We have been baited again. And we have taken the bait.
The right-wing virtuecrats and their liberal supplicants (the Tipper Gores of this world) have succeeded in turning the discourse about pop culture away from esthetics, and ideology, and into a referendum on indecency, forcing those of us who oppose restrictions on speech to stand side by side with some rather unsavory, reactionary characters.
Sadly, it seems to me there is little left to defend in the popular culture - especially music - not because of the ubiquitous sex, violence, and profanity, but because it is now to a great extent vulgarity in the service of reactionary sentiment - greed, sexism, homophobia, and assorted other attitudes we on the left should find reprehensible. Eminem and 50 Cent are both quite brilliant, but so was Leni Riefenstahl, and the British punk band Screwdriver (in their later, neo-Nazi incarnation.)
But it wasn't always this way.
I was in high school at the end of the 1980s, and the beginning of the 1990s. I had the good fortune of coming of age at the moment my generation took control of the culture, which by that point had grown stale and reactionary. I watched as generation x scenes on the west and east sides of Los Angeles and then Seattle break open wide, and take over the airwaves. I was at the now almost forgotten Janes Addiction shows at the John Anson Ford theatre in 1989, which were part carnival freak show, part pagan festival, and became the template for Lollopalooza.
It was every bit as vulgar as today, but it was progressive - largely - and openly embracing of the outcast and marginalized. For the first time since the height of the boomer counterculture, the freaks, losers, radicals, faggots, leapers, and fallen had a voice again, and the bullies, bigots, jocks, and right-wing assholes were in retreat. We were anarchists, and cynics, not collectivists, and idealists, but there was a whiff of hope in the air. Even if we couldn't have the world we wanted, at least we could smash the one that existed to pieces in song.
Even hip hop, which has never been a rich source of enlightened attitudes about women and gays, had the radical black nationalists Public Enemy and the great trickster KRS-One. Even gangsta rap could make a genuine claim at that point to hardboiled realism, and echoing life on the streets. It wasn't all just bitchas and hoes and faggots and ridz and cribz. There was a genuine political consciousness at work informed by real lives in the shadows of Reagan and Bush's and Clinton's America.
Some of these acts are still of course around, and some of them - the Chili Peppers, Green Day - still vaguely popular. But these are only the fading remnants, and I see little evidence (yet) the next generation is prepared to give us anything more than bubble gum pop and tepid rehashes of the past. Its time for generation y to take the culture away from the wretched pricks of my generation who own it, and show us how cool *and* enlightened you are. And while you're at it please be sure to tell your elders who want to censor everything to go fuck themselves.