>it's not clear to me that overtly political music is what it's all about
>anyway. nor was it much what is was all above *ever*. a repost from a
>thread where i had my first tango with eric --twitbuoy--beck!
Yeah, kelley, thanks for embarrassing me with that. That post was soooooo 1998.
>anyway, my argument, following some in the birmingham school of cultural
>studies, is that this isn't always about a literal message but can be, as
>is the case with rap/hip hop, about the politics of reclaiming "space". it
>seems to me that we need to look at something other than the lyrics for a
>"message" or "massage" as it were:
Rather than em-bare-ass myself again, I'll show my general assent to this statement with a little quote, this one from the school Frankfurt, not Birmingham.
"The relation between art and revolution is a unity of opposites, an antagonistic unity. Art obeys a necessity, and has a freedom which is its own--not those of the revolution. Art and revolution are united in "changing the world"--liberation. But in its practice, art does not abandon its own exigencies and does not quit its own dimension: it remains non-operational. In art, the political goal appears only in the transfiguration which is the aesthetic form. The revolution may well be absent from the oeuvre even while the artist himself is "engaged," is a revolutionary."
(Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt)
Eric