Posted on 06/17/2002 12:35:29 PM PDT by clintonbaiter
by William Grim
I was recently in the J.C. Penney’s store at the Tuttle Creek Mall in Columbus, Ohio shopping for some trousers. Now, clothes shopping is one of those activities—like root canals and remarriage—that I try to avoid if at all possible. The "shopping experience" has become more miserable of late because American retailers seem to believe that no one will buy clothes except to the accompaniment of Eurotechno or rap music screeching out of speakers at something approaching the threshold of pain.
While standing in line to purchase a pair of khaki Dockers the caterwauling began.
"Muthaf**ka, muthaf**ka, muthaf**ka," blared forth from the miniature Bose speakers attached to the steel gray pylons holding up a display of the latest oversized "pipes" jeans. Not being an aficionado of the genre, I was unable to determine the provenance of the rap tune, but its literary structure was unmistakable. All human discourse had been reduced to three words—bitch, ‘ho and variations of the f-word.
What was truly remarkable about this incident was how unremarkable it was to my fellow consumers. The grandmother and her pre-teen granddaughter in front of me smiled politely at the cute 20-something college coed clerk as they purchased a Rugrats t-shirt and two pairs of Winnie-the-Pooh knee-length socks.
"Yo’ muthaf**kin’ bitch is a ‘ho, muthaf**ka," continued the dulcet tones of Ice-T, Ice-Tray, Long Island Ice-T, whatever. The dutiful consumers of the Midwest continued dutifully consuming while the rap "artists" continued to extol the virtues of anal rape, sodomy and the ritual killing of policemen.
I handed my purchase to the cute 20-something college coed clerk who smiled at me and asked if there was anything else that I needed.
"Yes," I responded. "I’m curious, doesn’t that music bother you?"
"Gosh, is it too loud? We can turn it down," she replied.
"No, it’s not that. The lyrics. I mean, don’t you find the lyrics offensive?"
The smile on her face changed to an expression of complete bewilderment, like she had just been asked to explain the subtleties of quantum mechanics to a room full of Nobel laureates.
"It’s just rap," she replied.
"But the words, don’t the words they’re saying bother you in the least?" I asked.
"That’s just what they talk about in rap. It’s just words. It doesn’t mean anything." She smiled, handed me my receipt and thanked me for shopping at J.C. Penney’s.
My curiosity was piqued by this encounter because it occurred to me that the cute 20-something college coed clerk had succinctly, if unknowingly, summarized the central premise of the deconstructionists, namely, that a word has no fixed definition, that the meaning of a text is in constant flux. Richard Weaver was right. Ideas do have consequences and all of the fashionable nonsense emanating from the Sorbonne and L’École Normal et Supérieure will eventually find its way to the part-time tuitioners of Columbus State Community College.
I was also struck by the fact that the complete disregard of the unmistakably offensive nature of the rap song was at odds with the absurd sensitivity and political correctness displayed today by virtually every political, educational, social and business institution in the United States. I’m sure that if I had used any of the phrases from the rap song in conversation with the cute 20-something college coed clerk she would have been offended, and rightly so. I’m even more certain that if her supervisor had done the same he would have been summarily fired.
Sure enough, a quick perusal of the EEOC and Civil Rights Commission posters and corporate memoranda displayed publicly in J.C. Penney’s revealed that the corporation does not discriminate against anyone for any reason and that the corporation will tolerate anything except intolerance, including sexual harassment which could be defined as merely speaking words of a "sexual nature."
Wait a second. What about the rap song? Weren’t those lyrics of a "sexual nature"? Clearly, there’s some cognitive dissonance going on here, although I’m doubtful that the J.C. Penney Corporation will be suing the J.C. Penney Corporation for sexual harassment any time soon.
Later that same day I found myself at the local Media Play rummaging through a bin of CDs that were being sold at the ridiculously low price of two for 99¢. I happened upon an eponymously titled recording by a rap group calling itself UNLV—Unfortunately No Longer Virgins. Well, for 49 1/2¢ I couldn’t resist. It seemed like the perfect gag gift for a friend who teaches at UNLV—that is, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
The plastic cover of the CD had been removed so I thought I would give the album a listening. The featured song is a mellifluous refrain entitled "Bone It," and its lyrics consist largely of the phrase "Bone it, bone it like you own it" repeated ad infinitum. The context of the rest of the song’s text makes it perfectly clear that the phrase is not in reference to the Friday night Kiwanis fish fry at the town hall. This song, however, possesses a higher literary quality than its companion pieces, most of which are concerned with the aesthetics of thievery, rape and murder.
As is the case with most albums of pop music these days, UNLV’s liner notes contain a solid page of acknowledgements. First and foremost among these is the following:
Special thanks to our Executive Producer [italics in the original], our Heavenly Father, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, for the strength to persevere and for guidance, "We Worship You."
There you have it. Gangsta rap as hymn of praise. Jesus has returned and his name is Puff Daddy. Tupac Shakur died for your sins.
Excuse me, I may not be the most religious person in the world, but I’m unaware of any faith tradition that has looting, murder and sexual promiscuity as its core beliefs. Sure, the God of the Old Testament could get grouchy at times, but He was pretty explicit about how He wants people to behave.
The point of all this is not to make fun of the obvious inanities and aesthetic obtuseness of rap music. The blatherings about how rap is an authentic artistic examination of the Black experience in America deserving serious study—the kind of nonsense spewing forth from the likes of Skippy Gates, Cornel West and the rest of the multicultural homeboys who inhabit the affirmative action ghettoes of the Ivy League—can be dismissed summarily. Even a tenured idiot should be able to figure out that the path leading from Duke Ellington to Snoop Doggy Dogg has not been one of evolutionary ascendancy.
What these musings on rap do reveal is symptomatic of a more generalized sickness of the American mind. Like the members of the rap group UNLV, too many Americans kid themselves into believing that they can be transgressive and respectably bourgeois at the same time. They seek to shock, to be vulgar and crass, to destroy any semblance of civilized existence; but in the end they lack the Nietzschean will-to-power and pretend that their vulgarities are either artistic or devotional in nature. Thus, in postmodern America, graffiti becomes art, profanity becomes refined expression and blasphemy becomes religious ecstasy.
What is even more remarkable about the wholesale acceptance of postmodernist dogma in the United States is that the same people who insist that words and literary texts have no meaning, and can actually state without cracking up that UNLV’s "Bone It" is akin in religious expression to the Lord’s Prayer or the Kol Nidre, are the same people who want to ban virtually everything ever written by white males over the age of puberty due to specific meanings they find in those texts that violate their incredibly specific codes of political correctness.
In academia the deconstructionists vie with one another to see who can enact the most draconian speech codes. In many mainline seminaries atheism is the norm—but pity the poor seminarian who slips up and turns in a term paper referring to God in the masculine gender. Speaking of gender, ever notice that in our postmodern, words-have-no-meaning, more-transgressive-than-thou age, the fearless and transgressively hip are so fearful of being labeled insensitive by the thought police that it is not uncommon to see perversions of the English language such as "Each person got on their bike." Muthaf**ka is OK, but if we don’t ban the male possessive pronoun, it’s a slippery slope that could lead to Attila the Hun—or even worse—Mark Twain.
Recently it has been announced that an expurgated version of Huckleberry Finn will be published in which all passages that contain racially "insensitive" phrases will be rewritten. One can only imagine the result. What next? Joseph Conrad’s African-American of the Narcissus?
Yes, it’s true. Mark Twain employed the n-word in Huckleberry Finn but with much less frequency than the typical rap song. Huck, the victim of a dysfunctional family whose father beats him mercilessly, flees his home and, among other experiences, shares a memorable multicultural raft ride down the Mississippi River with Jim, a runaway slave. Confronted with the nobility of Jim, Huck sheds his racial prejudices and begins to realize that all human beings possess dignity and are deserving of respect. In the typical rap song, blacks are portrayed as pimps, prostitutes, rapists, thieves and murderers. So whom do the deconstructionists and politically correct want to ban? Do you even have to ask?
So there it is. The Kulturkampf is over. We lost. The good guys were routed largely because the strategically important role of language was surrendered about 30 years ago to a group of neurotic French academics who took up a German philosophical system devised by ex-Nazis who were doing everything possible to hide their sordid past. Under the banner of Martin Heidegger and Paul DeMan, the humanities professors of the world embraced the denial of meaning, and like Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, eventually came to love the power that would destroy their world. Heidegger’s brown-shirted, Sieg Heiling tenure as Rector of the University of Bonn? Just Bavarian kitsch, a victim of too much Heimat theorizing. DeMan’s anti-Semitic screeds in Belgian Nazi Party newspapers? To quote the aforementioned cute 20-something college coed clerk, "It’s just words. It doesn’t mean anything."
Should we despair? No. My advice is to sit back, relax and enjoy all the things that the censoring class abhors, such as fine drink and cigars, red meat, and the great works of art, music and literature that have been produced by Western civilization. The absurdity of postmodernism—that nothing has meaning but everything must be censored because of its meaning—is so illogical that, like communism, it will eventually implode of its own accord. And 50 to 75 years after the American public rejects postmodernism, it will finally dawn on the denizens of Harvard, Yale and Berkeley that the postmodernist agenda was a preposterous fraud.
As for me, I’m contemplating civil disobedience. If you’re ever shopping for clothes in J.C. Penney’s and suddenly hear Hal Holbrook’s voice reading Huckleberry Finn over the speakers in the Botany Bay kiosk, you’ll know where to send the Hate Crimes Unit to find me.
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It apears to me that Islam is pretty close.
It's amazed me for years, ever since I first heard a rap song not done by Will Smith, that teenage girls actually ride around, in a car, with a LOAD of guys....and listen to this stuff without feeling in the least bit threatened. Scary.
Thanks for posting this excellent article.
the path leading from Duke Ellington to Snoop Doggy Dogg has not been one of evolutionary ascendancy.
I see it as a decline so rapid its travelers must have gotten the bends. It truly is a "musical" journey back to the jungle.
My guess is that the district manager would have a fit if he/she walked into a Penney's and was assaulted by profane music.
Many are desensitized to rap and other music that glorifies sex and violence simply because it sells. I'll bet Penneys was selling that CD.
1) cRAP music;
2) musicians who all sound like Nirvana
3) soul music with someone moaning for 30 minutes on one note
As a marketing minor, I can tell you that there is a reason that Muzak was played over the speakers of department stores; slower, more easy-listening music makes people walk slower, look longer, thereby increasing the possiblity of seeing more to buy. Now, they play crappy music so loud, you want to get your business done and get out as quickly as possible.
Given the attitude of most 20-somethings in the workforce, he should consider himself lucky.
The context of the rest of the song’s text makes it perfectly clear that the phrase is not in reference to the Friday night Kiwanis fish fry at the town hall.
Thanks for posting this article, I got a kick out of it, and a few laughs I might add. :)
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