Eminem (was: Influenced by GR?)

[jporter]

> From: Terrance <Lycidas at worldnet.att.net>
> Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 07:41:09 -0400
> To: jporter <jp4321 at IDT.NET>
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: Eminem (was: Influenced by GR?)
> 
> 
> 
> jporter wrote:
> 
> Still, the music is a bridge for him and his
>> white (and asian and jewish) friends to understand and appreciate another
>> facet of HIS American Culture, and, therefore, it is way, way more valuable
>> and influential than Pynchon will ever be.  Pynchon is advanced technology
>> for the elite- a manual for a post post POSTgrad seminar in control.
>> 
>> jody
> 
> Yeah, The Negro to the white intellectual is what is he has
> always been, not a man, but a Myth. The Old Negro is a myth,
> a creature of moral debate and historical controversy.

Yeah. Alot of mileage has been gotten out of that ol' darky. But the use of
him made by Pynchon, was that purely satirical? If so, what does it say
about Pynchon's patrons (us)? Does it make the hierarchical reality of
society more bearable, that is, to understand or mythologize it so? Smile
and/or cry as you kill- that sort of thing?

>I
> have to laugh, two turntables and a microphone are now
> legend in a dictionary of rap or some such, I remember one
> turntable and microphone so does that make me cool or wigger
> to a white intellectual, or is there another term, another
> stock figure perpetuated by as an historical fiction without
> the innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate
> reactionism, attributed to the Negro.

How about just another victim of dumb luck who likes what you like without
feeling guilty, and asks to be judged by the way you are and not the color
of your genes.

> Yeah I put it on and
> the Negro, he contributes to it too with his protective
> social mimicry forced upon him, you know, by the adverse
> circumstances of dependence. A formula, right, an equation,
> like some compromise, not quite human: argued about,
> condemned and defended, kept down in his place and lifted up
> and empowered, worried about, and over, harassed and
> patronized, a social burden, a social problem, a social
> super fly on the wall of you conscience guilty with longing
> to feel the rhythm of the Negro, the beat, the beat, boom,
> can you here those big words dropped from the ivory tower
> hit the streets. 

Exactly. The double myth and the fantasy of liberation in bondage. The dark
soft easy yielding south and the masochistic fantasies of the pale north,
brought together in a pleasurable volume, stored high, high up on a private
ledge in the ivory tower and spilled out like code hidden in the embroidered
mantle.

>Yes, and the thinking negro, he got the
> same J O B, same attitude, waste all his time on these
> controversial issues, looking in the invisible mirror trying
> to see himself from the empty perspective of a social point
> of view, his shadow more real to him than his personality,
> he's had to appeal from the unjust stereotypes of his
> oppressors and traducers to those of his liberators, friends
> and benefactors he has had to subscribe to the traditional
> position from which his case has been viewed.  What
> self-understanding or social truth can come from such a
> situation? The Negro is become a "Vogue" again, partly as
> the result of a growing interest in the new Jazz, folkways,
> different spirits, partly as the result of the glamour and
> notoriety brought to the new Harlem Renaissance by the same
> old wealthy dilettantes who have taken it up as a sort of
> amusing hobby.
> 
Beautiful. Yeah, it comes as a surprise to find out that inspite of paragons
like Tiger Woods, and the Williams sisters, most of "them" are average, or
worse, whether from nature or nurture, just like the majority of uncolored,
and like the colorless, use what ever little advantage they might have in
any given situation to further their own cause.

jody