Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
"Shake your head at rap music all you like: When’s the last time you heard a popular country song about finishing up your master’s in engineering at MIT?"
National Review (!) |
This article is very hard to get through. The fact that the author chooses an analogy he doesn't even
try to understand undermines the whole piece.
If you're going to use Tupac and Ice T, you need to put in more than a gesture in the direction of actual work when it comes to understanding who they are/were, what they were trying to accomplish, and the environment in which those things are shaped. Using a video of Tupac as a fucking kid and describing him as an "effeminate young man" as the basis to question the authenticity of who he became as an artist (and a person) later is fucking inane.
Tupac's mother was Afeni Shakur, an activist, a paralegal, and a former member of the Black Panthers. She was also a former drug addict. When the family was homeless, Tupac joined a theater group, which changed his life. His mother made him read the NYT when he was a child. She was a deeply complicated, flawed, thoughtful person. Tupac was as well.
This idea that this author saw the "real" person in the video he uses and that he took on a thug persona just to be a successful rapper is such a superficial, ignorant reading of an amazingly talented, intelligent, and conflicted artist. Tupac was many things on stage and off. The reason why people loved him so much (aside from his talent) was his genuineness. He put himself out there as an artist and the many contradictions of who he was are reflected in his work. He could write a piece as touching and "soft" as
Dear Mama in one instance and turn around and write a piece as vicious as "Hit 'em up" in the next. The whole point of his professional work was to show that he embodied
both the beautiful and the ugly. The statement he continually made in his music and in interviews is that this country and its treatment of people like him
created him. And no matter what he did, he was going to be seen as a thug. He tried to take that and use it in a number of different ways. Sometimes he was purposefully in the face of the society that created and then labeled him. Sometimes it was him working out his issues with anger and violence. Sometimes it was to talk to people who were similarly labeled and cast aside to let them know that they have value. But in no way was it just a fucking mask he put on just to sell records.
Now, that's not to say that Tupac wasn't deeply flawed. He was. So was Ice T. But the reduction of complicated people and artists (and I'm no fan of Ice T, although he had a couple of okay songs early on) that this author uses as the basis of his analysis for his broader point is truly annoying. I understand what he's trying to do in this piece, but Jesus. Try a little harder.
If you want to use an interview to sum up Tupac, use this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrL3HmGdAZE
Aside from that, I found the article to be muddled and mostly without a point. I'm guessing the main point, which is hard to see through the anecdotal bullshit and "the poor are poor for a reason" recurring theme, is that the right should stop manipulating their base into thinking their problems can be blamed on third parties by using inauthentic voices passed off as genuine. While this is an easy concept with which one can agree, it overlooks the fact that this is entirely what the Republican Party has been about since the fucking Southern Strategy. So I'm supposed to take from this piece that this new wrinkle is bad because elite whites put on a white minstrel show to fool non-elite whites into thinking they are also non-elite to get their vote? This article is a whole lot of nothing.
TM
