Blink and You’ll Miss a Revolution

Since last night’s post made me out to be a passive, cynical, defeatist weenie (all of which is true, to a degree, but let’s set that aside for the time being), it seemed worthwhile to take a few minutes tonight to establish some equilibrium. Contrary to what I said last night, there are still things that I feel compelled to fight for.  One of them, as I’ve mentioned before, is education, and specifically public education.  As someone involved pretty heavily in preparing teachers for the classroom, I’m sensitive to what the media and politicians say about teachers, as well as the roadblocks put in their way in the name of “reform.”  I can get testy and belligerent when discussing the issue; I’m not so jaded that I don’t recognize the singular importance of speaking out when I see ignorance masquerading as policy.  So there’s that.

But my longest-running pet cause – #1 with a bullet for over twenty years – is being anti-censorship, almost 100% across the board.  You can blame U2 and R.E.M. and the Artists Against Apartheid tour and all the other lefty, tree-hugging bands I started listening to in high school (and which still make up 99% of my iPods’ contents).  Perhaps not coincidentally, high school for me was the era of Tipper Gore and the P.M.R.C. (Parents Music Resource Council), which wanted to label records and restrict who could buy them.  I was impressionable enough to be totally dazzled by Frank Zappa’s testimony before Congress, and seeing as I was as an angsty little guy who was heavily opposed to The Man, the freedom of speech cause was right in my wheelhouse.

Funnily enough, I’ve remained passionate about it ever since.  It’s not always an easy fit, though, with my other lefty, tree-hugging sensibilities.  There are times when I have trouble reconciling my belief in compassion and acceptance of all people with the occasionally perpendicular belief that we should have the freedom to say vile things about those same people.  Of course, in a perfect world we’d hope that everyone would understand the importance of civility, and that just because you dislike someone doesn’t mean you need to impugn them with racist/sexist/homophobic/otherwise icky slurs.  And in an even more perfect world, everyone would understand that these classifications don’t really have anything to do with our relative worth, and using them as a way of judging people is kinda shallow and stupid.  But we don’t live in a perfect world, and frankly, allowing people to use those slurs makes it oh-so-easy to determine who we should relegate to the “Not Worth Our Time” file (I’ve had former Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker sitting in mine since, like, 2000).

There are other nuances to this belief which I’m sure I’ll adress at some point (like the fact that I think someone can use racist language without actually being racist), but for now it’s enough to know that this is something I feel particularly strongly about.  And it’s interesting that I was thinking about this today because there are two current instances where censorship in pop culture has reared its (sort of) ugly head.  These aren’t things really worth getting bent out of shape about, but I do find myself fascinated with this stuff – the things people are so offended by that they decide no one else should be able to have access to them.

Here’s the first instance.  It’s a magazine cover.  Tell me: do you think Borders and Barnes & Noble were right to require that it be placed in a plastic bag where impressionable folk can’t see it?

What did you say?  For those of you who said the booksellers were right in censoring the cover, would it change your mind if I told you this is a dude?  It is.  If you click the link above, you’ll see that it’s an especially feminine-looking guy named Andrej Pejic.  So those offensive mammaries really shouldn’t be any worse than your average cover of Men’s Health or any one of those bodybuilding mags.  In censoring this issue of Dossier, Borders and Barnes & Noble are saying, in effect, that you can’t be trusted.  ”We know it’s not a woman,” they’ll say, “but you’ll look at this, and your filthy little mind will think it’s a woman, so we’re protecting you from yourself.”  It’s an audacious move, censoring something not for what it is, but for what it resembles.  Frankly, I’m more offended when I walk in Borders’ front door and see a huge display of the latest Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin or Bill O’Reilly screed.  This dude’s tits are nothing.

Here’s the other current example:

This is the cover of the album Goblin, by rapper Tyler, the Creator.  He’s a member of the hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All.  He’s a 19-year-old kid, and his album is pretty much tipping over from the weight of its misogynistic and homophobic lyrics.  Tegan and Sara – lesbian twin musicians – penned an open letter condemning Tyler for the content of his album and calling for other like-minded folks to join them in their opposition.  This is where that aforementioned tension between my conflicting beliefs comes in.  Is misogynistic and homophobic language repellent?  Yes.  Unequivocally.  Do Tegan and Sara have a valid point when they say that racist and anti-Semitic language wouldn’t be tolerated in the same way that Tyler’s slurs are?  Same answer.  Yes.  Absolutely.

The difficulty I have here is in policing and restricting artistic expression, as personally disgusting as we might find that expression to be.  Even though Tegan and Sara aren’t calling for an outright ban on Tyler, the Creator’s album, the implication is that he shouldn’t be allowed to say what he says.  My response to those who would be offended by Tyler, the Creator is to take the same strategy I use when faced with a Larry the Cable Guy standup special: ignore it.  There will never be a shortage of offensive material out there, and to think we should censor something we find personally repugnant is, in my opinion, wrong.

And, look, here’s the thing: in a couple years’ time, no one is going to remember Tyler, the Creator.  The album is – whisper it – boring.  For something as supposedly dangerous as this album is, there’s no excuse for it so easily becoming the background noise as I checked my email.  The hipsters and bloggers jizzing themselves over this slow-motion exercise in stultifying juvenilia will have moved onto something else  (probably wearing Ray-Bans and playing a recorder) in another six weeks’ time.  I’ll be amazed if this ever gains traction outside of Pitchfork’s solipsistic echo chamber.

And here’s the other thing: we’ve been here before.  Geto Boys, N.W.A., 2 Live Crew, fer crying out loud.  I remember the controversy surrounding each of these artists, and the existence of Western civilization supposedly hinged on each of them.  I shouldn’t have to be the one to point out that we turned out okay.   Hell, it’s not so long ago that we were doing this same song and dance about Eminem.  Now he’s affectionately viewed as an elder statesman.  I don’t have a single nice thing to say about Tyler, the Creator’s lyrics.  But I think one of the unintended byproducts of a society that values free speech is that this narrow-minded dipshit should be allowed to say every offensive thing that comes into his head.  If you don’t like it, let him know, as Tegan and Sara justifiably did.  But if there are people who actually like to spend their spare time listening to this stuff, it’s not my business to tell them they can’t.

*****

Current listening:

Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)