Monday, March 7, 2011

"Currently trending on Twitter and set to debride contemporary hip hop in the next year and all years"--debride eh? so someone else has been following the alarming recent uptick in stories about flesh-eating bacteria then...

but more salient to the point of the article, with Odd Future, as with Big Black and Nick Cave in girl-murder-mode and power electronics bands galore, there is this sort of defense mounted, often, in terms of the artistic imagination... they're imagining how the world looks like from inside the mind of the psychopath, the genocidal maniac... their interests, as Artists, is in investigating extreme psychology... but don't you think it's odd, them being so imaginative and all, that they never, ever, imagine how things look from the victim's point of view... Odd Future, like Big Black before them, and power electronics scum beyond tabulating, just somehow never quite find themselves writing a lyric from the viewpoint of someone being who's undergoing rape/murder... it seems to hold no attraction to them

funny that

1 comment:

Greyhoos said...

Right. It's something that I've found tiresome for ages. The whole lustmord schtick that Cave's milked time and again. Despite his affinity for murder ballads of old and for Flannery O'Connor, he always seemed (to me, at least) to have not learned much from them about the benefits varying/nuancing the narrative perspective.

A couple of weird exceptions that come come to mind (but of the non-rock variety): I recall Deep Puddle Dynamics had a track about a nightclub stabbing, related in multi-perspectival mode, with each emcee taking the role of perp, victim, witness, etc.

And Organized Konfusion's "Stray Bullet," which was more or less written from the neutral p.o.v. of same as it tears/ricochets through a neighborhood. I thought it made for a pretty chilling social commentary at the time.