Reading Violence 1: Real Events Part A -- Censored Angry Music

1. Reading Violence 1: Real EventsPart A -- Censored Angry Music Feb 1st, 2013 T-Mike in the house

3. Housekeeping • MyLS outage use http://ks101.wikispaces.com • IRP 1 now due MONDAY in MyLS (if down, see ks101.wikispaces.com) • Great journals! Great discussions! Thanks • Video games, gamers found (see me @break) • Field site problems: KW Art Gallery

4. “Cop Killer” lecture:Overview • The background • The reading • Illustrative clips • Reactions? • Essentialism versus situated knowledge • History of the Parental Advisory

5. Background • Metal, rap, hybridity • Rodney King • Lollapalooza • Fear of miscegenation (U.S., Canada)

6. Image, sound, text • Role of visual technology in the Rodney King beating. • Song lyrics • Reaction? • Song • Reaction?

7. Concepts from the reading 1 • Reaccentualization • Volosinov (a structuralist, by the way) • What happens to the words when Charlton Heston reads them at a Time-Warner meeting? • Strategy: call attention TO the black accent • Kochman: Black and white “styles” • For whites, fighting words lead to hitting

8. Concepts from the reading 2 • Decontextualization • Sister Souljah’s video and taking segments out of it • Just like taking snippets of lyrics out of context

9. Concepts from the reading 3 • Articulation with sexism and racism • “Ice-T’s music is sexist, so we should not listen?” • “Ice-T’s music is racist like the Holocaust was -- so he’s like a Nazi?”

10. Concepts from the reading 4 • Corporatization • Blame the parent company when it doesn’t fall into line with the hegemony of the political Right (hegemony as a system of alliances -- as a process rather than simple money-power or law-power)

11. Defenders do the same • The POINT is that those who defend the song also de-racialize it: • By connecting it to the folk-protest tradition • By going the Free Speech route • By focusing on the effects on white kids

12. Soundgarden and the Reterritorializing of “Cop Killer” • Black rage is no longer even a trace in Soundgarden’s profession of a free-speech stance. • “Cop Killer” has become a song about anti-censorship, free speech, protest against all limits, but… • Is thereby evacuated of its grounding in a particular history, a specific anger against racially motivated violence

13. Tactical Reframings • Sieving claims that we are doing the wrong thing if we take the race thing out of the picture. Instead he claims that racial difference should be foregrounded, so that the “discourse” of the oppressor is not legitimated by acceptance of deracialized defenses. So what does “re-racializing” black ways of knowing and speaking look like?

14. Social Context and Genre • Going back to the beginning of the article -- following John Fiske (who is following Michel Foucault), Sieving says that representation is always representation in a context of social power (who CAN name, make meanings, put particular procedures in place to lend legitimacy to a hegemonic meaning). • This connects to previous lectures on the ways in which we can see language constructing reality

15. So… • So where does this leave us? Perhaps to pay attention to Sieving’s case is to find a way out of the traps of liberal “tolerance” and “diversity” -- the relativism that tells us we are all equal, so why dwell on differences. It’s an argument for specificity in history and identity, without perhaps calling for a stable “identity politics.”

16. But: Ban, Censor, or Advisory? • Your journals were really instructive. Many of you dislike outright bans. Some want more control and censorship. Most favour some kind of (especially parental) control -- to protect children from a) sex, b) nudity, c) profanity, d) violence, and e) hate speech. But you don’t want to limit free speech or artistic expression. So you’re in a pickle! The middle ground seems to be “Advisory Stickers.” Let’s talk about these.

17. The PMRC and “Parental Advisory” • The role of the Dead Kennedys (Jello Biafra) • The Filthy Fifteen • Even John Denver???

18. John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” • Feeling corrupted yet?

19. One of the Filthy Fifteen Rock on, Dee Snider!

20. Punk, Rap, Censorship • Jello Biafra in the late 1970s/early 1980s and Ice-T a good decade later

21. PMRC vs. RATM • I wonder if all the kids who paid U.S. $249 to see the Rage reunion at Coachella got 14 minutes of this instead of music. :)

22. The Dead Kennedys (Jello Biafra) • An incident involving a poster included in the record Frankenchrist led to a lawsuit (later dismissed) and landed them in hot water with the PMRC, a collaboration among Democrat and Republican politician’s wives (Gore, Thurmond… !!!). • The poster was from an H.R. Giger work

23. H.R. Giger • This artist won an Oscar for designing the Alien in, um, Alien. His bio-machinic art is well-known for its surrealist cyberculture leanings, making its way into video games, novels, and film. The poster in question is… well, it’s disgusting. But it is a metaphor for everything Jello was singing about on Frankenchrist. WARNING: here it is…

24. Giger’s art (Landscape XX):

25. Reactions • Is this more or less palatable because it is punk instead of hybrid rap-metal? • Would you sue Jello if you were the parent of the little brother of the girl who bought the album? What if you were the girl who gave your little brother the poster? • How would you DO cultural studies with this event/picture/issue?

26. My Questions for YOU • At what age did you first encounter a disturbing media image? Should it have been banned? • What should we do with a movies like “Hostel” -- there is no “black rage” or “economic and social reality” to recuperate here, is there? Or is it a satire on aristocratic decadence? • What role do you suppose the REPRESENTATION of violence plays in our culture?

27. Break • 10 mins

28. Reading Violence 1: Part B -- Roadside Memorials • Real events • Bednar and photography: self-implication • Personal, political • Public space, sacred space, violent space • Legalities, memorialization, and the work of mourning / warning • Real and virtual responses to violent deaths

29. Real events • My relationship to the topic • Bednar-like him, I feel very odd in that I’m implicated in the subject at hand • The Eaton family, 2009. Alex, 2007. The aftermath of a rock cut crash near Haliburton, 2001? The guy from high school, maybe 1985? Brett? • How about all y’all?

30. Bednar and photography • Obviously, Bednar dwells a lot on the role of the photographer in the creation of meaning (watching himself watching, watching himself watching his family watching him, and so on) • He is keenly interested in the complications inherent in touristic, artistic, and plain old human experiences of the same spaces

31. Personal, Political • I suspect that Bednar would agree with me (and with the Feminist claim) that the “personal is political.” There is a politics of the self at play anytime a self is constituted as such. This “self” is constituted as a “self” via a complex interplay of so many factors, including (obviously) visual signs. Bednar, knowing this, spends a good deal of his essay thinking about the absent presence of the performative memorial (performative in that the visual sign, with or without words, brings someone into being each time someone looks)

32. Public, Sacred, Violent Spaces • Roadside versus… • Church • Funeral Home • A shelf or table or mantel at home • Cemetery

33. Mourning, warning • Bednar identifies that public mourning is certainly part of the roadside memorial phenomenon in North American culture • He also notes that such mourning is also circumscribed (and sometimes proscribed) by juridical discourse (State Laws, for one): memorials are sometimes set up purposely to warn (and in some cases, these are the only permitted memorial types)

34. Legal questions… • About public space • Should these memorials be permitted on public property? Private property? • What if they cause a visual distraction, increasing the danger of the roadway? • Should there be a time limit on such displays?

35. Cultural questions • How do we normally mourn someone’s passing? What are our rituals? • When do these rituals move into public space? When into the public sphere? • What does the internet do to these relations? Can we think about the differences between Facebook memorials, funeral home web pages, reality videos of tragic crashes, and roadside memorials? What “cultural work” gets done by each phenomenon?

36. Moments of reflection • A moment of silence for departed friends, family • Don’t forget the Big Picture here: in Cultural Studies, the reader is very much implicated in the reading. We read violence, we read ourselves reading violence, and we are shaped by our reading as much as by the thing itself