Mad Max Feminista

Mad Max: Fury Road is about a citadel in a post-Apocalyptic world where a dictator named Immortan keeps women prisoner for breeding War Boys and producing “Mother’s milk.” When his young wives escape, they leave behind the message “We are not things.” Imperator Furiosa, Immortan’s top war-rig driver, helps them flee and together these powerful women dominate the cast, so much so that Mad Max often feels like a secondary character in his own movie.

For this, Mad Max: Fury Road was quickly hailed as feminist, but Feminist Frequency founder Anita Sarkeesian--central to the Gamergate controversy--begged to differ in a series of tweets expressing her thoughts on the film, which I present continuously here:

"On the surface, Mad Max is about resisting a cartoonish version of misogyny. But that resistance takes the form of more glorified violence. Fury Road is different from many action films in that it lets some women participate as equal partners in a cinematic orgy of male violence. Feminism doesn't simply mean women getting to partake in typical badass 'guy stuff.' Feminism is about redefining our social value system. As a film Mad Max absolutely adores its gritty future. The camera caresses acts of violence in the same way it caresses the brides' bodies. 'We are not things' is a great line, but doesn’t work when the plot and especially the camera treats them like things from start to finish. Mad Max's villains are caricatures of misogyny which makes overt misogynists angry but does not challenge more prevalent forms of sexism. Viewers get to feel good about hating cartoon misogyny without questioning themselves or examining how sexism actually works in our society. It makes me profoundly sad that mainstream pop culture now interprets feminism to mean 'women can drive fast and stoically kill people too!'”

There is, of course, something to this critique, but there is much to question: Does the camera really caress the wives’ bodies? Is cartoon misogyny so ineffectual? What about the violence of the films’ protagonists is “male”? Why this Eighties-style moral crusader's condemnation of fictional violence? Don’t women enjoy guns and car chases, too? And why downplay the feminist content that does exist in the film? However, what I want to focus on is the certainty Sarkeesian brings to interpretation--an activity by nature closed to objective truth--and the resulting reductionist approach to art.

I first began wrestling with the questions of feminist interpretation after seeing the Greta Garbo film Queen Christina (1933). Queen Christina dresses and acts like a man, resists control by men--especially through marriage--and is determined to live as she pleases despite social norms. In a famous scene at the end of the film, she stands alone at the prow of a boat, alone and with nothing but her own will to determine her future.

At the time, I had this to say about the film:

"But there are limits to Queen Christina’s feminism. What are we to make of her penchant for dressing as, and even pretending to be, a man? Is she proving how even a woman should be able to do anything she pleases? Or does she feel that a woman cannot be equal as a woman but only by becoming a man? And what of her obsessive rejection of men early in the film? Can she not realize herself as a woman except through rejection of men? There is an awful lot of man in this formulation of woman."

This kind of questioning is what makes interpretation so enjoyable, rewarding and profound. Likewise, Sarkeesian’s tweets raise interesting issues regarding the portrayal of women in Mad Max: Fury Road and what that portrayal says about the treatment of women in our society. Exploring such issues would certainly be fruitful--from an interpretive as well as social justice perspective--but Sarkeesian is not content to question the text and let it speak. Instead, she appears to approach her text with the usual answers prepped.

I’m reminded of a passage in “The New Sexism: Liberating Art and Beauty” (1993) by contrarian feminist Camille Paglia:

“I have despaired about the tendentiousness, ignorance, and mediocrity of feminist attitudes toward art and beauty. Issues of quality and standards have been foolishly abandoned by liberals, who now interpret aesthetics as nothing but a mask for ideology. What madness is abroad in the land when only neoconservatives will defend the grandeur of art?” (emphasis mine)

To many feminists like Sarkeesian, a work of art’s worth is determined by its congruence to a particular agenda.

Mad Max creator and director George Miller displays throughout the series a much broader conception of art--using as well as questioning typical stereotypes of men and women as warlike and motherly, respectively--and a richer understanding of the twists and unexpected turns found in the human spirit, often in unsettling ways subversive to both dominant (e.g., patriarchal) and reactionary (feminist) ideologies. In keeping with previous installments in the series, Mad Max: Fury Road addresses ideology without pushing one--as does much art both high and low throughout history.

Popular culture and its legions of fans are now embracing feminism in theory and practice more than ever before, as evidenced by those celebrating Mad Max: Fury Road’s feminist streak, but many fans balk when they sense culture critics reducing their favorite characters, stories and franchises--and the magic in them--to a caricature in the service of naysayers' propaganda.

I don’t know if this strain of feminism will triumph, but I do hope it achieves its broader objectives of equal rights and opportunities for women rather than fall to a backlash by conservative forces. Most likely, it will serve as the basis for a new synthesis in feminist ideas, hopefully a strain of feminism that corrects current flaws much as the feminism of today arose out of a critique of earlier feminisms.

 

Previous posts touching on feminism:
The Limits of Feminism in Queen Christina
The Miley Cyrus Affair
Katy Perry vs. the Social Consciousness Nazis
The Impotent and the Potent (on the manosphere)
Two Narratives, Both Alike in Dignity (Teen Titans #1)
Thor Is the Woman of the Day!
An Open Letter to Feminists
The Rise and Fall of Kate Kane aka Batwoman
Nihilism and the Batgirl #41 Variant Cover Fracas

Journey into Hip-Hop: Expanding Horizons (4/4)

This is Part 4 of a series of posts discussing my search for a particular style of hip-hop music. It isn’t intended to exhaustively cover the genre, so if anyone is inclined to deconstruct what I don’t know from these posts about what I think I know—feel free to educate me via a comment below or tweet @Gleaming_Sword. 

“This is a journey into sound, a journey which along the way will bring to you new color, new dimensions, new value.” –Eric B. and Rakim, “This Is a Journey into Sound”

Of course, nothing says all hip-hop music must conform to my specific taste. One of the side benefits of my quest for the ultimate hip-hop sound has been encountering a wide variety of music and learning to enjoy different styles. Even albums I enjoy less as a matter of taste--Wu-Tang’s Enter the Wu-Tang, for example--have something to offer.

As in most things, an open mind is rewarding, so I haven’t avoided newer music. Kanye West’s Yeezus is a masterpiece that expands hip-hop’s horizons into dark, industrial geographies, while Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly is sometimes described as post hip-hop for its genre-bending style. On Tetsuo & Youth, Lupe Fiasco packs enough wordplay into one song to boggle the mind:

 

One of my favorite points in this journey came when I suggested on Twitter that Nicki Minaj was not true hip-hop, inviting a stern correction by one of her fans who quickly pointed me to some key tracks, like “Trini Dem Girls,” which has the zoom to satisfy even my criteria. It’s definitely danceable, as demonstrated here:

 

A series of posts like this is bound to end unsatisfactorily. I can barely begin to explore all the music I have sampled along the way--I haven’t even discussed favorites like The Roots or Run the Jewels--and even if I could, it would still be but a small fraction of all the music out there. Even as I put up these posts far into my journey, I’m discovering new music, like the old-school funk and flow of Eric B. and Rakim ca. 1990 and the rhymes-with-punch of the more recent group La Coka Nostra.

And then there’s Arrested Development, my departure point. I recently picked up Since the Last Time (2006) and Standing at the Crossroads (2012), and these later examples of the band’s music have the same verve and values while also reflecting changes in hip-hop over the years. If, like me, you wonder where all the real hip-hop went and nothing else I’ve mentioned has sparked your interest, Standing at the Crossroads, available for free here, could be the place to start your own search for the ultimate sound in hip-hop.

 

Previous posts in this series:
Arrested Development (1/4)
Hip-Hop Was Dead (2/4)
Mo’ Meta Playlist (3/4)

Journey into Hip-Hop: Mo’ Meta Playlist (3/4)

This is Part 3 of a series of posts discussing my search for a particular style of hip-hop music. It isn’t intended to exhaustively cover the genre, so if anyone is inclined to deconstruct what I don’t know from these posts about what I think I know—feel free to educate me via a comment below or tweet @Gleaming_Sword.

“I get down to what it is and if it ain't funky . . . see ya!” –Public Enemy, “Revolution Generation”

Aside from some House of Pain and Beastie Boys, I didn’t find much hip-hop music that hit the nail on the head until The Roots drummer Questlove’s memoir Mo’ Meta Blues came out in 2013, complete with sections on music crucial to his musical journey, and suddenly I had stars to help me navigate.

Here are the hip-hop albums I marked for checking out:

     Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back      (1988)

     De La Soul, 3 Feet High and Rising (1989)
     Jungle Brothers, Done By the Forces of Nature (1989)
     Ice Cube, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990)
     De La Soul, De La Soul Is Dead (1991)
     Dr. Dre, The Chronic (1992)
     A Tribe Called Quest, Midnight Marauders (1993)
     Nas, Illmatic (1994)

In approaching this list, I was looking for some mélange of the following: a live sound with upbeat tempos, funky beats, socially conscious lyrics, gritty samples, and scratching. From that perspective, this isn’t a bad list, but some of the artists definitely hit nearer the mark, namely Public Enemy, De La Soul and Jungle Brothers.

Early on, Public Enemy didn’t so much drop albums as drop like a force majeure on the hip-hop scene. Where I grew up, rap meant Run-DMC covering Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” the Beastie Boys album Licensed to Ill, and Flavor Flav bouncing around with his clock. Many today only know the Flav from reality television, but he, Chuck D, Terminator X and others of the PE crew have dished out some fine hip-hop with hard-hitting and consciousness-expanding lyrics and sounds. It Takes a Nation is good, but Fear of a Black Planet (1990) always gets me grooving:

Public Enemy continues to put out new music worthy of attention, as does De La Soul, which is known for a brighter, more positive sound. In the past couple years, De La Soul has released almost its entire catalog for free as digital downloads, but one need look no further than “The Magic Number” off their debut album 3 Feet High and Rising for the magic sound: 

 

After the death of hip-hop, this raw sound is rare, and when it does exist, it comes off contrived. Back in the Golden Era of hip-hop, however, it was a natural part of the culture, of the movement of hip-hop and the zeitgeist in the music. It sounds like the streets, like a house party, like the rhythms of America, and you want to dance to it. Listen to most hip-hop today and the tempos are too slow. There’s no up-and-jump, no verve. It's rap, it's "R&B," it's pop, but is it hip-hop? 

Once upon a time, that wasn’t a problem: Consider “Because I Got It Like That” (1988) by the Jungle Brothers. Some remixes from 1998 I ran across recently on a 12” single remind me of Arrested Development for the way they start slow, then take off. It’s music that winks and grins at you before tearing out of the driveway:

 

Other posts in this series:

Arrested Development (1/4)
Hip-Hop Was Dead (2/4)
Expanding Horizons (4/4)

 

Journey into Hip-Hop: Hip-Hop Was Dead (2/4)

 

This is Part 2 of a series of posts discussing my search for a particular style of hip-hop music. It isn’t intended to exhaustively cover the genre, so if anyone is inclined to deconstruct what I don’t know from these posts about what I think I know—feel free to educate me via a comment below or tweet @Gleaming_Sword.

“And something changed when commerce arrived. Good and bad stopped mattering; only effective and ineffective mattered. Whether a record worked on an audience became the standard, rather than whether or not it was any good.” –Questlove, Mo’ Meta Blues

By the late 90s and early 2000s, hip-hop music had risen to prominence in the music scene, but I didn’t like any of it. I felt like I should, because I’d never had anything against the genre, but a new aesthetic had taken over so that the triumph of hip-hop was simultaneously its death.

In his memoir Mo’ Meta Blues, The Roots drummer Questlove actually places the death of hip-hop a little sooner: the Source awards in May 1995:

 

They sat the artistic rappers, the have-nots of hip-hop, on the far right side: Nas, Mobb Deep, Wu-Tang, Busta Rhymes, and us. In the center of the place you had the Death Row crew and all the non-New York acts. On the far left of the place, you had the Bad Boy team. That room was like Apocalypse Now: The Hip-Hop Version. If you had sparked two rocks together the place would have exploded.

The divisions played out in the competition, with Nas’s Illmatic up against The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die:

One of those two records, Illmatic, was done in the naïve old hip-hop style of just being a great album from start to finish, with great production, great MCing, a sharp perspective, and so on. The other album was done with an eye toward hit singles, and it succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

Questlove’s description of how the night progressed is sad:

So both albums were up for the same awards, and of course Biggie won them all. And for every award Biggie got I watched Nas just wilt in defeat, and that killed me inside.

The new dominant aesthetic was one of fame, riches, bitches, gang violence and racial epithets--but all in a sleek pop package. Real instrumentation, scratching, and gritty samples were less noticeable in the music or had disappeared altogether, replaced by a narrow band of weak beats, slower tempos, and cheap sound effects. The rapping was often sub-par, or so fast and contrived as to be incomprehensible, and the videos were Gatsbean nightmares of gaudy cars and suits, booty in thongs, Benjamins, Kristal showers, and overblown cinematic prologues and interludes (as in The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Hypnotize").

 

 

To this day, when you meet someone who says they hate hip-hop, this is why. There’s often a broader animus behind such comments, but many of the artists and the producers who pushed them were guilty as charged, and they steered hip-hop in a direction from which it has yet to fully recover. One review I saw for A$AP Rocky’s At.Long.Last.A$Ap (2015) recommended it as one of the best new hip-hop albums if you could overlook all the juvenile posturing and casual misogyny.

This is what constitutes praise in hip-hop today?

But no doubt I’m being unfair to some extent. Reviewing some tracks for this post, I found much more to enjoy in the music than I did back then. In Mo’ Meta Blues, Questlove mentions Jay-Z in the context of the genre’s Copernican devolution, but he also expresses respect, and indeed Jay-Z’s last major release, Magna Carta… Holy Grail (2013), showcases an impressive lyrical and musical versatility. Some reviewers said he sounds almost bored on the album, but I suspect that’s because he could rap wonders even in his sleep.

And yet I can’t help but sniff in derision when I see comments online describing music from this period as “old school.” Quite possibly, many today don’t know there was a time before . . .

Other posts in this series:

Arrested Development (1/4)
Mo' Meta Playlist (3/4)
Expanding Horizons (4/4)

 

Journey into Hip-Hop: Arrested Development (1/4)

This is Part 1 of a series of posts discussing my search for a particular style of hip-hop music. It isn’t intended to exhaustively cover the genre, so if anyone is inclined to deconstruct what I don’t know from these posts about what I think I know—feel free to educate me via a comment below or tweet @Gleaming_Sword.

 

 

“If Jay-Z is Jehovah, I’m the Antichrist.” --Speech

The history of hip-hop music begins much earlier, but my history of hip-hop begins at Lollapalooza in the summer of 1993. When Arrested Development took the stage, a standard was set that I would find unmatched during the years of hip-hop’s ascendancy, leaving me to ask: What happened to hip-hop? And thus began my search for “real” hip-hop--hip-hop with a rare quality I couldn’t have defined at the time.

In 1993, I was a recent high school graduate who had been raised on Sixties rock, grown up watching New Wave on MTV, and developed a love of interesting rock, but I immediately loved Arrested Development. After seeing the party they brought to the stage with their boom, bap, scratching, African-inspired outfits, dancing, and arm-waving elder Baba Oje, I had to check out their only album at the time: 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of...(1992).

To this day, it is my gold standard in hip-hop.

 

 

The album begins with the sound of an old, scratchy record and proceeds with an intro that is a study in building momentum. Within two and a half minutes, you hear strings, horns, guitar, scratching, a wild beat on a trap set, tribal drums, various banging, a siren, music samples, a multitude of voices, and more. You can feel as the album warms up before taking off running. The rest of the tracks are as sonically diverse, plus rapping and singing about family, love, religion, integrity, social ills and African-American pride.

Always positive and bouncing along to some new surprise, it isn’t above controversy or harsh language, as in the hit song “People Everyday,” in which Speech, Arrested Development’s MC, spins a tale of falling out with some catcallers:

 

The next year, Arrested Development released Zingalamaduni, which is as inventive, effervescent and enlightening as its predecessor. However, it didn’t sell as well and Arrested Development, which continues to make music and tour, never returned to the spotlight in America in the way suggested by its stunning debut.

In part, this may be because by 1994, the newly christened “alternative” music genre was increasingly focused on rock, especially grunge. When hip-hop did begin to dominate MTV some years later, it was the antithesis of what Arrested Development represented and would spur me to set out in search of the ultimate sound in hip-hop.


Other posts in this series:
Hip-Hop Was Dead (2/4)
Mo' Meta Playlist (3/4)
Expanding Horizons (4/4)

 

Helloween Hermeneutics

I arrived late to the Helloween game--as late as Straight Out of Hell, which was released in 2013. That’s 29 years after the band’s debut album and long after the classic albums that established the band for all eternity in power-metaldom. Last week, when Helloween released My God-Given Right, I found its cover to be an interesting text for interpretive exploration.

 

At first, I wondered if the image was intended to express anti-American sentiment. Helloween is a German band and Europe has its share of anti-American sentiment. On the album cover, the band has chosen to show the Statue of Liberty buried in snow up to her eyeballs against a frozen urban skyline suggestive of Manhattan, while a figure stands atop her head inciting a horde of minions that has triumphed in America’s downfall.

In this context, the title My God-Given Right would be an ironical jab at America’s belief in its divine appointment to conquer and civilize the world. This belief is explicitly stated in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and remains operative to this day. The album art could be saying “Like Rome, your empire will fall. This is what will become of your hubris.”

But is that really what the cover is saying? Turning to the song “Lost in America” for a nitty-gritty critique of America, I instead find lyrics based on a true story about the group being drunk and high on an airplane with faulty gauges somewhere over the United States:

 

That’s hardly piquant social critique, but there is more than a “plunder the sky bar” mentality behind the image. Occasional Helloween cover artist Martin Häusler explained his thought process to Blabbermouth:

During my research, I stumbled upon the blockbuster Day After Tomorrow and the idea of just leaving the world to the “Pumpkins” was born.

In this light, it is not just America but all of human civilization that has fallen. The folly of those who pull the world’s strings has finally brought us to apocalypse, perhaps through nuclear war or environmental catastrophe. One song on the album, “The Swing of a Fallen World,” laments what may become of our world if The Powers That Be do not change their ways:

The treasure we had so crazy and mad
Was sold out by people who cannot be glad
A handful of greed
A contagious seed
A handful of assholes who never recede
This adverse evolution
Mankind knows no solution
It’s the swing of a fallen world

For all that, My God-Given Right is not a dark album. The cover suggests a brighter world to come, for when the mighty fall, little people rise up. In this case, the little people are the “Pumpkins”--humanoids with jack-o'-lantern heads that represent the band and its Pumpkinhead fans.

What would a world ruled by Pumpkinheads be like? Well for one thing, it would be crazy in true heavy-metal style: booze, loud music and late nights. Helloween sings about this lifestyle in “Stay Crazy.” However, according to lead vocalist Andi Deris, the song “My God-Given Right” was inspired by words his father said to encourage him in a life of music:

 

He said, “You’re my only son. If I see you happy, you make me happy and it’s your God-given right to do what you want with your life, or at least give it a try.

Freedom to do what you want. Comments made by Helloween’s band members suggest they have faced opposition throughout their lives and careers for being different, and this theme runs throughout their music, from lyrics to musical style. Like most metal bands, Helloween has come under fire anytime it does anything different, but for artists, exploring new creative avenues is the stuff of life. A world run by Pumpkins would be one in which people follow their bliss¹ and no one lets the bastards grind you down.²

Or is that all wrong? The video for “My God-Given Right” keeps the theme of individual freedom, but shows a lone female rebel fighting against shock troops in pumpkin helmets--which makes the pumpkins the bad guys. Furthermore, she eventually defeats them with grenades that briefly take on the appearance of the Statue of Liberty’s torch--which could be construed as pro-American.

 

Thankfully, interpretation as well as heavy metal is more about play³ than restrictive definitions and theories, so there is no need to search for the correct meaning behind the cover of My God-Given Right. The album rocks, the cover is cool, and both provide food for thought.


Footnotes:
1. Comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell's advice for fulfillment in life.
2. Drawing on lyrics from U2's "Acrobat."
3. A concept in the writings of philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer.