“The week’s events have been extremely upsetting and culminated with an email from an unidentified person threatening to kill me and rape me and my family. While it is certainly possible that the email came from an overzealous fan of Odd Future, and not from the group itself, it has become clear to me that this is a matter for the police.”
Amy Harris, photographer pressing charges against OFWGKTA’s Left Brain for a physical altercation.
I have just a few thoughts on this, which is of course a really up in the air, facts unknown type of thing. But, dating and living with someone who gets death threats, and threats of violence and rape, has given me a little perspective, maybe. For one, this happens! Which is amazing to me. I had previously thought that things like getting emails threatening to rape or murder people simply didn’t happen.
Emails, comments, message board threads about such. Who does that? Did I pass out on my keyboard and accidentally log into MySpace?
But, well, say someone does that. They’re not actually going to do anything, right? They’re just kids or trolls. Well, maybe. However — do you really want to 1) place the onus of whether or not to be afraid of a threat back onto the threatened rather than put it on the threatener? (No.) And 2) believe that semi-random/semi-premeditated rage-induced violence does not happen? (It does.)
The thing about Odd Future is that it’s never been about the lyrics. Not in a vacuum. It’s about the way people relate to the lyrics in a social way. The way the lyrics fit into the historical conversation of racism and misogyny in America. Proponents of the group, the thoughtful ones, claim OF gives a good occasion to re-enter those conversations with a fresh, modern perspective. The more critical of us claim that OF’s fans and admirers shirk their duty to do that, thereby just reveling in violence, racism, and misogyny as a tourist’s hedonistic enterprise into brief depravity. (There’s also a historical conversation about ‘slumming it’, appropriating others’ culture, and dabbling in violence to ‘feel alive’ or, if you’re Hegel, ‘be a human being’.)
Now, OF’s publicist’s statement after the event, which says in part,
Vyron (Leftbrain) took a swipe at a few cameras, NOT people. To manipulate the situation to insinuate an attack on a woman specifically is careless and manipulative.
is itself manipulative. Honestly, no one is an apt target for violence, just like no one is a proper perpetrator of it. But the group has a problem with women. Its de facto leader has made numerous public statements to the effect that he gives no shits about women. So when a woman ends up getting assaulted at an OF show, even inadvertently, that’s still on them. The publicist sounds like Sarah Palin defending her gun site imagery. Foolish.
