Dear David Banner, Please Stop Now Before You Undo Your Own Good Work
Because though your rhetoric may have been occasionally convoluted, your passion at the Congressional hip-hop silliness was admirable, even if some jaded blog-wags might claim you’d have gotten more accomplished for America/the art form had you spent the entire day at home in your boxer shorts. But your post-hearing comments are starting to reach the ludicrous stage, especially when Rolling Stone comes running looking for sensational quotes, and it might be time to dismount from the soapbox for a few weeks before you start claiming that instutionalized…whatever is keeping you from eventually making your Dream Of The Blue Turtles. Oh wait, you already are:
“One of my top three groups in the world is the Police. I love the old Police with Sting and the drummer holding the drum sticks the old-school drumline way … I happen to fall upon ‘Murder By Numbers.’ [Sings] ‘Murder by numbers, one, two, three … easy to learn as your A, B, Cs.’ He said in the song the best way to kill a man is put poison in his coffee. You look at ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger,’ that was a stalker song. Johnny Cash said he wanted to kill a man just for the sake of killing him. But that’s ‘art.’ So basically what you’re telling me is that [rap is] not art because we’re black.”
C’mon, you can almost certainly see the big ol’ reason-hole that needs filling in this argument, the gap between equating a reasonable human being of any race being skeeved by the 900th hardcore iteration of “She Swallowed It” with “a stalker song,” even one by a white man. There are lots of important things to say about the racial hypocrisies of American (popular) culture and its governmental and religious interest in forcibly cleaning it up, but drawing up wonky, easily dismantled/dismissed parallels between very different works of art is poor argumentative strategy, even if you’re in the junior high debate club.
Your fan, Jess
David Banner Has Five Big Complaints (And Oprah Is One) [Rolling Stone]
