Accountability in Music • Page 19

damn

 

when i was 15 i was in a facebook group called rock is better than rap andi said a bunch of real racist shit about rap not being real music. look at me now.

 

growing up in affluent st louis suburb in missouri is such a hotbed of racism. a lot of it real subconcious, a lot of it from the kids overt for shock/jokes/laughs. it wasnt until joining ap and divinginto the politics forum did i realize how harmful it all was. i happened to be living with some high school friendsin my sophomore year at college who were still awful and it led to such horrible depression i had to move home and switch colleges.which worked out because im an audio engineer now

 

“Can’t spell crap without rap!!!”

For real though I’m glad I found this site and drifted from my high school friend group because it was important for my maturity

 

honestly the thing that got me out of the hate rap phase (which came out of nowhere i loved rap as a kid/preteen) was graduation by kanye

 

The whole Kamaiyah is homophobic thing started when white guys got mad that their favourite rapper wasn't picked over her for the XXL list this year. They got petty and dug up those tweets. I really doubt that she is homophobic. Some rappers that I love have said the F word recently and she isn't one of them.

 

the homophobia in hip-hop discussion is difficult. as a bi man i dont particularly approve, but its not make or break hearing the word ***got dropped in a song or two. if its an ongoing thing, huge problem. but like one of my favorite songs of all time is a mili and wayne says ***got in it. the culture has problems but its not my place as a white man to preach or wag fingers (cough macklemore). there are artists who are against that shit. ye always been against that homophobic shit. asap rocky has had a shaky past with it but he generally is one of the good ones these days about it. young thug not overtly addressing it but bending gender fashion expectations is a positive force. then theres the gay/nonbinary rappers like le1f and mykki blanco and many others doing some of the most forward thinking stuff in rap. and queer/gay/trans producers like arca getting involved with yeezus, sophie with vince staples, and several others, make me see the whole culture is NOT fucked. and the young kids who have known nothing but the streets their whole lives hopefully have room to grow as they see the rest of the world. i think upbringing and environment are worth assessing why some attitudes are normalized or just looked over in some cultures. not as an excuse, but as an understanding and a way to start a convo of what we can do to advance the attitudes.

 

Macklemore using the f word to show how woke he is is still the funniest thing

for me it's that misogyny and homophobia are always called out in hip hop but not in other genres, which I'm sure has nothing do to with race

 

Right and misogyny in hip hop is a huge problem, yet on this site or Reddit or wherever it's brought up by people who don't listen to hip hop only when their favorite white musicians are called out on it. And it's usually in the context of comparing real assault or abuse to lyrics, sometimes even just the word bitch. Like come on. The word bitch isn't good (and I've had problems cutting it out of my own language, even today). But Kendrick isn't fucking assaulting women. Meanwhile the real hip hop fans on this site have been talking about that issue for like almost a decade

 

lots of homophobia, misogyny, weird random antisemism, and anti-handicapped shit that needs to be reckoned with within the genre.

as much as tyler has grown, hearing him still regularly call things “retarded” is really upsetting

 

I think its important to have these conversations, and they do fall under accountability in music. But also like yeah, there's no way Tyler saying fucked up shit years ago should keep him off lists in 2017 when there are still abusers on lists for shit they've kept doing for years. I'd like to see him speak more on it, or speak out more against that same type of hate from other people, but also I get it if he just ignores it and tries to be better. There's different ways of dealing with stuff.

Also yeah I was a huge piece of shit maybe even just five years ago. Self-improvement is huge and should be encouraged.

 

Here’s the CoS review when Flower Boy came out. Headline: “If (Tyler) really had something to say, he missed his chance.”
Album Review: Tyler, The Creator – Flower Boy Predictably, they didn’t include him in end of year coverage, and his prior persona seems to be why.

Personally, I think Stereogum spoke volumes about the way they’re handling that album too by not not including it on their top 40 rap albums of the year, especially with the way they tend to highlight what is culturally important and with how much they tend to overlap with Pitchfork. That’s just speculation and no one has come out and directly said that.

I don’t think I was spinning it some weird way to say that some prominent publications view his work like that, for better or for worse. I apologize for making it sound equally bad as some of the other abuse mentioned in this thread or for coming off like it was posted to start a witch hunt against him.

I appreciate everything you’ve said to oppose that view though. My question was really, what was the best way for a publication to handle that, and that seems like the consensus answer.

 

COS kind of blows though. they've written a lot of crap over the years

i still don't think stereogum purposefully didn't list tyler because of his past actions.

 

love the tyler album, and honestly went in listening thinking i felt wrong/bad listening to him bc his past. just a weird evolution. hope he continues to improve as an artist and person. he still has a way to go in both fields.

 

That’s fine. I just don’t believe that a publication that has the entire rest of the consensus top 20 albums on their overall AOTY list would completely exclude one of them from their overall year end list and the genre specific list if not for some reason.

Maybe you’re right though and the reason is “they didn’t like it as much as the other 50 overall albums and 40 rap albums they listed.”

 

That COS review is offensive on so many levels and was universally hated

 

Anyway it's all good I legit thought Tyler had done something much worse based on how it was being talked about and I think that's an issue

 

There’s a difference between “digging up old tweets” and recalling tweets that were made by a public figure after they had already become a public figure

Also not loving what appears to be “here’s a bunch of men’s opinions on what was said publicly to two gay women” but

 

theres not a difference. its digging up old tweets. no one denies they were a public figure. i do not see the point in doing that to tweets from 2012, 2011, and earlier other than to say "this guy was bad and needs to apologize." ive already said PLENTY on how i feel about it, and the fact that you cherry picked one phrase amongst a myriad of in depth posts about my very personal thoughts, experiences, and more, is disheartening.

 

especially i did not give a single opinion about the specific tweet to two gay women, or any specific tweets at all. if you're gonna do this do it honestly.

 

Unsure how I feel about this including “the three of us”.

 

why do these fucking dudes always have to talk about themselves? “I would never intentionally do this” “I respect victims of abuse” well you did it so....

 

I stopped reading after "almost ten years ago." I'm so sick of these statements, they're all the same, abusers always try to portray themselves as non-malicious, forgetful innocents while insinuating that their accusers are dredging up transgressions from a lifetime ago and conveniently neglecting to mention the innumerable ways victims are incentivized to stay silent. Any statement that tries to downplay the seriousness of these accusations by hiding behind the fact that time has passed is a bad fucking statement. Clearly PTV has done nothing to educate themselves about the power imbalance inherent in these situations.

Oh and their music sucks too