Herm said:james said:Herm said:
I'm ambivalent about this. To a point, I can appreciate what dude is trying to do, but I question whether depicting queer love purely in terms of torment and victimhood and sociopathy is the best way to do it. I would think that people who think of homosexual relationships as positive would most likely be saddened by a portrayal like this, where people who think of them as negative would most likely see it as "good riddance to bad rubbish." I don't know exactly who something like this is for, really, or exactly which unsympathetic views it's meant to challenge.
"Is the love shared by two people of the same gender, really that different than the love I have for my partner of the opposite sex?" I'm not trying to be flip, but I mean, unless the listener can imagine themselves shooting their partner between the eyes in a fast-food restaurant before killing themselves, I think the answer is likely to be, "There seem to be some differences, yes." I feel like whatever good intentions he may have had, by rooting it all in denial and absent father figures and bullying and gangs and incarceration and ultimately murder/suicide, the strongest message in the song becomes: There is something wrong with those people.
I guess that's an interesting (if somewhat aggrandizing) interview, but it doesn't really address any of the problems I have with the song or with his ostensible motivations in doing it. The greatest violence depicted in the song is a closed circuit between two gay guys, and whatever finger it's trying to point at wider society is nothing next to the finger it indvertently points at the destructive potential of queer love; whatever abstract effect the bullying attitude of the straight world might have had, it kinda pales next to the fact that this is one gay guy murdering the other. The most charitable reading I can give of the message this sends is : "Society, look at what you make these poor fucked-up people do!"
Plus, all that stuff in the bottom third--about "Never knew his father / Or spent time with any other men..." then getting caught up in crime and going to prison where he meets his first boyfriend--kinda gives the impression that the narrator thinks that Roderick was "turned gay" by shitty circumstances. What's up with that?
Again, dude's heart was clearly in the right place, but I don't think that gets you extra points in 2012. While it's a fine piece of work, it's tough to think that it hasn't on some level been a beneficiary of low expectations--low expectations by gays, low expectations by straights, low expectations by Murs himself, low expectations by us--for hip-hop's treatment of gay folks. It's a dramatically effective song*, but an ideologically flawed one, and if it was being framed as a creative, well-done narrative, it'd be one thing, but to frame it as challenging and progressive and all that is, I think, wrong-headed.
*Purely on some writing shit, I have to say that for a song 1) that concerns behavior considered by many to be subhuman and 2) that climaxes in an In-N-Out Burger, the title "Animal Style" is fucking genius. Whatever greivances I have with the song, my hat is off to dude for that.
I'm ambivalent about this. To a point, I can appreciate what dude is trying to do, but I question whether depicting queer love purely in terms of torment and victimhood and sociopathy is the best way to do it. I would think that people who think of homosexual relationships as positive would most likely be saddened by a portrayal like this, where people who think of them as negative would most likely see it as "good riddance to bad rubbish." I don't know exactly who something like this is for, really, or exactly which unsympathetic views it's meant to challenge.
"Is the love shared by two people of the same gender, really that different than the love I have for my partner of the opposite sex?" I'm not trying to be flip, but I mean, unless the listener can imagine themselves shooting their partner between the eyes in a fast-food restaurant before killing themselves, I think the answer is likely to be, "There seem to be some differences, yes." I feel like whatever good intentions he may have had, by rooting it all in denial and absent father figures and bullying and gangs and incarceration and ultimately murder/suicide, the strongest message in the song becomes: There is something wrong with those people.
I guess that's an interesting (if somewhat aggrandizing) interview, but it doesn't really address any of the problems I have with the song or with his ostensible motivations in doing it. The greatest violence depicted in the song is a closed circuit between two gay guys, and whatever finger it's trying to point at wider society is nothing next to the finger it indvertently points at the destructive potential of queer love; whatever abstract effect the bullying attitude of the straight world might have had, it kinda pales next to the fact that this is one gay guy murdering the other. The most charitable reading I can give of the message this sends is : "Society, look at what you make these poor fucked-up people do!"
Plus, all that stuff in the bottom third--about "Never knew his father / Or spent time with any other men..." then getting caught up in crime and going to prison where he meets his first boyfriend--kinda gives the impression that the narrator thinks that Roderick was "turned gay" by shitty circumstances. What's up with that?
Again, dude's heart was clearly in the right place, but I don't think that gets you extra points in 2012. While it's a fine piece of work, it's tough to think that it hasn't on some level been a beneficiary of low expectations--low expectations by gays, low expectations by straights, low expectations by Murs himself, low expectations by us--for hip-hop's treatment of gay folks. It's a dramatically effective song*, but an ideologically flawed one, and if it was being framed as a creative, well-done narrative, it'd be one thing, but to frame it as challenging and progressive and all that is, I think, wrong-headed.
*Purely on some writing shit, I have to say that for a song 1) that concerns behavior considered by many to be subhuman and 2) that climaxes in an In-N-Out Burger, the title "Animal Style" is fucking genius. Whatever greivances I have with the song, my hat is off to dude for that.
