—
Pitchfork: Album Reviews: EMA: Past Life Martyred Saints
This is a very good, very comprehensive review of a really great album, but for all that it covers the technically interesting and aesthetic parts of what EMA has produced, it mars it a little bit with the over-enthusiasm for perceived sincerity. I don’t know whether the description above is true, if it conforms to the reality of the act of artistic creation, but the point is that I wouldn’t really care if it wasn’t. What’s surprising is that one (white, indie) artist is being lauded for the apparently direct expression of ‘volatile emotion’ while a larger cohort of critics are wrestling with the authorial intentions of a (black, hip-hop) artist in expressing rage and a whole series of distasteful, practically sociopathic attitudes. Of course, EMA operates in vaguer and less confrontational medium than Tyler the Creator, as well as perhaps doing the self-loathing thing more successfully, with much less collateral societal damage.
This post is not really meant to be an Odd Future piece; having actually listened to Goblin now, I find it strangely fascinating, justifying some of the negative (aesthetic and non-aesthetic) criticism while opening up opportunities for further readings of it as a progressively ambiguous text. This is in theory about an album I like an awful lot more, yet also about how the reaction to it above seems to me to illustrate another layer to all the thinkpieces on Odd Future, and their attitude to art. Naturally, one of the best among these is by Nitsuh Abebe, and the most interesting of his ‘thoughts’ is equally naturally the following:
“6. Paradoxes
Tyler is in love with paradoxes. The first one we heard, on “Yonkers,” was clever: “I’m a fucking walking paradox / No I’m not.” He keeps doling them out, though. “I’m not a homophobe … faggot.” I think this is meant to underline that Tyler is complicated and will not be pinned down. “I’m not a rapper nor a rapist nor a racist / I fuck bitches with no permission and tend to hate shit / And brag about those actions in a rhyming-pattern manner.” I think this is meant to seem complex and clever instead of empty and defensive. He’s like a crap French intellectual.
It’s the same shtick that allows him to sneer at hip-hop orthodoxies — to be self-deprecating, or say he’s wearing panties, or act like a sniveling misfit skater kid instead of a confident adult. Much of the tizzy around Odd Future stems from the fact that he can do this with music, too. He does blown-up, chintzy piss-takes of hip-hop’s standards, the same way acid-fried freaks and smart-ass punks used to mess around with the pomposity of classic rock. Forget “Gimme the Loot” — when I’m enjoying this record, it feels more like listening to the Butthole Surfers or the Dead Milkmen. For all we know, Odd Future could be early instigators of a moment where hip-hop experiences the same spasms rock once did — the moment where its orthodoxies have started to seem old, bloated, or silly, so the anarchic freaks come rushing in to make it their creative playground.
Tyler just has trouble matching that accomplishment with subject matter that’s not a full-force assault on either (a) his own life or (b) people’s opinions about him or (c) women. His futuristic take on an R&B slow jam turns into a necrophiliac serial-killer fantasy. His over-the-top deconstruction of an “ignorant” fight-starting club track is about punching women in the face.”
Nitsuh Abebe, Vulture - NYMag.com
I particularly like the bit about “a crap French intellectual”, because aren’t they all a bit merde, even Sartre? They all like to deconstruct things and cram them full of ambiguities or, alternatively, grand pronouncements, because that’s what they do - it’s philosophy for life and politics seen as art, not as perfidious Anglo-American scientific exactitude. But in fact, aside from the moralising and the liberal hand-wringing - or perhaps at the very heart of them - is a dedicated attempt by American critics to apply as much nuance as possible to the question of Odd Future:
“Really, it is the case that the historical thrust of rap has been to give voice to the underserved. But OF is not, like, N.W.A. or Public Enemy, and no one really thinks they are. What they’re do-ing, perhaps, is co-opting the extreme violence and confrontation of golden age gangsta rap and bending it in on itself, a post-modern turn, that depletes its ostensible social meaning. To reiterate a point I’ve made elsewhere: Pimp C needed to be freed from trumped up jail charges; Earl’s fans chanted for him to be freed… from a boarding school.”
B. Michael, Feministe
Though in the end they turn out to be “an extremely post-modern exercise in hate-mongering”. Which is - I think - a bad thing? Nuance cannot survive the need for judgement, the demand to take a position on the phenomenon - whether it’s an artwork or an artist or a societal attitude is undecided; the only commonality is that it must really mean something, outside of the way we listen to it in our heads. This outer-world significance is crystallised in the question “where have all these ladies who are being raped’s agencies going?” What women? The ones that are fictional characters? It’s still a valid question, but it belongs primarily in the literary realm rather than the moral/political one.
“But my opinion on that is that everyone (or ‘erryone’, which I’m very pleased you used) can get fucked if they’re too offended by things that are very obviously being intentionally employed as roadblocks to bother with the rest of it. There is a literary complexity to what Tyler is doing that’s not possible in indie rock – because of the lack of presumption that it’s one guy ‘keeping it real’ – or printed fiction/movies – because it’s taken as a given that it is fictional.
What makes Tyler so interesting is that he’s doing high level ‘art’ stuff from a position that allows him to stand at least nominally on the ‘life’ side. If you’re too offended by Michael hitting Kay to watch the Godfather movies, then you miss out on the Godfather movies.
And I’m surprised you’re defending lazy reading. If you don’t want to put the effort in, you’re not going to get it, but you wouldn’t get Name Of Book Here Either if you just skimmed a couple of chapters either, so that’s on the reader, not Tyler. It’s not the artist’s job to make it easy.”
Karl McDonald, Those Geese Were Stupefied
I agree with almost all of this comment, except that in indie rock the contemporary fetish for sincerity - and the backlash-to-the-backlash on authenticity - makes the attitude of literal honesty, if not expected, then strongly valued and desired (e.g., see the end of this Fleet Foxes interview). But following on from doubts about the ability of the reader to discern the true intentions of a text, come doubts about the possibility of the author to create a text which is both honest and intentional:
“Before giving examples from the novels of this cruel incuriosity, let me offer another sort of evidence to back up the claim I have just made. Remember Nabokov’s rapid parenthetical definition of the term “art” in the passage about “aesthetic bliss” cited early in this chapter. Writing what he knew would be the most discussed passage of what he knew would become his most widely read manifesto, the Afterword to Lolita, he identifies art with the compresence of “curiosity, tenderness, kindness, and ecstasy.” Notice that “curiosity” comes first.
Nabokov is, I think, trying to jam an ad hoc and implausible moral philosophy into this parenthesis, just as he is trying to jam metaphysical immortality into the phrase “other states of being,” which he uses to define “aesthetic bliss.” If curiosity and tenderness are the marks of the artist, if both are inseparable from ecstasy - so that where they are absent no bliss is possible - then there is, after all, no distinction between the aesthetic and the moral. The dilemma of the liberal aesthete is resolved. All that is required to act well is to do what artists are good at - noticing things that most other people do not notice, being curious about what others take for granted, seeing the momentary iridescence and not just the underlying formal structure. The curious, sensitive artist will be the paradigm of morality because he is the only one who always notices everything.
[…]
But Nabokov knew quite well that ecstasy and tenderness not only are separable but tend to preclude each other - that most nonobsessed poets are, like Shade, second rate. This is the “moral” knowledge that his novels help us acquire, and to which his aestheticist rhetoric is irrelevant. He knows quite well that the pursuit of autonomy is at odds with feelings of solidarity. His parenthetical moral philosophy would be sound only if it were true that, as Humbert says’ “poets never kill.” But, of course, Humbert does kill - and, like Kinbote, Humbert is exactly as good a writer, exactly as much of an artist, capable of creating exactly as much iridescent ecstasy, as Nabokov himself. Nabokov would like the four characteristics which make up art to be inseparable, but he has to face up to the unpleasant fact that writers can obtain and produce ecstasy while failing to notice suffering, while being incurious about the people whose lives provide their material. He would like to see all the evil in the world - all the failures in tenderness and kindness - as produced by nonpoets, by generalizing, incurious vulgarians like Paduk and Gradus. But he knows that this is not the case. Nabokov would desperately like artistic gifts to be sufficient for moral virtue, but he knows that there is no connection between the contingent and selective curiosity of the autonomous artist and his father’s political project - the creation of a world in which tenderness and kindness are the human norm. So he creates characters who are both ecstatic and cruel, noticing and heartless, poets who are only selectively curious, obsessives who are as sensitive as they are callous. What he fears most is that one cannot have it both ways - that there is no synthesis of ecstasy and kindness.”
Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony and solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 158-160.
In the end - or at least at that stage in the analysis where we find it no longer productive to go any further - the problem is that Goblin showcases at least two people: Tyler the Creator, and Tyler the Creation, both fictional or at least somewhat mediated characters. Like Humbert and Nabokov, Tyler the Creation is just as good (or bad) a rapper/author/recent teenager as Tyler the Creator, but he’s not the answer to or even a true reflection of the latter’s problems. The line “I fuck bitches with no permission” doesn’t negate Tyler’s claim not to be a rapist, because at least one of them has to be a fictional statement; it does perhaps indicate, however, that the term ‘consent’ is not, specifically, in his vocabulary - which is a far more interesting idea, if one considers the words to have separate connotations, than whether the statement itself is true or not.
Finally, this Thought Catalog piece on the writing about Odd Future is well worth reading - it’s very firmly situated in the feminist perspective, basically with a litany of everything that’s happened on the internet against feminism prior to OFWGKTA (including a mention for ‘online activist’ Sady Doyle) - except for one flaw it has in ascribing male critics’ view of the group. Or at least, if any critics are doing it this way, they’re doing it wrong: “And yet, after these internal debates, they all seem to come around, to say that the rape imagery is something we should “look past,” and that once we do, we’ll see the true value of Odd Future’s music.” You can’t look past the rape/misogyny if you’re actually listening to the lyrics, any more than you can read Lolita and ‘look past’ the paedophilia. Look through, perhaps, to wider and less literal themes, or to see how what looks like approbation in one sense can also serve as an argument against: e.g., Goblin’s most blatantly misogynistic track, “Bitch Suck Dick”, ends with Tyler shooting (and apparently murdering) the two contributors.
But I shouldn’t need to be explaining the text in this way, since it’s only a provisional, speculative explanation in any case - what makes Goblin interesting is that there’s a text there to be engaged with, if you want to. Obviously there’s a huge societal problem in the existence of the attitudes which it reflects; as well as those who might unreflectedly absorb the text, but that danger exists with any art form and it can only be eradicated with censorship - censorship which erases our potential to learn anything. What doesn’t help is, deliberate attempts at nuance aside, the culturally ingrained and pervasive inclination to take the text literally, to take its sincerity at face value - despite that always remaining a possibility - and thus to constantly try and take its meaning outside of itself, to apply the art to the artist, the text to the author, rather than the other way round.
