Thursday, November 01, 2007

Quiet As It's Kept, Rap Haters Really Understand Little About Art

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
-James Baldwin

"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures."
-Henry Ward Beecher

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten....
-John Berger

"The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress."
-Hendrik Willem Van Loon


The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.
-Joseph Campbell

Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.
-Rita Mae Brown

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.
-William S. Burroughs

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great quotes for the archive! Thanks.

Oh and great accompanying pics!

Anonymous said...

Rap stars are encouraging early sexual activity among teenagers by promoting a degrading view of women, research shows.

Psychologists said their findings from a three-year study presented a worrying picture of how popular music affected the attitudes of boys and girls to sex.

Rap music and hip hop, with their particular emphasis on sex and demeaning depictions of women, were blamed for encouraging early sexual behaviour, leading to the spread of disease and underage pregnancies.

Dr Steven Martino, who led the US study published in the latest edition of the journal 'Pediatrics', said that "sexually degrading lyrics" - many graphic and filled with obscenities - caused changes in adolescents' sexual behaviour.

He said, "These lyrics depict men as sexually insatiable, women as sexual objects, and sexual intercourse as inconsequential. Other songs about sex don't appear to influence youth the same way.

"These portrayals objectify and degrade women in ways that are clear but they do the same to men by depicting them as sex-driven studs. Musicians who use this type of sexual imagery are communicating something very specific about what sexual roles are appropriate, and teenage listeners may act on these messages.

"These lyrics are likely to promote the acceptance of women as sexual objects and men as pursuers of sexual conquest. Despite the fact that degrading sexual lyrics are particularly demeaning for women, they affect adolescent boys and girls similarly."

The same disturbing messages were contained in videos which endorse the portrayal of women as sexual objects, the report said. The research team surveyed 1,461 children aged from 12 to 17 from across the US, asking them about their sexual behaviour and how often they listened to music by various artists including rock, country, rap, blues and pop.

They found that the youngsters listened to an average of 1.5 to 2.5 hours of music a day - not including what they saw on television or videos - but that 40 per cent of the songs referred to sex or romance.

Adolescents who listened to a lot of music containing "objectifying and limiting characterisations of sexuality progressed more quickly in their sexual behaviour" than teenagers who preferred different kinds of music. This was regardless of race or gender, the report said.

To Continue
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=401684&in_page_id=1770

Denmark Vesey said...

" Casper said...

Rap stars are encouraging early sexual activity among teenagers by promoting a degrading view of women, "research" shows."

LOL. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Massa creates a little ... "meme" ... a theoretical unit of cultural information ... and places it like cheese used to bait a mousetrap.

Of course they camouflage their mind controlling suggestions in all the accoutrements of institutional and academic sanction by calling them "studies" or "research" or "expert opinion".

But what continues to bewilder me, is black people who consume these little bits of "convenient propaganda" messages like fat kids in a hot dog eating contest.

Yeah right Casper.

10 years of Rap music caused the general decadence in this nation, not 90 years of Jewish Hollywood.

It's Little Kim's fault. Not Madonna.

It's Jay-Z. Not Harvey Weinstein.

It's Biggie. Not Robin Leach.

Fiddy "degrades" women. Not Larry Flynt.

GUnit is violent. Not Blackwater.

Confuse. Distract. Divide. Pit Against Each Other. Destroy.

Casper. Stop being a sucker.

Anonymous said...

If only folks could try to understand 'memes' as well as a much wider cirlce of folks has started to understand 'genes' in non formal scholarly circles.

If not understand at least aware of, that's a necessary start.