First, a word of apology:
If you've read this blog before, you know how I love to drop in pictures. I hope you like the way I play with them. But today I can't do it. Technical difficulties. On with the show.
Fuck Tha Police
Huge hit back in 1990. Dr Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren, Eazy E, Yella and the DOC received some personal correspondence from the FBI over it. Got a lot of negative press, and eventually became sort of an anthem for disaffected youth, anarchists and whiny little shits (different people, BTW).
Ice T got kicked off his label a few years later over Bodycount's "Cop Killer," leading to a very public beef with Charlton Heston (and the launch of Ice T's own, independent label*).
Neither track purported to be an objective assessment of facts. In both cases, the artists involved expressed that they were relaying a message from their neighborhood. Wasn't how they felt personally, etc etc... Dismissed as a convenient excuse to spread hate.
Funny thing about music and lyrics: They aren't dissertations. Rather, they are often at their best when they're conduits for raw emotional response. Neither FtP nor Cop Killer were particularly helpful in the grander scheme of things, but they did give voice to a group living under intolerable circumstances.
The problem of police excess is obviously getting a lot of attention again. So is the problem of talking about it.
Free Hate
Yeah, free speech is an inalienable right, but it's also a problem. A complicated one too. To the point, there's a line between free speech and hate speech; one's a right & other is a crime. The problem is in determining which is which.
Was "Fuck tha Police" a hate crime? The guys who wrote it would argue that it was a response to institutionalized hate crimes. Police officers across America obviously disagreed. And later on in 1992, as chunks of Los Angeles burned in the wake of the acquittal of four cops who beat an unarmed man to a pulp on video, the track would be simultaneously condemned for inciting the violence, and praised for predicting it.
They were illuminating a situation where the strong prey upon the relatively defenseless, and doing it the best way they knew how. From what I can gather, those guys grew up in a culture of Sun Tzu's first rule of warfare.
I'd say it was fighting fire with gasoline, but what do I know? That ain't my world. But the medium through which they gave it voice most definitely IS my world.
Ne Touche Pas
It's going to look like a sweeping generalization, but here's what I propose: The Arts are off-limits for censorship. Put a sticker on it warning parents if you have to. You know the rest of that argument.
Not even sure how I feel about censorship in general, but for art I know exactly where I stand. Art is a subjective (often non-literal) expression of the human condition, which is as broad and varied as humanity itself. It is the main conduit through which we are able to externalize our private commonalities, make visible what is invisibly real, and reconcile the paradoxes that make up our existence. It's how we share our appreciation of the universe's ineffable and infinite field of possibility and beauty.
It's also the way humanity collectively expels some of our most toxic fears.
Trying to shut that off is like sticking a cork in a volcano. Without that weird and imprecise capacity for expulsion of the toxins in our minds, we harbor and multiply them involuntarily. Even humans can only take so much of that. Short-term peace, long-term damage.
Individually we don't always understand a particular bit of art. It bites into you and fills you with anger or fear or a sense that you are hated. When that happens to me, my first response is to lash the fuck out and argue vociferously, spilling bile all over the place & multiplying the toxin.
All the more reason to just let it go. You can't respond to art with politics, but I continue to forget that, and so do you. Could have used that energy for a work of art.
Not saying "Fuck tha Police" is the best response to police brutality. Far from it. But it's hard to argue the virtues of shutting it off either, if you consider that it is an unreasoned response to a real concern. Take it for what it is, put it in context, and understand where the fuck it came from.
You can vomit when art makes you sick. That's your call. But it'll rot your teeth. Then how are you gonna bite back?
See you in another present.
*Not even trying to get into a fight about Ice T's choice of artwork for Home Invasion, but he could hove gone another way with it... somewhere that was more in line with his theme.
