Kevin's Watch

So I was recently reading that and Australian minister is attempting to get rapper Tyler the Creator banned from entry into Australia, due to the content of his lyrics. For those who don't know about him, in his music Tyler adopts a persona that is confrontational, abrasive, explicit and highly offensive. Violence, rape, and even necrophilia are featured in his songs. Detractors claim he is glorifying horrific behaviour- Tyler and his supporters claim it's self contained entertainment with no connection to the real world.

Most of you won't be surprised to hear of this, as you'll know it's nothing new. Anyone who has explored hip hop or extreme metal with any kind of depth will have encountered similar content. Nevertheless I'd like to have a discussion about it. Some questions I'd like to mull over with you:

When does entertainment begin to have a bearing on reality? Extreme artists often like to defend their works as self-contained and not to be taken too seriously. But Tyler's fans have recently sent threats of rape and murder to an activist who campaigned for age restrictions at his shows. And going further back in music history, the roots of Black Metal (a nihilistic, anti-religious and often Satanic) were tied up in burning churches, suicide, and murder.

Why do we seem to be less inclined to accept disturbing content in music as opposed to other entertainment mediums? No-one bats an eye at a gory horror movie. It might not be your thing, but no-one panics. But Death Metal lyrics involving blood and guts are met with a revulsion that seems disproportionate. Says George Fisher of Cannibal Corpse:

We don't sing about politics. We don't sing about religion...All our songs are short stories that, if anyone would so choose they could convert it into a horror movie. Really, that's all it is. We like gruesome, scary movies, and we want the lyrics to be like that. Yeah, it's about killing people, but it's not promoting it at all. Basically these are fictional stories, and that's it. And anyone who gets upset about it is ridiculous.

Where does the conversation about music as art fit in here? Pure entertainment is easily dismissed, while material presented as art generally demands further thought and dissection. To pick up the film comparison again, acts of extreme violence in Peter Jackson's "Braindead" evoke a much different response than the violence in Lars von Trier's "Antichrist." We don't seem to be as good at that separation of intent when public discussion turns to music lyrics. To me there's a clear difference in tone between these two lyrics samples:

Faith No More wrote:Now you are mine
I'll keep killing you till the end of time
Surprise! You're dead!
Guess what? It never ends!
The pain, the torment and torture, profanity
Nausea, suffering, perversion, calamity
You can't get away

Opeth wrote:Willingly guided into heresy
Beneath the surface, stark emptiness
And you'd pity my conviction
Whereas I though of myself as a leader

...

Wept for solace and submit to faith
In his shadow I'm choking, yet flourishing
Master

A delusion made me stronger
Yet I'm draped in pale withering flesh
I sacrificed more than I had
And left my woes beneath the mire

Both deal with the same broad topic: black magic, the occult, evil acts. Both contain imagery that could be called dark and disturbing. But the FNM song is cartoonish and gleeful. It's a shallow, over the top portrayal of a mad evil necromancer, and it's a hell of a fun song. The Opeth song, however, is a much deeper and complex beast. Themes such as self-delusion, pride, misplaced faith, self destruction and nihilism are brought to the occult topic. But often when you hear "offensive" lyrics discussed, it's in broad strokes of "bands who sing about evil things."

Sorry for the wall of text. Please post your ramblings and opinions.

I think ... I think people take things way more seriously than they should.

I think people look for scapegoats to justify why their kid turned to drugs, or robbery, or rape, or any other criminal act. I think entertainment is an easy target for that because it deals in fantasy situations, dramatic tension, and emotion.

I also think that, aside from the truly mentally unbalanced, most people understand the difference between listening to, say, a black metal band like Mayhem and burning down an actual church.

Though perhaps I'm a bit optimistic on that last point.

why doesn't anyone ever blame Poe or Lovecraft for some horrible crime?

maybe it's harder to sit and read a book for the cameras than to play a song for them.

some people are evil and do evil things. and sometimes those evil people like some music, or a movie or a tv show.

Wildling wrote:
I also think that, aside from the truly mentally unbalanced, most people understand the difference between listening to, say, a black metal band like Mayhem and burning down an actual church.

I think that's mostly so.
It's POSSIBLE some very small segment who are exposed to such when they are at some kind of crisis point where they could go either way might be nudged to the dark side.

OTOH...I'm often tempted to argue, just because of a general intuitive impression of folk as a mass [I'm sometimes even tempted to commit some time to researching it somehow to see if it is at all so...] that a significant minority [at least] of "normal" folk never really commit to "good" until/unless exposed to the dark.

So even if the risk is real, the fiction may well be necessary and the positive outweigh the negative. Maybe.

And/Cuz:

If we're going to control/limit/censor "bad" stuff, though, we have to start with the news. It's been shown...at least in children under 12 IIRC...that exposure to the exact same images/video of violence has different effects if it is believed to be real or fictional. Told it is real, the subjects are much more likely to act violently themselves than if told it is made up.

Wildling wrote:I think people look for scapegoats to justify why their kid turned to drugs, or robbery, or rape, or any other criminal act. I think entertainment is an easy target for that because it deals in fantasy situations, dramatic tension, and emotion.

This explains it succinctly. The only thing I can add is that people generally demonize that which they do not understand or that which they fear (sometimes they don't even know why they fear something).

Music is sometimes like visual art--it must explore themes which are dark and ugly so that we may examine them and thus understand them.

For me the difference is in the repeated performance and regurgitation of the material.

No one would consider that reading the first 7 chapters of LFB, which includes a rape and other acts of violence, would engender such behavior. However, one is not consistently repeating the acts in any sort of verbal manner.

The repeated singing of something, the repeated hearing of something, to me leads to a lot more desensitization that reading a book ever would or could. Same with TV or movies. The more you see or hear murder on the tube, the more you can watch it without emotion.

Only a fool believes that there's no link between media (entertainment) and actions. That's the whole point of advertising. That said, I love violent movies and balls-out metal, and I've never hurt a soul.