Fun Stuff > BAND
Will Sheff writes real good
Scandanavian War Machine:
so how do you guys feel about Johnny Cash then?
he has many a song about killing women.
the way i see it is this: when it comes down to it, there are alot worse things than misogyny. nuclear weapons, for instance.
basically, what i am saying is...does it really matter?
Borondir:
Johnny Cash was who I was thinking about when I mentioned the tradition of murder ballads in country. I'm a huge Cash fan, having grown up on him, and I'm almost certain he himself was not misogynist, but you really have to wonder how those songs affected people to ignorant to realize that.
And really, I don't know where you are getting off talking about worse things than misogyny, unless you want to start ranking the worlds evils by degree. Misogyny is a blight on human society that has resulted in an incredible amount of suffering, violence, and death for women whose only crime was being a woman. I'm positive misogyny has caused more suffering and taken more lives than nuclear weapons.
Scandanavian War Machine:
hang on.
domestic violence and misogynistic song lyrics are pretty much not the same thing. also, why can't we rank the worlds evils? there are greater and lesser evils, are there not? i mean, how does someone singing about male superiority rank against genocide? they're not even in the same ballpark. they're both wrong but one is clearly more wrong than the other.
at this point, i'm basically just play devil's advocate because i agree with both sides of the arguement and don't really care enough to take a side anymore. berate me, if you must.
a pack of wolves:
What you've missed is that genocide and domestic violence are only possible in a culture filled with hate, violence and concepts of superiority based on arbitrary traits, often ones which only exist when constructed by a society (gender, race etc). It's hard to start ranking these things when they cannot exist in isolation.
Johnny C:
--- Quote from: a pack of wolves on 05 Dec 2007, 01:54 ---I'd argue that in a certain sense they most definitely are.... I always think of lyrics as masks even when they're masquerading as something raw and honest, they are in fact masquerading as such in order to present a particular perspective on something. Sometimes this is the artist but I don't think the first-person lyrics of anyone can ever be regarded as anything but 'in character'.
--- End quote ---
I almost completely disagree, unless you're arguing that they're in the character of themselves. I know plenty of songs where the artist was writing directly and plainly about nothing but their own life. Think of lyrics as less of masks and more of mirrors, really. Sometimes the artist holds the mirror up to reflect his or her self, sometimes the world around them, and sometimes the world with them in the frame. The artist is always in control and always pointing it in a direction he or she wants to show, but sometimes isn't directly in the image. Instead, the artist merely directs our attention to the subject.
Sheff definitely writes as characters, and for the most part the soft rock artists are at most ambiguous. There are a few who write from character perspectives but for the majority of them we're given no reason to believe that it's anyone other than them speaking.
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