Still Free

Yeah, Mr. Smiley. Made it through the entire Trump presidency without being enslaved. Imagine that.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Speaking Of Double Standards

I was going to post on the whole double standard thing, but Dr. Edward Rhymes, who've I've had an online debate with before has an excellent post on the matter so I'll let him take the stage:

Eric Clapton's "Cocaine" and the Beatles "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" (LSD, as well as almost anything by Jefferson Airplane or Spaceship. Several songs from "Tommy" and Pink Floyd's "The Wall" are well known drug songs. "Catholic girls", "Centerfold", "Sugar Walls" by Van Halen were raunchy, misogynistic, lust-driven rock refrains. Even the country music legend Kenny Rogers in his legendary ballad, “Coward Of The County,” spoke of a violent gang-rape and then a triple-homicide by the song’s hero to avenge his assaulted lover. Marilyn Manson declared that one of the aims of his provocative persona was to see how much it would take to get the moralists as mad at white artists as they got about 2LiveCrew. He said it took fake boobs, Satanism, simulated sex on stage, death and angst along with semi-explicit lyrics, to get the same screaming the 2LiveCrew got for one song. Manson thought this reaction was hypocritical and hilarious.

I'm going to probably follow up with a post that addresses the following question posed in Rhymes' post:

Savage further asserts that the race-based double standard applies to violent content in music as well."There was the Eric Clapton remake of Marley's 'I Shot the Sheriff,' and there was little to be said. But then you have the 'Cop Killer' song by Ice-T and it's dangerous and threatening."

In this same article Cynthia Fuchs, an associate professor at George Mason University, affirmed that “the public seems far more disturbed by misogynistic lyrics in the music of rap and hip hop artists who are largely black than similar lyrics in rock music, perceived by most as a white genre.”

No comments: