Posts by Russell Brown
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(Oh, it's 'warrant', isn't it. I'm correcting my Jay-Z quote, post-post.)
Maybe I should post the whole verse so everyone knows what we're yakking about ...
The year's '94 and my trunk is raw
In my rear view mirror is the mother fuckin' law
I got two choices y'all pull over the car or (hmmm)
Bounce on the double put the pedal to the floor
Now I ain't tryin' to see no highway chase with Jake.
Plus i got a few dollars i can fight the case
So I ... pull over to the side of the road
I heard "Son do you know why I'm stoppin' you for?"
Cause I'm young and I'm black and my hat's real low?
Do I look like a mind reader sir? I don't know ...
Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo'?
"Well you was doin fifty-five in a fifty-fo' "
"Licence and registration and step out of the car"
"Are you carryin' a weapon on you? I know a lot of you are"
I ain't steppin out of shit, all my paper's legit
"Well, do you mind if I look round the car a little bit?"
Well my glove compartment is locked so's the trunk in the back
And I know my rights so you gon' need a warrant for that
"Aren't you sharp as a tack, you some type of lawyer or something'?"
"Or somebody important or somethin'?"
Nah, I ain't pass the bar but I know a little bit
Enough that you won't illegally search my shit
"We'll see how smart you are when the K9 come"
I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one
Hit me -
Yeah, I know. I've analysed that song every which way but loose.
Cool. Are you familiar with the 'Voodoo Problems' Hendrix mash-up? Totally wicked.
But there's a larger point there, which is that a 'pussy' is a bad, weak thing, and a pussy is what women have. It's not what men have. So that guy he's talking about is bad because he's weak, *like a woman*. Which is still pretty offensive, no?
Of course. But we're clearly on the same page: not everything is what it seems, and there are still gonna be tunes that you hate yourself for loving.
(I'm actually less offended by the booty-clap as a dance than I probably should be. That's one great ass-maneuvre!)
I'll have to defer to your judgement on that :-)
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__For example, I love Jay-Z's '99 Problems'. But the chorus, 'I got 99 problems and a bitch ain't one' isn't really something that a right-on third-wave feminist like myself wants to, um, 'reclaim' in any meaningful sense. Sigh.__
Love the tune, hate the lyrics? Bit of a bummer, I can see that.
Yep, and it's not even all the lyrics. The verses in that tune are clever and complex, especially the one about being pulled over by a cop ("because I'm young and I'm black and my hat's real low"). And then he busts this in the next verse:
Now once upon a time not too long ago
A nigga like myself had to strong arm a ho
This is not a ho in the sense of havin a pussy
But a pussy havin no God Damn sense, try and push meSo the ho he's talking about is a man.
If you took the "bitch" out of the chorus, it would actually sound quite different, but I guess the attack of words like "bitch" and "nigga" are part of the impact of hip hop.
The Prodigy's 'Smack My Bitch Up' (sole lyric, "change my pitch up, smack my bitch up" repeated lots) is another interesting one. When 15,000 teenage girls screamed "SMACK MY BITCH UP!" back at the band at the Big Day Out (which they did, and it sounded quite amazing), they weren't talking about being assaulted. It's just a transgressive phrase that means what you want it to mean.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that there's plenty of foul misogyny in commercial hip hop (any act that makes yet another pool-party video with champagne and near-naked models doing ass-claps should be first up against the wall), but Jay Z's got more going on than that, so don't feel too guilty about loving the tune.
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and a slight pedantry from me
Please, Che. Pendantry ...
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__That's unfair, Deborah. It's a bit hard to have a meaningful discussion if I can't make an observation to the contrary.__
I feel really snippy about this, Russell, because reading back through the thread, virtually everyone was making a huge effort to avoid generalisations.
But you put me in the difficult position of making it appear that I'm being insensitive or dismissive simply by disagreeing with you.
But I was also referring to what daleaway said here too:
Music is huge with the younger generation - far more so than when I was their age - and it's become almost entirely a nasty soup of male hormones. Much of it is plain malevolent towards women.
That's not even near true. Yes, some of what's in the singles chart (T-Pain's puerile 'Bartender) meets that description, but if you take a look there you'll also see Pink, Fergie and Gwen Stefani. Pink's song is 'Mr President' and even the Fergie song is about young woman sadly farewelling her boyfriend because she's off to pursue her life goals. The Plain White T's 'Hey There Delilah' is some guy in a band telling his girlfriend to just stay in school and they'll be together soon enough. The highest entrants on the album charts are the High School Musical soundtrack and the new Katchafire album.
So, yes, I thought saying that modern music is "almost entirely a nasty soup of male hormones" and "malevolent towards women" was an unwarranted generalisation.
I won't back through it all, but yes, I did observe that the kind of dressing you were concerned about was, from my experience, far from universal among young women.
I won't go on, but I get wary when one generation despairs of the moral state of a younger one because it dresses or acts differently. I thought you and anjuman and daleaway were actually being quite negative about young women at times.
But feel free to disagree :-)
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That's very positive of you, but even here on PAS, when some of us have been trying to express our worries, we have been told that we are making (invalid) generalisations...
That's unfair, Deborah. It's a bit hard to have a meaningful discussion if I can't make an observation to the contrary.
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I tell you what it is Russell, from personal experience, the camera definitely magnifies any imperfections you might have.
Of course. I try not to see myself on screen and think "where's the guy's teeth?" ...
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NZ's drug policy already leads and brings me great joy in the respect that:
(1) we already have a restricted substances category for recreational drugs not harmful enough to be made illegal; and
(2) the future direction was clearly signalled by statements made through the Minister that the onus is on sponsors of new products to show safety before their products come on to market;Y'know, Matt, I have tried to explain that to people here, so it's helpful to have you reiterate it.
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That maybe feeling/dressing a certain way (once you have a choice) maybe for your own pleasure but modelling etc is for others.
One of the grimmer evenings I've had (much more so than Mermaids, oddly enough) was a modelling talent quest in the 1990s sponsored by a computer company (on the basis that it was "creative" or something). Oh god. It was a parade of shivering too-young teenage girls, most of them too thin and one or two clearly with eating disorders.
The model agency didn't seem to think anything was unusual, but us IT types were appalled by the end of the evening. To quote the head of the computer company: "We are never getting involved with anything like this again."
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I like the idea of just being able to wear what I damn well want - that's why I'm wearing my MaryJane-style purple Docs today. But it seems odd when "I will wear what I damned well want" turns out to be "and that will be shoes that hurt, skirts so short that you can see whatever I am wearing, or not wearing, underneath, crop tops, and pouty red lips," all on a 16 year old girl. There's an odd undercurrent there, of turning girls into sex objects. And I wodner if they are even aware of what's going on.
Some of them are. I enjoy the occasional times I still go and pick my son up from Western Springs. There is no uniform, so everyone dresses as their favourite youth cult. There are a few Paris Hilton wannabes (and it looks dodgy), but a hell of a lot more goths, alt-girls, sporty types, etc. I'm finding the trend towards generalisations -- or maybe fitting everything in a particular frame -- in this thread a bit frustrating.
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