Eminem (was: Influenced by GR?)

[Thomas Eckhardt]

jbor wrote:

>I think it might be a little extreme to say that chauvinism and macho 
>bullshit (in art as in life) are down to (contemporary? 20th C?)
>African-American culture alone. There's often a healthy dose of irony in
>those "baby got booty" and "my posse/gun/car/jewellery/bankdraft is bigger
>than yours" anthems too. I think you need to look elsewhere for the roots of
>serious patriarchal attitudes. 

Oh, I didn't mean to say that this kind of posing was down to
African-American culture alone, nor was I attempting to lay my finger on the
root of "serious patriarchal attitudes". I was just talking about a certain
form of formulaic expression in rap lyrics, about the persona of the "big,
bad, black motherfucker" and musing about its cultural and psychological
background. And by saying "ridiculously exaggerated" I indeed meant to imply
the irony that more often than not is an essential characteristic of these
lyrics. 

>In fact, slavery and racial oppression
>thoroughly emasculated traditional African societal arrangements and largely
>served to valorise the Negro mother as the authoritative voice from within
>those cultures once they were transplanted to North American soil. 

Right. What I was referring to was the opposite side of the outwardly
induced inferiority complex of the colonized people, namely a strong
reassertion of black pride and manhood (finding political expression in the
Black Power Movement or in Afrocentrism or, in a different but, I guess,
related way, in the Nation of Islam) which cannot be understood without
taking into account the preceding centuries of oppression. My main source
for this would be Frantz Fanon, whose "Black Skin, White Masks" is an
utterly fascinating book. After having described the psychological
structures at hand Fanon argues that by turning the manichaeic equation, in
which white means good and black means bad ("The Bible says so..."), on its
head, the descendants of slaves remain imprisoned by the set of binary
oppositions, inherent in most of Western culture and of inestimable value
for the process of colonization, thus perpetuating the division. I don't
presume to know what is right.

Thomas