Come Back to the Five and Dime, Snoop Doggy Dogg: The Perils of Postmodernism

The Iconoclast ^ | Unkown | William E. Grim

[Apolitical]

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Snoop Doggy Dogg:
The Perils of Postmodernism

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..........

[Apolitical]

A sign of the times...sigh!

[Chad Fairbanks]

"My glock is loaded, and my trigger finger itches... cuz I be sick a men who be calling women b**ches"

[weikel]

Why do they have to rag on Snoop and Tupac. Snoop Tupac and Eminem are( in Tupac's case were) the best of the rappers.

[x]

If the clerk was desensitized to the lyrics it probably had more to do with Muzak and top forty radio than with Heidegger and de Man. Information overload and desensitization were recognized long before deconstruction. From at least the beginning of radio and television broadcasting people have been shutting out messages aimed at them.

[KineticKitty]

I love the fish fry comment at the end of the article, it's a riot. This has been posted once or twice, but it's funny everytime!

[RLK]

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.

------------------------------------

Uh, it doesn't bother her because today she is probably living what some of that music describes.

[Helms]

Awesome-the best I have read in a long long time. Neitzsche and Schopenhauer thought little of the Germany they saw. It is ACTIVE NIHILISM, and not PASSIVE NIHILISM (POSTMODERNISM) NEITZSCHE URGED. HE WOULD NOT BE PLEASED.

[Rocksalt]

"That's just what they talk about in rap. It's just words. It doesn't mean anything."
Rap and graffiti are two products of our urban enviornments that are part of urban culture,and they are nothing new.One thing I respect about the rappers is they are not afraid to say what they want to.They exercise their first amendment rights unabashedly.And they are honest about their feelings.It isn't pretty sometimes.But the music is a reflection of the environments they come from.

[NatureGirl]

"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."

Probably the best line in an all-around excellent article! Thanks for posting it. I can see that it's been posted before, but I must have missed it.

[j271]

"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."

Teacher Reprimanded for Using 'Niggardly' in Class

[cornelis]

You are right in part, of course. Desensitization comes in many forms, including information overload, including the purposeful aversion to perceive in the form of laughter, including the perpetuated parisian form of Apperzeptionsverweigerung, as well as other willfull hallucinatory inducements. Whether one comes before the other is the job of an particular historian to discover. However, the unwillingness and inability to acknowledge moral consistency is a particular disease associated with postmodernism for which there are unique factories (post-industrial factories if you like).

[cornelis]

Thanks for posting. Grim writes well.

[usadave]

Why do they have to rag on Snoop and Tupac. Snoop Tupac and Eminem are( in Tupac's case were) the best of the rappers.

To say that someone is the best of the rappers isn't saying much because rap sucks!

[weikel]

I guarantee you "the Kids" by Eminem will make you laugh your ass off.

[Dan Day]

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.

It's also interesting to note that Huck's realization is not presented in some touchy-feely "we are the world" sugar-coated PC moment.

Instead, because of his upbringing Huck actually believes that the right thing, even the godly thing, is to return Jim (the runaway slave) to his "owner". In one of the most marvelous passages in American literature, Twain has Huck decide to protect Jim *not* because he's piously doing the "right" thing, but even though he believes it's the *sinful* thing:

[After writing -- but not yet mailing -- a letter revealing Jim's hiding place] I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking -- thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell [by helping Jim escape]. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell" -- and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.

[Lizard_King]

I've got to admit to liking some rap, as an initial disclosure. But the hypocrisy that he expounds upon is all too real, and it is really a crying shame.

[moodyskeptic]

I pull up to a stoplight in LA, and the surly wannabe gangster next to me is pumping out bass that rattles his car. I have a choice, roll up my window and turn up my own tunes ( jazz, rock, whatever) or turn mine down and listen to the American Street.

I eavesdrop frequently, it's not hard at the popular volume, and , boy, I've heard an earfull.

As sick as you think it is, triple that. No, I'm not shocked, I'm saddened. I've been in alleyway vomit sessions and overdose scenes of my own, but the millions of fresh faced suburban American kids devouring this stuff have NOT seen anything tougher than taking out the trash, and they think they IDENTIFY with this underclass defeatism.

Anyone inside the record business will confirm it: middle class whites make up the bulk of the rap/hiphop audience. Read it and weep. It's cool to be angry and hopeless, the subtle subtext is there in the TV ads for all the major retailers.

I liked the article, well written, but where HAS the writer been for ten years?

[ppaul]

Thanks for turning me on to Grimm.
What a great writer and cultural critic.

[ppaul]

ping.

[driftless]

I view rap and music as two separate entities. The "music" in rap is of the most primitive moronic level. But to be fair what passes for popular mainstream music is also dreadful.

The author is correct, the culture has been on a downhill slide for decades. Thirty years from now the current rap enthusiasts will be wondering what kind of dope they were smoking when they thought this stuff was the greatest thing since taco pizza.