Johnny you're invalidating my experience. How dare you.
EDIT: I think that the fact that you consistently feel the need to justify your affection for various sorts of popular music by what is not in fact a reasonable argument but a sort of pseudo-academical intimidation (shotgunning out sources and naming grand-sounding theories and schools of criticism in a blustering effort to impress others with your scholarship) speaks volumes about your relationship to this music and that the content of these volumes is not entirely flattering towards you, though they are nowhere near as repugnant as Kieffers shallow, priviliged appropriations and postures. Just a thought.
hold up, this was not about my attitudes towards it, this was about you suggesting that "the vast majority of top 40 rap [is] moronic woman-hating neo-minstrel bullshit," and probably not even knowing that one of the articles i referred to that makes an effort toward refuting that or complicating it is in fact
from bitch
magazine. i could give a shit about whether or not people are impressed by my scholarship, but this isn't about what i know, it's about what you know, which is how to be a contrarian and very little else, at least in this regard. if you aren't a fan of rap, okay, whatever, and if you don't think the beats on top 40 are particularly hot you've got a lot of examples to choose from that would in fact prove that point. if we were just arguing about whether or not beats, rhymes, lyrics, songs &c. were any
good, that'd be different.
but - to be clear - what i'm upset about, and what i think i'm perfectly justified to be upset about, is the weird moral streak that you seem to have when it comes to hip-hop. and i'm also morbidly curious about why you choose to single out rap and why you choose to make the claims you make. there's plenty of chart hip-hop released in the last few years that actively refutes the claim that top 40 stuff is inherently misogynistic (ie, for example, "best i ever had," which was in its way a dude-centric song but not particularly flattering toward said dude), and since pretty much every genre is clogged with misogyny
anyways i can barely figure out why that is a critique you would exclusively choose to level at rap. the minstrelsy comment is really ugly, too, since it implies things about performer and audience that as one white dude to another i'm not sure
either of us is qualified to make. but i'm not even sure what songs you would be talking about.
if you'd care to name examples – i.e. perform a kind of sourcing of your claims that is common in academia but is also pretty much expected if you're going to level claims like that in any level of adult debate – then we could have conversations about that. but you're not doing that and you don't seem interested in doing that, and then you try and fall back on a defense about i'm invalidating your relationship to the music, or another defense that implies that the reason i listen to music is because i like to perform academic autopsies on songs or something, which is equal parts vaguely offensive and super incorrect. instead of making this about me and the way i listen to music, if you're going to make a moral or political argument about music why wouldn't you just fucking back it up with some proof? especially when you're going to make an argument as broad and damning as "neo-minstrelsy."
