Re: Good Dog Bad Dog classic album

[Don Smith <dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu>]

I feel like we need some Senor Love Daddy here on the list today.  Yo, chill
out!  [Do the Right Thing reference.  If you haven't seen it, you should.]

As far as that review went, I also, didn't think it was as bad as John made it
out to be.  The BAPM, while a ludicrous statistic by which to evaluate a work
of art (I could write a song that did nothing but lambast and deride the bible,
and it would have a very high BAPM count), was thrown in at the end, not a
central message of the review.  And John, much as I agree with what you said
about taking ideas seriously and reading carefully what people actually say, I
think *you* didn't read the review terribly carefully.  The reviewer never
"suggests" that "Latter Days" is about the end times.  Here's what she says: "I
was in an apocalyptic mood that night, selecting songs for my show that dealt
with the end of the world. I noticed a disc in my box had a song on it called
"Latter Days" and thought, "Hm. This could fit." I previewed it quickly,
thought it sounded rather pretty, and stuck it on the air."  She never says the
song was actually *about* the end of the world, and clearly, if she had given
it more than a quick preview, she would have realized that.  She said it
*could* fit.  She doesn't go on to say *anything* about what she thinks the
song is about; she just makes a free-association with the title.  She does say
she thinks the song is "a lovely kind of sad", without making any literary
analysis of the lyrics.

So, yeah, I agree that consumerism is dehumanizing, and trying to look for a
simplistic way to decide what's right and wrong to buy is approaching the
questions from the wrong direction, but I think you're blowing that out of
proportion in this particular case.  She spends most of the review talking
about the emotional connection she found with the record, and trying to
characterize the sound/style of the music.  Yes, the one paragraph on the
lyrics isn't terribly enlightening or deep, but that also clearly wasn't the
emphasis of what the reviewer wanted to convey to the reader.

Now, Eminem, that's an interesting case.  I had dismissed him out of hand based
on some reviews I'd read, but a friend of mine, whom I usually think of as
being up on feminist perspectives, *really* loved the movie, and when I asked
her about it, she adamantly encouraged me to give the guy a listen myself and
make up my own mind.  So I've listened to "The Eminem Show" a few times now,
and while I can't take the misogyny (which my friend acknowleges, but says he's
just expressing rage at things that happened to him personally, not trying to
call all women evil.  I'm not sure I buy that, because he pretty much does flat
out say all women are evil.  But he clearly loves his daughter.), I did find
that I liked his politics.  And I did not see any racism.  Rather, he seemed
grateful to be accepted into a largely black art culture, and spoke highly of
Dr. Dre for believing in his talent and giving him the self-confidence to
pursue the career as well as the opportunity to do so.  I did have a hard time
believing he was really that naive about what stardom means in terms of how
people, kids in particular, worship their heros.  But he's a fascinating bundle
of contradictions.  I haven't given up on him yet.  Although I don't think
he'll make it into my heavy rotation list.  Is he participating in a minstrel
show?  Quite possibly.  One of the things I appreciated about Spike Lee's
_Bamboozled_ was that he explicitly made the connection between the buffoonish
characters of the ol' watermelon patch and the gangsta characters of the modern
urban ghetto.  So if Eminem is perpetuating those stereotypes, then yeah, I
agree.  But I haven't seen the movie, and I only know the one album.  I don't
watch TV, so I have no idea what kind of imagry and/or hype is around his
career (videos, ads, etc.).  I only have the music to go by.

Back to work I go...
-- 
Don Smith                           Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                                 http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

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