard.
---------------------------
One of the CDs I grabbed for my trip to Posi's place yesterday was The Beatles'* Rubber Soul. One song on that album ("In My Life") reminisces about all the "places and things" and "friends and lovers" the singer has known through his life; how he will always hold them in great affection even as he loves his current partner more than any of them. I love the recognition that there is room in the heart for tender feelings that stretch beyond a single person and a single time. It's really sweet.
Another song ("Run For Your Life") threatens violence against the narrator's partner, telling her she'd "better run for your life if you can little girl," and he'd rather see her dead than with another man. Musical whiplash in one album!
I thought about the context of those two songs as part of the same greater creative work, and what I know about the time that created them, and similar contemporary music (see Jimi Hendrix singing "Hey Joe",), and in the end I could only think to myself, "culture is really complicated."
(And that's not the only such instance in the Beatles' oeuvre. Whenever I hear a snippet of the Beatles' "Getting Better", I think of Lennon singing:
"I used to be cruel to my woman
I beat her and kept her apart
From the things that she loved
Man I was mean
But I'm changing my scene
And I'm doing the best that I can."
But it still worked wonderfully for a GE advertising campaign a while ago because it's such a happy, upbeat, classic song, right!?)
Anyway, this morning, listening to a David Byrne album on the way to work, I heard "Now I'm Your Mom," a potentially offensive song from the perspective of a trans woman, and thought about Lou Reed.
A few months ago at work, Lou Reed came up as a topic of conversation between myself and two co-workers. I think we were talking about Walk on the Wild Side because it had come up in a public to-do about potential transphobia in its mention of Holly Woodlawn:
---
"Holly came from Miami F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she..."
---
The song was played at a college-related event and some students felt this was inappropriate because it minimized and/or ridiculed the process of gender transitioning. But Reed, and probably the bulk of listeners who understood the context, saw the whole song as a love letter to the weirdos and freaks of New York in general, and the acquaintances of Andy Warhol in particular. “Paul Morrissey made me a star," said Woodlawn, "but Lou Reed made me immortal.”
Because it's relevant, one coworker, 1, is a Black woman. As we talked about "Walk on the Wild Side," the other coworker, 2, clearly felt awkward about explaining why Walk on the Wild Side was racially insensitive. I personally didn't feel like a line referring to "colored girls" singing was out of line as a historical reference, so I quoted the line for 1 so she wasn't sitting in information limbo while we tiptoed around it. Later, when just 1 and I were talking, she pointed me at lyrics she'd found when reading up on Lou Reed. From I Wanna Be Black:
----
"I want to be black
Have natural rhythm
Shoot twenty feet of jism..."
"Have a girlfriend named Samantha
And have a stable of foxy whores..."
---
And that's leaving out a lot of other lines that would be, to put it mildly, inappropriate in a present-day context.
I think I said something like "Wow. That's really not ok." Because there wasn't really anything else to be said about that at that point. How do you understand and respond to something like that? Later, I looked around the internet to get an understanding of the context and to help me relate the song to the artist and his thoughts and intentions. I'm not going to try to contextualize it here because it's still rather outside my experience and understanding.
Sometimes people's reactions to problematic behavior on the part of content creators means is to believe that all of the content produced by that creator is indelibly stained by their thoughts and words and must be forever shunned. (Of course forever is a short time these days, but that's a tangent.) Whose work could we actually appreciate then, other than perhaps Fred Rogers?
I think there are things that shouldn't be part of the popular culture of TV, radio, and other such media. Things like Walk on the Wild Side and - another piece of media I haven't touched on here - Baby It's Cold Outside for instance. For a significant portion of people who hear them, they exist outside of their context and, in that way, are perfectly legitimate targets of serious criticism**. I still think they can be consciously enjoyed without inherently accepting racism or domestic violence.
Is such media categorically different from Reed's "I Wanna Be Black" or the Beatles "Run For Your Life"? If so, what differentiates them? If not, where is the line between 'acceptable in context' and 'simply unacceptable?'
And lastly, should I just shut the hell up and enjoy music? I guess that question is basically moot though. It's funny how strongly a question I was asked elsewhere on Facebook recently has stuck with me lately.
"Why do you care so much about this?"
How could I not? How could I *possibly* not?
--Footnotes
*I almost feel like Beatles albums don't even need to be introduced as such because everyone knows the names, but that's never really been true, and becomes less so as time passes.
**Meaning is created from, and exists entirely in, context. See the use of the word queer, for instance. If a song is felt to be misogynist or racist, then in a very real and important way, it *is*. To say otherwise; to say "if you knew the context you'd understand and your opinion is not valid" is a form of cultural elitism. But it's not *always* misogynist or racist. Or always *and* not always? Some kind of quantum state of...what? Problematicness? Culture is hard.